MarketingSherpa Blog

I was at a conference recently and had a very surprising conversation with the person I was sitting next to at lunch.

His company had no competition – and he said it was a bad thing!

What happens when you have no competition?

Having worked with a competitive sales office (the team responsible for generating a report explaining why every deal was won or lost) at a previous job, I gained a visceral dislike for the competition.

Much like in sports, we always like to root for the home team and against the rivals even when it doesn’t necessarily make sense.

As a Florida resident, my tax dollars equally flow to the University of Florida and Florida State University. But as an alumnus of UF, it’s hard to cheer for FSU even when the team wins a national championship.

My point is: Competition seems rooted in human nature.

I was surprised when my fellow conference attendee expressed that it was a real challenge not to have competition. Since there was no one else delivering his service, potential customers didn’t view it as category they should consider.

Also, potential customers couldn’t really get competitive bids or issue proposal requests (RFPs).

(Another) theory of relativity

There may be another factor at play here. Dan Ariely, who spoke at MarketingSherpa Email Summit, said, “We like to make decisions based on comparisons.”

In his book, Predictably Irrational, Dan gives an example in which if you were shopping for a house and had three choices:

• A contemporary
• A colonial
• A colonial that needs a new roof, but the owner will knock the cost of the roof of the home’s price

According to Dan, people will go with the colonial with the good roof. The contemporary suffers from a lack of competition.

Or, as Dan puts it, “We don’t know much about the contemporary – we don’t have another house to compare it with – so that house goes on the sidelines. But we do know that one of the colonials is better than the other one.”

Decision-making is complex. When we’re making decisions, we usually don’t understand all of the factors that go into it. Yet, we want to feel that we’ve made a logical decision, so we look to the information we have at hand to reassure ourselves.

How can we use this information as a marketer?

Some marketers try to avoid the competition and never mention them, especially if they are the market leader. Marketing tradition says that Coke never mentions Pepsi.

However, perhaps you should tell customers more about the competition. You should help them make the best choice between you and the competition and provide them with something to compare your company to.

Help your customers make a choice

For example, KAYAK does this with travel pricing:

Progressive Insurance very famously does this as well: 

This may seem counterintuitive, so think about the brick-and-mortar world for just a moment. Many businesses tend to flock to the same location as their competitors, such as the famed Diamond District in New York City or even car dealership row in almost every city in the U.S.

Customers want choice. They want to make a logical decision and consider their options, or feel like they did at least. Help by giving them options, even when those options come from your competitors.

Make sure customers experience a proper comparison

Showing competitive trade-offs is easier in some industries than others. After all, sometimes customers don’t understand what other choices they should compare you product to.

For example, it was rumored that marketers at Best Buy were sad to see Circuit City go out of business. Sure, they dogged competitors. But without Circuit City, would customers now compare Best Buy directly with Amazon.com? While Amazon’s prices are cheaper, is the service the same as a brick-and-mortar store?

The Rodon Group, an American manufacturer of high-volume plastic injection molded parts, faced this challenge. When companies thought of cheap sourcing for small components, they thought of China.

The Rodon Group wanted to change potential customers’ frame of reference and show that it was, in fact, also a low-cost supplier even though it was an American company. The company’s “Cheaper than China” campaign increased sales 33%.

You don’t determine the competition. Your customers do.

But you can help frame customers’ decisions by showing why your product should be compared to another offering.

Read more…

A recent MarketingSherpa Blog post, “Content Marketing: Interviewing internal resources,” covered one technique for including internal resources in your content marketing. This post features sources who each discuss an array of quick-hit tips on the topic.

Content marketing is major piece of any digital marketing strategy, particularly for B2B marketers. This content – in the form of blog posts, white papers, e-books, infographics, videos, podcasts and more – can be created by the marketing team and can also come from third-party experts.

Utilizing the knowledge of experts, such as developers or engineers, within the enterprise is another resource for content marketing. The challenge is taking advantage of those internal resources.

Simply interviewing those resources is one way to tap into their knowledge, and we covered that tactic in the earlier blog post.

Here are three of your peers in content marketing sharing their lists of tips and ideas to kick start the process of making use of your internal resources.

Tricia Heinrich, Senior Director of Strategic Communications, ON24, explained a number of tactics used at the webcasting technology company:

1. The primary challenge faced when working with internal personnel to develop marketing content is getting needed information from colleagues who are already too busy with their own day-to-day responsibilities. They see the value in marketing, but it is not their primary focus. Overcoming this challenge requires a combination of incentive, persuasion and simplification across all levels and roles.

2. A top-down approach is helpful – if the CEO or CMO mandates that everyone (or certain people) take a more active role in marketing their company and asks to see results, employees will be more accountable and likely to take part.

3. Critical to the success of ON24’s marketing and communications program is customer involvement, and key to recruiting quotable, positive customers is enlisting the assistance of our sales reps.

4. To encourage their participation in the program, we incentivize sales reps by providing a special bonus for customer media interviews, press releases and case studies.

5. Another strategy for successfully involving sales reps in ON24’s marketing and communications program is ON24’s annual customer awards program. Leveraging their relationships, sales reps publicize the program to their customers, recognizing that the program creates good will between ON24 and the customer. The customers who win an award are more likely to participate in the generation of marketing content.

6. To encourage blog posts and bylines by internal contributors, including the executive team, we try to minimize any extra work involved by repurposing content across channels.

7. For example, a presenter in one of our webinars will write a blog post based on his webinar presentation, and the blog post will then be promoted across social channels.

8. Bylined articles are also promoted socially when published – and are often posted on the blog or rewritten for the blog.

9. We also encourage colleagues to write about what they are passionate about. For example, our CEO Sharat Sharan sees the importance of communicating effectively in the workplace and emerging marketing trends. As a result, he has written pieces for The Economist and The Huffington Post on these topics.

Jeff Klingberg, President and CEO, Mountain Stream Group, offered tips with a focus on gaining knowledge from engineers:

This topic was discussed at great length in LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketing Community.

 

Issue #1. Time

Small companies (50 employees) are typically working with a skeleton workforce and everyone is wearing multiple hats. Even larger companies are facing downsized workforces since the “Great Recession.” Finding time in a busy workday to create content while fulfilling the day-to-day responsibilities to satisfy client needs can be challenging, especially in the engineering department.

 

Issue #2. Subject-matter experts

In manufacturing companies, the retirement of engineers has driven them to take a different track in meeting engineering department needs. Many companies are hiring CAD operators (designers) on a contract basis instead of hiring engineers. Therefore, they don’t have a lot of subject-matter experts available to create content.

 

Issue #3. Fear

Engineers, by nature, are not good communicators, so fear sets in when asked to create documents beyond the typical CAD drawing or manuals.

 

Issue #4. What type of content to create

Smaller companies typically don’t have a deep understanding of their customer personas, pain points and what customers’ purchasing influencers and specifiers are looking for in content. Also, you have to define what content is.

For example, 52% of engineers expect a supplier to have downloadable CAD drawings in order to consider doing business with that company, however, only about one-fourth of manufacturers have CAD drawings on their websites. And engineers are looking for 3D models to help them reduce time to market.

I know one company who has taken a novel approach to the 3D model issue. If their current suppliers don’t have 3D models, they have offered to create the 3D models for the supplier in return for product.

Ultimately, content creation is a team effort. Its importance has to start at the chief executive. Marketing personnel have to make it easy for subject-matter experts by providing research on subject and content needs, put questions together to help the SMEs create content or pull together information that Marketing can then [use to] create content.

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

If you want a snapshot of the user experience on your websites from the perspective of your prospects, just ask them.

This is exactly what James Coulter, Marketing Optimization Specialist, Sophos, did to better understand how prospects were engaging the organization’s website.

James shared some of Sophos’ user feedback that he really took to heart during his presentation at Optimization Summit 2013.

“I really wanted our website to be something that would help them in their purchasing decisions,” James explained.

I would wager there are many B2B marketers reading this who receive similar kinds of feedback from prospects a lot more often than they would like to.

This feedback, while harsh, is some of the most valuable insight you’ll ever receive. It’s also an honest wake-up call for making the changes needed to better serve your prospects.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want to share the three steps James used to implement a testing and optimization strategy for Sophos’ Web experience to hopefully help your team tackle the four toughest words in optimization:

“Where do we begin?”

Step #1. Identify your goals

James explained that although there were plenty of areas where he could have focused on increasing, such as white paper leads, free trial leads and new quote leads, narrowing the list down to the greatest opportunity would be key in developing optimization goals.

“There were hundreds of things we could have focused on,” James said, “and the first thing I tried to understand is: Where should we focus?”

Some of the information he gathered to help him understand where to focus was:

• Feedback from Sales
• A review of all lead sources (average cost per lead and lead/opportunity percentage)

This also gave James the insight he needed to set a clear goal of discovering “where can we have the greatest impact on revenue.”

Step #2. Put together a cross-functional team

Next, James put together a cross-functional team from Sales, Marketing and Product Management to help drive visibility, awareness and buy-in on the new initiative.

Putting together a diverse team is also a fantastic way to look for new ideas outside of your own and create a true sense of ownership in the success of the new approach.

Step #3. Craft your initial hypothesis

Finally, James and his team mapped their entire quote funnel to really drill down and understand where in the process most prospects were dropping out.

This led them to also identify where the greatest testing opportunities existed.

Crafting your hypothesis on customer behavior is also where you truly start to bridge the gap between intuition and data-driven insight and then turn that insight into goal-oriented action.

How would 6,000% more leads than you have now impact your organization?

Ultimately, the Sophos team developed a well-tested and optimized lead generation program that increased leads 6,012% and counting, according to James.

The team’s success also points to a bigger notion — the process of testing and optimization is a marathon.

It’s a long-term strategy that takes time, testing, analysis and even more testing to help you fully understand what works.

It’s a strategy where success is not the destination, but instead, the only option left.

To learn more about the challenges James faced in transforming Sophos’ lead generation program, you can watch the on-demand replay of “How a Long-term Optimization Strategy Led to a 6,031% Increase in Leads.”

You may also like

Web Optimization Summit 2014 — May 21-23, New York City

Lead Generation: Revamped marketing automation and CRM technology drives 75% more leads [Case study]

Marketing 101: How to get started in lead generation [More from the blogs]

Email Marketing: Do you test your legacy marketing? [More from the blogs]

Email Marketing: 2 campaigns that used innovative creative to generate leads [More from the blogs]

After leaving the world of public relations, I dove head-first into the world of marketing. It didn’t take long for me to realize my skill set as a public relations professional made me a different breed of marketer.

For example, while marketing concentrates on product placement, public relations focuses on building relationships.

Using basic public relations tactics can strengthen your marketing campaigns by reinforcing brand identity, expanding your customer base and creating an integrated customer experience.

To do this, you must master social media and understand how to use it effectively.

For the late adopters, you no longer can afford to ignore social media.

Consider that an Infosys study recently found consumers are 38% more likely to interact with retailers’ Facebook pages than their websites. Smart marketers are creating brand consistency by putting as much thought into their social media campaigns as they do on their websites.

But before you start tweeting and posting updates, keep in mind that all social media was not created equal. Knowing how to use the different platforms is going to give you an edge over your competitors and strengthen your brand identity.

Facebook is a place for conversations

Facebook encourages interaction between users. Communication consists of comments, likes and shares. The feedback that you get on this platform creates an interactive conversation with your audience.

When you post content that isn’t generating feedback, you’re not creating conversations. Instead, you’re creating noise and this will make the content you post irrelevant in the eyes of your audience.

If your Facebook page has low interaction, take another look at the value of the content you’re posting and who your audience is. Also, keep demographics in mind to help keep content relevant.

Let’s not forget that in order to have a conversation, you need to respond to the feedback of your audience. The easiest way of doing this is by replying to their comments.

Twitter allows you to network

Because Twitter feeds are constantly updated with a mosaic of content ranging from information to entertainment, there’s something for everyone. Tweets are similar to a stream of consciousness.

Start by searching for content that interests you. The search results will include people who use those keywords in their handles and hashtags. Follow, favorite and retweet to start building an audience.

Twitter is a great tool for connecting with people and organizations in an open environment. If you want your tweets to be found by your audience, use strategic hashtags.

If enough people interact with a hashtag, it starts trending and gets displayed on the main Twitter page. Businesses also have the option to pay for promoted tweets.

Playing in Austin? Tweet us using #BandVan and we’ll come give you a ride. pic.twitter.com/zSv4i4Z0s5

— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) March 12, 2014

The key to Twitter is personal interaction. It humanizes brands. An excellent example of this is @TacoBell. The sassy account has 1.1 million followers and constantly interacts with fans.

Blogs put you in control

The really fantastic aspect about blogs is that you don’t have to pitch your story to the media. By eliminating the middle man, you decide what gets published, when and how.

Because the featured content is your own, you’re in control. But with that control, comes a whole new set of challenges and demands to successfully build an audience of advocates.

A strategic blog should include content that informs, entertains and reinforces your value proposition.

Blogging includes the ability to engage in storytelling. While websites sell products, your blog sells your brand. By brand, I mean the “perception” that your customers have of you.

You can do this by featuring content that personalizes experiences with your product or company. For example, Starbucks uses its blog to publish content ranging from event recaps to letters from CEO Howard Schultz.

Stay relevant by planning out your blog posts and publishing consistently. A blog that is not updated consistently is wasted potential. Followers want to regularly consume information and if you don’t provide it, another blog will.

Putting it all together

When Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo rescued a panther cub, it did a fantastic job letting everyone know about it.

The picture the team at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo featured on their Facebook page received 1,313 likes and 137 shares, but they didn’t stop there. They also tweeted a video and posted mini press releases on their website.

ADORABLE ALERT: We are sharing new video of the #rescued #Florida #panther #kitten at the Zoo’s veterinary… http://t.co/uIQkDYtyCH

— Tampa’sLowryParkZoo (@LowryParkZoo) February 24, 2014

Read more…

Meeting customer expectations can be tough, but exceeding them consistently introduces a whole new set of challenges.

How do you build fresh excitement around a new product when customers have become comfortably numb?

This was the challenge facing Dave Sierk, Consumer & Small Business Email Strategist, Dell, who shared an interesting case study at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 on Dell’s approach to tackling this problem for a new product’s launch.

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, let’s take a look at the throwback creative Dave and his team used to effectively communicate value.

Expectations on autopilot are tough to disrupt 

Dell launches a few products a year, and as you would expect, most of them are laptops.

When the team prepared to launch the XPS 12 Convertible Ultrabook, a laptop that can transform from a laptop to a tablet, they realized communicating the new product’s value effectively would prove a little tricky.

Text and images don’t always cut it

A versatile range of motion is one of the core values of the product.

How do you communicate that aspect through an email using text or images?

You can’t.

Image stills do not fully deliver the product’s fluid range of motion, and a wall of descriptive text telling customers about it is not very appealing either.

Let’s not forget an even bigger problem …

While the laptop’s motion could be demonstrated at a brick-and-mortar store, the gap in effectively demonstrating the product online would remain unsolved.

A blast from the past emerges as a solution

The team decided to use a GIF to illustrate the product’s full range of motion in the email campaign. Another advantage of using this throwback to the 90s was that the GIF solved the problem of showing online users how the product worked.

“It’s a great way for a customer to get a full understanding of how that product is going to work in their hands,” Dave said.

Delivering value to the inbox is why customers buy from you

After Dell compared the campaign’s performance against internal benchmarks, it proved a success. Dave’s team increased conversion 103% and boosted revenue 109%.

This example also serves as a reminder as to why capturing and delivering a value proposition is vital to your email efforts versus just plugging a few product images and text in an email and hoping for the best.

You have to go beyond just sharing what something is with customers and show them why it’s the ideal solution for them.

To learn more about this campaign and other inspirational and transferable takeaways from Email Summit 2014, check out the on-demand replay of “Email Summit 2014: Top takeaways from award-winning campaigns.”

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I was recently reading your blog “Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better — Marketing or Sales?“ on b2bleadblog.com. It’s been really fascinating to me to try and figure all this sales and qualifying a lead thing out.

I’ve been employed to do a tough task in a small composite company that doesn’t have the finances to employ specialists. Do you have any advice or books on how to effectively get leads and qualify them and the processes involved in doing so?

Kind regards,

Philip La Trobe, business development analyst

(A young man employed to revamp a business, increase sales and address the communication lines between departments whilst increasing overall company efficiencies.)

I emailed a little more with Philip after this note, and he explained that his background is not in sales, marketing or business development, but rather materials engineering.

That was a wake-up call for me.

The challenge for anyone in B2B content marketing is to not only to create content that would impress the most experienced reader, but also to have some content that appeals to someone new to the industry.

For that reason, here is a beginner’s look at lead generation with links to many additional resources so you can dive deeper where you would like to. I’ll focus on some fundamental questions you should answer as you craft your lead gen program.

Experienced lead gen marketers reading this: What did I overlook? Please add your own advice in the comments section of this blog post.

Question #1. What do your potential customers want?

Getting leads isn’t as easy as it sounds, if it sounds easy at all. No potential customer wants to wake up in the morning and become a lead for your company.

So first, you must understand what your customers want. To figure this out, you have to answer two big questions that result in an infinite amount of more specific questions:

• What are their pain points?
  • What keeps them awake at night?
  • What could get them fired?
  • What do they want to avoid so bad that they would dedicate 15 minutes in their busy day to learn how to avoid it? An hour? Pay $100 to know how to avoid out of their own pocket? $10,000 out of their budget?
  • What is the bad outcome they are trying to avoid?
  • What are the three questions they?re worried their boss or client will ask them?
  • And on and on

• What are their goals?
  • What could get them a promotion?
  • What excites them about their job?
  • What do they want to brag to colleagues about? Their boss?
  • And on and on

There are many ways to learn this — surveys, social media monitoring, interviews with current customers, A/B testing, conversations with Sales, Services and Customer Support…

But the reason this is the longest section of the blog post is because the lead gen journey begins (and sometimes ends) here — what do customers want?

Helpful resources

Why Empathetic Marketing Matters and 7 Steps to Achieve It

Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

Search Marketing: Can your marketing team identify your buyer personas?

Marketing Research Chart: Top tactics in developing buyer personae

B2B Social Media: 4 steps to get your listening dashboard started

Question #2. What value can your company deliver?

Your customers may want unicorns. But unless you run a unicorn factory, that information isn’t going to be very helpful.

What we’re getting to here is this: What promises can you make to potential customers and actually deliver on. What is your company’s value proposition?

Helpful resources

Value Proposition: A free worksheet to help you win arguments in any meeting

Powerful Value Propositions: How to Optimize this Critical Marketing Element — and Lift Your Results

Value Proposition: Why do customers act?

Digital Marketing: How to craft a value proposition in 5 simple steps

Value Proposition Development Online Course

Question #3. What is a lead?

Is it an email address that you buy from a list? Probably not. Is it someone who provides a phone number for a white paper download?

Or is it someone who raises their hand and asks for more information about your company and product? Is it someone who has a big enough budget and the proper authority to buy your product?

Before you can really generate a “lead,” you should create a universal lead definition and make sure all the key players in your company (this usually includes Sales) to agree on what you’re actually trying to get.

Keep in mind, there is an implicit trade-off here. If you want to generate higher-quality leads, you will likely get a lower quantity (and vice versa) or have to invest more resources to get the leads.

On the flip side, if you’re generating a lot of low-quality leads, the cost will probably get you when you send them to Sales, in both man hours and the relationship between Sales and Marketing, because Sales tends to involve more human resources.

Marketing, on the other hand, tends to involve less human touch, whether that’s due to marketing automation or the simple fact that a print ad can reach many more people at a much lower cost than a sales person.

Getting this step right can also help your Sales-Marketing alignment. In other words, making sure everyone involved in serving the customer before a purchase agrees on the strategy and processes to do that.

Helpful resources

Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop

Intro to Lead Generation: How to determine if a lead is qualified

B2B Marketing: Why Marketing shouldn’t promise BANT qualified leads for Sales

Lead Gen: A proposed replacement for BANT

Lead Generation: Balancing lead quality and lead quantity

Sales-Marketing Alignment: 8 tactics from a marketer who has worn both hats

Question #4. How will we get leads?

This usually comes from some mix of content marketing, paid advertising, sponsorships and even affiliate programs.

This is, essentially, what most beginners think of as lead generation — the campaigns you run to engage potential buyers with your company.

This, like all these topics really, is a much bigger topic than a simple section of a blog post. But here are a few things to get you started.

Helpful resources

Marketing Research Chart: SEO most effective tactic for lead gen, but also among the most difficult

Content Marketing 101: 8 steps to B2B success

Marketing 101: What is conversion?

Orphan Forms: Marketing 101 change drives 32% increase in form completions

Inbound Marketing 101: 5 steps to help you get started

Social Media Marketing: 4 basic tips for getting started

Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started

Web Analytics: 3 basic insights to get you started

Lead Generation: 3 basic tips for webinar newbies

Question #5. Did we get leads?

Once prospects start responding to your campaigns, you have to determine if you really have leads. Question #3 will play a big factor in this determination. This is commonly known as lead qualification.

Helpful resources

On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads

Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue

Why the Term “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Creates Serious Confusion — Part I

Question #6. What do we do with the lead?

The answer to this question probably seems fairly simple — send it to Sales.

But what you may find through this process (as you can see, one question informs another) is that what you have received through your campaigns aren’t really leads.

In the work you’ve done answering these questions with Sales, you may find that this is what Marketing would determine is a lead (Marketing-Qualified Lead) but not what Sales would consider a lead (a Sales-Qualified lead).

Lead nurturing is the process to move the prospects you’ve gathered through the funnel (or buying process) to the point they are ready to talk to a sales rep. The best definition I’ve ever heard of lead nurturing is from my colleague at MECLABS, Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Lead nurturing is helping prospects whether they buy from you or not.

Helpful resources

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects — not selling them

What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing: How a social business strategy can help you move from selling to helping your prospects

How lead nurturing improves lead generation ROI

Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content

“Practice like you play.”

This truism rang in my ears as I reviewed one of the videos slotted for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014.

I was reviewing the video on a big screen in a conference room during a meeting as we prepared for Summit, and a key quote in the video was washed out and hard to read.

I realized I had made a mistake by previously reviewing the videos on my own monitor or the crystal clear monitors our A/V team uses.

However, the audience was not going to see the video on an LCD monitor 12 inches from their face. They were going to see it from a giant projector in a cavernous room at the Aria Resort & Casino Las Vegas.

How do you review agency creative?

This also got me thinking – how many marketers review agency creative the way prospects will receive it?

I’ll give you an example from my own time working at an agency.

When we presented print ads, we blew each ad up as big as possible and mounted it on a black board to really make it pop.

Then, we presented the ad with no distractions in a conference room.

The people reviewing them were marketers for the company, obsessed and excited about every tiny detail of their product.

How do potential customers perceive your marketing and advertising?

Of course, potential customers never received the ad this way. The print ad was just one of many in a Wall Street Journal filled with competing ads, screaming headlines and political coverage.

On top of that, the reader was going through the paper on a busy train, or with kids fighting in the background.

No one, except the marketers we presented to, ever saw the oversized ad in a distraction-free environment.

How do you grab the attention of someone who doesn’t care?

I’m not picking on agencies here. This also holds true if someone inside your company, like my first example, created the work.

Creatives, marketers, account executives – we want to present our work in the best possible light. So it makes sense that we blow it up and show it on super sharp monitors.

But if you really want your marketing to stick out, break through the clutter and be different from the crowd, here are a few questions you can ask the next time you are presented with creative to review.

1. Did you buy the newspaper or magazine you’re designing ads for? How will the paper quality (glossy vs. newsprint vs. poor-quality newsprint) affect the ad? How does the ad look, at its real size, placed in the publication?

2. I prefer not to see these banner ads in isolation; can I see them on a few of the websites they will be placed on?

3. How will the customer view this website? It may not be on an Internet connection as fast as ours, on a computer as powerful as ours, and it certainly won’t be on a computer as powerful as the ones developers and designers use. How does the website render and load on an older computer with a smaller, lower-resolution screen and with a slow connection?

4. Same goes for any mobile emails or mobile sites: Do customers have the greatest and newest smartphones and tablets? If not, how will sites render and how quickly will they load on slower devices? On 3G?

5. What compatibility issues will exist? How will this website look if they don’t have Flash? How will this email look if images are blocked?

6. If the audience is older, can they read type that small in a brochure, postcard or on a website?

7. Will our TV commercial or online video be able to convey any information if it is muted? Should we leverage more text to make sure it does?

8. This PowerPoint looks good on my screen, but how will it look to an audience of a thousand people? (Hint: Make the text bigger than you think you should, you can see my own error below.)

What you see when you review

What your audience sees

I’d love to hear you share your tips as well. How do you review marketing creative? What do you do to put yourself in the customer’s shoes?

Do you engage in copy testing, campaign pre-testing or other advertising research, or do you approve marketing campaigns based on your own opinion? If so, how do you decide?

  Read more…

Eyeglasses launched across the table. A focus group member was irritated, experiencing difficulty reading the AARP Services website.

“‘I can’t see this content because you’ve got a grey background!” the member complained. “There is no place for me to increase the font size!”

This was just one of the observations that helped drive the optimization of the AARP Services website, making it more user-friendly for its senior demographic. At Optimization Summit 2013, two members of the company’s team shared AARP Services’ secrets to success.

In this excerpt of the presentation “How AARP Services increased referrals and membership renewals,” we learned how focus groups helped fuel the first test’s goal – make the site easy to read and share.

Preeti Sood, Digital Channel Manager, AARP Services, admitted that she was initially opposed to using a focus group. However, by observing frustrations of customers, AARP Services was able to use data from a focus group to convince management to perform additional testing around readability and social media sharing.

This short clip showcases how changing the background color, font size and placement of the “email” button resulted in a 12% decrease in page bounce rate and 7% increase in social sharing – all beginning with information collected from a focus group.

Gaurva Bhatia, VP of Digital Strategy, AARP, also said he was skeptical about focus groups, especially given the subject matter at hand. He thought that website visitors could easily just change font size through their browsers. Why waste time and effort on this? After witnessing the frustrations from the focus group, it became clear that this was an area that needed priority when it came to testing.

This left Guarva with a valuable lesson.

“Listen to the members,” he explained. “Test what they’re telling you versus assuming about them and doing what you think is right.”

Watch the full free session from Optimization Summit 2013 to discover:

• How AARP Services adopted a “teach and learn” culture
• The benefits that can come from focus groups
• Items to keep in mind with the “newspaper generation”
• And much more

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Getting the right content to the right people continues to be a challenge in B2B marketing according to Byron O’Dell, Senior Director of Demand Management, IHS, who recently spoke at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014.

Byron explained how his organization transformed from batch and blast email sends to persona-driven campaigns.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want share the three simple steps for building customer personas Byron shared in his presentation to aid your targeted email marketing efforts.

Every solution starts somewhere

A big factor in solving the batch and blast challenge, as Byron revealed, rests in having the right people in the room to have a productive conversation about how personas can benefit an organization’s targeting efforts.

“It starts with some of the obvious,” Byron explained. “We needed to get the right Marketing folks and the right Product Management folks together and we knew we needed Sales and the voice of the customer as well.”

Step #1. Look to your existing customer data for insight into who buys from you

Once you have key people in the room, the trick to building personas is in looking at your existing customer data to gain insight into who buys from you.

“Initially we got the Marketing and product folks together and we [asked] what types of people are buying our products,” Byron said. “And we supplemented that with data looking at what types of [job] titles are we actually seeing in terms of net new deals.”

Step #2. Define your primary prospect personas

Byron also explained how the team used that insight to create six primary customer personas based on whom the organization would likely want to target.

Here’s the list the team created:

• Military/Government (Planning & Strategy)
• Military/Government (Technical & Program)
• Intelligence Analysis
• Industry (Commercial)
• Industry (Technical & Program)
• Media/Advertising/PR

Step #3. Never build personas in a vacuum

If there is one caveat to mention here, it’s that personas created in a vacuum outside of an alignment between Marketing and Sales is a fast track for missed opportunities.

Byron explained that the green primary personas were the ones Marketing believed were vital to their targeting efforts.

After some feedback from Sales, however, the team discovered there was some “granularity” that was also important to consider in building out personas.

The feedback led to the creation of a secondary set of personas that allowed the IHS team to really drill down into their targeting efforts in a way that would likely have been not possible had they not worked with Sales to develop the profiles of their ideal prospects.

Personas are only a means to an end

Personas can help you understand who is buying from you, but they are only a means to help you with the true goal of every email campaign: relevance.

Being relevant means you understand the needs of the customer and how you can serve those needs in a way no one else they encounter on the buyer’s journey can.

To learn more about the challenges Byron faced in transforming IHS’ email program, you can watch the on-demand webinar replay of “Marketing Automation: Key challenges a global information company overcame to transform from batch and blast to persona-driven email marketing.”

You may also like

Email Deliverability: 8 tactics help you overcome rising B2B challenges [Case study]

Email Marketing: Do you test your legacy marketing? [More from the blogs]

Email Copywriting: 3 tactics for delivering value over perceived cost [More from the blogs]

For thousands of years prior to the advent of agriculture in 8,000 BCE, our ancestors survived as hunter-gatherers. I would say we are still, at our core, hunter-gatherers.

This idea becomes really interesting when we stop and consider some of our shopping behaviors.

Think about the last time you went shopping – where did you go?

My favorite place to shop, for example, is about 20 minutes from my house. After I park my car and walk into the store, I’ve committed maybe 30 minutes of my time to the shopping experience.

Once inside, I generally walk around the store counterclockwise. I look high and low, feeling fabrics, examining products and “hunting” for the items I want to buy. If I go without a specific need in mind, I generally end up buying the coolest, newest item that catches my eye. I also see many people wandering around just looking to buy something.

They have a perceived need; it’s just not clearly defined.

Hunter-gatherer instincts go beyond the bounds of brick-and-mortar

For an example, I need a new pair of jeans. As I walk over to the men’s department, I scan up and down. Retailers have a knack for placing impulse buying items where people will normally look. By the time I get to the jeans area, I may have invested 45 minutes in my quest to buy a pair of Levi 550 jeans.

When I arrive at my goal, I find out they have one pair of 550s that are the correct size, but they are perhaps too faded, or too dark or otherwise not quite right.

Now I have a decision to make and a few options: go to another store and search there, go home without any jeans, or buy the jeans that are there.

In this case, I buy the jeans and head home happy, having spent a total of about 90 minutes in total.

Now, what happens when I go hunting online?

My trip is likely going to begin with a search engine, where I enter “Levi’s 550 jeans” in the search bar and 324,000 listings are shown in to me in about 0.45 seconds – a little faster than my trip to the store.

As I scan the different listings, I see Levi’s, Amazon, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s.

So I click on Levi’s first, and it has my 550s front and center. But for some reason, before I can shop with the  company, it wants my email address first. 

Now don’t get me wrong here, Levi’s is taking some interesting and creative approaches to engage customers, as one of my colleagues recently shared.

But in this particular instance, the experience is not so welcoming as the perceived cost for hunting here is rather high right off the bat, so I immediately back out and search elsewhere.

When the hunt is overwhelming, choice becomes paralyzing

Amazon is next. Now I must admit, I am not a regular shopper on Amazon, so I’m a little overwhelmed by all of my choices. All I want is a pair of jeans.

One more click and I am back out again.

Although my lack of Amazon savvy is no fault of the company, I like this example because it highlights the paradox of consumer choice: While consumers want choices, having too many options can lead to indecision.

So the challenge in building a fantastic customer experience is in finding the right balance of options to make consumer choices easier whilst plentiful.

When you’re loaded for bear, nothing else will do

My next stop was J.C. Penney and although the hunting here is a little less overwhelming, there was one interesting thing I noticed.

In this shopping experience, I was offered alternatives to the Levi’s I wanted first, which made me a little confused and uncomfortable.

To play the devil’s advocate here, the research manager in me think’s it’s absolutely plausible that J.C. Penney’s could be doing some testing, you just never really know.

Ultimately, the distraction I experienced here prevented me from moving towards the ultimate “yes” and here’s why.

The psychological investment required to discern between my perceived need for Levi’s and the alternatives offered was much higher than I expected.

So I backed out and continued hunting.

Read more…