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“You must unlearn what you have learned.” –Yoda
I am reading through reports this morning from the Business Marketing Association’s annual meeting which had the theme “Unlearn”. It is about time! Regardless I give them credit for their efforts. Here are some of the more interesting points that were presented.
“Business marketing is rapidly changing, and business marketers need to learn about the full spectrum of change that is taking place in our field,” said Gary Slack, chairman-chief experience officer at Slack Barshinger, Chicago, and chairman of the BMA. Pffffft, what did I say earlier? “It is about time!”
““We have been too worried about shareholders and not focused enough on customers,” said Ralph Oliva, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets. “When did the shareholder become No. 1? We need to unlearn going along with this ride and begin constantly teaching people how business markets work. In the wonderful place between the supplier and customers, when we do our job well, we work together to create new value. This is what will drive the growth of our domestic product.” THAT was profound! I would totally agree that our customers look to us for guidance. They want us to be the expert and to help them to understand.
Some Tweets I followed from the conference.
Help people declare their love – Let people tell their friends about ur brand in any way possible. @sernovitz
Word of Mouth Topics (WOMT) – Portable, repeatable, memorable. @sernovitz
Skittles example – Home page is now Facebook cuz fans have more to say than company could. @sernovitz
#bma09 – HIGLY Recommended… got to www.skittles.com
NOW, THIS is a game changer, skittles.com. You have to take a look at these innovators. Their home page is taken from Wikipedia. Their friends page links to Facebook. Wow! This will certainly be a marketing study for future Marketing 101 classes.
Study Shows Print Advertising Drives Online Leads
Can print advertising drive online traffic? Yes, according to a study released by Telemetrics, a Toronto based company that focuses on call tracking and measurement solutions.
Tracking unique URL activity in addition to call measurement demonstrated a 78% increase in overall leads in the study that measured Yellow Page print advertising. Telmetrics found that site referrals from print represented 44% of leads on average.
“Evaluating the impact that print advertising has on Web activity is critical. Without tracking unique URL traffic, Yellow Pages advertisers would not know the total number of leads the print product is driving, as those touch points could be attributed to online ad channels,” said Bill Dinan, president,Telmetrics. “Our URL tracking data confirms that traditional media complements the digital media mix and echoes consumers’ use of multiple media and platforms in their purchasing decisions.”
The study states that during the timing evaluated, “the ads that used unique URLs (for example: florists2.com) were more often visited than client-specific domains with URL extensions (for example: publisher.com/florists).”
One of the critical elements in creating the report were the techniques used for tracking. Telmetrics created a URL tracking solution that provided integrated lead reporting allowing publishers to prove the value of the print medium. Telmetrics was able to record call and URL activity as each ad includes a unique phone number and URL only attributable to that advertisement.
The Point is the Conversation
Social media has been spreading like a disease, except it’s not a disease. It’s the overnight sensation that’s taken about 7 years to appear overnight. Everyone, but everyone’s had a look at Social Media and formed an opinion – waste of time, waste of money, don’t understand it, can’t see the point. Maybe they’ve become social media ‘experts’ with a view on what will and will not generate revenue and offer value and produce returns. Everyone’s full of crap of course because there are no experts, no one knows what’s going to work and the whole space is a complete land-grab.
I have tried Twitter recently and it’s like the Wild West out there. I started some conversations and they’re carrying on. I have used Linkedin and I was able to create a network of almost two-hundred sixty connections. I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my twitter streams or my Linkedin network – yet. But I do know that, so far, almost everyone – has missed the point of these technologies. The point is the conversation.
The conversation is, for the first time, being shaped and determined by the customer not the provider. That was always the intention of the Social Media model – it’s very ‘Web2’. There’s a good argument that says ‘conversation doesn’t pay the rent’, but inevitably, new things take a while to figure out and I have the impression that the moment’s arrived. Or it’s at least arriving. There’s plenty of tech geekery around the subject and there are a load of experts professing to know all the answers, but there’s also a growing conversation. A movement. It has nothing to do with the people who think they know the answer to ‘Social Media Revenue Generation Models’. It’s just about the people – having the conversations and working it out for themselves and with each other. And from those conversations comes the revenue. Just as it always has?
The End of “Old School” Relationship Prospecting
Sales is about people. Orders get signed by people and the appointments needed to get those signatures come when a level of trust is established. If there is one single factor that determines sales success, it is a relationship.
In “Old School” relationship prospecting, salespeople would spend lots of time taking buyers to dinners, lunches, and on the golf course. During these events you would not only strengthen your existing relationship but you would also ask for new prospects. However ask any salesperson if these tactics work as well now as they did in the past and you will hear a resounding no! Today’s buyer is spending less time going to lunch or being social on the golf tee because they are under much more pressure to produce results with less and less resources.
However there is hope. There are new ways to build new business relationships. In fact these new ways allow you to build relationships faster than you could before and more relationships than you could before.
The new method of finding prospects and building relationships with those prospects involve using a business network called LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn to start relationships with people in your target markets is much more efficient than “Old School” methods and you can do so without ever leaving your office. Using LinkedIn search functions can help you find the prospects by job title, company name, or even by business types and all within a local region. Once you find your prospects you can use the messaging capabilities to send an introductory letter. Of course when you get a response you will want to deepen that relationship with a phone call and/or a face-to-face meeting. The human voice is and always will be the most desirable and pleasant way to communicate.
Additionally, LinkedIn tells me who the people I know in turn know. Its the equivalent of calling all the people I know to a meeting and telling them to bring their Rolodexes to the meeting then going through their Rolodexes to find the prospects that I am targeting. When you search for a company on LinkedIn, the results page will tell you who you know at that company. All other contacts listed that you to not know will display how many degrees of separation away from you they are. If you do not know the person you are targeting at that company, you can ask your known contacts to introduce you using the “Introduction Request” feature provided by “LinkedIn”.
I will discuss more ways to use Linkedin in the future, but if you are trying to build your business, I highly recommend that you take the time to become a member of LinkedIn.com.
Should Your Company be on Facebook? Absolutely!
Targeting Facebook users offers an opportunity to build brand loyalty while targeting your message in a very effective manner. Facebook Pages are free and offer the best way for your company to establish a presence on Facebook.
The main elements of a Facebook Page are
- Basic information such as location and hours of business, if relevant;
- A mini-feed of activity on the page
- The wall where people can post messages
- A discussion board where you can start and join conversations.
- Notes where you can post additional content to be linked from the Page.
- A list of fans featuring each person’s avatar
- Photos, and you can set controls so only you or you and your company’s fans can upload photos
- Videos, and you can also set controls for who can upload videos
When someone becomes a fan of your Page, a message shows up in their personal news feed so all of their Facebook friends see the action listed in their mini news feeds and have the option of clicking over to your Page to learn more or to become a fan as well.
As the administrator of the page, you have the ability to edit any portion of the page and turn features on and off. You can also assign admin privileges to other Facebook members who are fans of the Page. Administrators can also send a message to all fans which is a handy broadcast feature but one that should not be overused. I’ve personally removed myself as a fan from several company pages because they sent messages to my Facebook inbox too frequently.
Creating a Social Ad on Facebook
Having a Facebook Page should only be one part of an overall social media strategy. Facebook offers a potentially wide audience but you can also target a more niche audience. To drive traffic to your Facebook Page, you can opt to pay for a Facebook social ad. I love this feature because you can really hone in on your target audience. Just click on the “Promote Your Page with an Ad” link and begin narrowing down your search of Facebook members who you would like to see your ad. These ads appear on the home pages and profile pages of each member as they are viewing their Facebook account.
Facebook had fantastic targeting capabilities and offers a tool that will calculate the number of people you will reach based on your campaign criteria. You do have to pay for a Facebook ad but can set a limit on the amount you want to pay — based on clickthrough — and the duration of your ad.
While you can create a Facebook ad to drive traffic to your Facebook Page, you can also have the ad go to any website. Personally, I think that if you are advertising on Facebook to people using Facebook, you should first capture them as fans on your Facebook Page and then drive them over to your website or blog. Having fans on your Facebook Page is a powerful marketing asset.
Understanding Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting is an advertising delivery technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the
effectiveness of their campaigns. Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography, demographics or the surrounding content.
Behavioral Targeting is based upon information collected regarding an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. This behavioral history is then used to deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.
Most add delivery platforms identify visitors by assigning a unique id cookie to each and every visitor to the site thereby allowing them to be tracked throughout their web journey, the platform then make a rules-based decision about what content to serve.
B2B sites have traditionally used a simplified version of Behavioral Targeting by aggregating content into channels and then allowing advertisers to target those channels. Behavioral Targeting systems go beyond content targeting by monitoring visitor response to site content and learn what is most likely to generate a desired conversion event. The downside of Behavioral Targeting for B2B publishers is that onsite Behavioral Targeting requires a relatively high level of traffic before statistical confidence levels can be reached regarding the probability of a particular offer generating a conversion from a user.
B2B publishers interested in behavioral targeting should consider Advertising Networks as an alternative since advertising networks offer both the technology needed for Behavioral Targeting and the larger user base that individual B2B websites lack. Additionally, Advertising Networks use Behavioral Targeting in a different way than individual sites since they serve many adverts across many different sites, they are able to build up a picture of the likely demographic makeup of internet users allowing Advertising Networks to sell audiences rather than sites.
The Benefits of Webcasting and the Site Publisher’s Role
As a Marketer, you should strongly consider the benefits of webcasting to promote you your product. One of the most effective ways of creating, marketing, and delivering a webcast is to partner with a trade publisher that targets your desired market. These publishers are experts at delivering an audience and that element may be the missing element in your webcast marketing planning.
This presentation reviews the items that a vertical site publisher should provide for your company when planning for a webcast.
Video Commercials – How Many Must I Watch!
The ability to watch video online is really quite a nice feature, but must they deliver me a commercial between each and every three minute clip? When sites insist on delivering their message so many times, it just becomes unbearable. Dow Jones MarketWatch is an example of a site that makes this mistake. Check it out and give me your opinion.
How to Market to the B2B User Via E-Mail Newsletters
1. The offer. B2B email recipients were inundated last year with offers for free white papers and Webinars. Do you have to come up with something completely new for 2008? No, but your white paper or free guide better be pretty darn informative. Remember, it’s about your buyers, not you.
2. Landing pages. Without a successful landing page, your email campaign is going to flop. The Web page your readers click to does the heavy lifting. Use concise yet friendly copy to request the basics, usually no more than name, title, company, phone number, and email address. Then make it easy and fast to download the offer. Ideally, it’s a sequence of quid pro quo pages. You politely ask for contact information to collect a lead. In return, your reader gets the opportunity to specify how she wants to continue a conversation with you (by e-newsletter, phone, postal mail, etc.).
3. Measuring success. It’s not about click-throughs, although it’s nice to boast of a double-digit percentage. Ultimately, it’s not about conversion (i.e., those who clicked through to the landing page, filled out your form, then downloaded your white paper). It’s about sales. B2B email marketing is a long-term game. The medium is fluid and fast. But the decision-making that goes into the purchase of high-end products or services is often very, very slow.
Creative Lead Generation
Recently we have been using a new method of collecting advertising leads for our company. We call this method Showstoppers.
Showstoppers were created because we wanted to create a convenient yet effective way to tell our story to potential advertising customers 24 hours a day. We created a five minute flash presentation complete with a form asking the presentation viewer to register before watching the presentation. The registration information is sent to us by email automatically, informing us of who the presentation viewer was, their email address, and how many of the sixteen slides in the presentation that they actually watched.
If you would like to see this method, click here to go to our presentation.
eMedia Advisor 