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.

HubSpot’s ebook, Get Found Online, is right on the money. Today’s marketing is changing from outbound to inbound, and “consumers are going to the Internet to start their purchasing process.” For businesses to remain competitive, their websites need to be found online through search engines, the blogosphere and social media sites.

Luckily, this eBook gives detailed steps on how to be found on each of these inbound marketing techniques. Here is a short outline which should entice you to read the eBook for all the great how to tips (pages 5-9) to get found online.

How to get found on search engines:

1. Find Keywords – choose keywords that your target market is using
2. On-Page SEO – place keywords in the page title, URL, headings and page text
3. Off-Page SEO – build more links
4. Measure & Analyze

How to get found on blogs:

1. Read – other industry blogs
2. Comment – join in on the conversation (even link back to your own blog)
3. Write – find the right blog software, blog weekly and promote your blog
4. Measure & Analyze

How to get found on social media:

1. Guidelines for Engagement – join communities and provide useful information, don’t just sell your company
2. Publish, Share, and Network – everyone can publish and share anything, everyone can network with anyone (through content placement sites, linking to others an online communities)
3. Measure & Analysis

I manage all the online media for ReachForce, and found these tips extremely useful. It is really cool to see how many people go to our website from our blog and social media sites. Think of any other useful tips while reading Get Found Online? Please share!

HubSpot is an inbound marketing system that helps your small or medium sized business get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of them into leads and customers.

No book club next week for Thanksgiving (you have an extra week to read)! Look for us on Thursday, December 4th talking about Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing…enjoy!

Earlier this month, we packed up our little dog and pony show and headed for Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference.  If you have never been to Dreamforce, here’s a quick description: the Expo floor is pretty typical, cookie-cutter turnkey booths, lots of logoed button downs and khakis as well as a few who think outside the box (one booth was actually handing out condoms).  Last year we were the wackiest booth on the floor with a Let’s Make Deal theme complete with costumes.  This year, however, this was the first thing every attendee saw when they stepped onto the show floor:

I could not for the life of me figure out why this car was on the show floor and what it had to do with salesforce.com.  Come to find out it all had to do with Neil Young, yes that Neil Young.  He was a speaker at Dreamforce and is a driving force behind LincVolt.  Salesforce.com built a website for LincVolt; you can check it out here.  Apparently the site was built on the Force.com platform (so there is some relevancy) but the weird thing is LincVolt is not actually using it as their website.

The old adage says, “All press is good press,” but I have to say this was not at all targeted.  They did get a lot of attention and even the local news crew covered the event.   But LincVolt’s vision is “to inspire a generation by creating a clean automobile propulsion technology that serves the needs of the 21st Century and delivers performance that is a reflection of the driver’s spirit.”  Will someone tell me what that has to do with salesforce.com?

As I was working on my FREE list last week I noticed I seemed to also be building a list of things that we as B2B Marketers can do that require minimal cost, like less than $100.

• StumbleUpon advertising – be very targeted with your ad and your landing page.  Each click only costs  you $.05.  I’ve only heard good stuff about this, we’ll be trying this one immediately.
• Long Tail PPC keywords – think niche, pick words or phrases people would use to search for your EXACT solution.  The landing page is just as important as your ad.  You’re goal is to convert unknown visitors into known leads.  Remember you can track companies visiting your landing pages using ReachForce Convert.
• Survey Monkey or Zoomerang – both have free versions or subscription pricing (for more features) of about $20/per month.  Create a survey and use it for lead generation, thought leadership or PR.  People are interested in what their peers think and are doing, share your results with the participants.
• PRWeb – write a news release and link it up.  Add an offer to the news release or offer additional content on a landing page with the full announcement.
• Start a blog – you can do this for free but you might consider investing in your own look (vs. stock templates and photos).   Regularly updated content helps your SEO too.
• Video/Podcast Series – you can add them to your website and use them for lead generation programs.  Get a FLiP camera and set up your YouTube account and you’re ready to go.  Remember to keep your videos and podcasts short and to the point.
• Email campaign – If you don’t already use an email or marketing automation system, check out VerticalResponse.  Emails start at less than $.02 a piece.

I’m sure my short list is only a beginning of things you can do for about $100, please feel free to add to the list if you’ve got more.

Many B2B Marketers, along with most Americans, are wondering what is going on with our economy.  Now that we have elected a new President, will that help?  How long will this slump last?  How is this going to affect budgets and jobs and new sales opportunities?  While wondering all of the same things and how it will affect ReachForce, I decided to make a list of FREE things that we as Marketers can do in a recession.  Some lead generating tools and some awareness building tactics, but all things you can do at no cost.  Here’s what I came up with, please feel free to help add to the list.

Twitter – free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (AKA tweets), these text-based posts can contain up to 140 characters.  Feel free to share links to other good content in these micro posts too.
Here’s 10 tips for building a following a Twitter.

Commenting on other industry thought leader’s blog or other blogs related to your business – Get in on the conversation and get your view point out there.

Submit your best practice content to free sites – The content will be indexed by the search engines allowing people to find your article when searching for something related. Some examples are Scribd, Docstoc and WhitePapers.org.

Website Grader – Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

Email signatures – Set up a standard email signature for all company emails and include things like your blog, or events you’re attending or a customer testimonial video.  Easy to do and everyone that gets an email from someone at your company will also get your mini marketing message.

ReachForce Insight Lite -  Do you know your best customers? Can you easily identify your target market sweet spots – markets that you sell the most or the fastest? Are there other business buyers in your sweet spot that you should be targeting with your Marketing campaigns?  Download ReachForce Insight Lite on the Appexchange and see.

Re-purpose content you already have – or create a Top 10 list or a list of Top 5 things to Avoid.  People love lists and you probably already have all of this information at your finger tips.  At ReachForce, we’ve recently turned our best 101 blog posts into an eBook series.  We didn’t have to create anything new, we just pulled the best posts and put them together in an eBook format.  We’re currently using them for lead generation campaigns and getting GREAT results and feedback.  Also, it has increased our daily blog traffic.

LinkedIn – just sign up and start linking up.  LinkedIn is rolling out new applications and group features all the time, take advantage of these free networking tools.
Once you’ve set your profile up, check out LinkedIn Answers.

Facebook – Facebook is somewhat of a new thing for B2B Marketers, here at ReachForce we are still figuring out our strategy but know their endless opportunity out there.  Here’s a few tips on getting started and promoting your business via Facebook.

Google Analytics – why wouldn’t you use this?  Here’s a few more ideas on Tracking Tools.

ReachForce Convert 30 Day Trial – You are probably tracking web site visitors and your best PPC keywords, but are you capturing those visitors and turning them into actionable leads? Only 3% of web visitors fill out a form or announce themselves; what happens to the other 97%? ReachForce Convert, a software-as-a-service application, empowers Marketers to proactively target lead generation efforts at passive web visitors.  Why not try it, it’s free.

Press Release Grader –   “Press Release Grader rates a press release based on a checklist of criteria – from content and structure, to search optimization and link analysis. The free tool is designed to optimize a press release so it can be found more easily by media, bloggers, customers and prospects. Press Release Grader provides an analysis and recommendations that will help you improve the way your press release is structured.” It only takes a second and the recommendations for improvement are typically easy fixes.  Again, why wouldn’t you use this tool?

What FREE stuff are you using out there?  Please share with the rest of us.  Who knows, it could save your fellow Marketer’s job.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how to use Trigger-based marketing techniques in a down economy by leveraging Web 2.0 tools. Some of these tools are also great for online reputation management, as well, you’ll just want to focus on a different set of search/scan criteria.

To get started, you’ll need to identify keywords that are important for tracking your industry, key trends or issues, the competition, your company and product brand names, as well as company spokespersons’ names. Once you’ve come up with a manageable list, configure the following tools to scan and collect that data.

1. Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, and Google Reader: We’ve written a lot about using Google Alerts here on The B2B Lead. What we haven’t written about is organizing all of the discoveries you’ve made using these tools in Google Reader. It’s a great way to collect a bunch of sources of insight about your keywords and feed them into a list of must-read links each day.
2. Tweetscan: This is one of the most important feeds in your Google Reader list as you can use it to monitor what people are saying about you or your competitor throughout the Twitter universe. It’s also another good way to find people with shared interests.
3. For my company, most of the conversations are taking place on tech forums and message boards. I just discovered Boardtracker.com which will enable me to keep an eye on popular forums and alert me by RSS feed if my company is mentioned. But, you have to know which forums to track.

Need more? Marketing Pilgrim published this great post with 20+ others.

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.

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?

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?

It’s the perfect storm – tough economic times … budget scrutiny … the Q4 numbers chase … budget planning for 2009. As Reachforce CEO Suaad Sait says, this Fall is a marketers ‘oh-crap’ moment when we start asking ourselves if there is enough fuel (or money to provide the fuel) in the lead generation engine to fulfill current year sales needs and fuel 2009 momentum.

Under old school marketing rules this storm would usually lead to 1 of 2 things … 1) slam on the breaks and try to hit NOP numbers by minimizing expense, or 2) a flurry of spray and pray direct marketing activities that seek elusive bluebirds against all odds. The big problem is that neither of these well worn paths does a very good job at motivating prospects who are in the middle of the funnel.

On this note, Josh Bernoff – Forrester’s Interactive Marketing expert – made a great point in his February 2, 2008 writing entitled “Strategies for Interactive Marketing in a Recession.” It’s more obvious to some than others, but most mid-funnel contacts are logically folks who are still in consideration mode or somehow on the fence about making a purchase. Mid-funnel contacts are not only abundant, they are literally bluebirds in waiting who just need to be earned.

Companies who opt to slam on the marketing brakes in an effort to save their way to success are essentially putting all of the pressure to motivate a purchase on their sales closers. This may work in certain instances, but it’s not very strategic, scalable or sustainable. Nor is motivating these people a matter of creating awareness with direct marketing. While consistent DM needs to be happening for sake of keeping the top of the funnel fed, it rarely has the sort of impact needed to push mid-funnel situations forward.

But social marketing applications like interactive webinars, e-communities, blogs and networking sites are an effective way to align B2B marketing’s work with the things that are most critical to driving mid-funnel situations to closure I.e. – establishing credibility, delivering proof points, deep-dive Q&A, earning “trusted partner” status and best of all – a structured, pragmatic way to capture, manage and execute against those issues/objections that most often create and add to mid-funnel traffic-jams.

In his easy to read, highly recommended article Bernoff points out three important social media attributes that help recession proof your marketing plan:

• Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.
•  They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.
•  They motivate consumers in the middle of the funnel. Social applications like discussion forums are better than advertising at helping people in the consideration phase when they’re on the fence about purchasing. In a recession, improving consideration will be more cost-effective than blasting awareness messages at resistant consumers.