Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Apr 28, 2008
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.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Fri, Apr 25, 2008
As the latest BtoB Magazine webcast, “How to Leverage Online Communities for B2B Marketing,”got underway, I visited the launch page for a link to the webcast’s major sponsor, ITtoolbox .
The result? Nada.
I really wouldn’t pick on them for this oversight, if it weren’t for the fact that real-world examples can teach us much about best practices.
So, my apologies, ITtoolbox marketing team, for calling it out. But I fear that omitting a link from the event lobby might mean you have no click through stats on visits to ITtoolbox from the BtoB webcast event lobby. I definitely did not get routed to a customized landing page that helps move BtoB subscribers to accept the next offer: membership… and ultimately abandoned the site, for reasons I describe below.
I fear too that, as a result of omitting that all-important link from the event lobby to a customized landing page, the ITtoolbox marketing team might not get maximum dollar for dollar ROI on the webcast sponsorship – or indeed be able to measure ROI.
Going forward, this issue could be overcome with a few hours content writing and web development guided by MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook, so aptly described in Brian Carroll’s post Landing Page Handbook: How to Raise Conversions by 40% (get the handbook – worth every red cent if you’re responsible for conversions at your company’s site – at Landing Page Handbook: How to Raise Conversions).
I did accurately guess ITtoolbox’s URL, accepted a membership, started to complete a profile, and began searching for blogs to track and sub-groups to join. I got the impression that community creators want folks to blog and wiki about technical issues like software code. I’m not whining about their focus, I’m just mystified about the push to get me, a Sacramento marketing consultant, to join in the fun.
I abandoned the profile completion because there doesn’t seem to be a community of people at the site who are like me or could use my perspective.
Back to the BtoB webcast content.
One of the two most useful slides was provided by Booker Ellis. He discussed the shift in B2B PR and ad budgets from editorial and paid placements in traditional business media, toward user-generated business media. Here’s the matrix he developed to illustrate the point:
(Credit: Ellis Booker, Editor, BtoB magazine)
I wonder if perhaps the content-rich Technorati might be a better choice for the upper right quadrant, if we’re seeking companies emblematic of user-generated business media. I find LinkedIn great for keeping up with professional contacts but light on user-generated content – despite the fact that they make it very easy to connect one’s profile with one’s feed.
(Sidebar: Of the 2 contacts in my LinkedIn network that have linked their feed to their profile, there’s 1 I want to disconnect with — but is there any way to disconnect with people on LinkedIn – ?)
That said, Booker’s ‘evolving media landscape’ slide raises several interesting ideas. Among them is how this mapping approach might apply to the evolving agency landscape.
If Sacramento marketing consultants, for example, were mapped to this sort of matrix, a handful of nimble Web 2.0-savvy marketing agencies would sit in the top right quadrant; by contrast, I think all but one of the large Sacramento PR and ad agencies would sit in the bottom left area – due to their continuing focus on paid and editorial placements in traditional consumer media. (Friends at local large agencies, feel free to set me straight.)
Perhaps someone out there could establish a wiki-style forum for nailing down where Sacramento marketing consultants sit in such a matrix. Helping prospects see where various Sacramento marketing firms sit regarding Web 2.0 technologies is an idea that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for a couple of years — it was first inspired by SARTA’s effort to show the genealogy of Sacramento technology firms — but I never seem to get around to it.
Last item worth passing along: Jeff Zabin of Aberdeen Group noted the explosion in social media by huge enterprises, and provided this compelling image:
(Credit: Jeff Zabin, Research Fellow, Customer Management practice, Aberdeen Group)
Having a collection of enterprise perspectives on marketing via social media could be very useful when it comes to steering marketing budget allocations for the remainder of ‘08. And it conveys – to me, anyway - that we might be in a Web 3.0 world now.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Sat, Apr 12, 2008
I’ve been asked a number of times about our web content management system for clients. Here’s how it works.
You already have a website, but rely on a web expert to make changes. Or you can make changes to your website, but your site doesn’t show up in search results on Google. Now meet the web based content management system that builds your in-house capabilities and improves your marketing ROI. Business Communications Group offers a web based content management system that works on Mac and PC. It lets you manage many website updates yourself.
Here are a couple of samples:
- Business Communications Group’s own website, http://www.b2bcommunications.com/ was launched and is maintained using it.
- Two clients, Infinium Communications and MSD Health, launched websites in ‘07 using starter accounts in the system.
Creating an account is completely free. Once you have your account, you can add any number of websites. You choose which package to apply to each website – pricing depends on how many pages you want, how many people need to have access, and how much help you want on design. You can change a website’s package or cancel a website at any time. When you create an account, it comes with a free website to test-drive the software. You can upgrade, downgrade, and add additional websites anytime.
Get a free account in our web content management system.
For a reasonable fee we’ll take any existing web site and get it ready to go as a template on the system. We’ll set up a single user account to let you get a feel for the tool and practice posting a piece of content to your own web site.
We provide easy to use, web based, content management system tools that allow you to add content to your site. Our tools work on PC and Mac browsers. You can even give some staff members content management control on some web pages while locking them out of others.
We charge you a reasonable monthly rate for the web sites you manage through us. Our monthly fee includes the use of our content management system plus all web site hosting charges. And, whenever you need help to create a page or element that requires a web professional, we’re here to help as needed.
Request a free account in our web content management system.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Wed, Apr 09, 2008
I just listened to B-TO-B Magazine’s webinar replay “The Convergence Of Sales And Marketing Technologies.” (scroll down to the third webcast showing on this page).
But instead of the headache-inducing webinar replay, I recommend the Aberdeen whitepaper that came with the webcast.
I settled in for the 50 min webcast because I was curious to see if Aberdeen, one of the webinar presenters, might compare a solution like Eloqua with the Neolane solution. Our midsize and fast-growing small clients are on the lookout for affordable techniques for real-time integration between sales and marketing. I wondered if Aberdeen was onto the sort of solutions we’d experimented with.
The voice quality of the webcast is distractingly poor, and the presentation cut off part way through. And there is quite a bit of jargon to wade through. But in any case I think the upshot was:
1. Marketing and sales are poorly if at all integrated at most companies
2. The right software can solve the marketing-sales integration problem
—> Neocase is the right software to solve the marketing-sales integration problem
I think 1 is true. And, I’m sold on the importance of integration between marketing and sales. Here’s an example of how we’ve helped clients overcome the great divide, in my post Which B2B sales tools work?
I think 2 is false. The integration I’ve seen work is integration between teams – between people. It requires real time dialogue and human follow up internally in order to happen. That goes for extracting valuable information about clients and prospects from subscriber statistics, and other reports that potentially live in silos within marketing.
What’s your experience with this? Is my reconstruction of their case a straw man?