Marketo started interacting with prospects long before they had a bunch of white papers.  The first nurturing campaign was based on blog posts and other people’s content.  Marketo then added new pieces to the nurturing program as they built out content.  Now all of our nurturing tracks are infused with a mix of content- including white papers, webinars, blog posts, analyst reviews, and more.

Let’s say someone signs up for your company’s one white paper on VOIP.  You could still easily have a lead nurturing program without creating any other content.  Here is an example of a simple three month drip campaign: 

Day 1:   Thank you for requesting the VOIP paper, including link to paper
Day 15: Information about the future of VOIP, as posted by an analyst on their website
Day 30: Summary of a longer blog post about VOIP that your company did, with link to the post
Day 45: Information about big industry announcement, like X number of companies switching to VOIP, sharing excitement about the change, and linking to a post about it on a news site
Day 60: Summary of a video that your company participated in, even if not on your site, including link to the video
Day 75: Information about new books in your industry, summarizing why they may be interesting to read, and linking to the books
Day 90: Summary of and link to another popular post your company posted on your blog

In this example I used content by analysts, book authors, and other industry leaders to share my message without ever having created another piece of content other than some blog posts.  There are lots of options for this external content including:

Because each of these emails are html and because they have links in the emails to content, you can collect opens, clickthroughs, etc. just as you would using your own content.  And because the campaign is going out to people you know it doesn’t matter that the items do not go to offers with registration.  You will still have all the benefits of sharing your own content.

Don’t get me wrong, my job revolves around creating content and I am consistently working on new white papers, because I do believe they provide value.  The key is to understand that it’s not all or nothing.  You can still have a successful demand generation program that includes lead nurturing and scoring even if you only have one white paper or one webinar.

Also, by not focusing on the quantity of content you have, you can focus more on the quality of the content pieces you do produce.

My company insists I use a pseudonym in emails:

Marketing experts often say that conversations should be genuine and that emails should come from a real person at the company. Though some companies use a pseudonym instead of the name of a real person to avoid problems caused when their current employees move to other positions. Since your company insists on this, the only thing you can do is make the best of it. The goal here is to avoid having prospects upset when they find out that the sender is not a real person. This happens when they call up the general number and a sales rep says that it’s not a real person, or occurs when a contact tries to reply to the email they received, addressing the fake name.

The best way to handle this is to prepare for this to happen before it does. First, inform sales of the policy, and script responses for them so they know what to say when they do receive these inquiries. Also, when this email receives replies, send responses from your email and name. The sender will assume that the email was passed to you because you knew the response to their question. Try to then continue the conversation through your account.

My company insists that all emails go out as marketing@mycompanyname.com:

One way to sway management on this is to do a test to see if emails from your name get a better response than those from a generic email address. If they allow the test, look at the results and see if that supports the use of a real name, instead of a generic email box. Don’t just look at the open rate. Also, look at the click through rate and number of people that reply to each since prospects often feel their email will end up in an unmonitored email box if they reply to the generic account. Take this information to management in hopes of change.

If the results don’t support your case or if management won’t permit a test, do the best you can to make sure that you monitor that email box as if it was your own personal account. Make sure prospects know that everyone at your company will be responsive to them, even if they send an email to a generic account.

My company insists I tweet out as my brand, not as a person:

I think it is okay for a brand to have a corporate account not associated with a real person. I often find that I want to follow a corporate account to be made aware of new products and services, new blog posts or pieces of thought leadership, and coupons or discounts. I don’t like when corporate accounts try to hold personal conversations and constantly interact with people through the brand name. Try to use your corporate account to keep prospects and clients up-to-date on your company. Also, use the account to promote industry happenings, so followers know they can find out everything going on in an industry just by following your corporate account. Once that proves to be a success, approach management about creating a personal account to have more genuine conversations on social networks.

My boss or legal team wants to approve every social media post before it goes out:

I know a number of marketers that struggle with this issue. First, try to explain the need for the most up-to-date info on your blog or social sites and how the approval process may slow down news, making the posts obsolete before they have even gone out. Present examples of the companies who are doing a good job with social media, highlighting those in your particular industry. Also show how your competitors are beating you to stories because of the extra steps before posting.

If that still doesn’t work, propose that you get an approval on a topic before posting, but not the individual reply or post. For example, let’s say you plan on promoting a new product through social media. Put together a list of all approved collateral and ask legal or your boss if you can tweet out about or post blogs about the content that is already approved in these assets. Then when doing posts make sure not to use any facts that are not already okayed. This is a nice way to keep communicating, but only about the topics your boss is comfortable with you sharing.

My company won’t allow comments on our blog:

Companies are struggling to accept negative comments, on their website, or on social media sites. One way to overcome this on your blog is to moderate comments before posting. This will allow you to remove any from competitors, remove spam, and prepare responses to any negative posts before they are shown publically. If your company still won’t approve two way communications, I would still continue making blog posts, as this is better than nothing at all.

My company won’t let me do any inbound marketing. We don’t have a blog, we don’t any search engine marketing, and I’m forbidden to use social media:

If your company won’t allow these efforts, your competitors will be happy to take advantage of this opportunity. As competitors starts making these efforts present them to management, showing any new sales or successes that have lead from their online marketing efforts. This may help change their mind.

Good marketers who face extreme restrictions that prevent them from blogging, using social media, regularly updating web content, or presenting at industry events should consider moving to other companies or using free time to create their own blog or help a small business do inbound marketing (or all three). I know this isn’t an easy solution, but inbound marketing is transparent, and future employers will be able to see your online marketing efforts. It will be harder to find a job later as online marketing skills become a requirement for many companies. Another great way to build these skills is to help a charity with their online marketing. You can use the time you already put aside for helping charities to do this, and will get some great work references at the same time. When your company does realize the error in their ways you will already have the skill set to help them succeed.

In addition, you will soon start seeing posts from additional bloggers on my site.  More on that by month end as well!

Please excuse the construction.  The site will be better than ever in no time at all. 

Thanks.  -Inboundmarketer

Sales began thinking of marketing as an administrative function, coming to them for help with every presentation, a new brochure for every prospect, etc. This caused sales to spend too much time creating materials for each prospect instead of filling their pipeline and planning for future sales. It also made it impossible for marketing to keep all materials up-to-date all the time, so now, instead of sales asking for more materials they were complaining about the ones that were out of date or not as ‘fresh’. Finally, it left sales frustrated with the leads they were receiving from marketing, since marketing couldn’t focus on creating sales worthy leads while constantly updating materials.

Also, when a phone number changed or new office opened, the amount of redesign work on the hundreds of documents was almost impossible to update. This created confusion for prospects when receiving incorrect information. This also increased the turnover of designers, because as artists they became frustrated that they weren’t creating new and exciting viral pieces and designs, but instead constantly updating the same documents they had already worked on.

What happens after this is predictable. This poor, reactive marketing often creates a cycle that results in a drop in sales and replacement of marketing and/or sales management, and the disposal of many of the documents that were created to keep sales ‘happy’.

When creating sales enablement tools, the objective is to look at the characteristics of your most qualified or sold leads, and then follow the path those leads took when learning about your company. These are going to be the pieces of collateral that are most successful for sales. And these are the documents that should be updated and frequently refreshed. This can also be done by creating buyer personas and creating materials for those personas. Then marketing must spend time teaching sales how to speak to each of these pieces, so they know all of the materials available to them and how each is properly used. By taking this approach you will not only save marketing valuable time, but also keep sales selling, which is what will truly keep them happy.

Many marketers think because they run reports in their CRM or have canned reports ready for them in their marketing automation system that they are looking at the right data and are ready to make decisions. This is often an incorrect assumption. Data by itself is meaningless without context. Marketers must understand that data in a CRM is only as good as the information sales is entering, and if they are not working with sales to ensure the proper information is being entered that the data they pull from it is meaningless. They also must understand that a single report is often just one piece of a much larger puzzle. In the case above, the leads purchased from the vendor were not attached to the opportunity because they were not the final buyer in a long sales cycle. Instead, they were the initial contact and primary influencer of the purchase. Without these names the sales to many companies would not have occurred, but because of the simple canned report ran from the CRM, leads that would undoubtedly result in sales will not be purchased.

So how do marketers know when to rely on the data in a report, and when the report is not telling the whole story?

1.       Listen to your gut: If the report you are viewing doesn’t seem right or like it is missing data, it probably is. Try running the report a different way or look at a few individual records to make sure the right data is being captured.

2.    Audit: Don’t simply trust the data in your CRM. Monthly or quarterly audit the data in a report to ensure accuracy. For organizations that sell expensive products with long sales cycles, it is reasonable to review every sale to ensure the data in the record is correct and that you are properly capturing lead sources, search terms, and other pieces of information key to marketing.

3.      Clean out your CRM: Remove all fields that are never populated, make important fields mandatory- this will allow your sales team to focus on answering the important questions.

4.      Training: Be a champion of the CRM system. Work with sales so that it is clear what is expected and create dashboards that highlight data errors so that they can be fixed quickly.

5.      Automating: Try to capture as much information as possible from databases, the lead themselves, or other external sources. Then rely on sales to simply audit the data when speaking to a contact.

6.      Practice and Test: You must become familiar with the reporting features of the tools you are using. You can’t simply reply on the reports that others have created or utilize canned reports. Every company is different, so canned reports will often not apply to your business model and will need tweaking.

Not only will following the tips below ensure you are looking at better data, but by working regularly with sales and reviewing data you will understand how information is captured. This will result in better reports run, because you will understand what fields tell what story.

It’s important to use data to tell a story, and to do this you must understand all the different pieces that make it up. Don’t just run reports, focus on visualizing what you are trying to understand, and then find a way to capture data that answers your questions.

Steven Woods, the CTO of Eloqua, is going to be speaking immediately before the April Philadelphia Salesforce user group on Thursday from 3-4 pm EST at the Bourse Building in Philadelphia.  Alteva, who is hosting the Salesforce user group, has donated their space so you can hear from Steve about online buying behavior. 

Steven Woods has been a leader in the current transformation of marketing since 1999 when he co-founded Eloqua. Through his work with hundreds of today’s most innovative marketers, he has guided, been involved with, and written about many aspects of the changes currently under way in business to business and considered purchase marketing.

This event is free.  You are also welcome to stay for the Salesforce user group, even if you are not a Salesforce user.  During this user group meeting we have 3 speakers, plus a new “Ask the Experts” session.  I will be speaking on the Ask the Experts panel.  The 3 speakers are:

·       Salesforce Content Manager, Ritesh Gandhi, Alteva

·       Google Application Integration, Jesse Middleton, CRM Manager

·       Salesforce AppExchange, Sara Bright, Salesforce

I have also started a Twitter account to announce Philadelphia Salesforce User Group information.  If interested, please follow @PhillySFDC. 

If you have RSVP’d to the user group, then you do not need to RSVP to the Steve Woods event.  http://digitalbodylanguage.eventbrite.com/

Online Event Registration – Powered by www.eventbrite.com ]]> http://blog.inboundmarketer.com/2009/04/steven-woods-cto-of-eloqua-to-speak-to-philadelphia-marketing-technology-professionals-about-digital-body-language/feed/ 13808 http://blog.inboundmarketer.com/2009/04/steven-woods-cto-of-eloqua-to-speak-to-philadelphia-marketing-technology-professionals-about-digital-body-language/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InboundMarketer/~3/VYj9dLRFOLE/ http://blog.inboundmarketer.com/2009/04/better-virtual-trade-show-sponsorship-negotiating-your-participation-part-2/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:42:14 +0000 Maria Pergolino http://blog.inboundmarketer.com/?p=373 This is part two of my series of 5 blog posts, one each day of this week, focusing on how to improve your lead generation and branding efforts during a virtual trade show. These posts should benefit sponsors of these types of events.

These are thoughts I had after sponsoring many virtual trade shows (exhibiting as a sponsor) and then attending the MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer last week as a participant.

The topics of my blog posts this week will be:

• Content in your booth
• Negotiating your participation
• Promoting the event before the show
• Promoting your product throughout the show
• Engaging contacts after the show

Today’s post will be about negotiating your participation.

I don’t know how sponsorship worked specifically for the MarketingProfs Virtual Trade Show, though typically there is the organizer who creates the event, premier sponsors, and regular sponsors (sometimes separated into tiers) who all promote their products during the event.  Typically, premier sponsors receive ‘virtual’ signage, speaking opportunities, and the entire list of names of those that register for the event.  For this show, I believe about 14,000 people registered for the event, a substantial list for premier sponsors.  Other sponsors typically receive a specified number of leads based on their sponsorship level.  The leads they are given out of the list of registrants is typically based on who visited their booth followed by those that attended the show, but did not visit the booth.  If the guarantee for leads is not met at this point, the guarantee can be met by those who registered that did not attend.

If you are not the premier sponsor and are receiving a limited number of leads, make sure that it is based off of a select, not on those who visits your booth.  This way, you receive people who have joined the conference that are in your demographic.  This is important because often people are driven to your booth because they are analysts, interested in free prizes given by booth participation, or checking out the virtual trade shows functionality.  By purchasing your leads on selects you’ll be ensuring to receive leads in your demographic, not just those looking for a prize. 

Also, if you think about lead distribution for these events, almost everyone gets the name of the people who visit the booths, than many people get the contact information of those who attended the event, and typically only premier sponsors will receive the names of those people who did not attend the event.  Your goal should be to get the names that no-one else receives.  If there is not a package offered with this (there typically isn’t) propose one to the organization creating the event.  Offer an ‘after party’ type of sponsorship, where you email those that attended with a wrap-up of the event, and email those who did not attend with a summary of the event and information about how they can still see the content they missed.  By creating your own sponsorship package, you’ll be ensuring you receive the leads that are best for your organization. 

Finally, cost per leads for virtual events are typically much lower than those for content syndication or pipeline builders because the leads are shared between multiple sponsors.   Often an event promoter will offer a bundled package for the sponsorship with a pipeline builder, banner ads, or other advertising.  They do this to ensure they can meet your lead guarantee if the expected number or participants do not sign up.   In this situation the event promoter may say they will guarantee 5000 leads, and that a minimum of 2000 will come from the virtual trade show.  The remaining are then from content syndication leads that are typically more valuable to your organization.  When you do this you typically get a lower cost per lead (CPL) for the bundled package than with a pipeline builder alone, but this can backfire on you if you receive all 5000 leads from the virtual trade show and then do not receive the benefit of content syndication.  In this case, you may end up paying more per lead then you would have for simply paying for the co-sponsored event. 

The main lesson you should learn from this article is when purchasing sponsorship for leads you must make sure that you aren’t just buying a package, but  working with the vendor to develop a custom lead purchase that will help connect you with your prospects.  Doing this will allow you to reach out to contacts from the show that others may not and will allow you less bad fits in your lists. 

This week I am going to do a series of 5 blog posts, one each day of the week, focusing on how to improve your lead generation and branding efforts during a virtual trade show. These posts should benefit sponsors of these types of events.

These are thoughts I had after sponsoring many virtual trade shows (exhibiting as a sponsor) and then attending the MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer last week as a participant.

The topics of my blog posts this week will be:

• Content in your booth
• Negotiating your participation
• Promoting the event before the show
• Promoting your product throughout the show
• Engaging contacts after the show

Today’s post will be about content in your booth.

Sponsor booths typically have white papers, demos, company information, contact information, and a link to the company website. But the booths at virtual events can link to any online content and can promote any collateral held online. This means you can link to quizzes, demos, social media posts, and more. Why not make your booth more interesting and interactive by putting different types of content in your booth. Some ideas include:

• Social Media streams: put a link up that shows the conversations happening about the event on social media sites. An easy way to do this would be through Twitter search. You can set this up to show information about everything happening at the event or what is being said about your product depending on the search query you use for the stream
• What’s New: this is a great way to promote upgrades and new products to current customers who attend the event and will let prospects know you are always innovating and upgrading
• Upcoming Events: Why not post information about events you will be presenting at, allow attendees to instantly sign up for future webinars, or sign up for a physical event? This way they know where they can find you next
• Invite a friend: allow members to suggest people that are good prospects for your product
• Newsletter sign up: allow members to sign up for a newsletter or other promotions in your booth. Even though you will receive the contact names of people at the event, why not let them opt-in to your messages. This will make them less likely to opt-out later
• Tools: Demandbase had great success with a widget they promoted in their booth. Give the attendees something free for spending time with you
• Quizzes/Demos/Videos: Allow participants to click through and watch a demo or video, or allow participants to take a quiz. It’s a fun way to involve participants instead of just posting up content for them to read. This will allow for more immediate interaction as well, since white papers and brochures are often just downloaded for future consumption, and often not reviewed at all

Also, I noticed one of the sponsors had posted job openings they had at their organization. I thought this was a very interesting way to connect with participants. The obvious benefit is finding qualified prospects for the organization, but it also allowed for a unique way to segment. For example, if someone from the show was interested in a communications job and your company has a product that is applicable to communications professionals, it allows you to segment that prospect in a way that other sponsors of the event could not.

For anything besides white papers and brochures, which people want to download, host the content online and use unique urls to track how many people viewed content during the show. Simply give the event organizer a unique url instead of the direct one that clicks to the desired page. You can even do this for links to social media sites, by creating a url off of your domain that forwards to the social media site. Also, for your downloadable content, like white papers and brochures, make the urls in the papers unique, so if someone read them on their computer and then clicks through to your site, an offer, or for additional information, you know it originated from that white paper that was download from the virtual show. By gathering this data, you will know what attendees liked viewing so that you can duplicate the successful content for your next virtual online event.

The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Import all press and media contact lists into your marketing automation system.  Alternatively, you can bring them into your CRM system and allow them to sync with your marketing automation system.  If you do not have a marketing automation system, you can do this only using your CRM system or using your CRM system in combination with an email marketing system, but you may have less data available to analyze after the public relations campaign (like their website activity). 
2. Make sure that these contacts can be separated from the leads in your system.  This can be done by creating a lead source named media or by creating a new field that indicates which media list the contact originates from (i.e. analyst list, local press, etc)  You can also create a unique page layout for these in your CRM system so that you may capture information about the media representative, like their industry influence,  the publications they write for, or the strength of your relationship with them without having fields on your lead view that are not relevant to sales.
3. Send company news to press prior to release distribution.    Include links to additional information, an email to contact, and additional company links of interest in the email.   Group all of these emails together with a parent campaign or list, which will allow for easier reporting and reporting on the entire group of PR campaigns. 
4. Monitor which analysts or press representatives click through on links or send emails.  Follow-up with those that have taken interest to support their research efforts or send a follow-up email with additional information. 
5. Record conversations with press representatives and analysts (outbound calls, voice mail left, inbound calls, in person meetings) and attach emails sent similar to how sales logs activities for prospects.  This will allow you to pull up a full record of your interactions so you are more prepared when speaking to press. 
6. Review press that opts out of email notifications.  You may then choose to contact the press agent and discuss why you think your content is relevant to them.  You will also be able to see if certain types of announcements causes higher level of opt-outs. 

This can be taken one step further by utilizing your CRM to track press and analyst coverage of your company.  By monitoring this, you will see what causes the most press attention.  For example, if you pair the coverage received with the communications you sent to the press you will be able to run reports to see if analysts respond better to emails sent to them in the morning, or if they tend to give more coverage to emails that include pictures or videos, etc. 

You can also create workflow rules that notify your company’s communications specialist to follow-up with a press representative or analysts.  This can be based off of their online behavior, their reaction to an email (opens, clicks through) or on a lead scoring system that is augmented for media and analysts. 

I use Salesforce.com as my CRM system, and have also implemented PR Manager, a free tool by Force.com Labs, for additional tracking of communications efforts.   This can be downloaded from the Salesforce Appexchange in minutes and the fields can be customized to meet your company’s needs. 

And to help analyze all my marcom efforts, I have created a public relations management dashboard and scheduled reports to track the success of these efforts.  This allows management to see what is happening in corporate communications without me having to run and email extra reports. 

1. Company Party Planner

You can coordinate a large trade show with little effort; you can schedule a flawless road show in every city in the country, so obviously you can handle Dylan’s birthday party. And the company holiday party. And Mitchell’s retirement party. And…

2. IT Security

As a marketer you are getting comfortable with cloud computing. Often your emails and your CRM data are held on servers outside your firewalls and accessed over the web. Unfortunately, the head of IT security is not as comfortable. Make sure that when you are working with new SaaS vendors that you loop your IT security mangers in on the decisions and provide them with all the documentation that shows why your company’s data will be safe.

3. CRM Optimization

As a marketer you may rely on a CRM tool to pull data about the success of your campaigns, demographics of your prospects and customers, and sales by product. Since you need this data you will be responsible for make sure the system runs properly and that all users are trained on how to enter data into the system.

4. Powerpoint Pro

It is somewhere written in a sales handbook that all marketers know PowerPoint including how to over-animate, add animal sounds, and incorporate cheesy slide transitions. Since you have the ability to do this, and nothings makes a salesperson happier than tacky moving slides, you will end up helping.

5. Microsoft Office Trainer

Got computer skills? You are going to need to share them. As soon as people find out you know how to use software like Word, Excel, and Outlook you will be helping with fonts, creating formulas, and setting up out-of-office messages.

6. Copyright/Trademark/License protector

Typically marketers are used to protecting brand standards and monitoring how sales uses company content, but marketers also end up watching out for other people’s property and rights as well. This means reviewing sales emails and presentations to make sure pictures used and customer details listed are accurate and are legally allowed to be utilized in your sales promotions.

7.  Customer support

Each day there will be the potential for tens to millions of emails to go out in your name with your email address listed. And the people that receive them won’t necessarily care that you are in marketing and don’t know how to help them with their technical need. This means they will hit reply and ask you their question. At this point you have two options, to either forward the email along or to ask support for help and reply back with the personal service that your customer deserves. I suggest doing the best you can to help every customer possible, because they are the reason you are there to begin with.

8. Salesperson

See customer support above. Sometimes people will email you sales questions. Help as much as you can while engaging sales support. People will be used to seeing your name in emails. Make sure you know you can be reached and that you will help them. Purchasing decisions are often hard, and people want to feel like they are making the right decision so be supportive and helpful.

9. Sales Training

You will be creating materials for sales and they won’t use them unless you train them how to. That means attending sales meetings, sitting in on sales calls, and creating training materials. It also means putting the materials where they need them, and emailing them to them when they ask.

10. Counselor

Often, in Marketing, you are the one common person that works with product development, IT, service and support, finance, and sales. This means when one group doesn’t like what another group is doing you are the one person that will understand the entire situation. This means you will have to play group counselor and team therapist from time to time.