I have heard mixed reviews on using personalization in email marketing.  And if you have dirty data with things like LEIGH ANNE or Leigh Anne (don’t call til Q1) in the first name field of your CRM, using personalization can be pretty scary and it might be time for some data cleansing.  MarketingSherpa is a proponent of personalization as they use it in their own emails.  But shame on them for an email my co-worker, Lauren, received.  Check this out:

Dear ,

There aren’t too many positives to come out of the recession.

However, new MarketingSherpa research reveals one overwhelming positive: more than ever, companies are relying upon email marketing to engage prospects and generate high ROI…

Leading with the recession (which I believe is grossly overused) aside, “Dear” is not a greeting that can stand alone.  If you are going to use personalization with a holey database, you have to be careful.  Use a greeting like “Hi”.  It can be followed with a name or just a comma and not look weird or let prospects know that you don’t really know who they are. After all, the point of personalization is to make a prospect feel as though it is one-to-one communication.

We know all know Content is King in B2B Marketing.  We use it for blogging, email campaign offers, sales support, website content, whitepapers/eBooks, social media teasers and webinars.  In a recent study by Kingfish Media they found that over 70% of marketers are using custom content to communicate with current customers and 70% use custom media to attract prospects.

We also know that it takes multiple touches to convert a lead into a prospect so using the right kinds of content in the right marketing vehicles is key.

We just recently got back from the MarketingSherpa B2B event where I sat in on a presentation by Bob Johnson from IDG Connect.  He presented some really interesting stats on using content for lead generation.  One that really stood out – “Prospects that engage in 2 touch points are 25% more likely to be in a buying cycle.”  This is huge!

Knowing that content is so important (and so often used), you’ve got to stay fresh.  Here are a few ideas to help get started on creating new enticing content to engage your prospects.

Everyone loves lists, consider creating one of these –

• Compile the top blog posts on a specific industry topic (related to what you are promoting)
• Promote five blogs in your industry (be sure to let them know, you want to make sure they know you are out there too)
• Create lists of your own; things like Top 10 things to consider when choosing a XYZ solution or Top 5 things to avoid when implementing XYZ service (give your prospects a helpful tip and chances are higher that they remember you next time you reach out)
• Create a list of interesting industry stats

Get people to act, try one of these –

• Start a contest and ask for submissions
• Create a survey and commit to sharing the results with everyone that participates
• Start a discussion in your LinkedIn groups.  (Relevance is very important here.)
• Ask a question on Twitter and blog the answers

Think TIPs, everyone is interested in information that will help them –

• Explain industry terms for either the novice or the industry veteran
• Review a recent trade show or conference
• Interview industry leaders asking the tough questions and share their responses.

Remember you can repurpose all of your content.  Here at ReachForce we take our blog tips like this one and roll them into eBooks.  These tip-based eBooks are our most popular pieces of content and for us, writing them in bite size pieces (blog posts) makes the task of creating a new eBook a breeze.

We also use these blog posts for our monthly newsletter, it’s a compilation of our best posts from the previous month.  The newsletter typically gets about a 40% open rate.  It takes us no time to put together and it’s a crowd favorite.

Got any other content ideas, please jump in and share.

Creating new content on a regular basis is tough and very time consuming.  Here at ReachForce with almost everything we create we create a plan on how we are going to make use of the content in as many places as possible.  Things like converting eBooks or whitepapers into blog posts and vice versa or using surveys for lead information gathering as well as trend mapping.

Well, nurture marketers and sales teams out there here’s a GREAT idea!  I got an email from an Account Executive at MarketBright (see his picture below) that simply invited me to visit the MarketBright blog.  Then he went on to list a few of the most popular posts.  I thought this was brilliant.  He wasn’t trying to sell me anything, well maybe he was in the last paragraph but it was subtle.  He was just letting me know they had a resource I may be interested in.  No customization was needed, just a simple introduction and a list of the resources.  Easy as pie.

Here’s what the email looked like –

Ok, I must admit I think the picture is a little cheesy.  But it did make me giggle so I guess it worked, it caught my attention.  But otherwise, his hook worked.  Now I’m sure with the MarketBright email tracking, Jon was able to tell what I was interested in and now he knows what to follow up with next.

If you have a blog, steal some content from there.  Big change your prospects missed it the first time it went out.  If you don’t have a blog, pull out highlights from eBooks, whitepapers, webcasts, basically anything else you have and put together an email that links back to each of these.

I’m stealing this idea and going to do something like this for our pipeline nurturing program.  No selling from me, just trying to be resourceful for our decision makers and help encourage further interaction.  Jon, your email worked.  You caught my attention and I acted.  Thank you for the great idea.

Your collateral mix – do you have everything you need?  Does your sales team think what you’ve created useful pieces that help drive the sales cycle?  How do you know or decide when to add something new to the mix?

Wikipedia defines marketing collateral as the collection of media used to support the sales of a product or service. These sales aids are intended to make the sales effort easier and more effective.

As Marketers we should be doing regular reviews of our sales support collateral.  Here at ReachForce our marketing team is responsible for not only driving new leads into the top of the sales funnel but also marketing to those who have made it into and are moving through the funnel.   Each quarter as we are building out our programs we spend a good deal of time making sure we have the supporting pieces (collateral) we need to get the results our sales team is counting on.  This means we have to really think through our buying cycles and what is needed to generate interest as well as keep people moving once we’ve determined they are a viable prospect.

Here’s some interesting stats from a BtoB article, Finding the Best Collateral Mix,  back in January.  It highlights content strategy services company Eccolo Media’s survey of 155 technology buyers, all of whom said they’d made or influenced a b-to-b technology decision in the last six months. Each was asked specifically about how they consume marketing collateral.

• White papers remain the most effective piece of marketing collateral, with 86% of respondents finding them moderately to highly influential in the purchasing decision.

Interesting – I’d love to know more about these whitepapers.  How long are they?  Are they grouping eBooks here? And what stage of the buying cycle are these being used?  I’m guessing in the “gathering information phase?”

• Product brochures and data sheets were the most frequently consumed collateral type, yet they were also most frequently ranked as the least influential.

I consider these must haves and I agree that most people probably don’t read them but people seem to ask for them so you have to have them.

• Somewhat surprisingly, the majority of respondents viewed digital content on the desktop rather than printing out the content.

Not really surprising to me.  We seem to be more conditioned and comfortable getting all information online.  Printing it doesn’t give it more credibility. And hey Al Gore, your message is getting out there….

• The majority of respondents (54%) used collateral for the first time in the presales cycle, before they’d spoken with a sales rep or had had any contact with the company.

Interesting, not surprising but interesting.  This means we have to make sure we have everything online.  This doesn’t mean you need new content just make sure what you have is out there.

So all of your marketing communication marketers out there – your sales team needs you.  Before you start your long list of things to write, ask your sales team if each piece on your list will help them win a new customer.  If not, scatch it and ask them what they need instead.

Because “platforms” just don’t cut it anymore…

Quake in slack-jawed awe at the bombastic extremism that is….

Superplatform On-Demand

From the press release…
The term “Marketing SuperPlatform” was created by Upshot Institute and has gained fast industry acceptance. The term is applied to solutions offering multiple core marketing technologies, accessed as a single application suite.

Wow.  So where do we go from here?  How can anyone possibly top that?  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned for the next level of one-uppedness, which can only spring forth titles such as:

• Colossal Solutions Hyperplexus
• Marketing Methods of Gaussian Proportions
• Orwellian-Scale Mass Marketing

(any resemblance to companies or products, both real or hallucinated, is purely coincidental)

Want to make sure you aren’t filling your news releases with Gobbledygook?  Be sure to use Gobbledygook Grader.

Are you really writing for your buyers?  Do you know how many gobbledygook words/phrases you used in your last press release, your “About Us” page, your newsletter or your collateral?  Ok, first things first, what is gobbledygook?  Gobbledygook is a word used by David Meerman Scott to describe the over used marketing words that lack substantial meaning.  These words typically do nothing to actually add value to the content.  Does it really mean anything to your buyers that your product is a scalable, world-class solution?  To learn more, check out the Gobbledygook Manifesto.

Here are the top 25 gobbledygook phrases used in press releases sent in North America 2008:

Are some of these words looking a little all too familiar, in a bad way?  Gobbledygook Grader is here to the rescue!  Gobbledygook Grader is brought to you from the fine folks at HubSpot, creators of other great graders: Website Grader, Press Release Grader, Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader.  Gobbledygook Grader lets you enter any content and grades that content based on number of gobbledygook words, links, readability, etc.  It is also identifies all gobbledygook words in the content.  I recommend copying and pasting every page of your website into this to see how you rate.  Don’t worry if you have a few words here and there that are gobbledygook.  Sometimes those words are necessary.  Just ask yourself, is this really telling my buyer something about my company/product that would make them want to buy?  Market-leading, flexible, robust solution probably does not mean much to a prospect nor is it particularly compelling.

Thank you to HubSpot and David Meerman Scott for this very useful tool to keep our writing in check.

Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series.  Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.

• Dianna Huff’s Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now
• What we had to say…

• Brian Carroll’s Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation
• What we had to say…

• HubSpots’s Get Found Online
• What we had to say…

• Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
• What we had to say…

• David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
• What we had to say…

• ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
• What we had to say…

Happy Reading.  We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.

So…you have written white papers and eBooks and they are up on your website. They are probably on the resources page and get their fair share of downloads. That’s good, but with some of the free publishing sites out there you can get more exposure.

I have started to put ReachForce content on some of the sites and wanted to share the results, compare with you or ask if you had suggestions.

Content placement sites:

Scribd – the best content placement site I think. You can publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. It’s easy to set up…sign up and make an account for free, then just upload your documents. I have uploaded all of ReachForce’s eBooks and have gotten 5476 views as of today. People can add your works to their favorites and rate them. You can join groups an add friends.

Docstoc – provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety of categories including legal, business, financial, technology, educational, and creative. I uploaded all our eBooks and have 300 views and 30 downloads as of today.

edocr – upload your documents for sharing by the professional and business community. I uploaded our eBooks, again, and we have 618 views so far. One of our eBooks was featured on the front page when first uploaded.

whitepapers.org – is “all the world’s whitepapers in one place.” I really haven’t figured out how to see how many views or downloads our whitepapers have had.

The pros of publishing your content on sites like this is that it is free to do and can bring unexpected visitors an exposure. The biggest con I can find is that there is really no way to find out who downloaded our content (with information like an email address). To help with this, we added links to all our whitepapers and eBooks to hopefully drive traffic back to our website.

Suggestions?

We are big fans of Mr. Scott and his eBook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing, which gives tips on how to spread your ideas for free using word-of-mouse. Or in other words, “one person sends it to another, then that person sends it to yet another, and on and on.” With the internet, it is now easier than ever to start a viral campaign, but “marketers need to learn how to harness the amazing power of word-of-mouse.”

This eBook is full of case studies and other “people’s success so you can apply some of their ideas and lessons in your own word-of-mouse efforts.” Most of this is at the beginning, so if you are short on time I would start on page 14 for the real meat.

David’s formula for success:

“A combination of some great-and free-Web content (a video, blog entry, interactive tool, or e-book) that provides valuable information (or is groundbreaking or amazing or hilarious or involves a celebrity), plus a network of people to light the fire and links that make your content very easy to share.”

To help achieve this success, David provides specific advice on how to launch a viral campaign using YouTube videos, e-books and other techniques. I’ll pick out some points I thought interesting (or that I haven’t thought about before) and list them here, but make sure you go back and read the eBook for all the tips.

How to help your eBook get shared:

• Present you eBook in a landscape format, rather than the white paper’s typical portrait format. This makes it easier to read and signals to the reader that the content is interesting.
• Consider writing in a lighter, more conversational style than you would in a whitepaper, marketing brochure, or Web page. Think of the writing in an eBook as you would write for a blog.
• eBooks should always be free and should never have a registration requirement.  (This has been hotly debated for a while now on how to balance capturing leads and distributing content.  What do you think?)
• Put a Creative Commons license on the content so people know they can freely share your copyrighted material.
• Create a landing page from which people can download your eBook. (All of our eBooks and whitepapers have landing pages set up on the ReachForce Resources page on the website.)
• To drive viral marketing, (you have to read the eBook for the rest of this great tip)!

9 tips for using YouTube (here are a few)

1. Your video should be no longer than three minutes. (Come on, who has time to just sit and watch a 10 minute video…unless it is really funny or something). If you have a lot to say, consider creating a series of posts.
2. Don’t attempt “stealth” fake customer insertions. Be authentic and don’t try to sneak in company promotion where you can. (YouTube itself can catch unauthenic video and that might cause harm to a brand).
3. Make sure bloggers know about the video. The best way to do this is when you are reading and commenting on blogs in your space, next time you comment link to your video (if it makes sense to).

Other tips he mentioned:

• Use interactive tools (like Hubspot’s Website Grader)
• Don’t break the bank with expensive advertising
• Don’t beg mainstream media to write about you

I have left some really great tips and specific advice out, so go back and read what all David has to say about viral campaigns. Have you had success with viral campaigns? What did you do?

David Meerman Scott is an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over $1 billion in products and services worldwide.

Last year, we at ReachForce declared January 15th the “Oh $#%@!” Day in Marketing.

Here’s why:

Are you prepared to deliver sales-ready leads in January? December is typically a slower month for B2B Marketing teams, since most organizations slow down current marketing programs and instead spend their time preparing for the next year. Then, you leave for the holidays happy to have completed the painful process of planning and budgeting for the next year’s activities. But once the holiday haze clears, it’s January and everyone is ready to kick off the New Year with new customer wins. Your sales team wants to know, “Where are my leads? I’ve got a number to hit.”

The “Oh $#%@!” moment…

If you wait until you get back from the holidays to begin developing your marketing programs, when are you going to have leads to pass to sales? End of January? Beginning of February? Can your sales team land those deals by the end of Q1?

Instead, start developing your 2009 programs now and be ready to execute your first week back. Remember to go back and look at where you’ve been before getting started. With the economy on a roller coaster, we’re all being forced to do more with less. It’s more important than ever to analyze and target your lead generation initiatives at the right buyers in YOUR target market. I promise your sales team will thank you.