Kate Headen Waddell

Are You Mining Your Company’s Forgotten Gold?

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Savvy B2B Marketing Blog

One of the most overlooked veins of gold at most organizations is the “email list.” In a surprising number of companies, this list is dutifully compiled and then left in a dusty corner. No one seems to own it, and worse—no one seems to know what to do with it.

Old clients, current clients, prospective clients—it doesn’t matter. If you’re not doing all you can with that list you’re leaving prospects on the table. There simply is no better resource for dirt cheap lead generation out there. So, what should you be doing with your list?

Newsletters: Keep your email circle of friends up-to-date with the latest news about your company, your products and your industry. Keep it brief and to the point with links to deeper information on your website if necessary. Avoid fancy graphics and pictures that need special permission from the user to download.

Email blasts: If something big goes down—a new product release, a sizzling industry story, or a big “oops!” you need to explain, keep your email circle informed with a proactive email blast. Keep blasts to a minimum to decrease your unsubscribe rate.

Surveys: Surveys can help you get even MORE marketing gold from your customer base. It also brings participants into your inner circle and helps them feel more a part of the “family.” Offering a drawing for a gift certificate will help encourage folks to participate.

I once heard tell of a company that had an email list comprising nearly a half million names and addresses.  The list had grown from various sources over a period of years, and was spread across several departments that rarely communicated with each other. They had NEVER used for anything. Once they decided to start using it—to send out a series of newsletters, emails, and surveys—the response they got was amazing. Their open rates, click-through rates and participation rates were through the roof and their unsubscribe rates were remarkably low. It turns out that their email circle was just dying to get involved, and all they had to do was ask!

Kate Headen Waddell is a strategic copywriter specializing in web copy, white papers, case studies, solution briefs and other B2B marketing tools. You can visit her website at www.smartb2bmarcom.com.

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Ardath Albee

Lead Scoring with Juan Eloqua

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Marketing Interactions.

Eloqua has released the first in a series of B2B marketing guides labeled the Grande Guides. This first one is on Lead Scoring. To have a bit of fun, they’ve also created Juan Eloqua – who’s quite a Bold and Smoky guy whose specialty is growing fine coffee and, of course, revenues. If you haven’t met Juan, you should.

The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring is a nice educational piece. There’s plenty of explanation about what it is, why you need it and tips for creating a lead scoring model of your own.

So I won’t cover it here—go get your own copy.

What I want to discuss in this post is one of the predictions Eloqua makes at the end about the future of Lead Scoring. The second item on the list is content scoring:

<blockquote>“Content-based scoring. Companies that regularly refine their scoring models begin to notice patterns in lead quality that can be directly tied to the content that is accessed during the buying process. Advanced organizations are experimenting with scoring models based on content type – like whitepapers, product information and customer testimonials – instead of the download activity itself.”

I’d like to add a few ideas to their definition of content scoring. Learning more about content type is great. It can guide you to the types of content you produce, but that’s not nearly enough to help your content impact the buying process overall.

I suggest that we start looking at content groups or tracks – whatever you’d like to call them.

There are a couple of ways to think about content groups:

  • The content you use across the duration of a nurturing program. If your content is designed to answer prospects’ questions at each stage of the buying process, which content assets are getting the most attention? Take a look at what the content addresses. Find out from sales if this is a sticking point, slowing momentum. Perhaps you’ll need to create more of it. Also look at which content is getting the least attention. Is it in the wrong place in the track? Or is it answering a question your prospects don’t have?
  • All the content you have that addresses one problem-to-solution scenario, whether in your nurturing track or on your website, blog, etc. Are prospects seeking out related content in other locations? There should be a way to tag content so that marketers can say – show me the response to all the content that covers problem X. We should also be able to determine individual interest levels based on topic, not just types of content read.

Knowing that a prospect downloaded 5 white papers and 3 customer stories and 2 data sheets is one thing. Knowing that all of those resources are related to solving problem X can impact when you reach out as well as the quality of the conversations you’ll be able to have with the prospect.

With buyers’ expectations growing much faster than our abilities to engage them with added value, we need insights that help us to have better conversations, build our credibility and convince them that our company is the best choice to help them solve their problems.

The interest part of lead scoring needs to be based on a solid content strategy.

Ardath Albee is CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist for Marketing Interactions, Inc. Her new book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale was recently released by McGraw Hill.

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msweeney

Without an Action Plan, Market Research Is a Waste of Money

Abridged with the author’s permission from Marketing Trenches.

In many of our projects, we’re expected to either conceptualize, execute, or review various forms of research and testing. Some of it is what I’d call traditional market research, or an exploration of consumer attitudes towards a particular product. Some of it is usability research, or a test of how a user navigates through a particular website. Some of it is keyword research, used broadly to gauge demand or narrowly to forecast search engine marketing traffic and spending.

More often than not, the scenario looks like this. Expensive research firm is asked to provide insight into topic X, based on research and testing on potential consumers. Expensive research firm presents findings at the big annual meeting, and some of the data (in particular, the stuff that supports the CEO’s strategic direction) elicits the standard oohs and aahs as it appears magically on the PowerPoint. Here’s what typically happens next:

  • Research firm receives big check—job well done.
  • CEO or the sponsoring exec reminds everyone that the team now has a lot of material to digest, and that everyone needs to take this new data seriously.
  • There is an implied agreement that everyone is going to review the findings, and figure out how this data can be used to improve their function or department.

What actually happens? Nothing. Sure, an occasional email gets shot around—you know, the unproductive kind that involves 18 people—that cites stats from the research report as some type of justification for a new plan of attack.

But it typically ends at that. Why?

Because when research is ordered—be it extensive or narrow in scope—there is rarely a plan for how different individuals or entire departments are going to systematically review it, digest it, and incorporate it into their planning.

I happened to be privy to one of these planning emails last week, sent from the COO of a medium-sized software company to his staff regarding the group that was coming into to present some market research. I am paraphrasing to protect the innocent, but it read something like this:

The Johnny Come Lately Research Group is coming in to present its research next week. Let me remind you that we decided to hire and pay the Johnny Come Lately Research Group because many of you felt that we were flying blind in terms of the real demand and consumer attitudes towards our category of products. We know the research will be relevant and high quality, because we guided the entire process. Listen intently, because your teams will all have exactly one week to take what you heard and saw and work it into your 2011 plans. This data is not intended to represent cool numbers that we can throw at investors and partners, but rather data that shapes exactly how plan and execute in areas like products, services, communications, marketing, and business development.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Michael Sweeney is a managing partner at Right Source Marketing.

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Robert Rose

What to Do—and Not Do—When Your Social Web Strategy Blows Up

Abridged with the author’s permission from The Adaptive Marketer.

Earlier this year we all watched as Nestle suffered a major meltdown (forgive the pun) with its social web strategy when they didn’t react well to the Greenpeace campaign.

Then, last week two more, which gave us a great way to compare strategies.

First, the CEO of Target came under fire because he had donated $150,000 to the group MN Forward—which is running advertising for a Republican candidate who opposes same-sex marriage. As you might expect, Target’s Facebook page lit up with people calling for a boycott.

Despite the fact that their CEO apologized and offered a statement on the matter, Target still hasn’t acknowledged on their Facebook page anything at all. They seem to be ignoring it completely. And look what’s happened. The conversation on their Facebook page isn’t about the donation, or even the boycott anymore—it’s now devolved into basically a Free Speech and Gays Vs. Straight Hate fest.

Now, you can argue that the amount of damage that a bunch of trolls on Target’s Facebook page is going to minimally affect their sales—but this isn’t the point. The point is if you’re simply going to ignore everything—then why even have a Facebook page to begin with?

Compare that to…

Jetblue has an employee go bananas on a plane, grab a beer, deploy the escape chute and pull a “take this job and shove it” right onto the tarmac. By the next night he’s a folk hero.

I personally watched Jetblue’s Facebook page light up over the next two days. Some commenters were screaming that he should keep his job. Others were saying that ALL Jetblue flight attendants were horrible. Suddenly almost everyone had something negative to say. And what did I see from Jetblue?

At first, silence.

But then, a few days later, JetBlue posted a relatively tongue-in-cheek blog post entitled “Sometimes the Weird News Is About Us.” It was short, to the point—mentioned that there was an investigation and that they respected the privacy of the employee (the reasons they couldn’t/wouldn’t talk) and pointed to a funny clip from Office Space acknowledging that yeah, sometimes we want to bust up a few fax machines—but that there are 2,300 other employees who are still on the job.

I went and watched Jetblue’s Facebook page. On the same day they posted the fact that they had released the blog post, there were 200+ comments to that status update, and then—it just seemed to fizzle. Life went back to normal.

And, as of today, JetBlue’s Facebook page is chock full of stuff that’s NOT related to Steve Slater. Sure, there’s some negative stuff there—but there’s just as much regular ol’ “I love Jet Blue” and “Hey what about my discount you promised me” and just life as usual for the Social Media channel

Here’s what I think they did so well.

  • They waited for enough time to pass. So, unlike previous mistakes we’ve seen made when the company jumps and reacts too fast before all the facts are known—they waited. Maybe this was the lawyers—but it took guts for that Social Media team to not say ANYTHING.
  • They took just the right tone. They didn’t speak in lawyer-talk or get all “concern for security blah blah” and shift blame. And neither did they roll over on their back and throw all the employees under a bus. They balanced the popular sentiment that, yeah, sometimes work is tough—but we’ve got two thousand other employees who are awesome. Oh, and here’s a funny video.
  • They moved the conversation. By posting it on the blog—and then posting the Facebook update with a link to the blog. Again, no special fanfare—just moving the conversation simply and elegantly with a status update. Basically “go here and vent if you want.”

    Robert Rose is Founder and Chief Troublemaker at Big Blue Moose, a Web marketing firm.


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    Ian Alexander

    Traffic Versus Trust

    Reprinted with the author’s permission from Eat Media blog.

    There are only two types of (ongoing) content types that companies can create:

    TRAFFIC/SEO Content

    • Content that is generated to drive traffic.
    • Content generated solely for SEO that will lure users to a landing page but is not, and in most cases cannot be tailored to, engage.

    Costs for traffic building content can be as little as $5 an article.

    TRUST/Trust-building Content

    • Content that is created to build trust with visitors through the delivery of relevant and timely information.
    • Content generated specifically to generate trust won’t always be as keyword rich as SEO articles.

    Costs for trustbuilding content can cost as much as $1 a word.

    The implied value of these services/deliverables are very clear. Getting visitors to your site is not at all the same as keeping them there. Inversely, paying for good trust-building content without a comprehensive search strategy that includes SEO is also shortsighted.

    Ian Alexander, Principal/Storyteller has held fancy titles like Director of Technology Projects (not fancy), Director of Operations (not fancy) and Magic Pony (fancy); before moving back to his real love of telling stories. Ian runs the [content-first] Design | Development | Ideation agency Eat Media in NY.

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    dreich

    Stop Playing Hide and Seek with Your Contact Info

    This post originally appeared on my 2 cents. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

    I don’t understand why so many organizations and individuals who are online make it so difficult to contact them.

    My blog is clearly marked with how to contact me. Right in the left column are my email address, street address and phone number. My company website also has all that info plainly marked, not hidden away somewhere. If it means I may get a call from someone looking to sell me life insurance or stockbroker services, so be it. I’ll deal with those sales calls.

    I’ve always wondered why some bloggers and plenty of company websites don’t offer a clue as to how to call them or write to them by snail mail. It makes me wonder if they’re operating from home and they’re trying to hide that fact. Or maybe they’re ashamed they happen to be located in a small town or small city rather than a hub of business like New York, Chicago, etc.

    I don’t know why, but I’ve often wondered.

    And then this week, I and some of my colleagues ran into a stone wall called Google. We’ve been trying to contact someone there on behalf of a client, to see about running a promotion on their photo sharing site. We understand there might be a fee to do so, and we’ve been trying to find out how much it is and make arrangements to pay it.

    I responded to the spot on the site where it invites you to ask about “commercial partnerships.”  That was a week ago, and I haven’t heard a peep in response. The next logical step would be to call the company.

    Have you ever tried to get information on whom to contact at Google? For a company that is all about sharing information, Google is one of the most secretive or closed companies I’ve ever seen. Their website has no phone numbers and no hints of whom to contact for various purposes or how to reach them. I tried the p.r. department. Left messages and no response. Maybe I should have lied and said I was calling from PC Magazine or The Wall Street Journal.

    We had similar experiences when we tried to contact Yahoo.

    Someone suggested that since these are companies who give away some of their service free, they tend to give priority attention to the smaller group of people who pay for premium services or who are advertisers. But here’s a situation where I want to become a paying premium service user and I can’t speak to or hear back from anyone so I can begin to pay them.

    So my plea to businesses and bloggers alike is “Please don’t hide.”  Unless you’re doing something illegal, why put up a wall so it’s difficult for people to find you. It’s kind of ironic and a bit anti-social in this “age of conversation” or “age of connectivity” for companies to deny input, feedback, or legitimate business queries.

    David Reich, a 35-year public relations agency veteran, is head of Reich Communications, a boutique agency in New York City.

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    Doug Kessler

    Eleven Ways to Cross-Promote Your Content

    Abridged with the author’s permission from a two-part post on B2Bbloggers and Velocity B2B Marketing Blog.

    Cross-promotion is simply the art of using one goodie to sell another. Amazon is a pro at it but we B2B marketers are nowhere near as good at is as we should be. Done right, cross-promotion is the low-cost, low-effort way to drive downloads and other types of conversions.

    1) Don’t let cross-promotion inhibit primary promotion

    It’s always tempting to cram a whole bunch of stuff on every email, landing page and newsletter. It feels like it increases your chances of getting someone interested and earning that download. But in reality, you’re decreasing your chances by cluttering up your stories and diverting people from your offer.

    A landing page should lead people to one desired action. Stick to that and cross-promote at other points in the funnel, such as:

    2) Use auto-responders

    Automated emails that are triggered by an online action are great places to cross-promote.

    When people download your latest eBook, remind them in your Thank You email about another great piece of content that they might like.

    3) Use your web Thank You page

    Same idea but on the web page that you deliver when someone has done something desirable—like signing up for your e-newsletter or requesting a demo: ‘Thanks for that. Did you know about our cool fridge-magnet infographic?’

    4) Don’t forget outbound email

    Every month or quarter, send out a mail to different segments of your database (you are segmenting aren’t you?) to say, “Hi. Since you attended our webinar, we’ve produced this video on exactly the kind of thing I think you’d be into…”

    5) Get personal

    We’re all so in love with marketing automation that we sometimes forget the power of the personal note. A simple three-line text email that feels personal can dramatically out-perform that sexy HTML number.

    6) Use your email footers

    You’ve got lots of people throughout your company sending out lots of emails. I’m always surprised how many companies waste this opportunity or simply use it to broadcast a general message.

    Email footers can be as targeted as any other kind of communication and one great use is to cross-promote your back catalog. Different departments can get different promotional footers that reflect their audiences.

    7) Do a Round-Up blog post

    We all forget how perishable our posts really are. Once they’re in the Archive folder, they rarely see the light of day. Every quarter or so, do a blog post that gives readers a guide to your entire back catalog of content or the pieces you produced since the last round-up.

    8 ) Exploit your web forms

    Most forms need to be focused on one desired action (see Tip 1). But others are fine for cross-promoting content that is relevant to the form’s purpose.

    So a simple tick-box at the bottom saying, “Please also send me the Nine Rules of Rope-Making” can’t hurt, can it?

    9) Go back and revise your web copy!

    I am always amazed how infrequently this is practiced: You publish a great new eBook on The Future of Left-Handed Security Software and you promote the hell out of it.  But you never go back to the nine web pages on your site that talk all about Security Software and Left-Handedness and revise them to cross-promote the new content.

    10) End your webinars with a commercial

    Webinars attract your most engaged prospects. And the end of a webinar is where the really committed can be found. Over 90% of webinars end with a single URL. You should end each webinar with a quick summary of the great pieces of content waiting for your audience to download.

    11) Cross-promote within your new content.

    The best place of all to cross-promote content is inside your latest content. We end every new eBook or white paper with a Resources section that cross-promotes our other goodies and any other resources we feel are relevant.

    Doug Kessler is creative director of Velocity, a B2B technology marketing agency.

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    hhoover

    What’s In It for Me?

    Reprinted with the author’s permission from THINKing.

    blogpic

    The young lady pictured above is skeptical, and rightly so. So many blogs are posting content that doesn’t really relate to her. Will your blog be any different? She thinks not.

    I’ve been taking a look over the last couple of weeks at developing compelling blog content. Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me, so we can erase that look of skepticism and turn your blog visitors into regulars.

    You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog. My blog THINKing covers advertising, creativity, PR, marketing, and social media topics—a pretty broad spectrum.

    First, we keep an eye on our blog stats to see what are the top keywords bringing people to our blog.

    We have written a series called “New Business Primer”, which has been very popular.  The term “new business” brings in a lot of traffic for us. Phrases containing the words “creative” and “creativity” show up often in our top keywords, as do phrases containing “journalism” or “journalists.” Are you using your blog stats to review keywords?

    Another thing we do is review our stats to determine which posts get the most traffic, both initially and over time.

    Our posts on media relations always seem to be a hit, as do our creativity posts. Writing-related and social media posts do well, too. Advertising posts are not doing as well and we don’t post much on that topic any more.

    But it is not enough just to post on those topics. Just as we do in advertising copywriting, we need to think about the reasons people “buy” something. In a blog’s case, visitors are “buying” your writing.Geoff Ayling writes about the reasons people buy in his book Rapid Response Advertising. The 51 reasons people buy include,

    • to make more money
    • to attract praise
    • to avoid criticism
    • to make their work easier
    • to speed up their work

    So, how does that apply to the blogger? Let’s take the first one and come up with a post title that fits into THINKing’s list of topics. We know that people like our writing-related posts and Ayling tells us they want to make more money at it. So, how about: Copywriting Tips To Help Build Your Direct Marketing Business?

    Just remember, give the readers what they are looking for and they will come back.

    Harry Hoover is a Partner in the marketing communications firm My Creative Team.

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    Heather Lloyd-Martin

    What Good Is Text In a Video-enabled Web?

    Reprinted with the author’s permission from the SuccessWorks blog.

    I received an email from someone asking:

    “Since videos do so well in search results, why not just produce videos. Why do you even need words on the page?”

    Interesting question, and one that gave me pause. Because the thing is, video marketing (when it’s done right) can be incredibly powerful. Plus, videos are easy to produce. What may have taken a company back in the day many hours and thousands of dollars can now be done with a Flip camera and good editing software. It’s not perfect, but it’s “good enough for Google.”

    But here’s the thing: Video marketing can drive rankings, traffic and conversions. But I wouldn’t chuck your SEO content campaign out the window just yet. Here’s why…

    • Studies show that text still has power.  In an multimedia versus text eyetracking study by the Poytner Institute, people recalled slightly more facts when the information was presented in text.
    • Steve Rubel in his blog Micro Persuasion points out that text is more scannable, easier to distribute and easier for mobile users and cubicle-dwellers to view (He believes that “Watching videos [even work related vids] screams ’slacker.’”)
    • Jakob Nielsen in a 2005 post asserts that “talking-head video is boring,” indicating that attention wanders when people are watching video online.

    So does this mean that you should chuck video in favor of all text, all the time?

    Heck no. But on the flip side, you shouldn’t rely 100% on video either.

    I’m one of those folks who doesn’t like people “talking at me.” I can’t listen to talk radio, I have a hard time sitting still for two minutes. Watching online video drives me nuts. I want to know what I want to know NOW – and I don’t want to sit through a video, hoping my question is answered in the first 30 seconds. Will I watch videos? Yes – but not when I’m in information-gathering mode. I read too fast and I’m too impatient.

    At the same time, video testimonials and mini-broadcasts are powerful, powerful stuff (and yes, I’ll have to bite the bullet and do this myself.) Video gives us “real person” insight – we can watch and listen and see the story unfold. In terms of the consumer psychology benefit, when we see a video testimonial, we can immediately connect with that person and think, “Hey, she’s just like me. And this company was able to help her. Wow, maybe they can help me too.”

    The key is, you want to appeal to both folks. The people like me, who want their information now – and in text form. And the other folks who “connect” with a more visual medium.  So, for instance, if you’re planning a product page, you may consider offering both video and text and cover your bases. That’s what Brookstone does for their product pages – and it’s a powerful strategy.

    The beauty of the interwebs is you can give your prospects the exact information they want, when they want it. For some folks, that means text. For others, it means video. Both are good.

    Video didn’t kill the copywriting star. It just added a new dimension to how we collect and process information.

    (P.S. If you’re interested in video marketing, Greg Jarboe’s book, You Tube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day is a must-read.)

    Heather Lloyd-Martin is the president of SuccessWorks, which specializes in content marketing strategies, premium copywriting services and training in-house and freelance SEO copywriters. She also certifies copywriters through the SEO Copywriting Certificate program, the first Certification program for SEO content marketing professionals.

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    abrown

    Marketing Your Conference By Giving Away Its Content

    Abridged with the author’s permission from Sway Engine blog.

    Remember when people came to live events because they were hands-down the best places to network with peers? In fact, conferences and meetings were once the only ways to connect with peers who weren’t in your back yard. Conference marketing was a lot simpler back then. The value of conferences was clear to everyone.

    Conferences and meeting are still important, but one thing has changed—they’re not the only way people network with each other. The internet and social media has made it easier than ever to build a network and learn from others in your industry. The value of conferences and meetings is no longer clear to prospective attendees. The proposition has changed, so conference marketing itself has to change.

    The internet and social media—the very things that obscure the value of live events—are also the tools that make conference marketing more effective than ever. Some conference managers see social media as a threat, but it shouldn’t be. It takes a new way of thinking about how conference marketing works, but once you’ve adopted this new mindset, you’ll see how it drives more attendees to your show than ever before.

    The first step: break down walls.

    Conference marketing is most effective when you reach as many people as possible, right? The more people who know about the conference, the more likely they are to attend.

    The internet makes is so easy to reach prospects and to inform them about your conference, but the only way to reach them is by offering content they’re looking for. By offering relevant content and distributing it over the internet, you can reach more people in a month than you could reach in a year-long direct mail campaign.

    How is that possible? It’s simple: People who read good content will pass it along. Before you know it, information about your conference could be disseminated more widely than you could ever do on your own. The best part is that people will distribute your content for free.

    The next step: what is relevant content?

    Traditional conference marketing sticks to the basics: who, what, where, when. Conference marketing goes beyond basic information. For example, we launched a blog in support of a national conference. Months before the show began, we interviewed the educational sessions speakers and posted them on the blog. We asked them to talk about their presentation: what would they talk about, what did they hope the audience would get out of it, and so on.

    Traditional conference marketing would never let this happen! The old way of thinking is to build walls, to “force” people to attend if they want to hear from a speaker. The new conference marketing strategy breaks down walls. The interviews were interesting and viewed more than 4,000 times. At the conference itself, we covered the sessions and exhibit hall floor as if the blog were a daily publication. In fact, it was much more than daily. We posted on the blog at least three times per day.

    Andy Brown is the principal of Sway Engine, a content marketing and communications firm.

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    Posted in Marketing and promotion | Leave a comment