MarketingSherpa Blog

When your customer uses your product to sell a service, helping that customer sell their service provides both a co-marketing opportunity and a way to offer an additional level of customer service.

Toshiba America Medical Systems’ customers are medical imaging centers buying large medical devices such as MRI, CT and ultrasound scanners, and use those products to provide medical services.

Toshiba combines a co-marketing opportunity with a customer service element through Image Maker, an online portal. With this program, the team provides Toshiba Medical customers with some basic marketing advice along with a wide range of marketing materials – brochures, press releases, videos and more – for each of the company’s main product areas:

• Cardiovascular x-ray
• Computed tomography
• Magnetic resonance
• Ultrasound
• X-ray

These products are expensive, ranging from $50,000 for an ultrasound system to more than $1 million for a MR scanner.

I had the opportunity to interview Catherine Wolfe, Senior Director of Corporate and Strategic Communications, Toshiba America Medical Systems, for more details about the Image Maker portal.

Why create this online resource for marketing materials?

Catherine said Image Maker was created for two basic reasons – increase customer satisfaction, and brand building as a co-marketing program.

“The issue for our customers is how can they get information that helps them differentiate themselves in their particular market about the equipment and the benefits that it provides,” Catherine explained.

She added, “The other issue for us is how can we build our brand to the greatest extent possible, and by providing this added support to our customers, we are able to get our message out there to a much greater extent than we would otherwise be able to.”

Who is the marketing material for?

The marketing material found on the Image Maker is extensive enough a Toshiba Medical customer with limited staff or time could easily pull the creative pieces,  review some marketing advice and execute campaigns.

At the same time, Catherine said many of Toshiba Medical’s customers do have marketing staff and the material helps those marketers with ready-made art and messaging.

The online resource also alleviates a particular pain point for marketers in the healthcare industry.

Catherine explained, “The healthcare industry overall— it’s more difficult. Costs are being constrained more and more. Marketing tends to be one of those budgets that gets cut, so we are able to step in and help folks that may have experienced that.”

Beyond the actual materials and other online resources, the marketing team at Toshiba Medical has a dedicated staff member who provides support directly to its customers with marketing recommendations based on other customer’s experiences on meeting various marketing challenges.

What is in the resource center?

Catherine outlined some of different types of marketing content in the Image Maker portal:

• The most basic includes press releases or letters for referring physicians to help with local marketing
• Radio spots
• Videos for embedding on websites or even for broadcast advertising
• Brochures and promotional material

She added the brochures have areas where the marketer can customize the material by adding their own branding and information.

Read more…

On the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action, Milap Shah, CEO, NexSales, discusses research from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report …

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA (Information Technology Services Marketing Association), and Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing. Both were involved in recent marketing research, 2012 ITSMA/VEM Marketing Performance Management Survey: The Path to Better Marketing Results.

The survey was conducted during the summer of 2012 via email and social media invitation through Twitter and LinkedIn, and included 405 completed surveys.

Here is a chart outlining details of the respondents:

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All respondents were analyzed by company type, company size and by a self-grading system (grade results included, and note that “D” was the lowest possible grade):

• A – Marketing demonstrates contribution to the business: 25%

• B – Marketing makes a difference, but contribution is not measured (these marketers were considered “middle of the pack”): 33%

• C and D – Marketing may have an impact, but not known if impact is material (these marketers were considered “laggards”): 33% for “C” and 9% for “D”

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Here are the key takeaways from the research:

• Marketing’s satisfaction with its ability to measure, analyze and improve performance is shockingly low

• Marketers are caught in a downward spiral as they report past performance to continually prove the value of marketing

• A few exceptional marketers have cracked the code; they excel across the board in data, metrics, processes, tools, analytical skills and reporting

• These grade “A” marketers can clearly demonstrate their value and contribution to the business

• The number of “A” marketers has remained relatively constant over time, but we see a decline in the number of “B” marketers

Because the heart of this research was marketing performance management, the self-described grades listed above were created by the key question: What grade would the C-suite give your marketing organization for its ability to demonstrate its value and impact on the business?

Read more…

Cisco’s social efforts regarding Cisco Live, a popular event the company throws yearly, was recently covered by a MarketingSherpa case study. Kathleen Mudge, Social Media Marketing Manager and consultant, Cisco, agreed to speak further with us on how she views and uses specific social networks.

With the effort featured in the case study, Cisco was looking for a way to extend the excitement that surrounded the event through the entire year using social media channels.

Facebook proved to be the tactic with the greatest reach with Cisco’s audience, above LinkedIn, which was a bit surprising for a B2B effort.

Mudge’s view of the results is that while Facebook pulls in a larger audience, they are both effective in accomplishing her communication goals.

Read more…

There are times when one marketing tactic seems to totally dominate the discussion. In recent years, social media has been in that mix, and mobile and its various form factors and latest upgrade release dates are pretty top of mind for plugged-in marketers.

These days, the one tactic I hear about most often when speaking with brand-side practitioners and vendors/agencies/consultants alike is content marketing – particularly how important content and having a content marketing strategy is for B2B marketers.

I did not keep a formal tally, but I am willing to bet content marketing figured in to every presentation at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012 in some fashion. So much that I made the entire tactic the number one lesson learned in the event recap.

A recent B2B newsletter how-to article featured two B2B content marketing consultants providing tactics on the basics of B2B content marketing. As with many MarketingSherpa articles, while gathering material for the story, I ended up with more great marketing ideas than needed for the piece.

In this case, one of the expert sources for that article, Stephanie Tilton, B2B Content Consultant, Ten Ton Marketing, provided an excellent eight-point breakdown of how to get started with content marketing, and I wanted to share her insight with MarketingSherpa Blog readers.

Here are Stephanie’s eight steps to get started with B2B content marketing:

Read more…

The Internet has a wealth of free, public information that could help you uncover sales leads, get closer access to industry influencers, monitor your competition, and curate news for content marketing.

One way to tap into this wealth of data is with a listening dashboard. At one of the roundtables recently held during the B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, Nancy Chou, Senior Director of Customer Success, LeadFormix, shared a presentation on how B2B marketers could use social media to generate leads by creating a “listening dashboard.”

What is a “listening dashboard”?

A listening dashboard is ultimately a customer intelligence gathering strategy that consists of collecting and combining together smaller pieces of information to produce a larger and more insightful picture of a given topic, brand or prospect.

Here are some of the benefits Nancy listed that a listening dashboard can offer:

• Hear what people are saying, and uncover sales leads whenever people discuss relevant keywords
• Gain closer access to the industry influencers through the article and blog posts they write
• Monitor your competition, gather sales intelligence and beat your competition by following discussions in real time
• Share fresh news and content from industry thought leaders with prospects and customers

How to set up a listening dashboard

If you’re interested in building your own listening dashboard, Nancy provided four steps for building a listening dashboard for free:

1. Create a list of the RSS feeds you typically read
2. Gather additional newsfeeds on specific keywords using sites like alltop for newsfeeds and technorati or Google blog search to gather blogs written by industry thought leaders or topics of interest
3. Start following influential people on Twitter using search engines like listorious and wefollow that categorize Twitter users by keyword
4. Set up a Google Alerts account to be notified whenever a keyword, industry topic, competitor or thought leader releases new content

The steps above will get you started; however, if you need more sophisticated social media monitoring and tracking services, fee-based tracking tools are available.

Related Resources:

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

B2B Social Marketing: 4 ways to build one-to-one relationships with social influencers

Back in 1992, if you wanted to find information about a company or its products, you had two choices:

1. Spend hours at the library poring over periodicals, annual and industry reports, and magazine and newspaper clippings. (Do you remember microfiche?)
2. Meet with a salesperson.

Life was simpler then: You could reach quota by sending some direct mail, making a few phone calls, and scheduling a few meetings. After all, the customer had very few alternatives to inform themselves. You could succeed without a solid strategy; all that really mattered was the size of your Rolodex. Lead generation as we know it today didn’t exist. Frankly, it really didn’t have to.

Those days are long gone, yet too many organizations are still selling like it’s 1992.

How do I know?

All it takes is a quick review of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link). Of the 1,745 B2B organizations that participated, 61%  still have that big-Rolodex mindset – they send any lead that responds to a marketing campaign directly to sales. Furthermore, check out the chart at the right: The vast majority has not applied strategy to any aspect of lead generation.

These statistics are just a reflection of the day-to-day behaviors and attitudes that keep sales and marketing organizations stuck in a time warp. Here are five of them:

  Read more…

Optimization Summit 2012 wrapped up two weeks ago in Denver, and Amanda F. Batista, Managing Editor, DemandGen Report, sent along a few questions to get some information from the Summit to help marketers involved in the complex sale.

So, I grabbed Dave Green, Director, Best Practices, MECLABS, for his B2B view of Optimization Summit …

If you’d like to jump ahead to a specific spot in the video, you can use the links below:

00:25 – What are the most important metrics for B2B marketers to consider in today’s buyer-driven landscape?

2:04 – What are some of the key trends and imperatives in testing to optimize campaigns?

3:18 – Are there any particular case studies or anecdotal use cases that stood out at the conference this week?

Related Resources:

Gaining Business Leader Buy-in: 7 CEO personas

Event Recap: Notes from the Optimization Summit 2012 roundtable sessions

Lead Gen Apprentice Panel At Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit Puts Experts On The Firing Line (via DemandGen Report)

MECLABS Methodology (includes the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic)

In our most recent episode of Marketing Research in Action, I discussed how lead nurturing could help your B2B marketing efforts with Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, based on data from her 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt here).

Here is a look at some of the research Jen and I discussed with direct links to that part of the video.

0:38 – Organizations that are engaged in lead nurturing realize higher ROIs on their lead generation efforts.

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2:01 – Top tactics for creating engaging lead nurturing content

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5:40 – Frequency of lead nurturing touches

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Related Resources

Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex B2B sale

Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails

Lead Nurturing: You could be losing as much as 80% of your sales; here’s how you keep them

MarketingSherpa Webinar Replay — 5 Key Components for Establishing and Optimizing Lead Nurturing Campaigns

I’m a fan of gallows humor. So, as a Borders shareholder (until it went bankrupt), I love the sign a Borders store employee posted as the chain was going out of business …

Sorry
No Public Restroom
Try Amazon.com

It’s hard to deny that e-commerce has significant advantages over the traditional brick-and-mortar store:

• Lower overhead and inventory costs
• Open 24/7, often to any customer in the world with a connection
• High gas prices that convince customers to drive less
• No sales tax (although that playing field will likely level in the near future)
• The ability for customers to easily find what they’re looking for, comparison shop, and respond to offers

But now it’s time for B&Ms to fight back … at least when it comes to that last advantage. As this infographic created by Kaci Bower, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, shows, 72% of smartphone users look for information on the go.

Click to enlarge

Read more…