My colleague, good friend and fellow blogger B2B sales lead expert Mac McIntosh and I are putting together an e-book on the top 10 silly B2B marketing mistakes — and we want you to be part of it!
Here’s how it works:
Use our special survey link to tell us what you think are the top 10 B2B marketing mistakes. These can be anything from PPC ad campaign no-nos and social media blunders to “old school” marketing snafus including trade shows, print ads, etc.
We’ll collect your lists for the next two weeks (submission deadline is February 12, 2010) and then collate the results to determine what you, our fellow B2B marketers, think are the top 10 B2B marketing mistakes that others are making.
Everyone who shares their list of mistakes will have their name listed in the e-book along with a live link to your blog, Website, or LinkedIn profile. (Just gives us the link you prefer to use.)
One question the survey addressed: “Products deemed important to know about in order to execute marketing strategies” — with all of the usual suspects listed: social media, blogs, video, e-newsletters, etc.
What I found interesting is that respondents decreased the importance of all of these tactics from 2009 (e-newsletters, for example, decreased from a whopping 61% to 38%!) with one exception: mobile content. Mobile content increased from 24% to 38%.
Pulizzi doesn’t define “mobile content” in his survey. Hence, my question is, with the advent of smart phones, especially the iPhone and now Google’s Android operating system, isn’t *all* content mobile?
I bought my iPhone in August 2009 after fierce resistance. All I wanted was a phone that did its job — namely, make and receive phone calls.
Now that I have the iPhone, I don’t know how I lived without it and that’s because my iPhone is not just a “phone.” I use it for almost everything *but* a phone:
E-book reader – Thanks to the iPhone Amazon Kindle app, I now read business books using my phone. I love it.
Blog reader — Using Google Reader, I read blogs while waiting in the carpool line or while standing in line at the grocery store.
E-commerce — I particularly like the Fandango app, which lets me order movie tickets.
Social media – With apps for LinkedIn and Twitter, I can keep up with my network and respond to people, too, whether I’m at home, the office, or out and about.
Calendar — I used to struggle with keeping track of events and tasks as my life was tied up in ACT!, a desktop CRM application. Now I use Google Calendar and Google Tasks — and all of the information I need is available at the push of a button. (I ditched ACT! six months ago. What a relief.)
Yellow pages — With the iPhone, I can go to a company or business Website and click on a phone number and the iPhone will automatically call it. It will also map directions. Yet, I can’t tell you how hard companies make finding this important information. Even worse, some company sites don’t show up in the Google search results on my phone — which means they lose my business. (It also means that if your business isn’t optimized for local search, you are hosed.)
Restaurant finder — Thanks to the Urban Spoon app, my son and I found a *real* Mexican food restaurant in Massachusetts. (I mean real, as in California standard real.) Like everyone else, we rated it five stars. We often use Urban Spoon to see what others think of restaurants we’ve seen around town, which means that positive online reviews have become critical to many businesses.
Flashlight — Ok, I admit it. I LOVE the Flashlight app! I often use my iPhone to light my way in dark places.
Suffice to say, smart phones like the iPhone are no longer just for making phone calls. It also means content is no longer consumed by people sitting in a chair in front a desktop computer. It’s consumed by people in bits and chunks while on the go.
You can spend a great deal of time and money creating content for mobile applications. Or, you can take that marketing budget and ensure the content you already have is accessible to people on the go.
If you own an iPhone or other smart phone, how has it changed your content viewing / consumption habits?
How do you generate awareness for your company when your industry is defined by two Goliaths — namely SAP and Oracle? That’s the question that confronted Infor, a company that develops and sells ERP and other software solutions designed specifically for mid-market companies.
With over 70,000 customers, Infor has a strong mid-market presence — with very low name recognition. (In fact, I had not heard of Infor until I first saw their ad in the Wall Street Journal.)
Although SAP and Oracle have been moving into the mid-market with their own offerings, the market has been very poorly served. Designed for the biggest companies, “Big ERP” — as Infor calls it — was retrofitted for the mid-market, and in the process, has created a great deal of frustration.
“According to market research by analysts such as Forrester, people know of Oracle and SAP, and then you drop way down and a bunch of companies get mentioned, including ours,” says Dave Alampi, Infor’s VP of Marketing Strategy and Services.
“We wanted to move the needle on unaided awareness and preference and wanted people to think ‘Infor’ when they considered a business software solution. We wanted to take the big guys to task and create a campaign that would touch a nerve and connect what people were thinking about the market.”
Here’s how Infor set out to achieve these objectives.
Step #1: Develop a message and test it.
Infor’s Cambridge, Massachusetts agency PJA Marketing + Advertising, developed the campaign, which features the “Big ERP” characters who represent the frustrations mid-market companies have with regard to Big ERP software.
“We gave these characters personality,” says Mike O’Toole, President of PJA. “Our creative staff gave them a fun voice — and this voice worked naturally with the social media elements of the campaign. Infor began testing the “Big ERP” concept message to determine if it resonated with customers and prospects — which it did, in virtually every geography tested.”
Step #2: Get C-suite buy-in.
When asked if they had push back with regard to using social media and the Big ERP characters for the campaign, Alampi and O’Toole both said the top brass at Infor believed the campaign was the right thing to do.
One lesson marketers can learn is that it pays to have marketing strategy that’s based on business objectives and real world research — which is especially helpful when you have a new CMO come in when you’re in the middle of creating the campaign.
“We reviewed our goals with Robert Humphrey, our new CMO,” reports Alampi, “as well as the thinking behind the campaign, the details and media strategy, and our research and test results. He became a strong advocate very quickly.”
Adds O’Toole, “Infor isn’t opposed to social media nor do they believe in doing it just because ‘everybody’ else is. To back up our recommendation for social media integration, we used data from IDG Connect which showed that close to 80% of decision makers in the software adoption process use information from social media channels. We were able to prove that prospects and customers in Infor’s industry use social media to make purchasing decisions.”
Step #3: Create external and internal campaign components.
In addition, Infor ran an internal contest for employees on who could develop the best video or submit the funniest photos. To generate excitement, the company created full-sized cut-outs of the Big ERP characters, mouse pads, etc.
“We had lots of employee engagement,” says Alampi, “and over 40 submissions, including three videos, from individuals and groups around the world. Our employees really understand the frustration in the market and are very excited about this campaign.”
Once the campaign went live, Infor and PJA began engaging market influencers by following editors and analysts who write about ERP. “We commented on their Tweets and blog posts and after awhile, they started commenting back. We have over 300 followers now for our Big ERP Twitter feed — and while that sounds like a small number, these are highly influential people,” says O’Toole.
Step #4: Measure results.
Because the goal of the campaign was to raise brand awareness, Infor will be looking at its market awareness every six months and retesting to see how far they’ve moved the needle. The team is also looking at the impact on its sales pipeline and the number of hand raises due to the campaign microsite and traffic to the Infor site plus the 29 country sites.
And, the company will be tracking RFPs and RFIs to see if these numbers increase as well as the impact of social media on the broader conversation. The team is using Radian6 to look at naturally occurring conversation around ERP and the mid-market within the blogosphere, list serves, and social networks.
“We want to know,” says O’Toole, “how much of this conversation includes Infor and how we can increase natural mentions within conversations.”
When asked what other large companies like Infor can learn from the campaign, Alampi said, “You have to follow through. Our CEO, Jim Schaper, wanted to be bold and make a bold statement. As a marketer, you hear this often but once the C-suite sees what ‘bold’ looks like, ideas get watered down or campaigns canceled altogether.”
“Schaper wanted a bold campaign with a sense of humor,” continues Alampi, “and this gave PJA the freedom to develop ‘Big ERP.’ It’s different, it’s getting people’s attention, and people are responding to it. The campaign, which has yet to be launched in Europe and Asia Pacific, is already paying off. In fact, we’ve even received a couple of leads via Twitter, which was completely unexpected!”
Leigh Anne Reynolds, in her ReachForce blog post, “Set Your Content Free for More Clickthroughs” writes:
I will be the first to admit that I have been very skeptical about “setting my content free” (not using forms in front of eBooks and whitepapers.) I feel like if my job is lead generation then I have to capture those downloading.
She goes on to state that after much consideration, she decided to follow David Meerman Scott’s advice and make her e-book, 101 B2B Online Marketing Tips, registration free.
Although she didn’t do a strict A/B split test, she did see a 1600% increase in downloads. Yep! “Be free, content, be free!”
Today, online marketing is vital to any integrated marketing program. With so many new avenues for reaching prospective buyers, B2B Marketers have to think outside of the box to stand out in the crowd. From significant improvements in marketing program metrics to greater efficiencies in your sales funnel, employing new online marketing tactics can create immediate benefits, if done right.
In Volume 1 of this e-book, you’ll find the first 30 online marketing tips from The B2B Lead, including information on the basics of SEO, optimizing your video for the web, boosting your blog using twitter, how to measure your online successes and much more.
Lots of great content for B2B marketers was published in the last couple of weeks — including white papers. I had to make a decision: should I include white papers in my E-Book Central posts or stick with e-books?
Companies posting white papers usually do so to generate leads — and they can post their white papers on syndication sites which are designed to help them get these leads.
An e-book, however, is different. It’s usually registration-free, it’s easier to read, and the company presenting the content is sharing ideas with industry influencers and ultimately purchasers.
Because I have yet to find a resource that lists the viral e-books being published for marketers, I decided to stick with posting new ones each Friday (I’m also going to include guides and industry reports based on research).
After spending a good hour researching various white papers and e-books, I have a few tips for you to aid your readers when they try to download your content:
1. Make a dedicated landing page or write a blog post for the e-book. On this landing page, give a brief abstract of the e-book and how the information in it pertains to your audience. Be sure to ask your readers to pass your content along to others.
2. Make the free content *really* free. A couple of the e-books I considered and ultimately declined posting here wanted me to log into various sites or programs in order to view the content. A simple PDF link to the e-book ensures that people can easily download your e-book and share it with others.
3. Include a “hero shot” of the cover. Most bloggers will include the cover of your e-book when they write about it — if you provide one for them. When I write content for myself and my clients, I have my designer make a small jpg of the report, e-book or white paper cover just for this purpose.
If you’re unclear on the concept of how an e-book differs from a white paper, be sure to read David Meerman Scott’s, “The New Rules of Viral Marketing” e-book where he covers what an e-book is and how to market it.
This 103-page report sets out to answer the most important question of all — “How do you get sales people to sell more?” How do get from where your sales are now to where you want them to be in the future? You can follow many paths — but the real key is to provide reps with tools that will help them meet or exceed demands through the use of productivity tools. This is a great book even if you’re not in sales, as Nancy covers productivity and presentation tools marketers can use, too. It also gives you great insight into the sales job. (To download the e-book, look for the link in the sidebar of Nancy’s blog.)
With longer buying cycles, unprecedented information availability and buyers delaying sales conversations it’s imperative to continuously evolve your lead nurturing programs to parallel their needs. In this guide you’ll learn how lead nurturing differs from lead generation, the 7 Stages of the buying process and how to address them, and the three types of content that influence buying decisions — plus lots more.
Sadly, very few marketers and business writers introduce conflict in their writing. We all see tons of this stuff instead: “Here’s our product. It is great. Here are customers who say it is great. Now buy some of our product.” In this e-book, David gives an example of conflict-based writing in the hopes of getting you to think about how to introduce conflict into your own writing.
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