Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Thu, Sep 24, 2009
By Rebekah E. Donaldson
Everyone is supposed to be nailing down their plans for 2010 marketing efforts. What will go in your 2010 marketing plan?
As I write this, MarketingSherpa’s 6th Annual B2B Marketing Summit 2009 in San Francisco is winding down. And I don’t want it to be over. Every session, every speaker, and every piece of content was focused on helping attendees conquer the challenges of B2B marketing.
Here are links to get some of the facts you need for smart 2010 marketing planning.
Every marketer needs practical, up-to-the-minute planning and budgeting help when it comes to 2010 planning. And with B2B case studies, examples, and statistics from MarketingSherpa, you can justify spending using real-life results and plan new programs based on actual trends.
Here are some questions you may be thinking about this Fall, and my ideas on finding answers:
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Q: What are the best-value ways to generate leads in 2010?
a. Let’s start with tactics to be wary of:
- Don’t depend on bought or rented email addresses — even if it’s somehow legal to email lists of strangers, your time is better spent pulling in prospects and building a permission-based house list
- Don’t depend on cold calling — even if you can get past the front desk and call screening and voicemail jail, interrupting an executive is getting off on the wrong foot
- Don’t depend on a Flash video or wesite – usually, search engines can’t ‘read’ them and many busy business decision makers will skip them altogether
- Don’t rely on mailed letters — it’s increasingly expensive (think Fed Ex envelope made lumpy with some sort of item enclosed, etc etc) to get your mail opened… much less past the gatekeeper
b. If you only get one Sherpa resource, make it the 6th Annual ‘B2B Marketing Benchmark Report 2009-10’.
In it you’ll see:
- 2,631 marketing professionals surveyed
- 157 charts & tables
- First Ever: Social Media Marketing section
- 7 Marketing Insight sections, including: ‘Strategies & Tactics for a Rebounding Economy’
- 10 practical how-to best practices from the field
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Search Marketing Benchmark Report 2009-10
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Q: How should I balance PPC and SEO in 2010?
Should you bump up Adwords investment or focus on organic search?
a. Check out Cris Rominger’s article Effective Search Engine Optimization
b. Check out my article What’s Wrong with this Google Adwords Ad?
c. Consider diving deeper into what works and what’s a waste of time using Search Marketing Benchmark Report 2009-10. In it you’ll see:
- 679 marketers surveyed
- 176 charts and tables
- Stats on conversion, cost-per-click, and clickthrough rates
- Special Section: Worldwide & regional search
- Special Section: Critical Factors in SEO
- Special Section: Testing & ROI Tracking (B2B & B2C)
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Q: Is business use of Twitter a flash in the pan?
a. Maybe. But probably you should get involved anyway. Here are 9 articles we’ve offered related to the business use of Twitter.
2009 Social Media Marketing and PR |
b. Next, consider this resource: 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and Best Practices. In it you’ll see:
- 157 charts and tables on the emerging state of Social Media marketing
- 13 practical how-to best practices from the field
- Discover how Social Media is changing PR
- Find out the metrics and budgets of Social Media marketing
- Special report: Using Social Networking Sites for Demand Generation
- Special Section: “9 Steps to Social Marketing Success”
And now a question for you. What will you do differently in 2010?
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Sep 21, 2009
By Rebekah E. Donaldson
We’ve all heard the phrase, “You get what you pay for.” The truth is, sometimes you get a lot less than you pay for.
This is the first in a seven-part series of articles to help you get what you pay for when you choose a marketing agency. I’ll start today with a decision tree that shows the five key decision points. As the series progresses, I’ll show you a framework that CEOs can use to sort out the answers. In later articles I touch on the various types of marketers in the industry. You’ll also find 11 questions to ask an agency – with an example of what counts as a good answer (“pass”), and what counts as baloney (“fail”), for each. And in my seventh article in this series I’ll give five warnings, each of which begins, “Why to watch out if you hear…“
Outsourcing marketing – opportunities and threats
On the one hand, you need effective marketing because of competition and economic conditions; on the other hand, you risk:
- Wasting money
- Wasting time
- Making a bad impression on customers and internal stakeholders if marketing poorly represents the company
The real risk of taking the wrong path
A lot of marketing-related companies are vying for your attention — and your money. Cash vacuums like Google Adwords. Thousands of marketers with consulting practices. 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.
Fig 1 - Picking a marketing consultant decision tree |
Five key decision points – overview
After you resolve to do more effective marketing, you need to decide:
1. Do we need professional marketing help?
This decision is easy to overlook. After all, vendors like Google Adwords include campaign set-up and support, so why not take their free advice? Or, why not redouble your efforts with mailers and telemarketing, which produce a trickle of leads? That just requires bigger lists and more investment in the same types of marketing as before.
In this series I outline why not. And if you do need professional marketing help, you need to decide:
2. Do we need to outsource marketing or should we keep this in-house?
In 2009-2010, talent of all kinds can be had at bargain prices. But maybe you feel ambitious. Perhaps you’re up to managing marketing directly?
If you are interested in outsourcing, you may wonder:
3. Do we need a formal RFP process to look for a consultant?
There are some benefits to doing a traditional request for proposals. But that process can take months to complete.
If you can arrive at a short list more quickly and easily on your own using search engines, social media and referrals, what sort of professional marketers should make the list?
4. What kind of agency do we need — specialists or an all-in-one firm?
Specialists in marketing subdisciplines are critical to overall marketing success — but it’s risky to grasp at individual tactics (see also our Six Marketing Gotchas CEOs Can Avoid ebook). If you decide you need a firm to be accountable for helping you move the needle for your firm (not just hit marketing-centric numbers), you’ll need to decide:
5. Who should we pick — what do we ask to ensure we get the best agency?
Some folks grapple with what I think of as “early” decisions, like whether to outsource. Others skip the early decisions and go straight to weighing one resource over another.
Now that you see the path we’ll be following, we’ll start looking at the individual elements in more detail. If you haven’t already, please subscribe by email.
Posted by Robert Celaschi on Mon, Sep 14, 2009
By Robert Celaschi
Something strange happens to people when they send marketing email. They’ll take a powerful, persuasive marketing message, and torpedo the whole thing by slapping a lousy subject line on it.
What makes it really strange is that the email might contain a press release or other message with a really great headline. The sender could have cut and pasted it. But no, instead they type a vague or garbled mess of words that makes me shrug and move on.
I’ll confess I’m sometimes guilty of sloppy subject lines. I’ve struggled and sweated to craft the right message. I’ve set the right tone. I’ve targeted the right people. I’m ready to press the “send” button and then — oh, yeah, gotta put some kind of subject line on this puppy. Zip-zip-zip, done. Instead, I should take even more care with those precious few words that may determine whether the email even gets opened.
Let’s look at a half-dozen real subject lines that real marketing people emailed to me in the past month.
Subj: New Dilemma For Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment
Huh? Let’s see: I gather that there’s a new dilemma of some sort. For whom? Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment. Uhhhhhhh, sorry, does not compute. This one would work better with a simple colon after “Business.” Not great, but better. The story is about businesses transferring the leases on company cars, because they’ve laid off so many of the workers who used to drive them.
Subj: Non-Profit
That’s it, just “Non-Profit.” There are a lot of nonprofits out there. They do a lot of different things. I had to dig way, way down to discover that this nonprofit is a foundation that helps children. They are holding a fund-raiser this month in Miami. If I hadn’t picked this as an example for the blog post, I wouldn’t have bothered to find out any of that.
Subj: Survey: A Quarter of Firms Scaling Back Training
A direct hit. Tells me everything I need to get started. Now I’ll open the email and find out the details. Whoops — turns out that while 26 percent are cutting back their training programs, 28 percent have expanded. But, hey, they got me to read it.
Subj: Boston – Social Media Capital?
I don’t like questions for subject lines. Why are you asking me? Don’t you already know? If not, go do some more research and get back to me.
Subj: Time for Change in Credit Card Game
Maybe it is indeed time for a change in the credit card game, but since I have no idea what this means, it’s hard to say. The easy fix here would have been to condense the first line of the enclosed press release: Consumers now can say “no” to credit card interest rate hikes.
Subj: July home sales increased 12 percent; median home price declined 19.6 percent
This one delivers. I feel like a double winner, because I learn about sales volume and about price. This is about the California housing market, by the way. Bad news if you are a seller with a fat mortgage.
Your turn!
OK, you get the idea. Now take a look at the email you’ve sent in the past month. If someone didn’t already know your message, would they get the right idea from the subject line?
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Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.
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