Archive for February, 2010
Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight
Sunday, February 14th, 2010One of the biggest challenges b2b marketers face is what to do with all of those “names” that come into your system that aren’t really “leads” yet; contacts collected from white paper downloads, webinar registrations, trade shows and other activities. How do you separate hot leads from long-term leads from tire-kickers? How can you efficiently nurture those long-term prospects, learning more about their interests in the process, until they are really ready to engage with sales?
Those are the types of questions marketing automation / demand generation software vendors seek to address with their offerings. They apply technology to a difficult process. For b2b companies who are able to use such software effectively, the competitive advantage is akin to Indiana Jones taking on his would-be assassin in Raiders of the Lost Ark:
The challenge for b2b marketers in adopting marketing automation / demand gen systems isn’t with the technology, which is stable and reasonably easy to use. It’s with internal processes, office politics and other issues. In the scene above, although Indy clearly had the technology advantage, if he’d been a lousy shot, or didn’t have his gun loaded properly, he’d have ended up as shredded professor in a hurry.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder at marketing automation provider Eloqua, for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of marketing and the challenges faced by those adopting marketing automation / demand generation systems. Here are six key points that surfaced from our conversation.
1. “Marketing automation” is a misleading term. You can’t really automate marketing, of course, any more than you can automate gourmet cooking or great painting. “Demand generation” is a better term, though still not precise. “Software-that-helps-turn-raw-names-into-qualified-leads-by-delivering-the-right-content-at-the-right-time-and-monitoring-response” would be most accurate, but kind of a mouthful.
2. The buying process has fundamentally changed. Many marketers are starting to get this. Most sales people still don’t. Buyers no longer rely on sales people for basic information or exploratory “consultation.” They get 95% of the information they need from the Internet—online publications, analyst reports, vendor websites, blogs and other social media—before they have any contact with sales. They expect sales and marketing pros to be using the web as well to understand their problems before the sales conversation even starts. The key role of sales is to provide that last 5% needed to reach a buying decision: the company’s differentiating value, or what pain the prospect will experience if they don’t buy the right product or service.
3. Customers are those who’ve advanced from email service providers (ESPs). Small b2b companies often manage their email campaigns through hosted email services like Constant Contact, VerticalResponse or ExactTarget; when they’ve outgrown those and need more sophisticated segmentation, response tracking and automated response features, plus the ability to create and manage targeted microsites, they graduate to marketing automation / demand generation systems.
4. Building the logic behind the nurturing process is the hard part. Marketers who can do this effectively will command (or should be able to command) a premium. The technology is relatively easy. The hard part is mapping out the information delivery process. If we know that John Doe is the CIO at a medical manufacturing company with $100 million in revenue, what information should we deliver first? And we offer him two paths in that message, what should we provide if he chooses path A? What should we do differently if he chooses path B?
5. It won’t work if the processes and incentives between sales and marketing aren’t aligned. If, for example, marketers are focused on delivering leads who meet a defined threshold of interest as soon as they cross a certain point, but sales reps are comped on the number of calls they make, there is a fundamental disconnect. Calling even the right prospect at the wrong time, or trying to sell them the wrong product, can destroy the value of the marketing investment made to that point.
6. There is a crying need for this. It aligns vendor messages with buyer needs, saving money and corporate reputations. Prospective buyers are overloaded with information. Sending them more junk—information they can’t use or that isn’t relevant to them—makes your company look out of touch and reduces your ability to get the sale. Quick example: I used to have high-speed Internet service through AT&T. They would actually send me promotional mail for the dial-up service. Why on earth would they waste my time and their money trying to get me to downgrade my service with them? On the other hand, providing compelling information at the right time can reduce the sales effort required, shorten sales cycles, and make you look smarter than your competition as well.
The “science” of marketing automation / demand generation is well-established and readily available. The winning users will be those who manage to get the “art” part right.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in September 2009.
Manticore VII Marketing Automation and Lead Generation Released
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Marketing automation / demand generation software provider Manticore today announced the release of Manticore Technology VII, which includes a fully customizable user interface, email and landing page folders, an email delivery wizard, and drag-and-drop list building functionality. The company made the announcement at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Although the improved UI is the big change, the new version also adds integration with SalesForce.com for AdWords campaigns and improved lead generation capabilities.
Manticore was founded in 2001 by Nick Walker, who is now the CTO, and has been led since March of this year by Jeff Erramouspe. The company’s original focus was on web analytics. At the request of customers, email delivery and tracking capabilities were added in 2004, and the firm’s product has now evolved into a full marketing automation suite. Privately held and self-funded, Manticore has grown at a 50+% clip since 2005. It competes with vendors such as Marketo, Eloqua, Marketbright and Genoo. Pricing for Manticore VII, delivered on a SaaS platform, starts at about $24,000 per year.
The marketing automation market as a whole is still in early stage growth mode. Sirrius Decisions projects that penetration of marketing automation systems will increase from less than 10% in 2005 to more than 50% of BtoB marketers by 2015. Manticore’s Jeff Erramouspe believes penetration is still likely no more than 15% in the North American market, and even lower internationally. The early-adopting high tech segment is perhaps 25% penetrated. Jeff contends that marketing automation systems will become required tools for any b2b “considered purchase” (i.e., any significant price point, non-commodity products).
As many others have noted, the rise of social media and the explosion of online content has fundamentally altered the b2b sales process. Prospects no longer rely on sales people and marketing collateral for information; most of their research is now done before they ever make contact with a sales rep. This has made the marketing funnel longer, and the actual sales process shorter. Proper lead nurturing has become critical, which is where marketing automation systems come in.
As Jeff and other executives in this space point out, the biggest barrier to adoption isn’t the technology—which over time has become both more powerful and easy to use—but rather the change of mindset required, and developing analytical, process-driven marketing practices that capitalize on building upon the information prospects already have to help move them through the marketing and sales pipeline. While Manticore relies on its resellers to provide expertise with client-specific issues, the company is also creating a “success framework” that will guide users through the basic steps in lead nurturing.
Interestingly, the company notes that the heaviest users of the system tend to need the least technical support, because they know what they want to do with the product and use it on a daily basis. The experience of other vendors is likely similar; customers who have truly made marketing automation and lead nurturing an intrinsic part of their marketing and sales processes will be the most self-sufficient, and should theoretically be the most successful as well.
Marketing automation vendors like Manticore are likely to see continued sales growth as more b2b companies recognize the expectations of their buyers have changed. Just as buyers are now able to access and incorporate more information about vendors and products early in their buying process, so vendors will be expected to use all of the tools at their disposal to understand their prospects, and address their specific issues rather continuing with obsolete one-size-fits-all marketing practices.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in November 2009.
How to do Lead Nurturing Right
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Marketing automation provider Marketo has just published The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, a white paper that provides real value, covering the lead nurturing process from the basic how and why through ROI measurement. Unlike most white papers, this guide is very light on marketing (selected pages have sidebars headed “How Marketo Does It” rather than embedding marketing copy in the content—a nice touch). Also, it’s available in full immediately for those willing to provide their basic contact information, or as a series of chapters to be distributed throughout the month of August for those who prefer to obtain the guide anonymously.
The guide itself is well-researched, clearly written and highly practical. It starts with a clear rationale for making investments in lead nurturing processes:
- “Up to 95 percent of qualified prospects on your Web site are there to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, but as many as 70 percent of them will eventually buy a product.” (Brian Carroll)
- “On average, nurtured leads produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus nonnurtured leads.” (DemandGen Report)
- “Only in the last third of the today’s purchasing process do buyers want to engage with sales reps. This changes the role of marketing; instead of generating the lead and moving on, today’s marketers must synchronize their marketing throughout the buying process, providing potential buyers with high quality content that is contextually relevant.” (Scott Albro).
Research from other sources shows companies that excel at lead nurturing generate more qualified leads at a lower cost per lead, reduce the percentage of marketing-generated leads that are ignored by sales, increase win rates, and have a higher percentage of sales reps who make quota.
Content marketing plays a key role in lead nurturing as well as a successful lead generation and social media strategy. As the report notes, “The most important brand attributes for a B2B vendor are often credibility and trust – and unless you are a well known company like IBM, the best way to build credibility and trust is by sharing useful information. If you can help frame the discussion, your company will be seen as a trusted advisor and thought leader. If buyers believe that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them, this helps reduce the feelings of fear and can make a big difference in being selected for consideration and purchase.” It also sets you apart and builds credibility on the front-end of the buying cycle, making efforts from SEO to banner advertising and AdWords more effective and productive.
The report provides helpful guidance on lead nurturing basics, lead scoring, the different types of opt-in (and when each is most appropriate), and advanced lead nurturing tactics such as accelerator campaigns (“campaigns that attempt to move prospects along the buying cycle faster by providing relevant `nudges’ at the right time, usually triggered by specific buyer behaviors or sales updates”).
It closes with a section on the ROI of lead nurturing, complete with worksheets for performing your own lead gen activity return calculations.
Again, Marketo’s lead gen guide will be made available in chapters throughout this month for anonymous download, or you can grab the complete Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing today.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in August 2009.
Don’t They Know Who You Are? Why Reputation Management is Crucial
Sunday, February 14th, 2010In the old days—like, six or seven years ago—if someone had a bad experience with a company, he or she generally vented about it to a few friends and that was the end of it. The emergence of social media changed all that of course, so now that person can vent online to, essentially, the entire world. And search engines love social media, which helps expose that rant to anyone searching for the company’s name.
Lee Odden recently framed this topic effectively in a post about digital reputation management, noting “There are plenty of CEOs, executives, brand and business managers that are facing the dilemma of what to do about their company and brand reputation online…Companies like Kryptonite Locks, Comcast, Dell, Walmart and Sony have all experienced what it’s like to ignore the influence of the social web and the subsequent effect on how their brands are reflected, both in the search results and within social media channels.”
This Time, It’s Personal
What these CEOs and other executives also need to appreciate is the importance of their personal brand. These individuals are often the “face” of their organizations; as they get quoted in press releases and news articles, pen bylined articles, speak at conferences, and talk to industry influencers and prospective customers, their names can become almost as well known as their brands. That makes it crucial for business leaders even at smaller companies who may not in the past have considered themselves “public figures” to manage not only their firms’ online reputations, but also their own.
A few examples. One executive I know, the president of a software company, shares the first page of Google with a biomedical researcher, a diplomat, a (not exactly best-selling) author, and the Facebook page of a college student from North Dakota. While that isn’t a terrible group to potentially be confused with, this executive has a sufficiently unique name that he should be able to own more of the real estate on this page, including the top spot (he’s currently #5), thereby making himself—and his company—easier to find.
Another executive acquaintance has things a bit worse. He shows up on the first page alright, but several of the links are to dot-com-meltdown era news articles about a company he worked with that had some of the typical problems of tech companies at the time (collapsing stock price, low on cash, disgruntled shareholders etc.). The full story is that he wasn’t the cause of these problems at all; he was hired to fix them, which he did, successfully taking the company prviate and turning it around. But a casual Googler wouldn’t get that story from the page one results without really digging.
On the other side of the ledger are individuals such as Jon Rognerud and Guy Kawasaki. Jon has a somewhat unusual name obviously (and the “Jon” spelling helps), but he isn’t the only person on the planet with that moniker. Yet he owns the first five pages of Google for his identity. Guy owns at least the first ten pages of Google (being a best-selling author
How To Be Seen
Granted, it may not be realistic for executives with more common surnames and less fame to achieve quite those levels, but most could nevertheless dramatically improve their personal online reputation management using the following techniques.
- Buy yourname.com if it is available. Use the domain to build a professional website (e.g., GuyKawasaki.com) or redirect it to a suitable page, such as the Management Team page on your corporate site.
- While you’re at it, spend the $95 to own your personal LookupPage.
- Make sure the Management Team page on your company website is optimized for your name.
- If you can make the time commitment, start your own blog. At the very least, look for opportunities to write guest-posts and/or get interviewed for blogs related to your industry.
- Write an article (or articles) for Google Knol on topics pertaining to your product or service. As an example, here’s one I wrote about records management. You can link to other blog posts, published articles, white papers or other informational content your company has produced about the topic.
- Record a short video introducing yourself and your company to potential customers and anyone else who may be interested. For examples, see the Pitches section on TechCrunch. Use your name in the title of the video (e.g. firstname-lastname-of-companyname.mp4). Upload the video to YouTube and Vimeo so it’s easy to share on blogs and other sites.
- Upload company-related photos—you, other executives on your team, your building, your products, screenshots (if there is any software component to your product), your logo, etc.—to photo-sharing sites like Flickr.
- Start Twittering. Use your real name in your profile.
- Create accounts on social bookmarking sites like Wikio, Mixx, Digg and/or StumbleUpon. Any time there is an online news story or blog post published about your company or product, submit it. Also submit other items that may be of interest to your customers and prospects.
- Hire a social media-savvy PR person to help you get interviewed by prominent bloggers and writers in your industry.
- Consider writing a Wikipedia page about yourself. Keep in mind, however, that you have to be considered a public figure (or at least be able to make the argument that you should be) or the Wikipedia cabal will reject the article and take it down. That means you’ll need to have links to third-party sources who have written about you, and the, er, idiosyncratic folks at Wikipedia will have to agree. For example, Tim Young the relief pitcher for the Expos and Red Sox has a Wikipedia page, but Tim Young, CEO of on-demand social networking platform Socialcast doesn’t.
- Create and maintain profile pages on social networking and directory sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Naymz, Jigsaw, Plaxo, ZoomInfo, CrunchBase (for technology executives), and VisualCV.
Professional corporate “evangelists” like Scott Monty and Christopher Barger, not surprisingly, tend to show up pretty well on search. But shouldn’t the CEO—particularly at smaller firms—be one of a company’s biggest evangelists? Stakeholders may very well think so. As a top executive, you are a public figure, and people will search for your name on the web. Online reputation management gives you at least some control over what they’ll find.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in January 2009.
The Insidious Nofollow Tag: An SEO Rant
Sunday, February 14th, 2010I’m normally a positive, upbeat kind of guy, and as someone who’s been writing professionally since the days of disco, rarely at a loss for words. Yet mention the “nofollow” tag, and that all changes. I, like many other many other web marketing professionals, am left sputtering with a mix of disgust and rage, fumbling for an adjective that conveys sufficient contempt: despicable, vile, loathsome, abhorrent, abominable, wretched, odious, detestable, downright evil.
The nofollow tag was misguidedly inflicted upon the online world by Google in 2005. According to Wikipedia (among the worst nofollow offenders), “The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Blog readers and bloggers were well aware of the immense problem. Just like any other type of spam affects its community, comment spam affected the entire blogging community, so in early 2005 (Google and Blogger engineers) designed the attribute to address the problem and the nofollow attribute was born.”
Though the originators of WordPress have developed a far more elegant and inoffensive solution to the comment spam problem with Akismet, the execrable nofollow tag remains with us, like a cancer impervious to drugs or radiation.
The justification for the continued use of this repugnant scrap of code is to prevent passing link juice from listings on directory and social bookmarking sites to spammy or other objectionable content. But, to be charitable, the nofollow tag is to the world of web links what “let’s just be friends” is to romantic relationships. It’s a way for site owners to say: “I’m happy to use your content to build my traffic, but not to reciprocate. I don’t want anyone to think we’re together.”
An alarming number of once-respectable social bookmarking sites—Digg, delicious, Mister Wong, Reddit, Mixx, Bibsonomy, Jumptags, Faves, Yahoo! Buzz, Simpy—have now instituted dastardly nofollow tags. It’s easy to determine if your favorite site should now become an ex-favorite, just “view source” in your browser and search for rel=”nofollow.” If it’s there for any reason other than Pagerank sculpting (e.g. nofollowing pages like “Contact Us”), move along. If you’re trying to promote your own content, it won’t work. If you are trying to promote some else’s, you won’t help them much.
Hey, here’s a novel idea: if someone is using your blog, social media site or directory to link to spam, porn, hate speech, discount online pharmaceuticals, miracle weight loss nonsense, or work-at-home scams—DELETE THE LINK. Why is okay to have such crap listed on your site, regardless of whether or not you’re passing link juice?
In fairness, this pernicious string of characters once served a purpose, as a less-than-ideal solution to a serious problem. But today, Akismet solves the link spam problem on blogs. The community can be used to solve the problem on social bookmarking sites. A little bit of old-fashioned work can deal with issue on directory sites.
I’m not alone on this. It’s time to demand better, to rid the world of the reprehensible, insidious nofollow tag once and for all. Ideally, Google should announce it’s no longer recognizing the tag. Absent that, site owners should boycott it. And if they don’t, users should walk.
Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in October 2009. But it all remains true.
