MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

The quality of your database represents the quality of your customer and prospect relationships.

Here’s why: Effective marketing depends on relevant messaging, and relevant messaging depends on how well you know your customers.

For instance, at best, your email will be tuned out, ignored or lost. And, at worst, you’ll be labeled a spammer if you:

• Use the wrong name in the salutation or send to someone who has left the company.
• Send emails that detail tactical how-to’s while the recipient has long been promoted to a position that requires more strategic, bigger-picture knowledge.
• Offer solutions that are obviously unaffordable for the recipient.

The problem is cleaning and appending databases — making sure they’re accurate and contain all of the information you need to send the most relevant information — isn’t as glamorous as branding or content strategy. So, it’s easy to overlook. But no matter how beautifully you decorate the house, if the plumbing doesn’t work, you can’t live there.

It would be great if cleaning and appending data was something you only needed to do once. However, much like the plumbing I mentioned, the things we rely on eventually need maintenance to uphold that reliability.

When you consider there will always be changes in buyer behavior at play that will likely result in the need for rapid changes to your B2B marketing efforts, it becomes apparent that effective data hygiene is an ongoing process. Conceivably, if you avoid cleaning data for a year, 60% of your database could be obsolete by the end of those twelve months.

Receive help with your data

With all of the demands made of marketers, keeping data clean can be almost impossible to do on your own.

That’s why I’m involved in hiring a vendor to support MECLABS with this monumental task.

There’s a multitude of data vendors and sometimes it can be easy to go with whoever is the cheapest. But, cheaply acquired data is often the most expensive — it can be rife with inaccuracies.

You want to make sure the vendor you choose can live up to its marketing. This is why it’s wise to invest the time and effort to test prospective vendors before hiring them.

Step #1. Compile a list of vendors

So, where do you begin to search?

For us, the ideal place to start was by compiling a list of vendors recommended to us or have been used previously for smaller projects.

Step #2. Determine what information is most important

In our case, it was:

• Contact name
• Job title
• Company name and company address
• Contact phone number and company phone number
• Industry/SIC
• Revenue

Step #3. Weigh each record field by value

Assign weighted values to each of the appended items depending on your needs. For instance, if job title is most important, then give it a higher weight than company address.

Here’s a weighted version of the list from the example above:

• Job title: 5
• Contact name: 4
• Company name and address: 3
• Contact phone number and company phone number: 3
• Revenue: 2
• Industry/SIC: 1

Step #4. Use a large enough list to sample test vendor accuracy

We started by taking a list of 100 records we knew to be highly accurate and stripped out some of the data.

Next, we added those 100 records to a list of 900 additional records to create a test list of 1,000 total records that we sent to each vendor.

Once a vendor finished appending, we then pulled the 100 records we knew were accurate from their work and cross-checked them for accuracy.

We also used additional verification sources like LinkedIn to help double check the data in the samples to make sure each vendor’s quality was accurately assessed.

Step #5. Add up the scores and consider any other factors

The vendor with the highest score from your testing will likely be your best choice, but there are factors of completion time, size, cost and complexity of data to consider in your overall decision.

Selecting a vendor can be difficult, so I hope these steps will help put you on the path to having the cleanest and most relevant customer information possible.

One more thing…

How do you handle data hygiene?

If you have any other data cleaning recommendations, I would love to hear about them in the comments section below.

Related Resources:

Do You Expect Your Inside Sales Team to Practice Alchemy?

How to Build a Quality List and Make Data Drive Leads

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

List Buying: 6 tips for buying the most effective lead list

Does your marketing team have experience to fall back on, or have you found yourself in team conversations like this one …

Marketer 1: “I have this great idea! We’ll build a landing page and put a lead generation form on it!”

Marketer 2: “That’s genius! Everyone’s doing it! When visitors land on the page, they will enter their information and VOILA! Leads generated!”

Marketer 3: “That’s great, but what are you going to gate with the form? Why would someone want to give you their information? What motivation do they have?”

Is your team following best practices because they are popular, or are they approaching your marketing initiatives with consideration for every possible variable and objective?

Now don’t get me wrong. We all do our best to create lead gen pages that provide value and build interest in what we’re selling, but our best intentions are not the problem.

It’s all too often that we simply forget to thoroughly examine one key element for success – the incentive we’re offering.

So, in today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, I wanted to examine three questions every marketer should ask themselves about lead gen form incentives that you can use to tip the balance to your advantage.

Do our incentives provide tangible value to our visitors?

Incentives are something appealing that we can offer the visitor in return for their information.

They come in many forms and differing levels of value. Popular options visible in the digital landscape these days are discounts, educational content, product add-ons and free or expedited delivery.

Which should you choose? Which will provide value to your prospects?

There are two important things to consider when thinking about incentives:

• Cost
• Relevance

Will visitors to this landing page find the incentive relevant? Will it meet their needs or prove valuable to them? Does the incentive offer a high potential for return on the investment? Is it something you can even afford to offer?

Ultimately, the right incentive for your offer depends on the product and business model, the motivation of visitors, and how the incentive builds momentum through the buyer’s funnel.

When choosing, it’s important to find an incentive that provides added value by complementing your product or service and matching your visitors’ wants.

If you can offer a low-cost incentive that provides high value and ROI, that option is likely a good fit for you.

Is contact with a real person a valuable incentive?

Another approach to lead gen offers you can use is contact with a real person.

This can be contact with an expert on a widget or a representative who can help prospects navigate an extensive product line.

If you have a complex product offering or if there are many competing options that have muddied your market, this might be a good option for you. However, there are a few important things to consider here.

Do visitors need help with your product offering? Will speaking with a person help them make a better buying decision? Can contact with a representative expedite the buying process?

Be careful though, if your prospects don’t perceive a personal contact as valuable, you could scare some away. But, you’re almost assured that those who do make it into the funnel will be of a higher quality.

Read more…

Buying your first house is a big milestone in American life.

There are two entire HGTV shows, “My First Place” and “Property Virgins” centered around the experience.

Every episode follows basically the same trajectory:

Overly anxious buyers, with expectations that far exceed their budgets, hoping to find the “perfect” dream home to live happily ever after with no problems.

“Oh honey,” current homeowners say pityingly, as they shake their heads knowingly.

Good luck to whoever has those expectations. The really difficult (and least interesting) stuff happens once you move into that glorious, shining home.

Take a friend of mine for example – she recently made that big step into adulthood and bought her first home. Closing went fairly well, so she was feeling good when she finally moved in.

Then, like most first-time homeowners, she looked around and realized how much needed to be done, and how much stuff she didn’t have.

All at once the chaos of happily ever after began to unravel in a series of rescheduled deliveries and insanely long waits on the customer service lines. The real breaking point came when she was trying to schedule the delivery of her washer and dryer.

The company-that-shall-not-be-named rescheduled her delivery four times, and upped her backorder wait time from two weeks to six weeks. After being stressed out by multiple phone reps and receiving no responses to her emails to customer service (she’s still waiting for a reply, in fact), she decided to take the fight to social media.

She was shocked to see the company’s Facebook page promoting the backordered machine that had caused her so much trouble five weeks after purchasing. Not only that, but the website was making the dubious promise that people ordering five weeks after her would receive their washers only three days after her machine was scheduled for delivery.

In spite of posting her concerns, the only interaction she had was with other customers – the brand never commented or attempted to help.

The truth is, many large companies are still not placing enough importance on social media as a customer service channel that more customers have come to expect.

But, there is hope as some big brands are starting to use social media to truly enhance the customer service experience.

Social media is the ultimate opportunity to connect with customers

For example, Cisco is a large company that focuses on meeting customers in the social media sphere. Kathleen Mudge, Social Media Marketing Manager and consultant, Cisco, has previously spoken with MarketingSherpa about her views on different social media platforms.

Kathleen consistently embraces social media as the ultimate opportunity to connect with customers.

“Providing customer service can be an entry point to an ongoing relationship,” she said, adding customer service is a great opportunity for conversation and connection with the brand.

Because Cisco is such a large company, Kathleen said it can be “daunting and confusing for customers when an issue arises.  I love delighting customers with quick replies to questions, issues or concerns they post through their social media channels,” she said.

Make customers feel heard

Cisco’s social media channels are monitored year-round, Kathleen said, and her goal is to consistently be “extremely responsive to our communities.”

During off-peak times, when one of Cisco’s events isn’t ramping up or in progress, she said customers may expect a response within 12 hours, “but normally within the hour during the week.”

During events however, social media is in overdrive, and customers receive a response time that local emergency crews would envy – within three minutes or sooner.

Kathleen credits proper staffing to this feat, a necessity when “event conversations explode, as they did last June [during the Cisco Live event] with 46,000 total social mentions.”

Use complaints as an opportunity

Responsiveness is especially key when dealing with a complaint or upset customers, and addressing the issue immediately will keep the issue in check, Kathleen said.

“I may not have the answer, but I want to let them know I am aware of their issue and I am seeking an answer or solution or whatever it is they may need,” she said.

The same principles of customer service via phone, email or in-person are true in social media (perhaps especially important since it’s available for other customers to see) and making sure a customer feels seen and heard is paramount.

If there isn’t a timely response, “they will most likely continue to get more frustrated and their complaints may multiply, causing a very negative situation for the brand,” Kathleen said.

A complaint handled properly is an opportunity to solve the same problem for other customers who may be following the conversation.

“We can’t always provide a resolution that is what the customer is requesting. No brand can be all things to all people,” she said. But letting a customer know you are aware of their situation and troubleshooting it, “that does a lot to ease the aggravation.”

Use and promote positive interactions

Sometimes customers are using social media as an outlet to voice their excitement for an event or their overall experience with the company, and those positive updates, “truly make my day and are the favorite part of my job,” Kathleen said.

When Cisco customers post positive updates on Twitter, for example, Kathleen retweets it from the brand in addition to responding to them.

“When I see that I can make a positive difference for someone online through communication with the brand, I am absolutely thrilled and I want to amplify their update by a retweet on Twitter or a ‘like’ and response on Facebook or another channel,” she said.

Cisco’s events are also provide a great opportunity to  flaunt those positive customer interactions – as updates may appear on the big screen during a keynote in front of 20,000 attendees, as well as being available for their virtual audience.

Singling those comments out works for both parties: “They love being recognized and we love highlighting their comments,” she said.

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I once worked with a field marketing vice president who was calm, cool and collected for every presentation she prepared for.

Well, all except one.

The only presentation that ever seemed to rattle her nerves – and just ever so slightly – was the annual presentation to Sales leaders, justifying her upcoming budget (and, perhaps, existence).

“We talk to the customer every day…”

Let me first say, I am a huge proponent of Sales-Marketing alignment.

But today, just for today, let’s vent a little, shall we?

We’re among friends, so let’s be honest with each other. When things are going well, Sales receives the credit for making plan, making Club, for meeting and exceeding quota.

However, when things go south, Marketing receives the blame for not keeping the pipeline full, not generating enough leads, oh, and if they are generating enough leads, it’s not enough of the right people … these aren’t decision makers!

No matter how things are going, Sales tends to like to stick its nose in the Marketing plan, with the justification being, “We know the customer better. We talk to them every day.”

That is a hard claim to refute, but today on the B2B Lead Roundtable blog, I’m going to give you a little ammo.

Keyword strategy research

I just got back from MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco (MarketingSherpa and the B2B Lead Roundtable blog are both owned by MECLABS). Leading up to Summit, I had the privilege of reviewing all of the presentations to make sure they met MECLABS presentations standards.

I reviewed hundreds of slides, but the information from a single slide I’m going to share with you today really caught my eye.

Marie Wiese, President, Marketing CoPilot, ran an experiment with Grantek.com, a North American B2B systems integration company, to create a keyword strategy that would support lead nurturing.

The team created an initial list of 3,000 keywords, and culled it down to 50.

The keyword topic suggestions came from two sources:

• Sales-team suggestions
• Data-driven keywords

The Results: Data trumps the golden gut

Let’s take a look at some of the keywords that were chosen, along with how they performed:

Sales-Team Suggested

• Manufacturing electrical energy consumption – 6.95% clickthrough rate
• Manufacturing infrastructure – 7.7%
• CPU data – 5.9%

Keyword Strategy & Data-Analysis Driven

• Machine guarding – 11.5% clickthrough rate
• Manufacturing information technology – 10.6%
• Machine safety – 11.0%
• Manufacturing data – 10.3%
• Plant safety – 13.5%
• Access and control/access and control technology – 19.1%
• Manufacturing cloud – 16.2%

Key Learning: Use numbers to help make your case in the organization

I had a lot of fun ribbing Sales in the beginning of this blog post. But, I don’t mean this at all as a negative statement about the Grantek sales team, or any sales team for that matter.

This is human nature. We all feel that we have a golden gut to some extent, especially when we’re interacting directly with customers.

But unless you’re Steve Jobs, you don’t. You have to realize potential customers, especially those that choose another vendor, may not always honestly tell you why. Heck, they may not even know why their organization did or did not buy your solution.

But, here is where things like data, metrics, analysis and tracking results can be so helpful.

While it’s easy to disagree with opinions, it is very hard to disagree with numbers.

Looking to improve your own internal standing with the Sales team, and get a better understanding of what really resonates with your potential customers? I’ll leave the final word on the subject to Marie.

Every marketer has experienced that dreaded moment when trying to pitch a strategy to the sales team and opinion influences tactical execution. A sound keyword strategy allows you to develop content and inbound marketing tactics using data.

It’s hard to agree to spend time, money and resources on a whitepaper about fixing infrastructure when your data suggests you’d get better conversion by addressing access and control. Just because the sales team wants to sell infrastructure consulting, doesn’t mean that’s the best topic to generate leads and support lead nurturing.

Keyword strategies help you understand the difference between selling and buying and decide the right time for both.

Related Resources:

Best in Show: Top takeaways from Lead Gen Summit 2013 – Upcoming October 16 SherpaWebinar

Event Marketing: How a technology start-up made a trade show splash booth-free

B2B Digital Marketing: How Volvo Construction drove site visits through its email campaigns

B2B Sales Cycle: 4 steps to avoid the wasteful ‘no decision’

You’ll get no arguments from me that starting a new blog can be difficult.

There are plenty of great content marketing resources from MarketingSherpa and elsewhere to help you do that.

But, what happens when your company decides to undergo a change in content?

Navigating the waters of a new format on a well-established blog is a different kind of monster than starting from scratch.

Make sure everyone understands the big picture

If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of new faces on the MarketingSherpa blog.

Also, if you read the blogs of our sister brands MarketingExperiments and B2B Lead Roundtable, you will also find a lot of new contributors there as well.

When I asked Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Content Operations, MECLABS, about some of the elements driving the change in content, Brandon explained the new approach was a unique opportunity to return blogging to its roots.

“For us, it felt like it was time for our blogging voice to come full circle,” Brandon explained. “Blogging originated as the ultimate personal journal. It was a platform for practitioners who were passionate about their message being heard, but over time, that approach has evolved into a more sophisticated medium that has as much in common with a trade journal as it does with a personal journal.“

Another reason Brandon mentioned for the change was based on the idea that members of the MECLABS research team have a wide range of insights and practical advice to offer our audience.

“We realized that we are in a place to leverage the strengths of both approaches. Real world practitioner discoveries and observations supported by a consistent editorial standard,” Brandon said.

Instead of letting all of that content simply vanish, the era of the MECLABS practitioner blogger had arrived.

Consequently, this also meant the MECLABS research team would be taking on a new writing initiative, so the first real challenge was one of communication throughout the organization.

So, the first tip here is simple – communicate, communicate and communicate.

Make sure everyone in the organization understands the reasons for change and what their role in those changes will be, as your team can’t help build something they don’t fully understand.

Anticipate problems and start looking for solutions

This is my faith in Murphy’s Law – if anything can go wrong, it will – so the trick is to anticipate problems and find solutions to avoid headaches later.

For instance, while having a sizeable pool of new content creators was a great asset, there was one catch …

Most of our practitioners’ writing skills were based on formal training in academic writing.

Few had prior blogging experience, while only one to my knowledge had any experience in journalism or exposure to the editorial process.

Based on our assessment, here were some of the problems we anticipated:

• Limited blogging experience – How do we help analysts to start writing blog posts?

• Formal training in academic writing – How can the content team help practitioners develop blog writing skills?

• Few have exposure to editorial process – How do we build a new editorial process that allows for more revision and editing time? How can we educate our internal thought leaders on the editorial process?

After a few rounds of discussion, our team decided a blog post template provided a simple solution to solve the problem of helping analysts get started writing blog posts.

The feedback we received from our in-house writers so far is the blog post template has been helpful in providing some rudimentary direction and structure to get started.

In short, the more problems like these that you can anticipate and find solutions for beforehand, the less painful your transition will hopefully be.

  Read more…

“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.”

• Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”

The song was an outlet for bassist Roger Waters to express his dislike for the forceful approach to learning that was popular in the British education system during his youth. This serves as a great analogy for why forcing your customers to register for accounts is not always a good idea.

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, I want to demand that you allow your consumers to have their pudding, even if they don’t eat their meat.

But in some cases, I know that “required” just can’t be avoided, so I’ll also share two methods you can try when your company just won’t budge on “leaving the kids alone,” as the song goes.

Make buying easier for users with low motivation

Unless your brand has the near cult-like following of Apple or Coca-Cola, then it’s likely your website will play host to visitors with low motivation.

Now, what will chase away users – and metaphorical British schoolchildren – with low motivation faster than a 12-inch ruler?

Having to submit their information to yet another website!

If a new visitor – most likely an important demographic to your business’ revenue – is forced to commit to an account before they make a purchase on your site, then you could lose this new customer.

Avoid cart abandonment by keeping new users moving through your checkout

Another reason to avoid a required registration is the dreaded cart abandonment.

Combine a visitor with low motivation and subject them to a rather lengthy checkout process, and you are just adding another brick in the wall.

But sometimes, registered accounts simply can’t be avoided for whatever reason …

What do you do then?

Well, it’s all in how you approach a customer with your demands for their data. While I discourage required accounts, consider these two account registration methods from our research that you can test to hopefully increase your sales and minimize cart abandonment:

Method #1. Front-end option

Provide an optional account registration option at the beginning of the checkout process for users with high motivation or brand loyalty.

However, you may need to provide some incentives to convince that user the registration option is in their best interest.

Method #2. Back-end option

Most businesses still need to ask customers to fill out billing and shipping information during the checkout process.

Why not offer customers an opt-in to a registration after their information has been submitted?

This only requires one action from the visitor (a “yes” or “no” answer) and can be placed before or after the completion of the order.

You may also need some additional value copy to convince users that a registration option is in their best interest, but the beauty here is that you’re not making them jump through the same hoop twice.

No matter which option your pick, the goal here is testing your sales funnel to discover the most strategic place for a required account registration if you can’t avoid it.

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

We all are hearing time spent with mobile devices will surpass time spent with desktops.

Well, it is already happening in the B2C world, according to a recent study from Millennial Media and comScore. It won’t be too long before it starts happening in the B2B world.

According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), when asked, “Which mobile marketing tactic does your company use?” 64% of B2B companies listed mobile websites as their number one mobile marketing strategy in use.

Moreover, when asked, “How important is mobile to your organizations growth in the next three years?” 52% of marketers considered mobile marketing very important to influence their company growth in the next three years.

Knowing this, I thought it would be interesting to see how some top B2B companies are using mobile sites to influence business.

So, I went to the Fortune 500 list and randomly picked 12 B2B companies I was familiar with (no science behind the selection method) and found only four out of 12 have a mobile site.

To be honest, I was surprised to see so many companies without a mobile site. But at the same time, I felt relieved to see interesting strategies from those that had mobile sites. Now, let’s take a deeper look at the mobile offerings.

Caterpillar: Not a desktop replica

Caterpillar offers a versatile mobile site that allows visitors to not only to check products’ specifications, but also find dealers, rental locations and start the quote process, if they so desire.

The value of Caterpillar’s mobile site is that it’s not a replica of the desktop version. Instead, it is designed to meet “on-the-go” needs.

The categories tab helps users find machinery and tools needed in the field by providing navigation that is simple and direct.

One nice feature here is the “save preferred dealers” option that lets users keep them on hand for quick access.

As one would expect, Caterpillar’s customers or prospects may run into unexpected situations on a field where the only available device is either a cell phone or a tablet. Therefore, a mobile site makes a huge difference and can win someone’s business in the field.

The site has still opportunities to improve since not all of the sections are optimized to the mobile experience. But overall, it offers a great experience and satisfies diverse needs.

Cisco Systems: Customized mobile experience

Cisco’s main website uses responsive design, so it adapts well to different screen sizes, providing a seamless experience among devices.

But, that is not the nicest part of its online presence.

Cisco is putting thought into customizing the mobile experience. The site not only adapts to different screens, but it also prioritizes content to each form factor.

The section “Tomorrow Starts Here” takes first place in the mobile version while it is not even noticeable in the desktop version.

“Tomorrow starts here” reviews trendy topics in different and engaging formats like videos, infographics and articles.

This is a good example of providing content that fits well with on-the-go needs. Plus, through mobile-friendly content, Cisco can accomplish two important things:

• Users spend more time on the site
• Cisco’s brand remains top-of-mind

The only downside I found was the main rotational banner and some site sections redirect visitors to pages not optimized for mobile, which in turn, abruptly disrupts the user experience.

Grainger: Mobile site for prospects, App for customers

Grainger’s mobile store has the standard features one would expect from a B2B e-commerce site.

Users can search products, browse product categories, and make purchases.

The site layout is a simple and clean design that allows users to quickly find what they need. For example, two popular mobile activities like “Finding a Branch” and “Call Us” are just one click away.

Grainger is a good example of why it may be advantageous to have a mobile app in addition to a mobile site.

When you take a closer look at the app, you can hint that the app was mainly designed for existing customers. The elements and user options are more tailored for customers that have purchased from Grainger before or are frequent buyers.

The homepage presents “Products You Might Like” instead of “Browse Products.”

Instead of product categories, the app menu options are: Browse, Find a Branch, Quick Item Entry and Info.

Notice the quick order form option. This option is genius in that it really simplifies purchasers’ lives by letting them place a quick order on-the-go.

Even though apps require additional development and maintenance, they bring two important and unique benefits:

• Push notifications
• Physical presence on a customer’s phone screen

Both are very powerful tools to stay top-of-mind with your customers. But with that said, it is very important for the app to have a unique purpose. If not, there is no reason for someone to download or use it.

Avaya: Thoughtful mobile experience

Avaya offers a very functional and engaging mobile site.

Four aspects stood out for me:

1. Designed with mobile user in mind

The mobile site is another good example of adjusting content to mobile needs.

Although the mobile site has similar categories as the desktop version, the mobile categories are prioritized differently.

For example, “How to buy,” is option two in desktop menu, while it is the last option in the mobile version.

Avaya recognizes visitors are using the mobile platform differently and likely more for research purposes than for actual transactions.

2. Allows continued reading on desktop

Many sections of its main site are not optimized for mobile yet. But instead of letting users either become frustrated by doing a lot of zooming in and out or leaving the site altogether, Avaya uses an interim page to inform visitors the content they are about to see is not on the mobile site, but in the desktop version.

I liked that it gave users the option to continue, go back or “email me a link.” The email a link option allows users to continue reading where they left off once they return to a desktop.

3. Provides a variety of content

Besides its products and solutions, the mobile site brings the “Avaya Magazine” front and center.

The magazine offers users content to find inspiration and information to help them stay on top of technology trends. Topics are presented in a variety of formats including articles, videos and charts.

4. Option to stay connected

Social icons are not in the way of the mobile experience, but are clearly visible in the footer.

This allows users to follow them at any point during their visit. This is important considering recent research reveals 31% of a U.S. smartphone user’s total Web activity is spent engaging in social activity.

Overall, I hope this review provides you with some ideas for your mobile sites. Please feel free to comment or share any other mobile sites you recommend that are great examples of where marketers are getting it right in the mobile space.

Related Resources:

B2B Content Marketing: 5 questions every marketer should ask themselves when using native advertising

B2B Marketing: 3 reasons for adopting video content into your marketing mix

B2B Digital Marketing: How Volvo Construction drove site visits through its email campaigns

At some point in your marketing career, you’ve had a moment of artificial marketing brilliance.

It was a moment where you suspected your customers might respond better to a shorter form or a bigger and more colorful call-to-action button inviting them to a unique experience.

You might have even had the sneaking suspicion that changing some of the value copy on your homepage would boost sales of your product or service because no other competitor can boast figures close to your product’s success rate.

So, you make changes as your gut tells you, “Of course this will work.”

Afterwards, you kick back to watch the ROI roll in.

And then, it happens.

Your brilliant idea bombs in glorious fashion and you’re left scratching your head.

If your marketing is driven by intuition, at some point, you are going to fail and it’s one of the best things that can happen for your customers and your career. Read on to find out why.

Failure starts at relying on your gut

Many marketers use gut instinct in hopes of delivering optimal results, but when they fall short of expected results, those marketers never fully understand why.

But, if we use the hypothetical situation above, some clues emerge that can help us understand what leads to failure.

According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), when marketers were asked …

Q: Instead of analytics data to make marketing decisions, we rely on the following:

Nearly half (42%) responded with gut instincts, followed by historical spending trends.

So, with almost half of marketers proclaiming instinct and prior spending as their decision engines, let’s fill in the blanks with a few primary sources of inspiration:

• Case studies performed by other companies
• Best practices picked up along the way
• Marketing research

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these resources because, let’s face it, it’s easier to borrow from a seemingly good idea than it is to create a new one from scratch.

The inherent problem is not where you get an idea. The problem is how you intend to use it.

This is the point at which many marketing campaigns were doomed to underperform because ideas untested are always at the mercy of uncertainty.

Life beyond using your gut

Your gut failed you … now what?

One of the best career moves you can make is to move away from gut instinct marketing and begin using an evidence-based approach that is methodical and systematic. Chances are, you’re going to have some questions after your first radical redesign where shorter landing pages resulted in a 10% decrease in clickthrough.

Did the larger hero image take away from the copy? Was the award for customer satisfaction from 2004 recent enough to provide credibility? What turned the audience away?

You’ll also have questions if your redesign brought you a 5% lift in clickthrough. You might even be pretty content and let things rest, even if you could do better.

Those strokes of “marketing brilliance” are coming from a different source – online testing results that can be used to build a customer knowledge base.

Did your customers like your new vivid red button? Did they respond well to reading you were the only company in your field to offer one-on-one tutorials with an expert?

If you changed the eye-path on the page, could you have achieved a 10% lift? 20%?

The inevitable question – Why?

You must realize that success and failure lead to an inevitable conclusion in marketing – you have to test to truly discover, “Why?”

You can try to isolate the factors that seemingly impacted your audience, or you can test them and measure their performance to know for sure.

Understanding the “why” of customer behavior is really the product of methodical trial and error through testing, discovering and optimizing what you think works …

And then, it’s time for more testing.

Both the small gains and big flops lead you to learning more about your customers, a path riddled with failure, success and discovery, that no gut instinct on the planet can come close to.

Read more…

I’m live blogging at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco, and attending a brand-side case study with Jacob Baldwin, Search Engine Marketing Manager, One Call Now.

To begin a testing and optimization program, Jacob launched a test on the website with a radical redesign, attempting to improve lead capture. The program was executed sequentially as opposed to A/B split testing.

Jacob said each new homepage version replaced the previous – the marketing team created new treatments and “flipped the switch” to learn how the page would perform.

An important insight from this testing approach  is there isn’t necessarily a need for a complex A/B or multivariate testing program.

The testing program was run on the homepage, and there were several objectives:

• Increase conversion rate
• Increase traffic
• Reduce bounce rate
• Provide niched messaging via enhanced segmentation

Here is the test control and original website:

And, here is the radical redesign treatment:

There were several key differences with the treatment:

• Restructured navigation
• Consolidated calls-to-action (CTAs)
• Single value proposition – no competing headlines on the page
• Trust indicators
• Color palette
• New tag line
• New content

The original homepage, the control in this test, achieved 2.40% lead capture, and the radical redesign treatment pulled in 2.85% lead capture – an 18.75% lift over the control.

Jacob says the radical redesign was based on a revamped segmentation model.

“The new segmentation model drove the basic navigation structure and information architecture of the new homepage,” he explained.

This test with an early “win” was part of an ongoing optimization program. Not every test uncovered a lift, but every test did garner a discovery. The testing protocol involved taking the “winning” treatment and then refining the webpage layout, calls-to-action and length of the sign-up process for lead capture.

Through optimization, the sign-up process was shortened, and free trial sign-ups increased 55.3%, and the overall redesign of the entire website garnered a 89% lift in lead generation.

For the big takeaway, Jacob says, “Never stop improving. Complacency is lead capture optimization’s worst enemy and perfection is impossible. Complacency is conversion rate optimization’s worst enemy.”

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I’m at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco on day one, live blogging the Lead Management Workshop that features a dive into larger topics including lead capture, lead qualification and lead nurture.

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, presented the introduction to the workshop, and I’ve now had the opportunity to speak with Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Content Operations, MECLABS, and co-author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.

The main principles of the Lead Management Workshop were pulled from that book.

Brandon explains, “We updated the workshop material with a lot of the discoveries we’ve made over the past five or six years. It’s infused with MECLABS customer psychology process, so the workshop is really the best of both worlds – meaty lead generation strategy and tactics coming at it through the customer theory perspective that MECLABS has pioneered.”

Key principles of lead management

At the fundamental level, lead management is guided by four key principles:

1. Leads are people, not targets – Brandon says this goes back to the difference between company logic and customer logic. The focus should be on the customer.

2. People are not falling into the funnel, they are falling out – “It creates an intriguing, and I think important, model about how to rethink the traditional marketing funnel,” Brandon explains. “Everyone thinks with a funnel people are going in and narrowing down and that’s not really the case.” The inverted funnel shows the pipeline is more of a climb, with micro-conversions all throughout the process.

3. We are not optimizing webpages or call scripts, we are optimizing thought sequences – this means getting into the psychology of the customer and understanding those thought sequences to achieve the desired conversion – whether it’s a click, a filled-out form, or even a sale.

4. To optimize thought sequences, we must enter into a conversation and guide it toward a value exchange – Brandon says this means the perceived value of the marketing goal must be greater than the perceived cost. An example would be a Web form. The cost is giving up information, the value is what that person receives in return for providing that information.

The entire process of lead management is based on the concept of the inverted funnel, and the idea that the buyer’s pipeline requires a series of “micro-yes(s)” before getting to that “macro-yes” in the form of the final conversion-to-sale.

“There are all the little micro-yes(s) that you’re having,” Brandon explains. “A marketer may not be able to look at all the micro-yes(s) in their funnel on day one, but as they start to break down each one of those micro-yes(s) and start to look at what the perceived value and perceived cost is at each stage, that marketer is putting themselves in the mindset of the customer over the company.”

The ideal customer profile

In the lead qualification section of the workshop, understanding the ideal customer is a key concept.

Brandon says this is a place where marketers are not focused enough.

“You’re truly defining your ideal customer profile,” he says. “That ideal customer profile should be informed by your data. If you have contacts or companies on your list that don’t meet that ideal customer profile, then they shouldn’t be on your list. Or, you shouldn’t be marketing to them.”

To provide a set of guidelines for database form fields you might find valuable, here are two lists from the workshop.

Data to be collected

Basic:

1. Company Information: Industry type, annual revenue, number of employees, URL, general contact info, etc.
2. Champion Information: Number of contacts, roles and titles, level of authority/influence, contact information, etc.
3. Relationship History: Number of touch points, type of touch points, records of correspondence (what was said), etc.
4. Current Lead Status: Place in the funnel, lead scores, last actions, next steps, etc.

Advanced:

1. Engagement Metrics: Email opens, webpage visits, clickthrough, types of articles downloaded, etc.
2. Business Intelligence: Competitive data, industry trends, organizational changes, press releases, articles, quarterly reports, etc.
3. Life-Cycle KPIs: Average sales cycle, longest/shortest cycle, touch point clusters, lead source and touch point contribution reporting, etc.
4. Trend and ROI Reports: Lead flow, dials to disqualification, dials to leads, email success rates, revenue per customer, lead costs at various funnel stages, etc.
5. All Communication Records: Track, report and archive all email messages, calls and voicemails from contacts that can be associated with accounts or companies.

Keep in mind that these are all guidelines, and your business needs will determine the form fields that are most valuable to your marketing needs, but both the basic and advanced data field lists provide a starting point to begin creating your ideal customer profile.

Related Resources:

Infographic: Customer experience in the digital age

Customer-centric Marketing: Learning from customers helps increase lead quality 130%, Sales-accepted leads 40%

Customer-centric Marketing: 7 triggers to engage customers and build loyalty

Online Marketing: 4 sources of customer insight on your website