MarketingSherpa Blog

The ladder of success no longer has certain rungs that must be met. Now, companies are placing a greater emphasis on company culture, and are looking for people who will fit into that.

In the days when large corporations were the trendsetters of the business world, you could get ahead by following a certain set of rules. As the recession knocked down some of these traditional companies from their former glory, a new way of doing business was highlighted.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and a thousand others like them ditched the suits and turned casual Friday into a week-long institution. Ping pong tables (like the one here at MECLABS) replaced conference tables and office spaces began providing an environment that would encourage employees to “think different.”

Companies are looking beyond info from your resume, and wanting to get to know you. Zappos, for instance, has said that in their personality-focused hiring process, they ask themselves if the person being interviewed is someone they would want to get a beer with.

As personality and corporate culture become a bigger proponent of the hiring process, it may be time to make yourself known and stop hiding behind a generic black and white, 12-point Times New Roman font resume.

An increasing amount of companies want to see that you have unique, unconventional skills to bring to their team, instead of checking off a list of qualifications on your resume.

Establishing your personal brand online can be the most effective way to get – and keep – a company’s attention.

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

We surveyed 1,915 marketers for the 2012 MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report, and asked them about their most widely used lead gen practices. Here is what the data says…

Q. Which of the following lead generation tactics does your organization currently use?

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To help you improve your own lead generation efforts, here are some insights and tips from our audience…

Email Marketing

“Interesting chart, Daniel — thank you for sharing it with us. Do you have any correlation between method and its associated level of effectiveness?” asked Hank Boyer, president and CEO, Boyer Management Group. “For example, email marketing may be the most-used method, and often has the distinction of replacing junk mail with junk email…however, its level of effectiveness is likely pretty low on the list.”

Jann Mirchandani, owner and chief marketing officer, Marketing Café, added “This chart is interesting in that it shows which tactics are being used. It does not, however, show which tactics are producing results. I would argue that email marketing is a tactic that most business owners understand and have been using a long time.”

Excellent points Jann and Hank, so let’s take review at a chart that shows which tactics are producing results.

Looking at some further data from the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report that shows level of effectiveness, we can see that Hank has a valid point in his skepticism of email marketing being the most commonly used lead generation tactic for many marketers, however, he may be underestimating this lead generation tactic’s effectiveness:

Q. Please indicate the LEVEL OF EFFECTIVENESS (in terms of achieving objectives) for each of the lead generation tactics your organization is using.

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“Is email a lead gen tactic?” asks Brecht of Distressedpro.com. “If you have the email already, isn’t that the lead?”

That’s an excellent point Brecht, but it brings up another question in my mind — Is an email address really a lead? For some companies it may be, but your marketing team should have a Universal Lead Definition, mutually agreed upon with Sales, that defines exactly what a lead is. I would argue a true “lead” is whatever information most efficiently and effectively leads to a sale.

But that’s just my two cents. Here’s how Tommy Landry, founder, Return On Now addresses the question after he himself raises it?

“While I concur that email is the most important medium to get right, I question whether it should be considered a lead gen vehicle at all. If you are emailing them, they are already on your list of leads.”

“Using email right means that you are just catching existing leads at the right time to move along into the sales funnel,” Tommy says. “But I’m splitting hairs, and email remains the most important marketing tool for identifying ‘hot’ leads.”

Search engine optimization (SEO)

As we can see in the above chart, SEO was rated as very effective by a third of marketers, and this tracks with Hank’s experience.

“Our company recently rebuilt its website and we utilize both SEO and optimized Web design to enhance stickiness and click through,” Hank said.

“Early analytics from the site shows a significant improvement in traffic and time spent on the site. We believe this has been achieved by the inclusion of quizzes and assessments and relevant blog content, plus enhancements to the site’s navigation.”

Website optimization/management/design

On the MarketingExperiments blog (sister blog to the B2B Lead Blog Roundtable), we’ve found website optimization to be a very effective tactic, with double- and triple-digit lifts in reach for marketers.

If you are looking to optimize your own website to improve lead generation, here are a few tips from Tommy:

Website optimization goes beyond just the words on the page. It requires strategic long-term thinking and ongoing adjustment.

• Is your site usability as good as it can be, so prospects can self-identify as easily as possible?

• Does the design indicate that you are a serious business or look like you are a fly-by-night operation?

• Is the content on it valuable, written well, and easily scannable by busy users?

• Do the pages load as fast as possible or should you tweak your infrastructure, hosting, or CMS/theme?

The questions go on, but the premise remains the same — have you optimized the user experience of dealing with you online? The website is a huge part of that experience, so get it right. Source — Online Demand Generation: Top Media Vehicles for Driving Leads

Content Marketing

“Content marketing works! If you don’t believe me, check the Alexa rank of Return On Now,” Tommy said. “We kicked off a content marketing program in early July 2012, when our Alexa rank was just under 2.3M. The last I checked, it was closing in on 607K.”

If you’re looking for an example of content marketing, let me do a little horn tooting for just a second, and suggest you look no further than this blog and the MarketingSherpa article that prompted the responses you are reading now.

At least, so says Rebecca Caroe, founder, Creative Agency Secrets, “Daniel — great chart, great blog post and a superb way to demonstrate leadership in lead gen is to follow your tactics:

• Invite reader response

• Credit contributors

• Enable future content to be written based on submitted readers’ views.”

If you’d like to be featured in a future blog post, simply sign up for the free MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week newsletter and share your actionable advice on a marketing industry chart that tickles your fancy.

Related resources

Why 75% of Marketers Are Experiencing Lead Generation Pain and How to Stop It Before It’s Too Late

Lead Generation Strategy: 5 signs you’re selling like it’s 1992

Coaching a new biz dev executive…. part 4

Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Cheryl Burgess of the Blue Focus Marketing blog, chosen as best social media marketing blog … by you.

With the recent announcement of the “new” MySpace — and with Justin Timberlake providing the public face of the redesign — the question on everyone’s minds is: Will it work?  Can a social media platform that had been all but left for dead really resurrect its brand? Much has changed since the site’s heyday around 2006-2007, and many obituaries have been written for the flagging social media platform since the advent of cooler, more versatile and user-friendly platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

Other more specialized social media platforms have also been introduced into the mix such as Twitter, Pinterest and Foursquare, each offering users a deliberately limited—but engaging—social experience.  Quite simply, there will be a lot more competition for MySpace this next time around, including the thriving platforms responsible for “poaching” the platform’s original users in the first place.

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Despite the fact that we have never met them, and usually have no clue as to their qualifications, consumers put increasingly greater stock in the word of their fellow consumer.

“[User generated content] is just something that has evolved, but in many ways we have always had it,” said Kaci Bower, author of the MarketingSherpa Inbound Marketing Handbook citing mass reviews and word of mouth.

“Now, with the advent of social media, it is just exploding. Now consumers and brands actually have a place to share their opinions, thoughts and ideas,” said Bower. “It actually provides a platform for user-generated content to not only be created, but also shared quite easily.”

The puzzle is in learning how to harness its power.

Social media provides a more intimate cyber setting than any other format, and because of that fosters feedback that is more conversational and for better or worse, people don’t hold back. It gives marketers insight into what their consumers are really concerned about, or happy with.

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Everyone has been playing social media ROI hide-and-seek for some time now. How does social media drive sales? Does the extent to which a firm engages or fails to engage in social marketing impact the bottom line at all? Or, as some have suggested, is the return on social efforts akin to the Loch Ness monster — we’re pretty sure it exists, but nobody seems to be able to track it down.

 What if we’re looking at it from the wrong perspective?

What if social media is more of a process, a series of steps taken at every point in the sales process, which, in totality, makes it more likely to convert leads to clients but, in practice, is difficult or impossible to measure? Or, what if social media has to be done for a certain amount of time and at a certain level of devotion before those benefits manifest?

For instance, a recent study by Dr. Sounman Hong of Harvard University suggests that newspapers’ adoption of Twitter is positively associated with their number of online readers (readers = revenue, right?), and that the strength of the association increases the larger the social network is.

Common sense seems to suggest that social subscribers are added over time, and that a bigger subscriber list, in most cases, indicates a more mature social presence. In other words, we grow into our ROI by continuing to paint the fence and mature our social media efforts.

Another recent study, this one by James “Mick” Andzulis, Nikolaos G. Panagopoulos and Adam Rapp, goes so far as to break this social media evolution down into practical subdivisions. Now we begin to see a pattern emerge. Their take is that our social media efforts evolve though a series of four phases:

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What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential? When we asked that question to 1,646 marketers while researching for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s how they responded …

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So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is aimed at helping you overcome challenges #1 and #3: to help you get budget approval to build your skills. With Email Summit 2013 coming up in February, we’ll use a MarketingSherpa Summit as the example for this blog post to show you the factors you should consider when conducting a little internal marketing of your own.

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According to the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, CMOs see social media and mobile as the developments that will have the biggest impact on email marketing in the near future …

Q. What new developments will most affect your email marketing program in the next 12 months? Select up to five developments.

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So here’s the challenge to you, email marketers of the world. Not only must you integrate social media into your email marketing, you must integrate a rapidly changing social media environment.

Just when you thought you could rest after successfully integrating Twitter and Facebook, for example, along comes Pinterest.

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At MarketingSherpa, we focus on providing case studies and how-to instruction that provide actionable takeaways for our readers. An overwhelming proportion of this content covers digital marketing channels and topics, such as email, social media, website optimization and more.

Of course, traditional marketing channels still have their place, and today’s post looks at two channels we don’t cover very often – the traditional media channels of television and radio advertising.

Several weeks ago, the Consumer Marketing newsletter article was a how-to guide on the trending tactics and tips for the holiday 2012 marketing season.

One tip featured some of the unique aspects of this year’s holiday calendar and how marketers can take advantage of an extra holiday shopping weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

A tip that was not included in the article exploits another unusual aspect of this year’s holiday shopping season – the effect of the presidential race on television and radio advertising.

This tip applies equally to consumer and B2B marketers, and we understand not all of our MarketingSherpa blog readers engage in traditional media marketing. But, for those who plan on television and/or radio advertising over the next several months, this tip provides both a challenge to face and an opportunity to exploit.

JT Hroncich, President, Capitol Media, says the presidential race will impact traditional media buys in two ways – one negative and one positive.

“Thank Barack Obama and for Mitt Romney for your inflated ad budget,” JT states. “Every four years, marketers go head to head with candidates and issues-based organizations for advertising. The number of TV and radio advertising spots tend to decrease, while their rates increase.”

He adds that marketers should be prepared for early spot buys, now through early November, that will be considerably more expensive and harder to get than they are during non-election years. JT says when budgeting for traditional media, expect to spend more for those early spot buys and to consider some late season — mid-November, early December — buys after the season is over. Any unsold inventory can be up for grabs.

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I was reading The Wall Street Journal one morning about food makers using mobile games to market to children. It struck me that content marketing has a major effect on how some companies, especially publishers and media companies, must regard their competition. (It also struck me that my kids need to spend less time on the iPad, but I digress.)

So, I thought I would use that article as inspiration for an example to teach a quick marketing 101 lesson on the three types of competitors you must account for when marketing your product or service. For the sake of this blog post, our company is Spacely Games, and we make mobile games aimed at children.

I also got some input from Paul Clowe, Sr. Director of Finance & Operations, MECLABS, who has recently conducted competitive research here at MECLABS.

Download Competitive Positioning Template

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The Social Media Club of Dallas monthly meetings always feature a presentation on social media for attendees, and earlier this year, I had the chance to take in SMC Dallas’ case study “showcase.”

This event offered up a number of quick-hit social media case studies from a variety of marketers and agencies, and I wanted to provide MarketingSherpa blog readers with a sample of several of these presentations.

Local pizza chain increases ROI more than 300% with charitable effort

Background:  I Fratelli, a restaurant local pizza chain with nine locations, was preparing for its 25^th anniversary. Its brand identity included charitable outreach.

Marketing Opportunity: Understand that local organizations and charities are always in need of fundraising dollars.

Strategy: Create a local social and viral community fundraiser.

Jeff Schick, Director of Integrated Digital Strategy, Online Performance Marketing, said the objective of the effort was to emotionally connect with consumers so they would feel like part of the solution in i Fratelli’s charitable fundraising marketing campaign.

The campaign consisted of five steps:

1. Create a name/identity for the effort – in this case, “Pizza DoughNation.”

2. Get fans excited by allowing them to nominate their favorite charities.

3. Take an “it takes a village” approach, and leverage the networks of fans, charities and organization to spread the word. Seed code words across social media, and have consumers mention these code words during pizza orders.

4. Measure the effort by tracking code words.

5. Give proceeds to the charities. These check presentations were seeded on owned media, but then drove earned media.

The campaign itself used three main outlets: the website and blog, Twitter and Facebook.

The blog was branded as “The Sauce,” and offered a program overview, nomination form, best practices and tips, and past results for viewing.

Twitter was used for geotargeted and contextual conversations on pizza occasions, and content was regularly pushed out timed for lunch and dinner.  Tweets were cross-promoted to both the blog and Facebook. And, influencers were identified to propel the program’s success.

Facebook documented and housed the brand’s “giving back” strategy, and was used to develop relationships with local, regional and national chapters of charities. Also, the Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm was used to focus on an “aggressive news feed optimization strategy.”

Results

• 3,000 unique blog visits for nominations: 86% leads driven by social media, 14% direct URL entry
• Increased Facebook impressions over from 40,000 to 125,000 per month
• Increased retweet rate (generosity) on Twitter from 0 to 19.4%
• Drove ROI in the form of increased sales, ranging from 304% to 381% over first four months of program
• Impacted 32 local charities

Key learnings and takeaways

• Social media results are not just for big brands. SMB brands can leverage social media for attitudinal, behavioral and financial objectives.
• Get the product, service and experience right first.
• Get cross-functional teams involved — that way they begin to place a higher value on social media.
• Don’t be afraid to ask fans and followers for help. Engage with the social media audience.

About the effort, Jeff said, “It wasn’t necessarily a challenge, versus an opportunity. The i Fratelli brand is known for being a part of and giving back to the Dallas-Fort Worth community for the past 25 years. The opportunity was uncovering an idea that leveraged social media to make a greater impact. Historically, the community-giving initiatives were led and funded by i Fratelli alone. By creating the Pizza DoughNation program, fans could take part in and join in on the giving back efforts.”

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