Make the Most of Your Tradeshow Investment Using Word of Mouth Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #76
Friday, February 29th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a few tips on how to turn your tradeshow experience into a word of mouth marketing success.
When most B2B Marketers think of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing, they think of online/viral campaigns or customer referral programs. But, tradeshows can be the perfect setting for some of the best WOM marketing campaigns. Where else can you get so many people of like mind together in one place, short of Internet forums.
There’s nothing like a good stunt to get everyone at an event talking about your organization which contributes to both brand awareness and demand generation if you handle the lead capture and nurturing process appropriately. The guys over at GamePlan Marketing have been praised for their stroke of genius, “Operation Blueshock¸ a guerilla stunt that involved sending 150 male and 150 female models dressed to the nines onto the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show floor to talk up the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. For video of the stunt, visit http://www.gpexperience.com/work.php.
The results were staggering: on the day the models showed up at CES, the Bluetooth website had 18,500 hits– a 42-percent spike. In the post-show survey, 60 percent of respondents said they knew more about Bluetooth than just two days before.
So called “guerilla stunts” need not be one-hit wonders, however. A successful WOM event orchestrated by NetQoS has now become an increasingly successful yearly tradition. In an effort to catch the eye of Cisco and get a very target-rich environment to talk about the company, NetQoS marketers executed a WOM “stunt” at Cisco Networkers a couple of years ago. The company sent out invitations to an exclusive party at The MIX lounge in Vegas for an after-hours party starting at 11:00 pm. This generated a great deal of buzz on the show floor with attendees clamoring for an invite. Those lucky enough to attend were given shirts to wear the next day. This resulted in more than 200 NetQoS-clad advocates in sessions and on the show floor which helped to increase lead generation by 120% from the previous year. The next year, we expanded our presence further, booked the House of Blues and increased lead capture by more than 300%. We also gave out Flipcams to encourage attendees to spread the word via YouTube and the blogosphere.
How have you used WOM to improve your trade show experience?
Another 90% Statistic About B2B Marketing; Really! - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #75
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Tradeshows – Conferences – Users Group Events – May the religious wars begin. Sales loves them, marketing thinks they are cool as they make for a lot of creative fodder – CEO’s like the fact that their company is a player in the industry – businesses, at least high tech ones spend 25% or more of their marketing budget on events; to give away t-shirts and build “brand”. My view is that if you are a mid-sized business, the only branding you want to hear about is the one used to mark and track cattle.
Here’s another 90% WASTE statistic I heard about from Sirius Decisions – less than 10% of trade show leads are followed up by Sales. So what happens to the rest?
What are the best practices for reducing the 90% waste without all the rhetoric about branding – “was worth it because of the branding?” I get it, awareness on the business is important but why throw out the baby with the bathwater?
My view, as always, is to step back take a deep breath and think about this:
Why did sales only follow-up on 10% of the “leads”?
What was the makeup of the “good leads” or Glengarry leads?
Were the attendees (the companies) they came from a good fit?
Did you come back with the right company but wrong contact names (the IT Admin was at the event but our economic buyer is someone else that we want to target)?
How do we define the right company and filter them against those criteria?
Who is the right person/people at the company you want to reach out to?
Now that you have the answers to the question above, it’s time to turn the 90% waste into HIGH octane leads for marketing and selling. The yield will not be 100% but even if you end up yielding 1/3 of the 90%, you will be at 300% of where you are today with event leads.
Don’t let the data you collect from a tradeshow sit around – mobilize it to create actionable leads in your business. Take it from sludge to high-octane data!
Corporate Blog URL - Blog Master…NOT!
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008While I may be the blog master of ReachForce, I am definitely not the most technically savvy. I let my web guys handle the technology side of our blog. But, as a marketer, there are some technical decisions that need to be made when starting a blog. There are many great applications like WordPress and TypePad that make starting a blog easy but have you considered what the best url is for your blog? Mike Volpe at HubSpot dives into the advantages and disadvantages of each choice. This is great information I wish I would have had when I was making this decision.
Originally, The B2B Lead was a folder in our corporate site, but we wanted to make it distinctly clear that it is a thought leadership blog and not a sales pitch. We soon moved it to its own url. While I think we did gain points for differentiating it from the corporate site, Mike is right that it is a lot of work to build inbound links. In retrospect, I think I would have also considered making it a subdomain of our site. The point of starting the blog was of course to help boost SEO but more importantly to create great content that would be appreciated by other smart B2B marketers.
Direct Mail to No One - Marketing WTF?
Monday, February 25th, 2008Another great story, well a sad one really but still a jaw dropper.
One of my previous employers who shall remain nameless ran one of the most costly and ineffective marketing campaigns I have ever heard of (this was before I worked there of course). They had decided to run a big direct mail campaign sending out branded scooters. You know the razor ones that were all the rage about 5 years ago. Somewhere along the line the zip code column got moved around and it didn’t line up with the correct addresses. No one realized the problem until the scooters started coming back. They ended up paying FedEx twice, once to ship it there and once to ship it back because the zip code was wrong. So no one got the scooters and the marketing team had spent their budget on the scooters and all the shipping. Too bad – no one got a scooter.
When I started working there over a year after the Oops, they were still trying to give those darn scooters away. In fact I think I might still have one in my garage….
These marketers were also of the mindset that if you could get 100 t-shirts for $6 a piece then getting 1000 shirts for $4 a piece is a better deal. Even though no more than 100 people ever worked at the company. Saving money by buying in bulk is good but only if you can consume the larger amount.
Virtual Trade Shows – Are They the Better Alternative? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #74
Friday, February 22nd, 2008With travel costs continuing to go up and events getting more and more expensive to put on I’m wondering if all events will soon move into the virtual world. We, here at ReachForce, have signed up to sponsor and exhibit at MarketingProf’s B2B 2.0 EXPO, a virtual trade show this year. I’m REALLY interested to see what kinds of people attend these events and are they possible leads for us. We’re building our booth this week – any ideas or recommendations? If you’ve attended or participated in an event like this I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the event. I must admit, as a marketer scarred by the live trade show circuits, I’m really hoping this event delivers and that more and more continue to pop up.
Should Leads be Scored Like FICO? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #73
Thursday, February 21st, 2008Contributed by Cody Young, ReachForce Consultant
I came across an interesting post by Jeff Liebl on Performance Insider blog. The post proposed the notion of have a third-party scoring system for leads similar to FICO scoring. The potential pitfalls expressed in Jeff’s write-up about buying leads from online sources are well founded. And while conversation about scoring lead data in a way similar to FICO is interesting, the real value I see is the more practical and tactical thoughts he provokes about lead data quality in general.
First and foremost, the concept of establishing FICO-like rules for scoring individual lead quality while lists are being bought and sold shouldn’t be an edict for marketers to sit and wait for. Market forces are already making it happen in the B2B space (at companies like ReachForce) – and yes, it is having real effect on price models and competition between lead source vendors.
The most important element of any marketing effort is specifying the target – and you can’t really do that effectively by just ‘buying a list.’ Today’s marketing must be managed by understanding how sales funnels work and how buyers buy.
This puts a very special responsibility in the hands of all marketers to view this as filling up on ‘funnel fuel’ –not ‘list buying.’ Sadly, Jeff’s spot-on reference to “numerous reports of fraudulent and bad-quality leads” is a disturbing indicator that too many are still in line with the wasteful standard that marketing’s job is to buy lists and busy themselves sending out emails and letters for 2% response rates.
Buying data to feed sales funnels can best be compared to buying fuel – and from sludgy-crude to jet fuel, a wide range of grades exist. That being said, it should not surprise anyone that as new sales and marketing automation engines expose better ways to find, keep and grow customers, jet fuel is going to win the race every time.
Once high quality funnel fuel is secured, predictive modeling does not have to be a complex, budget busting ordeal. A simple way to start is by ranking a single-value to measure each prospect in a simple, but highly relevant way. These are what Dr. Eric Siegel calls ‘predictors’ in his short but informative article entitled Predictive Analytics with Data Mining: How It Works.
He draws a simple example using “recency” as a predictor (based on how long it’s been since a customer’s last purchase) and assigns higher point values for more recent customers. This simple analysis drives a very obvious prediction (you can probably guess) that contacting the customers in order of recency – calling the high scores first and the low score last – will result in better response rates.
Expanding on this, other predictive indicators and rules can be introduced to formulate smarter and smarter models as you go. The next example is to combine two predictors into a formula: recency + personal income. And if one of the predictors is more important to you than the other (by rule) then its weight is adjusted accordingly – e.g. 2 x recency + personal income.
Once you are able to score your database this way (or just parts of it for starters) using predictors that best fit your needs, the ability to target and finesse top scoring leads with highly relevant and personalized communication is enhanced – thus, increasing the probability that you can drive a prospect’s behavior and not just predict it (as with FICO scores).
A lot of the better marketers I know like this approach because it is not that complex and is the least costly, most deliberate way to drive sales revenue. After all, it really just keys on another formula that comes to mind: 2 x quality funnel fuel + targeted and personalized communications = high response.
Are Trade Shows Really Worth It? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #72
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008As a marketer with limited resources, I am always tweaking my programs and trimming the fat or trashing completely anything that isn’t helping to generate revenue. For a small company, impressions and brand awareness mean basically nothing to me. My job is lead gen, period. For me, events and trade shows have been one of those areas where I do get some good leads but the ROI often does not justify the expense. One of my favorite blogs, The Lonely Marketer, was discussing this topic in the post Are Trade Shows a Waste of Time and Resources.
At ReachForce, we are on a mission to increase the effectiveness of all lead generation activities including email, direct mail, search engine marketing and trade shows. Stay tuned to ReachForce in the coming weeks for a new product that will help you turn trade show contacts into actionable leads.
No Matter How Cool the Giveaway, Not Everyone at the Trade Show Will Want One - Marketing WTF?
Monday, February 18th, 2008This week we, at ReachForce, are announcing a new data solution to help event marketers turn event booth visitors into real high-octane marketing data for lead generation. As we talk about events and the uncertainty around them being able to deliver real leads that actually convert into the sales pipeline, I’m reminded of a few of my past trade show nightmares, so I thought I’d share for a quick giggle. These will definitely be filed under Marketing WTF??
In my early days as a marketer, I was thrust into managing all trade show events for my company with absolutely no experience. My first trade show was made quite memorable by my product marketing guy. He said he knew a guy who did promo items. My first time CEO was convinced that branded coffee mugs were the hot giveaway. This being my first trade show, I didn’t know what to expect so I went with it. The only thing they asked me was how many attendees will be at the show – 6,000. This was the last of the mug talk until I got a call the day before I was to leave for the show in NYC.
Product marketing guy ordered the mugs and instead of having them sent to the show he had them sent to the hotel we were staying in. The day before I leave for the show the hotel clerk calls to tell me that the mugs have been delivered. My immediate response - Great! No, he says, “You don’t understand Miss. There is a semi outside blocking traffic trying to deliver 6,000 coffee mugs to you here at the hotel.” At that time I still don’t think I understood the magnitude of the problem. We agreed that I would just pay for that night at the hotel and they would move the mugs into my room. When I arrived the next day, it was like I was a celebrity. When I got there and announced my name at the check in counter, people started coming out of the woodwork. Everyone wanted to see the girl that stopped traffic in Manhattan over some coffee mugs. I just smiled and apologized, still not having a clue what I was in for. Finally, I was greeted with the floor to ceiling boxes covering my room. There was little to no room to walk around. This was going to be fun – NOT! The show was okay and we tried to give everyone we saw a mug but we didn’t get through even half of the boxes. Now what? I hate these mugs…Could I leave them in NYC (still in my hotel room)? I couldn’t possibly pay FedEx to ship them all back to Austin… so instead I decided to call a freight moving company to come pick them up and take them back to Austin, in no hurry I might add. Thinking I was all set, I scheduled the freightliner to come the next morning. You see what’s coming next – once again I shut down traffic in Manhattan for these silly mugs. Needless to say the hotel was glad to see me go.
Lessons learned –
- Never let product marketing make decisions alone when it comes to event give aways.
- You never need as many giveaways as there are people expected to attend.
- Logistics, logistics, logistics.
Since there were so many mugs left they went to the next show as well. But this time we lucked out and the booth across from us had a keg and was giving away beer. It was like we had planned to be next to them with mugs in hand.
Maybe the more important takeaway I have learned from the giveaway fiasco is that obviously not everyone will want your cool giveaway but does the cooler the giveaway translate into even more “leads” that have NO interest in buying my product?
The L-word in B2B Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #71
Friday, February 15th, 2008
As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.
The article titled “The List World - List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!
Here are some of the points covered in the article:
- The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
- Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
- Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
- Custom database development is what people want with more precision
- E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
- Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
- Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments
As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend - stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.
Every Customer Communication is Important - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #70
Thursday, February 14th, 2008When you are communicating with your customers you should always mind your p’s and q’s. After all, your current customers are gold. You want to do everything in your power to keep them happy so that they will stay a customer. You need to keep in mind that every communication you have with your customer influences their opinion of you.
I recently received a new password from one of my SaaS providers. My preassigned password included the words “enemy” and “ogre”. Now if that doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, I don’t know what will! What are they thinking?! And while I am still a customer, this may be something I remember when my subscription comes up for renewal. The point is, every communication with your customers is important and as usual the devil is in the details.
