March 2010 Archives

One clear winner of the recession have been providers of marketing automation  software which promise to enable marketers to work with customers in a completely different way and add much more value to the sales process. In other words, three groups benefit from marketing automation technology:

1.       Marketers are able to create personalised campaigns appropriate for different stages of their target's buying cycle, automate part of the process to increase activity and optimise campaigns to boost the ROI. They can take responsibility for adding value to leads through nurturing techniques before passing them to sales.

2.       Sales should get fewer, but better quality leads as a result which should mean a more productive sales team and shorter sales cycles.

3.       Customers or prospective customers will get more appropriate and compelling offers which match their requirements and encourage them to do buy

Throughout 2009, we (RBI) experimented with different technologies and eventually settled on the Eloqua system which was more suitable for enterprise clients such as ourselves. The technology is now live and operational in two of our premium, subscription markets - XpertHR and ICIS. It's an exciting time as these tools allow many of the principles of marketing to be realised. For example, marketers can now have 'conversations' with their prospects, adjusting messages based on the recipient's response. Hard offers don't need to be the first offer and value can be added through a series of softer offers which match the stage of the prospect's buying cycle and therefore build trust and credibility. In other words, with marketing automation technology that has been properly integrated with other systems, marketers can replicate a face to face conversation by observing the digital body language of their recipient.

If you're looking at investing in marketing automation technology to improve your competitive advantage, the key lessons for me from this whole process are:

1. Be clear on roles and responsibilities - both within your internal team and the role that suppliers will need to play as they will change over time
2. Be prepared for a big shift in focus to planning which will take up the lion share of the work. Get this right and everything else flows. Over time, marketers will have more time to invest in understanding the target markets' buying process, issues and needs as well as ensuring that they can present their offers in the most effective way
3. Creating, tagging and filing content assets is important - don't underestimate the amount of effort this takes. Offers to download white papers means that you need to have a white paper, but consider what's already available before you set off to create something from scratch.
4. Working well with IT is essential, so make sure you have development resource available to tag pages and integrate other systems if that's a requirement

 

Further reading

Digital Body Language

 

Icis case study.ppt

 

The Online Marketing Summit in San Diego sounded like a great event, full of useful and practical ideas. Unfortunately I wasn't there, but Kim Albee was and she has provided links to many of the excellent insights that came out of the event from attendees and bloggers who were there. You can read the Online Marketing Summit Insights here.  Content marketing, Landing Page Optimisation and Lead Nurturing were key areas discussed.

For more on Lead Nurturing

Will 2010 be the year where the mobile device finally becomes a core element in the mix of channels, a marketers uses? Back in 2007, I did a couple of SMS experiments which paid back, but the results were all a bit too thin to scale it out in a bigger way. In other words, at the start, it seemed very straightforward, but when you throw into the equation a whole range of issues of obstacles, any margin we had quickly disappeared. How the world has moved on in two years. I was interested to see a recent post from Google's Richard Robinson which captures quite nicely how mobile devices have developed so much that they should no longer really be called 'mobile phones' as a phone is merely one small task amongst a myriad of other functions it is used for. Richard is speaking at the IDM B2B Conference on May 19th in London.

Marketing Week published an interesting article on how technology is enabling marketers to deliver far more personalised messaging at the correct stage of the buying process. i gave a short interview about our own experiences with marketing automation which is delivering interesting and encouraging results.

With less money and an increased focus on cost accountability, the subject of ROMI (Return-On-Marketing-Investment) is getting more and more attention in the b2b marketing world.  Here's a useful resource that will help you calculate your ROI - 10 of the best ROI calculators on the web. There are tools to focus on single channel (social media, webm email, direct mail) as well as multi channel campaigns. Take a look http://www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca/blog/2009/12/14/top-10-romi-calculators/

"Content Marketing is turning your insight and advice into campaigns that change people's minds and incite action."

2009 was the year that marketers became publishers and the whole area of content marketing took off. Some of my team ran a workshop to share learning across our organisation as white papers are relatively cheap to produce if you know how and can be used effectively to generate marketing qualified leads.

Here are a few tips:
* Look what content you have so that you can repurpose content that already exists (articles, blog posts etc)
* The hotter the topic, the more popular the content will be
* Understand your personals so that the content is relevant and
engaging
* Rotate white paper content frequently to maintain credibility audience engagement
* Create a white paper template to speed up the creation process (a process that may have once taken months, can be reduced to days)
* Turn the white paper into other forms of content - webinar, case studies or vice versa - make our content 'work harder'. More about this
* Promote white papers via the usual channels - email, online, social media
* Make it easy for people to share (through social media) white paper landing pages
* Look into ways of letting people, who have downloaded a white paper, comment and rate them (this will give us an understanding on what topics are working)
* Build an asset library of all content

Useful resources
1 Content marketing
2 Content Marketing Playbook (examples & benefits of different types of content)
3 The B2B content Marketing Workbook