MarketingSherpa Blog

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

  Read more…

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.

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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.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

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.

  Read more…

Almost every marketer I talk to wants to know about average conversion rates. And, I presume, they want that info so they can focus on being above average.

While a marketing Lake Wobegon, where all of your conversion rates are above average, sounds tempting on the face of it, let me make a, perhaps, counterintuitive argument …

Very high conversion rates are usually not good for your ultimate KPI — profit

And this is one reason why an obsession with average conversion rates can be harmful to your marketing health.

There are two possible downsides to very high conversion rates:

• You are focusing too much of your marketing efforts on an audience that would buy from you anyway, and not enough on finding new customers
• You are offering too big of an incentive

  Read more…

Virality is that state of marketing nirvana where your campaigns are liberated from the earthly confines of your own media spends and marketing efforts, and take on a free-floating life of their own.

As I’ve said before in “Social Media Marketing: Going viral is so easy it’s hard,” I don’t believe there is any secret to going viral, but you can position yourself well for that opportunity. That blog post has a few of the factors that influence your chance of going viral, but in today’s post I want to focus on one very specific tool that can help your efforts — personalized URLs, also known as PURLs.

If you’re unfamiliar with PURLs, personalized URLs are simply, as the name implies, unique URLs for each recipient. As with many marketing terms, different people tend to use the term differently (usually to the advantage of whatever they’re selling). Some people consider a PURL actually having the person’s name in the URL (for example, I might receive a mailer with a CTA that goes to DanielBurstein.MECLABS.com, while my neighbor’s CTA would point to TheJoneses.MECLABS.com).

Others consider a PURL to be any URL that leads to a personalized landing page (so the URL might be a random string of letters and numbers; however, the landing page would say “Hello Daniel Burstein”). And still others consider a PURL to be any custom URL assigned to only one person (for the purpose of this blog post, I’ll use this, the broadest definition).

Who can use PURLS? Pretty much any marketer. “Historically, the high cost of PURLs would limit the technology to larger companies with the matching budgets,” according to Martin Thomas, founder, Purlem. “But today, PURLs have become much more affordable and easier to use.”

Now that we’ve gotten in a little background info, let’s take a look at some ways PURLs can help position your campaigns for virality:

  Read more…

When you first started in marketing, your first thought might have been — I’m going to create the next “Got Milk,” “Think Different” or “We Can Do It!”

Of course, after a career of KPIs, lead nurturing and discount deadlines, it’s easy to lose that sense of wonder and forget about the power of creativity, or as Jason Falls calls it … the “Holy Smokes!” factor. At the end of this blog post, I’ll show you how one marketer brought that creativity to a campaign that sought to capture children’s attention through learning in an era when video games and Facebook compete for their attention.

But first, let’s explore the “Holy Smokes!”

Several weeks ago, I attended Explore Dallas Fort Worth, a one-day workshop/boot camp on digital marketing that was a great experience both professionally and personally. I recently had the chance to speak with Jason Falls, CEO, Social Media Explorer, and co-host of the Explore event that will occur in five cities across the United States this year.

Jason told me that sometimes marketers lose track of the essential point of marketing — persuading someone to take an action, an idea that ties into my recent blog post about conversion.

He says, “Even in public relations, sometimes you’re trying to persuade a legislature to go a certain way, sometimes you are trying to persuade the general public to have a certain opinion about your company. It’s not always about making someone buy something.”

To accomplish this, Jason suggests taking the “Holy Smokes!” approach for any activity, from writing a speech, to producing a video, to writing ad copy. He says the idea is anytime you are engaged in marketing, you want your audience to consume the message and think, “’holy smoke,’ this message is: incredible, sad, awesome, beautiful, intelligent, informative or some other declarative response.”

Ideally, they will think, “Holy smokes, I have to share that with my friends,” he explains.

  Read more…

Headlines are tricky little devils. Whether you’re writing them for an article or a PPC landing page, they can carry your campaign to glory or bury it forever.

We gathered some theory on writing great headlines from our sister company, MarketingExperiments, and capped it off with five tips from our editors and a useful process for improving results.

Before we get to all that, keep this in mind:

• The goal of a headline is to seize readers’ attention and convince them to continue

Headline Theory

There is no arguing it — people are busy. You need to write a headline that convinces them to ignore distractions and pay attention. When people see a headline, their minds want to know:

“Why should I read this instead of doing one of the other 50 tasks on my list?”

The key question is “what do I get?” A good headline answers this in one word, “value.”

4 attributes of value

Picture your ideal customer deciding where to spend his time and energy. He wants something good for his investment. A headline that emphasizes something “valuable” to him gets his attention. He’ll invest a click and continue reading.

Your headline is “selling” your next paragraph and you need to make a good offer (also known as a proposition). Researchers at MECLABS, our parent company, evaluate the power of a value proposition through four attributes. You can use these same attributes to create and evaluate headlines. Read more…