MarketingSherpa Blog

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, the most effective social marketing tactic you can implement is to build one-to-one relationships with social influencers.

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What I found to be truly interesting about this chart is the third most effective tactic: posting content on company branded/managed blogs. In other words, the time I’m using to write this blog post would actually be better spent building one-to-one relationships with social influencers in our space.

Of course, because we believe so much in delivering true value to our readers, I’m sticking this one out.

But the chart does leave us asking a question:If building one-to-one relationships with social influencers is so important to a social marketing strategy, how do we do it?

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Most email marketers still batch and blast their audiences, sending one email to everyone in the database, said Responsys CEO Dan Springer yesterday at Responsys Interact 2012. Springer spoke during the event’s kickoff session in San Francisco, and noted that not every marketer is guilty of batch-and-blast (Full Disclosure: Responsys sponsored my attendance of this event).

“For all of you that are already innovative, if you want to maintain your innovative status, you are going to need to keep pushing,” he said.

Where you should push is toward integration, Springer said, which he called the future of digital marketing. Yesterday’s sessions were loaded with examples of how companies are integrating email marketing with other channels. Here are two that stood out:

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I bet you could get a lot more actual work done without meetings, eh?

An example of this is David Meerman Scott’s answer to the question, “How are you so prolific?” He lists several reasons, but my favorite is, “I don’t have to sit in any damn meetings (unless I want to).”

However, you are probably not like Mr. Meerman Scott. If you are the average marketer, you have to sit through many, many meetings. Let’s take a look at how to make your meetings more effective and efficient (and feel free to pass this advice anonymously to the biggest time wasters in your organization).

The problem – unorganized meetings

Of course, this isn’t the only problem, but one major issue torpedoing many meetings is that they are unorganized and the facilitator put in little prep work on the front end. This is why so many meetings are ineffective, underutilized, unnecessary and just plain, well, time wasters.

To help you improve your own meetings, here is a free meeting agenda template. It’s what we use here at MECLABS. Feel free to replace our logo with your own if you use it internally or externally.

Let’s walk through the elements of the template. This advice isn’t based on research or reporting, simply what I’ve personally learned in my career. And I’d love to hear what you’ve learned as well.

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So I’ve got this old friend from college. At first, we had fun. Now I only hear from when he needs something. Then after I help him out … he disappears again.

Sound uncomfortably like your B2B marketing and sales efforts? Listen in as I speak with Brian Carroll, Executive Director, Revenue Optimization, MECLABS, about lead nurturing and post-sales nurturing, based on research from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report and MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

“The goal with nurturing is not just always be closing or always be selling,” Brian said. “It’s really, always be helping.” Watch the above video to see what other insights Brian shared. Here are a few key pieces of information that may help you: Read more…

For last Tuesday’s SherpaBlog post, I covered some of our own MarketingSherpa research. This post is about an e-book from Google – Winning the Zero Moment of Truth – by Jim Lecinski, Managing Director of US Sales & Service and Chief ZMOT Evangelist, Google.

What is the Zero Moment of Truth?

Google defines the zero moment of truth, or ZMOT, as the decision-making moment of online shoppers.

Here’s how the process that leads to ZMOT is described on the e-book’s landing page:

Today we’re all digital explorers, seeking out online ratings, social media-based peer reviews, videos, and in-depth product details as we move down the path to purchase. Marketing has evolved and modern marketing strategies have to evolve with the changing shape of shopping.

Jim describes this process as something that “changed the rulebook” on “where marketing happens, where information happens, and where consumers make choices that affect the success and failure of nearly every brand in the world.”

That is a pretty bold statement, but as practicing marketers, you probably have to agree that digital marketing and the power that consumers (for B2C marketers) and clients (for B2B marketers) have in terms of finding the information they want, and not necessarily what you want them to see, has been a true game-changer.

Here are the elements of ZMOT:

• Not surprisingly for an e-book published by Google, Lecinski says that ZMOT happens online, usually started by a Web search via Bing, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube or another search engine
• It happens in real time – any time of the day or night
• The consumer is in charge and pulling information, not consuming a pushed message
• It’s satisfying an emotional need of the consumer
• The conversation involves many parties: the customer, marketers, friends, strangers, websites and experts

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We want to serve you better, so we’re conducting a quick survey to determine the best way.  We’re interested only in aggregate needs and preferences, so individual responses are anonymous.  Every respondent will, however, earn a free copy of a MarketingSherpa 30-Minute Marketer report – How to Integrate Social Media with Email and SEO.

And if there’s anything we learn from the survey that we think you might find valuable, we’ll publish it.

Take the survey now

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

When you’re converting inquiries into qualified leads, it’s widely believed that time is of the essence. Even research published in the Harvard Business Review says you’re almost seven times more likely to qualify a lead if you respond by phone within five minutes than if you respond an hour later.

That’s why, when one of our Research Partners, a B2B telecommunications company, wanted to convert more inbound leads into sales-ready ones, we cut our response time. The results were surprising, as you’ll see in a moment.

We typically phoned people who submitted a Web form on the company’s site within about five hours. We slashed that to five minutes or less with:

• Automated alerts — Our IT team developed a program that notified our lead generation specialists to make a call the moment someone submitted a Web form.

• Adjusted hours — A lead generation specialist was always available during the hours when someone would most likely submit a Web form.

• An easier-to-use database — Lead generation specialists had to go through several steps to access the partner’s database; we revised it so they could reach the lead they needed in one click.

As a result, whenever someone submitted a form, the person received a call back within five minutes more than 85% of the time. At the end of six months, I was eagerly looking forward to the results. Here they are: Almost nothing changed! Even though we cut response time by more than 98%, the number of qualified leads remained virtually the same and the amount of calls it took to get a qualified lead actually increased slightly.

Our effort did not have much impact. So what did this teach us? To slack off and not respond to inquiries for days? Absolutely not. Instead, we learned three valuable lessons:

Lesson #1: Know your customers and their needs

Will they lose interest or select another vendor in the next hour or two? If so, then instant follow-up may be a good idea. But in the case of our partner, the potential customers? needs for B2B telecommunications were not going to change dramatically in a few hours, so cutting response times did not have much impact.

Lesson #2: Know what you’re selling

If it?s a transactional sale, five-minute follow-up may very well be worthwhile. Not so much, obviously, for the complex sale. However, again, that doesn’t mean if you have a complex sale you can kick back and wait to respond to inquiries. Our research in complex sales has consistently demonstrated that follow-up within 24 hours is always optimal.

Lesson#3: Test before investing

What works for someone else may not work for you — even if it was featured in the Harvard Business Review. Begin by identifying your key performance indicators: What you want to achieve. For this test we wanted to:

• Increase sales-ready leads — Our partners were satisfied with the amount inquiries their inbound marketing efforts were producing. They wanted more sales-ready leads — leads that fit their Universal Lead Definition.
• Improve lead qualification — Our goal was to reduce the number of dials required to attain sales-ready leads. We were hoping this could ultimately make our team more productive.

Once you set key performance indicators, measure them before and after the test, and compare. It’s really that simple. Start on a small scale, and then implement the program across your entire organization if the results merit it.

Related Resources:

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Webinar Replay: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

New Chart: Chief requirements for B2B lead qualification

At MarketingSherpa, our job is to help you do your job better. But we’re not the only place you turn to for helpful information.

So to help your peers find quality marketing information, we’re launching the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards. What marketing blogs do you find most valuable? Simply make a comment on this blog post with the name of the blog and the category you would like to nominate it for.

Here are the categories:

• Best B2B Marketing Blog
• Best Email Marketing Blog
• Best E-commerce Blog
• Best Inbound Marketing Blog
• Best Copywriting Blog
• Best PPC Blog
• Best SEO Blog
• Best Marketing Strategy Blog
• Best Social Media Blog
• Best Viral Marketing Blog
• Best Marketing Operations Blog
• Best Design Blog
• Best Optimization/Testing Blog Read more…

Nothing is perfect in this world, and that includes your marketing department. Even if you’re confident that you have the best team in the industry, there are likely a few tweaks you wish you could make to push it higher.

Take your budget, for example. Who couldn’t use a few extra resources to test website copy? Or improve landing page design?

A lack of funding or resources is the number-one challenge undermining the potential of marketing teams, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel. This chart shows the top challenges that marketers feel undermine their department’s potential, according to research of more than 1,600 companies surveyed for the guide.

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This week I’ve been reading the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook featuring W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingSherpa), as the lead author.

This handbook is full of great and actionable email advice, but Jeff particularly pointed me to the section on providing new subscribers with explicit expectations on what, when and why they will receive email after opting in.

Since it applies equally to B2B and consumer marketers, I wanted to share those tips and tactics with you, along with a fourth email element — privacy.

Here is the set-up straight from the MarketingSherpa handbook:

The time spent researching and developing eye-catching and memorable promotions that attract new subscribers is an enjoyable process for most marketers. However, equivalent effort and energy needs to go into reassuring the potential subscriber that your company is reputable and trustworthy. This is because after you have caught the consumer’s interest, and they are listening attentively, the new subscriber needs to feel safe to exchange their email address for a “special” offer.

Setting expectations right from the start of the relationship will reduce anxiety in the registration process and enable you to collect more qualified leads. Taking the time to inform new subscribers of what you will deliver yields more long-term subscribers. Adding a “join my mailing list” box with just a space to type in their email addresses will not effectively communicate expectations.

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