MarketingSherpa Blog

“Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else, sacrifice to get there.”

– John Kotter, professor, Harvard Business School

Are you a true marketing leader?

Does your marketing department have a well thought-out strategy with clear marching orders? Hopefully that question is a gimme, but here’s a harder one…

Have you set the strategy for your social media marketing?

Developing an effective and methodical social marketing strategy was the most frustrating challenge to social marketing effectiveness, according to the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.

And for good reason. Social media marketing is a huge paradigm shift for most marketers. It is a change from the command-and-control days when marketers owned the airwaves and printing presses because they had the power of the purse.

Social media has democratized the means of communication. Now, every customer is also a publisher. And the best you can hope to do, as overused as this saying may be, is to join the conversation.

Social media strategy planning tool

Of course, that doesn’t mean that creating an effective social media strategy is impossible. And anything you invest resources in, even if you’re just incurring a soft cost like your own time, should have a plan of action designed to achieve a goal.

If you don’t know where you’re trying to get and what you need to do to get there, then why even bother? Read more…

Location, location, location. No, I’m not talking about real estate, I’m talking about event marketing.

The location of conferences, summits, conventions and user groups is critical to their success. People don’t just go to events to network and learn how to do their jobs better, they want to go to a city they would really want to visit on vacation, like Orlando, or Denver, or Washington, D.C.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Now, everything has changed. Event attendees are no longer looking for flashy cities, they’re looking for budget-friendly destinations. Reasonable flights. Inexpensive hotel rooms. Goodbye New York City, professionals want to head to cities like St. Louis and Nashville for their industry events.

Here’s the thing. I don’t know which of the above statements is true. We were debating this very challenge, perhaps a similar challenge you’ve faced when planning your own events, in our latest event team meeting.

Share your opinion for a chance to win a $1,695 marketing summit ticket

So, we thought we’d start with a little unscientific, qualitative research. Simply put, which city or cities would be most appealing to you for a future marketing event? Let us know from the list below for your chance to win a ticket to a future MarketingSherpa Summit, such as B2B Summit in San Francisco or Boston, Email Summit in Las Vegas, or, well, you tell us….

(and if there are any cities we’re missing, feel free to let us know in the comments section below)

***UPDATE***

Congratulations to  Carol Reid, Owner/Marketing Consultant, Carol Reid Marketing, winner of a free ticket to a MECLABS summit. She has chosen the upcoming B2B Summit in San Francisco.

Related Resources:

Event Marketing: Regional customer forums improve field events attendance rate by 150%

Never Pull Sofa Duty Again: Stop guessing what your audience wants and start asking

Marketing Intelligence: 3 ways to better serve your customers (and your bottom line)

The Indefensible Blog Post: Actually, the old rules of marketing are pretty good

Social networks used to be the wild west of online marketing. Pioneers launched first, asked questions later, and staked claims on MySpace and Second Life.

Today, most marketers set clear goals and plan before hitting the trail. Your goals will often dictate which networks and tactics to try. Knowing which networks have turned into ghost towns and which are the next Dodge City can also help.

This chart from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition shows which social media platforms have proven to be the most effective for inbound marketers.

Read more…

It’s a pretty safe bet that everyone understands the importance of search engine optimization for global search. But local SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) is something of a different story. Did you know Google estimates 20 percent of all searches now have a local intent? Have you taken any steps to address this shift in search behavior? If not, you are not alone.

While looking through the MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition, I found this interesting chart:

Click to enlarge

This is from the report:

Forty-three percent of organizations consider local search a critical or important factor for achieving search marketing objectives. Individuals and businesses are increasingly looking to local listings for shopping, restaurants, services, vendors and more. For these reasons (among others), appearing in local search results, which are listed at the top of the SERPs, can help a business stand apart from its competition.

What really stands out to me is that more than one quarter of the marketers we surveyed described local search as “not important” for search marketing objectives. That’s not even asking where local search fits into overall marketing objectives, just within SEM. To my mind, that is a large percentage of marketers overlooking a potentially lucrative area of search. Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Too many marketers think that their inside sales teams are alchemists. They dump data that’s absolute garbage into the top of the sales funnel and expect sales lead gold to come out the other side.

This came to mind when my teleprospecting team was struggling with one of our lead-generation clients.

They had promised us a “high-quality list” from their database: tens of thousands of names of c-suite executives who were in their target-market sweet spot.

The reality: nearly half the contacts had disconnected phone numbers and another 30 percent definitely wasn’t in the target market for this particular product. Think fast food joints and mom-and-pop businesses. The remaining contacts had missing or inaccurate information. My team spent at least 80 percent of their time doing research and investigation to make the list usable so they could do what they were actually hired to do — generate leads.

Unless you want your inside sales professionals to be mere data entry clerks, test your lists! It takes about 30 hours of calling to attain a fairly accurate understanding of list quality by answering these questions:

• Is there duplicate data?
• Is the information current and complete?
• Are the contacts truly in your product’s target market?

If more than 1 out of 20 contacts fail this test, I advise cleaning this list before you pass it along to a lead-generation team. Unless, of course, you don’t mind your team spending their time tracking down and entering data instead of generating leads.

Here’s the crux: you may think you have this awesome, robust database, but only a small segment of it may actually be the customer you want to reach. Unless you’re constantly updating your lists, too much of the data is likely old and unusable.

Your team may, indeed, be alchemists, and generate impressive numbers of leads regardless of the garbage you’re giving them. My team did. They ended up giving the client with the horrifically bad list an 800 percent return on investment, but not without a lot of extra work and stress. I can’t help but think how much higher their ROI would have been if we were given a better list. Think about what your teams could achieve, too.

Recently, my colleague Brad Bortone forwarded me an inquiry from one of our readers, who asked the following:

–

Can you provide any insight into why my newsletter emails would receive a 10% unique CTR and a 3% open rate? Aren’t open rates generally the larger number?

We use XXXXXXXX as our email service provider. Could this be related to how our newsletter renders in the preview pane of email clients?

–

In thinking about this, I realized that many email marketers may be asking the same questions, and could benefit from an extensive reply. Besides, I don’t get much mail around here, so I was excited to help out.

Here is what I wrote in my initial reply: Read more…

The current global economy has been a tough place for quite some time, and this week’s events on Wall Street aren’t providing any reassurance that things will pick up any time soon. Throw in a bleak forecast from the federal government, and it’s enough to make a marketer wonder which way to turn.

Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MarketingSherpa, and I had a recent chat on this very subject. She offered some advice to help focus marketing efforts, even when resources are tight.

It all begins with the lead …

Tight resources include time, staffing and budgets, and Jen says, “Because of this, the quick fix is sought after. The truth is, in order to get results and convert modern buyers in a struggling economy, we have to address the full spectrum of the funnel.”

She offered six big picture tactics to help uncover and convert new prospects: Read more…

Email marketers, start your engines! The MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Awards contest is now under way. Enter today for your chance to win this year’s grand prize – a paid trip for two to Email Summit 2012 in Las Vegas. The contest is sponsored by Responsys, and entry is free-of-charge.

I recently received a stark reminder of the types of emails we look for in our “Best Email Innovation” category. Anna Yeaman, Creative Director at Style Campaign, described to me a technology her team developed that can dynamically update an email’s images at the time of opening.

For example, Style Campaign tested this system last year by sending a holiday email to its subscribers. The email gradually revealed a fun holiday image over the course of the day. Subscribers could see a little more of the image each time they checked the email, even if they had previously checked a few seconds earlier. The campaign featured a new image each day for five days.

“This was the first deployment of our dynamic imaging technology. We really wanted to test the whole proof-of-concept and see if we could get users to re-open the same email again and again over a period of time,” Yeaman says.

The test proved successful. Stats include: Read more…

Sometimes it’s helpful to challenge the model. And from time to time here on the MarketingSherpa blog, I’ll risk alienating my marketing blogger colleagues by publishing a post that calls into question what everyone else is writing about.

Ah, who am I kidding, I love stirring up the pot.

Today I want to talk about the “Old Rules of Marketing.” If you listen to the conventional wisdom, the old rules of marketing are dead, and there are absolutely new, ingenious, never before-thought-of ways that we’re supposed to market.

So I went up into my attic, dusted off my trusty tome “Ye Olde Rules o’ Marketyng” (picture one of those scenes where Indiana Jones opens a crypt that’s been closed for centuries) and I found…

Well…

Actually, the old rules of marketing are pretty darn good. See, all this digital stuff is pretty cool, and has certainly changed a lot of things. But we – you, me, and the other 6 billion or so inhabitants of our planet – are pretty darn similar to the people that came before us. Human nature has not changed as quickly as communication technology.

After all, in the end, “People don’t buy from websites, people buy from people” as Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, of MECLABS has said.

Sure the media you use to communicate with your potential customers may have changed, but the fact that you are communicating with potential customers has not. So let’s take a look at some of the old rules of marketing that I learned when I was just an eager young marketing pup, and see what you can still learn from them today … Read more…

When you think of marketing automation software, you likely think about B2B companies with those long sales cycles, and extensive lead nurturing and scoring to help move prospects through the pipeline. Because at B2C companies the distance from prospective customer to paying customer can be so short, realistically, marketing automation isn’t a necessary tool for many consumer marketers.

And just because marketing automation isn’t a great fit for many B2Cs, it certainly deserves more attention at any company with a longer sales process. Read more…