Training Marketer

I came across a great post today from Paul Dunay at Buzz Marketing for Technology about how business to business marketers can use social media to spark lead consideration.

“A prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand.”

Engagement is the first step, and many times the hardest, when developing leads. Tools like blogs and podcasts can initially engage customers with ongoing and relevant conversation.

Social media helps business to business marketers, who are faced with selling complex products and services, by asking the customer to simply consider their brand. Once a visitor considers your business as a possible source to buy from, you can then start the lead nurturing process.

Dunay also has some good advice on how to measure social media success -

“Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.”

You may want to take a second look at your open rates before making any changes to your email strategies. Email open rates are of limited usefulness, according to those at MarketingSherpa.

Their most recent chart shows that since 2004, email open rates have declined significantly. But, the Sherpas believe that open rates are a highly flawed metric and should be examined carefully before making any rash decisions.

How email opens are measured:
“A line of code resides within an email that asks the server to deliver a single pixel image. When that image gets served, it’s called an open. The problem? If the email client (Outlook, Yahoo! Mail , etc.) doesn’t allow the image to arrive, the open doesn’t get counted.”

With so many email clients (business and consumer) automatically blocking images, you can see why the metric can be tricky.

“Think about your own email reading patterns. How often do you read an article or scan an offer without enabling images? Probably quite often, if you’re like most recipients.”

Proceed with caution …

HRmarketer.com published their “Trends in HR Marketing” report, providing information on trends and best practices for marketing to human resources professionals and on HR buyer purchasing behavior.

The reports can be downloaded for free from HRmarketer.com (after filling out a quick registration form).

It is usually the person in the HR role who is purchasing the training products for their company, so knowing their buying behavior can offer insights on how best to market your product. This report could help you market more effectively, by knowing the best tools and methods to reach your target audience.

Covered topics include:

• Use of Internet search engines by HR buyers
• HR and Web 2.0
• How important is exhibiting?
• How often do HR buyers go out to bid for various products and services?
• HR “pain points” for the coming year
• How HR buyers “go shopping”
• Where should HR vendors spend their marketing and PR dollars?

HubSpot’s new Press Release Grader is an online application that evaluates and scores your press releases for free. (Special thanks to David Meerman Scott for sharing the good news with the marketing world.)

Just cut and paste the press release content into the tool, along with company information including your name, website and email. In a few seconds the site will come back with a “marketing effectiveness score” and specific suggestions on improvements.

Press releases are graded on basic factors most public relations experts stick to, along with factors from Internet marketing experts such as links and search engine optimization characteristics.

If you regularly create and distribute marketing press releases, check out the Press Release Grader and see how well you score.

During the first quarter of this year U.S. online ad revenue totaled more than $7 billion dollars, an increase of 23.9% compared to the same time last year, according to research firm IDC.

According to the new IDC report, with the decreased threat of a recession, online advertising will continue to grow at a rate between 15% and 20% each quarter.

The IDC also projects that U.S. Internet ad spending will more than double over the next five years.

“What happens is that the current economic crisis puts pressure on advertisers to save money and find more effective marketing channels,” said Karsten Weide, program director-digital marketplace and new media at IDC.

“Effectively, the crisis accelerates the shift of advertising budgets from traditional media into new media.”

Velocity had an interesting post a few weeks ago about how spending less time and money on company videos can work for B2B companies.

In the past, Velocity would spend more than $50K on short films that took weeks to shoot and edit. They’ve recently been experimenting with “guerrilla” videos that only require a camcorder to shoot and only days to edit and upload to the web.

“The point of guerrilla video is to shoot first and ask questions later. If the footage is disappointing or the experiment is a failure, you’ve lost very little. If you get good footage you’re ready to edit.”

Video content on B2B sites can help tell your story, demonstrate a product and share your ideas.

Instead of wasting money on costly, large scale videos, why not make it simple? Grab your video camera, shoot a quick video and get it out there. Get past the “pretty” and focus on delivering true customer value.

Especially if you have a limited budget, low cost videos can be the solution to a problem you never thought you had the time or money to produce.

Take a chance, test it out and start shooting.

Twitpitch - your company’s story in 140 characters (roughly 20 words) or less.

The term was created earlier this year, when social media pioneer Stowe Boyd, decided to only accept his Web 2.0 Expo appointments via Twitter. Companies were forced to fit their company’s story into a short “Twitpitch.”

In order to make things simple for me, I am hereby posting a schedule of the times that I will make available for meetings with companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, and I am not going to accept email-based proposals to meet, only Twitpitches.

Note also, in a twitterized style of business, I am only allotting 30 or 40 minutes for meetings. Let’s get down to it people. Cut to the chase. If I fall in love with it, I will be the first to ask for a follow up.

Small companies everywhere can learn a lesson from this interesting social media experiment - get to the point. In this age of information overload, less is more. People don’t have the time to sit and wait for your main point to come around, they want you to tell them now, and it better be quick, or they’re outta here.

Marketo recently posted their “9 Commandments” for marketing high-tech companies, beliefs that can be followed across the business to business marketing world. Especially with training marketers, who just like high-tech marketers, sell their brands to niche markets and face similar challenges.

Most marketers face the same challenges: limited budgets and limited resources. Through it all, they’ve been able to establish a strong brand and “powerful marketing machine.” The following are some of the lessons they’ve learned that are most relevant to training marketers:

1. Be omnipresent. Training product buyers are using the Web to shop for products the same way they shop for products themselves. Marketo “spread out as many online tentacles as possible” to reach their customer in multiple areas on the Web. If your budget is spread thin, focus on high ROI tactics like a blog and search engine optimization.
2. Test, but don’t over test. Testing helps you decide what is truly working and what you should throw out. Over testing, by combining too many variables may lead to insignificant results and wasted time.
3. Train your sales team. While focusing on the marketing is important, it’s also important not to forget about the sales team that is in charge of selling your product. Make sure your marketing message is delivered evenly across all aspects of your business. Your sales team is the voice of your company. Train them to deliver the value of what your selling and explain why you’re different than the rest.
4. Find balance. Being everywhere at the same time, like we said above, is tough. Don’t let it get you stressed out trying to cover all the bases. Instead, focus on what is working and let go of what’s not.
5. Build in stages. Don’t try to do it all at once. You may think that you need the best website, with the latest and greatest bells and whistles programmers have to offer, but you can’t do it all today. Build your marketing in pieces.

“Direct marketing e-mail is a powerful marketing tool and still one of the best ways to reach HR buyers,” according to Kevin Grossman at HRmarketer.

With extensive experience marketing directly to HR decision makers across the U.S., those at HRmarketer are some of the best in the business when it comes to e-mail marketing. Luckily for us, they’re happy to share some of their best practices for direct e-mail campaigns.

Fact: The open rate for “flat” print direct mail is on average 2.73%, and for e-mail it is 1.12%. Direct e-mails that offer a compelling content “offer” in the form of a free downloadable white paper or research report are significantly more likely to generate a response than promotional offers. Save the promotion offers for your print campaigns and for current customers.

The HRmarketers recommend seven key components to remember in your direct e-mail marketing campaigns:

1. List size. Send to a list of at least 5,000 people once each quarter and expect to spend between $0.25 and $0.50 per e-mail.
2. Compelling offer. You’ll have better response rates with direct e-mail when offering compelling content (i.e. free white paper or research report). “Save the promotional offers for your print campaigns and current customers.”
3. Straightforward subject line. Keep it short, simple and straightforward. “Tell what’s inside, don’t sell what’s inside.” Do a few tests to see what works best for you.
4. HTML content. The look of your e-mails should match the look and feel of your website. Offer a single call-to-action. Avoid “spammy” words like free, guarantee, opportunity, and order now. Don’t hide your text in an image, rather use rich text in the body of your e-mail. Attach tracking codes to links to track where visitors are coming from.
5. Landing page. Create a landing page that matches the look of the e-mail and your website. Reinforce your call-to-action from the email and the value of the original offer. Take yourself through the customer experience to make sure everything is flowing correctly.
6. Lead acquisition form. Collect at least the visitor’s name and email address. Asking for too much may have visitors abandoning your site.
7. Lead follow-up. “The best time to follow-up on a Web lead is within 24 hours.” Be aware of the limited opportunity window and have your sales team prepared to capitalize on new prospects.

An addition to the list: Remember that the people you’re sending to are people. Talk to them like people and in words they understand. Listen to what your customers want and do your best to give it to them.

Seth Godin points out the obvious in a recent post about “rough edges and attention.” Explaining that sometimes it’s the human touch that gets things noticed. Like a haphazardly placed sign on the back of a UPS truck or the list of specials on a restaurant table, “you notice it because a human being did it.”

Add a human touch to your marketing pieces, “you” is a powerful word. Remember that your customers are people. Think of how you communicate with family and friends. Try to extend that type of communication across to your customers. Talk to people like they’re people.

After you figure out your customer demographic, how do you know how to talk to them? What tone will fit best?

Copyblogger tackled that topic early last month in a post titled “Are You Talkin’ to My Generation?”

Your customers may fit into one or a variety of groups, that’s up to you to figure out. Copyblogger can get you started by breaking most consumers into four categories: the silent generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.

Here’s their general breakdown of how each likes to be spoken to:

Silent Generation: respect for authority; conformity and adherence to the rules; law, order and duty; dedication, hard work and sacrifice.

Baby Boomers: personal gratification; personal growth, health and wellness; optimism and positive attitude; teamwork and being involved.

Generation X: diversity and global thinking; self-reliance and independence; life balance; fun and informal attitude; technologically literate.

Generation Y: confidence and achievement; sociability and collective action; diversity and morality; street-smart; optimistic and savvy.

“These days, it’s not enough to slap up a nice design and some well-written content. You have to get into the heads of your buyers and learn how they think – and why they think that way.”