MarketingSherpa Blog

 At this week’s B2B Summit in Boston, one of the case studies presented was on a multi-channel lead generation campaign conducted by CenterBeam, a technology infrastructure company serving mid-sized businesses. This campaign included an extensive outbound element with multiple phone calls and follow-up email, and a “friends and family” referral program.

The third piece of this campaign, a new content marketing strategy, was created from the ashes of a failing pay-per-click effort.

Reallocate the budget away from losing efforts

CenterBeam simply took money from the PPC campaigns, and put that budget line into the content strategy. There was no new expense, just a reallocation of money Marketing had to spend.

Karen Hayward, EVP and CMO, CenterBeam, says the company’s paid search program was not producing positive results. The campaigns were bringing in smaller companies that weren’t part of the CenterBeam’s target market.

The solution was to take that spending and apply it to a concentrated content marketing strategy to boost organic search traffic, and hopefully draw in more qualified leads.

For this effort, CenterBeam went to an outside vendor specializing in custom news creation with a number of requirements:

• 50 articles per month
• Every article had to be unique and exclusive to CenterBeam’s website
• CenterBeam optimized the keywords
• CenterBeam provided six categories of relevant topics for the articles

Here you can see a screenshot of the news page at CenterBeam showing the heavy dose of new content: Read more…

Photo credit: NatalieMaynor

I’m horrible at naming. As a writer, this is one of my least favorite projects.

First, you have to create a string of words/syllables that have never existed before. Then, you have to make sure that, well, it truly never existed before and you can legally get the name (and, as the Barenaked Ladies so wisely sang, “It’s all been done.”) Lastly, you want to secure that Park Avenue address of the Internet – a “.com” address.

Whew.

And unlike the perfect headline that just sounds like music to my ears (even years later), by the end of the entire process, I find myself saying random syllables over and over so much that they all just start to sound kind of weird.

Yet, a good name can make be a huge ally to all of your future marketing endeavors. I’ve always loved ICQ, an early instant messaging client, because it gave you a real sense for what the product did. HotelTonight is another great one, and the subject of David Kirkpatrick’s product launch article in today’s MarketingSherpa consumer marketing newsletter. Get a hotel … tonight.

But if you’re engaged in your own product launches, you flat out need a good name. So I asked a few marketing pros for the origin stories behind their own names, and what lessons they learned in the process to help you the next time you have to, gulp, name that product or company … Read more…

Here at MarketingSherpa we are always looking to bring you actionable tactics and interesting insights based on surveys of your marketing peers. You can pre-order our latest research — the 2012 Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition. Better yet, you can even download the executive summary from the report at no cost.

The direct download of this excerpt is free and does not require registration.

In the executive summary you’ll find six charts outlining the key findings from our research, but one of the perks of working here at Sherpa is I get the chance to take an early look at entire report (and the rest of the 125 charts.)

During this sneak preview I found a couple of charts that highlight an area where many marketers can improve their pay-per-click efforts. Read more…

Location, location, location. No, I’m not talking about real estate, I’m talking about event marketing.

The location of conferences, summits, conventions and user groups is critical to their success. People don’t just go to events to network and learn how to do their jobs better, they want to go to a city they would really want to visit on vacation, like Orlando, or Denver, or Washington, D.C.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Now, everything has changed. Event attendees are no longer looking for flashy cities, they’re looking for budget-friendly destinations. Reasonable flights. Inexpensive hotel rooms. Goodbye New York City, professionals want to head to cities like St. Louis and Nashville for their industry events.

Here’s the thing. I don’t know which of the above statements is true. We were debating this very challenge, perhaps a similar challenge you’ve faced when planning your own events, in our latest event team meeting.

Share your opinion for a chance to win a $1,695 marketing summit ticket

So, we thought we’d start with a little unscientific, qualitative research. Simply put, which city or cities would be most appealing to you for a future marketing event? Let us know from the list below for your chance to win a ticket to a future MarketingSherpa Summit, such as B2B Summit in San Francisco or Boston, Email Summit in Las Vegas, or, well, you tell us….

(and if there are any cities we’re missing, feel free to let us know in the comments section below)

***UPDATE***

Congratulations to  Carol Reid, Owner/Marketing Consultant, Carol Reid Marketing, winner of a free ticket to a MECLABS summit. She has chosen the upcoming B2B Summit in San Francisco.

Related Resources:

Event Marketing: Regional customer forums improve field events attendance rate by 150%

Never Pull Sofa Duty Again: Stop guessing what your audience wants and start asking

Marketing Intelligence: 3 ways to better serve your customers (and your bottom line)

The Indefensible Blog Post: Actually, the old rules of marketing are pretty good

Sometimes it’s helpful to challenge the model. And from time to time here on the MarketingSherpa blog, I’ll risk alienating my marketing blogger colleagues by publishing a post that calls into question what everyone else is writing about.

Ah, who am I kidding, I love stirring up the pot.

Today I want to talk about the “Old Rules of Marketing.” If you listen to the conventional wisdom, the old rules of marketing are dead, and there are absolutely new, ingenious, never before-thought-of ways that we’re supposed to market.

So I went up into my attic, dusted off my trusty tome “Ye Olde Rules o’ Marketyng” (picture one of those scenes where Indiana Jones opens a crypt that’s been closed for centuries) and I found…

Well…

Actually, the old rules of marketing are pretty darn good. See, all this digital stuff is pretty cool, and has certainly changed a lot of things. But we – you, me, and the other 6 billion or so inhabitants of our planet – are pretty darn similar to the people that came before us. Human nature has not changed as quickly as communication technology.

After all, in the end, “People don’t buy from websites, people buy from people” as Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, of MECLABS has said.

Sure the media you use to communicate with your potential customers may have changed, but the fact that you are communicating with potential customers has not. So let’s take a look at some of the old rules of marketing that I learned when I was just an eager young marketing pup, and see what you can still learn from them today … Read more…

When you think of marketing automation software, you likely think about B2B companies with those long sales cycles, and extensive lead nurturing and scoring to help move prospects through the pipeline. Because at B2C companies the distance from prospective customer to paying customer can be so short, realistically, marketing automation isn’t a necessary tool for many consumer marketers.

And just because marketing automation isn’t a great fit for many B2Cs, it certainly deserves more attention at any company with a longer sales process. Read more…

You’re in a meeting. The CEO asks the CFO what he thinks about something. The CFO tells the CEO what he thinks, and the CEO nods. He accepts the CFO’s answer.

The CEO then asks the head of product development about something, and the same thing happens. Acceptance. Respect.

Then, the CEO asks you something. You answer. The CEO starts questioning you, listens half-heartedly to your answer, then turns to others in the room and asks their opinion – about a marketing issue!

Why does this happen? Why don’t you just “get the nod?”

Because you are making a fundamental mistake. You are basing your advice – and staking your reputation – on what you know about marketing, rather than how well you know your customer.

Who is your customer? How did that customer find you, and why did he buy from you? What does that customer tell others about you? Even more important, what does the customer wish your company would do for him? That knowledge is your only true source of power. You may think you know these things, but in my experience, you’re probably missing the mark. Everyone else does.

I’m going to teach you how to change this “no nod” dynamic for good, in my keynotes at the B2B Summit in Boston and San Francisco. I’m going to teach you how to get the information you need from customers, present it to management so they “get it,” and make the kinds of decisions – strategic and tactical – that will not only give you the nod, but give you the kinds of results that every marketer wishes they could deliver.

But before I put these presentations together, I am going to “eat my own dog food” as we used to say in Silicon Valley. I practice what I preach.

I want to interview you

If you’re coming to a B2B Summit, I want to talk to you to make sure that what I present will address your very specific concerns, and will give you practical, take-it-back-to-the-office-and-make-it-work advice.

As I interview you, you will have the chance to experience a proven, customer-intelligence-gathering interviewing process first-hand, as the customer. This will help you when you start to put those new, “get the nod” practices into action in your own company – and in your career.

I will only need to talk to about ten of you, so if you want to be part of this process, let MarketingSherpa know now. I only need your name and email address; I’ll contact you to set up a phone appointment.

Thanks, and I am looking forward to our conversation.

Related Resources

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy)

The Indefensible Blog Post: Forget Charlie Sheen, here are 5 marketing lessons from marketers

The Data Vs Creativity Debate: Is successful marketing driven by analytics or art?

Guided by Buyers: Four tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy (Members-Only Library)

B2B marketers are increasing their investments in inbound tactics. Don’t just take my word for it. When we surveyed 935 of your peers for the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, 60% said they were increasing investment in virtual events and webinars.

But what does it take to produce an effective webinar? A virtual event that will grab people’s attention and encourage them to leap into your funnel, as opposed to check their email while you ramble on?

At MECLABS, we produce some pretty popular webinars. I’m not trying to brag about our crazy webinar skills. The truth is, we invest a lot of resources in these. And that’s why they’re good.

So when webinar director, Austin McCraw, presented me with an org chart of the roles that we fill during the average webinar, I thought it could be very useful to the MarketingSherpa audience.

Now, when I saw we invest a lot in these webinars, these are not full-time employees dedicated solely to webinars. Webinar director is not Austin’s official title. And on one webinar or another, I’ve filled every role we’re about to discuss. You will very likely have one person fill more than one role.

But I think this org chart may be helpful to you because it gives you an idea of all the bases you should consider covering for a successful, interactive webinar with your audience.

Producers

In Hollywood, the producer is the money man. The one investing in the film, but also ensuring it makes money (or, in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” loses money).

In the marketing world, the producers are likely marketing managers, product managers, and business leaders that fund the webinars with their marketing budgets, and seek to generate profitable leads or valuable lead nurturing from the webinars.

It is crucial to ensure producers are involved in the entire webinar process, so everyone is clear on the goal for the webinar and the value your company expects to derive from it.

Director

You don’t need Spielberg, but you do need one central decision maker. Webinars are live productions, and as with any live event, (even when it is virtual) things can and do go wrong. You need someone who is quick on their feet and has the guts to be able to call the tough shots. Your Internet connection died. The slides aren’t advancing. The audio isn’t working. What do you do? Quick, you have 12 seconds to decide before your audience starts dropping off the webinar.

Writer/Stage Director

A good webinar is filled with well-thought out content that guides your audience through a logical thought sequence, much like a film or story would. You need to not only create that content, but prep your presenters for exactly how to deliver it. Virtual stage blocking, if you will.

Technical Director

You can’t host a webinar without technology. And as with any technology, it helps to actually know how to use it. You’re far less likely to have a Skype chat pop-up that reveals company secrets live to the audience if you actually know what you’re doing and don’t have to ask “what does that red button do?”

Our setup for the MarketingExperiments Web clinic is quite complex, complete with a mixing board, handheld and wireless microphones, and an Apple computer running Final Cut Pro to capture the live audio for our Web clinic replays.

You don’t need to go to this level. But you do need to know, or have someone who knows, how to actually use the webinar platform.

Audience Supervisor

Sure, you could drone on for an hour about all the features and benefits of your product. Or, you could actually respect your audience (and capture their attention), by including them as much as possible in the webinar. That is, after all, the benefit to your audience of taking an hour from their busy day and actually attending a live event.

The audience supervisor not only tries to maximize interaction points with the audience, but also monitors the audience’s feedback and reactions to constantly make the course corrections needed to optimize the performance while the webinar is being conducted.

A good speaker naturally does this before a live audience, gauging the reaction – from boredom to engagement – and changing the presentation as she goes. This is harder, but not in possible, in a virtual event, so your presenters are going to need a little help and guidance.

Main Presenter

The main presenter is essentially a moderator. Someone who can act as an advocate for the audience. He’s Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Oprah Winfrey, Terry Gross, Bill Maher, Ira Glass. The kind of person that can relate what a technical expert is saying to novice listeners.

Another important skill is the ability to tie disparate parts of the presentation together into a natural flow with well thought-out segues. And, with the audience supervisor’s help, tie in audience comments, questions, and other interaction.

All very naturally. All part of the flow. All part of the show.

Presenters

Your practitioners and subject matter experts are why people tune in to being with. But they’re not necessarily expert presenters. And that’s one reason why you have everybody else in this org chart. To support these guys…your well-coddled stars.

The main presenter may certainly well be one of your subject matter experts or practitioners, but it takes the right set of skills and the right personality to pull both roles off well.

Monitors

The monitors support the audience supervisor and, based on your resources, they all may be one and the same. They engage with your audience using virtual platforms – responding to questions, probing the audience for feedback and interaction, providing supplementary resources, and solving problems. We’ve found that the Q&A function in the webinar platform, along with a hashtag on Twitter, are good platforms for interacting with our audience.

You should also have a technical monitor making sure the audio and slides of the webinar are streaming well and actually working. It could be someone in a different room or even a different city. Your other monitors should pick up on this if they’re listening to audience feedback, but it never hurts to know something isn’t working before your audience starts complaining.

Related resources

Marketing Webinar Optimization: Five questions to ask yourself about webinars

New to B2B Webinars? Learn 6 steps for creating an effective webinar strategy

Free webinar, Wednesday, July 20 — Copywriting on Tight Deadlines: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework (educational funding provided by HubSpot)

Free webinar, Thursday, July 28 — How to create engaging content for successful lead generation

Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and similar providers track senders’ reputations by IP address. This is partly why sending emails from dedicated IPs (instead of IPs you share with others) is the most effective tactic for improving deliverability, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

Many smaller companies, though, cannot manage a dedicated IP well enough to build a strong reputation and are better off using shared IPs, says James Thompson, Email Systems Manager, Infusionsoft.

“What we found is that most small businesses really don’t have the resources to be able to dedicate the kind of attention and maintenance required to maintain a good status on a dedicated IP,” he says.

Thompson oversees the sending of about 40 million emails each week for clients at Infusionsoft, a marketing automation software provider that caters to small businesses. He is tasked with maintaining the email architecture and deliverability for clients across the system.

Thompson has been through the trenches of email deliverability and helped to pull the company’s average delivery rate from the mid-90-percent range two years ago to consistently above 99 percent today.

Thompson shared several stories on how his company handles deliverability. His examples can help email marketers of all sizes understand how their reputations can extend beyond webmail providers and ISPs and begin to affect their relationships with agencies and vendors.

Three tiers of email IPs

One of many changes Thompson’s team made to improve deliverability was to shift its email architecture onto a message management platform. The new platform allowed the team to establish three groups of IP addresses to send from:

Group #1. Transactional emails

This first group of IP addresses was used to send invoices, order confirmations and other transaction-based emails for Infusionsoft’s clients. Thompson’s team wanted to isolate these emails because they had some of the best performance metrics of any email type, and because getting them delivered was critical to Infusionsoft’s clients.

Group #2. Single opt-in lists

This group of IP addresses was reserved for client lists that were built using unconfirmed- or single-opt-in tactics. The team isolated this group because its lists generated a higher number of spam complaints. Grouping them would prevent the complaints from hurting the reputations of IP addresses that sent emails to more qualified lists.

Group #3. Double-opt-in lists

This final group of IP addresses was reserved for email lists that were generated with confirmed- or double-opt-in tactics. These lists generated fewer problems than single-opt-in lists, and therefore benefitted by being associated with each other rather than with lists of lower quality.

Why this matters:

Thompson noted that the delivery rates between Group 2 and Group 3 originally differed by as much as 5 percent, but is now down to about 1 percent.

“However,” he says, “we are talking about averages here on millions of emails, so that does add up.”

So even if your company is relying on a shared IP address from a provider, it can still be in the best interest of your deliverability to build high-quality lists with confirmed opt-ins.

Three strikes and you’re out

Thompson’s team realized it had a few bad apples in the barrel when it began work to improve delivery rates. The team reached out to clients who were hurting the sender reputation of Infusionsoft’s IPs and tried to enlighten them on the issue.

“What we have come to find is that most of our customers who generate these spam complaints don’t necessarily understand or aren’t aware that their practices are abusive,” he says. “So essentially what the solution has been is to work with them, give them a set of criteria to meet, and then the problem is usually resolved.”

Unfortunately, not every situation was resolved. Some clients were unable to make the necessary changes and the team had to let them go to protect the reputations of other senders who used the system responsibly, Thompson says.

Now the team has a three-strikes system for handling clients that generate a high number of complaints.

“AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and those types of companies want to see average complaint rates of about 0.1 percent,” Thompson says. “So that means for every 1,000 emails we send, they only want to see one person complaining.”

Thompson’s team uses this same guideline when monitoring its system. Senders who regularly generate two or three complaints per 1,000 emails sent (0.2% or 0.3%) are given suggestions to improve their practices. Clients who fail to respond or make changes can be asked to leave (though this is rare).

So if you’re using a shared IP address to send email, the impact of a complaint can extend beyond your email program and even begin to impact your relationship with your marketing vendor — so keep those rates down!

Related resources:

Members Library – Email Marketing: How Publishers Clearing House uses “blacklisted” words yet achieves a 99.2% delivery rate

Members Library – Webinar Replay — Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation

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

Email Deliverability: Riddles answered on spam complaints, feedback loops, and dedicated IPs

Message Systems – the message management platform used by Infusionsoft

While digital marketing and social media are all the rage (and rightly so), there are a number of reasons for B2B marketers to use teleprospecting as a foundational element of their lead generation strategy.  In fact, for those marketers who don’t own the teleprospecting function, here are nine reasons you should.

If you are trying to reach prospects who won’t spend more than $10k to $15k per year for your products or services, then using the phone for lead generation will probably not prove economically viable. You need to use lead scoring and route those leads to an inside sales team or your indirect channel.

If you have higher value deals, teleprospecting can be a valuable tool.

It is especially useful for pilots. Consider these four ways you can use teleprospecting in a pilot scenario:

1. Conduct end-to-end lead generation. Teleprospecting can function as an end-to-end lead generation capability. That is, you can generate demand and then qualify and nurture leads all within the teleprospecting function. That means there are fewer moving parts. For those marketers that need to demonstrate the potential of lead generation, fewer moving parts simplifies measurement and coordination issues.
2. Leverage small sample sizes. The conversion rates are usually much higher with teleprospecting than with other forms of contact so the sample size can be much smaller. This factor is especially helpful if you want to focus on large accounts where the deal sizes are often large and the number of accounts to call is low.
3. Gain valuable market feedback rapidly. You can get on-going quantitative and qualitative market feedback. If you have digital recording technology, you can even hear exactly what customers are saying. I love statistics. But sometimes, to more deeply understand market behaviors and attitudes, you must hear how potential customers respond to your value proposition. In fact, even if you can’t conduct a statistically valid test, you can use teleprospecting to get directional indicators and then leverage more scalable media.
4. Experiment. Because of this depth of feedback, you can experiment extensively with targeting, messaging, cadence, and integration with other channels and then make rapid course corrections.   For example, you can test leaving voice mails or not, the timing of calls and emails for both lead follow up and for lead generation, the interplay between phone and email, and much much more. This is a factor that is inexplicably under leveraged by B2B marketers.

Measure the ROI

Let me add a final word about measurement in a pilot.  From an executive standpoint, there are two ways to measure the financial benefit of teleprospecting:

1. As a tool for qualifying and nurturing leads. The issue is whether the added cost is worth it.  The simple equation would be this:

ROI = (cost of generating inquiries + cost of teleprospecting + sales costs)/revenue from the qualified leads.

That will give you an expense-to-revenue ratio that your CFO will appreciate. The reason to include sales costs is because the quality of leads can either increase or decrease sales productivity.

2. As a demand-generation channel. In this case, you are looking at teleprospecting as one of many ways to generate demand and so you’re trying to see where it works best so that you can allocate sufficient budget to it relative to other choices.  The simple equation would be this:

ROI = (cost of teleprospecting + sales cost)/revenue from the qualified leads

If you were integrating outbound teleprospecting into other forms of outbound contact (e.g., following up a direct mail package with a phone call), then you would need to include the costs of all of the integrated demand generation channels.

You may need to estimate sales costs.  One way to do that is to set up a control group that gets leads and one that does not.  You can then get sales budget numbers for each group.   

Make sure the lead volume uses as much of the sales capacity of the test group as possible.  Then you can simply measure the revenue difference between the two groups.

The good news is, it’s not uncommon for teleprospecting to yield at least 20 dollars of revenue for every dollar of investment. So the ROI is often outstanding.

Related Resources

Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot

Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen

Lead Marketing: Cost-per-lead and lead nurturing ROI

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing