B2B

Social Media in B-to-B Survey

Our most recent b-to-b social media survey examined a wide range of issues, including strategy, budget, tactics and measurement. While social media appears to have moved past the “shiny new toy” phase, clear goals are still evolving. Companies must understand opportunities and limitations as they move beyond trials to integrate social media with more established marketing functions

During the past 24 months, SiriusDecisions has collected data and insight about the evolution of social media in b-to-b as related to awareness, adoption, measurement and much more. In this post, we review a few findings from our 2009 Social Media in Business survey.

A cross-section of b-to-b organizations that sell complex, enterprise b-to-b products and services participated in the quantitative portion of the survey, which was co-sponsored by social media vendor Visible Technologies. Appropriate data and insight from SiriusDecisions benchmarking activities, consulting engagements and client inquiries were added to the sample as appropriate. As observed in prior surveys, all phases of marketing – including reputation initiatives – are now being more closely evaluated to determine return on investment. While there is a general understanding that social media is not necessarily the most efficient direct demand creation engine (especially in the short term), leading-edge organizations are increasingly testing new ways of integrating social media initiatives with other key marketing activities. Once organizations have gained working knowledge of how various social media activities can impact their prospects and customers at which particular points in the buying cycle, they can better align social media content to demand creation and sales enablement.

Our survey tracked the behaviors of b-to-b organizations around a number of social media activities. Specific observations in two areas include:

One: Usage and Objectives. We asked organizations to rank order how they are using social media, with the most important objectives listed first. While there was no dominant consensus, generating awareness ranked highest (26% of respondents) followed by engaging with customers to promote loyalty and retention (18%), and interfacing with analysts and other influencers (16%). Marketing specific products finished fourth in the rankings (15%). Each of the top four responses points to active, information-to-the-market type activities; monitoring and responding to customer support issues finished immediately behind the group. Perhaps this information feedback use is assumed to be part of all social media initiatives; however, the value of social media to constantly take the pulse of the market and its perception of your organization’s reputation should not be underestimated. Without a formal process or dedicated resources to monitor market perception, a company can be easily overwhelmed by misunderstandings or misinformation, hindering its ability to make any headway in the social media space at all.

Two: Demand Generation Support and Alignment. Studies by SiriusDecisions of broader reputation activities during the past 24 months have revealed a growing trend toward integrating reputation and demand creation. In our last survey, 33% of organizations reported that more than half the time, they linked their reputation with demand creation activities. In our social media survey, only 15% of respondents reported that more than half the time, they use social media to support their demand creation efforts. More than two-thirds of respondents reported that 25% of the time or less, they align social media with their demand creation activities. Clearly, organizations are still in need of a strategy to best leverage social media within the demand creation process. Organizations must begin to consider the ways that social media tactics can be applied beyond the top of the demand waterfall, such as for pipeline acceleration efforts and more comprehensive, just-in-time sales readiness.

Slowly but surely, social media technologies and systems are emerging from their initial perception as just a shiny new toy to be played with, then discarded. As organizations identify and recognize the risks and rewards of social media, they have begun to clarify best usages and objectives for specific initiatives, as well as to learn both the nuances and positioning of various social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook. Knowing which watering holes are frequented by which audiences – and what types of content can best influence them – can help marketing and sales organizations better customize messages. All of this guidance and information helps organizations understand the optimal role of social media for supporting broader demand creation and sales initiatives.

Sales and Marketing - Allies?

In many organizations, the reality is that sales and marketing relationships can be strained. In contrast, research shows that organizations that have embraced an integrated approach vastly outperform those that have not.

In conjucntion with the Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA), and SiriusDecisions, we (CMA) are examing what successful integration looks like through an online survey with the B2B community.

If you role is sales or marketing, weigh in and provide your persepctive -- take the survey now!

Survey closes on Friday - Feb. 5th.

Elizabeth Harvey

B2B Branding: Internal Branding a Key Factor to Success

Much has been written in the past few years on the topic of B2B branding. I find it the most rewarding aspect of branding and marketing planning, when it is done right.

Last week, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel on the topic of B2B branding; what does it take to win. I have to say that the quality of the panelists' discussion was top notch in terms or insight and expertise. The discussion lasted over 2 hours and easily could have gone on for several more…

A couple of first-hand observations that I took away from the panel include: 1) the agency turnout was stronger than client. This likely reflects the newness of the topic and the desire for greater expertise. 2.) The importance of internal branding was cited over and over again by the panelists (using a range of terminology) as the key factor for success in B2B branding. Considerations with internal branding and the connection to B2B branding success or failure included:(i) building trust with and through your employees in their one-to-one relationship with customers; (ii) the power of developing one voice through consistent internal and external communication; (iii) the absolute necessity to consistently delivering on the brand promise (key benefit) that you make through your people; and (iv) the importance of gaining buy-in from your CEO as you develop and refine your organization's B2B brand. Employee communication and education as well as connection to performance management systems were discussed in detail.

Several examples were provided by the panel and the audience of B2B brands failing to keep their promises and the tremendous opportunities presented when you get it right.

Has your organization had experience recently with B2B branding success or failure that relates to your internal brand?

By Patricia McQuillan, Brand Matters

Product Marketing Trends for 2010

While your mechanic might want you to believe that your car needs an oil change every 6,000 kilometers, automobile and oil technology has progressed to the point where recommended service intervals are now 15,000 kilometers or more. While this saves money and time, the downside is that minor problems often go undetected and become major issues; thus, it probably makes sense to have someone pop the hood every once in a while. In much the same way, product marketing should conduct periodic checks to ensure things are running smoothly. A perfect time to do this is during the yearly planning and budgeting cycle. In this post, I will reveal three key trends that should be on the radar of every b-to-b product marketing executive in 2010.

One: A Role in Sales Readiness
Many organizations have a dedicated sales readiness function that resides in sales and owns coordinating, synchronizing and integrating field, inside and channel sales with a variety of marketing functions. Product marketing must work with this function to define a common lifecycle management process across product lines/business units and to develop field requirements for sales tools, which will help sales reps understand what will be available when a new product or service is introduced. Product marketing will also need to work collaboratively with field marketing and communications to build the tools and collateral necessary for sales to more effectively facilitate buying/selling cycles. Product marketing can also play a key role in the evolution of the sales and marketing portal still prevalent in many organizations. Newer sales enablement platforms give reps the ability to intelligently search a content database for opportunity-specific content and customize it. These platforms also encourage collaboration across sales and marketing functions through community features and support for embedded social tools.

Two: The Rise of Hypersegmentation
Effective b-to-b organizations target at a sub-vertical level rather than stop at macro verticals, as buying triggers, trends, regulations and propensity to buy often vary wildly. This calls for increasingly defined target-level segmentation, or hypersegmentation, then choosing the strongest targets relative to one another. As product marketing tends to serve as the go-to source for information on an organization’s target markets, it will primarily fall to these marketers to educate the rest of the organization about deeper industry segmentation possibilities and how they can help provide a competitive advantage. Tighter targeting helps product marketing deliver better intelligence in such key areas as markets and roles, competitive threats and opportunities, win/loss analysis and pricing. Product marketing should help develop processes to take advantage of a hypersegmentation model without having to continually recreate individual programs to target.

Three: Program Interlock
One common theme for every marketing role is program interlock, or the process of marketing counterparts building integrated programs that align reputation, demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence goals under a common campaign framework. Besides streamlining activities, this level of integration supports the reuse of content and best practices across marketing programs. Working together to align campaigns will also help raise the visibility of product marketing within an organization. Product marketing can provide field marketing input on product/solution positioning and messaging to ensure consistency, but also share its customer knowledge with field marketing to take advantage of hypersegmentation, which should improve the performance of demand creation programs. On the reputation side, product marketing can contribute to communications programs with unique value propositions for various audiences, then work collaboratively to define the mix of tactics that deliver them.

Product marketing is a hub of marketing, providing a foundation of intelligence and content that can be leveraged by the entire marketing function. While its capabilities and value to sales and marketing processes are often overlooked, product marketing can take concrete steps to integrate its expertise across a wide range of marketing programs.

More on What's Right (and wrong ) with B2B Advertising

“We find it truly surprising that businesses full of smart people produce so much advertising that isn’t...Why then is good business-to-business advertising so hard to come by?” DAVE AND ALEX.

Dave and Alex are a pair of advertising executives who evaluated 79% of a set of 200 B2B print ads as “poor”. They followed up this assessment with a 12-page (highly entertaining) supplement called: “Why do so many business-to-business ads suck?"

1.The misunderstood business customer: some ads would have you believing that business buyers are “soulless automatons with parallel processors for brains”.

MY OPINION: the individual making an organizational purchase is weighing unique parameters – the B2B and B2C purchase processes are not equivalent. Emotions do play a part in B2B decision-making but it is qualitatively different from consumer decisions. The B2B campaign should focus on the feelings generated about the product or the company – the B2C campaign focuses on how the customer feels about himself.

2. The sales guy culture: B2B marketers are more likely to be drawn from sales and engineering backgrounds, and sales guy advertising tends to resemble product brochures.

MY OPINION: somewhat true. B2B marketing efforts are often reactive rather than proactive (i.e. prompted by a specific turn of events). There is a lack of strong training programs focusing on the business marketing, branding and advertising processes.

3.Lazy agency syndromes. According to Dave and Alex, agencies creating B2B ads tend to resort too easily to business terms and clichés such as handshakes and globes and mountain climbers. An internet search (by Dave and Alex) turned up thousands of clichés: “Why we mean business...When we say internet we mean business...We mean business in space”.

MY OPINION: again, a lot of this reflects a lack of understanding of the business marketing and advertising processes including: the role of emotion in business marketing and advertising; the uniqueness of business products and services.

4.Corpo-babble: the inability to speak clearly and directly to the target audience such as the following example: “Anticipating millions of connections your network will support, we deliver a business optimized infrastructure that provides scalability”.

MY OPINION: business marketing has become better than ever at communicating a single meaningful message and utilizing effective creative. Note the following headline for an IBM ad: “Stop thinking like a bank. Start thinking like a customer”. This is an ad informing bankers how IBM can ensure that their customers can open a new account in minutes rather than hours! It effectively uses copy and visuals to back up benefits suggested in the headline.

5. Marketing schizophrenia: Dave and Alex say the typical B2B marketer knows how he has to “differentiate” his product but when push comes to shove tends to back away from creative opportunities and seeks “credibility” and “security”.

MY OPINION: a fading problem – as evidenced by the many good examples of focused B2B marketing and advertising out there but some may be going too far (but that happens in the B2C world).

6.Trying to hard: when they do go out on a limb, B2B marketers will try to be unique and draw attention to themselves in almost a “frantic and hyperactive” fashion”.

MY OPINION: this is still very true – sometimes it is very hard to tell who some business ads are targeting. Fortunately it’s not all bad news. Many more B2B companies are investing in business marketing and there is a noticeable increase in the variety and number of business advertising campaigns. BtoB Magazine, for example, in its monthly evaluation of business advertising campaigns (Chasers) has no trouble digging up examples of both well and poorly executed B2B campaigns. This suggests we’ve come a long way as an industry but there remains lots of opportunity for improvements.

Inbound Marketing Automation: 5 Steps to Harnessing its Power

The last of a three-part series:

post one - introduced the idea that Outbound Marketing techniques are no longer cost-effective in reaching B2B buyers, and suggested that we use Inbound Marketing Automation to replace it.

post two - provided a brief overview of what Inbound Marketing Automation is, and then outlined the software techniques used to automate it.

And here, post three details the 5 steps to harness Inbound Marketing Automation's power.

STEP 1: Shift your Marketing from Outbound to Inbound

Turn your website into a prospect magnet, and stop interrupting people with Outbound messages.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Start by developing your online brand identity: Your keyword strategy. Find those keyword phrases that you can compete on, and which will minimize “bounce” and maximize conversion. Optimize the content and structure of your website around those keyword phrases. And then, create meaningful external backlinks to your site, to boost your site’s credibility and its importance to search engines. Successful SEO is a marketing exercise and a technical one; so before the techies begin, make sure you have the marketing strategy defined well.
• PPC: If needed, use this same “keyword identity” to compliment your SEO strategy with PPC ads.
• Free Content: Show off your company’s knowledge leadership in your industry by creating the great content which inbound prospects want. Publish this content as whitepapers, videos, and webinars. Make it free and downloadable, provided prospects identify themselves and give you permission to communication with them 1:1. Map your content to your sales cycle, so that you can feed prospects with valuable information at each stage of the sales cycle.
• Integrate Outbound Campaigns with Inbound Marketing Automation: Some outbound campaigns – like tradeshows and direct contact programs – may still be delivering ROMI. (Return on Marketing Investment). By using customized landing pages on your website, you can bring those traditional outbound campaigns into the efficient inbound world of integrated analytics, CRM integration, and automated sales lead management.

STEP 2: Automate to cope with the volume and need for speed

Use Inbound Marketing Automation technology to manage the routine repeatable tasks, like the generation and management of inbound sales leads, and data analysis. Free up marketing and sales for value-added, strategic activities and the closing of deals. Two important elements of Inbound Marketing Automation are:

• Reputation Management Analytics: New tools allow you to Join in and influence the online conversation, with minimal investments in time. See Step 4, below, for more.
• Sales Lead Management Automation: Employ a Demand Generation software solution to automate the generation and management of inbound sales leads. Working with Sales, automate best practices and set business rules to automatically grade, score, and nurture prospects. Together, have Marketing and Sales define the stage a prospect is ready to be handed to sales, (by setting Grade and Score targets). And when you have a hot lead, seamlessly feed the new prospect’s profile and “digital footprint” data into your CRM system.

STEP 3: Get Analytics on your side

Transform marketing from art to a science. Inbound Marketing Automation captures and processes massive amounts of information, enabling you to close the feedback loop from your market and individual prospects. Now you can get this all in real time.

• For a macro view of your market, you can use Google Analytics, a free program. This yields macro insight, but does not “put faces” on individual visitors.
• The real power of Inbound Marketing Automation analytics is in the ways it captures the profile and digital footprint of every prospect visiting your website. By implementing a Demand Generation solution integrated directly into your CRM system, you can obtain a 1:1 insight into your prospect’s preferences and needs.
• Multivariate testing allows the effectiveness of different marketing messages, landing pages, and campaigns to be compared in real time.

STEP 4: Participate in the Online Discussion

Another opportunity to accomplish McKenna’s closing the loop; is to join the conversation in relevant social media.

• Join-in on the Conversation: Find the key forums, communities, and, especially, the blogs in your industry. Listen to industry issues, trends, and concerns. You have a unique perspective - you are after all the expert - so give it a “Voice” and point others back to your valuable content and website. This allows you to build backlinks, boosting your site’s credibility with search engines.
• Create your own blog. But beware of the time commitment: the effort required to keep it meaningful is high. But blogging is also a great way to increase your SEO effectiveness by creating effective backlinks to your site.
• Give your market a way to express itself: Empower your prospects and customers by giving them a forum to discuss issues of relevance. Give them the tools to build their own content. Create a portal that functions as a “water cooler” for customers and prospects. To marketers schooled in Outbound techniques, this is a risky proposition, but to Inbound Marketers it’s an opportunity to show leadership, add value to the industry, and strengthen connections with your market.
• Hidden in the last point is a tremendous potential benefit to your company. You can use the feedback you get from the community to help you design and develop your next products!

STEP 5: Make it easy for your visitors and customers

This step may seem low-tech, but at the core, this is really what Inbound Marketing is all about.

• Consider the entire prospect and customer online experience. Trace it through the complete interaction lifecycle – from first contact, to training and after-sales support. Now remove any barriers or impediments to this cycle.
• Think Buying, not selling. Empower the Buyer by giving him or her all the information needed to make the decision. Make the purchase process itself as easy as it can be. Watch people interacting with your site and its software and fix any place where the person halts in confusion or goes back to try again.
• Remember, as a B2B marketer, your customers must buy. Many B2C purchases are discretionary, but B2B customers need your products and services to keep their own businesses running. It’s not just a want; it’s also a need. Often what determines whether they buy or not, is how easy you make it for them to do so.

In other words, make it easy for prospects to become customers, and then easy for them to remain one, and you’ll have a customer for life.

By implementing an Inbound Marketing Automation system, you, too, should see large increases in the volume and quality of sales leads, and triple digit increases in their sales conversion rates.

Please visit our website for more details, or to download white papers or tools to help you assess the opportunity.

B-to-B Reputation Trends for 2010

While time spent enjoying the cool days of fall is flying by all too quickly, so too is the time allotted to meet those inescapable work deadlines. For b-to-b communications professionals, this means before you blink, it will already be time to reflect on the current year’s accomplishments and submit budgets and plans for the next year. Part of this process requires evaluating strategies and tactics that have been employed during the past year, retaining some and replacing others. In this post, I will share three key trends that will impact b-to-b communications in 2010.

One: Program Interlock
Is working with your marketing counterparts to build integrated programs an uncommon occurrence? How many times have you created a press release or secured a customer or analyst quote, only to use it in just one piece of outbound collateral? Unfortunately for many organizations, communications programs are developed and run in isolation, leading to not only disjointed efforts and duplicate offers, but also to a fatigued prospect and customer base bombarded with messages through multiple channels. To derive the most impact from reputation programs, these programs must be interlocked with major marketing initiatives that align with the company’s overall goals and objectives. Best practice organizations operate from an overall campaign perspective, aligning reputation programs with those from demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence functions.

Two: Social Media Grows Up
For too long, marketing has considered social media as a set of tactics executed outside of usual workflow. Social media tools should be considered part of the overall portfolio of tactics that marketing leverages to optimize their true reputation, demand creation and sales enablement value. We advise positioning social media in two key ways, including as an additional channel to engage your existing target market and as a way to target segments that prefer to communicate in an entirely different way. While the second approach demands a consistent application of time and resources to become accepted as a trusted member of a community, the first one can be tackled immediately. Instead of simply posting a new white paper, parse its content into a series of short (five-to-seven minute) podcasts where you interview the subject matter expert on certain key points. This not only offers users a choice in the way they can access the content but also significant incremental leverage. Add the ability to subscribe to the podcast series and you have a higher level of qualification in the form of an individual that wants to be notified of new content proactively.

Three: Measure Results, Not Activity
Many communications functions have an extremely difficult time proving their value, as they only collect activity-focused data. In a sense, this is no different than filling out a time sheet; it means you’ve had a busy day, but it won’t demonstrate the impact of what’s been done. Instead, communications should track these activities as drivers of both original demand and the facilitation of sales/buying cycles by benchmarking the performance of demand creation programs with and without reputation support. A mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics will demonstrate the true impact of reputation efforts, particularly when applied to interlocking marketing programs I discussed above. Collecting the appropriate metrics will require not only a monitoring technology or agency to track your reputation-specific efforts (both in traditional and social media channels) but also gaining a level of visibility into your organization’s demand creation reporting. In the end, demonstrating that a well-organized, well-executed reputation strategy that fits tightly into demand creation efforts drives response and qualified lead rates is the key to long-term viability of b-to-b communications.

A key theme for the communications organization in 2010 is leverage, as the ability of other marketing functions to leverage your activities and insights will do much to break the insular perceptions often directed at communications. While more organizations are integrating their reputation and demand creation efforts, these are often more opportunistic in nature and don’t reflect an integrated strategy across the marketing organization. Without this level of integration – not only from a program perspective, but also from standpoint of systems and processes – the impact of communications impact will never be fully realized.

Inbound Marketing Automation Overview

My post last week introduced the idea that Outbound Marketing techniques are no longer cost-effective in reaching B2B buyers, and suggested that we use Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation to replace it.

This post provides a brief overview of what Inbound Marketing is, and then outlines the software techniques used to automate it. The third and final post in the series, coming soon, will provide 5 steps you can take to implement Inbound Marketing Automation in your company.

Inbound Marketing Overview

The major thrust behind Inbound Marketing’s success, is that done right, your ideal prospects come knocking on your door and give you permission to sell them something. It’s a lot like the Field of Dreams: If you build a great website, the buyers will come.

And because the buyers may number in their hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions), you will need some software tools and techniques to manage it all. But please note: This is an all or nothing approach. Automating a part of the whole process, is akin to speeding up the flow of water in the middle of a river. It makes that part rush for sure, but the overall throughput doesn't change. In the case of Inbound Marketing, there are a great many tools and approaches already on the market and new ones arrive daily. But the mechanics of the process remain the same and the basic set of tools you need is not beyond your reach – albeit, perhaps, with help. How much help depends on your comfort zone with technology moving at this pace. If you’re hesitating to take the plunge, think of the huge increase in conversion rates and reduced cost.

Imagine visitors, attracted by your excellent keyword and SEO strategy, arrive on your site. They find your amazing content and register to get it. They read it and hustle back for more. From their first visit, till the moment they pop up as a red-hot prospect in the sales CRM system, these people are managed automatically. Nurtured and cared for, according to your best practices; flawlessly, repeatably and 24/7. And with each automated drip-mail element of every campaign, provided with just the right response to nudge them to the next step in the sales cycle.

Components of Inbound Marketing Automation

1) Your Content. A subject unto itself, but the whole process depends on having content that makes your site the destination of choice for people interested in your field. Tools here help create it, display it, play, disseminate, promote and catalogue it. Our blog offers some ideas on how to create such content (website details at the end).

2) SEM Tools. Search Engine Marketing includes tools for Organic Search (SEO) and those for Pay-Per-Click (PPC). There are tools to help you devise the right Keyword strategy; others to assist in developing your advertising campaigns; yet more tools score your website, analyze its traffic share, determine your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking, assess incoming and outgoing links, and on and on.

3) Reputation Analytics monitor the social networks to determine the “buzz” around your products/services and company. These tools help you to find the most authoritative or influential blogs and websites for your area. The better tools not only point these out to you, but automatically scan them all each night and give you a count of how many mentions you earned, and then use their natural language ability to determine whether the sentiment is positive or negative so that you can focus your attention in the right places.

4) Demand Generator packages capture, score and grade visitors on their profiles and digital footprints, and then nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects.

5) The hot prospects feed into your CRM system and your sales people place those effective sales calls.

Next week I’ll give you the 5 steps you can follow, to implement these exciting techniques in your company.

Our website introduces Inbound Marketing Automation, and through its glossary of terms, white papers and tools, details the way it works, its advantages and cost benefits.

Eric Goldman is CEO of Gossamar Inc.

Inbound Marketing Automation - The Time has Come

Introduction

The pervasiveness of digital technology no longer surprises us; what does amaze us as marketers is the size of the digital marketplace. Facebook has more than 300 million subscribers. If it was a country, it would be the 4th largest. And LinkedIn would be bigger than Canada.

But for some marketers, this digital revolution spells uncertainty. Where do you stand on this digital divide? Are you still committed to the traditional, Outbound, approach to marketing? Have you embraced Inbound Marketing and its suite of Automation tools, or are you still thinking about which way to go?

If you’re a B2B marketer, the choice has been made for you. More than 90% of business buyers today begin their search for a solution online. And the overwhelming majority of them use Google to find their solutions. More than 85% of these people don’t progress beyond the first page of Google’s results: If your company’s website isn’t in the top ten results for its field, you may as well not be in business. If you’re still relying exclusively on Outbound Marketing, you soon won’t be. (For the experts among you, yes, there are other ways to drive traffic to your site, such as Pay-Per-Click ads and referral links, but organic search, the non-paid-for search results, is the best).

Strong words? Perhaps. But it’s hard to fault the theory below on how Outbound Marketing became irrelevant. And for those of you who agree with me, the rest of this post is about why its replacement should be Inbound Marketing.

My next post will describe what Inbound Marketing is, how its Automation works, and provide the 5 steps you can take to harness the power of Inbound Marketing in your company.

Outbound’s 3 Strikes

Outbound Marketing broadcasts a message to as many people as possible, hoping that it will resonate with some of them. Ads in print, direct mail, tradeshows, email blast campaigns – each one a steamroller trying to crack a nut. I believe Outbound Marketing is broken because:

1) Digital transactions have shifted power from the seller to the buyer. We all prefer to buy things rather than be sold to, and the Internet has not only enabled this, but made it compulsory.
2) In Recessionary times, the least defensible budget is the first to suffer cuts. With their notoriously difficult to calculate ROIs, traditional marketing programs are prime targets.
3) Attention Deficits caused by the overuse of Outbound techniques. Viewers, readers and listeners are tired of the noise, cynical of the claims, and fed up with the interruptions. They have simply tuned out.

A little more detail on each point

Before the rise of the world-wide-web, the seller controlled the dissemination of information to the people in his or her sightline. Today, buyers surf the net to find all the seller’s information, and their competitors’, without talking to sales professionals. They enjoy the freedom to set their own pace and to explore more and more details until they feel they know enough to make the right decision.

As for ROI, Inbound Marketing automatically calculates the Return on Marketing Investment for all your campaigns. By showing you, in real time, what each campaign is contributing to the bottom line, you can stop doing what doesn’t work and spend more on what does.

And Attention Deficits? Well Inbound solves this issue by listening instead of shouting.

For more detail on the demise of Outbound, read my blog.

In with Inbound Marketing

How Inbound works

Imagine your website has been setup to take advantage of Inbound Marketing and is fully Automated to handle it. Further imagine that Joe Visitor arrives on your website after clicking a link in Google. Let’s assume that your site matches the keyword phrase he entered to initiate the search, so he doesn’t bounce off immediately. He discovers that your content answers his questions. He finds a white paper promising to give him some information he values enough to give up his name and email address to get it. He registers, downloads the white paper, reads it, and returns for more. Each time he answers a few more questions about himself or his company, building up his Profile. And right from his first visit, and on every visit thereafter, the system:

1) Tracks his digital footprints around the site: pages visited, time on page to judge if he read it, length of visit, and many other micro-analytics.
2) Handles his requests for information, and sends him reminders and links to new information based on his previous choices. And continues to ask questions, adding to his Profile.
3) Uses all the above to grade his Profile (which indicates how interested you should be in him), and score his online footprint behaviour so you can see how interested he is in your solution.
4) Feeds his name into your Customer Relationship Management system when he reaches a predetermined grade and score.

Inbound Marketing Automation’s benefits

Inbound Marketing, and its suite of Automation tools, provides the following benefits to your organization as a whole:

More Leads: 60% of B2B buyers start their online research with search engines. Of that, 64% click on organic search engine results listed on the first page. If your website ranks on the first page for your targeted keywords, you can drive almost 40% of all potential sales leads in your industry to your website.

Higher Quality: B2B companies with “best-practice” lead management systems deliver a 250% increase in closing rates.

Lower Cost: Savings of 30% are common.

And Inbound Marketing Automation provides marketing with the following additional benefits:

1) By automating the drudge or routine tasks of lead generation and management, the system frees up your marketers to create one innovative campaign after another. And these higher quality leads, graded and scored till they are sales ready, allow your sales people to focus only on hot prospects, ending their complaints about poor sales leads.
2) The digital footprints and the person’s profile information yield priceless market insight into your prospects, for free. Even paid-for market research doesn’t yield this kind of insight: it’s provided in real time, literally while you watch your prospects interacting with your website, observe their performance on multivariate tests, and record their reactions to your latest offers.

To learn more, feel free to download these white papers:
How to gain Priceless Market Insight for Free

7 Ways to boost Profits using Sales and Marketing Automation

Next week, a brief overview of Inbound Marketing Automation and the 5 steps you can take to harness its power.

Eric Goldman is CEO of Gossamar Inc.

What's Wrong with B2B Advertising? -- Not as Much as You Think

“We’re not saying all business-to-business advertising sucks – many achieve mediocrity and a few are excellent”.
Dave and Alex

A few years ago a pair of young advertising executives (Dave and Alex) rated 200 B2B print ads: only 5% were rated as excellent; one-fifth as mediocre and the large majority (79%) as poor. Dave is still around and is currently paired with someone called Eddy (of the Dave and Eddy show) but the evidence shows that B2B advertising has matured substantially in just a few short years.

Dave and Alex received a lot of attention for their opinions – but by their own admission they admit that their approach was not very scientific: they basically selected an assortment of ads from six trade magazines. Nevertheless business advertising executives would agree with a number of their conclusions about what constitutes a poor or mediocre business ad:

No creative concept
Business ads with a simple product photo shot and headline with a poorly worded selling proposition: Everything you need is a router at half the price...Why not cut costs without cutting corners. Compare these to another ad for a healthcare company targeting HR personnel in small companies: Cut costs, not coverage – a captivating headline in bold white copy or red background which meshes with the selling proposition.

The trite analogy
B2B ads riddled with clichés such as: canyons (symbolizing depth); geysers (dependability); lurking wolves (competitive threats); bouncing balls (flexibility).

The creative misfire
Usually refers to tasteless ads such as one targeted at the beef trade featuring a live cow over the image of a cooking fire with the headline: Smoke gets in your eyes.

Sponsors of the five excellent ads mainly included large and well known companies: Microsoft; EDS; Internet Security Systems to name a few. In most cases the production values tended to be described as competent and noted for their clarity: single message and easily understood; their creative indivisibility (where the headline and visuals work well together); their restraint (simple graphics and tight copy).

Reality check
Even though this study was conducted a few shot years ago, the measly 5% of B2B ads classified as excellent would easily climb to 40% or more today:

-B2B advertisers include some of the biggest companies in the world – Intel’s Intel Inside campaign continues to be regarded as one of the best campaigns of the 20th century; and the gold standard for B2B ingredient advertising.

-BtoB Magazine in its monthly feature called 'Chasers' probes into the mechanics of B2B ads and has no trouble finding both the poor and excellent examples.

-Chasers recently compared two airline ads targeted at business customers offering 'comfort': one featured a stylized visual of a woman blissfully at rest on a flight but the rest of the copy failed to exploit this theme; the second ad featured the business class section (of a new airplane) floating on clouds and displaying extra wide comfortable seating and luxurious in-flight service.

Surprise

Not many things surprise me after so many years in this business, but I have to admit, this did:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Since starting my own creative consultancy two years ago, I've written many websites for clients who think that key words actually matter. So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in their web search ranking. Obviously this isn't as earth-shattering as learning that cigarettes are bad for you or that Balloon Boy was a hoax, but it does raise an eyebrow given that Google hasn't exactly advertised this news. Thoughts?

Demand Creation Trends for 2010

As 2009 begins to wind down, most of us feel like we just need a breather. A breather from the breakneck pace of change over the last year. A breather from what at times seemed like a non-stop torrent of bad news. And a breather from feeling on many days like things were simply out of control. Planning season is a perfect time to take that breath, not only to reflect on what is now behind us, but more importantly to consider what is to come. In this post, I explore three core demand creation trends for 2010 that should be top of mind when key strategic discussions begin.

One: Proactive Waterfall Management
The rapid, steep decline in business over the last year has convinced most marketers that a role for their function throughout the demand waterfall – vs. only at its top – is anything but optional. In a growing number of organizations, sales is requesting help with pipeline acceleration, lead nurturing and account-based marketing (ABM), pinpoint programs that when put into place help organizations actively control waterfall performance rather than passively observe (and try to react to) the results that come out of it. Still hindering progress in many companies is the lack of common nomenclature around the types of ABM, pipeline acceleration and lead nurturing potentially at the disposal of an organization. Simply starting by understanding their options, sales and marketing can work together to determine which will address specific issues within the waterfall best, leaving others to be pursued at a later date.

Two: Automation Takes the Next Step
Though SiriusDecisions estimates only 8% to 12% of b-to-b organizations (up to 19% in the high technology space) have implemented a marketing automation platform (MAP), we do expect this number to grow to nearly 50% by 2015, fueled by an increasing number of options available as well as everexpanding functionality. Following recent briefings with a number of organizations within the MAP vendor community, we have honed in on some of the more interesting advances that will be driving the category in the near term. These include ties between social media monitoring tools and the MAP to capture and score these interactions; support for multiple scoring models (both by product and for individual prospects interested in multiple offerings); and greater predictive capabilities. For larger organizations that require it, the tighter integration of marketing resource management (MRM) functionality with the MAP adds a more robust layer of budgeting, planning and tracking. At this point, it remains troubling to us that a number of organizations that have purchased a MAP are still struggling to implement core functionality, including basic lead scoring, lead routing and portfolio marketing. With features being added regularly, these organizations risk being left far behind if they do not get help from external MAP partners, or bring in human resources that have implemented this functionality in other organizations.

Three: Measurement Missing Links
Despite all of the advances in b-to-b marketing technologies over the past 10 years, key areas of measurement that help field marketing, operations and the executive function make better tactical and resourcing decisions have been elusive. Lack of visibility into and connection with CRM/SFA systems; weaknesses in these systems that “credit” only the first or last touch with a prospect; and a weak (if any) closed loop are just three reasons why many marketers still feel like they are operating with one hand tied behind their back. Over the last 12 months, however, a growing number of marketers are finding ways to break through these barriers, typically using a combination of back-end manual processes and lighter-weight, desk-top-based business intelligence (BI) tools to do so. Though these processes help directionally, it is in the greater use of this next generation of BI by marketing operations and field marketing analysts in conjunction with sales operations that we believe the most actionable results will be generated.

For many, 2009 was frankly a year to forget. For those organizations that had put the right people, process and technology in place to drive systematic demand creation in place before the bottom fell out, however, it made all of us remember how best-in-class companies became what they are in the first place.

Consumption smoothing - how to stress test your marketing strategies

Will a cut back in consumer spending have a dramatic impact on your business performance? The key to succeeding in these challenging times is to explore scenarios that you haven't looked at in the past because business cannot use the same strategies for a different set of economic conditions or marketing outcomes. Consumption smoothing is an emerging trend that may be of interest to marketers. It’s a popular approach used by consumers to insure their consumption in the presence of risky and variable incomes.

What is Consumption Smoothing?

Consumption smoothing is an economic concept which seeks to balance spending and saving to attain and maintain the highest possible living standard over the course of one's life. This idea is notable because of its difference in approach to common knowledge about consumer behaviour during periods of economic growth. However, in uncertain times, the concept can have a significant impact on the growth and profitability of your brands if you identify customer groups who are most likely to experience consumption smoothing.

What does this mean for marketers?

Here are five ideas on how senior marketers could approach this emerging trend:

1. Explore new consumer segmentation models.

Account for risk profiles of your most profitable customers. Adding a variable that measures attitudes to risk may provide an indication of how consumers will react to changes in household incomes, economic conditions and pricing changes.

2. Revise price elasticity models.

Research indicates consumer behaviour in a crisis is characterized by consumption smoothing at various levels. In sum, these behavioural adjustments result in significant reallocation of consumption expenditures depending on the profile of your most profitable customers. Brand portflio pricing strategies that account for potential shifts in purchase patterns can deliver more profitable growth strategies.

3. Assess the potential impact of consumption smoothing on your brand portfolio.

Consumer smoothing is accentuated in some categories and for some brands that have specific profiles that make them more vulnerable to changes in economic conditions and consumer spending patterns. Using scenario planning techniques may result in increased visibility of potential strategies.

4. Ask the right questions.

Often marketers take the approach of looking at their competitors for cues on superior strategies. This could be a suboptimal approach if these strategies do not undergo rigorous stress testing for emerging consumer behaviour.

5. Look at best practices from past recessions.

Explore successful strategies adopted by brands with similar profiles in past recessions. The analysis may shed some light on opportunities for initiatives that can lead to superior results.

Please email me if you may have any questions or would like to receive more information about consumer smoothing trends in your product category.

Avoiding the Dark Side of Social Media

An unfavorable negative comment on your blog. Reports of service disruption by your customers on Twitter. Too aggressive of a demand creation positioning in a community. All of these missteps can cost you big-time in the social media environment if you are ill-prepared to handle them. In this post, I will discuss four potential pitfalls that face organizations using social media and how to avoid them.

1. Adherence to company policies and procedures. As more people engage in sites such as Twitter and Facebook, an organization’s reputation grows increasingly distributed; a general first impression of a particular company may be connected to a specific employee’s interactions on a social site. Add to this the time and productivity that can be lost by employees spending time on these sites and the benefits of social media begin to dim in the eyes of some. It’s becoming increasingly unrealistic to simply block access to these sites; however, you can build policies for how employees represent themselves as a company agent or expand the scope of existing media guidelines. These guidelines should be part of the employee handbook and clearly outline the areas that are off-limits online, including financial information, competitors and specific customers.

2. Outsourcing content development. The point of using social media is to engage with a market rather than to broadcast to it. This engagement typically comes at a high cost, not necessarily in dollars but in the time and resources it takes to write blogs, monitor and deal with issues that arise in online communities, or respond to posts from users and other participants. Faced with these daunting tasks, a growing number of organizations have looked to outsource some of their social media efforts to either a public relations agency or a boutique firm specifically in the business of driving social media participation. This is a strategy we believe is both risky and unsustainable. If you pay someone to write positive comments in response to blog posts or engage in discussions on your behalf, strict oversight will be required to make sure these participants stay on message and don’t engage in spamming community sites. Realize also that by outsourcing these activities you not only can paint a false picture of the company, but run the risk of alienating at least a portion of your community if they discover your social media efforts have been underwritten or ghostwritten.

3. Dealing with negative content. It’s as inevitable as taxes; create any social media presence and rest assured that some of the first comments directed at your organization will be negative in nature. In some ways this is to be expected as dissatisfied customers are often the most vocal and now have another outlet to express their views, particularly if they have issues that have not been resolved through other mechanisms. As a result, before making any social media splash, check with your support organization to make sure you understand the extent to which technical issues are an issue with customers. Use negative responses and issues as an opportunity to publicly engage with your stakeholders; the lengths you go to solve individual issues and the time it takes to resolve them will go a long way in demonstrating how you deal with (and feel about) your customers. At the same time, there will be detractors that often use these social media channels to attack you for no discernible reason. The best advice we can give is that if warranted, respond to criticisms once, then let them lie; if you have an engaged user base your best defenders against such negativity will be your own customers.

4. Demand creation comes last. An effective social media strategy targets customer engagement and loyalty first, awareness second and demand creation third. While high-profile brands understand this approach, many organizations will not embark on using social media if they can’t prove it generates more leads. The same rules that apply for outbound marketing regarding the ability to opt in or out of your communications are even more important in the social media world. Over time, once your organization has become a trusted member of a community, the tolerance level for soft selling grows, specifically the ability to point out solutions and success stories when appropriate. As long as you do an effective job in the loyalty and awareness departments when engaging in social media, demand creation opportunities have the best potential to follow.

The potential benefits of social media are significant, but all too often these advantages can be undermined by reactionary missteps. While outside expertise can be beneficial in implementing a sound social strategy, external execution has pitfalls that may be hard to overcome. The most effective way to avoid the dark side of social media is to have a holistic strategy built on three principles: frequency, consistency and transparency. This strategy offers an approach for not only leveraging social media but also participating regularly on a consistent and open basis with your customers, prospects and partners.

Hybridization -- And the Changing Landscape of B2B Branding (the hidden challenges)

About a year ago I upgraded my laptop. My search for a new model started at the Dell website but ended up at the company’s booth at the consumer home show (somewhere between the condiments and electronic brooms) and ended at the Dell kiosk at Sherway Gardens shopping mall. What’s Dell to do with customers like me who look for a serious business computer at shopping malls and consumer home shows – but that, unfortunately, is the essence of “hybridization”.

The “fruit” wars -- iPhone versus Blackberry – last winter the New York Times featured a run of full back page ads for the iPhone in the business section – targeted at business customers and focussing on the iPhone’s powerful access to Internet business applications. RIM, on the other hand, has claimed for a while that the large majority of “new” Blackberry customers are consumers (not traditional business and government users).
In addition to overlapping into each other’s “territory”, RIM and Apple also appear to have different marketing approaches: Apple basically markets ONE smartphone model (the iPhone), tends to focus on a myriad of applications.

By comparison, the Blackberry comes in several models (at last count there are nine featured on its web site excluding half a dozen versions for each of the Pearl and Curve).

Dell, Apple and RIM are all basically marketing “hybrid” products – a trend initiated mostly by B2B companies expanding into the consumer world. Even companies that deal mostly with business suppliers and customers are becoming more and more conscious of end users and consumers.

Hybrid products (and companies) have a unique set of challenges -- how to match different products/models with specific target audiences; how to accommodate consumer versus business audiences and differing (and sometimes incompatible) needs and requirements; how to prioritize all of these issues.

“Hybridization” is more complicated than it appears:

• About one fifth (22%) of the Top 100 Interbrand brands can be categorized as hybrids and outnumber the “pure” B2B brands (8%). But the fact is that many “pure” business brands don’t have a hope of making it to the top of anybody’s list. The top hybrid brands spend an enormous amount of money ($$$) on both consumer and business marketing which substantially increases their brand profile (and equity).

• “B2B companies shouldn’t try to become consumer brands... but they should seek to attain the maximum value possible within their industry (from the Hidden Wealth of B2B Brands)”. Pure B2B brands consistently achieve lower brand equity scores – in a recent ranking by Corebrand the strongest “pure” B2B brand was Caterpillar with an equity rating of 12% (versus 18%/19% for hybrids like Fedex and UPS); the next highest “pure” B2B brand was Emerson with an equity measure of only 5%.

• B2B versus B2C – these represent two very very different buying, marketing and branding processes. The problem is that the business side of these processes is not well understood. Identifying and profiling business target audiences is a complicated process: there can be several audiences within a client company (from C-levels to buyers to end users); there are secondary influencers (external to the business customer but either directly or peripherally involved).

• B2B trumps B2C – business suppliers, customers and intermediaries often have excellent “insight” into end users and consumers. Business intermediaries should be asked to provide feedback with respect to new products, services or marketing strategies before they are rolled out to consumers.

• “I find that there is currently a blurring and fusing of B2C and B2B research... and there is less of a desire to identify B2B and B2C research as separate or different disciplines” – these are the words of Phyllis Macfarlane a longstanding member of the U.K. B2B research community. B2B research has the same issues as B2B marketing – and also requires a better understanding of the business buying, marketing and branding processes.