MarketingSherpa Blog

Teleprospecting, email campaigns, drip marketing, lead nurturing — all of these marketing tactics have one very important element in common. Each one begins with a list, and the quality of the data in that list has a direct influence on the success of each tactic.

Looking at the top of the funnel

“Data is so top of the funnel, yet it is so undervalued,” says Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for the Leads Group, MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingSherpa.)

He explains that creating a quality list begins with an organizational philosophy that places a high value on data quality. This might require a philosophy shift in some companies, and it will likely require leadership support in the idea that data quality is important and that this importance might need to be proven by testing.

“A lot of times I see that marketers think they have this really robust, large database, but soon find out that because of data quality issues, they only have a small segment of their actual ideal customers that they wanted to be focusing on,” says Stamschror. “They are kind of getting lost in the quagmire of trying to manage untargeted data.”

Pay more, gain more

Stamschror says the solution may be to spend more on data to reap the benefits of higher-quality lists.

He explains you want to:

• Be specific about the data you need to focus on
• Don’t collect more data than you really need on your ideal buyer profile or persona

If you don’t do these two things, it can become overwhelming to manage a very large list. And if your data quality is low, you might have a list of 50,000 contacts, with only 10,000 who are relevant to your business.

Data hygiene is an ongoing process

Looking at data quality isn’t something you can do once and be satisfied that you’ve completed a task to take off the “to-do” list. Stamschror recommends data remediation projects every three to six months if there is no other data hygiene process in place.

Even though it’s not cost effective having your lead generation and prospecting staff spend time tracking down bad entries in the list, or engaging in a wholesale data update, it is beneficial to create a process where your team is regularly updating and appending account information as part of their day-to-day activity. There is little, to no, additional investment for staff to update contact fields as they discover missing, or incorrect, items. Stamschror adds if controlling data quality isn’t feasible as an internal process, you should find a data quality partner you can trust.

He explains, “It is always important to have someone who has some distinct responsibility for data quality.”

Stamschror says that as many as half of all lists he’s encountered contain duplicate information because there is no data hygiene or remediation process in place to keep the database clean.

“It really gives you a false sense of security,” he says. “You think, ‘I have all these contacts that I can run email campaigns or teleprospecting campaigns off of,’ and then you find out once you get into it that your list isn’t really as big as you thought it was, or as robust as you thought, and worse yet, you are spending a lot of time just wasting time (with the bad list).”

Less can be more

Stamschror says it is much more important to have a very clean, but smaller, prospect list, as opposed to a bloated list full of bad and/or irrelevant data. He states this is particularly important for B2B marketers who should be focused on a smaller group of highly targeted prospects.

Stamschror offers a piece of final advice, “You know the companies that you really need to be focused on. So focus on the right one.”

Related Resources

(Members library) CRM and the Marketing Database: Data hygiene, behavioral analysis and more

(Members library) Cause Marketing: Marketer builds email list with 20% conversion rate

New Chart: Most effective email list growth tactics

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

Photo credit: Donovan Govan

Over the last two weeks I’ve covered a number of angles on lead nurturing. Last week’s Sherpa B2B newsletter took a look at five lead nurturing tactics, and yesterday’s blog post was on why you should consider nurturing leads lost to competitors along with tips on how to do just that.

Today, MECLABS’ Executive Director of Applied Research (Full disclosure: MECLABS is the parent company of MarketingSherpa), Brian Carroll provides insight on how to look at both cost-per-lead generated in terms of lead nurturing and measuring the success of a lead nurturing program through return-on-investment (ROI).

Cost-per-lead is the wrong metric

Although many marketers are interested in the cost-per-lead number, Carroll says this is the wrong metric to focus on. He explains by saying if a lead is generated at a low cost, but never contributes to the sales pipeline, it is a wasted expense. Great cost-per-lead number, but terrible (non) contributor to the bottom line.

Carroll believes two metrics that are better measures across the entire process are cost-per-opportunity and cost-per-pipeline revenue. Cost-per-opportunity helps you understand how Sales accepts and pursues leads, and in the long run that metric shows if those leads are actually helping Sales, and if Marketing is contributing to the pipeline.

He says to take a look at your entire marketing expense-to-revenue, and then contrast that number to expense-to-revenue after implementing lead nurturing.  He adds lead-to-sale conversion rate is the most important metric in the entire process.

Carroll states, “We have examples of nurturing programs returning a ten-times return for every dollar spent, and we had other examples of nurturing programs where it is a fifty-times return for every dollar spent, meaning for every dollar that we put towards an existing lead, we are generating $50 of top line revenue.”

Here is a list of metrics and indicators from one of Carroll’s blog posts:

These are real-world metrics that every marketer should track in their lead generation program:

• Number of inquiries? (people who raised their hands)
• Number of leads? (qualified as “sales-ready”)
• Number of opportunities? (leads that move to pipeline)
• Number of closed sales? (generated from marketing leads)

If marketers know those metrics they can start to track the following key performance indicators:

• Inquiry to lead ratio (cost-per-lead)
• Lead to opportunity ratio (cost-per-opportunity)
• Lead to pipeline revenue ratio (cost-per-pipeline revenue)
• Lead to sale (win) ratio (cost-per-closed sale)

A value-driven mindset requires leaders and marketers to plan and budget for the long term and to take a more holistic view that goes beyond cost-per-lead budgets.

Using ROI to measure lead nurturing success

Carroll began this conversation by describing lead nurturing investment. He gives an example that if you plan on spending $100,000 on a new lead program, $25,000 of that investment should be allocated to lead nurturing. Lead nurturing should command about 25 percent of a lead campaign’s budget.

When looking at ROI goals for lead nurturing, he believes you first look at the objective of the lead generation program — ten times, 20 times  return or whatever goal you set — and use that goal as a starting point for the lead nurturing goal.

He adds what companies generate from a lead nurturing program is going to be affected by a number of factors:

• The product sold
• The brand
• The value proposition
• The offer
• The ability of Sales to convert leads into revenue

It’s also important to remember nurturing programs take longer to provide a return because a typical lead nurturing program involves multiple touches over a period of time, but marketers can point to building momentum toward final conversion as a positive result of nurturing.

Carroll says, “I documented a case study of someone seeing a four million dollar lead nurturing pipeline impact in year one, and that same company, the following year, with the same budget from that same lead nurturing program saw a fourteen million dollar pipeline impact because returns on nurturing over time grew to be exponential.”

A lead nurturing analogy

To complete all this talk about lead nurturing, here’s an analogy from Carroll:

I worked on a farm growing up and the farmer said, “You don’t pick your corn to check if it is growing. You have to nurture it. It needs sun, it needs water, it needs good soil to provide a yield.” And the same is true in these relationships that we are building as well.

Related Resources

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

Are Marketers Measuring Their Success or Someone Else’s?

Lead Nurturing and Management Q&A: How to Handle 5 Key Challenges

(Members library) Lead Gen Overhaul: 4 Strategies to Boost Response Rates, Reduce Cost-per-Lead

Content marketing goes well beyond publishing text-based material. Your company can provide videos, slide decks, Twitter feeds and even Web-based tools — like ClickMail’s ESPinator.

ClickMail pairs companies with email service providers (ESPs) and helps them establish effective programs. For years, its marketers have published a blog and an annual PDF guide about selecting ESPs.

“We’ve always felt that we had a clear view of the strengths and weaknesses of the various ESPs,” says Marco Marini, CEO, ClickMail. “From that, we evolved into an annual guide on selecting the best one. It’s completely vendor-neutral. It doesn’t talk about any vendors at all, just what the factors are.”

The ESPinator is the next step in that strategy, Marini says. Launched last month, the tool asks users a series of questions and suggests up to three ESPs that are well-suited to their needs.

“Every vendor at a trade show says their solution is the best. There truly isn’t a best solution. It all depends on what your specific needs are,” Marini says.

“There are more than 30 ESPs in the tool, and we don’t have a relationship with the vast majority of them. So this is truly more for the email marketing audience.”

Upfront investment vs. long-term upkeep

Content marketing requires investment. Someone has to create the content and it has to be really, really good. You can either invest your time or pay someone else. Either way, there is no free lunch.

This is also true of ClickMail’s ESPinator, which took over two years to create and is still in beta. One of the biggest challenges was building its scoring system. Each ESP had to be scored in various categories so it could be matched against a user’s needs.

One such category is each ESP’s depth of integration with salesforce.com, a popular CRM solutions provider.

“All [salesforce.com] integrations are not created equal among ESPs,” says Cameron Kane, CTO, ClickMail, who headed the project. “Some may synch simply contact data, some synch lead and contact data, some work with custom objects, some will not work with custom objects” and so on.

– Keeping content alive

Some types of content — such as books — require a onetime investment. Once a book is published, it’s published. Blogs, on the other hand, require on-going investment or they will wither and die. ClickMail’s tool is somewhere in the middle and will require updates.

“When an ESP on that list comes up with a new version or enhancements, we need to go back and modify the scores on those areas that they have potentially improved,” Marini says.

Marketing plans to attract attention

The ESPinator is so new that ClickMail has just begun its promotion. The team launched it at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit last month — the industry’s largest event — and plans to do more soon.

Ideas they are kicking around include:

• Offering co-branding partnerships to companies
• Offering the tool to prospects as part of the lead-nurturing process
• Pitching the tool to industry press and blogs (like this one) to score inbound links

Ultimately, the team hopes that the ESPinator provides a useful service and helps attract attention to ClickMail and its services. Furthermore, the tool’s calculated suggestions will help position ClickMail as a company that is well-suited to help marketers choose email providers.

“When you say content marketing, I immediately think of thought leadership,” Marini says. “Our company philosophy is to show that value upfront without asking for anything.”

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit 2011: 7 takeaways to improve results

MarketingSherpa German Email Marketing Summit 2011

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog

Fellow marketing managers, commiserate with me for a moment. I’m sure you’ve been in a similar situation. You’re given a new marketing initiative that you know little to nothing about. For some it might be Twitter. For others, maybe landing page optimization. My intimidating hill to climb, was the webinar.

While preparing for today’s MarketingSherpa webinar about email relevance and deliverability, and researching for the past couple of months on webinar creative practices, it became more evident to me that a clear marketing strategy was needed in order to produce better webinars in the future.

Highlighted below are the six tactics that I found successful for creating a clear webinar strategy and currently impact the way I plan, create, and promote MarketingSherpa webinars. And if you’re a MarketingSherpa member, we even have a complimentary Sample Webinar Plan that you can download.

Step #1: Know your deadlines and deliverables
Early communication with the sponsors, clients, and presenters is key. Email them and introduce yourself laying out a timetable for future meetings and deadlines. Once you know the key dates and information (webinar date, presenters, and topic), work backwards from the date of the webinar and set up target dates for completion. Important dates to remember include:

• Landing page setup and review
• Launch calls
• Presentation deadlines
• Dry runthrough

I highly recommend you set up a launch call to review these deadlines and discuss any concerns as well as present an overall webinar outline for a suggested topic.

Step #2: Map out an effective marketing plan
Once you have confirmed the target dates and deliverables, you can begin to create a marketing plan. This plan should include your plans on promoting the event (emails, banner ads, social marketing) along with key dates and deadlines. The difference between a good plan and much better plan is in the details. The more specific you can be with target audience, goals, and call to action, the more effective your plan will be. When this is completed, send it to all the parties involved (including your sponsors and presenters if applicable) so they can see the plan details and discuss plan specifics.

Step #3: Create relevant webinar copy for target audience
Relevancy is the key. If your audience feels that the webinar subject and email copy is relevant to their needs then you will be more successful in engaging prospects. As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director (CEO), MECLABS always says, “Clarity always trumps persuasion.”

Shy away from vague statements like “leading,” “best” and “most.” Be specific. For example, “Homepage Design: The five most common pitfalls and how to overcome them” Subject titles and copy that are specific may be enticing to a smaller audience, but most of the time this audience is highly interested and therefore a better lead. Always include a good call to action and use this line of thinking when creating copy, “If I am the ideal prospect, why should I attend your webinar?”

Step #4: Apply marketing promotions across all channels
Using a number of highly targeted email blasts from in-house and sponsors lists, along with banner ads, you can bring in a significant amount of attendees. However, when marketing for our last webinar 2011 Top B2B Marketing Practices: From Lead Generation to Marketing Automation, it was the social media activity (Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs) that drove an additional 200-250 attendees within a week of the webinar. When tweeting, make sure to begin to establish the Twitter hashtag you plan to use to live tweet during the webinar.

Many companies do a number of webinars a month and using every avenue possible to create buzz is crucial to a webinar’s success. I’ve found that the sweet spot for marketing is two weeks to the day before the event.

Step #5: Preparation precedes power – practice and execution of the webinar
No matter what webinar platform you use (GoToWebinar, WebEX, ON24) it is imperative to learn the basics of these programs before you begin using them. Spend some time watching the “best practices” training presentations, and reading the FAQs and how-to sections many of these platforms offer.

Knowing the tips and tricks of how each of these platforms function will be critical to avoiding “Uh oh” moments. Familiarize yourself with the important functions, like polls, registration questions, follow-up emails, and reminders.

Also, familiarize yourself with Twitter. Establishing a Twitter hashtag, and having at least one person from your company live tweeting during the webinar, is a great way to drive conversation and interaction and also gauge the sentiment of your audience in real-time.

Bottom Line: Your preparation will give you the power you need to execute the webinar and the practice will give you the peace of mind.

Tactic #6: Follow up and review – continuing the conversation
Once the webinar has concluded, it’s important to keep the conversation going. Sending a follow-up email containing the slide presentation and any special offer material you promised is only one part of the conversation. The second important part is keeping them engaged with other webinars, articles, books, classes, and events that apply to the topic of the webinar. Think of Amazon, “Those who attended a webinar like you also found this interesting…”

It’s also important to review how the webinar went. Spend an additional five to ten minutes getting feedback from the speakers and monitoring the Twitter hashtag after the webinar concludes. This feedback will help you in making improvements in future webinars.

Related resources

Marketing Webinar Optimization: Five questions to ask yourself about webinars

B2B Marketing: Take established tradeshow best practices and adapt them for an online audience with virtual events

Members Exclusive: Download your complimentary Sample Webinar Plan

My first job was on a bond trading floor at a Wall Street investment bank. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of innovations in computing and telecommunications on the financial markets in the 1980s.

Within a decade finance was transformed from a clubby, old-boys’ network to a 24-hour global trading system.

With that revolutionary shift a new currency of success emerged: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second – real time.

Today, no financial professional would ever consider making a transaction without understanding where the markets are trading right now and what’s happening in the news at that precise moment.

It has taken a quarter century. But in fields like marketing and public relations, the impact of the real-time revolution in finance is finally beginning to be viable for any organization.

Real-time lead generation

Here is just one aspect – a data driven real-time website with an email component – of what the instant environment offers:

As a buyer visits your Web site and registers for a webinar, an alert is triggered on the salesperson’s real-time dashboard, providing details about the buyer based on the page that person is visiting. The alert notes that the person downloaded a white paper a few days ago.

In fact, the alert is flagged as high priority because that combination of actions (white paper download plus webinar registration) is highly indicative of a propensity to buy.

The alert automatically pulls up information on the buyer’s company. Are they already a client? Have others from this company visited the site before? What do third-party information providers say about the company? News stories from Dow Jones or Bloomberg appear along with a company snapshot from an information supplier like Hoovers.

Even the buyer’s LinkedIn and Twitter profiles appear. And all of this happens in real time.

The system then automatically creates an email that can either be sent automatically, or reviewed by the salesperson first and then sent right away.

In the emerging real-time business environment, where public discourse is no longer dictated by the mass media, size is no longer a decisive advantage.

Speed and agility win.

But you need an infrastructure, much like a Wall Street bond trader, to play in this new world.

Let’s look at a B2B example to see how this works. This is an example I’ve written about before on my own blog, but I want to delve into it deeper than I ever have before for the MarketingSherpa audience, and give some actionable advice you can use to improve your email marketing, and marketing in general.

Imagine a huge company announces it is to acquire one of your competitors. It hit the wires five minutes ago.

What would you do right now?

Not tomorrow. Now.

How about writing a blog post about it in real-time? And then how about sending an email right away to all of the contacts in your database who you know are customers of your competitor?

That’s what Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua did when Oracle announced the acquisition of Market2Lead, a company that is also in the marketing automation arena.

I’m on the Eloqua advisory board and was having dinner with Joe, other advisory board members, and the Eloqua management team on May 24 in San Francisco when this went down.

Joe checked his BlackBerry and saw that the announcement had just been made.

The Oracle announcement contained only a North Korea style one-paragraph announcement. So Joe realized that there was a tremendous opportunity RIGHT NOW to write a blog post and define what the announcement meant.

In his post, “Oracle Joins The Party,” published a few hours later, Joe said (in part): “I expect Oracle’s entry to make a major difference in the attention paid to this sector. It’s going to open marketers’ eyes, and, as a result, expand the market. This is exactly the type of movement this industry needs. You see, the potential market for lead management systems is less than 10 percent penetrated.”

Eloqua’s CEO now owns the soundbite!

Can you see what Joe did? Oracle announces an acquisition but provides almost no details. The media is hungry for something to say and someone to quote. Bingo, a Google search pops up Joe’s post and now reporters, analysts, and bloggers have an authority to cite in their stories.

As a result of this real-time market commentary, Eloqua became an important part of the resulting stories in InfoWorld, Customer Experience Matrix, PC World, Customer Think, etc.

Now, when people want to learn about this transaction, they find Eloqua in the discussion. If you’re an analyst coving the market category or an existing customer of Market2Lead or are evaluating marketing automation platforms, Eloqua becomes someone you should consider.

Now is when the email kicks in. The marketing team at Eloqua queried their prospect database for any company in the sales cycle that was either an existing or potential customer of Market2Lead. Each of those people then received an email which was sent from the email address of their sales rep, pointing out the real-time blog post that Eloqua’s CEO Joe Payne wrote. These emails were customized by the sales rep:

Subject: Transition program

Hi Jim ,

I wanted to check in because I see you are using Market2Lead. It’s been quite an exciting week for Market2Lead and Oracle with the acquisition announcement. No doubt Oracle’s arrival at the party will bring increased attention to the sector. You see, as an early adopter of Marketing Automation, you’re one of the less than 10% of organizations who are recognizing the value it brings to your business.

Not surprisingly though, we’ve had a lot of calls over the last few days from many nervous clients as Oracle only acquired Market2Lead’s Intellectual Property (IP), not their customer contracts. As the leader in marketing automation, Eloqua is interested in helping you transition to a platform that will allow you to continue to do great marketing. We are offering Market2Lead clients a transition program consisting of a free SmartStart onboarding program and a six-month, money back guarantee on all subscription fees.

The Eloqua team is committed to helping you make a smooth transition.

Let me know when you have 10 mins to chat. You’re not alone!

Best,

Sales Rep Name Here

Eloqua

Amazingly, this Eloqua email was often the first that the customers of Market2Lead were hearing that their vendor had been acquired. Again, Eloqua owned the sound bite because they were first.

Many of those sales prospects then contacted their sales rep to learn more and soon deals started to close. The first signed customer as a result of this effort was Red Hat, a Market2Lead customer who chose to switch to Eloqua resulting in a $250,000 deal.

I’m constantly amazed at what real-time communications can do. Had Eloqua waited several hours to act, the moment would have been lost.

An immensely powerful competitive advantage flows to organizations with people who understand the power of real-time information.

Here are some things you can do right now to get started:

The most important thing is to develop a real-time mindset – an attitude that recognizes the importance of speed. It is an approach to business (and to life) that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right. Developing a real-time mind-set is not an either/or proposition. I’m not saying that you should abandon your current business-planning process. Nor do I advocate allowing your team to run off barking at every car that drives by. Focus and collaboration are essential. The smart answer is to adopt a both/and approach, covering the spectrum from thorough to nimble. Recognize when you need to throw the playbook aside, and develop the capacity to react quickly.

The first priority to implement your mindset is to listen to bloggers, analysts, journalists, and others who talk frequently about you and your business. To find these voices, start by checking the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so on) for all the relevant keywords and phrases you can think of: your company, customers, competitors, prospects, product categories, buzzwords—whatever you can think of. Use specialized blog search engines like Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and Technorati to find bloggers interested in subjects related to your business.

Develop guidelines that permit people to communicate at speed. Develop an effective code of real-time communications and proactively embed it throughout your organization. Train it, demonstrate it, discuss it, and review it until this becomes second nature to everyone. Have your people internalize it as deeply as the instincts that tell them when it’s safe to turn left at a traffic light (or right if they’re Brits). This is fully possible. IBM’s code is called Social Computing Guidelines. The IBM guidelines include all manner of helpful instructions. Be who you are; be thoughtful about how you present yourself in online social networks; respect copyright and fair use laws; protect confidential and proprietary information; add value; don’t pick fights; and don’t forget your day job. But the single most important guideline in the IBM document is this: Speak in the first-person singular. In fact, I think that speaking in the first-person singular is essential to understanding what we’re really talking about here.

To support real-time business, you need technology infrastructure every bit as sophisticated as a financial trading floor. When well-integrated into an appropriate technology backbone, real-time data work together to feed the dashboard that your marketers, PR professionals, salespeople, and executives use every day.

Fortunately for organizations like Eloqua that operate in real-time, not many people are using these technique yet.

When everyone else is pitching the media using traditional methods and sending plodding emails pitching product when it suits them, why not frame the discussion with your own well-placed commentary and alert prospects by email.

Editor’s Note: David Meerman Scott will be the featured keynote speaker, sponsored by ExactTarget, at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 + Awards & Expo in Las Vegas, January 24-26, and all attendees will receive a copy of his latest book, Real-Time Marketing & PR.

Related Resources

Email Marketing Manager: Look past campaigns to boost your career

B2B Marketing: Marketing automation helps with lead nurturing and management

Email Summit ’11: Tackling the Top Email Challenges with All-New Research, Case Studies and Training

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve noticed a recurring theme in my conversations with B2B marketers: This is the year to get serious about lead management and lead nurturing.

It’s not that lead management is a new concept – in fact, many marketers I talk to already have some kind of nurturing and scoring process in place. But many of those same marketers admit they haven’t fully realized all the benefits of their system and need to optimize it.

And now, a range factors are coming together to push those teams to get more out of their lead management systems – while pushing teams that haven’t adopted lead nurturing or scoring to create a system of their own.

Here are a few of the factors I’ve seen:

– Lead nurturing can address some of the biggest challenges B2B marketers reported facing in our 2009-2010 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report:
• Generating high-quality leads
• Marketing to lengthening sales cycle
• Marketing to a growing number of people in the buying process

– Staff and budget cuts brought on by the recession are forcing teams to streamline and automate more of their marketing processes. Things like automated drip-email nurturing campaigns look more like a “must-have” when your staff and budget for campaign execution shrinks.

– On a more positive note, optimism about an economic recovery has some teams thinking about future growth. They realize that the manual systems they use now won’t scale when their volume of leads and sales activity picks up again.

Any of those factors would be a good reason for you to revisit how you manage your own lead flow and qualification process. I have to note that, unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy route to lead nurturing nirvana.

The process requires a lot of work – collaboration between sales and marketing, planning and development of automated campaigns, monitoring and analysis of data, and routine testing and modification of your process, among other tasks.

On Thursday, June 10, I’ll be conducting a free webinar with Jennifer Horton, Best Practice Consultant, Eloqua, that provides research data and case study results to address some of the key challenges in optimizing lead management. (Here’s the registration form with more information.)

But if you’re ready to put in the effort, you can transform the way your marketing team operates, improve your relationship with sales, and make an even bigger contribution to your company’s revenue.

Want to share your B2B marketing expertise with hundreds of your marketing peers, or recount a particularly successful campaign?

We’re looking for speakers to take the stage at our 7th-annual B2B Marketing Summit this fall. This year’s event takes place Oct. 4-5 in San Francisco and Oct. 25-26 in Boston. During those two days, we’ll be featuring a mix of research, hands-on training, panel discussions, case studies and how-to presentations that will help you optimize your lead generation process.

To be considered for a spot on that agenda, share the details of your speaking proposal here.

We’re looking for presentations that provide practical, actionable advice for B2B marketers based on measurable results and real-world experiences. Think about your own success stories in the following areas:
o Lead generation
o Lead nurturing
o Lead scoring
o International demand generation
o Email marketing
o Paid search advertising and SEO
o Content development
o Social media marketing
o Metrics and analytics

Once again, please use this form to provide details of your proposed session.
(Deadline: Wednesday, May 12)

And stay tuned to this blog, the MarketingSherpa home page, and our B2B marketing newsletter for more details on the Summit as we develop the program.

Thanks!

Our recent case study about Level 3 Communications’ video eBook highlighted a great tactic for getting non-marketing colleagues to help create marketing content. It can be hard to convince a busy VP or engineering-type to write something for you, but they’ll often agree to be interviewed on a subject for a video or audio piece.

Interviews are a great way to let knowledgeable staff members share their expertise in a low-pressure, low-commitment way:
o You can give them questions in advance so they can gather their thoughts
o The process can take as little as 15 or 20 minutes
o A little post-production editing can highlight the best bits, even if they ramble a little.

But you have to choose the right people to interview and manage the process carefully to ensure the content is trustworthy and relevant to your prospects. Here are a couple more tips on getting the best out of your subject matter experts:

– Avoid using salespeople for lead-gen interviews.

Nothing against salespeople – they are great at what they do, and know your products’ features and benefits inside and out. But using a salesperson may send the wrong message to prospects.

The vast majority of the audience for your video or podcast isn’t yet ready to talk to a salesperson. Instead, you should feature an authoritative voice from within your organization, such as a technical expert or product manager, who can project an educational, authoritative tone. Save the sales team’s role for negotiating with leads once they’ve been qualified through your marketing process.

– Don’t let subjects read their answers.

People reading off a script almost never sound natural. You want the content to be conversational, not scripted.

If the interview subject is working off of notes and it’s not sounding great, ask them to try it again without reading their notes. Tell them to focus on talking to the interviewer as if it were a one-on-one conversation — not a presentation.

And remember, editing is your friend. You can always delete pauses, “ums” and “ahs” or repetitive statements after the fact.

I recently talked with Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant in the Best Practices Group at Omniture, about how to best measure and monitor a site’s SEO results (keep an eye out for the article in our search newsletter).

Knoch provided a wealth of information. One bit I found particularly interesting was about connecting offline conversions to online behavior. Many marketers invest loads of time and effort into search marketing to generate leads that will convert offline. Most of these marketers are certain of how many leads they’re getting, but are less certain of which channels generate the best leads; those most likely to convert.

A rental car company, for example, might collect leads online by pointing traffic to an online registration form. The customers convert and pay when they arrive on-site to pick up the car. So leads are generated online, but not all of them will arrive on-site to complete the conversion.

For marketers in this boat, connecting online lead gen to offline conversions is essential to determining which efforts are pulling in the best leads. Is it paid search? If so, which keywords? Is it natural search? Is it display advertising? You should strive to segment the performance of each channel, Knoch says.

“If you’re not mapping your online [lead gen] to your [in-store] conversions, you may be judging your natural search just the same as your display–which is not a good thing to do,” Knoch says. “If you’re not optimizing to offline data metrics, then you’re missing the full picture and you may be spending money on the wrong keywords or the wrong channels.”

Teens are using social network sites, video-sharing sites, online games, iPods, and mobile phones. That’s no news flash.

What’s new is a study of 800 interviews with youth and their parents that has shed light on why young people use digital media. Here are the major findings:

Read more…