Marketing WTF? - How do some of you have a job?
Thursday, December 20th, 2007During my short tenure in the marketing world, I have noticed several styles of marketing to drive leads into the sales pipeline. The most successful, by far, are multi-touch, multi-message email and direct mail campaigns that are complemented along the way by sales calls. The keyword here is COMPLEMENTED. I have spoken with several “marketers” who do no marketing programs….they simply buy lists and give them to the sales team.
Let me preface my next statement with this: I think all sales people should not rely solely on marketing for leads….they need to cold call and prospect on their own. With that being said….HOW DO SOME OF YOU HAVE A JOB??? If all you do is buy lists…not even role-based, highly targeted lists like I sell…but generic, crappy lists to hand over to sales for them to drive business, how do you have a job? Why couldn’t a 7th grader come over during recess and do the same thing for an ice cream cone? Forget wasted budgets, let’s talk about wasted salaries and benefits to employees who do nothing but spit out a lot of fluff at meetings and then go buy lists to give directly to sales. How is this marketing?
Do some webinars….drive traffic to events you will attend….send out white papers….do email and direct mail campaigns with altered messaging depending on the measured results of each touch….find out criteria about your current customers that you can use to identify “warmer” company targets….and lastly, send all marcom “stuff” to role-based contacts! Without the last step, everything, EVERYTHING, is wasted.
In conclusion, your sales guys need to be driving their own business through cold calls….but marketers need to incorporate multi-touch, nurture programs with measured results and calculated changes in order to not be a complete waste of a salary.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #52 - Coming Soon: Day of Reckoning for Marketing’s Role in Business
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007I sat on a panel recently titled Austin AMA Executive Advisory Board Panel discussion: “Does Marketing Deserve a Seat at the (Corporate Boardroom) Table?”
It was interesting to note that we fundamentally in the business world don’t know how to define the role of a CMO/VP of Marketing. The best description was given by Mike Shultz CEO of InfoGlide, he said Marketing’s role is to explain to the company “where we are now and where we are going” and in his view, marketing leadership does not have to be a job but a role played by one of the key executives – CEO, VP of Products, someone or as he put it, “someone better play it” or we are in trouble.
It seems like a lot of people are stirring the debate on my favorite topic “revenue impact of marketing”:
- A piece on Marketing’s lack of impact on Sales that I read recently in AdAge
- Fast Company did the same, calling the CMO’s job the most dangerous job in business
So is it the measurement instrument or the person or the heritage of the marketing function to blame? What do you think?
Best of The B2B Lead 2007
Monday, December 17th, 2007If you are new to The B2B Lead or just want a refresher on what we have said in 2007, here is a list of our favorite posts this year. If you like what you see here, be sure to check out the archives for much more. Enjoy!
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #1 - B2B Marketing Copy – Write it Right
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #7 - Know Thy Customer aka The Principles of Deliberate Marketing
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #8 - B2B Marketing Copy - Write it Right Part II
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #12 - Six Principles of Subject Line Writing
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #15 - Everything I Know About B2B Blogging I Learned from Perez
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #18 - Avoid being called a SPAMer
Marketing WTF? - I See Dead People – In My Database
Marketing and Sales Tip #22 - Forget Everything You Know About B2B Web Site Design
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #23 - Implement Lead Scoring for Better Marketing ROI
The B2B Lead Podcast #3 – Making a Viral Campaign Successful - Seeding
The B2B Lead Podcast #4 – Adapt or Die – Marketing and PR in the Blogosphere and New Media
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklist: Step 1 - Start with SEM (ala Google Adwords)?
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #48 - Understand Your Google AdWords Spend and How to Boost ROI
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #50 - Don’t Forget About Happy Customers
Blog Master…NOT – So You Want to Start a Corporate Blog
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #51 - Put the Long Tail Work in B2B Marketing
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #53 - Practice Metrics-Based Copywriting
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #57 - Beat the Holiday Rush, Send Thanksgiving Cards
Marketing WTF? - Who Listens to Voicemails from Sales Guys?
The “Oh #%@$!” Day in Marketing
The B2B Lead Vidcast – A Case Study in Viral Video Marketing
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #62 - Put These 20 Ideas into Action for B2B Viral Marketing Success
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #63 - Lessons from Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #64 - Take a Hard Look at Funnelnomics as You Move Into 2008
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #51 - B2B Marketers Can Get in on the Holiday Action Too!
Friday, December 14th, 2007At a recent Eloqua user group meeting, an attendee asked if anyone had any Holiday-related campaign ideas or plans to share for the B2B marketers in the room. No one raised a hand.
So that got me to thinking. Can B2B Marketers get in on the Holiday action that is so often considered the sole domain of B2C?
When it comes to taking advantage of end of year themes, and non-religious Holidays like Thanksgiving the answer is clearly “Yes.” ReachForce has done a great job of this with their Marketing Oh Crap Day and Use it Or Lose it campaigns. And, at NetQoS, we used this year’s Cyber Monday Holiday shopping fiasco to promote our NetFlow monitoring capabilities in this Network Performance Daily blog post. And, we are currently having some fun with a New Year’s resolutions contest for Network Engineers.
But when it comes to Christmas, Kwanza or Hanukah, it’s probably best to steer clear or go with the generic Holiday theme. Obviously, introducing religion into the business world is not a great idea. It’s not even a good idea for some B2C Marketers. Witness this controversial ad for (WARNING: If you are easily offended, do not click here) Red Bull. According to Reuters, a priest persuaded the soft drinks company to withdraw an advertisement setting its product in a nativity scene on the grounds it is disrespectful to Christianity. Many in the church labeled it blasphemous!
Got any other examples of Marketing WTF moments involving religion or the holidays? Share them with us.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #50 - Defining a Lead
Thursday, December 13th, 2007Note the perspective in this blog bite assumes the following: Lead generation is about delivering high quality targeted opportunities to sales to accelerate revenue.
I have spent several years listening to people complain about the following:
Sales: Marketing does not know what they are doing, their leads are bad
Marketing: Sales is not smart enough to follow-up on our leads
The crux of the problem, in my view is the definition of a lead and metrics that are used to measure marketing success. My opinion, 2 things you should consider:
- Get WRITTEN buy-in from sales on definition of a lead
- Compensate marketing not on generating volume of leads but the number of leads that sales “accepts” – based on #1 (compensation tied to revenue is ALSO key)
So what is a lead?
I like Sirius Decisions framework. It’s a good place to start, then you can adapt for your business:
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #49 - Take a Hard Look at Funnelnomics as You Move Into 2008
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Marketing Profs ran a great article yesterday by Russell Kern entitled “How to Solve Direct Marketing’s Five Biggest Problems” that struck a nerve with me as a B2B direct marketer. He writes “Salespeople love to receive a nice steady flow of leads that keeps them busy, but not too busy. When that’s not what you’re giving them, they tend to become, well, verbal. So what does Sales do? It cherry-picks the best leads, letting the surplus responses fall to the floor to rot. Within 45 days, they’re yelling for “fresh” leads.”
Wow, does that ever sum up the universal B2B Direct Marketer’s challenge! It’s either too many or too few. We can never win. ReachForce’s superbly targeted B2B Marketing Oh Crap day addressed this challenge brilliantly. I know we can all relate to the effect that the holidays has on our lead flow.
If you are struggling with too many leads or too few fresh/high quality leads, then Kern advises:
- One of the fastest and least expensive methods to improve your results is to eliminate poor targets and increase the number of look-alike suspects.
- Here is a simple exercise to perform when putting together a lead generation mailing: Have your data-processing vendor run a count, by title, of your mailing list. At the same time, run a count of your customer titles.
- Now, compare the results. How many of the titles in your suspect mailing list are not in your customer file? How many titles like “administrator,” “consultant,” and, yes, even “inmate” have somehow slipped into your mailing list—people who will respond for the sake of it, but never, ever buy your product?
Once you’ve taken the important step to better target your campaigns, you should also consider a great automated scoring and lead scoring and nurturing program as we wrote about in The B2B Lead and our ebook on the topic Funnelnomics. If you have some time to sit down and study up on database marketing fundamentals this holiday season, I encourage you to take a moment to download the book and put a few of the lessons into action in 2008.
Blog Master…NOT – Blog Basics
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007If you feel like you are completely lost when it comes to blogs, here is a great post on the basics of blogging from VR Marketing blog.
Here are some key takeaways and a few of my own thoughts:
- Be sure to link back to your corporate site, this is especially important if your blog has its own url. (One major reason to start a blog is because it can increase your search engine ranking)
- Tag each post with categories. This will help your readers find what they are looking for and help boost your search engine ranking as well.
- Blogs are a great medium for customer feedback. Write a post that gets your customers talking (and commenting) or put a poll on the blog to survey readers on a specific topic.
- Always moderate your comments. There is a lot of SPAM out there and you want the comments section to be a true dialog that is not interrupted by SPAM. It is ok if someone disagrees with you, do not block that comment because it can get people talking. Comments are boring if everyone agrees and there are no new ideas.
- Avoid “shameless self promotion.” Blogs with interesting, relevant, and up-to-date content will gain a loyal following. Don’t try to trick your readers and sneak in a sales pitch. Be transparent or risk loosing readers.
- Be sure to include keywords in titles and within relevant content for search engines.
- Your blog can be a great supporter for your PR efforts. Post an excerpt from a press release on the blog or reuse blog content for PR ideas.
- Don’t just put your blog out there and expect readers to come. Be sure to leverage your database of customers to let them know about it.
- Make sure your posts are up-to-date. They recommend twice a month but I would say at least twice a week. In a world of instant gratification, we are used to getting what we want when we want it. If your most recent post is two weeks old, I probably won’t be checking in again anytime soon.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #48 - Lessons from Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit
Monday, December 10th, 2007I spoke at the Eloqua Marketing Effectiveness Summit last week up in Dallas (http://summit.eloqua.com/) – strangely enough as I write this I am back in Dallas on a trip to the east coast and my flight is cancelled (another blog, another story) and since I am here for 3 unplanned hours, how better to spend my time then to blog!
As the session started and the discussion leaders engaged the attendees (lead generation folks from companies like National Instruments, Vignette, FuelQuest, Paymetrics, etc.), I felt like the session was going to be a support group with 2 major glaring issues:
- Sales and Marketing Relationship/Rules of engagement
- Data Issues – New data (lists. Leads) sourcing, working with internal data (house lists, customer data, support data, cross selling, up selling).
On number 1 above I believe (and did pontificate at the session) that marketing and sales have to co-exist in harmony or the business loses. I also recommend a formal legally binding (not really) contract between marking and sales on the definition of a lead. As one marketer said, working with sales or empowering them with information to market to their customer base was “like giving the devil a soul” – lady calm down, maybe you need to talk this one through. Hey Psychiatrists out there, there is a new form of couples therapy needed on the planet – B2B marketing and sales.
In terms of data issues, I have been frustrated for the last 10 years on the poor quality of lists and also the lack of analytics available to marketers (and hence we launched ReachForce) but did not realize the gravity of the problems/issues and ongoing struggles. Some interesting points of note were:
- We are all stuck in a B2C world of thinking and need to think about B2B marketing differently – it is different and more complicated from a sales process perspective
- Internal company data is suspect at best – how do you define rules of engagement between sales and marketing on when or when not to touch a prospect / customer
- How do you keep internal data (in the CRM system) refreshed/updated as it’s touched by different people at different stages of a sales (and post sales cycle) – who is the MASTER owner of the data and defines the different roles of people by stage of marketing sales/cycle
- Data visibility – how do you think about direct visibility of service and support data (the instance was a support ticket) associated with a customer as a flag to marketing and sales before that person/company is touched/messaged next
- And on and on … enough that I think we will start B2B Marketing support group in Austin as a start in 2008!
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #47 - Put These 20 Ideas into Action for B2B Viral Marketing Success
Friday, December 7th, 2007Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains 20 ideas for packaging, promoting and tracking the results of your viral video campaign. It also contains visuals from The B2B Lead Vidcast on viral video marketing.
As I’ve written previously on The B2B Lead, many Marketers advise there is no simple formula for making your campaign go viral. Others argue that they can help anyone go viral and will use less than authentic and transparent techniques to do so. As you can see from this vidcast case study for a B2B viral video campaign NetQoS ran, it is possible to be successful without resorting to trickery. It just takes relevant content, clever packaging, a solid conversion strategy, and transparent outreach via Social Media.
However, even with a good idea and superb execution, there are no guarantees. Viral marketing is like walking a tight rope. There is a fine line between success and failure. There are no assurances. No opportunities for testing messages. And it could backfire or simply fizzle. But the great thing about walking a tight rope is that no one can pass you.
Want to improve your odds in the world of B2B viral marketing? Here is a roundup of the 20 ideas that made the NetQoS network monitoring campaign a success, and some of the charts and graphs that you might not have been able to see on the video.
Viral Video Idea #1: Set clear objectives for your campaign. For NetQoS, we wanted to use viral marketing to increase brand awareness, break into the blogosphere in a big way and increase web traffic and leads. We set specific objectives and measured our success.
Viral Video Idea #2: Be relevant. Make sure your message and content are relevant both to your company and to your target audience. Because without relevant content, you may hit a home run but effectively strike out. Kind of like that dancing baby concept from the 90’s. Can you name the company behind that one?
Viral Video Idea #3: Know your audience. And, I’m not talking about their pain points and job roles. I’m talking more about psychographics and behavioral characteristics. Understand what interests them, where they live and work, how they get their information. For NetQoS, we knew that our audience would be a great viral target—they were comfortable online, 80% read blogs or are active in blogging, 84% start their search on a search engine. Most are smart and cynical audience—marketing averse.
Viral Video Idea #4: Be opportunistic. – Have your FlipVideo on you at all times to capture a great idea or moment. I heard a story about one of the leading open source database providers recently. Apparently, a Marketer for that company had a great idea for a video. He Twittered his circle of contacts to round up a video camera and by the time he was ready to shoot, his competitor had already heard about the idea and beat him to the punch.
For us, we were lucky enough to have the right video material right under our nose. A senior researcher had developed a 3D video-game like data visualization of our product data. It converted live Network Performance data from our products into 3D images. It was unique and very, very relevant.
Viral Video Idea #5: Have fun. As I wrote in this blog post from The B2B Lead, you should make fun of yourself before someone else does. We were extremely kitschy because we knew the quality of the graphics was not up to the realistic standards of today’s CGI. It had a very 80’s Tron like feel so we made the most of that. We didn’t just post the clip. We named it, packaged it and added humor at every turn.
Viral Video Idea #6: Develop a seeding and conversion strategy prior to posting your video. In 30 days with less than $7,000, our in-house team along with our team at Porter Novelli developed the strategy and materials for a complete viral video experience including seeding the campaign, welcoming viewers and offering additional content as well as a program for building a following after the campaign.
Viral Video Idea #7: In the world of viral video, production value isn’t important. In fact I would discourage it. Ours looked like some techies had cooked it up in their spare time. In fact, that’s how it started. But we did put a great deal of thought into the packaging, promotion and conversion strategy for the campaign. It is important to always provide a thumbnail image of what the viewer is getting.
Viral Video Idea #8: Protect your brand. You can make fun of yourself but don’t do anything that will embarrass you or the company. Don’t take chances with controversial content or release anything of such poor quality that you create a negative brand image. Don’t use dubious tactics to get noticed or bait and switch techniques. We explained very clearly what Netcosm was (a data visualization) and was NOT (a product for sale). We also made it clear that the work was done through NetQoS Performance Labs and not beta tested.
Viral Video Idea #9: YouTube reports that the average viewing time for videos is 15 to 30 seconds. You have a very short runway to take off. Get to the point fast, entertain and leave them wanting more. We added captions based on the old “This is brain, this is your brain on drugs” campaign. We selected clips that showed the most action and had some fun with the content. Then we offered a longer video if people were interested in seeing more.
Viral Video Idea #10: Somewhere between 40,000 to 65,000 new videos are posted to YouTube every day. Help people find it by optimizing for search engines: Tag it, name it appropriately, describe it, add links and compelling copy and optimize using the right keywords. If it takes off in a big way, you want as many links to your content as possible using your top keywords.
Viral Video Idea #11: Use your corporate blog to trigger the viral distribution and keep the story alive. You’ve got to get the word out and a press release is simply not appropriate for viral marketing. What’s more, blogging with the full story behind the campaign helps to give your program and your company a face and a personality. Make sure that personality is one that will garner respect by being completely open and honest on your blog.
Viral Video Idea #12: Build a community of interest. This is the core message behind my prior B2B Lead post on the subject of viral video marketing. Don’t use trickery or bait and switch to get people to your video because you will be forgoing one of the most valuable benefits of the viral approach – the ability to quickly and inexpensively build a community of interest. The Word of Mouth aspect of viral marketing gives Marketers a powerful way to attract a following. Do this by explaining each step of the program using your blog. Tell your audience what you were thinking when you produced it. Report on the results. Give followers a way to track the momentum and keep it alive.
Viral Video Idea #13: Seed the story with the blogerati, your customers and friends, your social network. Post it to Digg and Reddit or whatever social media site is appropriate for the topic. Twitter your followers. Leverage Social media like Facebook, MySpace, and other groups to spread the word. Of course timing is everything. Here’s a high level snapshot of our timeline.
Viral Video Idea #14: Track and monitor the results and keep your followers and the blogging community posted on the momentum building behind your viral video. This helps build excitement and credibility around how your video is resonating with the audience. It might just convince an influential blogger that he/she should write a story about you. We not only tracked YouTube views and Most Viewed Honors, but we also monitored:
- Google Analytics for web traffic
- Google Alerts for media and blog coverage
- Salesforce.com for leads and evaluation requests as well as revenue opportunities
- Eloqua for clickstream analysis to determine if people were using the right path from the blog story to the video to the microsite and finally to product pages and offers
Viral Video Idea #15: Automate and expedite lead processing. When viral goes big, it really goes big. And, studies show that B2B Marketers and Sales reps need to follow-up on Web-generated leads within 30 minutes of a registration or the chances for conversion are poor. If you don’t have a great program for automatically scoring and qualifying leads so that you can route quality leads to your salesforce instantly, you could be asking for big trouble using viral. First of all your Inside Sales team is likely to be swamped with a larger percentage of irrelevant leads. Secondly, you will miss out on a number of great sales opportunities by taking weeks to respond. We were actually given the Marketer’s Choice award by Eloqua for our Lead Scoring and Automation program that enabled us to process the leads generated by our viral campaign within 24 hours. Eloqua’s Marketing Automation was critical to this process.
Viral Video Idea #16: Demonstrate that you met your objectives. YouTube will allow you to track some of your results, but it won’t show the whole story. Here are a few results that NetQoS tracked:
- YouTube Views: 66,000 and growing. (This did not include those who viewed it on Google video, Tech Crunch or other blogs.)
- Blog Coverage: 70+ blogs wrote about the video.
- NetQoS Blog Readership: Traffic more than tripled.
- NetQoS Corporate Web traffic: YoY 43% higher
- Organic SEO: As the chart below shows: weighted market exposure for NetQoS top keywords increased by 41% for all keywords plus 600% on the primary keyword.
Viral Video Idea #17: Show your campaign delivered value to the business. You most certainly will have to do a lot of convincing to get sponsorship for your viral campaign, so don’t miss your chance to prove to all of the skeptics that the idea was worth the investment. Show that the spike in traffic and coverage hit the right audience and generated brand awareness or demand. For us, the results show it was:
As the charts below show, there was a spike in web traffic for all product pages and a large 4X increase in Web-based leads. We also showed a 26% increase in product demo requests. Our cost per qualified lead was $16. Other techniques range from $60 per qualified lead for Google AdWords to $250 or more from a seminar or online advertising campaign.
Viral Video Idea #18: So, show me the money. Viral video, like any other Marketing campaign, should always demonstrate a positive return. While it is still too early for us to show revenue, we do have more than a half a million in pipeline from this campaign that cost $7,000.
Viral Video Idea #19: Don’t forget to subtly brand the video and microsite with your company name. Don’t be overly obvious or slick. The point is to entertain and encourage people to spread the word while subtly associating your company with the content.
Viral Video Idea #20: It’s not over when it’s over. Extend the life of your campaign. You’ve done the hard work to build a community of interest, so keep them interested and the lines of communication open. Evolve your story, and continue to post updates. For NetQoS, we turned the Netcosm experience into a live event and continued to post about it on our blog.
When we first embarked upon this viral video campaign, there was no playbook. The NetQoS Marketing Team, Dr. Mike Johns, and the Porter Novelli Austin team all worked together to figure it out. Now we are sharing our playbook with you. Let us know if you’ve had success using it or your own techniques.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #46 - The Survey Says…B2B Marketers Should Clean Up Their Customer Database
Thursday, December 6th, 2007Apparently dirty data and 2% response rates are global problems. New survey results from UK-based marketing communications agency Godfrey show business-to-business Marketers have ‘plenty of room for improvement’ when it comes to using customer and prospect databases for direct marketing purposes. The research offers new evidence that direct marketing campaigns could be more effective if B2B Marketers would clean up their data and use a systematic direct marketing program based on database marketing fundamentals.
Lynne DeMers, strategic direct marketing team leader at Godfrey, is quoted as saying: ” Direct marketing is not about sending 20,000 mailers to a rented list and hoping for a two per cent return.” Wow, where have we heard that before? Maybe in our Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook?
She also makes a great point about effective direct marketing: “It is about creating a programme and a system of messages, offers, information capture, measurement and refinement.”
The survey also found that:
- Only 60 per cent of Marketers use their customer database for targeted direct marketing, and only 40 per cent regularly update customers with new offers.
- While mass direct marketing techniques typically yield response rates ranging from 0.5 to two per cent, targeted direct marketing technologies are considerably more effective, according to Godfrey.
- B2B marketers can realize 40 per cent open rates, 10 to 20 per cent click rates and opt-out rates of less than one per cent with segmented email marketing and e-newsletter campaigns.
Sounds like it’s time for drastic change and there are many good lessons in how to make those changes in the complimentary Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook offered on this site.
