You Are What You Publish: Building Your Marketing and PR Plan - ReachForce Book Club
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008“What are your organization’s goals?” For most B2B marketers the answer is increasing revenue. David says that leads and website visitors are the wrong things to focus on. I have to disagree. At ReachForce, we are all striving towards the same goals (proven by the fact that all of our bonuses are tied to revenue and bookings goals). But, each department sort of reverse engineers what they individually have to achieve in order to meet those goals. We measure everything, so I know exactly how many new leads need to be delivered to sales in order to for them to reach their bookings numbers. I cannot make a sale or generate revenue directly, so I have to focus on goals I can achieve.
I think a great question you have to ask is “what is the goal of my website.” I touched on this some in my last post, but it is even more relevant for this chapter. Is the goal of your website to:
- educate buyers about your products or services?
- get buyers to download a white paper, eBook, webcast, etc?
- get buyers to contact you?
- get buyers to request a demo?
Most executives will say that they want all of the above. In my opinion, you can’t have it all for every persona. Your website should lead buyers down a path. The better goal may be that you have a different goal for each persona. That way your website is reaching all of these goals but each persona is traveling down the best path for them. Now I would love to tell you to check out the ReachForce website as a great example, but I don’t think that it is. Check back in a few weeks though because we are making lots of changes in this direction.
David spends a lot of this chapter talking about personas. Our own Pam O’Neal has blogged about personas before. I find that the best way for me to think about my different buyer personas is defining the different members of the decision making unit. I already segment my database that way and have different offers for different roles, shouldn’t my website be the same?
Anyone had any success using personas to drive their web design?
The Content-Rich Web Site - ReachForce Book Club
Friday, August 29th, 2008In this chapter, I didn’t really feel like David was talking to me. He gave great examples of a non-profit who used their website to spread their ideas and increase awareness as well as a large company who has policies and procedures to make sure all of their business units’ websites are aligned. And while I absolutely agree that content is key, I could not really relate to his case studies. Maybe I am just lucky that I work at a small company where I, as a marketer, am in charge of our website. I am amazed that I still meet marketers who work for much larger companies than ours and have no control over their website. I have to ask that company, “What is the goal of your website?” Because if the answer is to reach buyers, marketing should be the ones creating the content.
As I myself am heading towards a redesign I am asking the same question. We have so much content that we could put out there but the way we organize it varies based on our goals. Also something that David did not touch on is that great content leads to better SEO. So, if one of your goals is to improve SEO, should you put your best content behind forms? This is a battle I face everyday. Is it more important to get your content out there or know who is downloading it?
Next week we will be discussing chapters 10 and 11 on Building your Marketing and PR Plan and Online Thought Leadership.
Advertising or Entertainment: You Be The Judge - Marketing WTF?
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008Google has captured the hearts and minds of most of the civilized world, so the company really doesn’t need to advertise. Although I, for one, wouldn’t mind if Google would reach out and update me on their latest “toys.” So, just what would a television ad for Google look like? Check out these hysterically funny YouTube videos produced by The Vacationeers, here is Part 1 of “The Googling” be sure to check the entire series.
Forums, Wikis, and Your Targeted Audience - ReachForce Book Club
Friday, August 22nd, 2008Do you know anyone who is not online? I even know an 87-year-old who uses eBay. The fact of the matter is that everyone is online. The question is - are they talking about you and do you know what they are saying? David Meerman Scott gives some great examples of how different companies responded to negative comments on forums and blogs. I think there are two great lessons to be learned from these examples:
- You need to know what people, especially your customers, are saying about you
- You need to respond swiftly and genuinely directly to your audience. Do not do what Sony BMG did and respond to bloggers by going on the radio, respond where your audience is, online.
Hopefully most of you are already using Google Alerts to help you monitor blogs and news stories but it will not catch everything. Here are some other monitoring tools you should check out:
- search.twitter.com - you can search on any keyword, like your company name, to see who is tweeting about you
- blogsearch.google.com - again you can search on any keyword and add an RSS feed of it to your Google Reader. Tip: you can exclude your own blog or website by adding -site:yourwebsite.com after the keyword. So if I want to see who is talking about ReachForce I would search: reachforce -site:theb2blead.com.
I have discussed this before on The B2B Lead, but you should also monitor an RSS feed of blogs and forums that are in your space. These are the most likely targets for your customers and prospects. Have someone in your company who can add value to the conversation be involved. This is not always easy, but can have great benefits.
The point is:
- Be involved online and know what people are saying about you
- If you see something negative, don’t go dark, respond to try to make it better and admit when you have done something wrong. Everyone appreciates an apology when it is genuine.
- You can gain credibility by having an in-house expert active on forums and blogs - remember no sales pitches
What have you found to be successful online. We would love to hear any success stories. Know of any good monitoring tools? Please share.
Stay tuned next week when we will be covering chapters 8 & 9 on going viral and content rich websites.
365 Days, 9,435 Readers, 3 honors, 140 Tips and 28 Marketing WTF?s!
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Happy Birthday to The B2B Lead! Last Friday, The B2B Lead turned 1. We celebrated with the entire ReachForce team and threw a little party as you can see in the pics. We launched The B2B Lead a year ago with hopes of delivering great content to our prospects, customers and other smart marketers but had no expectation on what it would deliver back to us. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we have learned so much from our readers and hope that they are learning just as much from us. We are proud to have brought you now over 140 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips. I hope you will keep coming back for more.
Here are some of the best posts from the past year:
- Are You a Viral VIP? - The Definitive Guide to Viral Video Success
- Don’t Forget About Customer Marketing
- Lead Generation Using Email Marketing
- Using Surveys for Lead Scoring
- How to Get 3,190 People to Watch a Demo at a Tradeshow
- 10 Signs You Picked the Wrong Web Design Agency - Marketing WTF?
- Invest in the Right Tools to Track the Metrics That Matter
- Even Hitler Got Twitter - Marketing WTF?
- Trade Shows - Branding or Demand Gen or Waste of Time and Money?
You can also download 101 Sales and Marketing Tips from The B2B Lead. The first two volumes have been released with 3 more coming soon. The first two volumes cover the best tips on Online Marketing and Direct Marketing. I hope you will stay tuned to see what we will bring you next!
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?
Reaching Your Buyers Directly - ReachForce Book Club
Thursday, August 7th, 2008So of course I have to talk about chapter 3 – Reaching Your Buyers Directly. As you know this is the foundation ReachForce was built on, targeting the right companies and reaching the right buyers, every time. Anyway, back to the book…
Know the Goals and Let the Content Drive Action – this is what I really want to talk about. “On the speaking circuits and via my blog, I am often asked to critique marketing programs, Web sites, and blogs. My typical response, ‘What’s the goal?’ often throws people off. It is amazing that so many marketers don’t have established goals for their marketing programs and for Web sites and blogs in particular.” This struck me for some reason. As B2B Marketers we are constantly creating, writing and inventing new content and new outlets for people to reach us all with the intent of building awareness and driving leads to revenue. This doesn’t necessarily mean goals for each outlet are the same.
We are about to do a ReachForce website update. Leigh Anne had just come back from SEO conference and was filled with great ideas on helping us stay focused on our goals at hand. As Leigh Anne and I discussed what we wanted to change and things we wished we could do with the site, she stopped me and asked – “What is the goal for our reachforce.com site?”
Is it to provide general information or are we trying to get people to download our best practice content or are we trying to get them to contact us directly? Navigation, page lay outs and landing pages would be created differently based on our intent and goal. For example, if our goal is to get people to call us, then we should have contact information on every page. If our goal is get people to download content via forms, then we should be creative with the way we continue to collect info. so we can use it to better qualify leads. We should also be sure to mention the resources we are offering on multiple pages.
We are still deciding what we want our overall goal to be with our site and how we are going to refresh it to meet these objectives. As Scott did, I’d like to close with, “Ultimately, when marketers focus on the same goals as the rest of the organization, we develop marketing programs that really deliver action and begin to contribute to the bottom line and command respect.” Ok, all you B2BLead readers out there, my guess is most of you manage some if not all of what happens on your corporate site. Do you have a goal for it? If so, what things are you incorporating to achieve that goal?
Next week we will be covering chapters 4 and 5.
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.
Opting Out of Opt-In - B2B marketing and Sales Tip #131
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008Something I have been asked about lately is opt-in emails. There seems to be a battle between what is the best marketing practice. I will be first to admit that opt-in is always best, but for a new or growing company, building an opt-in list can be a difficult and lengthy process.
First things first, here is Wikipedia’s definition of Opt-in email:
Opt in e-mail is a term used when someone is given the option to receive “bulk” e-mail, that is, e-mail that is sent to many people at the same time. Typically, this is some sort of mailing list, newsletter, or advertising. Obtaining permission before sending e-mail is critical because without it, the e-mail is Unsolicited Bulk Email, better known as spam.
There are several common forms of opt-in e-mail:
Unconfirmed opt-in
A new subscriber first gives his/her address to the list software (for instance, on a Web page), but no steps are taken to make sure that this address actually belongs to the person. This can cause e-mail from the mailing list to be considered spam because simple typos of the email address can cause the email to be sent to someone else. Malicious subscriptions are also possible, as are subscriptions that are due to spammers forging email addresses that are sent to the e-mail address used to subscribe to the mailing list.
Confirmed opt-in (COI)
A new subscriber asks to be subscribed to the mailing list, but unlike unconfirmed opt-in, a confirmation e-mail is sent to verify it was really them. Many believe the person must not be added to the mailing list unless an explicit step is taken, such as clicking a special web link or sending back a reply e-mail. This ensures that no person can subscribe someone else out of malice or error. Mail system administrators and non-spam mailing list operators refer to this as confirmed subscription or closed-loop opt-in.
I want you to repeat after me, “I cannot buy and opt-in list.” For an email list to be truly opt-in, the subscriber needs to have signed-up to receive communication from you. If a company is selling an opt-in list, they are selling the names and emails of someone who has agreed to receive emails from affiliates. (We have all signed up for these when ordering a magazine or joining a new website) Many recipients on these “opt-in” lists still consider these affiliate messages to be SPAM.
Some marketers think that they can only email opt-in lists to avoid being a SPAMer. When actually, you just have to include a way for recipients to opt out. There are a few other rules you can read about on the Federal Trade Commission’s website, but currently there is no requirement for the opt-ins. If you are emailing internationally, be aware that each country has different laws for email marketing. Some countries in Europe have much stricter laws than in the US.
Really the best way to avoid being a SPAMer is to deliver relevant content to those you are emailing. Highly targeted and segmented campaigns with compelling content that speaks to the audience and their pain points. We have found that after we deliver new content to our prospects, they sign up for continued communication.
If you are looking to expand your opt-in list, check out Vertical Response’s Umpteen Ways to Build Your Email List.
Doing More with Less - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #127
Thursday, July 24th, 2008It only makes sense that if we are able to get the right message to the right buyers in the right kinds of companies we will increase Marketing ROI and accelerate Sales cycles. So why don’t we actually do just that?
By segmenting our leads database into smaller groups with similar characteristics, we are able to create very targeted programs that enable us to highlight exact pain points and specific solutions for those points. These more focused groups also enable us to very direct with our content and offers. We no longer have to generalize or discuss issues from 10,000 ft up.
Also, consider this – wouldn’t you consider a responder to a very direct message a more qualified lead than one that bites on a general offer? Also, wouldn’t your Sales team prefer fewer, more qualified leads to buckets of names of people who you don’t know what they do on a day to day basis?
Here are a couple of different ways I segment our leads for targeted programs here at ReachForce.
We slice leads by:
- Geography
- Industry
- Prospect title
- Prospect role (i.e. end user, decision maker, key influencer, etc.)
- Special interest group (i.e. event attendees, customers of salesforce.com, etc)
- Company size
- Company revenue
- Product line offerings
- Customers’ competitors
- People who acted on a specific call to action
- People who downloaded Product/Service Info.
- People who took a demo
- People in the sales pipeline that are stuck
Can you think of any more?
