Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Anatomy of a Marketing Automation Manager

Great post over at the LeadSloth blog....Why Are Marketing Automation Managers So Hard to Find?

With tight marketing budgets and marketers wearing more hats it's especially interesting to see a  marketing automation job description laid out like this. A great description to pull together your job requirements for the position that is opening up, or a great blueprint on what you need to learn how to do to make yourself more valuable. Great discussion in the comments area as well, especially about the science of marketing automation vs. the art, because while it is one thing to know how to launch a campaign and track the results, it is still another to be able to write the copy or create the offer that people will respond to.

Nice post, Jep!

Peripheral Vision and Windows 7

by Jason Stewart

Just got a great email from MarketingProfs - one of their "Get to the Point" emails called "Peripheral Vision."

"...if you let your vision get too category-specific, you might miss the fact that you're also competing with companies that offer products and services quite unlike your own."

It reminded me of another article I read recently at CrunchGear called How Microsoft Will Lift Us Out Of the IT Spending Dumps, talking about how the impending arrival of Windows 7 could single-handedly spark an IT spending frenzy.

"...a number of IT guys I know are genuinely excited about installing Windows 7 in their shops, guys for whom Vista didn’t even register. We’re about see an IT renaissance, and it will be driven by Microsoft."

True, a lot of companies will be spending money on Windows 7. And there will also be a lot of money spent on hardware and peripherals. But consider this...how much money will be left for other projects?

The bottom line is that when people ask you who your competitors are and you rattle off a few companies that do what you do, you are missing the point. Always keep in mind that what you are competing for when you market and sell your products or services is budget. And you are not strictly competing for that budget against your direct competitors - you are competing against all the projects that everyone in that department (or even across other departments) are campaigning for.

And in Q4 you might be competing against Windows 7.

You need to emphasize the benefits of your products and services to your customer, and focus on why you are the best move for their company at the highest level. Don't forget to talk big picture. Sell why they need this type pf project more than any other first, and then (and only then) talk about why you are better than the other guy.

Or how the ROI on your project could pay for that Windows 7 upgrade in Q1 2010.

Top 5 Takeaways From the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation Summit

by Jason Stewart

Last week Demandbase participated as a sponsor at the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation Summit in San Francisco. The Boston edition is coming up on October 5th and 6th.

While we spent most of the time speaking directly with customers and prospects sharing information about our B2B lead generation solutions, we also took notes from the various sessions and did a little digging into Twitter and the blogs to document tips and trends worth sharing. It is interesting to note that the top three "tweeted" tips from the Sherpa summit were, interestingly enough, a return to the basics. An emphasis on the bread-and-butter topics that Sherpa has always done really well, and that keep coming back year after year.

• e-Newsletters: Email marketing ranks highest for topics that were tweeted and retweeted at the show, proving it’s still the top tool for B2B marketers in reaching prospects and customers at every stage of the buying cycle. Consistency, relevancy, and quality content make all the difference in your email ROI. Check out the Demandbase on-demand All Star Email Marketing Webinar for more tips focused on email marketing for B2B.
• Landing Pages: Second on the tweet list is tips on building better landing pages. Probably no surprise considering that Marketing Experiments, the kings of landing page optimization, are the parent company of Marketing Sherpa and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin gave an outstanding opening presentation. The key is to make it obvious what you want them to do and why they should do it - everything else is a distraction.On a side note, the Marketing Experiments folks took a look at one of our landing pages and said it was "one of the best they'd seen all day" but offered a few tips as well as the advice that we should share more information about benefits of the offer. Much better than last year's evaluation - it's always nice to hear you're on the right track...
• Quality Content: It's not enough to write a white paper. You need to write a white paper that people will be interested in regardless of whether they become your customer or not. Whether it’s a video, an on-demand webcast, or that ubiquitous white paper it’s likely the cornerstone of most of your campaigns - or at least the ones designed to generate new leads. According to Bob Johnson from IDG, if you get customers to engage with 2 pieces of content you’ve got a 25% chance getting them into your pipeline.

The other two takeaways fall into the "buzzworthy" category...

• Buying Personas: This is a topic that seems to be gaining a lot of traction in B2B marketing, and I have heard people speak about it at several events this year including the Inbound Marketing Summit. Fujitsu and Bulldog Solutions said they increased sales pipeline by creating "buyer personas" – and people took note. You may recall the having heard about "Personas" during the last election when campaign strategists spoke about crafting messages that would appeal to the “soccer moms” ... B2B marketers are getting into the game and are finding groups with common wants and needs around their products and creating "buyer personas" to keep their team on track when developing website content, email copy, and white papers that cater to specifically to those personas. You can get started by getting sales and marketing in a roomto discuss a few current prospects in each stage of your pipeline and talk about their demographics, peers, what they’re measured on, what they need right now, and what they have in common.
• Social Media: While the topic still fills a room, it's a lot easier to find seats at the back than it was at this time last year. There does seem to be a growing backlash as there has been a shortage of fresh content out there for a while. As a matter of fact, we got a bump in traffic in the exhibit hall during the social media sessions with visitors citing "burnout" on the topic. And the top questions about of social network marketing still focus on ROI. Social media does tie in very nicely with the concept of "buying personas" though, as when you create the buying persona you should definitely factor in where your buyers are spending their time on the web (online forums or communities, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, et al.). Social networking marketing tactics are great for extending the life of your well developed content, your email campaigns, your word of mouth and keeping tabs on customer sentiment and can be worth the time and investment - but are still not likely to replace more traditional B2B marketing methods any time soon. Small and medium sized businesses, especially, often have resource challenges and have difficulty launching a significant presence in social media while still managing to do all the other things that they are expected to do. This is not to say that one "Tweet" can't make a difference - clearly it can - but managing a growing brand online, monitoring your competitors, finding the trending topics in your space and continually finding relevant content to share can suck up resources very quickly. That's where the ROI questions come into play. No one denies that there is opportunity to build pipeline out there, the questions center on the cost in time and resources.

Finally, the message we took away and encourage our customers to consider is simple: once you’ve got the basics down for a quality campaign the business is yours to lose. Pay attention to what your prospects and customers are telling you by their clicks, downloads, pageviews and tweets and then nurture them based on the behavior will directly affect your pipeline and your bottom line.

See you next year Sherpas!

The Top Lead Scoring Tip from the Marketo User Summit

by Jason Stewart

I gave a presentation on lead scoring last week at the Marketo User Summit in San Mateo. Aside from some general background on the differences between demographic scoring (based on things that can be gleaned from a web form like title, department, company size, etc.) and behavioral scoring (based on actions a prospect takes or web pages a prospect visits) I gave a few examples of one-off or periodic lead scoring activities that fall outside of these parameters.

Some of my tips can be found in these previous blog posts, Lead Scoring Should Influence Your Web Forms and Capturing That Shy Prospect.

The number one tip that people spoke to me about after the event has to do with the way that Salesforce.com works, but even if you don't use SFDC your CRM/SFA system might work the same way. When a new prospect fills out a form or gets loaded into Salesforce.com, they usually enter the system as a lead. Once a lead makes a purchase or engages with your sales team in some way, the salesperson has the option to create a sales opportunity to help with forecasting, monitor the sales cycle and track potential revenue.

When a lead is engaged with sales enough to be associated with an opportunity they are converted to what is called a contact. So, for arguments sake, consider a lead to be a prospect and a contact to be either a customer or a highly engaged prospect.

If a lead has been in your system for long enough to have been a part of numerous marketing campaigns (or opportunities to gain lead scoring points based on their behavior) but still hasn't shown enough promise to be converted to a contact, then a lead scoring adjustment should be considered.

At Demandbase, if we have been marketing to a lead for a year and they are still a lead (not a contact), then there is a significant lead scoring penalty. Nothing so severe that they cannot recover, but enough that they need to participate in a fair number of lead scoring behaviors before they can reach the threshold for sales notification via lead scoring alert.

Demandbase Business Contact Data

Demandbase just launched some new pages over at www.demandbase.com with some details on the kinds of business contacts you can have access to for email marketing, list building, multi-channel marketing or sales campaigns and lead generation. Modeled after traditional "data cards" from list providers, you can now check out how our database of more than 8 million business contacts breaks down by industry, company size, department and more.

The general directory of business contact lists is here, but check out these example charts breaking down marketing contacts, IT and Information Systems contacts, or Software industry contacts. All lists offer details as to their composition by sub-departments and sub-industries so that our customers can build very detailed lists.

As always, there is no minimum purchase or subscription requirements when buying contacts from Demandbase, and we'll even give you a $20 credit to buy a few contacts and check out the service. Register here for your $20 credit towards business contacts with email.

Q&A Follow Up From All-Star Email: Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing

Feedback from our last webinar, "All Star Email: Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing" has been fantastic! You can view a recording here, but there were a few great questions we ran out of time for at the end of the webinar. Here they are:

Are there best practices you would recommend to ensure that your email makes it through SPAM filter? Are there services/sites that you can use to test your e-mail for SPAM rating?
This is a great question,as just because your ESP marks an email as "delivered" it doesn't mean it went into the recipient's inbox. You could have been trapped in the SPAM filter. CAN-SPAM compliance is the first and best thing to get you past the SPAM blockers, but there are no guarantees, and deilverability success is going to require some work. One thing that you can do is remind people to whitelist your address so that they can guarantee your emails will come through ... but of course, this doesn't always help you. Especially if they are receiving the email from you for the first time. So, keep the best practices from the webinar in mind (avoid too many images, pay attention to your text-only emails, etc), check and see if your ESP has any tools or services centered around proofing your emails for deliverability before they go out, and consider hiring a deliverability firm like ReturnPath if your concerns are very serious, as they have seedlists with all the major ISPs (including the B2B ones) that show you how well your emails are performing across all of the major email providers.

Do you have a point-of-view with regard to html vs. text-based emails?
This is actually a point of contention in many companies. A favorite technique of mine used to be to create an HTML email (so that I could reap all of the benefits of reporting/opens/closes from my ESP) that looked like the regular emails I send out of Outlook. I was absolutely convinced that this was the best way to go, and that images were bad. Until I started testing emails with images, that is. In my opinion, what really matters most for driving an "open" is a combination of the FROM label and the subject line. Do they know you and is the offer compelling? After that, you goal is to drive a "click" and what really matters most to drive that click is the content. Well-formatted, informative content that shows them exactly what they expected to see when they opened the email is going to drive that click. Oftentimes the best way to present an idea or get someone interested is with images. Food for thought ... my boss prefers to send text-centric emails, but the ones he shows me as examples of what caught his eye are typically nicely formatted emails with compelling images. That's the long answer. The short answer is the usual one ... test both and see what works better for your audience.

If you conduct monthly webinars as an offer on your web site, is it appropriate to send an invitation email on a montly basis to people on your house list who have not responded or signed up previously? Or, does that risk "list burnout?"
If you are offering good, new content to your audience on a monthly basis then letting them know about will in no way "burn them out." If you are sending them monthly invitations to a "demo webinar" that is the same thing, month in and month out then you will burn them out. New content is king! If you create good, new content that people will like then your list will be safe from burnout.

Is there a "best" day/time to email? What is considered a "good" open rate for monthly B2B email via house list?
Conventional wisdom says Mondays and Fridays are not good for email campaigns. On Mondays people are more likely to delete without reading as they get up to speed from the weekend, and Friday people have "checked out" and are focused on wrapping up what they need to finish before the weekend. That being said, it might be a good idea to try out a mailing on a Monday or a Friday, since you might have less competition in the inbox. The best way to find out? Test, of course! Don't be afraid of Mondays, don't be afraid of afternoons or early mornings. Every house list is unique! I even heard someone speak once regarding their email campaigns to doctors, selling medical equipment. The best time to email a doctor? Late nights and weekends. That's when they check their email, because they are not with patients. As far as open rates go, there is no "industry standard." If it is a cold list I am happy to get 5-8% opens. My house list (who is familiar with me) can approach 20% with the right offer, but I'm happy with 12-15% if I can get it. Honestly I think it is more important to focus on what you wanted to accomplish with the email rather than how many people opened it, and go from there.

Is there a CanSpam requirement re: the time period you have to remove someone from list. (i.e. from the point of unsubscribe, when do you need to remove them by)?
We didn't know the number off the top of our heads in the webinar, but it is 10 days. Thanks to all the folks who wrote in.