About MarketingSherpa Blog

MarketingSherpa is a publisher focused on reporting on inspirational stories of customer-first marketing. Our goal — to give marketers of the world the stats, inspiration and instructions to improve their results.

Since 1999, we’ve published 8,508 (and counting) case studies, how-tos, charts, blog posts, videos, publications, events and webinars, which can be searched in the MarketingSherpa library.

Our name “Sherpa” refers admiringly to the Sherpas of Nepal who guide climbers up Mount Everest. Our goal is to be your friendly guides who help you on your tough climb toward more effective customer-first marketing results.

Our offices are located in Jacksonville, FL, at MECLABS Institute. MarketingSherpa is a subsidiary of MECLABS, a research organization dedicated to discovering how people make choices. MECLABS provides research, education and services backed by customer-first science.

How can our content serve you better? Let us know by emailing customer.service@marketingsherpa.com

MarketingSherpa LLC
320 1st St North
Suite 603
Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250

The MarketingSherpa Bloggers

		Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute Daniel oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the marketing direction for MECLABS Institute — digging for actionable discoveries while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine — from Web clinics to Research Journals to the blog. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications — a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 18 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement and field marketing communications. Blog Posts | LinkedIn | Twitter
		Austin McCraw, Senior Director, Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute From Web clinics to certification courses, Austin works behind the scenes to bring our research analysts’ discoveries to our audience in clear and creative ways. Before joining MarketingExperiments, Austin was the Promotions Director for a PBS affiliate in Gainesville where he was in charge of publicizing local and national programming. A graduate of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, Austin specializes in new media and video production by day and producing family memories with his wife and two children by night. Blog Posts | LinkedIn | Twitter
		Linda Johnson, Copy Editor, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute Linda oversees the technical integrity of the content for MarketingSherpa, MarketingExperiments and MECLABS Institute. She places special emphasis on clarifying the writer’s intentions while preserving the writer’s voice. But first and foremost, Linda is an educator. Before joining the team, she was an educational consultant, a blogger and a freelance writer for various print and digital magazines. Her focus is on simplifying complex topics for all kinds of learners, including aspiring marketers. Linda believes in living life on purpose. Blog Posts

Other MarketingSherpa team members, present and retired, and contributing partners include: Dr. Chuck Coker, Kaci Bower, Stonie Clark, Adam T. Sutton, Todd Lebo, David Meerman Scott, Bob Heyman, Jen Doyle, Brad Bortone, Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe, Jeanne S. Jennings, Chris Heine, Stefan Tornquist, Anne Holland, Sean Donahue, Natalie Myers, Boris Grinkot, Tom Sather, Jay Baer, Marcus Sheridan, Justin Bridegan, Chad Divine, Jonathan Greene, Rachel Minion, Eric Coffman, Allison Banko, Brittany Long, John Nye, Erin Hogg, Taylor Kennedy, David Kirkpatrick, John Tackett, Matthew Hertzman, Taylor Lightfoot, Philip Axelrod, Daniel Beulah, Maria Lopez, Beata Bordas, Lauren Pitchford, John Cockburn, Kayla Cobb, Jessica Lorenz, Shelby Dorsey, Kylie Hyer, Joey Taravella, Andrea Johnson, Brian Carroll, Emily Rogers, Emily Munns, Martha Faulk, Jon Powell, Shaun James, Spencer Whiting, Regina Love, Liva LaMontagne, Tony Doty, Susan Warren, Brent Knauff, Courtney Eckerle, Michael Groszek, Ashley Lazo, Ken Bowen, Greg Hamilton, Annie Summerall, Tara Marotta, Gina Greco, Rebecca Strally and Paul Cheney.

So, how’s this for a business model? An “ongoing T-shirt design competition.”

Well, that’s the way Threadless keeps hip people in hip T-shirts. And with a business model like that, you need A LOT of engagement and interaction with your customers…key marketing buzzwords for 2011.

To get a behind-the-scenes look at how the online T-shirt retailer works its mojo, you can attend the “Growing Email Lists and Engaging Customers with Social Media” how-to panel at Email Summit 2011 in Las Vegas (January 24-26). Liz Ryan, Email Marketing Manager, Threadless, will be one of the panelists.

To give us a quick glimpse into the Threadless marketing machine (or, perhaps, marketing loom), Liz was kind enough to answer the following  questions…

Threadless has more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter. What can you possibly be tweeting about that’s so interesting?

Liz Ryan: We wouldn’t have much to say if it weren’t for our awesome community. The majority of our tweets focus on our community-submitted tee shirt designs, voting, and community events. We also of course tweet about any specials on pricing, shipping and new products.

Sometimes we tweet on things going on at HQ, live stream of a band playing in the warehouse, DJ or holiday party. Other times it’s an interview with our founder, Jake Nickell, an event we’re participating in, or a Threadspotting – celebrities in Threadless shirts.

Our marketing team has autonomy over the channels we manage. So there is a flexibility and authenticity to the way we manage social media. We tweet about what we want to tweet about without approvals, executive sign offs and strict calendars.

It’s collaborative in that email, social, public relations and advertising work together to make sure messaging is cohesive, but other than that we have complete control over our channels.

Part of your panel is about “…and Engaging Customers with Social Media.” When we hear about social media, we hear a lot about engagement. But how can marketers move customers beyond just engagement to action?

LR: Give them something to take action on.

As marketers, we’re used to pushing information at consumers. We have to change that dynamic and give them something worth pulling and something worth doing:

• Open dialog – At Threadless, we provide an opportunity to have an open dialog with the Threadless team and other community members and an opportunity to take action. That might mean buying a tee shirt, but we also place a high priority on inspiring our community to submit a design, or to vote on designs, or comment on designs, or blog, or come out to a stop on our tour, or post a photo.
• Incentives – We not only provide information about what’s going on with Threadless, but we give our community incentives to take action on promotions – whether it’s a giveaway on Twitter, trivia on Facebook, or responding to a blog post.
• Don’t micro-manage – We don’t micro-manage our community involvement on comments to each other regarding their work. We give our community the power and voice to be Threadless and they take it from there.

Threadless is a “community-centered online apparel store.” I got that information, by the way, from Wikipedia, which, of course, is also collaborative. Marketers are increasingly looking to leverage community-based models – from creating Super Bowls ads to creating, as you do, T-shirts. And, when you think community, most people naturally think of social media. But is an email list a community as well?

LR: Absolutely, email is the original social media. As email marketers, we struggle with making email a two-way interaction. There have been groups and listserv since email was invented, but how do you scale that to one million plus email subscribers?

It’s important we don’t silo email as a solitary channel. At Threadless, we use email to help guide subscribers to our site with newsletters that highlight our latest designs.

We encourage discussion about the designs, the company and our community through blogs and social media channels. It doesn’t make sense to ask one million subscribers to respond to an email, so it alone is not always a two-way channel, but absolutely we respond to emails if someone does reply to our email.

We also respond to our community’s preferences to not receive all our emails or to get info on new designs through social channels only, or maybe you only want to hear about sales. Great! Email is a channel by which we can serve our community, and through that sell some tee shirts.

Your community of 1.3 million regularly votes on their favorite T-shirts. Why? In other words, in possibly a combination to my two previous questions, what motivates them to act?

LR: We give them the platform by which to act, and they are motivated by each other, the community itself. They’re generally supportive of one another’s efforts and feel the need to give feedback to fellow artists. They also feel emboldened to choose new tees to be printed. Their participation can directly affect which shirts are available to buy.

Since you are essentially crowdsourcing your main products, your T-shirt creators aren’t punching a clock at Threadless HQ, I would imagine you would want to keep a pretty close eye on the competition. After all, they could steal not just some of your best product ideas, but also the very people who created the T-shirt designs. What kind of competitive analysis do you perform?

LR: We keep an eye out on other graphic tee companies, but because our business model is ever evolving, we don’t worry so much about what other companies are doing as much as our focus on giving our community what they want – multiple platforms to display their art while providing outlets to give and receive feedback to each other.

I do however receive emails from other tee-shirt lines. In general I am constantly monitoring retailers’ email programs to see what others in the space are doing in terms of messaging, cadence and any deliverability issues they may have.

My favorite T-shirt on Threadless is…

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator

What’s yours?

LR: As a zombie culture fan, I love The Horde. As a mom, I’m really into the Threadless Kids! line, especially the new longsleeves. Running Rhino is one of my all time favorite designs.

Related Resources

Social Marketing: Twitter contest boosts followers 43%

Social Media Marketing: How enterprise-level social media managers handle negative sentiment

Improve Your Facebook Profile to Increase Consumer Interaction: 4 Tactics (Members’ Library)

New MarketingSherpa Inbound Marketing Newsletter

Twitter ‘Teaser’ Campaign Supports One-Day Sale: 5 Steps to a 4% Conversion from Tweets (Members’ Library)

Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to chat with Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research at MECLABS, the parent company for MarketingSherpa, about the current state of B2B marketing, and what marketers can look forward to in 2011.

Our discussion covered three main areas — the alignment of Marketing and Sales, marketing automation tools and marketing operations as new a position within Marketing — and how all three are related.

For those attending MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 (January 24-26 in Las Vegas), Brian will be moderating a panel entitled, “How to Develop Content for Specific Buying Stages” as a B2B breakout session on Day 2.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

B2B marketers are being pressured to prove their value, particularly in terms of being able to contribute measurable revenue, and the struggle is that marketers are not fully in control of the process. Essentially marketers do not get to own a lead from first contact to close. Leads are generated and at some point the baton is handed to Sales to, “run the race and win,” as Brian put it.

He explained to me, “A lot of marketers don’t really understand the challenges facing salespeople today because they haven’t been a salesperson themselves. So there is the age-old debate around Sales and Marketing alignment, which is — Marketing wishes salespeople would act on their leads and give them feedback, and the salespeople wish that Marketing would actually give them leads, or at least more of the good leads and less of the bad, because they want real opportunities.”

Brian said the big theme is: the alignment of Sales and Marketing will drive results from the top of the funnel to the bottom line. Many B2B marketers understand that aligning Marketing and Sales is a net gain for both departments and the entire company, and evidence of that can be found in the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report where research found that lead quality is a top priority for B2B marketers.

And to go back to Marketing proving its value in terms of revenue? Brian said the key metric more and more executives are looking to Marketing for is the expense-to-revenue ratio, that is, the expense of marketing efforts to the revenue produced.

Marketing Automation

According to Brian, marketing automation is not going to solve every problem, but it’s a great start to help marketers. He did caution that often starting a marketing automation effort can expose more problems than it solves. It can expose things like the weakness of the data quality marketers are using. So it’s important to remember marketing automation is a tool, but it won’t do the work for you.
He said many marketers are using marketing automation mostly as an email tool, and this usage can expose the lack of a content strategy.

“Most people are still doing ‘batch-and-blast’ campaigns to lists that aren’t very targeted,” Brian told me.

This ties back into the alignment between Sales and Marketing, because better alignment will, hopefully, help bring about a content strategy, clarity of the value proposition, effective lead qualification and a lead nurturing process.

Marketing Operations

During our talk, Brian said, “I think what’s really needed is new position within Marketing which is called ‘marketing operations,’ and what that entails is really working to understand how Marketing is interfacing with the different operational aspects of the company — including Sales, including IT, including Finance — because those are all the places that marketing needs to go to get the data points that they need in order to prove their value.

“And on the other side of that is they are often going to be interfacing with the product development, or R&D, inside the company as well.”

He added that when marketing automation exposes problems, it will be up to marketers to really act as leaders inside their companies to teach and explain, and to not just report data, but to give real insight to the executive suite. When the CEO asks why only 1000 emails were sent to a list of over 10,000, the marketer is ready to explain those 1000 addresses were created by a high-level segmentation and that targeted list represents 70% of the revenue opportunities for the year.

He thinks when marketers can achieve better alignment with Sales and are prepared to explain and lead, they will do a better job of marketing inside the company. And that will make their marketing outside the company more effective as well.

Related Resources

Email Marketing Summit 2011

Fostering Sales-Marketing Alignment: A 5-Step Lead Management Process (MarketingSherpa Members’ Library)

2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Marketing Career: Can you explain your job to a six-year-old?

Marketing Leader’s Perspective: No cogs allowed in social media and content marketing

At MarketingSherpa, we’ve noticed that inbound marketing is a growing tactic that is starting to show consistent results for marketers, which is why we’re launching an Inbound Marketing newsletter in 2011. For example, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, the majority of B2B organizations are increasing their marketing budgets for inbound tactics like social media and SEO.

So, I was a little surprised by a recent statistic that came across my desk. Out of 534 Fortune 1000 CMOs surveyed byBlog2Print, only 23.2 % utilize corporate blogs. As a content marketing insider, I thought everyone and their sister (well, my sister is at least) is blogging. But that’s my problem. As a content marketing insider, I get all tingly when I see my blogs’ names up in lights on a tree (no, that’s not a Christmas reference. For a creative interesting inbound marketing tactic, check out The Blog Tree by Eloqua and Jess3. And thanks, Joe!)

So I pulled another Sherpa book off my shelf (the 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, for those keeping score at home), and noticed that while marketers find blogging to be one of the most effective social media tactics (behind only blogger relations and microblogging), it is also one of the most difficult (second only to blogger relations).

So, to help you kick start your blog in the new year (or kick start the new year with a new blog), here’s a three-part answer to a question that I find marketers often struggle with: How can I get subject matter experts onto my corporate blog?

Step #1: Make it easier

While I have the luxury of a highly talented team of reporters and writers here on the MarketingSherpa blog, over on the MarketingExperiments blog we rely on subject matter experts who have better things to do than write blog posts. Their time is valuable. And one way they don’t want to spend it is figuring out a blog platform.

Yet, when I first started with that blog, our research analysts were publishing their own posts. They were going into WordPress, wrestling with picture layouts, the whole nine. We quickly removed that impediment. All we require is a poorly written Word document. Sometimes just an interview. Heck, once I even received a blog post written in Excel from a data analyst.

We don’t need their writing (or blog posting) skills. We can do that for them. We just want their subject matter expertise. Because these guys (and gals) are smart, and there is no way we can replicate their years of research and experience.

You might not have the exact same infrastructure, but ask yourself this – is there any way I can make the entire process easier? Ask them to forward an email they’ve already written. Take them for a walk and pick their brain. Heck, check out what they scribble on whiteboards throughout the day. After all, while they may be engineers or architects, they certainly aren’t writers. And they don’t need to be.

Step #2: Show them what they know

Another thing I’ve found with subject matter experts is that they are, as the name implies, experts. That means they have extremely deep knowledge. So, sometimes they set too high a bar for themselves. They don’t realize that their likely audience is not…well, experts. So when it comes to putting themselves out there in the world, they want to write a deep, knowledgeable post that will take them three weeks to compose and possibly will only be understood by three people.

Or they could swing in the other direction. They assume that everyone knows what they know and they would be mocked for even thinking about writing about such a simplistic topic. “Pssshhh. Everyone knows a 3.89-meter transinducer couldn’t stand up to the shock of multiple neutron bomb strikes with a 12 parsec velocity” Substitute the word “transinducer” with “server specs” or “mortgage regulations” and you’ll likely face the same challenge.

It’s something we wrestle with on our blogs as well. Where is the sweet spot? We don’t want to write content that is too elementary or too advanced. But sometimes I overshoot as well and forget that simple blog posts can be very helpful, as we’ve found with recent blog posts about email marketing and landing page optimization.

So challenge your SMEs (I love that abbreviation…so Peter Pan-esque) with this question – if I was new to our industry, what are the first three things you would want me to know? A treasure trove of blog post lies in the answer to that question.

Step #3: Reward them (differently)

While doing good is its own reward, writing a blog post is not. It’s one more task you’re throwing onto an already too big heap. After all, they (like you) are busy.

And, essentially, what you’re trying to do here is make a sale. Getting a subject matter expert to write a blog post is a conversion. So work up some of your marketing mojo and make sure there is a true value exchange. You are buying some of their precious and scarce time, and what do you have to offer in return?

While it is part of everybody’s job to help make the company more successful, in fairness, you will be getting more than you’re giving. Still, it’s important to reward your SMEs (more than Captain Hook did for Mr. Smee, that’s for sure) for the time and effort they put in to help grease the wheels for you as you try to get future blog posts from that subject matter expert.

But there is no one-size-fits-all solution that makes a good reward for a blog post. So, you must ask yourself – what motivates my subject matter experts? Here are a few types of subject matter experts and the rewards that might be most helpful to them (most people are a combination of the below archtypes):

• The Aspiring Industry Rock Star – Show them all the recognition they’re getting around the Web and particularly in your industry. Show them how their post was tweeted or quoted by an industry luminary.
• The Plumber – As Eddie Vedder said, “I want to be the plumber of rock stars.” Some people just like helping others and making a difference. For these people, share feedback you’ve received from your audience showing them how they helped move the needle in people’s careers and in their lives.
• The Ladder Climber – For these people, it’s all about career growth. So, do what you’re doing for the plumbers and the rock stars, just make sure that their boss (and their boss’s boss) knows about it as well.
• The Bottom Liner – It’s all about the Benjamins, baby. One of the reasons we all work, we all leave our loved ones and head out on that 6:35 train, is for filthy lucre. Try to work with your management in getting a little something extra for bloggers. A $25 Starbucks gift card for the blogger with the most tweets every month. A small year-end bonus for the person with the most comments. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth properly incenting.

And always, always, always give credit where it’s due. Speaking of which, thanks to Ruth White-Cabbell of Cisco for a conversation that inspired this post, and our own Joelle Parra for copy editing and Sean Kinberger for designing and posting what you just read.

Related resources

Create and Manage a Team-Authored Blog: 8 steps to reap SEO gains

How to Keep Your Blog Out of a Courtroom – Advice from a Legal Pro on Providing, Creating Content – Member’s Library

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly research Journal, Q3 2010

photo by: Mai Le

Kristin Zhivago, a longtime friend of MarketingSherpa, has over 30 years of experience working toward improving the alignment between Sales and Marketing. Through her company, Zhivago Management Partners, she works as a “revenue coach” for entrepreneurs and CEOs at companies from startups to Fortune 500 firms.

Her current focus is on making the entire sales and marketing process more customer-centric, and a major part of that effort is to conduct research and actually map out the customer’s buying process. This process is unique down to different customer groups (such as an IT buyer versus a C-level buyer) for specific products at specific companies.

Four product and service categories

During a recent conversation about how to create a customer-centric marketing organization at a B2B firm, Kristin also offered an interesting insight that applies to B2C marketers as well. After being part of mapping many customer buying processes for many different products at different companies, she developed the idea that all products and services fall into one of four categories based on the amount of scrutiny the customer applies to the buying process:

• Light scrutiny products are impulse purchases and relatively inexpensive trinkets. She describes them as, “checkout counter” stuff.
• Medium scrutiny products include items such as clothing. There are questions, but usually only one buyer, and these products run from the tens, to the hundreds, of dollars.
• Heavy scrutiny products include items like cars and houses. Zhivago says they involve contracts, salepeople and possibly a demonstration or some other type of try-it-before-you-buy-it. Heavy scrutiny products involve lots of questions and most likely multiple buyers.
• Intense scrutiny is everything involved with heavy scrutiny, plus, as Zhivago puts it, “you get married.”Intense scrutiny products involve some measure of ongoing services.

Knowing what category the product or service you are selling falls under is key to implementing the correct strategies for marketing to customers.

Marketing to the wrong category

Treating a light scrutiny product as though it was a medium scrutiny product only serves to waste sales and marketing resources. Little stuff like money and time.

And treating a heavy, or even intense, scrutiny product or service like it was merely a medium scrutiny product is a recipe for disaster. The customer has a page full of detailed questions and is looking for a little hand-holding while the company is whistling and tapping its foot with arms crossed, so to speak, and thinking, “Why don’t they just buy the thing already?”

Kristin told me she came up the four product categories after seeing companies making both of the above mistakes over and over again. As she put it, once a company knows what category their product or service falls under, they can stop making stupid mistakes like churning out newsletters teaching people how to chew gum.

I don’t know about you, but I think I have gum chewing pretty nailed down.

Related Resources

Guided by Buyers: Four tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy (Open access until 12/25)

Conversion Window: How to find the right time to ask your customer to act

Kristin Zhivago Reveals What Businesses are Doing Right — and What They Are Doing Very, Very Wrong

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy)

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…that is, unless you’re trying to minimize the amount of extra work you need to do before the calendar flips to 2011. Every December, my inbox lights up like Rockefeller Center, filled with email and social media requests from various publications asking me to submit my thoughts about the year that’s ending, and the one yet to come.

These crowdsourcing efforts are a great opportunity for so-called “personal branding” and “thought leadership” for the average marketer. But as much as I’d love to share my ideas with every one of these outlets, like many of you, I simply don’t have the time to do so. So when I do take the time, I want to make sure my ideas get picked. But what stands out?

How to grab attention

Well this year I have a unique perspective on the topic because I’m sitting on the other side of the submission form as well – I’m editing MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Wisdom Report. If you’re not familiar with our Wisdom Report, it’s a little New Year’s gift we distribute free to our audience of 237,000 readers. You can take a look at last year’s Wisdom Report for real-life stories and lessons from 70 of your fellow client- and agency-side marketers to see what I’m talking about.

Based on this experience, I’ve discovered an area that I’ve gained significant wisdom in – crafting a successful crowdsourcing submission. So if you do take the time to share your knowledge, it’s worth your while. (Some of this might apply to you public relations folks as you pitch media outlets as well.) And if you’d like to share your wisdom with our audience, I’m all ears.

1. Sometimes, simpler is better.

As much as we love to hear results, it’s not necessary to provide us your company’s bottom line or a three-part novella in order to have your entry published in the Wisdom Report. Sometimes, the simplest, most concise entry can evoke more inspiration than reams of positive results. Below are two of our favorites from the 2010 Wisdom Report (and based on feedback we received, they were among your favorites, as well):

“Consistently recognize the individual efforts of team members. Be specific. Be appreciative. Especially this year – when budgets are tight, tensions are high, and pay raises but a dream – affirmation and acknowledgement becomes even more meaningful. Making it a point to do this can positively alter the culture of an organization. I’ve seen it happen!”

And of course, there’s always the “Golden Rule”:

“Never undermine people who are working for/with you, and who you are working for…”

If that doesn’t qualify as universal wisdom, I’m not sure what does.

2. Be honest. Be yourself. Be real.

A trite platitude? Perhaps. But not all platitudes are without value. Each year, the Wisdom Report provides a forum for marketers to speak candidly about both successes and failures, explaining how their outcomes become lessons – lessons that provide a basis for future planning and a better understanding of their respective situations.

And, with the country still struggling within a tough economy, there are undoubtedly many of you who were forced to find new ways and means to stay afloat – and stay profitable – in 2010. You’re not alone.

As much as necessity is the mother of invention, our recent economic struggles have to be considered the mother of innovation – innovation that drove you to maximize limited marketing budgets, test new ideas and hopefully, create new opportunities to build upon for future success.

In short, the most successful Wisdom Report submissions are the ones that put aside the usual posturing and marketing-speak, and replace them with honest reflection to be shared with your peers.

~~~~~~~

As mentioned earlier, with each year that we publish the Wisdom Report, we also receive an increasing number of entries that deviate from our intended focus. These “rogue” entrants often choose to entertain more than enlighten, and promote more than they inspire. Because of this, they also don’t get in.

Let’s discuss what not to do when composing your 2011 Wisdom Report entry.

3. Laughter isn’t always the best medicine…especially when the medicine isn’t funny in the first place.

I think we all know, whenever you post an online entry form, you run the risk of a few attention-starved individuals (or bots) trying to garner a few seconds in the spotlight.  Sometimes these submissions can be amusing. Sometimes, they even contain a modicum of relevance to the topic at hand. But most of the time, Web-trolling Shecky Greenes provide entries more akin to this 2009 slice of hilarity:

“You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.”
— H. Jass, (company and location unknown)

First off, this is a family publication, so I’ll just let you figure out what the “H” in this person’s name actually represents. But more importantly, this one-liner wouldn’t sound right coming out of my crazy uncle’s mouth, much less that of a respected marketer.  This is more an example of failed spam filter than it is a legitimate submission.  But, as you’ll see, humor doesn’t quite get the job done in the following entry, either:

“If it ain’t broke, you probably haven’t tested it in Outlook or Internet Explorer yet.”

Yes, this is a more intelligent, amusing entry than the one above. But it’s still not exactly “wisdom,” now is it? Since our website and publications reach a fairly targeted audience, it’s safe to assume that this person isn’t just an Internet wise guy, but more likely a marketer who believed that this humor would somehow fit right alongside submissions from our focused, business-minded reader population.

Had this entry been accompanied by an anecdote explaining how his/her company saved money in a tough economy by eschewing enterprise software for open source offerings, then the quote isn’t only amusing, but also relevant to a broader audience.

4. Proofreading proves wisdom.

One thing that remains great about the Wisdom Report each year is how it allows marketers to represent themselves, and their companies, in their own words, rather than through homogenized “marketing-speak.” This is why it’s so important to spend a few minutes reviewing your submission, rather than quickly hammering out an entry replete with typos, grammatical errors and other mistakes that could possibly present you in a less-than-flattering light.

Note that we only edit submissions for simple errors. If a submission is written in a way that makes it difficult to decipher, we simply don’t use it, even if it contains a wealth of valuable information underneath the typos. It’s not feasible for us to contact you for clarification, nor do we publish inaccurate, error-filled copy.

Bottom line – a few extra minutes with a red pen could garner your words – and possibly, your company – some very valuable exposure with our readership. Don’t let your haste turn into our waste.

One example of this is an excerpt from last year’s Wisdom Report:

“Ranking Ranking..I want our site to be ranked number 1..” Sounds familiar ? From your clients ? Or from your management ? Many site owners fall into this, even till the extend of entering keywords they feel they should be ranked the number 1 spot which they haven’t. And they could rant on and on with ever debates on keyword rankings. Without even realizing does the ranking actually correlate to targeted traffic and eventually successful conversions which relates back to the overall business goals and objectives…”

As you can see, this person clearly had a number of thoughts about SEO and search marketing. But, while the “stream of consciousness” tone gives this entry a sense of enthusiasm, it was simply too grammatically poor to enter as-is.

Because of the inherent value in this person’s complete submission, we chose to edit and use it in the book. But, once we begin rewriting a submission for grammar and punctuation, it can no longer truly be considered “in your own words” – which simply isn’t in line with the spirit of this publication.

5. Show, don’t tell. And no matter what, please don’t sell.

I can already hear the uproar – “How are we supposed to discuss our successes without promoting our [companies/products/brands/taglines/other]???”

Simple.  Tell us a story that has universal value – value that can be applied across tactics, industries, borders and cultures. Tell us what worked and what didn’t. Tell us about creative new risks or your back-to-basics approach.  Don’t just tell us that you’re even more amazing than you already were – tell us why and how you’ve improved.

Once more with feeling, from the 2010 Wisdom Report:

“My embroidery and logowear business, [company name], is one of only a few in our industry to find success using a Web-based model, and I’m convinced it’s because we’ve been able to take our key differentiators — including exceptional customer service — and effectively communicate them to an online audience…”

The above is the (submitted) opening line from one of last year’s contributors. At its core, this is a very strong sentence that serves to introduce a solid anecdote about simplicity in Web design and online forms. The problem is that in order to get to that solid anecdote, you had to endure a) the company name and target market, b) a self-serving statement about the company’s superiority in its space, and c) a thinly-veiled pat on the back.

It’s not that the company doesn’t deserve accolades. It’s that only after the reader gets past this boilerplate copy does the submission demonstrate its true value. And, following some extensive details, we read:

“Conversions increased 49 percent with the new form, cementing for us the idea that people want to do business with people, not with Web sites.”

This simple statement offers us a concrete metric, and more importantly, a statement about how this new tactic led to a valuable lesson that is applicable beyond this specific business.

I think you get the point.

We’re sure you’ve got a great story to tell that will help make us all better marketers in 2011. And we look forward to reading them.

Related resources

Submit your 2011 Wisdom Report entry

2010 MarketingSherpa Wisdom Report

Public Relations: The best press release is no press release

“The best research is when individuals pull out their wallet and vote with cold, hard cash.” – my first boss

My first experience in marketing was working with a specialized publishing company. I had the privilege to work on exciting products with sexy topics such as “human resource compliance regulations.” Trust me when I tell you there is no better ice-breaker at a party than talking about a ground-breaking court ruling that will change how your company meets compliance of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

As a publisher, we used direct-response marketing to drive sales, with an aggressive program of direct-mail, email and telemarketing. And when it came to new product development, we were big believers in research. From customer surveys to industry research to focus groups, we used it all to make the best possible decision. At least, that was the general assumption…

Out of focus

You always have to test because many research tactics just help you achieve a best guess. And while a best guess is often closer to the truth than a random guess, it’s sometimes widely off the mark. In fact, I learned a valuable lesson one day when our company performed a focus group.

The members of this particular focus group were subscribers of a paid newsletter, and we knew that each person had subscribed by responding to a specific direct mail piece. That mail piece was extremely effective, with a powerful but somewhat provocative subject line and letter. Many people loved that direct-mail piece, but many hated it, so we wanted to get the opinion of the focus group members. When we showed the group the direct-mail piece and asked them if they would respond to that piece, 40 percent said they would never respond (if they only knew what we knew). Wow, we were shocked!

So, should we conclude that those 40% were bold-faced liars? Not necessarily. What we can conclude is that what people say they will do and what they actually do may be totally different. That is why research is only part of the equation, but if you want to sleep well at night, you have to take the next step…

Voting with their wallets

At the end of the day, the best research was when we tested the product and let the customers in the marketplace determine with their wallet if it was a viable product. We would test critical elements, like book title and price, and very quickly we would know if we had a winner or not.

Yes, all of the surveys and research were necessary to get started, but the most critical research was in our testing program. Testing is an amazing research tool. Regardless of the conversion you are trying to achieve, when your prospect takes (or doesn’t take) an action, you a have a valuable piece of information. Your conversion goal may be an event ticket sale, a white paper download, an email newsletter signup, or hundreds of other possible actions, but one thing never changes – the action you are seeking to drive can be tracked.

And if you’re ready to measure when your prospect engages with you, that is when the learning begins.

So, I’m thankful for that boss early in my career telling me repeatedly that the best research is when individuals pull out their wallet and vote with cold-hard cash. Over the years, I’ve had many experiences when individuals tell me they are going to do something but until they actually do it, I’m a little skeptical. (Editor’s Note: It’s true. Todd told me he was going to write a blog post for quite awhile. Now, I believe it.)

So gather as much research as possible, but always remember that cold, hard cash is a pretty sweet piece of research.

Related resources

Are Surveys Misleading? 7 Questions for Better Market Research (Members Library)

Marketing Research and Surveys: There are no secrets to online marketing success in this blog post

Focus Groups Vs. Reality: Would you buy a product that doesn’t exist with pretend money you don’t have?

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

Social media marketing often involves interacting with your audience and giving it what it wants — whether it wants high quality content, customer service or something else. Consistently meeting these goals helps build a following on the networks.

Neil Bhapkar, Online Marketing Manager, Kobo, and his team had followings on Facebook and Twitter, but wanted to boost Twitter followers last August. The marketing team at the global e-book retailer had experimented with a Twitter contest earlier in the year, and wanted to give it another shot with a heavier marketing push.

Kobo had about 4,600 Twitter followers at the time. Although Bhapkar did not consider Twitter to be his team’s most impactful channel, he felt that holding a contest on the network could help boost followers while further engaging Kobo’s online audience.

“I would call it efficient because it’s not overly costly,” Bhapkar says. “It’s a unique way to push the envelope in how we’re engaging with our customers and getting them to spread the word about Kobo.”

Promote contest through multiple channels

The team designed a contest to give away three of Kobo’s eReaders. People who followed Kobo received one entry into the contest. Additional entries could be received by tweeting a book recommendation with the @Kobo tag. For example:

“My favorite books is Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain @Kobo”

The team explained these rules on a contest landing page (pictured here). The page also included:
o Picture of the eReaders
o Countdown clock
o Links to share the landing page via Twitter, Facebook or email
o Official contest rules.

The contest lasted 10 days, during which the team promoted the contest in the following channels:

– Email

Just a few hours after announcing the campaign on Twitter, the team sent an email to its house list describing the rules and linking to the landing page. This was the only email sent to its list for the effort. The team’s parent company, Indigo Books & Music, also added a button in its email newsletter linked to the contest landing page.

– Homepage banner

The team posted a large image on its homepage, just below the fold, mentioning the campaign and linking to the landing page.

– Social media

The team launched the contest on Twitter using software from Offerpop, through which they also monitored its progress. The team reminded Twitter followers about the contest about five times over the 10-day span.

“Whenever the launch happens, there’s a first burst of activity and then it flattens,” Bhapkar says. “The best way to reinvigorate it is by tweeting to our follower base to remind them of what is happening.”

The team also mentioned the contests to its Facebook followers.

– Paid search

The team ran paid search advertising in Google for branded keywords such as “kobo ereader” and linked the ads to the contest landing page.

More engagement from relevant offer

After 10 days, the team closed the contest, randomly picked three winners and reached out to them with direct Twitter messages. Results the team saw include:
o 43.5% increase in Twitter followers
o Reached about 500,000 Twitter users with tweets related to the campaign
o More engagement with Kobo’s audience

“It was surprising how engaged some of the most active followers were. Some people didn’t stop at having just one recommendation or two. They actually had double digits; 10, 20. They were really interested in pushing their recommendations…not just in spurts but throughout the duration of the contest,” Bhapkar says.

By crafting an offer sure to interest Kobo’s followers and by encouraging more engagement, the team concentrated more energy into its Twitter campaign and saw an appreciable lift in followers. Due to its low cost, the campaign proved to be an efficient means for increasing Kobo’s following online, Bhapkar says.

Related resources

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report

Social Media Marketing: How enterprise-level social media managers handle negative sentiment

The swirling vortex of shopping and hype that is affectionately known as Black Friday to Cyber Monday always draws plenty of ink, both virtual and actual. Here at MarketingSherpa we prefer metrics to hype, and real world stories over vague lifestyles “reporting.” With that in mind, following are some facts about this past Monday online, a chart and below the fold an entire host of actual reactions to Cyber Monday from e-tailers, industry insiders and more.

Just the facts, ma’am

• Email is big this year – Experian CheetahMail found email volume around Black Friday was up 23 percent over 2009
• This year’s Cyber Monday was the most profitable e-commerce day in the history of the Internet
• ComScore found online retailers broke the $1 billion sales barrier, a 16 percent increase over last year
• More than nine million people shopped on Cyber Monday – up four percent over 2009 – and spent an average of $114.24
• Amazon won the most trafficked Cyber Monday e-commerce site title
• Walmart was the most searched term on Cyber Monday
• US visits to the top 500 retail sites were up 16 percent
• Search and cross-shopping across other retailers sites accounted for 44 percent of referrals last week

And now the chart …

Head below the fold for Cyber Monday reactions … Read more…

“Would you like to hear a secret? Do you promise not to tell?” John, Paul, George and Ringo knew how powerful secrets are, as does every Internet marketing “expert” who has ever written a blog post.

Well, I’m sorry, but MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments don’t have any secrets to share with you. The only effective strategy I’ve ever seen is hard work and experimentation. Not only do we not have secrets for you, we don’t really even have any answers. But, we can help you ask the right questions.

Question everything

“My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, ‘So, did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference, asking good questions, made me become a scientist.”
– Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi, discovered nuclear magnetic resonance

And do we ever raise those questions. Like a recent article by Senior Reporter Adam T. Sutton, Are Surveys Misleading? 7 Questions for Better Market Research. When Adam first showed me the article, I knew it would be a little controversial, so I pushed him a little harder than normal in the editing process. Look at the results, and I think you’ll agree that Adam delivered. (If not, I want to hear about it.)

I was a little surprised that the biggest challenge came from within my own company, though. MECLABS Director of Research, Sergio Balegno, questioned the article’s affront to online surveys. Sergio’s a smart guy, so when he says something I listen. And I think he’s right. Well, kinda…

When online surveys are effective

For the kind of surveys Sergio’s team conducts, I believe surveys to be very effective. I use his team’s research all the time in trying to decide what content would be the most helpful for  MarketingExperiments’ and MarketingSherpa’s audiences.

click image to enlarge

The above referenced article, from a recent Chart of the Week email newsletter, questions B2B marketers about the SEO tactics they are currently using. Sergio and his team are not asking about a vaguely potential and highly personal decision somewhere down the road; they are simply asking which SEO tactics B2B marketers use, which were the most effective and which required the greatest level of effort? And here’s where you can learn from Sergio.

I believe surveys can be effective for:

• Gaining insights into current actions
• Deciphering opinions on specific subjects that the audience has a high-level knowledge about
• Getting some new ideas (essentially, crowdsourcing)

When online surveys are not effective

“Would you buy a product that doesn’t exist with pretend money you don’t have?” Yeah, there’s the rub…

Online surveys do not accurately predict actual customer behavior. Or, do they? Frankly, it’s just a shot in the dark. Your goal should be to try to truly gain knowledge about real-world situations that require complex, often counterintuitive decision-making processes that your subject may not even understand. Would a few questions on a Web page really help you gain that knowledge?

Online surveys are not effective when you’re trying to decipher:

• Potential consumer actions (such as a purchase)
• Potential B2B marketer purchase decisions very early in a sales cycle (too many variables)
• Highly sensitive information (if you disagree with this statement, please share your past three sexual experiences in the comments section of this blog)
• True sentiment on a complex topic that the survey respondent does not have expertise in. For example, 58 percent of Americans favor repeal of the new health care law, according to a recent Rasmussen Reports survey. Meanwhile, in a CBS/New York Times Poll, 41 percent of Americans favor repeal (stop and think about that for a second); and when people were actually told what features would be given up if the law is repealed, that number dropped to 25 percent.

Let’s do a little thought experiment, shall we? Write the answer to this question down on a piece of paper and bury it in your backyard… “How likely are you to buy each of the following in the next 12 months: regular mayonnaise, light mayonnaise, mayonnaise with olive oil, canola mayonnaise, low-fat mayonnaise?”

Now go leave yourself a reminder on Outlook for November 23, 2011 that says, “Dig up mayonnaise survey.” So, how accurate were you Carnac the Magnificent?

Only you can discover the marketing tactics that work best for your company

OK, I was a little too fresh up there, sorry about that. But I’m trying to help you understand this simple point (to annotate MasterCard)…there are some things in marketing that can’t be observed, for everything else try an online survey.

If you can’t observe the information you seek to obtain and there is a strong likelihood that your subjects know the answer, then a survey could be very helpful. In the example chart above, you likely could not observe the SEO tactics of 935 marketers and see into their brains to determine the effectiveness and effort required. Those respondents also likely know what SEO tactics they used, how well they worked and how much effort they required.

However, when you’re looking at potential customer actions, don’t try to ask prospective customers to predict what they might do under fictional, hypothetical circumstances. From the number of times I’ve asked my wife why she bought those shoes, believe me when I say she likely doesn’t know the answer herself.

Instead, simply observe their actual actions. And you can do that with real-world, real-time online testing.

After all, that is the real goal of all the information we provide. Again, we don’t write about secrets to Internet marketing success on MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa, and very rarely even give you any answers.

But we do help you ask the right questions and then do the experimentation (and hard work) necessary to determine what works best for your organization.

Related resources

2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Ask the Scientist: Price testing methods and practices

Anti-Crowdsourcing: On (not) getting marketing ideas from your customers