MarketingSherpa Blog

I enjoy contributing to webinars. They give me a chance to immerse myself in research and talk shop. They also force me to shut off Outlook, Skype and anything else that might distract me, which is great when we have a good co-presenter. I can give them my undivided attention (which frankly isn’t possible when I’m an attendee).

Last week, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar on email deliverability with Tom Sather, Director of Professional Services at Return Path, the webinar’s sponsor. Sather is a top-shelf deliverability expert, and he presented data from a global study his team conducted during the first half of this year. I was glad I paid attention.

Sather noted the average inbox placement rate (the percentage of emails sent that make it to the inbox) is somewhat low across the globe.

Global deliverability stats

• 81% inbox placement rate
• 7% spam placement rate
• 12% missing rate

This data was compiled from about 140 ISPs across the globe, Sather mentioned. As you can see from the webinar slide below, emails in North America fared a little better in the study. Read more…

Do you love your marketing job? If you do, you might be in the minority, according to CareerBliss, an online career community dedicated to helping find workplace happiness.

CareerBliss determined the top 10 hated jobs by analyzing hundreds of thousands of employee-generated reviews from 2011. And, two marketing management positions landed on the list.

Director of Sales and Marketing hit at number two, with only IT Director beating it out. Ouch. And Marketing Manager slipped on the list at number 10 spot. Not a promising outlook for those not yet in management, and a worse outlook for those already there.

CareerBliss provided two reasons why the positions earned their spots on the top 10 hated jobs: “an absence of room for growth” and “a lack of direction from upper management.”

After reading this study, I thought about what I would do if I were in the unhappy marketers’ shoes. So I delved further into the topic by reading every article and study Google would give me on the topic. Nothing I found directly answered my question. However, putting all the readings together allowed me to form some ideas to help jog your thinking.

While I wouldn’t suggest quitting your current job just yet (at least not without some research of your own), I do hope this post can give you some hope of getting out of that job you hate. I’d also love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

In this blog post, we’ll see if there’s real truth behind those reasons given by CareerBliss and what you can do to overcome them. Read more…

Problems in your marketing can be tricky to identify. They might seem isolated, but they can also have a single root cause.

Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS, believes a central problem for many B2B marketers is a lack of effective data.

“Everything connects to your data,” Carroll said. “Your data represents relationships, and that’s the hub.”

Carroll touched on this issue at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week. He described how seven of the most common problems that B2B marketers face have their roots in poor data optimization. We’ll go through each of these below.

–

Click to enlarge

Read more…

Marketing and Sales alignment is always a hot topic. When the two business functions are working together marketing efforts are more effective and Sales’ job becomes easier.

At the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week, Michelle Mogelsen Levy, Associate Vice President Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, presented a case study on a successful quick-hit, top-of-the-funnel effort that had the side benefit of getting already close Marketing and Sales teams into even closer alignment.

–

Sales’ challenge for Marketing

Sales at ECI Telecom came to the marketing team and asked for support to penetrate a brand new geographic market in a very limited time frame – under 30 days – and fill the top of the funnel with high-quality leads.

The resulting effort was a proprietary workshop in Sweden, a new market Sales was targeting. Marketing’s challenge was finding a way to get relevant prospects to the event with an eye on being cost-conscious. And the goal was to register 20 participants for the eight-hour workshop.

The strategy was an inbound effort combining Sales leveraging its connections through email and social media with Facebook posts and other outreach, and Marketing taking advantage of the existing database along with reaching out to anonymous web visitors from Sweden. Turning unknown website visitors into known visitors was a key goal in the effort.

ECI Telecom went out and found a vendor that was able to provide a tool that allowed for segmenting Web traffic and delivering relevant messages to those visitors, and allowed for real-time intelligence on site visitors and behavior. Read more…

In speaking with many, many marketers over the past year, two words — well, actually one word and one acronym — stand out in my mental word cloud when thinking about marketing in 2011: revenue and ROI (return on investment).

The first is a term more commonly seen in financial reports and tossed around the conference table during company meetings. The second is another financial term.

And I’m not just dreaming that these words have infiltrated marketing. Research from the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report found that 54% of surveyed marketers think “achieving or increasing measurable ROI from lead generation programs” is a top strategic priority for 2012.

–

Click to enlarge

–

I know I’ve written about Marketing proving its worth within the company in terms of revenue generation or measuring ROI more than once over the last year.

Menno Lijkendijk, Director Milestone Marketing, a Netherlands-based B2B marketing company, says the emphasis on ROI in marketing should be reexamined.

Menno’s main point is unimpeachable — return on investment is a financial term with a specific definition that has a very specific meaning to the C-suite in general, and particularly to the CFO. His concern is, not only is the actual ROI of some marketing activities overemphasized, the term itself is gathering too much marketing “buzz.”

He provided an example of a comment left on an online video of his that referenced “intangible ROI,” something he (rightly) says does not exist.

“There is no such thing as intangible ROI. The whole definition of ROI is that it should be tangible,” Menno says.

He continues, “This term — ROI — is now starting to lead a life of its own, and is being used by email service providers to explain to their potential customers that doing business with them will give them great ROI on their marketing investment.” Menno also mentions email providers are not alone in using this sales pitch and cited search marketers, social media markers and other agencies.

“There is more than just ROI, and the real value of marketing may require a different metric, or a different scorecard, than just the financial one,” he states.

– Read more…

I am going to take a shot at a B2B marketing taboo that I and my colleagues encounter on a regular basis. I certainly do not expect universal support, but I freely invite you to speak your mind in the comments.

While at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in Boston last month, Jay Baer tore the robes off of this taboo and forced the audience take a good look at it. Here’s what he said:

“I have done a fair amount of speaking at B2B conferences and every once in a while someone comes up to me … they say ‘well, that was great, but you use some examples that are B2C.’ Get over it! I’m going to use some examples in this presentation that are B2C. I am going to offend your territorial sensibilities. You’re making way too big a deal out of this.”

Baer was speaking about social media marketing. I agree with his sentiment (although “get over it” is not the exact phrase I’d use) and believe this concept applies to channels beyond social media. Read more…

“Marketing is broken…”

In an event packed with quotable, Tweetable comments from marketing experts, the above, from Kristin Zhivago’s keynote, “The Buyer’s Funnel and Your Political Power: Joined at the Hip,” may have been my favorite sound byte from the East Coast swing of B2B Summit 2011.

(Though I also loved her idea of “drinking from the fire hose of truth,” but I digress…)

According to Zhivago, customers’ wants and needs are unknown, and as such, Marketing is making assumptions on how to market to different segments. We’re expected to communicate with customers, but are often removed from the conversation by Sales. Essentially, the customer relationship is regularly outsourced to Sales, relinquishing control of our most crucial job function. Think about it, if your CEO asked, “What does the customer want?” would she ask you or someone in Sales?

And the answer to that question has never been more crucial. Thanks to the continually growing importance of easily accessible information on the Internet to buyer decisions, customers have been forced into a position of power, and are more in charge of the buying process than ever before, leaving companies to struggle with this shift in power.

More than 80% of customer questions are answered before talking to a salesperson. Their information needs are being met by other customers, not company authorities.

In short, if you can’t answer customers’ questions both internally and with your marketing, you’re abandoning your position of authority in your organization and undercutting all of your marketing efforts.

– Read more…

Sure, the economy is a bit uncertain. But companies are still looking for high-performing marketing professionals. I know because they post these job openings almost daily on our marketing job listings page.

In fact, I recently came across a shocking bit of data in The Wall Street Journal. From my experience, jobs in advertising and marketing tend to be the most sensitive in an uncertain economy. In a recession, most CEOs seem to cut the marketing budget as step #1 (Step #12, corporate jet).

However, according to SimplyHired, marketing managers is “where the work is,” as it’s listed as one of the occupations listed as having many openings.

I’m not personally familiar with this metric, but marketing managers is listed as having 108 job openings for every 1,000 people employed. That is much more than the “few openings” for mental-health counselors and preschool teachers, with only two openings per 1,000 employed. It’s even more than registered nurses, which I always see recruitment ads for and is widely regarded as desperately in need of more talented people (82 per 1,000).

Intuit is one such company hiring marketing professionals right now. So, I sat down with Leslie Mason, a Senior Recruiter at the computer software company, to help give you an inside scoop about what companies are looking for when they fill these plentiful marketing job openings.

Read more…

You have likely experimented with social sharing buttons in your emails. You know, they’re the buttons readers click to share your emails on Facebook, Twitter or another social network.

And how’s that working for you?

All kidding aside, many email marketers struggle to get the audience to use these buttons. As you can see in the chart below from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, “social sharing buttons” are one of the least effective tactics you can use to build your list.

Read more…

If you could break it down to its essence, what really is B2B marketing? It is not, as the name suggests, one business marketing to another or one business buying from another. If you look up the definition of a business, after all, it is an organization.

An organization of people. In the end, people choose to buy, or not buy, from you. When I’ve worked with enterprise sales organizations, they’d often talk about the deals as the “Bank of America deal” or the “Walmart deal” when they really should have called them the “Hannah, Fred and Bill deal.” After all, Hannah, Fred and Bill are the ones making the buying decisions, not a multinational corporate entity that exists only on paper in a P.O. Box in Delaware.

So to truly succeed in B2B, you need to make it P2P. Even more so than consumer marketing, where a customer may buy a product off the shelf with no interaction at all with the people in your company, B2B is very people-oriented. Everyone from sales executives to customer service reps to consulting teams interacts with the real people in your customer organizations … except, perhaps, marketing managers.

If you’re in marketing, you tend to have among the least interaction with your customers. And yet, you are the ones responsible for the messages you’re sending to those customers. How can you bridge that gap? Check out this video A/V Specialist Luke Thorpe put together about Kristin Zhivago’s keynote at the East Coast swing of MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 – “The Buyer’s Funnel and Your Political Power: Joined at the Hip” – along with my quick interview with her after the Summit wrapped …

Read more…