Did you know that our new President Barack Obama was named Marketer of the Year 2008? Last month, Advertising Age named Barack Obama “Marketer of the Year”. Congratulations, on both counts. It doesn’t matter if you voted Republican or Democrat this year; I think we can all agree Barack Obama took campaigning to a whole new level. As an independent first time voter, I was impressed as a Marketer by the campaign overall. The dimensions of marketing they put to use stretched my marketing brain. With the use of direct marketing, event marketing, online marketing and new media the Obama team understood the need to reach out to voters as individuals – demographics and targeting were central to the campaign.

Obama and his team understood their target demographic/markets and how to use a mix of multi touch, multi level and multimedia platforms to reach these people where they were already hanging out. By using video game ads, Twitter, an active online community, and a list of other marketing vehicles, the Obama marketing team understood the importance of motivating the younger demographics and using multiple mediums that worked for them.

B2B Marketers take note. Our new President has something to say about reaching the right audiences with the right kinds of messages through the right vehicles. Below is a list a few places you can find Barack Obama marketing. Are you there for your business and what lessons can we learn from the reach created by his campaign?

Email marketing

• event based – I would receive text messages and emails while Obama was at an event or debate
• 1:1 with key players – email messages from Barack, Michelle Obama and Joe Biden – For example, I got a message from Michelle Obama reminding me it was the last day to give money to the campaign.

Community – currently over 1 million members. Through the community supporters can:

• find information about local events or groups
• connect with other supporters
• share information or real-life stories
• donate to the campaign

PPC – 14% of Barack Obama’s online traffic in August 2008 came from paid search

New Media – Barack Obama is out there, are you?

Polls are showing more young voters have registered to vote than ever before. I have no doubt that Obama and his team’s approach to reach them drove this involvement.

Thank you President Obama. You are proof that targeted marketing does drive real results…oh, and I’m sure your messages and positions on the issues helped too.

My Granddad used to say, when times are tough hang on to those that love you. Is the same true for tough economic times and B2B relationship marketing?

Your market is fundamentally made up of three types of targets. Customers you have, those you’ve lost, and potential accounts who – so far – have decided to do business elsewhere.

This is the first of a serial discussion (please join in) about measuring and connecting some specific customer experience management dots for minimizing customer churn, growing key accounts and identifying new revenue opportunities with companies that share common profiles with those with whom you do well.

Over the decades I’ve devised and managed dozens of customer retention programs. As a deliberate marketing proponent I was an enthusiastic Net Promoter adopter because of its implied relationship with corporate growth and its sheer simplicity – something very appealing when trying to achieve internal buy-in for major (sometimes costly) customer experience initiatives.

But in times like these where the outcome of a company’s customer experience strategy can make or break quarterly revenue plans, a one dimensional measurement such as NPS may help to know how many loyal customers there are, but isn’t very good for knowing about problems or –more importantly– how to fix them.

So while I love the idea of NPS as a simple advocacy index (as well as the role it’s had on increasing the importance business owners now place on these types of marketing metrics) I’ve found it to be just one of the many dots that need connecting to drive revenue growth. The most common mistake in the B2B world today is confusing loyal customers with satisfied customers.

The difference between satisfied customers and loyal customers is distinctly a matter of emotion. And while metrics dealing with both are very different and have unique implications – they are interdependent as two halves – quantifiable (satisfied) – and subjective (loyal) of the complete customer relationship picture.

This means customer feedback must be secured, structured, analyzed and acted upon in both concrete and abstract formats. To this end I have developed an arsenal of best practices that can be used for the following:

1. Optimize the flow of information and feedback that captures both quantifiable and emotional responses to “customer experience” surveys.
2. Analytical methodology for connecting and measuring quantifiable and emotional feedback to determine a “CEI,” or Customer Experience Index for each customer on your list.
3. Templates and guides for using CEI scores to craft short, mid and long term account plans for retention, up-selling and cross-selling.
4. Templates and guides for using highest CEI scores to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting.
5. Templates and guides for using lowest CEI scores to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions

Over the next few weeks my blog posts will address these subjects one-by-one. Again, I’d really appreciate your feedback as we go.

 Getting ready for your next trade show? Don’t skimp on the tchotkes with boring and ineffective promotional items like hats, stress relievers or mints. Take a lesson from the queen of self-promotion Madonna and go for something unexpected and memorable.

Successful Promotions magazine just ran a cover article on the killer goodies rock stars like Madonna distribute to promote their albums and/or tours. For her recent Sticky and Sweet tour, Madonna had giant lollipops made with her album cover emblazoned on them. Other musicians mentioned included Ice-T who distributed body bags and the Black Crowes who produced rolling papers.

If those options seem a bit inappropriate for your business, keep these tips in mind for selecting giveaways that help support your message and make your brand more memorable:

1. Think visual branding. To help your message or brand promise “stick” in the minds of your target market, go with a promo item that underscores your brand promise or the message of your latest campaign. For example, if your product promises to install within minutes instead of days, give out a stopwatch and invite users to put you to the test.
2. Create a must-have collectible or invest in a hot product that works as an incentive to draw people to your booth. NetQoS created a series of collectible t-shirts that were popular enough to draw 3500 booth visitors year after year. Other companies have accomplished this with less expensive product like buttons.
3. Come up with a giveaway that will garner press coverage or blog commentary. At Pervasive we created a campaign that involved jog wallets stuffed with different denominations of money. This clever program netted press coverage in Information Week magazine.

What are your favorite tchotkes — either for giving or receiving?

New stuff to do now!

I got the heads up from Chris Brogan, and now I want to share with all The B2B Lead readers about the new applications LinkedIn has released. On first glance I was really impressed. The list is not sooo long with applications (like Facebook) that have nothing to do with the business world, and I really think these apps will make LinkedIn much more interactive and useful.

So far I have downloaded the 2 apps for blogging and My Travel (to tell everyone I’ll be at Dreamforce next week), and am still exploring the others. Other applications let you show what books you are reading, upload slideshows and more.

Go check it out and start using. What other applications would you be interested in seeing?

Web analytics fascinate me. I can spend hours looking at trends in visitors, referring sources and content. It helps me set and achieve goals and identify popular content so I can create more. But, it always leaves me wanting more. Especially when it comes to Google and social media, which are always at the top of our referring sources list. Unfortunately, it’s been very difficult to report on the results we see from the traffic these sources generate. Essentially, I would like to know two things:

1. What did the visitors from those sources do? Download a white paper, watch a video, or just look at our Careers page?
2. Who is the visitor? Or at least what company they work for.

As B2B Marketers, we work really really hard to attract website visitors. There’s typically a direct correlation between web traffic, leads and revenue. So, this is a top metric. Yet, according to statistics quoted by ReachForce, only 3% of web visitors fill out a form or announce themselves. What can we do to get a little insight into the the other 97%?

Right now at BreakingPoint, we are testing out two very intriguing tools for identifying web visitors:  ReachForce Convert (sold by the producers of The B2B Lead) and Get Clicky.com. Here are a few details on each:

ReachForce Convert provides reporting on where inbound visitors are coming as well as where the companies are geographically located. This is key for identifying the right prospect. Convert also profiles top visitors by industry and appends these records with industry verticals, SIC codes, revenue and employee size. With this data, you can better target unannounced visiting companies but also get contacts from companies with similar profiles. Now, here’s the real value: Once you have identified the companies that are visiting your website unannounced, ReachForce Discover data services are available for role-based contact discovery within these new target companies.

Get Clicky is much more of a low cost analytics tool with rich data. According to its site: “Get Clicky is a web analyzer that was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting. Since then, many additional features have been added to Clicky, such as the customizable dashboard full of Ajax love, and our amazing filtering interface that gives you actionable data on any subset of your visitors (see screenshots on the right hand side). These features, along with many others, make Clicky one of the best web analyzers on the planet.”

I tend to agree. They even have a cool iPhone interface.  Take a look at how it compares to Google Analytics.

The net net: Both products enable marketers to capture detailed visitor information and spot trends. While ReachForce Convert claims to help turn these visitors into actionable leads, Get Clicky will show me if my social media sources are actually converting into engaged visitors or prospects.

Hopefully by now you have an account on LinkedIn, or at least plan on joining in the near future. LinkedIn is a professional online network that enables you to connect with classmates and colleagues, and then 6 degrees of separation later, connect with your connections’ connections.

LinkedIn’s main purpose is for business professionals to network with other business professionals. Other ways LinkedIn has become more interactive (and something you should look into) is to join groups, discussions happening within groups and what is really cool…LinkedIn Answers.

LinkedIn Answers is a great tool to showcase yourself as a thought leader in your industry, listen to what other people in your industry are talking about and find out answers to some questions you might have. I browse questions people have posted a few times a week and look for questions that pertain to BtoB marketing, lead gen, social media, etc. I will answer it or pass it along to someone in ReachForce that would be better qualified.

Recently I got our sales team on board to look and see what potential prospect’s questions are.  This gives them a chance to look like thought leaders as well and gain valuable insight into their prospects needs. When you ask a question, it shows on your profile so all of your connections can see it and you can interact with anyone that answers you.

Other proof of value? Got it. Last week on one of my browses, I came upon a question that ReachForce could be the solution and passed it along to sales and now they are talking. Also at a conference I attended, one of the speakers said he was asked to be a speaker because of his answer to a LinkedIn Question. Pretty cool, right?

How to find and get started with LinkedIn Answers:

• See “Answers” in the top header
• Once clicked, scroll down and browse the categories on the right (I usually look in Marketing and Sales category)
• Start scanning questions

Have you been using LinkedIn Answers? Any tips?

A few months ago I spoke at a Marketing Profs conference and had the good fortune to meet and listen to Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, discuss the paradoxical choices consumers often make.

Recently, Ariely spoke with the Marketing Subgroup of the Bootstrap Network on the topic of consumer behavior. Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences captured and posted a Podcast of the discussion. If you can suffer through the first few minutes of boring introductions, you’ll be treated to a very interesting discussion on the value of “free” and how it influences behavior.

Ariely claims that “free” is the Kryptonite that cripples our decision-making no matter how rational we think we are. He claims the “freemium” models that Web 2.0 sites use to lure audiences are not as effective as a discounted service. He argues that once free is introduced, that’s its perceived value.

Perhaps, but in the B2B world, there’s nothing like a free widget or product trial to capture visitors and contact information. It all depends on how you structure the offer. A wonderful example of this is HubSpot and their Website Grader tool. The allure of using the free Website Grader tool was enough to get me to give them my contact information. Once I used it to identify problems that needed solving, I was all too eager to buy the product to help me fix the problems.  Oh, and there’s also the issue of how I found Website Grader…giving away a free tool is great link bait – the most powerful SEO tactic I know.

For more predictably irrational fun, check out the Predictably Irrational Blog.

Monday’s Marketing Profs “Get to the Point” newsletter featured Mike Volpe’s 5 tips for starting search engine optimization. Mike is the VP of Marketing at HubSpot and blogger for HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog. These are great SEO tips and we wanted to be sure to share them  with the readers of  The B2B Lead.

5 tips you should be sure to include in your SEO strategy:

1. Pick good page titles. The words that appear at the top of the browser window are what a search engine looks at first as it evaluates that Web page. Use keywords and unique titles.
2. Be smart about URLs. If you’re using a URL like yourcompany.blogspot.com, then you’re building SEO power for blogspot.com, not your own company.
3. Start a blog. Blogs help in two ways. They provide new content (search engines prefer new over old). Plus, the more interesting blogs tend to generate lots of inbound links.
4. Leverage your PR program. Use press releases and externally distributed articles to drum up more inbound links. To maximize effectiveness, link back to your Web site from keywords.
5. Use social media to build links. Find out where your customers hang out online, and start participating there. Remember to add value. Don’t lead with a sales pitch.

Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

Before joining ReachForce I was a sales guy with no marketing department.  Knowing how important and effective marketing strategy can be, I set out to try and do my own lead generation. I can remember investing days and days of work on this one project.  As a sales guy, I had a particular interest in automated lead generation (that’s right, sales guys are typically lazy) and had been studying it for months.  I finally grasped the concept of doing it right, I thought.

So, having never been blessed with the spiritual gifts of patience or discernment, I decided my next step was to find and buy a list of 1,200 names to send my message to.  The plan was to do an email blast with an offer to download a new report.

The report looked great – guaranteed to attract plenty of hot prospects, turn them into customers, and make me look like the Dalai Lama.  The email was perfectly crafted, engaging, and sure to catch the eye.  I told my wife to get ready for the commissions to start pouring in.

So, with palms sweating and my reputation at my company completely mortgaged (side note – companies don’t like spending money on things they don’t understand), the time had come for launch.  Three…two…one…CLICK.

Within 15 minutes my mailbox was full!  The response was unbelievable…from “System Administrator, Address Unknown.”  The list of 1200 contacts turned out to be about 60% accurate, at best.

I believe whole-heartedly that a company’s biggest asset are customers and happy ones are even better. I’ll even take that a step further, though.  A sales and marketing person’s biggest asset is a database of FUTURE customers (prospects).

** WARNING – Here comes the ReachForce promotion.  Your prospect database should be 100% accurate, up-to-date, properly targeted, and relevant to your business.  Each name you have listed should be the right person inside the right company.  You’re thinking “in a perfect world…”

If you’re not a ReachForce customer and you’re reading this, here’s a few interesting data points to consider:

• Industry listed (rented) deliver less than a 3% response rate
• Sales people can spend up to 1/3 of their time hunting down the right buyers in a prospect company
• According to Gartner, 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.
• 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

If you’re interested in cleaning up the data you already have, check out this post on Dirty Data.  If you’re interested in hearing how ReachForce can help, please contact me.

Sales people out there – please jump in here, tell your marketing counterparts to help you out and make sure they are marketing to the right people in the right companies so you can spend your time selling, not hunting.

Just returned from Brussels where I represented BreakingPoint at the Broadband World Forum (BBWF). Our  6 meter by 3 meter booth was quite a difference from my typical experience in a 30′ X 40′ Platinum booth at the show entrance.

As a startup and a new entrant in the market, we didn’t have the large Marketing budget to invest in a huge exhibit and it wouldn’t have made a good investment anyway. We also didn’t have the history to score a great booth location. Finally, to make things even more challenging, we didn’t have the $80,000 exhibit that our competitors had to stand out at the event. So, we had to rely on a superior product and a little ingenuity to get the most from our investment in the event. Here are a few tips for your next trade show:

1. Locate your exhibit right next to your hottest competitor. It’s a risky move, but if your product stands out and provides superior capabilities this strategy should help you attract a steady stream of qualified traffic. It also makes a bold statement about the confidence you have in your product.
2. Locate your exhibit next to your largest partner. This will also help you attract qualified traffic without the risk. Even better, your partner may actually recommend attendees visit your booth.
3. Make use of lots of plasma displays to tell your story without the need to invest in a costly booth or expensive graphics.
4. Promote and deliver presentations in your booth. Live presentations from subject matter experts attract significant crowds and helps position your company as a thought leader.
5. Produce a creative marketing campaign that stimulates word-of-mouth.
6. Use Twitter to spread the word about your exhibit.
7. Take your show on the road. At BBWF, I actually saw an exhibitor rolling a mobile demo stand around the show floor. Genius!

Just a few ideas to help your startup stand out at the next trade show. Wish we would have had the time and resources to leverage all of these ideas at BBWF. As it turned out, simply using idea #1, 5, and 6 were quite enough to drive very qualified traffic. Another interesting data point: our Twitter updates drove about as much traffic as our email blast. Neither of these techniques worked as well as parking right next door to our competitor, however. Big risk, big reward.