Posted by JT Long on Fri, Aug 27, 2010
JT: Is Internet marketing really necessary?
Red: A better question is: "Are you visible to decision-makers?"
A recent survey of 4,000 B2B buyers by MarketingSherpa showed that 80 percent went and found their marketing company. This demonstrates a shift in power. Your prospects are out hunting for vendors and you have to be present where they are looking. A smart Internet campaign can help you magnify your attractiveness.
Four tactics can raise your visibility and build demand for the long-term.
1. Search Engine Marketing: Focusing on keywords, keeping your site current and connected.
2. PR 2.0: Publishing articles and commenting and guest-blogging in all the right places.
3. Tailored Communications: Helping people make good decisions.
4. Ongoing Monitoring: Keeping tabs on how you are perceived in the digital world.
All of these strategies involve the Internet at their core.
Take Away: If you hear from an agency that Internet marketing is not important, that should be a dealbreaker.
Your Turn: How do you get found online? Share your best practices.
Posted by JT Long on Thu, Aug 12, 2010
JT: What is the difference between B2B and B2C or consumer marketing? It's all selling to people, right?
Red: Yes and no, In business-to-business marketing, you're dealing with multiple individuals - often "buying committees" - during a decision-making process. Each person has a role in the process and a responsibility to judiciously compare all the options. This enhanced scrutiny compared to a typical consumer purchase is due to the fact that a decision about a professional service or produce can have enormous impacts on a company's productivity, operations, legal standing, reputation, sales, and - ultimately - the bottom line. The risk of a wrong decision is high.
Usually companies conduct extensive research on possible partners so being at the top of search results with the right message is important. Web site keywords need to be refined and benefit-focused.
Because buying committees expect a powerfully-built business case, smart B2B marketers focus on building a relationship through credibility and trust while offering multiple opportunities to engage. After all, in the end, they are buying the supplier along wit the product or service so give them value with every interaction.
For all these reasons, B2B companies need to make sure they are dealing with marketing experts who understand the challenges they face and have the skills to get them noticed with the right audience.
Take Away
So, if an agency tells you "there is nothing special about marketing to savvy business decision makers," that could be a Dealbreaker.
Your Turn
How do you market differently to B2B than B2C? Share your best practices here.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Wed, Aug 11, 2010
Nobody likes long goodbyes. And a fancy email signature can cause more headaches than it's worth.Do you know someone who's overloaded their email signature? What's packed into yours? Let’s go through a quick checklist. Count how many of these elements your signature has:
- Several styles and sizes of type
- Special line spacing
- Different formatting (like bold, italics, regular text)
- A company logo
- A picture of you
- Little icons (like tiny phone symbol)
- Special characters (like TM or SM in superscript)
- A call to action or sales message
- A disclaimer
- Links to social media accounts
- A catchy quote or motto
None of those things is so terrible by itself. Heck we've all got some of this stuff. But when you pile them one on top of another, the result can be jarring.
Understated elegance
A client of ours has agreed to be an example in this article. Meet Van Haas, who leads the best cost management company in Sacramento. He likes e-mail signatures with bells and whistles - and this is how his signature looked in the early days of our collaboraton -->
The message and contact info are hiding somewhere in there. But here was my plea to Van:
Imagine you bump into the CEO of a $200M company you want as a client. You follow up with a quick email note. She looks at it on her Palm and forwards it to the VP/Operations. He gets it at his work address but he's telecommuting using his Mac. With corporate firewalls and ISPs and email platforms all processing the info, the stuff that looked cool at the sender's end gets scrambled and whacky and squinty, if not lost. And the VP/Operations parks the email for later, when he has a minute to ask the CEO who the sender was. Great opportunity evaporates.
Van wrote back:
“Ok ok ok. I get it. But, I like fanciness. :-)” And proposed this:
Better!
But we're still in the land of fancy formatting. The simpler and cleaner, the better.
Even Microsoft is realizing this. In June the company announced that it would stop adding lines of promotional text at the end of Hotmail users’ messages. As reported by Todd Bishop of Techflash, Microsoft had been getting a lot of complaints about the taglines creating clutter. So even though the taglines promoting Hotmail generated about 2 million clicks per month, Microsoft realized that the clicks weren’t worth the animosity.
Here's the sparkling clean version Van has today - yeay.
What's in your email signature and why?
Posted by JT Long on Fri, Jul 30, 2010
How do you know if your prospective B2B Marketing Partner is a good fit for your organization?
In this special audio blog, we share a tip-off that you may not be working with the right company.
Audio Dealbreaker of the Day
Red: What if you went to see an optometrist you hadn’t met before, and, before testing your vision, he said, “surgery can help you.” Wouldn’t that be weird? The equivalent happens in marketing all the time. Just Google “marketing consultant,” call the first 10 companies listed, and ask them what you need. The good ones will insist on building a foundation before diving into tactics. They’ll link marketing goals with business goals, and ensure that the marketing planning is grounded in real client and prospect perceptions. In short, the initial focus should be on methodically preparing your firm to attract and quickly capitalize on a moment’s attention from a prospect. A focus on a particular tactic right out of the gate can make you wonder: Does this marketing consultant see all the options? How can they confidently recommend this over the others at this point?
Take away
If you wouldn’t trust an optometrist who gives you advice before checking your eyes, don’t trust a marketer who pushes a tactic before checking your marketing.
Your turn
Did we get it right? Leave anything out? Chime in below.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Tue, May 18, 2010
After you resolve to do more effective marketing, there are a few decisions ahead. Among them:
1. Do we need professional help? Or could we do it ourselves?
There are lots of good reasons to self-serve:
- Saves cash
- Keeps all marketing communications efforts centralized
- Builds skills internally
- Leverage free resources available
DIY resources
There are great resources available for DIYs. I recommend just about any MarketingSherpa benchmark report or how-to guide you can get your hands on. Even if it's an old outdated version it could be an eye opener. Vendors like Google Adwords include campaign set-up and support, so why not take their free advice?
Or, if you already do mailers and telemarketing, you could always increase the volume of each. All that requires is bigger lists and a bit more cash outlay. It could be low-hassle, in the sense that the path to increased exposure is nice and short. No fussing with messaging. No fiddling with design. Just feed more bills in and get more leads out.
Machine out of order?
If that will work, do it. And instead of messing with marketing, do something more fulfilling.
It’s a question only you can answer. You have the 30,000-foot perspective on how you’re doing relative to your business goals.
But as you weigh your decision, let me offer a couple points:
- First, unfortunately, bad marketing is worse than no marketing at all. The reason is that it takes more time and money to repair the damage from a bad impression, than to make a good first impression.
- Second, if you're a b2b company, it's probably not enough to just do more of what you’re used to doing already – if what you’re doing is conventional marketing like advertising, call outs, mailers and Yellow Page ads. I could go on about why; in a nutshell, it's because savvy business decision prevent and resent interruptions.
Inbound marketing involves helping your target market find you easily when they are searching for help. It includes such tools as
search-engine optimization, which is a way of making sure your website contains the same keywords that people are most likely to use when they are looking for your kind of product or service. But it has to be done in a way that impresses both search engines and high-potential prospects. And SEO is only one of many tools used in
inbound marketing.
As Laura Ramos, formerly of Forrester Research, wrote in How To Avoid Becoming Obsolete,
“Focusing simply on new campaigns, clever advertising, and delving into social media will only paper over problems. Turning up the heat on conventional marketing activities won't spur the profound changes required.”
Decision point
If you don’t need professional marketing, stop here.
And if you need help shifting to a new, more productive, inbound marketing approach, it’s still not time to hire. It's time for your next decision. Look for our next Dealbreakers article due out next week!
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Thu, May 06, 2010
Kenny Rogers’ Gambler knew when to hold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run. Apply this to B2B marketing agencies and you can avoid screw ups, disasters, flops, and frustration. Kenny Rogers’ Gambler knew that the trick to winning at cards was knowing when to hold ‘em and when to walk away. The same is true in business.
Hear that sucking sound?A lot of marketing-related companies are vying for your attention — and your money. One option is to feed the one-armed bandits by picking Google Adwords keywords without knowing how Adwords works; or hiring marketing automation software companies, web hosts, email marketing tools, graphic designers, online directories, multimedia companies, social media sites and dozens of other types of vendors. All in hopes of a big, lucky payout.
Back on track
A few weeks ago I wrote about a new series of articles on the way about how to pick the best b2b marketing agency. Now I'm finally starting that series. The goal is to help CEOs avoid outsourcing when they don't need to... or avoid underperforming B2B marketing consultants -- who can contribute directly or indirectly to losing customers, partners, competitive edge, and reputation.
I'm finally kicking the series off.
Really.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Apr 12, 2010
"If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing..." - @
We've been ranked #8 in a list of 100 HubSpot All Stars - yahoo!
Hubspot is software & advice that helps your business get found online by more qualified visitors, convert more visitors into leads, and more efficiently close leads. But their inbound marketing community has 10,000+ marketers doing amazing things every day. How did we rank at #8?
According to Hubspot, All Star status reflects,
“the long-term viability and awesomeness of a customer's marketing programs. The higher the CHI score, the more traffic and leads are likely to be generated by that customer in the future. (Traffic and leads make customers happy, hence the name.)”
What is "awesome" when it comes to inbound marketing programs? Here's what worked for us:
- First principles: give reliable, ethical advice aimed at helping you move the needle. Have humility. Own mistakes. Learn daily.
- Awesome content is king: We strive to publish content you might actually want to read. But success with our published content didn’t happen over night. Our first ebook was on the dry side, for example. And I've written some lame blog articles (no, I won't entertain you by linking to them here!). With the help of my awesome team, we've published moderately successful stuff. Our ebook "Six Marketing Gotchas CEOs Can Avoid" has been the most popular.
- Close the loop! Using Hubspot's awesome analytics, over time we've learned more about which keywords are best to focus on, what content you like best, and how you are finding us. Take the Six Gotchas ebook as the example again. You commented and linked the most to articles that called out common marketing mistakes. We wrote an ebook in that vein, gave it a catchy headline, jammed in as much concrete advice and examples as we could muster, and showed on the cover an executive slipping on a banana peel - doh! (Hankering to see what's behind the cover page? Awesome...)
- Brains over cash: Pick cost-effective ways to promote content - like social media marketing and PR. We invest time just about daily in LinkedIn, and just about weekly in Twitter (@b2bcommunicate and @b2bjt). We follow and comment on relevant websites, blogs, LinkedIn questions, and tweets too. Hubspot's awesome Social Media Module makes it possible for mere mortals to stay on top of myriad social media accounts.
- Be clear about the next step. If you get our Gotchas ebook, for example, you'll also get a link to access a menu of services. It's our job to be clear about how to move along. You choose whether or not to take the next step.
High threshold for follow up
Because this whole system results in daily leads, we keep a very high threshold for follow up. For example, almost daily folks download our stuff, and/or click through from the follow up email to get more stuff like the 2010 Information Kit.
There is no way we can call all these folks, so we focus on keeping up with requests for services.
More resources
See all the great resources available in the Hubspot Service Marketplace.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Thu, Mar 18, 2010
How can it be that marketers – people who
specialize in creating positive images – have such an image problem?
In my career, I have met a lot of marketing professionals. Hundreds? Thousands? And, on the whole, they're ok. Just folks trying to make a living.
But we also have more than our fair share of wanna-bes.
Spotting B2B marketing wanna-bes
Wanna-bes are difficult to spot until it is too late. They have great business cards, LinkedIn profiles, and brochures. But hook up with a chronic underperformer, and they can run your business into the ground.
The impact of chronic underperformance by a marketing consultant goes beyond the tens of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising, lost sales, and missed opportunities. It can also lead to lost customers, lost partners, a lower barrier to entry for competitors, and even PR crises for the organization -- not to mention a career crisis for the executive who picked the underperformer.
That's a dealbreaker!
Dealbreakers come in many shapes and sizes. Here are a couple to look out for -- I'll expand on these in future articles.
If your marketing consultant...
- Does cookie-cutter marketing, where every campaign is a variation on the same theme... that's a dealbreaker
- Has a "command-and-control" mentality, where the agency tries to tell the client what to do without listening to their needs... that's a dealbreaker
- Over-sells, meaning the agency is all bling and no cha-ching... that's the ultimate dealbreaker
This last bunch is especially irritating. They make lots of noise about design awards and awareness campaigns but say "it's just so hard to know" when prospects ask, "what did it produce?"
It is true, of course, that it is hard to know what marketing produced -- IF the marketer doesn't do closed-loop marketing. That's the sort where results from each effort are fed back into planning cycles. Indeed, deciding about future marketing efforts without a clear view of what's worked amounts to guessing. And guessing on the client's dime is not ok. It's... a dealbreaker!
More to come. Meantime, here are some related articles:
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Wed, Feb 17, 2010
Blogging for SEO = mind numbing boredom
In my experience, one of the biggest hurdles any blog, newsletter, website has to overcome is sheer boredom. So much content that's pushed out -- especially stuff written with SEO in mind -- is mind numbingly boring.
Blog content is for blog readers. Readers like new and different. Readers are easily bored.
It's tempting to keep churning out "top ten ways to blah blah blah" stuff, packing it with keywords -- or to keep churning out announcements, packing it with marketing messages.
I do some of that, somewhat guiltily, knowing it's more boring than the other stuff. It's a continuing battle for me when it comes to the content balance at this blog.
Being controversial = being rude?
One thing that's not boring is being controversial. But does that mean being rude? No!
I think this is the breakdown:
Bad idea:
- Ad hominems
- Offensive jokes
- Mocking/ sarcasm
- Posting/commenting with the intent of embarrassing someone or winning an argument
Good idea:
- Frank
- Edgy
- Direct
- Transparent
- Admitting one's own weaknesses/ uncertainty when appropriate
- Posting/commenting with the intent of helping
I have a friend who's really good at walking this line in his blog posts.
What's not boring?
What else isn't mind numbingly boring? Perhaps doing more on this blog regarding...
- Screw ups
- Disasters
- Flops
- Failures
- Blunders
- Mistakes
- Backfires
I think that may be our theme here on this blog, in 2010.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Dec 21, 2009
Money talks
Over the last nine years, I have made a living at helping B2B companies generate leads. Through close collaboration with clients, we've helped produce $2B in qualified B2B leads and $225M in B2B sales opportunities for clients.
Take my client that in 2009 built $1M in B2B leads in 12 weeks on a $25,500
investment, for example. That’s a 3,922% return on investment. Another increased B2B sales by more than half, with less than 2% of its annual revenue invested in B2B marketing. Another grew B2B sales leads 500% in about 12 months, with less than $50,000 invested.
What is (and isn't) a sales lead?
Per B2B sales lead expert Mac Macintosh, "leads are qualified, sales-ready opportunities."
A guy visiting your website isn't a sales lead.
A guy you bump into at a tradeshow isn't a lead.
A guy who subscribes to your newsletter ain't a sales lead, either.
An inbound lead generation campaign is about jump starting real relationships with real business decision makers, while holding costs to a minimum.
B2B lead generation blueprint
To do it, we prepare and rollout a 12 week lead generation campaign focused on developing and promoting an educational guide (or ebook, executive brief, tip sheet, decision guide...). In each guide is a call to action that helps prospects to the next step.
- BUILD CONTENT - First we interview you about topics important to your target audience. Drawing on your comments, we write one executive brief, guide, or ebook conveying important tips, insights, and steps to learn more. We write a search optimized landing page (LP), confirmations page, and email confirmation. We also adapt the content to prepare a search optimized press release. We prepare blurbs you can place on your website, email signature area, and other places.
- ADAPT CONTENT - We optimize visit-to-lead conversions by having hard-working landing pages and attracting prospects to them using search engine optimization, social media marketing and an optimized press release. We adapt the content to other purposes as well, to get more mileage. For example, we help equip the CEO to offer information on the content via email, on his networking platforms like LinkedIn, and – importantly – in person to other executives.
- PROMOTE CONTENT - On an agreed-on date, we publish the guide, issue the press release, send the promotional email, and post links on social networks. We meet weekly to track and discuss campaign ROI.
When we get started with content marketing, it typically benefits the client within weeks.
Your sales leads and experiences
Where do your sales leads come from? What does and doesn't work, in your experience?