More Marketing and Sales Tips for Driving Lead Generation

101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead VOLUME FIVE More Marketing and Sales Tips Generating leads and driving revenue via Facebook, the media, current customer marketing and more PRESENTED BY 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY 20 More Marketing and Sales Tips for Driving Lead Generation Our first four volumes of 101 Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead are Online Marketing, Direct Marketing, Event Marketing and Marketing and Sales Alignment. These volumes are full of great tips including targeting and segmenting your prospects, increasing webinar attendance, the basics of SEO and practical strategies for building marketing and sales alignment. This final installment brings 20 more tips for B2B lead generation teams. In this collection of 20 more marketing and sales tips from The B2B Lead, you will find information on marketing to current customers, creating a business page on Facebook, and much more. Here’s a few of the included tips in this eBook: • Persona Marketing in a B-to-B Environment • How to Write and Market Whitepapers • How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly • 5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook • Get to Know Your B2B Technical Buyer If you like what your see here, be sure to check out theb2blead.com for more B2B Marketing and Sales tips. Content contributed by: Amy Hawthorne, Director of Marketing at ReachForce Laura Koether, Online Media Specialist at ReachForce Pam O’Neal Mickelson, VP of Marketing at BreakingPoint Ellie Mirman, blogger at the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog and Inbound Marketer at Internet Marketing company HubSpot. Suaad Sait, CEO at ReachForce Leigh Anne Wallace, Marketing Manager at ReachForce VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 2 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Table of Contents 1. How to Create a Facebook Page for Your Company 2. 5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook 3. Persona Marketing in a B-to-B Environment 4. The New Rules for Reaching the Media 5. Drive More Successes From The First Half of 2008 6. Networking with the Affluent 7. Don’t Forget About Customer Marketing 8. Go Direct With PR - Write Your Own Coverage 9. Learn From the 6 Cs of Social Influence Marketing 10. Trade in an Bad Addiction for a Good One - StumbleUpon 11. Stock Photos vs. Real Pictures 12. Get to Know Your B2B Technical Buyer 13. Take a Hard Look at Funnelnomics as You Move Into 2008 14. Monitor Your Company or Product in the Blogosphere 15. Skip the Mega-launch, Opt for a New Approach to Generating Buzz for Your New Product or Service 16. How to Write and Market Whitepapers 17. How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly 18. Are You Writing Gobbledygook for Your Buyers? 19. Don’t Forget Where You’ve Been When Deciding Where to go Next… 20. Forums, Wikis, and Your Targeted Audience VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 3 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY How to Create a Facebook Page for Your Company Wikipedia’s definition of Facebook - a social networking site where users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. I got on Facebook when I was in college (when only college students could be members), and used it to keep up with hometown friends, keep up with other students I had met, join groups that I cared about, send messages to friends and post fun pictures and wall posts reminiscing from the weekend before. Now that I am out of college and working, I still use Facebook to keep up with friends (maybe a few less pictures and groups), but I also use it now for networking and more business purposes. My personal and professional life are definitely colliding! Facebook has made itself easier for professionals to use with groups, discussions and ads, but I think the best thing you can do for your business on Facebook is Facebook Pages. Facebook Pages help to build a business presence and engage with customers, co-workers, partners and fans on Facebook. Users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, writing on your wall, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups. You can send updates to your fans regularly — or just with special news or offers. Add applications to your Page and engage your users with videos, reviews, flash content, and more. More importantly, it is free and easy! To get started: • You need to be a member on Facebook • Go to facebook.com/business/?pages (or go the bottom of the page and click “advertising”) • Click “create a Facebook Page” and follow the directions • Upload a picture (best to use your logo for this) • Fill in company information • Take it from there…add photos, discussions, notes, video, etc. (you should see all the categories to edit right there on the page or if not click “edit page”) • Click “more applications” if you would like to browse what other applications are out there (like RSS Feeds) - you can look or type in the search box • Publish the Page (in red lettering at the top of the page) • Ask co-workers and customers to become fans and start getting the word out Now you know how to get started with a Facebook Page, how do you manage it? We over here at ReachForce just put up our own page, and are still working to get the word out. Luckily, our friend Ellie Mirman from HubSpot has some experience. Look for a post from her soon on how to manage your page and get fans. HubSpot already has 797 fans! VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 4 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY 5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook So you’ve got a Facebook Business Page… Now what? Building a Business Page is one of the best ways to increase your presence and engage more potential customers on Facebook, but it’s more than just clicking “Create Page”. As you venture out into the social media world, here are a few tips to help you promote your Page and reach more of the 100 million Facebook users. Create a Facebook Business Page worth becoming a fan of. To quote David Meerman Scott, nobody cares about your products and services (except you). People care about how you can help them solve their problems. To extend that thought to Facebook, don’t use your Facebook Page to talk about your products all the time. People aren’t interested. Instead, create some interesting, useful content that people want to receive. This could be blog posts, whitepapers, or simply discussions. Take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook. Facebook provides great opportunities for viral marketing. Facebook creates a “News Feed” of your friends’ activities on Facebook, like posting photos, changing statuses, or becoming fans of a Page. What this means is that every time someone interacts with your Page in some way, that action is published across all of their friends’ News Feeds, giving you exposure to that person’s entire network. The best way to take advantage of this is to engage your users and give them more opportunities to interact with your Page, for example, by fostering discussions, inviting them to events, allowing them to post links. Leveraging the power of the News Feed is a critical part of establishing your presence on Facebook and building a fan base for spreading your messages. Don’t forget to draw on your network. All promotion does not need to take place within Facebook. Feel free to email your opt-in e-mail list, blog about your Page, and post a link to your Page on your company website. The best people to help you build up your fan base for your Business Page on Facebook are those people already subscribed to your blog or engaged with you in some way. Optimize your Page for Facebook – and public – search. Another way to get found and build your fan base is through Facebook’s search. Facebook – like all other search engines (Facebook was noted the most used people search engine) – has an undisclosed algorithm that ranks search results in a way that aims to return relevant and useful results to the searcher. The best think you can do to show up higher in these search results is to build a large following of your existing fans, because entities with a larger network tend to show up higher in search results. Also note that Facebook Business Pages are public and indexable by search engines. This potentially gives you exposure to those searching in broader search engines like Google. To make the most of this, start lots of engaging discussion threads on your Page, so that if someone is searching in Google on that very topic, they can stumble upon your Facebook Page and discussion thread. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 5 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead Get an extra push with Facebook Ads. PRESENTED BY If you want to give your Business Page an extra push at the beginning, you can also buy some advertising slots. Note that Facebook ads are much less effective than the viral marketing options on Facebook, and the click through rate for Facebook ads is notoriously low. Facebook advertisements show up on the sidebar as users browse through their friends’ profiles, groups, and so on. When you set up your ad, be sure to include “social ads” – these draw on a users’ network to see who in their network has already engaged with your Page and shows, for example, “Jim Smith is a fan of Company ABC” next to your ad, potentially improving your click through rate. Also, make sure that you give viewers a relevant reason to click on your ad by inviting them to connect with industry peers or offering a free whitepaper, for example. Also in this vein, note that you can target your ads by age, gender, interests, geography, and other factors, to reach users who may be more interested in your Business Page. Bonus Tip: Measure your results. Once you’ve built up your Facebook Page it’s good to measure what you’re actually getting out of your social media program. Some metrics you may want to measure are: number of fans, page views, and unique users. Facebook’s “Insights” provide some of these metrics, including demographic data. You’ll also want to track actions beyond your Facebook Page, namely, website traffic, leads, and sales that come from Facebook. Hopefully some of these tips will help you get your Facebook Business Page off the ground and build it into a valuable channel for reaching your potential customers. All this said, social media, including Facebook, is by no means static. It is constantly changing and we, as marketers, are constantly learning the right way to leverage these channels for marketing. If you want to see what we at HubSpot have done, you can become a fan of our Page at http://facebook.hubspot.com. And, if you’re looking to network with other marketers on Facebook, you may be interested in the Facebook Pro Marketers group, a group for marketers passionate about marketing. Perhaps there we can continue discussing ideas for marketing on Facebook. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 6 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Persona Marketing in a B-to-B Environment I have been reading Mac McIntosh’s blog on B2B Marketing and agree with his view on Persona marketing. Some interesting nuggets on his views follow: Persona marketing in a business-to-business environment can offer different challenges than in a business-to-consumer environment. McIntosh offers this advice on getting started with personae in a b-to-b world: • Convene a group of employees who interact with your customers and prospects. Bring in lunch and a white board and ask them to help you build personae for your target customers. • Describe the target customer’s role in the company: Is he the CEO or a purchasing agent? An influencer or an end user? • Describe the kind of company each type of customer works for. What industry is it in? How big is it? How up-to-date is it? Does it have a lot of competition? • Give each persona a name, a title, and an age, and describe how he (or she) looks. How does he dress? What kind of car does she drive? What does he do in his free time? What kind of educational background does she have? Flesh out as many attributes as you need to give a full picture of who this person is. • Think about each persona’s problems and goals. What does this person’s daily calendar look like? What are his most pressing concerns? What product or service attributes would be most helpful in solving this person’s problems? • When formulating your marketing messages, think about what path this prospect or customer might pursue to solve this problem. Will he turn to white papers? Articles in trade publications? Websites? Would this persona seek input from a speaker at a networking group of their peers? • Let the personae steer the route; you can then pave the route with information to help your prospects and customers move forward in their consideration and buying process. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 7 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY The New Rules for Reaching the Media One of the perks of being a ReachForce customer is being a part of our book club. In this post we discuss lessons learned from The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. The Web, of course, has made getting in touch with the media much easier. However has anyone had luck with emailing a journalist (you don’t know) a story and actually get published? If so, what is your secret? In most cases however, (in the words of David) “PR people are spamming journalists with unsolicited and unrelenting commercial messages in the form of news releases and untargeted broadcast pitches.” Don’t worry, David is here to help with The New Rules of Media Relations: • Nontargeted, broadcast pitches are spam. • News releases sent to reporters in subject areas they do not cover are spam. • Reporters who don’t know you yet are looking for organizations like yours and products like yours-make sure they will find you on sites such as Google and Technorati. • If you blog, reporters who cover the space will find you. • Pitch bloggers, because being covered in important blogs will get you noticed by mainstream media. • When was the last news release you sent? Make sure your organization is “busy.” • Journalists want a great online media room! • Some (but not all) reporters love RSS feeds. • Personal relationships with reporters are important. • Dont’ tell journalists what your product does. Tell them how you solve customer problems. • Does the reporter have a blog? Read it. Comment on it. Track back to it (send a message whenever you blog on a subject that the reporter blogged about first). • Before you pitch, read (or listen to or watch) the publication (or radio program or TV show) you’ll be pitching to! • Once you know what a reporter is interested in, send her an individualized pitch crafted especially for her needs. Now your rate of getting noticed will hopefully be much more successful when you use these tips. And now let’s fast forward a bit, you have used the New Rules and started building relationships. How do you pitch to these journalists now? David has a few tips on this as well…woo hoo! • Target one reporter at a time. • Help the journalist to understand the big picture. • Explain how customers use your product or work with your organization. • Don’t send e-mail attachments unless asked. • Follow up promptly with potential contacts. • Don’t forget, it’s a two-way street-journalists need you to pitch them! Mainstream media is still very important and hopefully you will follow the New Rules and tactics to start getting noticed. To close the same way David did, “you need to be smart how you tell your story on the Web-and about how you tell your story to journalists.” Next week we will cover chapters 17 and 18 on Blogging to Reach Your Buyers and Podcasting and Video Made, Well, as Easy as Possible. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 8 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Drive More Successes From The First Half of 2008 As we are fast approaching mid-year, it is a good time to look back at the investments you have already made this year and look for new ways to leverage these investments. This is a time to make the invisible visible. Most B2B Marketers have invested in either search engine optimization, paid search advertising or both this year. My guess is you were probably hoping for more quality leads from these investments. Have you considered these ideas to get more bang for your buck? • Identify visitors that didn’t announce themselves (the companies they originated from). Your web analytics tools can help with this or check out ReachForce Convert for more segmentation level data and visitor patterns. • Now that you’ve got the companies identified, do you have the right contacts to reach out to and play offense? Consider reaching out with an offer call to action relevant to the pages they viewed. How about your current customer marketing? Are you doing everything you can to get more from what you already have? • Is your customer database up to date and complete? 2% of data goes bad every month. Which 2%? Who knows. Your customer database is a great place to start a data refresh project. • While you’re refreshing, do you have the right buying contacts for additional products or services? If not consider adding these to the customer records so you are ready when you have new or updated product offers. Many of you invested in events in the first half of ’08. Have those leads been followed up on? According to SiriusDecisions, only 10% of trade show leads are followed-up by Sales. Are you, as a Marketer, nurturing the other 90%? • For those leads that are non-responsive, make sure that you have the right contacts in those companies. Think about the role of the person you are targeting? Think about the multiple folks involved in a purchase process at your target and their role. You might need different offers or calls-to-action for each member of the decision making unit. • Continue to nurture leads not ready for sales – dialog is important, it takes 5 to 7 touches to turn a lead into a prospect. Webinars seemed to have only increased in popularity in 2008. Although the event happens live, the recorded content can be repurposed. • Did you record the webinar and post on your website? Are you campaigning around the event even though the live version has already happened? • Have you considered using services like Insight24 to syndicate your webcast to over 13 million viewers? • Don’t forget about the podcasters. You can easily turn a webinar into multiple podcasts. Make sure short, bite sized content is available for those always short on time. Summer is often “down-time” for marketing and a time to plan for the blitz of lead generation post Labor Day. This summer instead of “getting ready for what’s to come”, consider spending a little time repurposing what you’ve already done, in between the down time of course. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 9 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Networking with the Affluent One of the perks of being a ReachForce customer is being a part of our book club. Throughout the year we send our customers a new marketing book and discuss it on The B2B Lead. Our first book was Marketing Gurus which is a compellation of summaries of great marketing books. In this post we discuss lessons learned from Networking with the Affluent by Thomas Stanley. One of Thomas Stanley’s forms of networking is called Give Information; Get Clients. Stanley lists 4 steps in this process: 1. Focus: For B2B Marketers, this means narrow your targets. Know the industries you are trying to target and the types of companies within those industries. Also, focus on the revenue range, employee size and geographies that are in your sweet spot. 2. Enhance your credibility within an industry: Make sure you are in the same places that your prospects go for information and thought leadership. These days that includes more than just industry publications. Be sure you are also commenting on the right blogs (and hopefully have your own), monitoring user communities and posting on Facebook. 3. Target the leaders of the affluent group: Target the leaders in the industry. Find out who has the hottest blog in the industry or latest book out and try to connect with them. Just be sure that this is a mutually beneficial relationship and not a one way street. 4. Recruit top professionals as speakers and network contacts: This doesn’t have to be limited to individuals. Work with your partners as well to create joint webinars or have a top executive from a partner be a guest blogger or participate in user communities. The better you position yourself/your company as an industry thought leader, the more credibility you will have in the market. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 10 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Don’t Forget About Customer Marketing B2B Marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to acquire new customers. After all, you have sales guys breathing down your backs for new leads all the time and quotas to meet for bookings and new customers acquired. As the drum beat on the recession gets louder, there’s more and more buzz about holding on to what you have, that means current customers. Why is it that in a downturn we worry about keeping our customers happy and not in growth cycles? Have you and your executive team ever taken a step back to see how much of your revenue actually comes from current customers? Or how many customers use you for a year and then choose not to renew because they have been ignored all year? Adding a current customer program has the potential to dramatically increase revenue, quickly. Implementing a current customer program involves much more than just a nice holiday card/gift once a year. You should have programs throughout the year to keep them engaged. Just as in lead generation, current customer programs should be segmented. This can be based on your own parameters: by products purchased, by size, by revenue contribution, by role within the company, etc. Once segmented you will be able to prioritize and focus on their needs with relevance. Also remember that cross-selling a current customer is more than blasting the new message to a current database – ask yourself, is the person (role) of the person in my database the right one for this value proposition/message? Do I need to find the right decision maker for that role? Here are some ideas to building and maintaining an ongoing relationship with your customers: • Start a newsletter – be sure to tell them information that they care about not just the latest award you have won • Ask them for feedback and input; consider asking them “The Ultimate Question” www.theultimatequestion.com • Create a customer community – you can develop your own or start small with a Facebook or LinkedIn group; the social web has enabled us to keep the conversations going all of the time. • Send thought leadership – this could be whitepapers or books that are exclusively available to customers, do a survey and share the results, share best practices • Host a user group conference – this is the most expensive but it is a great opportunity for you to connect with your customers and for them to connect with each other What percentage (%) of your marketing spend do you focus (or should) on current customer marketing? It’s never too late to get started driving more out of what you already have. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 11 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Go Direct With PR - Write Your Own Coverage TechCrunch published an excellent mini-tutorial on how to develop and distribute press releases in a Web 2.0 world. Why should you care? After all, who reads press releases? Well, according to the Tech Crunch article, a recent Outsell study highlighted that over 51% of IT professionals reported that they get their news from press releases in Yahoo and Google news over trade journals! Tech Crunch advises,“the trick for this new breed of press releases is to write it as the article you want to read.” Because, if you’ve done a good job, very often that is exactly what will be published. Here’s another gem: “When implemented with calls and links to action, and if they read in a way that’s compelling to people aka customers, you’ll find that they’re usually compelled to act.” The TechCrunch post is a must-read. And, here are a few other tips on getting better press release pickup in last week’s blog post, Using Press Releases to Drive Web Traffic and Leads. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 12 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Learn From the 6 Cs of Social Influence Marketing When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers. With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work. You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report. 1. Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support. Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets. 2. Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves. 3. Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site. Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at www.jaffejuice.com. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 13 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Trade in an Bad Addiction for a Good One - StumbleUpon Are you a Stumbler? I must admit, I find myself neglecting family and friends for my nightly StumbleUpon fix. For those of you scratching your head, StumbleUpon is–according to Wikipedia – a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user—known within the community as a Stumbler—clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles. And, for B2B Marketers, a StumbleUpon addiction could actually be a good one. Here are a few cool articles and tools I’ve found while Stumbling: • KnowThis • IA • Internet Marketing Simple And, a few of the more fun finds: • Shipment of Fail • Clean the Screen Now for the really good part. Turns out Marketers can pay to have their sites featured or served up to Stumblers. It’s called Stumble Upon Advertising and it’s really powerful, especially if you have the type of product or service that seems to be most popular with the StumbleUpon crowd. For pennies per view, you can target an audience with your website or blog. StumbleUpon then brings users directly to the page you specify and they rate your site. It’s a great way to drive web traffic and leads. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 14 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Stock Photos vs. Real Pictures Stock photos are generally a great resource for high quality images that don’t have the high cost of a custom photo shoot. The problem is that you are not the only one with access to them. At ReachForce, we recently changed our whole look and feel and no longer use any stock photos of people. Boy am I glad we did. I was recently driving down the freeway and saw a billboard using the same stock photo as our old homepage banner. The worst part was, it was for a church. Shame on them for not even using their own members for their ad. And last week I opened up my alumni newsletter only to see another one of our old stock photos but this time it was photoshopped so one woman was wearing my school colors. With as much money as my alma mater (The University of Texas) has, I would think they could at least get some real alumni for a picture. My recommendation is to use real people. Take photos at your user group conference or use your own employees. It is obvious when a stock photo is being used (especially if the reader has used it themselves!) If the quality isn’t perfect, that’s ok. It adds to the realism. And if you can’t get photos you like, an abstract image can convey meaning better than two people shaking hands. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 15 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Get to Know Your B2B Technical Buyer Attention Conservation Notice: The following post highlights research on B2B Technical Buyers and provides a quick overview of how to develop a persona for this role. Building an effective B2B target database takes a lot more than just identifying the right market segment, company size, and target title. Before you get started building your database, it’s important to get to know the different roles, responsibilities and characteristics of each person involved in the buying process. Today, we take a look at the B2B Technical Buyer – the person within a company or organization who is responsible for ensuring a solution meets the technical requirements of the company. For technology purchases this could be an IT professional. For CRM software it might be a Sales or Marketing professional. Depending upon the size of the organization, these individuals may or may not have final financial approval but they do hold significant influence over the purchase. Here’s what a recent MarketingSherpa Benchmark Study says about this role: a. white papers, product literature and industry articles as their top sources for product information. b. their top search engine is Google. Depending upon the source of data, you’ll hear that anywhere from 80 to 98% of them start their purchase process on Google. c. 64% of them shortlisted a product based on a timely sales call. What does your technical buyer look like? For my network management software company, we built a persona profile that described his or her job, life and daily concerns. We did this by describing our best customers. We even gave him a name—Ajay—and a face by adding a photo. Now, whenever I write literature or design a campaign, I always think of Ajay and I’m better able to target the campaign using the right messages and media. Here are a few items to think of when you are building your own: Name: Photo: Geographic: Gender: Age: Annual Income: Marital Status: Number of Children: Education: Work/Life Experience Psychographics: Current Work Environment: Mobile Devices: Presence in the Buying Cycle: For more on this topic, download the free B2B Marketing ebook called Funnelnomics from ReachForce. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 16 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Take a Hard Look at Funnelnomics as You Move Into 2008 Marketing Profs ran a great article yesterday by Russell Kern entitled “How to Solve Direct Marketing’s Five Biggest Problems” that struck a nerve with me as a B2B direct marketer. He writes “Salespeople love to receive a nice steady flow of leads that keeps them busy, but not too busy. When that’s not what you’re giving them, they tend to become, well, verbal. So what does Sales do? It cherry-picks the best leads, letting the surplus responses fall to the floor to rot. Within 45 days, they’re yelling for “fresh” leads.” Wow, does that ever sum up the universal B2B Direct Marketer’s challenge! It’s either too many or too few. We can never win. If you are struggling with too many leads or too few fresh/high quality leads, then Kern advises: • One of the fastest and least expensive methods to improve your results is to eliminate poor targets and increase the number of look-alike suspects. • Here is a simple exercise to perform when putting together a lead generation mailing: Have your data-processing vendor run a count, by title, of your mailing list. At the same time, run a count of your customer titles. • Now, compare the results. How many of the titles in your suspect mailing list are not in your customer file? How many titles like “administrator,” “consultant,” and, yes, even “inmate” have somehow slipped into your mailing list—people who will respond for the sake of it, but never, ever buy your product? Once you’ve taken the important step to better target your campaigns, you should also consider a great automated scoring and lead scoring and nurturing program as we wrote about in The B2B Lead and our ebook on the topic Funnelnomics. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 17 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Monitor Your Company or Product in the Blogosphere In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Manage You Company’s Reputation with Google Alerts), we wrote about how to use Google Alerts to manage your brand reputation. Now, MarketingProfs is listing a round up of paid services and a few free tools such as Blog Pulse (www.BlogPulse.com) which features conversation tracking, and visual trends. Marketing Profs advises readers to: “Set up a Google Alert so that every day, or as it happens, you get an email that shows you who is talking about that keyword (which can be your product or brand name). The challenge with simply using a tool like Google or Technorati Watchlist is the sheer volume of information. You need to either task people with manual assessment or use better tools (many of which are paid services) or contract with an outside provider. An alternative to Alerts, which hit your email inbox, is to setup an RSS Reader (Google, Bloglines, etc). Then you can check it as needed, versus filling your email inbox to the brim. The risk with an RSS Reader, though, is that you don’t look often enough.” VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 18 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Skip the Mega-launch, Opt for a New Approach to Generating Buzz for Your New Product or Service Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term. The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market. There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul: “The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin. Let’s look at an example. My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago. In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Devote 80 hours to prep time. At $100 an hour, that’s $8K. Speaking coach - $5K Travel - three nights for three people - $6K PR rep - $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer) Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. - $3K to $5K” Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint. Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass. So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, rolebased database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles. Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 19 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY How to Write and Market Whitepapers I saw a great presentation earlier this summer at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum by Michael Stelzner titled “Attracting Quality Leads with White Papers.” Michael has generated 60,000 qualified leads with his program, so I thought I would share some of his ideas. Here are Michael’s 6 mistakes Marketers make in regards to whitepapers: 1. Product Marketing Curse - Using a technical document for lead gen. 2. Marketing the Wrong Content - used car salesman approach, highly focused on company and product. 3. Post and Hope Syndrome - You need to drive prospects to the content, “If you build it, they will come” only works for Kevin Costner. 4. Brief Landing Pages - long form with little content 5. Immediate Access to Excellent Content - No registration, no follow-up emails 6. Not Integrated with Other marketing Efforts - Not promoted through email or direct mail campaigns, left out of newsletters and blogs Michael gave some compelling reasons why whitepapers should be a part of your marketing mix. To get to the point, they are a proven lead gen tool, help educate your buyers and position your company as a thought leader. Here are Michael’s tips for writing and publishing whitepapers: • When you sit down to write the whitepaper, you first need to determine which type of problem you are going to solve: People problems, Process problems, Quality problems or Absent problems. Then lead with the challenges faced by the ideal reader. • Discuss the solution is generic terms. People need to think that they need a solution like yours before you can sell them your specific solution. • Include a “what to look for” list - This is your silver bullet where you create a condition where only your product or service can succeed. Be sure to call out points where you deliver over your competition. • Only at the end of the whitepaper do you mention your company and the product or service you are promoting. Do be sure to have your branding on every page as well as the landing page. • Save the call to action for the very last sentence - make it compelling, actionable, and measurable • Think of the first page of your whitepaper as a movie trailer - show them enough for them to be willing to pay (fill out a form) for the rest. • Identify the ideal reader, summarize the challenge, summarize the solution, state the goal of the paper • AVOID: detailed explanation of the solution and features, introduction of your company, humor • When developing a title, keep in mind “what’s in it for me?” and the 3 U’s: • Ultra-specific • Unique • Useful to readers • Test the title with current customers, they will be the best judges. • Have long landing pages (this is against a lot of what we are hearing right now, but Michael has the results to prove that it works) • Provide a significant amount of content at the top of the landing page with a very short form (Michael suggests just name and email) at the bottom. This way readers are already hooked by the time they get to the form and more likely to fill out the form to get the rest of the whitepaper. • It is also great for SEO • Don’t allow immediate access to the whitepaper. Wait 30 minutes to send the pdf directly to the email address given. This does two things. First, it provides a sense of anticipation. Secondly, this is a way for you to verify that they gave you a valid email address, not mickeymouse@mickeymouse.com. I am working on implementing some of Michael’s ideas. He shares a lot more in his book, Writing White Papers. Do you have any suggestions for what works in writing and promoting whitepapers? VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 20 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly One of the perks of being a ReachForce customer is being a part of our book club. In this post we discuss lessons learned from The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. In Chapter 5 we learned the New Rules of News Releases and how news releases should be written for your buyers. Building off of the New Rules, after you have written for your buyers, now you need to reach them. David gives tips on how to develop a news release strategy in order to reach buyers directly. Here are some of his tips: Write about pretty much anything that your organization is doing. • Have a new take on an old problem? • Serve a unique marketplace? • Have interesting information to share? • CEO speaking at a conference? • Win an award? • Add a product feature? • Win a new customer? • Publish a whitepaper? Publish news releases through a distribution service. • Business Wire • Market Wire • PrimeNewswire • PR Newswire • PRWeb We have been using PRWeb for our latest news releases and have gotten descent response. What service have you had success using? Use RSS feeds. • Many distribution services provide this to make your news release available to other sites, blogs, journalists and individuals. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 21 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead Simultaneously publish news releases on your web site. Link wherever possible. Focus on the keywords and phrases your buyers use. • Think about your buyer personas. PRESENTED BY Include social media tags. • Like Technorati, DIGG and del.icio.us Tell the media, your clients and your prospects. • • Repurpose content for all audiences. Example: Tweak content for use in company newsletter. I’ll close with what David said about the importance of reaching your buyers. “Implementing a news release strategy to reach buyers directly is like publishing an online news service - you are providing your buyers with information that they need in order to find your organization online and then learn more about you.” VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 22 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Are You Writing Gobbledygook for Your Buyers? One of the perks of being a ReachForce customer is being a part of our book club. In this post we discuss lessons learned from The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. We’ve talked a lot about writing best practices here on The B2B Lead. B2B Marketers out there, pay special attention to this chapter. Gobbledygook words – that’s what David calls jargon-laden phrases. Words like groundbreaking, industry-stand, and cutting edge are good examples of gobbledygook words. David goes on to say that business-to-business technology marketers are the worst offenders. Here are some interesting findings from a study David highlighted in this chapter. 388,000 press releases were analyzed over a 9 month period. 74,000 of them had gobbledygook words 9895 of them used the words next generation over 5000 of them used words like flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use between 2,000 and 5,000 used words like cutting edge, mission critical, market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking WOW! And isn’t the goal of doing a news release to stand out in the crowd? Well we’re not if we’re using these words. Here’s a few more tips – another study highlighted in this chapter, this time a survey of general business and trade editors. These are these people that we sent out announcements to. Are you using these words? • “Leading” (used as an adjective) – 94% of editors feel it is overused • “We’re excited about…” – 76% of editors feel it is overused • “Solutions” – 68% of editors feel it is overused • “…a wide range of…” – 64% of editors feel it is overused • “Unparalleled” – 62% of editors feel it is overused • “Unsurpassed” – 53% of editors feel it is overused David does a great job of summarizing the importance of writing for our buyers, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to steal a couple of lines for the book to close this as well. “Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action, which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want this in their own words, and then they want proof. Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince. At each stage of the sales process, well-written materials combined with effective marketing programs will lead your buyers to understand how your company can help them.” If you’re worried about your use or overuse of gobbledygook words in your news releases, check out Hubspot’s Press Release Grader. This free tool helps you make sure you are getting the most out of every news release you write. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 23 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Don’t Forget Where You’ve Been When Deciding Where to go Next… As the summer ends and everyone comes back from vacation we’re quickly reminded that the end of the year is right around the corner. As Marketers that means we really only have about 10 weeks left to drive meaningful activity (sales-ready leads) this year. With only limited time left we naturally want to target our marketing efforts at low hanging fruit first. Targeted lead generation requires reaching the right buyers in the right companies, right? Before you kick off new programs, why not start with what you already know and have? Consider these starting points: Sales Pipeline data - Customer win data and in-funnel opportunities can be a goldmine at your fingertips. • Understand where you’ve been, where you won and who else is out there that match that profile. • Look at what prospects are moving through the funnel the fastest, find more like these. Website Analytics – Visitors are stopping by, but do you know who they are? • Are there visitor profiles or patterns of interest? If so, do you have a plan to act on these? • Web analytic tools can help you identify the company that is visiting, interesting. Identifying the right decision making unit inside these visiting companies, even more interesting. Once you’ve identified the companies with the highest likelihood to buy, don’t forget about your decision making unit buying personas (influencers, evaluators, recommenders, end users and budget owners). What do your buyers look like? What do they care about? Why should they listen to you? As you are getting ready to ramp your lead generation for the end of the year push don’t forget where you’ve been, who you’re attracting today and how you are going to use this information to get the best results possible. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 24 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Forums, Wikis, and Your Targeted Audience Do you know anyone who is not online? I even know an 87-year-old who uses eBay. The fact of the matter is that everyone is online. The question is - are they talking about you and do you know what they are saying? David Meerman Scott gives some great examples of how different companies responded to negative comments on forums and blogs. I think there are two great lessons to be learned from these examples: 1. You need to know what people, especially your customers, are saying about you 2. You need to respond swiftly and genuinely directly to your audience. Do not do what Sony BMG did and respond to bloggers by going on the radio, respond where your audience is, online. Hopefully most of you are already using Google Alerts to help you monitor blogs and news stories but it will not catch everything. Here are some other monitoring tools you should check out: 1. search.twitter.com - you can search on any keyword, like your company name, to see who is tweeting about you 2. blogsearch.google.com - again you can search on any keyword and add an RSS feed of it to your Google Reader. Tip: you can exclude your own blog or website by adding -site:yourwebsite.com after the keyword. So if I want to see who is talking about ReachForce I would search: reachforce -site:theb2blead.com. I have discussed this before on The B2B Lead, but you should also monitor an RSS feed of blogs and forums that are in your space. These are the most likely targets for your customers and prospects. Have someone in your company who can add value to the conversation be involved. This is not always easy, but can have great benefits. The point is: • Be involved online and know what people are saying about you • If you see something negative, don’t go dark, respond to try to make it better and admit when you have done something wrong. Everyone appreciates an apology when it is genuine. • You can gain credibility by having an in-house expert active on forums and blogs - remember no sales pitches What have you found to be successful online. We would love to hear any success stories. Know of any good monitoring tools? Please share. Stay tuned next week when we will be covering chapters 8 & 9 on going viral and content rich websites. VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 25 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY About ReachForce ReachForce delivers software (SaaS) and data services that enable B2B companies to laser target their lead generation programs. ReachForce solutions allow marketing and sales teams to target market ‘sweet spots’ using CRM and website visitor data then reach the right buyers in these companies using role-based contact discovery services. ReachForce was created to ensure Marketers, keep their seat at the table. As a team of long time Marketers we decided we were tired of it being ok to be wrong 97% of the time. With marketing response rate industry averages being less than 3%, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we as B2B Marketers have been driving lead generation initiatives. Response rates don’t equal leads and leads don’t always mean qualified buyers. At ReachForce, we don’t care about or measure response rates, we drive and measure revenue delivered to the business from lead generation initiatives. By addressing the foundation of any marketing program, the data - or “The WHO” as we call it, ReachForce was founded with one goal in mind: to provide businesses with revolutionary, high quality, costeffective data to fuel their marketing and sales lead generation initiatives. About The B2B Lead We’ve designed The B2B Lead blog to deliver real world, practical B2B Sales and Marketing Tips to help you capture more qualified buyers and convert them into profitable customer relationships. Each week, we will deliver snack-size how-to’s and thought-provoking commentary from B2B Marketers for B2B Marketers. ReachForce customers–who include Directors of Marketing Communications, Sales Professionals, Marketing Programs Managers–and other guest writers will share techniques that help you take a more deliberate and predictable approach to increasing the velocity and efficiency of the Marketing and Sales funnel. If you want to share ideas while learning from your peers, subscribe to our B2B Marketing RSS feed now. We hope you will make it your go-to resource for techniques to succeed in the new world of metrics-driven Marketing. This is the last of a five volume collection of B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead. To download all 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips, visit http://www.reachforce.com/resources/. The collection includes: Volume One: Online Marketing Volume Two: Direct Marketing Volume Three: Event Marketing Volume Four: Marketing and Sales Alignment Volume Five: More Marketing and Sales Tips VOLUME FIVE • More Sales and Marketing Tips 26