October 2010 Archives

A useful analysis  from Forrester of how marketing automation can help to align B2B marketers with sales and bring large business benefits.  However, 'Marketing Automation is like a painter's palette - it doesn't make you a master' and the research reveals a number of issues:

 

1. Focus is stuck at the top of the funnel - many B2B marketers are not using the system to nurture the leads, but to blast their entire database.
2. There is a lack of process - before automating, few B2B firms had any real process in place for lead generation and the handoff to sales.
3. Not enough support from the sales organisation exists.
4. Resource bottlenecks persist - once marketers realise what's possible with automation, they naturally want to run more campaigns, but don't have the content they need to engage buyers.

 

Further references

Making Marketing Automation A Catalyst for Alignment with Sales

At the recent Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit, Dr Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABs ran through 14 useful tips for optimising the marketing conversion process. Tiny changes have an enormous effect and can substantially alter the ROI:

1.    Remember people don't buy from websites, they buy from people.
2.    Use quantitative statements to support your claims, rather than vague qualitative
       language that anyone can say.
3.    Keep paragraphs short, supported with quantitative evidence.
4.    People naturally read from top to bottom, so don't put obstacles in the way of the
       natural flow of the eye.
5.    Reserve the right-hand page for supporting information.
6.    If you make a claim in an ad (eg award winning), substantiate the claim on the
       landing page to follow the natural thought sequence.
7.    Forms that are separate from a landing page should emphasise the value
       proposition much as the landing page.
8.    Some landing pages need so much work that it's more efficient to just scrap it and
       start again.
9.    Remember the job of a headline is to engage someone sufficiently to read the first
       paragraph.
10.  The role of first paragraph is to answer the key questions in visitors' minds - Where a
       am I? What can I do here? Why should I do it?
11.  Keep the number of clicks that a user is required to do to a minimum - research
       indicates that every time you ask someone to click, you potentially lose 50% of 
       audience.
12.  Become a master at using the elements of the page that control eye
       movement: shape, position, size, colour.
13.  Remember to test variables such as the use of different words (eg does the word
       'Trial' convert better than 'Demo?)

The challenge for marketers is to guide users through a process, helping them overcome the 'FRICTION' that they meet along the way:

 

Tool	What you'd like a user to do	What often happens
Search ad	Read the ad and click	Ad isn't relevant so clicks back
Landing page:  headline	Read the headline	Not engaging, so hits the back button
Landing page:  first paragraph	Read the first paragraph	Not specific or relevant, so clicks 'back'
Call to Action (CTA)	See the 'CTA', clicks, reviews the form and completes it	Starts the process, but abandons it part of the way through

Further References
Slides from the B2B Marketing Sherpa Event

 

 

I was at Marketing Sherpa's B2B Summit last week in San Francisco and it was useful to see how the world looks from the techology capital of the world. 

Marketing Sherpa's 2011 B2B Benchmark Report
The conference opened with Sergio Balegno, the Associate Director of Research, outlining the findings of Sherpa's 2011 B2B Benchmark report.  Containing the views of 935, US-based marketers, the research highlights three issues that are keeping B2B marketers up at night:

1. The quality (rather than quantity) of leads which has grown in importance since 2009 (+9%).
2. Optimisation of website pages and social media has also grown in importance and is predicted to take up an increasing proportion of budgets by 2012.
3. How to communicate the value of marketing to C-level executives in an environment of increased accountablilty and cost pressure.

Optimising the Marketing Funnel

Another highlight for me was Dr. Flint McGlaughlin's session on ways of optimising the top of the funnel.  In other words:

1. How can you get the most from the mix of search ads, emails and other tactics used to generate visits. 
2. How can you ensure that landing pages and forms are engaging enough to encourage those visitors to take the action you'd like them to take and convert. Dramatic ROI improvements can be achieved if the messaging is optimum.
   

The three  principles of optimisation are:

1. Increase specificity in a message to reduce page leakage.
2. Continuity -  keep users engaged throughout the process  to maintain persuasive momentum. For instance, there needs to be a connection from a search ad to landing page to form.
3. Intensify relevance - figure out who is buying, who is influencing and why. Then tie the pieces together and write copy which addresses the key motivation of the specific market segments.

Read more tips on optimisation

Lead Nurturing & Lead Scoring
Brian Carroll addressed ways marketers can help to optimise the sales funel by:

• Creating and refining a universal definition of sales-ready leads
• Nurture early stage leads until they are sales-ready. Brian defined nurturing as 'a relevant and consistent dialogue with viable potential customers, regardless of their time to buy'. In a b2b context, organisations as well as people should be nurtured
• Define the hand-off process from marketing to sales to make sure that the 'baton isn't dropped' and leads are converted to opportunities
• 'Huddle' with sales to get feedback on sales-ready leads - in other words which ones are moving forward and which ones should be handed back to marketing for further nurturing

Using Advanced Analytics to improve ROI

Susan Zykoski, a Marketing Business Analyst at Citrix Systems, told the story of how she has developed a 'metrics philosophy' in her company to answer two questions:

1. What's happening?
2. What are we going to do about it?

They have successfully incorporated data from their web analytics tools with their marketing database to provide analysis at both an aggregate and individual level.

Further references
14 Takeaways from the B2B Summit
Slides from the conference
#b2bsummit on Twitter for a run down of what attendees thought throughout the event
Marketing Experiments

Marketing Sherpa's B2B Marketing Summit

 

An interesting piece of research from the Marketing Leadership Council  shows common approaches to equipping Sales Reps so that they can successfully engage and convert customers during these economically challenging time.  The 6 initatives that marketers can support are:

 

Better communicate the value proposition

Build business acumen

Build Rep confidence

Reinforce the sales process

Strengthen customer relationships

Increase Rep effort

 

There are also some useful profiles of sales reps, including:

 

The Challenger - someone who always has a different view of the world, understand the customer's business, loves to debate and pushes the customer. Another one is The Relationship Builder - a Rep who build strong advocates in a customer organization; is generous in giving time to help others and gets along with everyone. There are others too.

 

The research shows that Challengers are far more likely to be high performers than any other profile