I recently received an invite to a conference via email, quite common these days. The problem was, wait no, I should say the problems were:
It was addressed to someone who has not worked for my company for over a year
It was sent to sales@reachforce.com
It was addressed to the former CTO
This is an announcement to all sales people: if you want me to spend money with you, know that the person you are selling to still works there. A quick trip to our website would solve that. And do you really think that the CTO receives anything from sales@blank.com? Never send a marketing message to sales@blank.com or jobs@blank.com or contactus@blank.com, it will be deleted immediately.
Find the right decision maker to sell/market to and deliver you message directly to them. Sending your message to sales@blank.com just shows me you are lazy, and I will never buy from someone who is lazy.
Quick – how can understanding the science of vision and cognitive psychology help you boost B2B Marketing leads and revenue?
The Click Fu Masters at StomperNet just posted this intriguing video tutorial to help B2C and B2B Marketers boost their “Click Fu.” The team explains that understanding the function of the human eye and brain can help you improve marketing results and drive more revenue.
First, the eyes: StomperNet advises Marketers to understand the function of the eye and visitor blind spots to improve landing page design. Well, that’s a no-brainer. But, they go further explaining that primal man’s eyes were designed for two purposes: to eat and avoid being eaten. The FOVEA, designed for finding food to eat, is sensitive to fine details and color. The Periphery, designed to avoid being eaten, is tuned to motion and contrast. Understanding how to make appropriate use of color, organization, and design details while employing the right structure to the page can help Marketers boost conversions by more than 25 percent.
Now, the brain: StomperNet advises you to understand the link between vision and behavior so that you understand why a #10 result on Google will get you more clicks than a #6 or 7 position. Basically, their cognitive psychologist advises that: Easy wins out over Good or Better. Make user feel it will be easy to get what they want and they’ll stay longer and learn more. Understand your visitors’ goal and what they need to achieve the goal.
But that’s just the beginning. This is definitely a video that is worth watching.
During 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.
Sheer genius. This Dr. Pepper version of the Tay Zonday Chocolate Rain Video is hysterical and very nicely produced. I love the clever “viral” look introduction combined with the surprise MTV-style production. Also, nice job with the subtle branding near the end.
Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains quick tips for blogging best practices
including a link to a video interview on the subject.
Concerned with the increasing level of noise pollution in the blogosphere and inspired by this wonderful video interview of Cory Doctorow about blogging best practices, The B2B Lead is going green—green marketing, that is.
Long time readers of The B2B Lead know that our mission is to provide snack-size tutorials and tips. That’s about all busy B2B Marketers can take in these days. Of course, sometimes it just isn’t possible to communicate critical information in a short post. For example, in B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #59, we wrote about using Twitter to drive B2B blog readers and the post was much longer than traditional posts. Pondering the Future of B2B Marketing was equally lengthy.
So, for those of you who still want in-depth content along with your snack-size tips, we will now include Attention Conservation Notices to help you conserve your precious attention resources. As Doctorow advises in his video interview, we will lead off our blog posts with a short summary of key takeaways so that readers can decide whether they would like to invest their time in reading the entire article. Let us know if you find them useful.
So, I just heard about a marketing team that is making, in my opinion, a big mistake. To give you some background, these guys target HUGE companies. Their newest lead generation technique sends mass voicemails to contacts within companies like Nike, Sony, Reebok, Toshiba, Microsoft, etc….A few thoughts:
Who checks voicemail?
If it is checked, how many times have you deleted the VM as soon as you realize it is a salesperson who you have never spoken to?
If you do catch the name of the company before you delete the VM, how many times have you thought, “what a terrible way to try and sell me something…what were they thinking”?
This company is targeting marketers….don’t marketers take offense to being sold to by stupid marketing?
Let’s say that the sales rep makes it past 1-4 above….WHO IS HE/SHE CALLING??? How do they know that the VM they are leaving is for the person responsible for purchasing their solution?
B2C companies as large as these guys may have 500 people involved in marketing. Piggy back to point 5.
Heard about a very interesting Vendor Relationship Management project (the counterpart to Customer Relationship Management or CRM) today. Apparently, ProjectVRM, headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was chartered to “improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter.”
What really captured my interest was this intriguing presentation on possible scenarios with some fun and interesting implications for micro-segmentation marketing (Minority Report) vs. social media (The Global Village).
Attended the Austin Social Media Workshop today where I had the pleasure of listening to Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations) Connie Reece, Mike Chapman, and a bunch of other social media evangelists. One of the highlights that really drove home the point of the day was this genius video spoofing the typical one-way Marketing one-size-fits-all approach. This is definitely worth a watch!
Can you believe this is at a trade show and not Halloween? That’s right, at this year’s DreamForce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference, ReachForce found a fun way to stand out from all the other booths. The theme was Let’s Make a Deal. You can see Monty Hall in the center with his wacky contestants around. The theme definitely worked and gained a lot of attention for ReachForce and their debut software product, Insight. One lesson learned though was that some people had a hard time having an intelligent conversation with Fred Flintstone. If you try to get noticed at your next event with costumes, choose wisely who will wear them.
Yep, you heard me, Mr. Happy Crack. The clever folks at Crack Team USA Inc. in St. Louis have managed to make a successful viral video campaign for their concrete repair business. According to the Wall Street Journal Independent Street blog:
“The video doesn’t preach, it’s not blatantly advertorial (at least in the beginning), it emphasizes brand over product and you might watch it even if you’re not in the market to get a crack repaired. Though chances are good that, next time you do, you’ll think of this company first.”
