Justin King December 12th, 2008
Integrating online and offline channels is extremely important when holistically looking at your marketing function. The marketing funnel applies to both disciplines and should be looked at together in an integrated fashion. This graphic represents a holistic look at the entire marketing funnel for B2B organizations. From attract to convert.
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Justin King December 12th, 2008
I love images that assist to understand and this chart has resonated with my clients lately. As the folks from Marketing Sherpa recently stated, the sales and marketing sales cycles are important, but as an interactive marketer, I work to move users through the stages – focus on the transitions. Some key principles of this model:
O/R = Offer / Response
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Justin King November 23rd, 2008
My friend and colleague Chris Boggs just posted a great posting on selling SEO during an economic downturn. As B2B marketers, there is probably little that we can do in 2009 more importantly than optimize our organic search. Chris’s approach is to those on the agency side selling these types of services. Chris is without a doubt one of the top 5 SEO consultants in the country, and I have the privilege having him involved in my pursuits at Rosetta.
Here are a few of Chris’s recent suggestions for selling SEO:
For B2B marketers, SEO is one of our foundational tenets. The ROI on SEO is always incredible and with over 80% of research occurring online, how you position your organization online is critical.
Justin King November 20th, 2008
For the last 2 months, we (Rosetta) have been working with a traditional marketing agency to do a joint comprehensive pitch for a brand new product launch. Up to this point, we have worked with more traditional agencies as part of a campaign and branding efforts, but this is the first opportunity that I have ever had to do a complete end to end marketing launch. I will continue to detail more of our process out, and unfortunately, the product launch is incredibly confidential so I will remain careful in how I present it, but the process has truly been fascinating. This afternoon was our pitch, and here are the elements that we presented:
I think the most amazing part in all of this is how well we all worked together. We had three companies working together: Tradition Marketing, Us / Interactive Marketing, User Research. Not only did we work together well, but the final presentation was a true integrated, cross channel plan. Print media was supported by PR, PR provides link baiting for microsite, microsite as the nucleus for the entire launch.
Within our digital plan we concentrated on creating sales-ready leads through our B2B model of attract -> capture -> persuade -> convert. It was a unique approach for the traditional agency to focus on the marketing funnel, and the client immediately responded as we talked about nurturing leads for the purpose of converting sales-ready leads.
A few points that I learned:
Justin.King November 15th, 2008
Very appropriate post today from Marketo. In addition to the below great points, I would add that we need to make sure we are addressing the real needs of our customers, and find ways to engage with our customers in a relevant dialogue. This last week has been a week of conversations around “How do we engage with our customers in a meaningful and relevant way”. These are good first steps and I love that my customers are starting to think that way – here are some other strategies as well. I realized this week, that it is important to have a level setting conversation a couple of times a year with our customers. This conversation should be looking at the original objectives, measuring how we are doing, and brainstorming about new ideas.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, as many are contemplating survival techniques. We have seen marketing budgets shrink considerably, but luckily businesses continue to move into interactive marketing so our plans remain steady.
Here are a couple great tips from that Marketo post.
What does all this mean? It means that now, more than ever, marketers need to:
- Maximize conversion of their advertising dollars into prospects by optimizing their landing pages.
- Stop wasting leads that aren’t yet sales ready and start using lead nurturing to build relationships so that when they are ready to buy, you’ll be positioned to win. In a recession, new prospects are less likely to be looking to purchase right away — which means they are less likely to want to talk to a sales rep. Lead nurturing is even more critical in a recession to ensure you convert the precious dollars you spend acquiring prospects into revenue.
- Use lead scoring to identify the best leads and help the sales team prioritize where they spend their time
- Prove the impact their marketing activities have on revenue and pipeline
What kind of conversations are you having?
Justin.King November 15th, 2008
We (Rosetta) just launched Aucuvue’s viral marketing campaign through Facebook. For those of us with a stigmatism, these contacts (you can get a free pair) are amazing. Check out the campaign and let me know what you think. Click here to go to the Facebook application page and become a fan.
Justin.King November 7th, 2008
I recently have been sitting through a number of meetings where we have been developing positioning statements for new products or services. I know it’s kind of old school, but it has helped us keep a target and objective in mind as we develop the rest of the pitch.
For those of you that don’t know what a positioning statement is, here is a quick walk through.
Positioning template
For (target audience), (product, company name) is the (frame of reference) that (benefit / point of difference).
It’s easy – all you do is fill in the brackets. Yeah, right – do this with a committee of 10, and you will be there for hours.
It did take me quite a while to come up with my personal brand positioning statement – even though it was just me. i had to fight to keep it authentic!!
Do you have a positioning statement? Share it if you don’t mind…
Justin.King November 7th, 2008
I have been working with a major brand that sells specialty tools to contractors (plumbers, electricians, etc.). They are planning on launch on a new product, and my agency Rosetta is putting together the product launch plan and digital marketing approach.
Partnering
We are working with the companies traditional agency of record, as they have no true interactive marketing capabilities. This has been an excellent process, of which I would like to dedicate another post to.
Research
Together with the traditional agency, we did quite a bit of customer research, talking to prospective customers, conducting online surveys, and talking to editors of trade magazines. Through the research we found that the customers of this new product had some significant challenges in front of them.
What we found
In our quest to be relevant, we also faced challenges. What was easy to do for the client was to create a microsite with the typical features | benefits | case studies information. As I probed deeper and deeper, we kept asking the question what does your customer care about. The answer was simple – the customer wants to be able to make more money in this down economy. They are not sophisticated enough to determine ROI – they just care about the R (Revenue). Therefore our content that we provided needed to be focused around solving this core problem of making more money for the contractor.
Lead generation
The goal for the product launch was to create a lead engine that could attract prospective buyers and in the end create sales-ready leads that were ready to be engaged by a salesman who could close the deal. To get those leads, we knew we had to give the contractor something of value so that we had the right to ask for a name and email address (simple forms for landing page optimization). Going back to our research, we decided to create white papers and eBooks around “How to make more money in a down economy”. We are now going to tailor those to each primary segment and personality profile that we have identified. So we will have “4 ways for HVAC contractors to heat up your business in a down economy” and elements like that. The information is simple, not product focused and has a lot of value – no marketing propaganda.
What’s next? We are now working on the nurturing approach to turn them from leads to sales-ready prospects.
Creating a relevant dialogue is critical. Here are a few practical strategies to keep your content relevant.
Justin.King November 5th, 2008
Get to know your customers
The only way to know if your content is really relevant is to get to know your customers, and understand what their perceived problems and needs are. While you’re at it, get to know your potential customers as well.
Identify and extract thought leadership in your organization
Thought leadership is found in people not departments and roles. Most organizations have certain employees that always have ideas or are a step ahead of the organizations. Incent those employees to come forward and start providing content. This content can be white papers, case studies, blogs, twitter updates, etc. Make sure you give these employees time to create content, and recognize them throughout the entire organizations. BTW – if you can’t identify those employees you have a whole other problem.
Tell a story
We all know that stories sell. Your stories should include real life examples, weave in research and case studies and trends in your industry. The best stories engage the reader emotionally. See this posting for great information on creating white papers.
Research
Backup your stories and content with real research that shows subject matter authority based on quantitative data. While you are at it, use that research to seed PR news releases and blogs.
No more propaganda
Relevancy by definition means no sales and marketing propaganda. Focus on educating, informing, and attacking real problems with real solutions (not your products!)
You gotta give it away
I know it’s hard, but give that content away. By give it away, I’ll still allow you to get a name and email address in exchange.
Justin.King November 5th, 2008
A number of client meetings and biz dev discussions over the last couple of weeks has prompted me to ask you the question above “What are your primary domain names?”. I keep getting answers about the companies dot coms and even their microsites, but they all look at me in confusion when I tell them that Google.com is the “other” primary domain.
Investment and time needs to be equally split between Google.com and your .com. People spend the time and effort to use Google to find relevant information and it is the gateway to most (if not all) your traffic. Understand it, invest in it, spend time in it, love it – okay, going a bit overboard…
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