http://ittybitty.bz/CRMSWDec
Email marketing has certainly matured as a b2b communication and lead generation tool over the past several years. Historically, email was that tool that allowed marketers to mass message lists and segments, often pulled from our CRM. While useful in many respects, email blasting or bulk email delivery has failed as a true lead generation medium in a b2b environment. To be clear, by failed, I mean that email blasting, in and of itself does not lead to a high number of lead conversions. By conversions I mean leads who click through the email and ultimately convert to a sales opportunity in CRM.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
I learned everything about b2b marketing from infomercials!
I learned everything I need to know about b2b marketing from watching Infomercial!
OK, so I'm spinning a bit of a lie. I didn't learn lead scoring or progressive profiling or email design from infomercials, but in the spirit of catchy subjects, that seemed to work well. The point is, however, that we can learn a lot of valuable and practical strategy for developing b2b marketing campaigns by paying close attention to the structure, language and flow of an infomercial, particularly the short ones (7-15 minutes). Forget the late night 30-minute sessions. I'm talking Sham-Wow, OxiClean and Ginsu Knives. These 10-15 minute vignettes are constructed with a great deal of planning, purpose and the single minded goal of getting the sales.
Our b2b marketing campaigns can learn a lot from the late great Billy Mays. One of the consistencies you will find in any infomercial is that they are crafted very much the same way as a typical b2b pitch is crafted. Whether the pitchmen are selling cleaners, onion choppers or the next great cell phone holder, they are adhere to the a strict format in selling their products
Enter the OnionChopper2000. It is the solution to the pain and situation created by the lack of adequate onion chopping tools. The infomercial dazzles the viewer with the numerous ways one may chop an onion (or pretty much anything in your fridge). The features/benefits of the OC2000 are clearly stated and the problems each feature solves are directly related to the various pain points established in the situation portion of the infomercial.
Now, as a direct marketer for many years, I watch these shows with professional curiosity. I also respect the producers for creating a natural pain/solution chain in 20 minutes. This is what every good b2b salesperson should aspire towards. Beyond being a good lesson for a b2b salesperson, these vignettes also provide a blueprint for how b2b marketers should approach our campaigns.
Situation
Pain
Solution
In breaking down these 3 areas, we can relate how each can and should apply to creating good campaigns that illicit high response and lead conversion for our companies.
Situation: What is the situation our clients face that causes business (financial) pain? Let's take the healthcare space an example. If you sell to hospitals, you must understand that the "Situation" (not to be confused with the endearing Jersey Shore character) hospitals face is about money and the ever-changing regulations to reimbursement from both government and insurers. This "Situation" causes pain for your prospective buyers. This pain creates need. The need is for solutions that maximize their reimbursement without sacrificing patient care.
In creating campaigns for this market, you have to build your campaign around this model. Campaigns must paint the picture of the problem and quickly tie the solution to the pain you provide, caused by the situation. Simple examples are a white paper outlining best practices for managing claim denials from Medicare. The situation outlined in the campaign is "Reimbursement Changes Increase Denials". The solution is providing a software application that manages claims more effectively by incorporating new regulations.
Too often, marketers fall into a trap that a lot of junior b2b sales persons fall into. Show up and throw up is a phenomena wherein a salesperson comes to a meeting, throws up a powerpoint and blindly presents all of the great things that their solution can do for the prospect....without asking questions and identifying the situation/pain.
When designing an email campaign or a landing page, for example, how many times have you over-designed the email or the landing page to include a not-so-small subset of everything on your website? I have seen this time and again in PPC landing pages in particular. The marketer behaves like a dog chasing a car....when you catch it, you're so excited you don't know what to do with it! The same holds true for a landing page or email....you design because you're excited someone has actually opened it or clicked on it...and you try to cram tons of extraneous information into it. Your campaign will suffer because it is not focused on the task at hand.
It is much more productive to create several micro-campaigns than one big all encompassing one. Reason being is the conversion rates on the emails, landing pages, direct mail will be much higher when the message is focused on the 3 elements mentioned above.
So, before you hit send on that next campaign.....watch and infomercial first.....and take heed to just how focused the messaging is on those somewhat corny....yet extremely effective advertising vignettes! And don't laugh...they're on TV because they MAKE MONEY.
OK, so I'm spinning a bit of a lie. I didn't learn lead scoring or progressive profiling or email design from infomercials, but in the spirit of catchy subjects, that seemed to work well. The point is, however, that we can learn a lot of valuable and practical strategy for developing b2b marketing campaigns by paying close attention to the structure, language and flow of an infomercial, particularly the short ones (7-15 minutes). Forget the late night 30-minute sessions. I'm talking Sham-Wow, OxiClean and Ginsu Knives. These 10-15 minute vignettes are constructed with a great deal of planning, purpose and the single minded goal of getting the sales.
Our b2b marketing campaigns can learn a lot from the late great Billy Mays. One of the consistencies you will find in any infomercial is that they are crafted very much the same way as a typical b2b pitch is crafted. Whether the pitchmen are selling cleaners, onion choppers or the next great cell phone holder, they are adhere to the a strict format in selling their products
- Situation
- Pain
- Solution
Enter the OnionChopper2000. It is the solution to the pain and situation created by the lack of adequate onion chopping tools. The infomercial dazzles the viewer with the numerous ways one may chop an onion (or pretty much anything in your fridge). The features/benefits of the OC2000 are clearly stated and the problems each feature solves are directly related to the various pain points established in the situation portion of the infomercial.
Now, as a direct marketer for many years, I watch these shows with professional curiosity. I also respect the producers for creating a natural pain/solution chain in 20 minutes. This is what every good b2b salesperson should aspire towards. Beyond being a good lesson for a b2b salesperson, these vignettes also provide a blueprint for how b2b marketers should approach our campaigns.
Situation
Pain
Solution
In breaking down these 3 areas, we can relate how each can and should apply to creating good campaigns that illicit high response and lead conversion for our companies.
Situation: What is the situation our clients face that causes business (financial) pain? Let's take the healthcare space an example. If you sell to hospitals, you must understand that the "Situation" (not to be confused with the endearing Jersey Shore character) hospitals face is about money and the ever-changing regulations to reimbursement from both government and insurers. This "Situation" causes pain for your prospective buyers. This pain creates need. The need is for solutions that maximize their reimbursement without sacrificing patient care.
In creating campaigns for this market, you have to build your campaign around this model. Campaigns must paint the picture of the problem and quickly tie the solution to the pain you provide, caused by the situation. Simple examples are a white paper outlining best practices for managing claim denials from Medicare. The situation outlined in the campaign is "Reimbursement Changes Increase Denials". The solution is providing a software application that manages claims more effectively by incorporating new regulations.
Too often, marketers fall into a trap that a lot of junior b2b sales persons fall into. Show up and throw up is a phenomena wherein a salesperson comes to a meeting, throws up a powerpoint and blindly presents all of the great things that their solution can do for the prospect....without asking questions and identifying the situation/pain.
When designing an email campaign or a landing page, for example, how many times have you over-designed the email or the landing page to include a not-so-small subset of everything on your website? I have seen this time and again in PPC landing pages in particular. The marketer behaves like a dog chasing a car....when you catch it, you're so excited you don't know what to do with it! The same holds true for a landing page or email....you design because you're excited someone has actually opened it or clicked on it...and you try to cram tons of extraneous information into it. Your campaign will suffer because it is not focused on the task at hand.
It is much more productive to create several micro-campaigns than one big all encompassing one. Reason being is the conversion rates on the emails, landing pages, direct mail will be much higher when the message is focused on the 3 elements mentioned above.
So, before you hit send on that next campaign.....watch and infomercial first.....and take heed to just how focused the messaging is on those somewhat corny....yet extremely effective advertising vignettes! And don't laugh...they're on TV because they MAKE MONEY.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Email marketing's evolution challenges some popular notions about new marketing channels
So email marketing is a dying channel? Social media has taken over and now rules the roost? Not so fast.
In the trenches, where actual marketing and lead gen occurs, outside of the scope of industry articles and blogs that state otherwise, email is growing in use at an exponential rate among b2b marketers.
While the days of generalist mass email blasts are going the way of the dinosaur, the use of email as a nurture marketing and content delivery vehicle are rapidly expanding. We may not see a similar volume of email, but the usage by savvy marketers is certainly growing fast. This post explores the new ways smart b2b marketers are using email to increase their lead conversion and improve their overall marketing presence.
Get personal - the b2b marketer should rethink email marketing firstly from the perspective of what it is attempting to communicate to the potential buyer. Personalization in email is not a new concept. Marketers have been applying personalization to email for some time. So what do I mean when I say "get personal"? I mean get personal in the the content you deliver and how you deliver it with email. Go beyond dropping the person's name/company in the email and start to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. That is the essence of getting personal in email marketing. In order to execute a more personalized chain of communications, you need data. What data you needs depends on how automated you want to go or how deep your content catalog is. A simple example is you have solutions that support 3 vertical market segments. A lead comes to your website and downloads a white paper relevant to Vertical segment 1. You will then execute a series of follow up emails (usually automatically based on triggers) that provide supporting and relevant content.
A typical email trigger series may look like this:
Action - Download vertical white paper 1
Save Time and Money with Triggers
Trigger-based emails are becoming extremely popular amongst savvy marketers. The reason is simple, Triggers never sleep. While you're on vacation, in a meeting, at a trade show, home sick....whatever, you're triggers are sitting there, faithfully doing what was once a rote task that you had to be there for. Well, I'm here to tell you that while they may sound simple, trigger-based emails are not as easy as an auto-responder. Like any good campaign, they should have expected outcomes, planning and follow up actions. Trigger-based emails, like the ones found in SalesFUSION, are often tied to the website. You're website is presenting content out to the masses. Someone comes in and accesses an asset. The trigger-based email fulfills the asset automatically, then waits a day, thanks them, waits a few more days, thanks them again.
The importance of triggers cannot be understated. They allow the marketer to always be on. They also enable you to make actionable the content on your website. You can also ensure that all leads that hit your website are treated equally, at least initially. This has a real and measurable impact in your lead conversion rates.
Drip Campaigns
Unlike trigger campaigns, drip-based marketing campaigns are used more as a series of communications that are related to each other. The primary difference between drip-based email and trigger-based email is who receives it and when. In drip campaigns, you are communicating initially with a group, segment or list on a specific calendar date and time. Most typically, the drip campaigns have specific follow up emails that are sent to groups who have behaved or interacted with the previous email in a certain way. This string of communications can be relatively short (say 30-days) or long (90-days). The benefit of drip campaigns is that they allow for continuous branding and messaging of relevant content to a group of people over time.
Email marketing has not succumbed to social media, or any other channel for that matter. It is rapidly growing in usage amongst b2b marketers. Email is being used more efficiently and effectively and has grown up in its overall efficacy as a marketing channel in and of itself.
In the trenches, where actual marketing and lead gen occurs, outside of the scope of industry articles and blogs that state otherwise, email is growing in use at an exponential rate among b2b marketers.
While the days of generalist mass email blasts are going the way of the dinosaur, the use of email as a nurture marketing and content delivery vehicle are rapidly expanding. We may not see a similar volume of email, but the usage by savvy marketers is certainly growing fast. This post explores the new ways smart b2b marketers are using email to increase their lead conversion and improve their overall marketing presence.
Get personal - the b2b marketer should rethink email marketing firstly from the perspective of what it is attempting to communicate to the potential buyer. Personalization in email is not a new concept. Marketers have been applying personalization to email for some time. So what do I mean when I say "get personal"? I mean get personal in the the content you deliver and how you deliver it with email. Go beyond dropping the person's name/company in the email and start to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. That is the essence of getting personal in email marketing. In order to execute a more personalized chain of communications, you need data. What data you needs depends on how automated you want to go or how deep your content catalog is. A simple example is you have solutions that support 3 vertical market segments. A lead comes to your website and downloads a white paper relevant to Vertical segment 1. You will then execute a series of follow up emails (usually automatically based on triggers) that provide supporting and relevant content.
A typical email trigger series may look like this:
Action - Download vertical white paper 1
- Trigger 1 - "Thank you for accessing white paper - cross promote white paper 2"
- Trigger 2 - "Thanks for accessing white paper - here is a link for product data sheet for vertical 1
- Trigger 3 - "Promote webinar/event relevant to vertical 1
Save Time and Money with Triggers
Trigger-based emails are becoming extremely popular amongst savvy marketers. The reason is simple, Triggers never sleep. While you're on vacation, in a meeting, at a trade show, home sick....whatever, you're triggers are sitting there, faithfully doing what was once a rote task that you had to be there for. Well, I'm here to tell you that while they may sound simple, trigger-based emails are not as easy as an auto-responder. Like any good campaign, they should have expected outcomes, planning and follow up actions. Trigger-based emails, like the ones found in SalesFUSION, are often tied to the website. You're website is presenting content out to the masses. Someone comes in and accesses an asset. The trigger-based email fulfills the asset automatically, then waits a day, thanks them, waits a few more days, thanks them again.
The importance of triggers cannot be understated. They allow the marketer to always be on. They also enable you to make actionable the content on your website. You can also ensure that all leads that hit your website are treated equally, at least initially. This has a real and measurable impact in your lead conversion rates.
Drip Campaigns
Unlike trigger campaigns, drip-based marketing campaigns are used more as a series of communications that are related to each other. The primary difference between drip-based email and trigger-based email is who receives it and when. In drip campaigns, you are communicating initially with a group, segment or list on a specific calendar date and time. Most typically, the drip campaigns have specific follow up emails that are sent to groups who have behaved or interacted with the previous email in a certain way. This string of communications can be relatively short (say 30-days) or long (90-days). The benefit of drip campaigns is that they allow for continuous branding and messaging of relevant content to a group of people over time.
Email marketing has not succumbed to social media, or any other channel for that matter. It is rapidly growing in usage amongst b2b marketers. Email is being used more efficiently and effectively and has grown up in its overall efficacy as a marketing channel in and of itself.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Trash to treasure? How to use your existing marketing & sales collateral to drive cheap lead generation.
In the growing spirit of austerity, i thought I would re-start SalesFUSION's blog with a new post that is a follow up to a recent webinar created and presented by SalesFUSION and leading B2B Agency, Renaissance Direct. The theme of the webinar was "re-purposing your existing marketing collateral to generate new leads". Without beating the hackneyed drum of "how to generate leads in down economy", this post will explore practical advice and usable tactics for making the most out of what you already have.
The realities of the current marketing environment dictate that we take a more rigorous approach to tracking and managing the opportunity value generated from the campaigns and corresponding spend. We as professional b2b marketers are being asked to generate the same or more leads with less budget, personnel and resources. We can however, leverage new tactics for old materials. Chances are your company has a veritable treasure trove of collateral that has been collecting dust or sitting static on your website. Or worse yet, your marketing collateral and sales collateral sits idly on a C: drive somewhere and is only accessed by sales reps engaged in a sales cycle.
While marketers grasp with these challenges and attempt to achieve their goals with less, they often overlook the obvious. Let's start with the website. Many innovative companies now employ an online resource center as a standard page in the corporate website. The resource center is meant to be a public facing document repository that is updated frequently with new content and promoted to the masses. A typical online resource center will contain categorized links to White Papers, product data sheets, case studies, press, videos (testimonials is the hot one), screenshots (for software companies) and sales presentations. Whats important to note is that the majority of what would make for a good resource center for most companies is material that already exists. Once you buy in to the notion of creating an online repository of materials, a few key elements must be put into place. Firstly, you have to make the decision to put some or all of the materials behind lead capture pages. The lead capture page should be treated like a landing page for pay per click. It should be user friendly and capture enough information to start a digital conversation with the lead. Solutions like SalesFUSION's eDialogs provide a variety lead capture page types and configurations to accommodate all websites.
Once you have the content and mechanism for capturing those who access the content in place, it's now time to promote the materials on the resource center. There are several no-brainers when it comes to this. If you have an existing house-file of leads/contacts, you can start with regular email blasts out to these lists. It's important to provide regular updates to the resource center as it gives you a reason to send email updates out at some interval. When sending out your emails for the resource center, don't get fancy. Keep the emails simple and to the point. Provide only one external link in the email; for the resource center.
Beyond email, we'll explore some other ways to promote this great new sales and lead generation tool on the cheap. Social media outlets provide the next logical medium to promote our materials. Any social media outlet with categorized groups is prime real estate for publishing good content. LinkedIn is a perfect example and lends itself well to these types of posts. Proceed cautiously however because how you post is as important as what you post. Many social media group-type sites frown on over sales messages. When posting your web content in social media sites, be sure to post educational content first and inform the reader in the post that the materials require a form to fill out to access the materials. This up front notice actually increases the form completion rates.
Other ways to leverage social media are allowing sales team members and other members of the company to post content in their respective twitter and facebook accounts. There are a couple of caveats to consider before proceeding. Firstly, HR should establish a policy for posting corporate content in social sites. Personal Facebook pages and twitter pages may contain material that is inappropriate for business use. It must me made very clear that content cannot be posted alongside personal photos that may be too risque for the legal team. Another consideration is how to track inbound clicks from social sites. SalesFUSION just released a series of add-on social media posting tools for its dialog products. These tools convert the landing page or dialog URL's so that they are track able to the person posting and fit within sites that have character restrictions such as Twitter.
An extension of social media, business social publishing sites have emerged as very good outlets for a variety of materials from a variety of industries. Customer Think is a great example of these emerging user-driven publishing sites. Members can join these sites for free, create an online profile and then post educational content and materials. This is a wonderful outlet for your existing white papers, press releases and more. Depending on the specific rules of any site, you can even post product-centric information. Another social publishing site that has emerged is FOCUS. Focus is tied to a popular LinkedIn group and like Customer Think, allows its members to drive the content. What's interesting about Focus is that it rewards its regular posting members with different Status'. This encourages users to strive for the elevated status by posting good content on a regular basis, thus enhancing the information quality on the site.
Don't forget to dust off those power point presentations! Other outlets, which are more product centric but can be linked into social media profiles are SlideShare and Box.net. These are more file-sharing in nature but allow users to post content that eventually becomes indexed by Google. Grab all of those old power points that have been created. Turn them into presentation for Slideshare and box.net in your LinkedIn profile. Encourage your reps and other employees to do the same.
What's important about the social outlets is that you can direct social traffic back to your online resource center. You can also spread your name through the web via social business publishing sites...both of which carry no cost. In the end the more you post into the social and business sites, with PDF's that havce active links back you your site, the better your SEO will ultimately perform.
I summary, it's important that marketers look to their internal collateral as a valid means of increasing your exposure through multiple channels. You don't expensive agencies or consultants to create campaigns around this content. Just get it out there. Make sure it has LOTS of links back in to your site and work towards creating a regularly-updated online resource center and you will dramatically improve your industry footprint.
In SalesFUSION we use a suite of tools known as eDialogs. These are sort of like landing pages, sort of like social publishing tools, and many things in between. Ultimately the goal of pushing content through eDialogs is to make the inbound traffic track-able. All marketers need to strive towards tracking inbound leads right through to the CRM. SalesFUSION, as a marketing automation platform, is built specifically with this process in mind.
The realities of the current marketing environment dictate that we take a more rigorous approach to tracking and managing the opportunity value generated from the campaigns and corresponding spend. We as professional b2b marketers are being asked to generate the same or more leads with less budget, personnel and resources. We can however, leverage new tactics for old materials. Chances are your company has a veritable treasure trove of collateral that has been collecting dust or sitting static on your website. Or worse yet, your marketing collateral and sales collateral sits idly on a C: drive somewhere and is only accessed by sales reps engaged in a sales cycle.
While marketers grasp with these challenges and attempt to achieve their goals with less, they often overlook the obvious. Let's start with the website. Many innovative companies now employ an online resource center as a standard page in the corporate website. The resource center is meant to be a public facing document repository that is updated frequently with new content and promoted to the masses. A typical online resource center will contain categorized links to White Papers, product data sheets, case studies, press, videos (testimonials is the hot one), screenshots (for software companies) and sales presentations. Whats important to note is that the majority of what would make for a good resource center for most companies is material that already exists. Once you buy in to the notion of creating an online repository of materials, a few key elements must be put into place. Firstly, you have to make the decision to put some or all of the materials behind lead capture pages. The lead capture page should be treated like a landing page for pay per click. It should be user friendly and capture enough information to start a digital conversation with the lead. Solutions like SalesFUSION's eDialogs provide a variety lead capture page types and configurations to accommodate all websites.
Once you have the content and mechanism for capturing those who access the content in place, it's now time to promote the materials on the resource center. There are several no-brainers when it comes to this. If you have an existing house-file of leads/contacts, you can start with regular email blasts out to these lists. It's important to provide regular updates to the resource center as it gives you a reason to send email updates out at some interval. When sending out your emails for the resource center, don't get fancy. Keep the emails simple and to the point. Provide only one external link in the email; for the resource center.
Beyond email, we'll explore some other ways to promote this great new sales and lead generation tool on the cheap. Social media outlets provide the next logical medium to promote our materials. Any social media outlet with categorized groups is prime real estate for publishing good content. LinkedIn is a perfect example and lends itself well to these types of posts. Proceed cautiously however because how you post is as important as what you post. Many social media group-type sites frown on over sales messages. When posting your web content in social media sites, be sure to post educational content first and inform the reader in the post that the materials require a form to fill out to access the materials. This up front notice actually increases the form completion rates.
Other ways to leverage social media are allowing sales team members and other members of the company to post content in their respective twitter and facebook accounts. There are a couple of caveats to consider before proceeding. Firstly, HR should establish a policy for posting corporate content in social sites. Personal Facebook pages and twitter pages may contain material that is inappropriate for business use. It must me made very clear that content cannot be posted alongside personal photos that may be too risque for the legal team. Another consideration is how to track inbound clicks from social sites. SalesFUSION just released a series of add-on social media posting tools for its dialog products. These tools convert the landing page or dialog URL's so that they are track able to the person posting and fit within sites that have character restrictions such as Twitter.
An extension of social media, business social publishing sites have emerged as very good outlets for a variety of materials from a variety of industries. Customer Think is a great example of these emerging user-driven publishing sites. Members can join these sites for free, create an online profile and then post educational content and materials. This is a wonderful outlet for your existing white papers, press releases and more. Depending on the specific rules of any site, you can even post product-centric information. Another social publishing site that has emerged is FOCUS. Focus is tied to a popular LinkedIn group and like Customer Think, allows its members to drive the content. What's interesting about Focus is that it rewards its regular posting members with different Status'. This encourages users to strive for the elevated status by posting good content on a regular basis, thus enhancing the information quality on the site.
Don't forget to dust off those power point presentations! Other outlets, which are more product centric but can be linked into social media profiles are SlideShare and Box.net. These are more file-sharing in nature but allow users to post content that eventually becomes indexed by Google. Grab all of those old power points that have been created. Turn them into presentation for Slideshare and box.net in your LinkedIn profile. Encourage your reps and other employees to do the same.
What's important about the social outlets is that you can direct social traffic back to your online resource center. You can also spread your name through the web via social business publishing sites...both of which carry no cost. In the end the more you post into the social and business sites, with PDF's that havce active links back you your site, the better your SEO will ultimately perform.
I summary, it's important that marketers look to their internal collateral as a valid means of increasing your exposure through multiple channels. You don't expensive agencies or consultants to create campaigns around this content. Just get it out there. Make sure it has LOTS of links back in to your site and work towards creating a regularly-updated online resource center and you will dramatically improve your industry footprint.
In SalesFUSION we use a suite of tools known as eDialogs. These are sort of like landing pages, sort of like social publishing tools, and many things in between. Ultimately the goal of pushing content through eDialogs is to make the inbound traffic track-able. All marketers need to strive towards tracking inbound leads right through to the CRM. SalesFUSION, as a marketing automation platform, is built specifically with this process in mind.
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