Online leads: do you act timely to respond?

Reading an interesting research summary in HBR that I wanted to share.

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, the time taken to respond to prospects stimulus online can significantly change the ROI of your web presence. As this research shows, many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads. As HBR states:
- 37% responded within an hour
- 16% within one to 24 hours
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- and 23% never responded at all!

As companies are investing significantly to get prospects out of the web, they should have a much better turnaround, don't you think?

Reasons not to do so include retrieving leads from CRM daily rather than on the fly, sales forces focusing on their own generated leads and rules for leads dispatching not effective enough ("fairness" can be damageable).

Where are you with this? Better know where your marketing ROI is headed sooner than later.

Happy Easter.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

How to measure your brand's online influence?

Several tools are emerging to help you do this, and Inc. touched on this in an interesting post about it and even providing in their opinion the 11 best web analytics tools. They come back on how Web Analytics 2.0 is defined:

1. The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition
2. To drive a continual improvement of the online experience of your customers and prospects
3. Which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)

Inc. concludes like this:

"Measuring online influence can be useful—and has potential to reinforce your social-media strategy (hey, it just feels cool when you get a high score)—particularly for growing brands looking to utilize technology to make their jobs easier and more effective. However, it's not for everyone." -- Dave Smith, Inc.

Another post on GigaOm from Georgina Laidla highlights the 5 Ways Brands Influence Social Media Strategy:

"It’s not just the way organizations engage through social media that matters: the portrayal of a business brand in this space is affected by a range of factors."

And the factors she lists

1. Network & Tools - the tools and network you use say something about your brand
2. Types of engagement
3. Who's making the update?
4. Degree of integration with other offerings
5. People your brand follows, friends and fans

preaching for an evolving approach.

At the end of the day, there is in my opinion no option for all of us to engage into measuring our brand's influence online. We better get starting ASAP and make our plans on how to do it. This is what I am doing already for the brand I work for which faces an interesting challenge to do it with one voice globally. Your feedback and experiences are more than welcome on this blog.

Unhappy Customers Can Be Won Back via Social Media

According to a report (pdf) sponsored by RightNow, Social Media is an effective way to bring back unhappy customers. Marketing Charts reports about it as well here. The research present a number of facts to support this: 

- 68% of consumers who posted a complaint or negative review on a social networking after a negative holiday shopping experience got a response from a retailer.
- 18% of those turned into loyal customers, 33% turned around and posted a positive review and 34% deleted their original negative review

On top of it 50% of consumers say great customer service/experience influences their decision to buy from a specific online retailer and after a positive shopping experience 31% purchased more from this retailer.

Finally, 28% of consumers looking for information or support with online shopping researched what other customers said on social networking and reviews websites.
In many cases, the 32% of US consumers who posted a negative review of a holiday shopping experience in 2010 and were ignored by the retailer simply had a bad impression reinforced. Six in 10 (61%) of these consumers said they would have been shocked had the retailer contacted them.

So YES social media has a growing influence on your customers loyalty and you should be paying attention to it. Actually we all know that a happy customer is the most effective sales influencer when turned into an advocate.

According to the same research, for consumers who had a positive exeprience this holiday season online, 21% recommended the retailer to friends and13% posted a positive online review about the retailer.

Social Marketing: identify influencers for free

source Elliott Lemenager 

This is the question I get very often even from marketers already involved and active in Social Marketing: how to identify influencers? Yes, seems like 101 but actually not so easy to figure it out.

The notion of influencers came first to me with Regis McKenna back in the 80's -- wow already! Here is the quote:

« The infrastructure includes all individuals between a vendor and its customers that can influence the buying process. » -- Regis McKenna

Pretty wide isn't it? But for B2B marketers like me this is so true and so daunting. Today's Marketing 2.0 reinforces and stresses our imperative to identify them and reach out to them through social media because we need them to be involved in the conversation, hopefully positively.

To start with today, I wanted to share with you this blog post: Social Marketing: Hybrid Approach to Identifying Targeted Influencers. Dive in as Elliott's post has lots of tips and links to tools and present it in a very simple way. His Hybrid approach actually refers to a combination of manual operations and free services you can use if you're on a budget contraint and cannot hire an agency to help you. Enjoy!

source Elliott Lemenager 

Social media marketing: build a lasting methodology

Here is an interesting post about optimizing your social media marketing from David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Experiment.

Justin Bridegan, Marketing Manager MECLABS Primary Research said, “One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is creating a lasting methodology that works.  Time and resources continue to be two of the most difficult challenges social marketers face.”

Justin’s key takeaways:

1. Start small and test – “You don’t know what you don’t know”
2. Having a solid social marketing methodology in place will allow you to focus on real obtainable goals.
3. Determine the most effective offers for your campaigns including: Contests, incentives and promotions
4. Weigh Quality vs. Quantity with your offers, and remember the need for balance in your engagement
5. Successful campaigns don’t always equate to revenue, but can be one of many contributing components

Related resources on Marketing Sherpa

Free Inbound Marketing Newsletter – Case Studies and How To articles about social media, SEO, and content marketing

New Chart: Social Marketing Maturity and the Social Marketing ROAD Map

Social Media Marketing Research: Rolling up my sleeves and getting social

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Most-Tweeted Blog Posts of 2010: Facebook case study, social media marketing human factor, antisocial media, and more

How does your marketing compare to best in class?

A recent research from Aberdeen about Marketing Asset Management gives an opportunity to compare to the best in class.
Aberdeen uses 3 key performance criteria to compare:

1. 44% of the sales forecasted pipeline generated by marketing, as compared to 2% contribution for laggards organizations,
2. An average 9% reduction Year-over-year cost of market asset creation, as compared to a 6% increase among laggards,
3. 15% average decrease in year-over-year time-to-market of content of all types and formats, as compared to an increase among laggards.

To achieve best in class performance, you need to

• Allow all geographies and business units to customize marketing content with proper control
• Centralize asset approval and distribution to expedite time to market and improve content

Why are so many things broken? Seth Godin talks about poor design

Why are so many things broken? In this entertaining talk - one of the favorites of Gel 2006 - gelconference.com/​c/​gel06.php

Seth Godin gives a tour of things poorly designed, the reasons why they are that way, and how to fix them.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Combining Email, Search, Social and PR for a Content Marketing Campaign: 6 Tactics to Generate Surge in Visitor Traffic

You know I'm a big believer in integrated marketing. Now that Social Media is making a surge in our marketing plans, I found this article on Marketing Sherpa interesting as it summarizes what we should do better:

"

Marketing teams often focus tactics and goals in a particular channel, overlooking how these channels can complement one another. With a bit of planning, a campaign can harness the strategic value of email, search, social media and other outlets for a single purpose. See how an online luggage retailer created a premium report based on a survey of e-newsletter subscribers and captured 5x more blog traffic.

"

Their blog traffic increased 518% Y/Y and additionnally the report’s landing page had a 16% lower bounce rate than the site’s average, 29% of report downloads came from referring websites, 22% of downloads were referred by search engines.

The tactics used:

• Tactic #1. Use search metrics to research potential report topics
• Tactic #2. Build an online survey
  
• Tactic #3. Send survey request to email database
• Tactic #4. Host report download on a dedicated landing page
  
• Tactic #5. Pitch report to media outlets
• Tactic #6. Use social channels, even if you don’t have them
  

Feel free to post back your own experiences here, I'd be happy to hear about it.

P.S. link related to this bcase Creative Samples from Suitcase.com’s premium report marketing campaign

B2B Marketers’ Priorities and Pain Points for 2009

According to Marketing Sherpa new research, the previous one was conducted in Feb 2008, B2B marketers will focus on:

1. Dealing with lengthening sales cycles
2. Doing more with less
3. Web 2.0 and social media marketing
4. Focusing on lower-cost, high-impact lead gen tactics

I will obviously only highlight the point 2. which wouldn't have been on the list a few month ago. I remember being looked at as a strange animal when pitching about Marketing 2.0 back in 2007. I heard many things as "this is just a fad", "you're always trying to bring up something new", "Our customers are not 15 years old", etc.

In the marketing area, social media and Web 2.0 importance is raising under this economic downturn period we're in, more rapidly I anticipate than if the business was going to grow. I'm expecting Cloud Computing and new software subscription business models to come up more rapidly in the IT space for the exact same reason. The economic downturn is an incredible opportunity to reconsider what we've been doing so far, to challenge deeply our fundamentals, to stress decisions that were not that urgent otherwise. A good thing in my views though of course I suffer just as everyone out there of this downturn (mood downturn as well by the way).

The research points out that many marketers still find Web 2.0 usage within their marketing campaigns arsenal a challenge. First and foremost because Web 2.0 is still new for a lot of them. They're not digital natives and tend to relate to the activities they're comfortable with (Webinars, White papers, etc.). Their top challenges, according to the research are:

1. Social media development/integration
2. Developing emerging Web 2.0 content, such as videos, blogs and podcasts

My take would be for you, already a blog reader ;-), to start your day in the office tomorrow by deciding to integrate in one of your planned campaigns a Marketing 2.0 technique. Try to pick the one that is intuitively the most relevant to your audience (start a blog or a podcast, foster a community or integrate an existing one, turn a major topic of interest into a wiki for and by your customers, start a twitter micro-blog for one of your offer) and do not forget about including video material as we discussed earlier this month.

I would also support this recommendation from Marketing Sherpa:

“Mapping content to the sales funnel “ is an immensely important aspect of success in lead nurturing for the complex sale. It deserves to be among the top priorities because some of the others – Web 2.0, social media and traditional content – are at their most effective when mapped to the sales cycle.

Marketing 2.0 will make it big in 2009.

WOMM: Marketing 2.0 lethal weapon

One of the most critical dimension of Marketing 2.0 lies in Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM). As defined in wikipedia:

"it is a term used in the marketing and advertising industry to describe activities that companies undertake to generate personal recommendations as well as referrals for brand names, products and services."

WOMM in my opinion was first identified by Regis McKenna when describing the market infrastructure in his aging book The Regis Touch. WOMM now has its association Word of Mouth Marketing Association and his guru Word Of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking - Andy Sernovitz. As Andy puts it, here is his WOMM Manifesto:

"1. Happy customers are your best advertising. Make people happy.
2. Marketing is easy: Earn the respect and recommendation of your
customers. They will do your marketing for you, for free.
3. Ethics and good service come first.
4. UR the UE: You are the user experience (not what your ads say you are).
5. Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.
6. People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.
7. Be interesting or be invisible.
8. If it’s not worth talking about, it’s not worth doing.
9. Make the story of your company a good one.
10. It is more fun to work at a company that people want to talk about.
11. Use the power of word of mouth to make business treat people better.
12. Honest marketing makes more money." -- Andy Sernovitz

Let's make sure you've got a WOMM plan embedded in your coming PR activities. It is cheap, mostly effective, but terribly difficult to ramp up. Who are the individuals you're targeting? How do you approach them without sounding too much biased? How do you recognize them? With what stories and messages do you nurture them? All these questions need to be addressed prior initiating your WOMM as WOMM is Marketing 2.0 lethal weapon.

- Image courtesy of The influencers at www.theinfluencers.ca

Let's support sales performance

Several years ago I discovered Sergio Zyman in Paris when he was conferencing for his new book "The end of marketing as we know it". He's not bringing some rocket science to marketing but effectively highlights and helps us focus on the do's and don't of an effective marketing. As a matter of fact, he left me with this quote that I keep in mind at all times:

"The sole purpose of Marketing is to sell more to more people, more often and for more money." -- Sergio Zyman

In light of this quote, I'm always focused on filling the gap between sales and marketing, making sure sales reps are perceiving added value from marketing activities. If you do not enjoy good business relationship with your sales counterpart, start asking yourself what is to be changed in your deliverables. Marketing success is about increasing revenue and lowering cost of sales. Whether in Marketing 1.0 or Marketing 2.0 it makes no difference.

I'm bringing this up as I recently read some interesting numbers about Sales performance Benchmarks, and I wanted to share with you the striking ones out of this survey from 1,300 companies across all industries:

• Only 60% of sales reps are making or exceeding quotas.
• Only 37% of firms report they have implemented a formal sales process.
• 63% of revenue comes from existing business, while 37% comes from new business
• Only 38% of companies have what they would call "forecasting accuracy."
• Most have close rates of under 50% of proposals written (average=48%).

This Lewis Green post says it all:

"For at the end of the day, our bottom lines and the value of what we do are measured in sales, not direct mail campaigns, sell sheets or packaging....I also believe that sales and marketing staffs should be in one department and should work closely together on every step of the process, from understanding the customers, to strategic marketing and sales planning, to closing sales" -- Lewis Green

Fellow Marketers, we're in charge on this. Let's make it happen.

Market segmentation to increase attitudinal loyalty

I mentioned behavioral targeting recently on Marketing 2.0 as a way to increase marketing effectiveness. I wanted to come back on this topic in light of a datasheet that you can download from Omniture, to share with you a tip about successful segmentation as described in Wikipedia.

"The requirements for successful segmentation are: homogeneity within the segment, heterogeneity between segments, segments are measurable and identifiable, segments are accessible and actionable, segment is large enough to be profitable.
These criteria can be summarized by the word ADAMS:

• A Actionable: you must have a product for this segment
• D Differential: it must respond differently to a different marketing mix
• A Accessible: it must be possible to reach it efficiently
• M Measurable: size and purchasing power can be measured
• S Substantial: the segment has to be large and profitable enough" -- Wikipedia

I won't come back on all segmentation variables (Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic and Behavioral), you can follow the links for more, but I wanted to highlight the behavioral ones: benefit sought, product usage rate, brand loyalty, product end use, readiness-to-buy stage, decision making unit as Wikipedia refers to it in the Marketing 1.0 world. This is still valid of course, but new dimensions do appear with Marketing 2.0 especially around behavioral analysis. Thanks to web techniques you can easily track, using cookies for instance, what a prospect did before landing on your web site and what retained their attention.

More interesting, in our web 2.0 world, is the way a prospect, or for that matter, a customer expresses his relationship to your brand. This has changed significantly with the web 2.0 advent. As a matter of fact, behavioral targeting and market segmentation offers a powerful way to dialog differently with each segment. Defining your segments along the lines of attitudinal loyalty -- more on customer loyalty on wikipedia -- and remembering ADAMS rules will guide you to the appropriate solution to improve it.

Increase Marketing effectiveness: use behavioral targeting

It's been around for quite a while, the late 90's. But as privacy and technical issues are going away, marketers should consider behavioral targeting in their on-line advertising campaigns.

For those who just missed it, behavioral targeting is the ability to deliver ads to consumers based upon their recent behavior viewing web pages, shopping online for products and services, typing keywords into a search engine or a combination of all three. You can have some more details on behavioraltargeting.com and behavioral targeting 101 on iMedia Connection.

Microsoft recently added it to its offering -- read Microsoft adds behavioral targeting - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com -- as Yahoo did before as well -- read Yahoo! behavioral targeting.

Interestingly enough, AdAge Digital highlights that Behavioral Targeting becomes The New Killer App for Research. Some even put forward some effectiveness performance:

"The behavioral targeting ads increased ad awareness by 51%, while content targeting resulted in only a 33% boost." -- Snapple

As Marketing 2.0 is all about considering your customers and prospects literally as Stars, this should be no surprise to you that I wanted to stress the use of it as a "must have" advertising tactic. Relevant context is king.

Study your competition on-line for free

Studying your competition surely is an important part of your marketing activity. Now that a lot is happening on-line, there are very easy and cheap (FREE!) ways to do this on a regular basis.

Let me highlight some interesting tools to do it.

The very first thing to use, if you didn't already, is to leverage Google Alerts. Set a few agent that will bring you back on the fly, daily or weekly, whatever web page, news item and now blog posts relative to the keywords you're looking into. Here is a result of blog search for Marketing 2.0. I use daily agents for the core topics I am covering for Sun and have an e-mail sent to my inbox and provide my team around the world with a weekly summary. Very powerful to always stay on top of things.

Now what about discovering your competitors marketing campaigns? Spy Fu can just help you do this for free. It is still in beta but effective. Enter your competitors name in there and find out how much they're paying for search advertising daily, the number of total clicks they're receiving, their keywords ranking and their average ad position. Spy Fu monitors 4.5 million domains.

Another good tool is the Internet Archive. You can track there how many times your competition changes their web site and is it split tested.

Finally, you might want to know who owns one of your competitors site and where it is hosted. Use Whois Source for this. Could be effective to establish partnerships as well and get in touch with the web master.

I'm still looking for a solid blog competition research beyond Google new blog search. Let me know if you found a good one.