Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Under Construction and Coming Attractions

by Jason Stewart    

You may have noticed it has been pretty quiet here at demandblog ...and it's because we are redesigning the blog -- and creating some new stuff, too! Product/Industry information, additional authors, and more. Stay tuned, as if there are any new instructions or changes in how to continue getting new posts fed to you we will post. Hopefully it will be before the end of April!

In the meantime, there is a ton of good content and events happening you should know about...

4/20: Focus Marketing Roundtable -- What could "Do Not Track" Mean to marketing automation and B2B?
Panelists Amanda Batista (Managing Editor, DemandGen Report), Dennis Dayman (Chief Privacy, Security, and Deliverability Officer, Eloqua),  Thor Johnson (CMO & CEO, Team Thor Marketing), Aaron Kahlow (CEO, Online Marketing Connect) and Adam Needles (VP, Demand Generation Strategy, Left Brain Marketing) discuss the possible impact of proposed “Do Not Track” legislation on B2B marketing.

4/22: Webinar -B2B Website Conversion Optimization: Attract, Engage and Qualify with Jay Gaines from SiriusDecisions
B2B marketers have long known that their Web sites should be the hub of their lead generation efforts, but very few have realized true success. Learn why Website Conversion Optimization is no longer optional, and how leading organizations are finally turning their old, informational Websites into demand creation machines that effectively and efficiently attract, engage and qualify targeted visitors.

4/25: Webinar - Avoiding the Lead Gen Trade-Off: How to Boost Web Form Conversions without Sacrificing Lead Data Quality with Jason Stewart (Demandbase) and Craig Rosenberg (Focus)
B2B marketing organizations invest a great deal of time and money on ways to increase online conversions. The problem is that just as marketers have taken steps to optimize web conversions, they’re also tasked with gathering richer data on their prospects. Improvements in one area typically come at the expense of the other -- you can gather more leads with shorter forms and less data, or fewer leads with longer forms and deeper data. There is a way to avoid the trade-off and provide sales with the best of both worlds.

Top Takeaways from the Adobe Omniture Summit

by Jason Stewart

I heard someone say last week that 30% of all online marketing spend was represented in Salt Lake City at the Adobe Omniture Summit.

That's a lot of money.

It also occurred to me that lots of people would be interested in what these folks had to say, regardless as to whether or not they were using Adobe/Omniture tools like SiteCatalyst (analytics) or Test & Target (multivariate testing). I created a group on LinkedIn, and invite everyone who went to the show to share their top takeaways from the summit. I posted two takeaways up there to get the ball rolling.

Also, I'm pulling together a webinar next week to discuss the feedback. Register here.

What B2B Needs to Know About Online Visitor Identification

by Jason Stewart

Almost a year ago, Demandbase released our Real-Time Identification Service ... and since then we have gotten TONS of questions about online visitor identification. Most of the questions and confusion are centered around two things:

1. Reverse-IP lookup in public registries
2. Individual tracking tools like cookies

IP-based lookup for B2B companies is severley limited when free analytics tools rely on public databases, and when you bake those cookies they are really focused on tracking IDENTIFIED users, not identifying anonymous ones. It's worth a deeper dive, to be sure.

Join me on Tuesday, March 22nd for a short discussion with Demandbase Director of Data Architecture David Steinore. We'll discuss IP-based identification, exactly what analytics and marketing automation does for visitor tracking, and all the things B2B companies need to know about online visitor identification. Register here.

Three Analyst Firms to Watch

by Jason Stewart

One of the most wide-ranging and challenging tasks as a marketer is to get someone else (with a voice and an audience) to say something nice about you. But it can also be extremely discouraging when you get that special someone to listen, and they try to fit you inside one of the boxes that they have already defined. Sometimes they are right to do it and they understand, with great clarity, where you should sit in the grander scheme. But there are times that emerging technology companies feel like the proverbial square peg being crammed into the round hole.

With no disrespect to the largest firms, there are three smaller analyst firms that are continuing to impress me with their clear vision and web-forward approach to B2B sales and marketing :

Sirius Decisions
Can these guys still be classified as a smaller firm? At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, the B2B-themed sessions were constantly peppered with quotes and citations from Sirius. With a clear and concise focus on B2B sales and marketing, these are the folks that the companies that you want to sell to are listening to. Analyst Jay Gaines is fast becoming the foremost expert on B2B website conversion optimization, and Megan Heuer's thoughts on sales and marketing operations and metrics are always worth reading. These guys are smart.

Gleanster
Jeff Zabin, author of Precison Marketing and "Chief Gleanster" understands that B2B is different than B2C, but is fascinated with how those personalization techniques that have been refined in the B2C space can be adapted and refined for B2B. He also says that "...labels are for food. When you are talking about emerging technologies, there is no need to label them." I really like how he understands B2B but is not afraid to say that benchmarks and baselines are meaningless without context. Interested in seeing what sorts of things he wants to know, and in getting a free copy of the resulting research? Here is a link to their current survey on B2B precision marketing as well as access to a webinar on Thursday 2/24 sharing some preliminary results.

Beagle Research
If you are at all interested in CRM and the software tools that plug into them, Beagle is a great place to look for research. And with CRM rapidly becoming the center of the B2B universe, as the one place that sales and marketing are looking at the same reports and measuring the same things, it is important to quickly understand the nuances of the rapidly changing space. Denis Pombriant knows CRM.

Context is King: Content Optimization and B2B Marketing

by Jason Stewart

Demandbase has a webinar next week, focused on account-based content targeting.

B2B marketing is clearly different than B2C, but as more interactions shift online B2B marketing benchmarks are looking more and more like B2C every day. B2B marketers are coming to regard every data point as an opportunity to paint a more accurate and complete picture of their prospects in order to engage them in a relevant, context-sensitive manner. This webinar will look at how Top Performers are achieving their desired business objectives, based on the experiences of more than 300 companies.

Thursday, February 24th at 10AM Pacific.

Jeff Zabin, author of the business bestseller Precision Marketing and research director at Gleanster, and Jason Stewart, chief blogger at Demandbase, will present preliminary research findings on best practices in data-driven marketing improvement. They will also share actionable insights into the future of B2B marketing that companies can take to the bank today.

You will learn:

• How B2B and B2C marketing techniques and performance metrics are merging
• Benchmarks and performance metrics compiled from hundreds of B2B companies
• How to measure and interpret your own success metrics vs. the “common” indicators
• How to begin the process of transcending the benchmarks to move your performance beyond “average”

Also keep an eye out for how to contribute to the research findings by participating in the survey, as survey participants who attend the webinar will receive a PDF of the final benchmark report. A link to the survey will be sent after you register.

The Most Important Point from the Sirius Decisions CMO To-Do List

by Jason Stewart

John Neeson at Sirius just posted his 2011 CMO to-do list for B2B marketers. The single most important point, in my humble opinion? Website optimization.

" If 58% of leads are coming from the web and this will accelerate during the next five years, how are you leveraging your web properties to your advantage?"

Landing pages and microsotes are not the key to improving conversions. You need to step back and look at the bigger picture of website conversion optimization.

Check out the entire Sirius Decisions piece here.