Red On Marketing Blog

B2B Companies Don’t Pick That Up - You Don't Know Where It's Been

Before you cut and paste, at least verify that the information is true

A year ago, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for several kinds of fraud and money laundering. People trusted him with billions of dollars, and he bilked them instead of investing it. What’s especially astonishing is how he managed to string them along for decades. Ever wonder how he got away with his scheme for so long?

One reason is that when a new investor came along, he saw the prestigious client list and figured Madoff must be all right. Surely those earlier clients had checked everything out, right? The problem is, some of those clients had relied on the famous names of even earlier clients. They never checked out anything, they just wrote out checks.

Recyling dangers

Here’s how this applies to b2b company marketing materials: A lot of people make the same mistake when they start gathering material for a blog or a web page. They see a great item elsewhere on the Internet, and with a few clicks of the mouse they copy and paste it into their own file. Surely the other guy knew what he was talking about, right?

Nope. Very likely the other guy stole it from an even earlier appearance on the Internet. Even if the other guy said where the information originated, you still can’t trust it. He might have stolen the attribution, or he may have garbled things in an attempt to put it into his own words, in the course of internet marketing.

Oooo, shiny!

In some ways, we’re like little kids who see something nifty on the sidewalk and want to play with it. As Mom always said, “Don’t pick that up; you don’t know where it’s been.”

Earlier this year I spent the better part of an afternoon chasing down a statement that supposedly appeared in a “recent” issue of a national magazine. I thought it was a great item. So did about 20 different bloggers and companies who posted the same statement, word for word.  Not one of them cited a specific publication date, or even the name of the article. Finally I tracked it down in the footnote of a book. The “recent” article had appeared in 1989. Even with that, I couldn’t find out who the author was, or if he was quoting someone else.

Stats sleuthing

Here’s a great bit of sleuthing that illustrates my point. Mel Gosling and Andrew Hiles tried to track down the origin of some oft-repeated stats, such as the claim that "over 70 percent of businesses involved in a major fire fail within 3 years, if they ever re-open at all."

In many cases, the folks presenting the stats online couldn’t say exactly where they came from. They saw it, they copied it, they repeated it. Who bothers checking out whether it’s true?

R.e.s.p.e.c.t. yourself

Now, maybe you don’t care about putting junk in your blogs or your web site. Maybe you are just looking for something that sounds good. Maybe you are so anxious to make a point that you’ll grab anything that seems to support it, even though you have no idea where it came from.

More likely, however, you want to be seen as a real authority. In that case, take the extra time to find out where your information originally came from, and whether it’s true. Yes, that means extra work during blogging, SEO copywriting, etc. It’s worth it.

Sleuthing assignment

Here’s a homework assignment: The next time you come across a statement that you’ve always accepted without question, see if you can find out where it originally came from. You may find out that it doesn’t have the pedigree you thought it did.

B2B Lead Generation Blueprint: killer 12 week campaigns

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

Wanted: The Chuztpah to Resist B2B Marketing Laziness

Good content and ethics -- why responsible marketing takes courage.

By Rebekah Donaldson

A few minutes ago I read a post by Sonia Simone of Copyblogger titled "The First Rule of Copyblogger." It took my breath away. She writes,

"....content is too often a lame version of work done by a real expert. (You know, someone who cared enough about the topic to actually learn a lot about it.)

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of content marketing. Which means I’m a huge opponent of badly done content marketing.

Sloppy, junky, selfish content just gives the legitimate folks a bad name.

The first rule of Copyblogger is you do not publish content that sucks

Why do we hammer you every week with techniques to make your writing sharper, crisper, more effective, and more magnetic?

To let you create content that’s as strong and alive as it can possibly be.

Sure there are tools that will let you hack, mash, smash, and mangle someone else’s content into a word soup that Google thinks is original.

Google won’t help you if no one wants to read what you’ve got to say.

It's not just a practical matter

Sure there's the practical matter of, "what works? What produces the best results at the lowest cost?"

And yes there's the professional ethics issue of keeping a promise made in a headline and teaser.

But beyond that there's an issue of, well... intellectual chutzpah.

Meaning: When marketing, am I holding myself to a high standard of clear thinking, clear expression, and original contributions? Or am I being intellectually lazy?

Regularly publishing crappy marketing content reflects a deep cynicism about B2B buyers.

Resolutions

Sometimes I get lazy about content. But it won't do. I'm better than that. And you can smell stinky content from a mile away.

Plain English Guide Helps People Learn About Quality Health Care

National Business Group On Health publishes "Choosing the Right Hospital" toolkit with our help

By Molla Donaldson, DrPH, MS and Rebekah Donaldson

With all the talk of health reform, one issue that keeps coming up is that people should have access to affordable quality care. But how can we know what quality of care is when it is so complex? Part of the answer is to make quality of care information publicly available. Another part is to take the language of quality ("mortality" "risk" "variation" etc.) and translate it to plain English.

 

See the Toolkit and Employer's Guide we helped write. What do you think? Please comment in the Comments area below.

The National Business Group on Health has published “Choosing the Right Hospital,” an online toolkit developed to help people choose the hospital where they are likely to receive the best care. Molla Donaldson and I helped prepare it, under the leadership of National Business Group on Health President Helen Darling, and Director of Benchmarking & Analysis Karen Marlo.

We also developed a guide for Human Resources officers to help employees use the guide.

“We are grateful that Molla and Rebekah were able to lend their expertise to the development of these valuable tools for employers and employees alike,” said Darling. “Helping employees understand the importance of using quality hospitals and providing them with tools to do just that is imperative to improving the safety of care in our hospitals and helping to control health care costs.”

The National Business Group on Health is an association of many of the country’s largest self-insured businesses. Their website and publications provide a large employers’ perspective on national health policy issues and practical solutions to its members’ most important health care problems.

Through this project, I (Rebekah) learned how frequently medication errors, surgical mishaps, and other patient safety issues occur.  The Institute of Medicine (with Molla’s help in 2000) alerted the public to medical errors almost 10 years ago in a widely publicized report.  There was great hope that safety would improve.  But in a follow up study, the federal government’s 2008 National Healthcare Quality Report found that hospital patient safety measures have worsened by nearly 1 percent each year for the past six years.

When people can choose a hospital, it is most likely based on their insurance, where their doctor practices, and advice from family and friends – but this information may not be accurate.  There are good web sites now, and our work tried to make it easier to understand the quality and safety information–and what patients themselves report — at the federal government’s site, Hospital Compare.

We’ve written in the past about how organizations do well by doing good. The National Business Group on Health has merged doing well with doing good. Choosing the Right Hospital helps everyone compare quality and safety. We believe that the more people know about and insist on safe care, the more likely it is that health care will improve.

 

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(Note: comments were imported 11/6/09 during migration from Wordpress)

Using social media: copying others doesn’t work

It’s no secret that social media have become part of the mainstream culture: blogs, YouTube, online forums, networking sites and so on. We’ve been writing about the topic for a while, such as the impact of social media on B2B marketing and tipping points for business participation.

The secret is how to master these new tools for B2B marketing. There are few success stories out there, and copying others doesn’t work, according to Forrester Research Inc.

 

Finding your prospects’ venues

A sensible starting point: learn who is showing up at these new venues and why. To get the answers for one slice of the business world, Forrester Research surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and packaged the findings in a report titled “The Social Technographics Of Business Buyers.”

A full report is accessible to Forrester clients, or access a free replay of Laura Ramos’ talk on the subject.

One of the first things you’ll notice in their findings is that, regardless of how involved they are with social media, this audience is still overwhelmingly male. The “creatives” among them, the ones who publish their own blogs, video and music, are 83 percent men.

 

Making sure social media efforts are integrated

If you are trying to reach these folks through social media, make sure the effort is integrated with the rest of your marketing. Forrester discovered that while most of them view social media very favorably, they still fall back on more traditional marketing materials when deciding what to buy.

For example, word-of-mouth has a big impact, but they tend to pay attention to their colleagues at work much more than their counterparts online.

 

Social participation doesn’t automatically give you influence

In other words, business buying is still complex, Forrester says, and social participation doesn’t automatically give you influence.

Does that mean we should give up on it for marketing purposes? Not a bit. In fact, it means just the opposite.

 

B2B buyers believe social media will be a bigger part of decision making

The survey results show that in the coming year, buyers believe that forums, virtual trade shows, and online reviews will be a bigger part of their decision-making. These are the social media options that most closely resemble the user conferences, exhibitions, and buyer guides that these buyers have been relying on for years, without requiring them to physically be there.

Question: B2B buyers believe social media will be a bigger part of their decision making. Do you?

 

Learning more

• A full report is accessible to Forrester clients
• Access a free replay of Laura Ramos’ talk on the subject

From the Shocking Marketing No Nos Department

A high profile marketing automation company assuming permission — in an email with subject line “B2B marketing best practices”? Sounds too ironic to be true.

Last week I noticed a nice clean online ad by Marketo for a whitepaper. I clicked it and saw a landing page that made it easy to get what the ad had offered. I requested the whitepaper. The confirmation page that popped up invited me to engage with Marketo in other ways — right when they had my attention.

Here’s a shot of the confirmation page — good stuff. Bravo!

The next day, this email arrived:

If my image is too hard to read, it says:

“When you recently visited Marketo.com, you requested information from us via email. I think you will be interested in other B2B marketing best practices, so I will send you an email every two weeks for the next few months…”

My emotional response: “You bastards! You will do no such thing!”

My actual email reply: “Shame on you for assuming permission. You know better than that — c’mon guys.”

My blogger brain’s snarky thought process: “Another lovely No-No for my bloopers folder! Thank you marketing companies who make ironic blunders, may I have another?”

What do you think?

Humor at work – 10 entertaining finds

Here’s a countdown of 10 toons, articles, and videos I can’t stop laughing over.

Oh, business humor, if I had more chutzpah (and you’d think I have a headstart on that, with the ‘kah’ in my name), I’d make you myself.

But at least I’m doing the next best thing… collecting the most entertaining things I run across at work. Not all are about business. But all of them have been useful while doing business.

Sorry to post links rather than images. I know it’s not very sexy. But I don’t want folks with traditional copyrights (versus Creative Commons copyrights) to yell at me.

10. “…[whereas] the run-of-the-mill Amazon bracelet provides no special protection.” — Wikipedia entry revealing details of Wonder Woman’s bracelet technology http://tinyurl.com/78zldt

9. “Dude, Cold Calling Is For Losers” – Hubspot video http://tinyurl.com/42w3jl

8. “You should invest all of your money in diseased livestock…” – Dilbert cartoon http://i35.tinypic.com/2liwwvn.jpg

7. “Free giant squid on Craigslist. I would take it in, but I’m not sure if it would get along with our cats.” – LaughingSquid tweet (ok, I snuck in one tweet!) http://tinyurl.com/9xzprh

6. “Let me see the first one again.” – Tom Cheney cartoon http://tinyurl.com/74lguz7

5. “Twitter in Real Life – the Follow Back” – Hubspot cartoon http://tinyurl.com/6ru58j

4. “How about never? Is never good for you?” – Robert Mankoff cartoon http://tinyurl.com/howboutnever

3. “Just build these features into your web site. They’re like an internet marketing mullet.” – Conversation Marketing article http://tinyurl.com/4sqbbo

2. “Work-chair with a giant no-distraction hood.” – BoingBoing http://tinyurl.com/5lkmdu

1. “I love market analysis, Fred, but my heart’s with the World Wrestling Federation.” – Leo Cullum cartoon http://tinyurl.com/6buvdg

I’m pretty sure I’ve violated the “Do Not Make Fun of Your Industry” rule set out by Brad Shorr in “The 5 Rules of Business Humor“… probably several times. But I think people can handle it. And there’s good reason to think so… the New Yorker Store gets $125 for a framed print of each of their cartoons!

So… what’d I miss?

Next up: 10 tweets that kill me

New rules: business ethics and the rise of business blogging

Yesterday I participated in the CSUS Symposium on Personal and Professional Integrity in Business. I think I was the lone Sacramento marketing consultant. The event was excellent - it surpassed my expectations.

Congratulations to Christina Bellon, Russell DiSilvestro, and the whole CSUS Philosophy Department on a job well done. Rick Shubert introduced me, moderated, and paraphrased questions from the audience - the better to capture them on the video recording and to clarify the essential point for speakers. I nominate Rick to moderate the presidential debates in 2012. Can I get a second?

Standouts in business ethics

I was thrilled to see colleagues, including Elisabeth Brinton, in the audience, when I offered my session, "The New Rules of Business Communications - Business Ethics and the Rise of Business Blogs." My only regret is that, because of a client committment, I missed the morning keynote by Ed Hartman of the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Business blogging questions posed by the audience

Some of the questions from the audience yesterday:

1. What can be done [in the blogosphere?] to recognize and support the authenticity of the individual voice?
2. What can be done to protest against false accusations online?
3. Do you think that the anonymity of online forums creates a tendency on the part of participants to fight against rather than for a cause? Do you think it gives rise to conflict-oriented interactions?
4. Do those in marketing have a robust fiduciary obligation to their employers or are they merely a means to their employers ends (so long as those ends aren't evil)?

If you attended or have on-topic feedback, comments (or, please, for heaven's sake, answers!), use the Comments area below to chime in.

Business ethics discussions - the new rules of B2B communications

Two good sessions are coming up in Sacramento on business ethics - one on Oct 20th and one on Nov 18th. They're listed from most to least important (Elisabeth's talk will be twice as good as mine) - which turns out to be reverse chronological order. Turn the monitor over and read upside down, and you'll have it straight.

Nov 18h: "Moral Courage & Ethical Decisions" at eWomen Network

Elisabeth Brinton will give a talk on Moral Courage & Ethical Decisions at November 18th eWomen forum. Registration

Brinton was recently named one of the "Women Who Mean Business", 2008 Business Women of the Year award winners for the Sacramento region by the Business Journal. She serves as an appointed official in Governor Schwarzenegger's Committee for the Employment of People with Disabilities, helping in job creation and equal opportunity for all California citizens.

Here is part of the talk's description:

As businesswomen and leaders we have the opportunity to address the need of our times: re-establishing moral courage and ethical leadership. Each of us has the opportunity to lead by example...

Oct 20th: "The New Rules of B2B Business Communications: Business Ethics and the Rise of Business Blogging" at CSUS

I'll lead a discussion the week after next at the CSUS Symposium on Personal and Professional Integrity in Business. It's a day-long event on the Sacramento State University campus, in the Hinde Auditorium of the University Union. Here's a campus and parking map.

The keynote is 9:30-10:50 a.m. by Dr. Edwin Hartman, Stern School of Business, New York University, on "Aristotle on Character and Integrity"

My session runs 3:00-4:15 p.m. Session III - title: "The New Rules of Business Communications - Business Ethics and the Rise of Business Blogs"

The new rules of corporate communication

Building on the popular ideas in the book "The New Rules of PR" by David Meerman Scott, I'll try to describe "New Rules of Corporate Communications." Roughly, the idea (not originating with me - credits below) is that, unlike a few years ago, in today's world corporate communicators should:

• Be an individual with a personality, not a unit with a title
• Speak in a real, authentic voice... be vulnerable (credit: D.M. Scott)
• Invite dialogue and improvements
• Avoid patronizing guru-speak (credit: Tom Pick)
• Zap jargon and double-speak before it starts (like gingivitis!)
• Don't be boring (this has nothing to do with ethics. Just don't be boring.)

I'll use 3 examples as a jumping off point for group discussion of the relationship between professional ethics and the New Rules of Corporate Communications.

More info

Ex-member, ex-fan -- the cost of having screwed up business ethics

The National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) appears to have handed over my contact information to guys who want to pitch me on everything from spa treatments to financial advice.

Again.

Sharing my contact info with all comers is a great example of worst practices in building trust with a contact base - of trading high customer lifetime value for short term gain.

Business Communications Group was a member of the NAWBO Sacramento Valley Chapter several years ago. I volunteered as well, directing the chapter's marketing efforts while on the Board.

MarketingSherpa and other researchers have shown that business people at all levels and in every industry and job function are quick to tune out or block senders whose messages do not, for one reason or another, resonate with them. They control who gets into their inbox and what sort of content they receive - either by selecting specific types of communications from their preferred senders, or by turning them off. Turning off and tuning out can happen through unsubscribing, marking a sender as a ‘blocked sender,' or marking a message as spam.

Failing to give contacts control over types of content, frequency, and mode of communication puts an organization at risk of being ‘tuned out' or, worse, destroying trust and decreasing its perceived value.

In this particular case, all those negatives apply. Today, I'm not just an ex-member. I'm an ex-fan.