MarketingSherpa Blog

Bribe them and buy them. That was an old-school marketing technique to acquire customers when the value proposition of a product just wasn’t strong enough to pull in enough interest of its own.

Do corporate social media accounts face that challenge? While many Facebook pages and Twitter accounts offer strong value (news, humor, insider information, etc.), the average corporate account can find it challenging to develop a following without an incentive.

One incentive that works well for many marketers is a sweepstakes or contest. (While those terms are often used interchangeably, technically the winner of a sweepstakes is decided by random chance, and a contest is decided by skill and competition.)

“Some of the main benefits of a social media-based contest are fast time-to-market, immediate responses/results, low-cost and no-cost program options, and measureable ROI,” said Sandra Fathi, President, Affect. “I have yet to find an organization — business-to-business or business-to-consumer — that would not benefit from some type of online contest.”

Sandra pointed out that even the President is holding an online sweepstakes to help with fundraising efforts.

The goal of online sweepstakes and contests

 While online sweepstakes and contests can help boost your social media following, they can help you meet other objectives as well.

“The goals of any marketing effort should align directly with business goals – and the same holds true for social media promotions,” Sandra said. She provided some example objectives:

• Accelerate social media adoption/participation
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads/sales
• Drive product/service usage
• Recognize or reward customers/prospects

However, sometimes it pays to think outside the box.

“For example, we launched the New York Intern Project as a recruiting tool that also provided ancillary benefits, such as doubling our social media following, generating media coverage and new business opportunities with clients who were interested in hosting contests of their own,” Sandra said.

Here are a few mini-case studies to help you visualize successful sweepstakes and contests, and then we’ll review seven steps for launching your own sweepstakes and contests.

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Noted author, speaker and copywriter Sally Hogshead will keynote this month’s B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando. To whet your appetite for her keynote address, “The Nine-second Attention Span: Selling your brand, and yourself, in social media,” let’s look at her talk from TEDxAtlanta to begin learning how to grab your potential customers’ attention, even though they likely have the same attention span as a goldfish …

Related Resources:

B2B Summit 2012, August 27-30, Orlando

Blandvertising: How you can overcome writing headlines and copy that don’t say anything

Improve Your Copywriting with Help from Social Media: 7 Tactics from David Meerman Scott 

Copywriting: How to improve headlines on landing pages and blog posts

Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM, understands analytics and metrics are, as he puts it, “a huge part of marketers’ lives.”

He says the question then becomes, “How much time and energy should marketers spend checking out metrics and worrying about the analytics of their efforts?”

Yuchun adds, “I think the market trend has been moving towards incorporating more and more data and analysis of customers.”

This includes learning what messaging is relevant to your customers.

“Being able to analyze the data to understand a customer becomes paramount for every business,” explains Yuchun.

This data analysis allows you to determine consumer sentiment, which in turn provides a framework for relevant communications. 

Read more…

At B2B Summit 2011, keynote Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, discussed social media marketing myths. Here are a few excerpts…

Here are a few key takeaways from Jay’s keynote excerpt video embedded above:

0:30 – Myth #3: How B2C uses social media doesn’t apply

3:30 – The overemphasis on Facebook “likes” as a metric

5:06 – Focus on being social, not doing social

If you enjoyed these excerpts, you can watch Jay’s full one-hour B2B Summit 2011 keynote, for free, on MarketingSherpa.

Related Resources:

B2B Summit 2012, August 27-70, Orlando

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

B2B Social Media: Jay Baer discusses social media ROI and Facebook likes [Video]

TEDxAtlanta – Sally Hogshead – How to Fascinate

Email Summit 2013, February 12-15, Las Vegas

Social Pros 6 – Instagram Lessons from a Giant B2B Company

I think all marketers would agree that digital technology has brought about a sea change in the world of marketing. The basic model has gone from almost exclusively “push” messages to more of a “pull” approach that combines traditional channels, such as advertising and direct mail, with strategies like search engine optimization, social media marketing, mobile and email marketing.

At one point in time, marketers could dictate the message their prospects and customers received, and then hope that message resonated enough to drive sales. In the complex sale, this meant Sales was handed scads of leads from a variety of sources with almost no additional information about that prospect on where they were in the buying cycle, or even where they were in the buying process at their company.

Power shifting to the customer

In marketing today, prospects and customers are educating themselves about your industry, business space and product or service area. This holds true in both B2B and consumer marketing.

These people are not interested in receiving marketing messages pushed to them from the mountaintop. They want useful information to begin the decision-making process long before they actually interact with your company or brand.

This new way of looking at marketing has been described a number of ways, and one new book fresh off the presses calls it, “precision marketing.”

I had the chance to speak with Sandra Zoratti, Vice President Marketing, Executive Briefing and Education, Ricoh. Along with Lee Gallagher, former Director Precision Marketing Solutions, Ricoh, she co-authored, Precision Marketing: Maximizing revenue through relevance, which is this week’s MarketingSherpa Book Giveaway.

Sandra defines the term, “Precision marketing is about using data to drive customer insights so that you send the right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel.”

The precision marketing framework is about following a logical, sequential and continually improving process:

1. Determine objective
2. Gather data
3. Analyze and model
4. Strategize
5. Deploy
6. Measure

We covered a variety of what Sandra considers precision marketing topics, including how it can even help improve your marketing career.

Before I get into Sandra’s ideas, here are a few interesting data points from the book:

• 64% of consumers say promotional offers dominate email and traditional mail received. Only 41% consider these offers “must-read” communications.

• Out of the 91% of consumers opting out or unsubscribing from email programs, 46% do so because the messages are not relevant.

• 41% of consumers would consider ending a brand relationship because of irrelevant messaging, and an additional 22% would definitely end the relationship because of irrelevance.

• A survey of IT buyers by the International Data Group found 58% of vendor content was not relevant to potential buyers, and that this lack of relevance reduced the chance of closing a sale by 45%.

Are you seeing a theme here? Relevance is extremely important in marketing today.

“I say customers are powerful, in control, and they know it,” Sandra says. “They vote with their dollars. They vote with their attention, and what I would call their brand-altering online voices. So, customers are really in the driver’s seat, and marketers need to recognize that.”

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

If there is a chance to network and build relationships, there is opportunity to generate and nurture leads. Trade shows, workshops and webinars are gold mines for obtaining information. It’s fair to say 98% of attendees likely have an interest in your solution, and that is enough to begin the nurturing process.

Of course, it is very important to capture attendees’ contact information and product interests at that point of high interest, and then act on that interest before it fades.

Generating and nurturing trade show leads

In this particular test, conducted by Craig Mullenbach, Program Manager, MECLABS, and his team, an industrial testing equipment manufacturer wanted MECLABS to follow up on leads generated through campaigns and trade shows.

The goal was to determine

• if following up on trade show contact information would translate into leads,
• when calling should cease, and
• if analyzing this process would allow us to optimize similar contracts in the future.

Answers came screaming through the data we tested.

The test found that 90% of successful lead follow-ups occurred within 28 days of first contact; 60% of those leads were actualized on the first day of calling. Halfway into the calling (day 15) proved to be the last point at which 1% of conversions occurred. The graph below displays our findings.

Interest degradation

From my experience, the interest of a prospect drops off significantly over time after they leave an event or attend a webinar. The half-life is likely only a few days, and once you reach 20 days out, people can barely remember they attended the event, let alone remember a specific product.

During this test, the last conversion occurred on the 343^rd day. At some point when running an experiment, you must determine the point when the diminishing returns make further data collection no longer worth your while.

What can you learn for your own lead generation and nurturing efforts?

For every company and every product, the correct calling procedures will vary. Say the product of interest is worth thousands of dollars. In that case, continuing to call into that 41^st day may be worth your while — it just depends.

It’s all about maximizing the potential profit in the least amount of time. Beyond the specific results of this test, I think the biggest takeaway that will help you is this: Start testing your own lead programs if you aren’t already.

You can test different approaches and timeframes to see which brings your company the highest ROI. You’ll learn what works, what doesn’t work and what value you can identify from analyzing this entire process. We found immense success, and we continue to refine it to better the data and practices we employ in this specific follow-up situation.

Creating a successful lead program is an iterative process

Each trade show, webinar, and/or workshop is an opportunity bursting with potential leads. Setting up a repeatable, iterative process that you can learn from and continuously optimize will help you get the biggest return for your investment:

• Create a plan of action before the event — How will we turn this information into leads? What can we analyze and test from this information gathered?

• Capture important information — Obviously, contact information is important. But, thinking beyond the basics will help your follow-up efforts. Why are they there? What information most appeals to them? What solutions most interest them?

• Follow up promptly — As you can see from this test, follow-up should often occur within 30 days, if not sooner. But remember, it is important to determine the most successful timeframe for your own efforts …

• Test your follow up efforts — Which timeframe is most successful? Which follow-up methods work best (e.g., email and a call, or just a call)? Which offers resonate the most? Which areas do we want to learn more about? And, ultimately, what will bring us the greatest results?

• Take what you learned and build off it for next time — How can we improve? What elements can we optimize and test further? How can we implement this new strategy?

Related Resources:

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Nine Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment

Lead Generation: Phone calls turn first-time webinar into million-dollar leads

If you attend an industry event with Owen Blevins, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Mid Atlantic Concrete Equipment, you better expect to hear the refrain, “Hey, Cretehead!”

It’s not an insult, just evidence that people are buying what Blevins is selling. As the founder and host of Concrete Answers, “the Internet’s most passionate show about concrete plants and equipment,” Blevins is becoming a concrete-industry celebrity, and, of course, he kicks off each episode with a resounding, “Heeey, Creteheads!”

Every other week, he introduces machinery and processes in direct response to the questions he receives from customers via his company’s website, events and sales meetings.

Even though the show is only about two years old, it has received more than 85,000 views.

“It’s not a bulldog on a skateboard, but we have a niche market. Our goal is to inform, educate and offer a little bit of entertainment. If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, be sure to watch,” he laughs. “It’s highly technical.”

Hundreds of hours of work = Hundreds of thousands in sales

Every minute of the final product represents an hour of work – planning, shooting, editing and posting. However, Blevins says the hundreds of hours devoted to Concrete Answers are well worth the investment.

“We typically know exactly what brought our customers to us,” says Blevins. “This information allows us to justify expense, because there’s a lot of time, effort and energy that goes into the channel. It’s definitely been worth it; otherwise, we wouldn’t do it. I won’t reveal exact ROI, but I can tell you the show has ultimately resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment sales.”

Read more…

Before you start an optimization program, you have to be clear on what you are trying to optimize. Or, as Brad Damphousse, the CEO of GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site, puts it, “What’s the one thing that really matters?”

The GoFundMe team determined that, for its site, it had to focus on making it easy for anyone to receive donations. To achieve that goal, the team would have to optimize for both of its customer segments (which are essentially on both sides of the transaction): users asking for donations and donors making those donations.

So, Brad launched a series of A/B tests to help convert more new users and to gain more donations from donors.

Test #1: Sell the service

For the first test, the team mapped out its funnel and identified where leaks were occurring.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

Our job is to help you do your job better. One way we do that is through events, like the upcoming Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas.

You can help make this event more valuable for yourself and fellow marketers by taking a few minutes to fill out the survey below.

As a thank you, you’ll receive a FREE copy of MarketingSherpa’s 30-Minute Marketer: How to Segment Your Email List for Better Results.

Related Resources:

Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, Feb. 12-15, 2013

Email Summit 2012: Top 5 takeaways from the industry’s largest research-based event

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

To help you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, here’s a quick tidbit for your Friday from the MarketingSherpa blog …

SEO is usually seen as some complex, magical, always evolving formula you need to master. And, while the constant changes to Google’s algorithm (so there’s this Panda all hopped up on Caffeine …) is enough to make your head spin, Optimization Summit 2012 attendee Matt Brutsché of Austin Search Marketing advises marketers to start by focusing on the basics – meta tags.

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