Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Start Helping, Stop Selling

 
You can create magnetic content that wows prospects if you focus on helping, rather than making sales.  Five tips follow:
 
Identify Prospects' Needs
You need to understand what your prospects need to make better decisions, and how you can improve their lives by providing it. Sometimes the best approach is to pick up the phone and talk to existing customers.  Go talk to your customers. Ask them why they bought your product.
 
Map Customer Needs To Useful Marketing Content
Once you really understand what buyers need, you can focus on mapping your content to truly resonate with those needs. A sales lead is a prospect who meets specific, predetermined criteria for becoming a customer. They desire specific information about their circumstances, and eventually, they might have a problem that your product can solve.
 
Market Your Marketing
First, you'll want to employ "seed nurturing."  Basically, you put your content everywhere that prospects find it -- thus planting "seeds."  Any of these might take root and grow. You might promote it on your homepage, share it on social media, include it in a newsletter, and include it in ad and product publicity in print media.
 
Make Helping A Process, Not A Project
Change is inevitable.  A prospect's needs may be different tomorrow than today. In addition, new technologies open doors to new ways of helping.  Film died and was replaced with digital images. Cassettes died and were replaced with digital audio formats. People change.  Technologies change. You need to keep adapting.
 
Keep Score
You don't want this initiative to become a novelty.  It must me measured effectively. You'll want to know how many times your mobile app was downloaded, how many times your blog was visited.  But keep in mind you're not just looking for eyeballs.  You want to know what those eyeballs are doing.
 
You'll want to know when someone is reviewing your content as they may be considering a purchase.  But don't put long forms there.  If your value is strong, prospects will contact you after they finish their research.
 
If you can track where the prospect originated, and which origins resulted in wins, you can create metrics to measure sales.
 
 

Monday, July 28, 2014

Convert More Website Visitors Into Leads - Part II

 
Don't be afraid to put your most important sales message on the home page -- for two reasons. One, most links to your site will point to the home page. Why make someone have to go somewhere to get your sales message?  They're already there; take advantage of that. Two, it will help your search engine optimization. As other sites link to your home page, the more copy (and keyword search phrases) that you have, the better.
 
Then too, if you're using a pay-per-click campaign to drive traffic to your website, you definitely want your sales message to be on the exact page that your driving them to.  You're paying to get them there. So, a great headline to make them start reading, a very strong first paragraph, and enough information to get your message (and maybe become a lead) helps if the visitor doesn't have to click somewhere else.
 
Don't rely on your web prospects to figure anything out. Use a strong call to action for everything on your site. But for something that's as proven as the concept of the importance of strong calls to action, many web sites don't practice this rule. On many sites, the best is a tab that says "Contact."  And visitors may have to search too hard to even find it. Three simple rules follow for any web site:
 
  1. Display your contact information on every page. The top right, or the top left, or right-hand column all work. You never know when a prospect is going to get mildly interested enough to want more information.  Make it easy.
  2. Make all of your contact information mini calls to action. Don't just show your email address.  Instead, say, "For free information about lowering your costs twenty percent, just email us here." Or say, "Call us 8-5 Pacific Time at 800-555-1234. After hours? Submit this form and we'll get back to you promptly."
  3. Always give a web prospect at least three ways to contact you -- whichever they are most comfortable.  They can call, or email, or fill out a convenient form.
If you want a lead, give something of value.  Want more leads?  Give more value. A small percentage of web visitors may be desperate to buy right now.  They'll pick up the phone and call. That's great, but if that's all you get, you're missing out big time. Most web visitors are using the Internet to research products and suppliers, often at the very early stages. One of the secrets to capturing more leads online is to consider prospects that are not red hot right now. The whole idea is to capture their email address as soon as possible, and follow-up with all of them over an extended period of time. until they become hot down the road. Then, you'll be right there to help them. 
 
To get web visitors to give you their email address, you have to give them something.  And, it's important to think about prospects in the early stages of research.  They want information and knowledge.  Examples include:
 
  • White papers
  • Free reports
  • Critical check lists
  • Quick start guides
  • Product demos
  • Free trials
  • Industry surveys
Just keep in mind that it's better to give something if you want to get something.
   
 
 

Monday, June 9, 2014

Convert More Website Visitors Into Leads - Part I

 
First, think of your website as a 24/7 sales person sitting in front of your prospect whenever they want to listen.  Like any good sales presentation, your website needs to talk about the prospect and the benefits of your product(s) for him - not about yourself, your company or your features. Your prospects only care about their needs and how you can help them. Use the word "you" a lot, not "we."
And make it easy and convenient for prospects to listen to (read) your presentation. This means don't make them click all over the place to read your sales message. It's amazing how many websites get prospects just where they want them, and then make them go somewhere else after just a couple of points. And then go somewhere else. And then go somewhere else.
 
If you had a 30-minutes sales presentation with a decision-maker, would you stop every five minutes and say, "That's a little bit about how we can lower your production cost twenty percent.  Now, let's move into the next room and we'll talk about our excellent warranty." After making your prospect get up every five minutes, I think he's likely to say, "No, I think I've got the picture. Thank you very much for the excellent presentation. We'll be in touch."
 
Silly, right? Then why do so many websites stop every few paragraphs and make you click somewhere else to continue? Just like the example above, this is crazy. If the prospect is going along reading your sales message, he either likes it or doesn't. If he doesn't, he'll stop and go somewhere else anyway. You're not any better by hiding the stuff he might like on another page.
 
And if your prospect likes it, why in the world would you want to stop every couple of minutes and say, "Are you still interested? Really? Okay, then are you interested enough to click over here and wait for another page to load, find the right place to start reading, skim through the fluff at the beginning and start reading again?  You are? Great, click here."
 
Every single time you make a prospect stop and think about whether he really needs to learn any more, you're going to lose a certain percentage of web visitors.
 
Again, we're not talking about using your website to do everything for everyone.  We're talking about how to capture more leads as a percentage of all site visitors. One way to do that is to refrain from continually interrupting them in the middle of your sales presentation.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Advantages Of Print - Part II

 
The advertising media format of the moment seems to be leaning more toward online advertising -- but does it clean up in every department?
 
Some progressives may say no, but the fact of the matter is that magazine advertising does have advantages in the media advertising mix.
 
One of the primary advantages of print media is its capacity to excite and stimulate when people are in a relaxed frame of mind. Even though online advertising has the edge in cost per lead terms, it is print media that seems to stay with us. If you run a magazine ad campaign, you are not able to monitor the effectiveness of that schedule in direct response terms.  While print media has moved away from the old reader service card response process, it is now perfectly positioned as the corporate, brand awareness medium.
 
Another advantage of print is credibility.  If you see it in print, it usually holds a higher position of respect and value -- one thing that the Internet can't fulfill due to the fact that it is very much a content-led format.  It depends very much on results from search engines for prospects than are typically already researching your company or product(s) largely due to pre-existing brand awareness.
 
Regardless of growth of the Internet, advertising through print continues to bring a definite competitive advantage. Let's just say that a company chooses not to communicate with customers and prospects. The result is likely that most prospective buyers will not even consider your company or product(s). It's simply "out of sight, out of mind."

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Advantages Of Print


If you believe that print is dead, you didn't get the memo. Recent research shows that print advertising campaigns combining internet advertising achieve up to 25 percent higher response.
Print has some characteristics that the web simply can't match.  Six reasons follow though you may think of even more.

Targeted Marketing: Magazines offer the ability to target a specific demographic. Advertisers can target subscribers that B2B magazines qualify by industry segment, job title and more.

Print Ads Have High Retention Rates: Magazine ads can be viewed in a single glance and don't require scrolling or clicking through. When people read offline, they tend to have longer attention spans. Web reading is useful for gathering quick blurbs of information, but people pay more attention to what they are reading with print. For this reason, buyers tend to remember more of what they read (and see) in print.

Brand Marketing With Print: Because print ads are inherently visual, graphics and text can be used to convey an emotional response to create brand  recognition.

Print Has Authenticity: Sure, getting a case history or some other kind of editorial in a magazine's web site is a big deal.  But it's an even bigger deal for that story to appear in print.  Print has a tangibility that doesn't exist with the web. On a more personal scale, marrying the solidity of print to the convenience of the web strengthens both media.

Print Readers Are Focused: If you're browsing the web with six tabs open and watching TV in the background, you may not be that receptive to all the advertising going on around you. But if you're reading a magazine, you're generally focused on just that. Most of the time someone reading a magazine is not multitasking.

Sometimes Unplugging Is Very Appealing: We're creatures of our tech-saturated times, and that's not going to change. However, people are starting to see the value of occasionally unplugging themselves from their devices and the web.



Friday, April 18, 2014

Maximize Your Marketing Automation Process

 
According to Frost & Sullivan, the majority of marketing leaders report dissatisfaction with results from marketing automation. CMO's know their marketing automation isn't delivering results but aren't sure what do.  There are three key questions to evaluate if your shortcoming rests in the process alone:
  • My prospects and customers are not presented with quality content.
  • My entire program is automated without leveraging personalized one-to-one nurturing.
  • My lead generation program is not guided by a lead management process.
Lack of Content: Research shows that the #1 reason for marketing automation failure is lack of content. Without quality content the system is on the road to failure.  The majority of marketing departments struggle to produce sufficient content to fuel marketing automation. Focus on producing the right content to engage prospects depending on where they are in the buying journey.
 
Undefined or Lack of Lead Management Process: A lead management process converts early stage interest to sales qualified leads. Marketing teams that operate ad-hoc suffer from below-average conversion rates. Successful marketers generating optimal conversion rates share a common trait. They operate from a documented lead management process that result in more qualified leads flowing from the top of the funnel.
 
Over-emphasized Automation: Ultimately, people buy from people. Just because you can automate something doesn't mean that you should automate everything. A lead management process should be built on the buyer's process. A buyer's process map provides insights into when the right level of human interaction is desirable. There is missed opportunity to exclude human intellect. Prospects who are early of midway through the buying process don't want to be "qualified." They want to engage and discuss key concepts. Automation by itself causes leads to go away. Prospects respond favorably to their first human contact that seeks to provide one-to-one nurturing.
 
Source: Vince Koehler, Sales Benchmark Index

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Nobody Wants To Get Blasted

 
Just recently, I came across an e-book called Conversations, Not Campaigns.  The title caught my attention, if only because it was aligned with my personal views about marketing: Most people don't want to be "sold" to. Think about it: Do you want to be campaigned to, and treated like a gigantic walking wallet?  No, you'd probably prefer to be a part of a conversation, and treated like an intelligent human being. The psychology is simple.
 
Gone are the days of batch and blast. The bigger-is-better, hard-sell, batch-and-blast mentality is now the dinosaur of modern day digital marketing. Contemporary buyers expect personal and relevant emails on a non-disruptive schedule. Bottom line: Nobody wants to get blasted.
 
While most marketers are now on board about the importance of content marketing, can you put your finger on what really makes your content engaging?
 
Engaging content should stimulate organic dialogue.  It's all about a relationship-oriented mindset, which means:
  • Being spoken with instead of talked to
  • Dialogues instead of narratives
  • Personalization instead of classic automation

Much of this may sound like common sense when it comes to your digital marketing efforts and the volume of customers and prospects you're trying to retain and acquire, but the human touch often takes a backseat to technology's ability to automate.

Less blasting...more engaging!

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Enchantment To Break Down Barriers

 
 
Having a great product is one thing, but your company needs to thoroughly enchant its customers to be truly successful. The more innovative the product or service, the more you need enchantment. In a perfect world, just a great product would have the world beating the path to your door, but it doesn't work like that. Creating an enchanting brand requires authenticity, trying to help users, and trying to see the world from the customer's perspective.
 
Enchantment is a key to breaking down barriers that can hold your business back. Identify key elements that create enchantment for buyers who aren't eager to convert. No one sets out to build a product or company hoping or knowing people will hate it. You want your product or service to be embraced. To make this happen, you have to not only consider the qualities that make your product or service a joy to use. Its also about how you market it after the fact.
 
So now that you have a product or service with depth, completeness to make buyers more productive, "give them peace of mind."  What's next? How do you actively enchant when it's out on the market?
 
Do a pre-mortem, not a post-mortem.  The term "post-mortem" has become the norm for many marketers to analyze what went right, what went wrong, what could be done better. A post-mortem is something you do after something dies to make you feel better.  The problem with this: It's too late. If it doesn't go well, a post-mortem can turn into a bunch of finger-pointing and anger.
 
When you do a pre-mortem, you ask your team, "Let's pretend that our product, or our company has failed. We failed. Now, what are all the possible reasons we failed?" Maybe it was the lack of distribution, an unsophisticated sales force, an unreliable product, or inefficient technical support. Whatever it is, you come up with all of the reasons. And then, in an unemotional way, you talk about how you can eliminate each of these reasons. This is a very different conversation.  Do a pre-mortem so you never have to do an actual post-mortem.
 
Once your product is out in the wild, its success rests largely on marketing.  And enchantment should be your marketing team's wheelhouse to break down barriers of resistance. You need to explain your product, why it's needed and why it's "lovable."
 
 

Monday, April 7, 2014

Media Usage Trends

 
We (Gardner Business Media) just completed our fourth annual Media Usage Survey to gain insights about media usage trends and buying behaviors of today's manufacturing technology buyer. I now follow with an overview and what findings mean for suppliers targeting this group.
 
Brand awareness remains the most influential factor impacting media usage and vendor selection. Industrial buyers rely on sources and suppliers that they recognize and trust. The influence of brand is most apparent when buyers review search results, select vendors and conduct research.
 
More than 70% of manufacturing buyers look for products or services at least once a week. The majority of manufacturing technology purchases are influenced by at least three people.  There is no significant increase in overall mobile use, but significant gains appear in laptop and tablet usage. Primary mobile use is email and web browsing as buyers prefer browsers to apps when accessing web content on mobile devices.
 
Social media adoption has increased somewhat for the third consecutive year.  However, the perception of its usefulness remains flat.  LinkedIn and YouTube are the most useful social media sites for manufacturing buyers.  Twitter and Facebook are blocked at nearly 20% of responding companies while LinkedIn and YouTube are the most open social sites.
 
The most influential criteria impacting a buyer's selection of a potential vendor is technology followed closely by service and reputation.  Buyers turn to peers, technical articles and tradeshows when forming a perception of prospective vendors. Still, process-related trade magazines delivered in print continue to be the top "push" media influence with buyers.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

There Is A Role For Print

 
 
 
Yes, in the era of iPads and Apps, there is still a role for print.  As a B2B marketer, there is an opportunity here.  Here's why in my mind:
 
Getting Attention: Have you noticed how many fewer magazines you're getting in the mail these days? There's just less mail, so more attention is paid to each piece.
 
No Audience Development Costs: Publishers expend huge amounts of time and money qualifying subscribers.  Many times, publishers invest multiple dollars per subscriber for auditing purposes (BPA Statement).  They send direct mail, they call, they send email so that the magazine can report subscribers requesting the magazine. That's a cost marketers don't have to worry about.
 
Prospects Still Need To Ask Questions: We love the Internet because buyers can find answers to almost anything.  But where do we go to think about what questions we should be asking? The web is where we go to get answers but print is where we go to learn questions. The print vehicle is still the best medium for thinking outside the box to ask tough questions based on what your read. 
 
Print Still Excites People: The printed word is still perceived as more credible to many people than anything on the web. It goes to the old adage, "If someone invested enough to print and mail it, it must be important."
 
Customer Retention: Recent research studies highlight how print is still best for customer retention to build brand awareness.
 
Unplug: More and more people are actively choosing to unplug, or disconnect themselves from digital media. I'm dong this myself. I'm finding myself turning off my phone and email more to engage with printed material. 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Do You Need A Ping-Pong Marketing Plan?

 
 
Most marketers don't think about the interplay or ping-ponginess of the B2B buying process. Too many still have campaign mentalities.  We still care mostly about what we want  buyers to do...whether we're accommodating what they want, or not.  We still sit down to plan a campaign and focus on the deliverables. "Okay -- let's publish a couple of blog posts to drive registrants to a webinar, then we'll follow that with a white paper and a sales pitch. How many leads do you think we can generate for sales if we execute this program in Q2?"
 
Why don't we think about it like Ping-Pong?  There's a rhythm to Ping-Pong, a back-and-forth. Playing Ping-Pong is like having a conversation. And that is what your content should be designed to do. It doesn't mean that the campaign above won't work if rethought, but the problem is that it stops in its tracks when planned this way. It's a snippet of the conversation that will need to be held over a complex B2B buying process. As it stands, there's no connection to anything that comes before or after.
 
It's like having a conversation and suddenly, in mid-sentence, the other person gest a text, glances at his smartphone and steps away to deal with it, never returning and leaving you to wonder if you're really that boring. That's exactly how a campaign can treat prospective buyers.
 
Stick with me to think about it:
 
Buyer: I wonder what my peers are doing to solve problem X?
 
Marketer: This blog post talks about six different ways people are dealing with problem X.
 
Buyer: That was great information. Oh, look, they're having a webinar with more examples.  Think
            I'll sign up.
 
Marketer: Thanks for attending our webinar.  Here's a link to replay.
 
Buyer: I was there. I don't need to see it again. What else have you got?
 
Marketer: Silence.
 
Buyer: Hmm. Those examples got me thinking, but I wonder if there are any industry best practices
            emerging about problem X?
 
Marketer: Silence.
 
Buyer: Where'd they go?
 
Salesperson: Since you attended our webinar, we thought you might need a demo of our solution. Got
                     30 minutes?
 
Buyer: What? I'm not sure this will work in our situation.  I need to talk to David and Harvey and
            Sam.
 
Salesperson: I just sent you an email about a demo, thought I'd leave a voicemail too.  Want a demo?
 
Buyer: I wonder who the experts are who can help me learn more about dealing with problem X?
            Maybe I'll try a search on Twitter for X...
 
Marketer: Silence.
 
You may be shaking your head about these exchanges, but this is what so many B2B marketing campaigns look like. The problem with a "campaign mindset" is that marketers are missing the Ping to go with the Pong. And your buyer prospects are very aware of the lapse.
 
But not to worry.  They won't be waiting on you to fix that issue. They've already moved on to someone else who is more helpful and concerned about what they want and need over the long term. Someone who's dedicated to playing the game all the way through.
 
It's one thing to map content to the buying process. It's quite another to plan for the Ping-Pong scenarios that will keep the ball in the air. 
 
What new considerations are you adding to your content strategy to account for the back-and-forth of extended conversation that won't abruptly leave your prospects hanging?

Source: Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions
 
 

Monday, January 13, 2014

Why So Many Companies Get Branding Wrong

 
A brand is the only corporate asset that, managed properly, will never depreciate. Think about it: patents expire, software ages, buildings crumble, roofs leak and machines break.  But a well-managed brand can increase in value year after year.
 
Despite this unique characteristic, brand is often misunderstood. It seems soft and fuzzy. It's often incorrectly defined. And, at least historically, it hasn't been a hard, measurable metric like sales, market share, stock price or price/earnings ratio that can be tracked on a spreadsheet or reported to the board. But neglecting a brand is both naïve and shortsighted.
 
In some ways branding is a victim of semantics. Call it "reputation" and nobody would ever argue that it's anything less that critical. All companies are careful to avoid doing anything that would harm their reputations.  But management teams commonly underachieve in the application of reputation management best practices...in a word, branding.
 
Too many business leaders believe branding is a discipline that lives in the marketing department. But it's much broader than that. Branding includes everything a company does, from the logo, to the way it handles customer complaints, to whether personnel keep their shirts tucked in. It's easy to limit perspective of branding to the verbal and visual expressions a company puts into the marketplace, but there isn't anything that anybody within an organization does (or fails to do) that doesn't affect how your company is perceived.
 
Effective branding improves the visibility of and respect for a product, service or company. It attracts attention and drives sales. It also enhances margins, as customers are willing to pay more for products and services from companies they know and trust.
 
It's easy to think about branding just in terms of the latest-and-greatest social media platform, viral video or smartphone app. Doing so means missing the fundamental principles of the discipline that go well beyond the trendy and transient. It's not like mathematics, engineering or accounting, in which there are rules or regulations to be followed. Instead, there are a significant number of commonsense, sometimes counterintuitive truths based on how real humans interact in the real world that can make a significant impact on any business.
 
Resource: Steve McKee

MY OBJECTIVE:

To share common sense lessons learned with 40-plus years experience in marketing, sales and as a B2B publisher.

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