Business Blogging Tips - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #141
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Check out our rock star Leigh Anne on Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog! In her interview she highlights tips for business blogging and what has worked for us on The B2B Lead.
Some of her points/tips:
- Why the domain or URL of your blog is important, our domain is separate from ReachForce. We wanted to build a place for B2BMarketers to come and share tips and not have to worry about ReachForce corporate speak or promotion. Now don’t get me wrong, I try and slip it in every once in awhile but subtly, hopefully.
- Blogging is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader
- Blogging is a good tool for lead nurturing and can lead to speaking opportunities
- Don’t forget, you need to post frequently to keep readers engaged
- Be sure to re-purpose content for email campaigns and newsletters
- Most important – know your audience and produce valuable content
Use Lead Scoring to Identify Sales-Ready Leads - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #140
Friday, August 15th, 2008Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo
Most leads from B2B marketing campaigns are still researching. Prematurely passing these early leads to sales only annoys the buyer and makes sales even less likely to follow-up on marketing leads. This means the majority of inquiries require further lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.
This is where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads — meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs equal 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
How can you use lead scoring to achieve this kind of benefit for your organization?
First of all, too many companies use only basic demographic data (e.g. title, company size, etc.) in scoring. This is useful, but demographic data only tell how interested you are in the prospect—and nothing about how interested the prospect is in you. Even BANT criteria (budget, authority, timing, and need) have limited usefulness since buyers’ answers to those questions are notoriously inaccurate, and as we all know, people’s actions speak louder than their words. This means you should also track a lead’s behaviors so you can you measure their interest and engagement in your solution.
Begin by monitoring and tracking online behaviors, such as email responses, completed forms, and Web site visits. You can do this manually with web analytics, or automate the process using marketing automation software. Assign a point value to each, just as you would assign a value to each job title. Certain behaviors – such as using your company brand name in a search, visiting your pricing page, or returning frequently to your site – indicate higher readiness to buy, so assign even higher weights to those behaviors. Since B2B purchases typically involve 6 to 21 different people, add up the scores for each contact at a given company to measure the total level of engagement for that organization. Finally, be sure to lower the score over time if engagement goes down.
Review the point values with the sales team, and decide what score indicates sales-readiness. If the sales team determines a prospect is not yet ready, recycle the lead back to marketing for additional nurturing. Finally, be sure to close the loop and refine your scoring rules and point values over time for continuous improvement.
Want more details? Here’s a link to a free eBook from Marketo called Best Practices in Lead Scoring.
The New Rules of News Releases - ReachForce Book Club
Thursday, August 14th, 2008According to David Meerman Scott, Press Releases are virtually dead having been replaced by News Releases to reach buyers directly. Here are David’s “The New Rules of News Releases:
- Don’t just send news releases when “big news” is happening; find good reasons to send them all the time.
- Instead of just targeting a handful of journalists, create news releases that appeal directly to your buyers.
- Write releases that are replete with keyword-rich copy.
- Include offers that compel consumers to respond to your release in some way.
- Place links in releases to deliver potential customers to landing pages on your Web site.
- Optimize news release delivery for searching and browsing.
- Add social media tags for Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us so your release will be found.
- Drive people into the sales process with news releases.”
You can check out what we have already discussed about Keyword Optimization for News Releases. News Releases are really just another way to put fresh content out there to help buyers find you.
Do you feel like you have made this switch yet or are you still writing press releases in hopes of being picked up by the media? All marketers feel pressure from upper management to drive more leads and bring in more buyers. Well done news releases could be a great tool for this, however, upper management are also the ones that want to see their name in print. I think news releases are the future, but a few press releases are good to keep everyone happy.
Does anyone have good ideas or examples of reasons to send out news releases to fulfill David’s first rule?
Next week we will be covering Ch. 6 &7.
Dusting off some old direct mail ideas…wondering if they still work? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip#139
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008I’m constantly trying to add new things to our marketing mix. I feel like I’ve talked a lot about direct mail on The B2B Lead but we still haven’t given it a shot here at ReachForce. Before email marketing, direct mail and events were our only options to directly reach a prospect. I’m wondering… is everything done online only now? Do people even pay attention to or read physical mail anymore? I’m not sure, anyone done a B2B direct mail program lately? Did you get the ROI you were hoping for?
We all know physical mail costs more than communicating online but is it possible to stand out in the crowd? As I went back to a box of old ideas, I ran across a few ideas I pulled out and thought about giving another try.
- Got an event invite? – Try sending your invite attached to a helium balloon and put the whole thing in a FedEx box. I haven’t tried it myself but I think this is a great idea. Helium balloons last a couple of days. This ensures your invite sticks around for awhile not to mention it will literally jump out of the box when they open it.
- Mailing to a small group or a very targeted high impact program? Try handwriting the address instead of printing it. There are services/people out there that will do this for you. You might also consider using stamps instead of metered mail.
- Send or use something useful – I got a wine bottle opener from an advertising agency with a tag attached that said ‘OPEN’ on one side and on the other side they reinforced the ‘OPEN’ theme by listing a series of things like –“We’re open to the most innovative and effective approaches to building companies and brands.”
- And there’s still always the hook of “I’m sending you half of something. To get the other half you have to contact me.” We actually just did a small test batch of these just recently. We sent ReachForce branded remote control cars and motorcycles to the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing in a few target companies. We mixed up the remotes so they had to chat about them to switch the remotes back. We are now following up with these people with an “everyone benefits if you work together” message. We’ll see how it works out…..
Anyone got any other good direct mail ideas? Is direct mail part of your marketing mix or is it considered old school now? Jump in and share…
How to Write and Market Whitepapers - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #138
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008I saw a great presentation earlier this summer at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum by Michael Stelzner titled “Attracting Quality Leads with White Papers.” Michael has generated 60,000 qualified leads with his program, so I thought I would share some of his ideas.
Here are Michael’s 6 mistakes Marketers make in regards to whitepapers:
- Product Marketing Curse - Using a technical document for lead gen.
- Marketing the Wrong Content - used car salesman approach, highly focused on company and product.
- Post and Hope Syndrome - You need to drive prospects to the content, “If you build it, they will come” only works for Kevin Costner.
- Brief Landing Pages - long form with little content
- Immediate Access to Excellent Content - No registration, no follow-up emails
- Not Integrated with Other marketing Efforts - Not promoted through email or direct mail campaigns, left out of newsletters and blogs
Michael gave some compelling reasons why whitepapers should be a part of your marketing mix. To get to the point, they are a proven lead gen tool, help educate your buyers and position your company as a thought leader.
Here are Michael’s tips for writing and publishing whitepapers:
- When you sit down to write the whitepaper, you first need to determine which type of problem you are going to solve: People problems, Process problems, Quality problems or Absent problems. Then lead with the challenges faced by the ideal reader.
- Discuss the solution is generic terms. People need to think that they need a solution like yours before you can sell them your specific solution.
- Include a “what to look for” list - This is your silver bullet where you create a condition where only your product or service can succeed. Be sure to call out points where you deliver over your competition.
- Only at the end of the whitepaper do you mention your company and the product or service you are promoting. Do be sure to have your branding on every page as well as the landing page.
- Save the call to action for the very last sentence - make it compelling, actionable, and measurable
- Think of the first page of your whitepaper as a movie trailer - show them enough for them to be willing to pay (fill out a form) for the rest.
- Identify the ideal reader, summarize the challenge, summarize the solution, state the goal of the paper
- AVOID: detailed explanation of the solution and features, introduction of your company, humor
- When developing a title, keep in mind “what’s in it for me?” and the 3 U’s:
- Ultra-specific
- Unique
- useful to readers
- Test the title with current customers, they will be the best judges.
- Have long landing pages (this is against a lot of what we are hearing right now, but Michael has the results to prove that it works)
- Provide a significant amount of content at the top of the landing page with a very short form (Michael suggests just name and email) at the bottom. This way readers are already hooked by the time they get to the form and more likely to fill out the form to get the rest of the whitepaper.
- It is also great for SEO
- Don’t allow immediate access to the whitepaper. Wait 30 minutes to send the pdf directly to the email address given. This does two things. First, it provides a sense of anticipation. Secondly, this is a way for you to verify that they gave you a valid email address, not mickeymouse@mickeymouse.com.
I am working on implementing some of Michael’s ideas. He shares a lot more in his book, Writing White Papers. Do you have any suggestions for what works in writing and promoting whitepapers?
Blogs – Don’t Underestimate Their Reach - Reachforce Book Club
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008How many B2BLead readers are bloggers? Do you have a corporate or company sponsored blog? If so, do you have set goals for the blog?
Chapter 4 is all about blogging. David (I feel like we are virtual friends now, so I’m referring to him by his first name) talks about the history of blogs and outlines a few different ways to use them. In this chapter David tells a story of Alacra, a company that creates online technology and services for financial institutions. The CEO of Alacra said and I absolutely echo the thought, “We didn’t know what would happen, but we wanted to try it.”
This week The B2B Lead turns a year old. In fact, we’re having a birthday party to celebrate. We’ll be sure to share the pictures later this week. Anyway, back to the book…
When we were putting together our ideas for what the B2BLead would be we knew we wanted a place where we could interact with customers and prospects about their day to day jobs as Marketers. This was not going to be a place for ReachForce promotion (although I do try and slip it in every once in awhile). Our goal was to serve up bite size tips and tricks that could be used in our real jobs.
Still not sure how this was going to increase ReachForce awareness or drive more leads, we jumped in with both feet. And much to my surprise, The B2B Lead has taken off. Here’s a few exciting things that have happened to us since launching the blog –
- We have connected with key industry influencers that we’d been trying to reach for over a year.
- We are able to engage with and leverage our partners via joint thought leadership
- One of our tips was picked up for MarketingProfs newsletter (we didn’t pay for this)
- A post about us was ranked #1 on Sphinn
- Provided us an opportunity to be seen as thought leaders in our industry
- As bloggers, we’re building out a Twitter following
- The B2B Lead was added to Guy Kawasaki’s Marketing Alltop list
- Through this book club, David Meerman Scott now knows who we are
In addition to the external PR, we felt like we’re putting great content out on The B2B Lead and we wanted to be able to leverage it in different ways. We’ve now also developed programs around repurposing the stuff out there. Here’s a few examples of what we’re doing.
- We use The B2B Lead content for our lead generation programs.
- We use blog content in our newsletter.
- The blog is now also integrated with other programs, both lead generation and PR.
- We now get net new leads every week from the blog.
Since we tend to share Tips on The B2B Lead, here are a few tips that have contributed to our success.
- Don’t use your blog as another version of your website or a sales pitch.
- Don’t just post boring press releases.
- Humanize your authors, provide some color around them, their experience, what they are going to contribute, etc.
- Good content will take you a long way.
- We try to post at least 3 times a week (usually more like 5 or 6). We don’t want people to forget about us.
- Linking is REALLY important.
- Set goals for the blog and stick to them.
- Don’t be everything to everyone. Know your audience and speak to their needs. It is better to have the right readers rather then just a lot of readers.
If you’ve got a blog, how are you using it? Any big successes you’d like to share?
Going New Places – Targeting New Buyers in New Vertical Markets - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #136
Friday, August 8th, 2008As B2B Marketers we can be faced with the challenge of branching into new and untested markets. Environments where we have no marketing history, no means to set expectations, no sales pipeline predictability. Below are a few best practices we are using here at ReachForce as we look to make our next move. This is our approach to being more deliberate about targeting new buyers in new vertical markets.
Step 1. Customer Profiling
- Produce a profile of top customers in best performing markets.
- Identify universal characteristics and apply to new market to select top priority prospect companies.
Example – If you are currently seeing success selling into larger companies vs. smaller or companies that have many divisions or branches. These characteristics carry over multiple verticals. It’s a good place to start when venturing into a new space.
Step 2. Prospect Matching and Research
- Apply profile to companies in new vertical market to identify those with highest propensity to purchase.
- Find out where decision-makers, recommenders and influencers from these companies hang out. What associations do they belong to? What events do they attend? What newsletters or magazines do they subscribe to?
- Phone screen sample base to map the Decision Making Unit and understand unique vertical market needs, decision drivers, and pain points.
Step 3. Prospect Discovery
- Map profile to existing database to determine what contacts you already have
- Identify what companies and contacts you are missing
- Augment what your marketing database with role-based contacts, this enables more targeted lead generation programs.
Step 4. Marketing Campaign Execution
- Execute multi-modal Marketing Campaign to contacts focusing on key vertical pain points
- Leverage independent analyst reports, vertical customer case studies, testimonials, or awards to establish credibility in a new market when available
- Support Direct Marketing efforts with New Media, Search Engine Marketing, and PR programs
- Harvest responders, further qualify
- Funnel sales ready leads to Sales team
Step 5. Lead Nurturing
- Support Sales cycle by periodically reaching out to prospects.
- Provide information/offers to stay top of mind and encourage engagement.
For best results be sure to engage with sales before launching the new program and ensure they are on board to provide guidance and feedback throughout the process.
Before starting to explore your new world of buyers remember your dollars and sense. To execute a healthy ROI generating program it’s important to map out each step of the building process taking into consideration your budget, timing and appropriate follow up activity.
Click here for a template to help you build out your own vertical focused lead generation programs.
Email Marketing in a Web 2.0 World - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #135
Thursday, August 7th, 2008I know, I know, “Web 2.0” sounds sooooo cliché but the so-called Web 2.0 world has really changed everything when it comes to marketing including those traditional activities like Webinar marketing, email campaigns, and direct marketing. Now, Jeff Pulver posts some wonderful advice on avoiding email marketing mistakes in Marketing 103: e-mail Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in a Web 2.0 World.
I encourage you to forgive him his “web 2.0 world” reference (we’ve all made them) and read this great post. Most of his advice is focused on formatting the email to look as if it is personalized. But he does offer a few tips that many marketers may not have considered such as:
” - Be ONLINE and AVAILABLE.
The sender of the email marketing campaign should be plan to be online and responding to messages as they are received from people asking questions from the email they just received. The more available the sender is, the higher the probability the success rate will be higher. Avoid going dark if you can avoid it.
– KNOW the DEVICE and Platform being used by the recipient to read their messages. This continues to be the BEST way to increase the chances your message will be seen in a way you intended it to be seen. The information about the default device/platform used to read e-mail can have a tremendous impact on the future effectiveness of future e-mail marketing campaigns.”
By following Jeff’s advice and investing in a great database and email automation tools, you can make your email marketing campaigns less of an intrusion and see an increase in click throughs and conversion rates. However, I recommend you take Web 2.0 a step further and offer up a number of options for communicating with your customers. Make sure you give them the choice of receiving an email, RSS feed, or Twitter updates. You can increase the frequency of your outreach to customers and reduce the investment you sink into building an email marketing campaign by leveraging these social media tools to build a network of followers. At BreakingPoint, we’ve built a rapidly growing following on Twitter that is paying off in terms of web visitors, leads, and loyal followers who help us spread word of mouth about our products. Curious about how we did it? Follow our corporate feed at www.twitter.com/breakingpoint. Or, if you want to get updates on The B2B Lead stories follow the bloggers at www.twitter.com/poneal, www.twitter.com/lawallace and www.twitter.com/ahawthorne.
“Fuel” for Lead Generation - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #134
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008The talk of high gas prices today – it’s on everyone’s mind and we can’t get away from it.
Cost of lead generation – it’s on every smart marketer’s mind and we can’t get away from it.
There seems to be an interesting parallel between the two. With higher gas prices, also come new alternative ways to travel, for example, carpooling, hybrids and fuel efficient cars. If you have high quality fuel to put into your marketing programs, it’s even more important to determine which vehicle(s) will most effectively accelerate sales conversions.
Test your options and see how your prospects respond and engage. Build your programs based on results.
- Do they prefer to attend live webinars or watch recorded webcasts to get information?
- Or do they prefer white papers because they can read it on their own time?
- Or do they prefer white papers because they can read it on their own time?
- Do they participate in surveys? Or take free online demos?
- Do they subscribe to a specific set of industry newsletters?
- Do industry analysts play a role in their buying decisions?
- Do they go to the blogosphere for their ‘real’ information?
- Are they in communities you possibly haven’t discovered?
The goal of testing here is to better understand your prospects and the way they consume information for making buying decisions. Once you’ve determined the most effective vehicles, consider your marketing mix.
Marketing Mix
- Make sure you always have a goal in mind. How are you gauging success?
- Include different vehicles in your marketing mix to ensure your prospective buyers are receiving your message in the method they best respond to.
- Be sure not to exclude suspects by being exclusive with your offers. You don’t want to miss opportunities.
- Consider adding new media outlets to the mix and you may discover new ways to reach your target audience.
The most important message here is that you use your fuel as effectively as possible and find the vehicle that best reaches your buyers and accelerates your lead generation conversions.
Is Dirty Data Sabotaging your Marketing Results? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #133
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008Dirty data—whether purchased, gathered via download offers or aged and stored in your internal database—costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity.
Today’s mobile workforce is changing jobs faster than ever before. According to Gartner, 30 million of the 138 million workers in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. Now add that to the number of businesses that move or get acquired every month. It’s easy to see how they dirty data piles up and piles up fast.
Feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect that can derail success by:
- Delivering the wrong message to the wrong person
- Annoying customers and prospects with redundant messages
- Losing credibility due to botched attempts at personalized communications
- Failing to leverage multi-modal marketing capabilities
- Misinterpreting campaign success metrics
- Creating more Sales inefficiencies
Even with so much at stake, tackling data cleanup issues is a daunting proposition. Most Marketers are overwhelmed by a customer or prospect database with hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in myriad states of completeness. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years. It is often too difficult to know where to begin.
Before you undertake any data cleaning, segmentation, or augmentation initiative, be sure to map out your plan. Here’s an outline to get you started.
Targeting the Right Companies–
Use what you already have access to first – your CRM data and your web site visitor logs
- CRM data
- Profile your top performing market segments – where are you winning?
- Identify your best target markets – what kinds of deals close the fastest?
- Determine key qualifying company characteristics and buyer roles.
- Website visitor logs/Unknown visitor logs
- Look for visitor patterns – ex. are there lots of healthcare companies visiting you that you haven’t directly targeted?
- Are companies visiting already currently in your database, if so, are you recording these page visits?
- Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, just because they don’t announce themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t potential leads.
This analysis will help you determine where to find your target market “sweet spot”.
Once you’ve built a profile of common denominators or qualifying criteria for your target market “sweet spot,” now you’re ready to identify your decision making unit. The decision making consists of everyone involved in the buying decision of your product or service.
Start with a decision making unit profile to identify the types of buyers involved in the buying process and the roles of these buyers both in the buying cycle and their role within the organization. It is vital to understand the responsibilities for each of your buyers. With this information, you will be able to refine your data augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted marketing programs.
Now that you have your buying unit profiled, pull a list of pre-existing contacts that correspond to your Target Accounts so you can begin the process of de-duping, identifying missing fields such as addresses or contact details, and identifying gaps such as key buyers, roles and other relevant details.
After your de-duping process, you now know what you have and what you need to fill in. When filling in the gaps, remember to look for role-based contact resources, like ReachForce. Shameless promotion I know…but remember the title-based lists we’re all used to using are still delivering a less than 3% response rate. Isn’t it worth the risk of trying something new?
A few extra data hygiene tips from our Marketing Ops Guru, Lauren, here at ReachForce –
- Mark all records that are included in your current target market, you don’t necessarily want to delete the data you aren’t using but you want to be able to pull your new target market data easily. You’ll be thankful you did this, I promise.
- Add a ‘born on’ date field to the record and once you’ve refreshed it, add the date, everyone touching the record will be happy you did this.
- As you are filling in gaps and building out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options. While you’re updating you should go ahead and do this too. This will enable you to laser target your message at these prospects.
