MarketingSherpa Blog

This holiday season might be another tough one for retailers. According to The National Retail Federation, sales could rise 3.9% to $602.1 billion. Not great when compared to the 5% gain seen in 2011 and 2010.

This means that competition among retailers just got tougher. For instance, it has been reported that close to 50% of retailers will start their holiday campaign sooner than usual.

So, I decided to browse around 20 top online retailers’ sites and explore whether they had launched any holiday campaign or not. To my surprise, my small sample more or less confirmed the forecast.

Out of the 20 retailers I checked, seven had some sort of holiday campaign going on.

So, how are these seven retailers getting a head start with the holidays? Mainly by using one of these three tactics.

Tactic #1. Sneak peek-terest Black Friday board

Lowes is running an interesting and unique Black Friday campaign using Pinterest. Many items have been added to its new Black Friday Deal Reveal board, but they are disguised.

Followers are asked to guess what the items are, which in turn generates good engagement and excitement for the shopping day.

The nice aspect about this campaign is how it leverages the core value of Pinterest as a social network. People in this channel are interested in collecting pictures with a purpose: their lifestyle, seasonal or tactical. By tactical, I mean that Pinterest is slowly becoming the holiday shopping list of online consumers.

Why keep a list on paper when you can pin the items you like or want for the holidays? Even better, you can share your board with family and friends.

Tactic #2. Email sneak peeks

There’s nothing tactically new here, except the campaigns are rolling out just a little earlier than usual due to the lackluster sales I mentioned earlier.

But, there is something to be learned from these front-runners. 

In these cases, The Home Depot and Target are asking visitors to give up their email address or mobile phone number to receive updates on special offers.

There is no clear value of what customers will receive beyond exclusive offers. Even worse, the disclaimers clearly suggest they will be targeted to receive any type of offer year-round, not just Black Friday offers.

That is disappointing.

Starting holiday campaigns sooner than your competitors is one thing, but putting out a campaign without clear value because it’s too far ahead of the crowd is another.

By launching holiday campaigns sooner, some retailers may feel the illusion of a head start.

But how will that illusion hold up as the Black Friday creep controversy continues to push shopping further into Black Thanksgiving territory?

Tactic #3. Holiday gift guides

This is also not a new tactic, but there are some interesting new spins on it.

Amazon.com, Nordstrom, West Elm and Barnes & Noble are all running holiday gift guides. Visitors can search products by price, gender, interest and other filters. Only Amazon.com and Nordstrom have added some features to generate engagement with their guides.

Amazon.com offers a holiday-specific forum where visitors can solve any type of concern they might have. There were already 316 discussion strings when I was writing this post and the list was growing! To me, this reflects that people are indeed not just thinking about what to buy, but actively researching the best buys.

Nordstrom, on the other hand, is trying to go viral. The company is running a sweepstakes that requires visitors to create their wish list and share it with friends and family in order to be eligible to win a $5,000 gift card. Pretty nice incentive.

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

It’s hard to believe that this December will mark 10 years since I received my first cell phone as a gift on Christmas morning.

It was a black and white Nokia that I used for three things:

• Phone calls
• The occasional text
• Playing “Snake”

Needless to say, mobile devices have come a long way in 10 short years, with Americans now consuming 12% of their media through mobile phones. While this evolution of mobile devices has widely made accessing the Internet far more convenient for consumers, it has added a whole new challenge for digital marketers.

Although this media consumption is centered on B2C consumers, it’s worth keeping watch for two key reasons:

1. The lines between B2C and B2B are growing more blurry (and debated) as B2I grows in relevance
2. More than half (52%) of B2B marketers consider mobile marketing very important to influence their company growth in the next three years

We all know that mobile users are different. They want to find their valuable information quickly and easily. This is not always an easy task given the small screen size and touch functionality found on most mobile devices, but it is certainly not impossible to provide users with a compelling, user-friendly mobile experience.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog, I’m going to share three spend ideas to help you balance value and reduce the overall user friction in your mobile experience.

Spend #1. Make convenience essential

Mobile users are exactly what their name entails. They are typically on-the-go and may not have long periods of time to learn how to navigate a site.

Ensuring that prospects can find the information they want as quickly and easily as possible is essential to ensure users have an enjoyable visit.

This is often difficult as mobile visitors expect a level of value similar to your website in a simplified format. But, there are options available to make your mobile site very convenient.

Utilizing one-touch tools across your mobile site will allow visitors to easily navigate without having to select multiple small calls-to-action.

One-touch CTAs allow the user to perform actions such as calling for assistance, finding a location near them, and adding an item to the cart. These are to ensure that a user can navigate as easily as possible.

Spend #2. Keep the mobile experience simple

As I’ve mentioned, your mobile experience should be convenient and user-friendly, allowing the visitor to easily access the information they are looking for.

Presenting them with a cluttered layout is the quickest way to get a user to bounce from your mobile site. Therefore, keeping it simple is the key to your success. While this may seem fairly intuitive, making this step a reality can be difficult.

Users come to a mobile site expecting it to have the same functionality as the desktop version, but on a screen a fraction of the size. It is extremely important to test your mobile site to determine the information and features that are most important to visitors, eliminating all unnecessary clutter.

While there will always be people in your organization that argue against the removal of certain information and features from a site, maintaining a simple layout is crucial to the success of your mobile site.

Spend #3. Keep the experience congruent across devices

This may be the one of the most difficult steps to accomplish when developing a mobile site, but in terms of continuity, it’s vital.

While your mobile site must be optimized for the mobile user, it should still have a similar feel to your desktop experience.

Let’s use Boeing as an example of what I’m talking about in terms of keeping your aesthetics congruent across multiple devices.

Many mobile visitors will already have a familiarity with your brand and have likely visited your desktop site prior to accessing the mobile version.

So ideally, you want to ensure that the form and function of your mobile site are similar to that of your desktop version.

This will give these users a sense of familiarity with the site, even if it is their first mobile visit.

Even when your mobile site uses a similar structure, many users may still prefer the desktop version of a site. Make sure that you include an easy-to-find link – typically placed in the footer – allowing visitors to switch to the desktop version of your site on their mobile devices.

While creating an engaging mobile experience is not an easy feat to accomplish, it is certainly not impossible given the tools and resources available today.

Hopefully these three ideas will help you strike the right balance between value and friction on your own mobile site.

Also, share any tips you have for helping marketers develop a great mobile experience in the comments below.

Related Resources:

Mobile Marketing: What 4 top B2B companies can teach us about mobile

Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better – Marketing or Sales?

Lead Management: 4 principles to follow

For Jermaine Griggs, Founder, Hear and Play Music, communicating with customers through email was a critical part of his marketing efforts. By embracing behavior-based marketing tactics, Jermaine achieved an increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) of 416% in 14 months simply by harnessing the power of personalized marketing strategies.

At Email Summit 2013, Jermaine explained how he accomplished these results in his presentation, “How an Online Music Teaching Company Harnessed the Power of Email Automation & Behavior-based Marketing to Increase Conversions.”

In this video excerpt, learn about behavior-based marketing, and how Jermaine applied it to Hear and Play’s CRM system.

“Personalized marketing is about authentically altering the user experience based on data and behavior,” Jermaine explained

In this short clip, watch how Hear and Play captures and uses internal and external data to increase the effectiveness of campaigns. Also, understand how to let what your customers and prospects do dictate what you do in return.

Read more…

“The medium is the message.”

Or so says Marshall McLuhan.

But, when I think of cross-channel and multichannel marketing, I often think of the words of another 60s icon – Jimi Hendrix.

“You’re just like crosstown traffic, so hard to get through to you …”

Cross-channel marketing is difficult because it often involves lots of coordination to keep the messaging consistent.

For instance, you have the players involved …

Multiple departments (and often multiple companies), ranging from:

• The brand
• Agency vendors
• Media partners
• Channel partners
• Freelance writers
• Franchisees
• Really, you name it

Also, don’t forget about the process …

You must get buy-in on budget, launch dates, incentives, brand use, legal regulatory compliance and real estate on the homepage or in-store.

The list goes on.

Needless to say, it can be very hard to get through to everybody.

So to help you herd cats … I mean, to help you with multichannel campaign planning, here are tips to help you overcome some key challenges. These are meant to give you a heads up on potential land mines you might hit and challenges you might run into, before you hit them, so you’re able to coordinate with all parties in a smooth, efficient manner.

Or, at the very least, appear to have some of your ducks in a row.

Challenge #1. Knowing who you’re talking to

No campaign, not even a multichannel campaign, should start with channels. Or even a message.

It should start with a person.

The customer.

It’s even better if you’re able to segment this starting point into several types of buyers.

“As the world becomes more connected and the consumer really has the ultimate control of the brand, I think it’s even more important that we put their perspective first in our marketing efforts,” said Tami Cannizzaro, Global Director of Marketing, Social Business, IBM.

Tami shared some of the persona work she’s done with IBM as an example …

“We developed ideas around the different possible stakeholders in an enterprise-buying decision. We put thought into their personalities and lifestyles,” Tami said. “I think the most important piece of the exercise was that we thought outside our standard viewpoint, put aside our knowledge and assumptions of the market, and considered our customers’ various needs first and foremost.”

To put a face behind those customer segments, you can include fun little doodles, real pictures or stock photos, but most importantly, try to put yourself in the customers’ varied shoes.

A mistake I often make is to think about how I would react to a certain message or piece of content that I’m working on. But, unless my audience is comprised only of devilishly handsome directors of editorial content living in Jacksonville, Fla., I’m missing the boat.

A great example of this often happens at marketing events. A speaker will ask, “How many people in the audience have smartphones?”

Invariably, 99% of the audience raises their hands. Then, they’ll say, “See, everybody has smartphones!” and then proceed to harangue the audience for not engaging in mobile marketing.

But, unless your target market is people who attend the same marketing conference as you, by following this advice, you are not considering the customer. If, for example, your audience is poor or old, mobile marketing may not be a priority for your company’s marketing budget.

So, never make the argument, “Well, I would love a campaign like this.” Instead, take a good, hard look at “Oliver Old Skool” in your buyer persona, and ask, “What would Oliver think?”

Challenge #2. Hitting it where they are

The purpose of a multichannel marketing campaign isn’t to get your message out to as many channels as you can. It’s to get your message out to the most effective, most efficient channels.

“A millennial is likely going to interact with greater frequency and preference on mobile, so mobile would be a priority channel if you’re targeting that audience. If you’re trying to reach a senior B2B buyer, that might not be your best channel,” Tami said.

“Social properties like Facebook and Twitter may provide you data and insight into your customers, your owned properties can provide your insight into how your customers seek information, engage and transact with your brand,” Tami suggested.

The personas can really help here, as well.

“Millennials might like less text and more video. The techy guy might like more hands-on demo. [The persona] forces the exercise of targeting so your website isn’t completely generic,” Tami said.

As you’re selecting channels, budgets have a way of focusing the mind. After all, if we all had our druthers, who wouldn’t want a Super Bowl spot? But, the varied channel costs, much like a fantasy football draft, force us to make those trade-offs.

As an example, in our “How much should leads cost?” panel at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013, Tom Reid, Executive Director, Hacker Group, shared the following media mix review for a health care company …

So, how do you get started?

“By starting with small tests and proper Web analytics and attribution, marketers can get a good enough grip on the role each channel plays towards reaching the campaign objective and allocate budgets accordingly,” advised Lori Davis, Online Writer, Qwaya.

Challenge #3. Finding their voice, not your voice

Once you know where to say it, you have to know what to say.

“Too often brands lead with product-focused messaging. It’s the wrong approach. Customers don’t know what you’re talking about, or worse, know that you’re trying to sell them something without providing them value. That’s a branding misstep,” Tami advised.

“Marketing should approach any customer-facing campaign by putting their customers’ needs first; it should provide value, it should be like a service. You need to build a conversation with your customers and first speak to their interest or pain point and then, after multiple interactions, consider a solution. It’s about relationship building.”

Challenge #4. Creating a consistent message and experience

To help build that relationship, once you know what you want to say, you must ensure everyone is saying the same thing across all channels – with a seamless customer experience to boot.

If the email department sees the campaign focused around luxury, and the agency copywriters creating prints ads think the message is about value, there can be a serious disconnect to the consumer.

As you’re thinking about this, take a look at the world of politics.

Political parties are essentially one big brand, with hundreds of owner-operator franchisees.

It’s also a world where a single slip-up by any one of those owner-operators will be broadcast across the 24-hour news networks and blogosphere with a maddening speed threatening to torpedo the brand.

To stay on the same page, the parties create talking point memos.

“In an attempt to influence public opinion, the leaders of both major parties — Democrats and Republicans alike — craft talking points, scripts for rank-and-file members to follow when discussing particular policy issues. Talking points, when used frequently, become the party line.” – FactCheck.org

Likewise, when you are launching a complex campaign across many entities, you need to ensure the messaging, and central thesis behind the entire campaign, is understood and embodied by all involved.

Your brand comes into play here. A clear primary value proposition along with derivative value propositions is essential.

But, it would also help to have your own version of a talking points memo. Tami presented a Campaign Message Map at Lead Gen Summit that her team uses, and she was kind enough to allow you to download it for free and use it for your own campaigns.

“We start by building a very simple conversation map. It starts with key pain points of our customers, then drops to the business value and finally to our capabilities,” Tami explained.

Beyond messaging, there is also the functional aspect of ensuring a consistent experience from one channel to the next.

“Only marketers think in terms of channels – consumers don’t. They consume content, not caring if it’s via the ‘mobile, social channel’ or via the ‘print channel.’ Keep that in mind to make sure the consumer’s transition between channels is natural,” Lori said.

Lori provided this example, “If you advertise a URL in offline media, make sure the website provides a good experience on mobile devices. Sounds obvious, but it is often missed.”

The next level is to gain a single view of the customer.

“You need to create a consistent experience and then you need the ability to track your customers whether in-store, online or via mobile so you have a single view of the customer and can personalize their experience in a way that they will appreciate, to build loyalty,” Tami advised.

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

At MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013, I had the privilege of sitting in on a session with Todd Wilms, Head of Social Strategy, and Adriel Sanchez, VP, Demand Generation, both of SAP, as they discussed how they use a business model called “social business” to help their teams across the globe engage local audiences.

So, what is social business exactly?

While it would seem intuitive that social business is a social media best practice, that assumption could not be further from the truth.

Or as Todd declared, “The difference between social media and social business is the difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it.”

According to Todd, social media, social media marketing and social business are three very distinct concepts.

Todd said SAP uses social business as a strategy that employs social media, social software and social networks to drive a mutually useful connection between people, information and assets.

“Social business is really how do you take all of those concepts of social media, all of the things you’ve been doing around social media marketing, and define them against business outcomes for your organization,” Todd explained.

Sales leads as you know them are changing

Todd made the case for transforming to a social business model by describing how the very idea of the “lead” is changing at a faster pace than Marketing can keep up with.

“This idea of moving from ‘sell’ to ‘helping your customers buy’ is at the heart of social business. It’s a model that the customer is going to make the decisions already, they’re going come to you when they are ready,” Todd said.

From strategy to practice

Adriel also mentioned as evolving buying habits exert more pressure on lead nurturing, today’s common lead nurture tactics — teleprospecting, webinars, trade shows, email, etc. — will need help from social media to remain effective.

“These tactics need help because they’re not giving you access to the full universe of people that are interested in buying your solutions,” Adriel said.

Here are three tips Adriel shared with the audience to help you use social media to aid your lead nurturing efforts.

Tip #1. Listen for what people aren’t telling you directly

Adriel explained SAP uses social listening tools to follow social media conversations by:

• Filtering for keywords that indicate lead-relevant activity
• Following key accounts directly
• Understanding the needs of your customers’ customer

This allows the team to sift through the massive amount of conversations to find those that may be potential leads with an added bonus ?

“Listening to those conversations on social media can give you incredible insights into the types of content that you can use to nurture those leads,” Adriel explained.

Tip #2. Seed the conversation with what you want to talk about

Adriel advised if you want to steer the conversation toward your solutions in the marketplace, your approach should be consistent, but also smart.

Here are some of the key strategies he revealed SAP uses to guide social conversation:

• Implement a pragmatic approach
• Reward top contributors
• Enterprise-wide advocacy management tool

Tip #3. Engage judiciously and in the right context

Adriel explained once you’ve identified lead-relevant conversations, the next challenge is engagement. Adriel also explained the context of how you engage in the social media channel is vital to success.

“You could be talking to the right people, have a great offer and terrific creative, and while that may work in email, it can fail in social media because the context is different.”

Here were some of his suggestions to help your company engage in the right context:

• Educate your sales force on how to engage in social selling
• Leverage your call center for inbound lead engagement
• Bring customers and prospects together in social channels

Adriel warned in regard to the contextual differences between engagement in social media and different channels, prospects in those different channels will likely have different thresholds for how they absorb marketing messages.

“The accepted norms in that channel are different and peoples’ tolerance for marketing-related materials is different.”

Related Resources:

B2B Social Media: SAP Latin America boosts followers 900% [Part I]

B2B Social Media: SAP Latin America boosts followers 900% [Part II]

Social Media: How SAP operationalized social for replicated worldwide success

Why Social Media is the New Customer Service Hotline

Marketing Careers: Why gut instincts are only artificial marketing brilliance

I’ve decided to start a Facebook account. Now what?

To start, we need to determine if we are looking to do a business account or a personal account.

Which type of Facebook account is right for you? For the purpose of this blog post, let’s focus on a business account.

If you are going to have a business account, you must start with a personal account. Facebook business pages are similar to personal timelines. A big difference are the analysis tools Facebook includes for business pages that offer in-depth knowledge to help you see how well you are connecting with your community.

Let’s walk together through setting up a page for your business. Please note that the Facebook landscape changes on a regular basis, so remember you can always visit Facebook’s Help Center for updated instructions.

Step #1. Set up your personal Facebook account

First, you are going to need a personal Facebook account to set up a page for your business.

The reason for this is driven by Facebook limiting your availability to access its business account process without an initial personal account.

If there is a silver lining to this, the business page will not interact with your personal page and your personal information is not public on the business page.

Facebook will allow you to switch back and forth from your personal account to your business account so you can interact as the business on the business page and then simply switch back to your personal account.

In addition, the business page is capable of being managed by multiple administrators if needed. Once additional administrators are set up for the page, each administrator can simply log in to their personal Facebook account to access the business page’s control panel.

Step#2. Select “Create a Page”

You can find this in the “More” section at the bottom of your personal account homepage.

Step #3. Select a page

Which page category should you select? 

Facebook classifies business pages into six major groups. Here’s a breakdown of each group to help you select the right one for your business.

Local Business or Place

• If you have a brick-and-mortar store where customers physically visit, select the Local Business or Place page.

Company, Organization or Institution

• If your business is mostly run online or has multiple locations, then you should select the Company, Organization or Institution page.

Brand or Product

• If your business has products that are sold through multiple websites, resellers and/or retailers, then you will want to select the Brand or Product page.

Artist, Band or Public Figure

• If you are in the public spotlight and your business is focused on promoting,  the Artist, Band or Public Figure page is the appropriate selection.

Entertainment

• If you are looking to promote your television show, movie, book, radio station, magazine or other media, select the Entertainment page.

Cause or Community

• If your organization is a community of action that supports specific issues, campaigns or nonprofit organizations, select the Cause or Community page.

If you feel like you made a mistake in your choice of page, you can always change your page type and category. You can do this after you’ve created the page through the admin control panel.

Step #4. Select your category and get started  

The category selection is just a simple category drop-down list.

After choosing a group that best fits your business, enter the required information for your page, read the terms, and if you agree, check the box and click “Get Started.”

Now that your business page is set up, the hard part is over!

Step #5. Create cover and profile photos  

Facebook allows for a standardized template design with two elements that can be changed on a regular basis.

These two components are:

• Cover photo
• Profile photo

These elements are essential to the look and feel of your page. They also serve as free advertising space for your business. Let’s take a more in-depth look at each of them.

Cover photos

Cover photos are the large image at the top center of your page that can serve multiple functions.

The size dimensions for cover photos are 850 pixels by 315 pixels.

To give you an example, let’s take a look at Motorola’s Facebook page.

Motorola has blended images of its products and text to thank fans for their engagement, which leads me to another point.

Cover photos are versatile and only limited to your creativity. They can introduce visitors to your page, promote special offers, provide contact information, and most importantly, help you set the tone of your page.

Even if you are not a designer or have very limited resources, you can still create effective cover photos.

Freeware like GIMP or Paint.net will allow you to size, crop and save your images as needed.

Also, here’s a tip – try not cover more than 20% of the image with text. The reason is Facebook has been rather picky in the past about the amount of text you can use in images.

I also recommend creating multiple cover photos initially, and then upload and swap them out on a weekly basis.

Creating multiple images is hard enough without adding in the reminder to change the cover photo once per week. However, at the moment, when you change your cover photo, your audience will be able to see that photo in their timeline. Another recent MarketingSherpa blog post dives into the details on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.

But for now, I suggest implementing this tactic as a best practice to keep your brand top-of-mind with your Facebook fans. Also, changing out the cover photo on a regular basis to keep your page looking fresh is a good idea.

Profile photos

The profile photo is the square box to the bottom left of the cover photo. The dimensions for profile photos are 180 pixels by 180 pixels.

Your profile photo serves one main purpose: every time your page posts an update, your profile photo will appear alongside the post on your fans’ timelines.

The profile photo is a small square, so you will want to minimize the amount of text used in this box to maximize the real estate.

A lot of brands safely use a logo in this space for identity, but there is no right or wrong choice here. As I mentioned earlier, your boundaries are the limits of your creativity.

I recommend taking some time to find the right profile image that captures the heart of your business.

Related Resources:

Get the latest inbound and other marketing case studies and data from MarketingSherpa delivered straight to your inbox

Social Media Marketing: A quick look at Facebook EdgeRank

Social Media: 4 simple steps to calculate social media ROI

Social Media Marketing: Why should I like or follow you?

I had a conundrum once at dinner when I was a young military guy stationed in Tampa, Fla.

I wanted to try something new, and I had my mind set on Chinese food. In an attempt to get an unbiased opinion, I fired up my trusty laptop and Googled “Chinese food Tampa.”

After sorting through a few million results, I arrived at a few good recommendations based on star ratings and other such nonsense. Just to double check, I phoned a friend who had eaten at the spot I chose.

Knowing my personality and my legendary picky eating habits, he recommended that I not go to my top choice. Of course, I completely ignored him and did it anyway.

Gripped in the depths of gastrointestinal distress two hours later, and surrounded by throngs of hipsters, I realized a simple truth: star ratings are a ridiculous way to gauge a product or service.

As it turns out, most Americans agree with me, at least in principle.

A recent report from Forrester Research indicated 70% of Americans trust brand or product recommendations from friends and family. To give you an idea of how high that percentage is, only 46% of Americans said they trusted consumer-written online reviews.

The takeaway from this research is Americans trust personal recommendations at a much higher rate than reviews from strangers.

That creates an interesting dichotomy since most e-commerce stores offer consumer ratings, but not friend and family recommendations via social media.

Take a look at this product page. It just so happens to be the Amazon product page for my recently published book. 

You’ll notice the product page offers a star-based review system whereby people who have read the book are able to review it.

This represents the traditional attempt by retailers to reduce customer anxiety about their purchase and increase credibility of the product by allowing real people to give their unfettered opinions of the product. The problem, of course, is the Forrester report has introduced an element of doubt about how effective consumer-written online reviews are at influencing the purchasing behavior of individuals shopping online.

Let’s compare Amazon’s attempt to assuage anxiety to another approach, below:

I really like this example of integrating a Facebook comment into a product page because it illustrates the potential for using social media to build your products’ credibility. The widget will allow anyone to comment on your product or service, provided they have a Facebook account.

The widget can be coded to display socially relevant results first. In other words, you can show any comments from your customers’ friends and relatives at the top of the list, and as we’ve discovered, the recommendations of friends can be much more trustworthy.

The only problem I can foresee with this approach is having a lack of comments on a particular product.

Could the Facebook commenting process be so foreign to people that it scares them away?

Do customers understand this is the functionality that they should use to leave a recommendation?

We don’t have answers to those questions.

It seems as if we’re left with a valid research question: which attempt at alleviating anxiety and boosting credibility will be most effective?

Will it be the traditional user-based “star” concept that made me sick, or the socially empowered “friends and family” approach?

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Recently, we ran a live test for our audience at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 and as I discovered, this isn’t the easiest thing to do.

The greatest difficulty rests in thinking about lead generation and optimization in new ways – and hoping those ideas produce significant results.

For example, the design process forced us to examine two important questions: what is a quality lead, and how do we measure it?

Live test background

For the past couple of months, we’ve been planning and designing a live test for the recently held Lead Gen Summit 2013.

During that planning, we had to address a paradox that exists in lead generation.

Marketers typically want more information about their leads. This translates to more form fields on a lead generation form.

What they are also doing is adding more friction to the lead capture process, which increases the likelihood for a potential lead to say “no” to your form and abandon the entire process.

So, how do you find the right balance between lead quality and quantity?

For our test, we tried to meet in the middle.

Control

The control lead gen page design was a single offer, short form page that featured only four form fields with a free downloadable MarketingSherpa Quick Guide, a $45 value, as an incentive.

We needed to identify a baseline for comparison to the other treatments. This control allowed us the opportunity to test multiple aspects of lead generation in one test.

Does choice of incentive lead to higher perceived value which results in more lead completions? Will this perceived value be enough for visitors to battle more friction in a longer lead generation form?

Treatment #1

In Treatment #1, the design was also a short form layout. We hypothesized offering a choice of Quick Guides would allow visitors to perceive the incentives as having a higher value and increase overall lead captures.

And the crowd goes wild conservative

We left Treatment #2 up to the audience at Summit to design. We asked them how many additional form fields they wanted and what those form fields should be.

Surprisingly, 44% of our attendees decided to be conservative with their selection.

They chose to only add one additional form field. This could be a representation of what attendees were learning at Summit in regards to form length and completion rate.

But keep in mind, even though one additional form field was the majority vote in this case, there were still many attendees who wanted more form fields (56%). We did not have a chance to ask them why they made the decision they did, but I think it is reasonable to assume they wanted more lead information.

Now, let’s look at what type of form fields the audience wanted to add.

The audience’s choices continued to intrigue us. Job title was the top pick for the additional form. The majority may have decided a deeper context over direct contact was more valuable.

These marketers may have suspected that a phone number field was risky (phone number fields are susceptible to fake numbers) and decided to play it safe with job title.

Treatment #2

A concern our team had based on the audience’s treatment design was that the variation between the control and treatments had relatively low friction to begin with. How much friction can one additional form field about job title really add?

Apparently, it created a lot.

Results

There was no statistically significant difference between the control and Treatment #1, where the only difference was a choice of offers.

However, there was a statistical difference between Treatment #2 and the control. Treatment #2 decreased lead generation by 11.9% at a 99% level of confidence.

One form field had a significant impact and it wasn’t even a high friction question, just job title.

Our live test reiterated the point that marketers need to be strategic with lead generation forms. Prioritize the information you ask for and limit what you do upfront because it may lead to a negative impact on your overall lead generation.

Related Resources:

Lead Generation: How one additional form field decreased conversions 11% [Lead Gen Summit 2013 live test]

Lead Generation: How using science increased teleprospecting sales handoffs 304%

Lead Gen: A proposed replacement for BANT

Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better – Marketing or Sales?

“OK, email should be relevant. I get it.

But, how? I’m struggling with where to begin.”

The above quote was a lamentation from an email marketer at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011.

As I had the opportunity to be one of the judges for MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014, presented by ExactTarget (there’s a picture of us deliberating the entries), I was really impressed with how far marketers have come in a few short years.

While I am the first one to scoff at the idea that software solves problems – sometimes I worry it’s oversold as “software is magic” and will cure what ails your company – I must admit the growth of marketing automation is a contributing factor to the leaps and bounds marketers have made in sending emails that are more relevant to customers than ever before.

This is partly because it has given marketers new capabilities and partly because it has also forced them to think in a way that is more customer-focused.

Are you still struggling with delivering relevant emails to your audience?

Well, you should be. It’s hecka hard.

So to get your creative juices flowing, here are three examples from this year’s winners.

Lesson #1. Turn lemons into lemonade (for people who like lemonade)

If you have more than one product or service, you likely have more than one type of customer. To create relevant communications for those customers, you need an understanding of which products are most appealing to them.

A winner in the Connect and Integrate – E-commerce division, Creative Co-Op used data and marketing automation to target closeout products to past purchasers who would find those products relevant.

“The Creative Co-Op campaign uses multiple data sources to create timely and relevant emails. We use individual order history data to send a personalized email when items a customer previously ordered are on sale, in addition to website data to actually showcase those items in the email, linking directly to the product. Putting all their data to work has led to an incredibly effective email campaign,” said Caitlin Kelly, Senior Account Manager, Whereoware, the agency involved in the effort. 

The result? This campaign was one of the company’s highest revenue-producing emails, delivering an 808% ROI in the first month alone.

For those cautious of closeout pricing, here is another insight from Caitlin’s Email Awards submission – “Interestingly enough, pushing users to visit the site led to huge sales outside of just closeout items. Customers went to see the deal, and purchased other items while they were visiting.

“Treating these retailers as individuals paid off big for Creative Co-Op, with huge gains in both closeout items and, unexpectedly, non-closeout items.”

When I asked Caitlin her advice about how marketers can deliver more relevant email, her answer contained the triumvirate of elements that comprise a successful automation campaign – data, personalization and triggers …

“Treat customers as individual purchasers with individual interests. Data is key to creating a personalized experience for your customers. Most marketers have data sources for campaigns that they have not considered or tapped into. For example, a marketer may have historical order data, but has not thought about pairing that source with a product file or website behaviors. Combining multiple sources as a trigger for one campaign creates an additional layer of personalization for the email recipient and will likely help increase conversions.”

Lesson #2. Guide people from where they are to where you want them to be

Content marketing is all the rage and for good reason. Providing value and education to potential customers produces good customers.

But good content, itself, isn’t enough.

You need a strategy to provide relevant content. That’s important because as prospects grow in your content and lead nurturing program, what was once relevant to them no longer is – the distance from brilliance to also-ran in content marketing is shorter than the distance between pop stardom and washed-up lounge singer.

That’s what makes content marketing so hard. The first time we teach you something, you think we’re brilliant. But the second time you hear that piece of information, we’re redundant hacks.

IHS, the Best in Show for Lead Gen, actually killed the newsletter for its Jane’s Defence product. The newsletter is typically a cornerstone of content marketing, but IHS switched to a focused path of content for its target audience – members of militaries, governments and intelligence services, as well as global aerospace and defense industry companies.

I’ll let Byron O’Dell, Senior Director, Demand Management, Corporate Marketing, IHS, explain …

“IHS used email marketing and marketing automation along with good content marketing principles to transform the way we engaged with this hard-to-reach segment. We transitioned from a monthly broad-based batch newsletter into a targeted lead generating engine allowing contacts to opt in based on their interests and customizing messaging and offers based on their actions.”

Here’s a high-level look at the program …

As a result, IHS has seen 10 times more engagement than what the previous program produced.

“Executing these sophisticated marketing automation/content marketing projects are tough,” O’Dell said in his entry. “The first, most critical step was to define our team, and together, step back and review our current process.”

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Creating intriguing and relevant content is key to successful content marketing.

Webinars, webpages and ebooks were all cited in the 2013 MarketingSherpa SEO Marketing Benchmark Survey as “the most effective places to create content for meeting marketing objectives.”

Creating content is one thing, improving it through copy editing, however, is another step in the process.

I say this because content becomes less effective with each glaring error. Depending on the circumstances, those mistakes are perhaps even costing your organization revenue as customers look elsewhere to shop.

Think about it …

Do you want to spend your time deciphering information riddled with grammar and spelling errors?

Well, your readers certainly don’t and why should they? Why should they take their time to untangle a web of errors and inconsistencies in a content piece in order to understand the message?

They will simply move on to something else that is polished, clear and professionally written. Luckily in the digital realm, minor mistakes can be caught after a blog post, article or social media post is published online and can be seamlessly fixed.

However, some diligent eyes can spot errors before critics take to social media and immortalize a glaring typo.

For example, the Mankato Free Press was not immune to criticism when a creative, but poorly designed page slipped past copy editors and startled readers while enjoying their breakfast.

As the copy editor at MECLABS, my job revolves around editing everything from blog posts, articles, landing page copy, marketing materials and many other essential pieces of content for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments.

The insights in this post revolve strictly around copy editing to help you focus on improving the accuracy of your text, not editing, which is designed to help you improve the organization of your content.

Read on for seven copy editing tips you can use to improve the quality of your content.

Tip #1. Stick with a style

When copy editing, consistency is very important – so pick a style and stick with it.

Establishing style standards early on will help keep all the content you produce uniform across different formats.

At MECLABS, we devised a Stylebook that incorporates elements of AP style and stylistic preferences unique to our company.

For instance, some of the most common words and phrases utilized in our content appear in the Stylebook reflecting MECLABS’ usage.

Words like clickthrough, call-to-action, homepage, e-commerce, Web (always capitalized) and others have a specific way of being spelled or capitalized preferable to us that may not be used the same grammatically or contextually elsewhere.

Not everything can be covered in a company style guide, so having a secondary resource such as the AP Stylebook on hand is essential for finding those words and phrases you may not know how to utilize correctly in a piece.

For other aspects of writing, such as headlines, consistency is also extremely important.

Editors tend to decide what words are used in a headline, so your stylebook should include style preferences for headlines, to help editors keep those copy decisions consistent.

Also, try to make considerations in your Stylebook for any additional content you may have that will need formatting guidelines and make sure your content team understands and adheres to those standards.

Tip #2. Read aloud

The very first step of copy editing is reading through content to make changes.

Reading silently to yourself is a good way to start, but taking it to the next level and reading a piece aloud will help you catch more errors and hear how the words and sentences flow together.

It may also seem like common sense, but reading it aloud conversationally is not enough to catch mistakes. By reading slowly and articulating each word, you are more likely to spot grammar and spelling mistakes that your word processor might have missed.

Tip #3. Keep it concise

Attention spans are shorter than ever, so keeping length in mind while editing is also extremely important. By keeping sentences concise, you will captivate readers by making every word count.

When possible, delete extraneous words from sentences unless they impact the integrity of the overall meaning.

For example, the word “that” is often used as a crutch word and can be eliminated in most cases.

Tip #4. Do a final proofread after publishing 

Hitting the “publish” button is not the end of a copy editor’s work day. Even after a vigorous round of editing, mistakes can still fall through the cracks.

This is why taking one more look at your content after it’s published is a great idea.

As I mentioned earlier, digital publishing in most instances is a lot more forgiving than print. Once you publish content in a print medium, the words and any mistakes you may have missed are stamped onto the pages of your publication and into history.

One example I can think of recently was the misspelling of the word “Marketing” as “Makreting” on the spine of a printed publication. Luckily, the error was caught before a large pressing of the misprints was ordered.

Consequently, although something may already be published, some minor changes can still likely be made if needed before the majority of your audience engages the content.

Tip #5. Avoid proofing your own work whenever possible

(Most) copy editors love to write, but reviewing your own content can be problematic, and should be avoided unless there is absolutely no other option.

Therefore, having another set of eyes on your piece can catch errors you would probably miss as the writer.

If others proofing your work is not an option, putting the finished product aside for a few days can help you get out of “writer” mode and into “proofing” mode.

Also, the content isn’t nearly as fresh in your mind, so you’re more likely to catch mistakes.

Tip #6. Read through backwards

This may seem a little strange, but the best tips usually are.

From my experience, going through content one sentence at a time backwards is a surprisingly great way to catch problems in the copy.

Incorrect punctuation, extra or double words and other issues that might have been skimmed over normally, can be singled out quickly by reading it backwards.

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