Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Jun 30, 2008
While reading B2B magazine’s Interactive Marketing Guide earlier this year, a cluster of graphics caught my eye. They had to do with expected marketing allocations for online video, podcasts and other technology through 2012.
Through 2012?!?
Fortune magazine is not publishing recommendations on specific stocks to buy in 2012. Why would we pick specific 2012 marketing tactics now? It’s more risky than picking stocks. If you bet wrong on your organization’s ability to communicate with its target audiences, that could result in zillions of lost opportunities.
A lot can happen in the online world in four years. Think of how many tools weren’t around as recently as 2004. No YouTube. No Twitter. Facebook and other social networking sites were barely getting off the ground. Would your 2004 online marketing plan still work well today?
You can bet there will be plenty more changes by 2012. Who knows what will come along to change the online marketing world? The most effective marketing allocations will depend on things like ESPs’ relationships with the biggest domains; whether chat overtakes email for peer-to-peer communications, as the experts predict; whether a niche engine like business.com continues to gain market share from Google.
It’s good to have long-term plans as long as you can be flexible about them. Go ahead and think about your marketing allocations four years from now. Write a brief plan and put it away for a year. Next year take it out and revise it with a little more attention to details. Do it again in 2010 and 2011. By the time 2012 shows up, you’ll surely have changed your outlook.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Tue, Jun 17, 2008
MarketingSherpa has just released a new chart showing how marketers perceive their ROI on organic search and pay per click.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is aimed at attracting desirable traffic to a website by making its listings appear more prominently in organic — or unpaid — search results. With Pay Per Click (PPC), advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use when they search online for a product or service.
Marketing Sherpa chart released June 17 2008
(A larger version of this chart available at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-06-17-08-lp.htm)
Sherpa’s key points:
In its analysis, Sherpa reports that:
One-fifth of respondents called SEO their “strongest tactic” for ROI….
Paid search also fared well in this year’s benchmark research. The number of marketers calling it their “strongest tactic” dropped a couple of points, but the percentage designating it as having “good ROI” rose markedly by 7 points (20%).
Take it with a grain of salt
This sort of chart has to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s not revealing actual ROI, after all. It’s revealing what markers think about their tactics’ ROI.
Marketers are under alot of pressure to show good — and improving — ROI.
Still, the findings are notable. In the last 12 months many B2B marketers have been both attracted to and repelled by paid search — attracted because pay per click provides control and metrics that other marketing methods do not; but repelled because the stampede into PPC has caused a sharp rise in bid prices on popular (and even not so popular) keywords.
Worth the work
Many B2B marketers, including yours truly, expected paid search ROI to drop as costs rise. Effective integration of search with other lead generation methods is helping marketers wring more value from search despite rising costs.
Post a public comment or link this post at www.b2bcommunications.com/chart-search-bears-fruit
Contact Rebekah Donaldson with questions or comments at Ask@b2bcommunications.com
See other posts and this blogger’s bio in the Red On Marketing Blog at www.b2bcommunications.com/red-on-marketing
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Jun 09, 2008
BtoB magazine and the Sales Lead Management Association report that 45.4% of the 273 corporate marketers they surveyed in May plan to increase spending on lead-generation programs in the second half of 2008.
Marketingcharts.com reports,
The biggest obstacles for increasing spend on such programs, the majority of respondents (47.2%) reported, was that they do not have reports to show the ROI for what they are spending.
Meeting the challenge: reporting marketing ROI
It’s no small task to manually project and measure your return on a marketing campaign or new hire – especially when you may be touching prospects in several ways (in person, with nurture emails, via website downloads, through social networking sites, etc).
If you have a webhost like Earthlink, Comcast, or Register.com, you probably have website statistics by Urchin or SmarterStats included in your hosting package.
Google Analytics goes a crucial step further, helping to link marketing goals with business goals. It’s a hosted app, meaning your data and interface is completely online. It doesn’t cost to establish an account, but the tool requires that you enter accurate detailed information about the value of prospect interactions. It also takes some know-how to add Google Analytics code to your website so that the program can tell who’s done what at your site.
Urchin 6 is a web analytics solution similar in scope to Google Analytics – but it’s installed locally on your company’s network. It carries a price tag of $2,995.
Still, these tools only tell you about what’s happening at your website. Your email service provider tells you only about what’s happening with newsletter activity. If you use a telemarketing firm, they’ll report their success rate for setting appointments.
For the tear file: sample metrics for an ROI report
Here’s an example of metrics I think are important to track.
- Response rate
- Percentage of responses that become qualified leads
- Close rate
- Time to close (length of sales cycle)
- Percentage of new business from marketing touches
- Email click-through rates
- Publicity value of articles published
- Amount of time spent on your website
- Number of return visitors to your website
I’m not quite ready to post examples of our Client ROI Calculator reports… but hopefully I’ll be able to make that accessible in B2B Central this summer.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Thu, Jun 05, 2008
Tom Pick just wrote that he’ll be starting off his presentation at the Blogging for Business Conference tomorrow with the statement, “The practice of PR has changed more in the last five years than it did in the previous fifty.”
Tom Pick writes:
…Prospects and stakeholders no longer want to be an audience for corporate news, they want to be participants. And through various forms of social media—blogs, video, wikis, forums, podcasts, social bookmarking and networking sites—they have made themselves participants.interactive PR, or, if you prefer, social PR or conversational PR. The role of PR is now to start the conversation, which is two-way or many-to-many, then monitor and participate in that conversation…
PR practitioners can no longer practice “microphone PR,” which, as the term implies, is about one-way, one-to-many communication controlled by the PR person. Social media has shifted the practice to
What do you think?
Is Picks’ view:
- Completely off base
- Obviously true
- Intruiging – tell me more!
How hard is it to break the habit of ”microphone PR”?
Not hard at all if…
… Interactive PR efforts are implemented by a person with good table manners. A GenX or GenY professional may be the best person to help a company learn the etiquette of posting in others’ forums and creating its own. Etiquette is a very big deal – at least as important as the content communicated.
… Interactive PR efforts spring from an overall committment to trust-based marketing. Meaning, a committment to investment in dialogue and relationships with key audiences.
… So-called ‘microphone PR’ efforts in past were not as they appeared. If, all along, you or your PR consultant have sought feedback from analysts and reporters before issuing news over the wires, you’ve been investing in exactly the right thing: dialogues and relationships. Your techniques have generally meant behind-the-scenes email and phone conversations and, when needed, group editorial board meetings. Social media opens myriad ways to expand this conversation to engage more thought leaders.