In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Manage You Company’s Reputation with Google Alerts), we wrote about how to use Google Alerts to manage your brand reputation. Now, MarketingProfs is listing a round up of paid services and a few free tools such as Blog Pulse (www.BlogPulse.com) which features conversation tracking, and visual trends. Marketing Profs advises readers to:

“Set up a Google Alert so that every day, or as it happens, you get an email that shows you who is talking about that keyword (which can be your product or brand name). The challenge with simply using a tool like Google or Technorati Watchlist is the sheer volume of information. You need to either task people with manual assessment or use better tools (many of which are paid services) or contract with an outside provider.

An alternative to Alerts, which hit your email inbox, is to setup an RSS Reader (Google, Bloglines, etc). Then you can check it as needed, versus filling your email inbox to the brim. The risk with an RSS Reader, though, is that you don’t look often enough. “

Submitted by Ron Levine, CEO at Accelerated Sales Training, Inc.

Sales professionals depend on knowing how to ask the right questions to discover the real needs of our clients. Often our clients tell us what they would like us to do, such as, “I need a solution on change management,” but without telling us the ultimate result they want to achieve.

To be truly effective we must be able to help our clients articulate the cause of the problem and to be able to identify what would be different if the solution is successful. Armed with this additional information we can then design the most effective solution for the problem at hand.

So what are some examples of questions and statements you can use to open up the prospect to discussing their problems.

Help me understand. How do you measure your key performance indicators?

I’d like to learn a little more about. What do you do when that happens?

Where do you find are the bottlenecks?

How high is the absentee rate?

What are the biggest challenges you are currently facing?

What are your top priorities over the next three months?

Tell me more about that.

Give me an idea how you currently process that specific type of data?

Please describe how you use spreadsheets?

What do you do when your system goes down?

Please explain your funding process?

Compare for me how your test scores went down last year and up this year?

In what way do you measure your production?

To what extent has this been a problem?

Go through the steps when your production line goes down?

What happens when a system outage occurs?

These questions are designed to root out the problems, needs or challenges your prospect is incurring right now. The next question is one you need to ask yourself. Can you fix the problem with your solution?

If the answer is yes or even a partial yes then you have the basis for closing for an appointment. If the answer is no, you’re better off letting the prospect know up front rather than wasting their valuable time or yours.

Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS

The B2B Lead features a number of helpful articles on copywriting, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite tips for ensuring B2B marketing copy is relevant. As marketers we constantly try to write compelling copy that motivates people to take some sort of action. The trick is to write in the voice of our target audience; speaking to them using language they respond to. Sometimes we use focus groups or A/B testing to help with this; getting out in the field and talking to prospects/customers also helps. In the end though, the words we choose often amount to best guesses.

Keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends, and the Google Keyword Tool provide a wealth of insight into the voice of our audience. Using search data and trends can give excellent clues to the words people use to describe things. Talking to your audience, using the same words they search for themselves, puts you at a major advantage. For example, the other day I was crafting an email to promote a new webcast. Problem was, some people were calling it a webcast and others were calling it a webinar – which was it? What would more people respond to; a webcast offer or a webinar offer? I decided to use Google Trends to compare the search volume of both words. I figured the term that is searched more often will also be the term used more commonly in conversation. This term should also spark a higher interest if used in my email. So I quickly pulled up Google Trends and here is what I found.

This obviously made my decision easy. Split testing my email offers confirmed that using “webcast” got the better response.

Now, this is just search-driven copywriting in its simplest form. If you want to take this further, you can use the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker almost like you would a Thesaurus. For example, maybe you are promoting a “golf strategies” guide. If you plopped this keyword into the Google Keyword Tool, it would offer you numerous suggestions for related terms people are searching for. In this example (shown below) maybe you would be better off promoting it as a “golf tips” guide since that term is searched more frequently.

Hopefully by now, you are starting to get the idea. This stuff really works – I have personally seen higher conversion rates on landing pages and emails by using this strategy. If you are interested in reading more about similar ideas, Aaron Wall has a very interesting article on keyword research that is definitely worth a read.

http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets/

http://www.wordtracker.com
http://www.google.com/trends
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Heard about a very interesting Vendor Relationship Management project (the counterpart to Customer Relationship Management or CRM) today. Apparently, ProjectVRM, headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was chartered to “improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter.”

What really captured my interest was this intriguing presentation on possible scenarios with some fun and interesting implications for micro-segmentation marketing (Minority Report) vs. social media (The Global Village).

Details on the Project VRM wiki – http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Scenarios

Submitted by Jonas Lamis

Inspired by Pam O’Neal Mickelson’s recent presentation on Viral B2B videos, I’ve been searching for other examples that might actually drive purchasing. I came across one today…

The IT Room teaser: http://theitroom.com/index.php

I found the link embedded in a TechCrunch advertisement and had to check it out. While the company behind this serial Geeks gone Wild save Corporate America with a Monkey remains obscured (at least on the surface) I cant help but wonder why the video “player” has a discrete DELL brand at the bottom.

Regardless, I’ve added it to my RSS feeds as the teaser episode was entertaining enough to make me want more. Plus – and a big plus, the video streamed through my company’s firewall. This is something that Youtube videos don’t do, and something that marketers should be aware of as they consider B2B video.

I’ve just begun working on Part II of the Funnelnomics book I co-wrote with ReachForce CEO, Suaad Sait. The new section is on B2B market micro-segmentation. Specifically, I want to detail the possibilities and a process for using automated pipeline analysis to slice your target market into smaller and smaller markets with common interests/needs. Then use marketing automation to deliver more relevant messages to those markets to drive Marketing ROI. Sort of like Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (http://www.longtail.com/) for B2B Marketing. (Still not totally sure this analogy applies, but you get the point, I hope.)

In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Get Real-time Insight into Your Marketing and Sales Funnel) I wrote about how I am using ReachForce’s new salesforce.com add-on to get real-time insight into my funnel or pipeline. Initially, I used it to spot our top vertical markets and then identify other companies that met our target market criteria. Now, I’m experimenting with using it to conduct some experiments in micro-segmentation. So, I want to see how I can use it to…

1. See which campaigns are producing high velocity leads—those leads that move through the funnel fastest and invest more marketing dollars in those campaigns.
2. Drill into the pipeline to identify trends in certain geographies and then identify additional opportunities within those geographies.
3. Identify bottlenecks—stages of the funnel where leads from a particular campaign are stuck so that I can move those leads along with tailored communications or timed offers.
4. And, last—perhaps—but not least, I recently realized that I can now spot gaps or “problem spots” in the funnel so I can actually tell Sales reps in a particular territory that they don’t have enough leads to meet their revenue number. Imagine that! Marketing telling Sales that they don’t have enough leads.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the possibilities of using automation to deliver more targeted/relevant campaigns to smaller and smaller markets. This would improve your response rates since the message and the offer would be more relevant to the market. It should also enable you to dramatically improve the efficiency and velocity of the funnel (ie. my funnelnomics). You could conceivably manage your funnel almost like a manufacturing process squeezing out inefficiencies as they became obvious. Plus, the reduced costs required to deliver more targeted messages—instead of spraying them to a broad audience—should ensure Marketing ROI will be higher.

So, these immediate rewards are pretty obvious. But what about the longer term effects of smarter, more relevant Marketing techniques on the practice of Marketing as a whole? Is it possible that this approach will take some of the heat off of today’s B2B Marketers who are criticized for being self-important Spammers who spray their messages out to target markets without bothering to understand what is appropriate for the buyer? I mean this video (B2B Marketing WTF: The Breakup) says it all, doesn’t it?

It remains to be seen if taking this type of approach can help Marketers penetrate the Teflon-like resistance of most buyers toward traditional marketing efforts. But Facebook, for one, is already unveiling its own version. Should be a good barometer to watch to see how actual users are reacting to this newly introduct ad targeting concept http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/22/facebook-experiments-with-ads-targeting-peoples-interests/.

It seems to me that if the content B2B Marketers deliver is truly relevant, it could become welcome content. However, if the ad platform enforces a sort of intimacy—yet the “content” still resembles advertising—it puts everyone in a very uncomfortable position.
Esther Dyson made a great point about this at the Defrag conference when she proposed that Marketers give users disclosure messages that are personalized http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6892 . She said that she wasn’t sure about personal rights, just that individuals have the right to demand to be made happy by whatever service they use.

Will micro-targeting make users happy? Will Facebook’s ad platform actually add value? Those are the real questions for Marketers to figure out. But I, for one, am excited by the possibilities. Stay tuned for more developments on the subject. Or, better yet, share your 2 cents.

Attended the Austin Social Media Workshop today where I had the pleasure of listening to Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations) Connie Reece, Mike Chapman, and a bunch of other social media evangelists. One of the highlights that really drove home the point of the day was this genius video spoofing the typical one-way Marketing one-size-fits-all approach. This is definitely worth a watch!

The Break Up
Video sent by geertdesager

Want to share the fun? Check out Q&A from the event.

When I started at ReachForce in July 2007, I was tasked with managing the blog. The design had been finalized and we had a few posts ready to go, but no one internally really knew much about blogging. As the younger member of the marketing team it was expected that I knew all about the latest in social media, since it is my generation that is driving most of it. While I do have a Facebook profile (mostly due to much peer pressure), I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert in social media. Immediately I began to read everything I could about blogging and tried to figure out what would work and what wouldn’t for The B2B Lead.

If you are planning on heading down the path of starting your own company blog, you will find as you read everyone’s opinions on what a corporate blog should be that they are in fact opinions and there is no right answer, and actually a lot of disagreement on the subject. At ReachForce, we decided that our blog would be a collection of cool and crazy marketing ideas that we have come across or developed ourselves, it will NOT be our laments on how great ReachForce is. We hope to be a source for marketers to gain and share ideas on how to be better marketers.

Back to my point, you need to decide early on what the environment of your market is. You need to recognize who your intended audience is and create the look and fell as well as the content around that. A blog for bankers will be different than a blog for high tech CEOs.

Expert I am not (hence the title of this series), but I hope that you can learn something from my mistakes and successes.

Leigh Anne Wallace, Marketing Coordinator at ReachForce

I am the ReachForce resident blog master, but that doesn’t mean I am not learning/making it up as we go along. Corporate blogging can be a very scary and exciting venture. My goal is to share with you what I have picked up along the way on this adventure and hopefully you can give me some insight into where you would like this blog to go. Also, as the marketing newbie around here, I plan to give a fresh perspective on balancing between old school marketing methodology and the latest and greatest marketing techniques.

Recently I attended an event in Austin, TX called Austin 3.0. Just as the name suggests, the event was to bring together thought leaders (obviously they invited me as a mistake) in Austin, TX –the main agenda was a focus around B2B marketing and sales. The session was hosted by Bulldog Solutions CEO, a friend, Rob Solomon.

The session focused on a number of areas in and around the “new” role of marketing (see a different post for that). The one area that I found intriguing was brought up by Jeff Hunt, CEO of GCI Group – what about happy customers? His question was, what are you doing about your happy customers? Are you talking to them? Are they part of your inner circle? How do you manage them? His firm recently did a study pulling top companies from the Inc. 500 and the Fortune 500 and asked the question – what are you doing for your happy customers? – they received responses from the customer support departments like “sorry to have inconvenienced you and someone from our customer service department will be in touch shortly”. The net-net view is that happy customers are a blind spot for us all – we spend our time worrying about winning new customers and servicing unhappy ones, what about our greatest assets, happy customers??