Inbound Marketing seems to be all the hype these days.  B2B marketers are getting their feet wet with new social media tactics, online marketing is bigger than it’s ever been and word-of-mouth strategies are being built into most marketing plans today.  But what are you doing with all of this inbound activity on your web site and leads from registrations?

Are you adding them to your next email program?  Are you including them in your newsletter list?  Are you inviting them to your next webinar or live event?  Is your sales or tele-sales team following up with them via phone or email?  Chances are pretty high you’re using these inbound leads to fuel your outbound marketing programs.

What about all those web site visits?  Do you know what companies are visiting your web site?   What pages are they on? How long are they there?  Should you develop a Outbound Marketing program to reach and target the right person in those companies?

With the explosion of marketing automation, B2B Marketers now have the tools they need to better segment, target and reach these inbound leads with tailored messaging via Outbound Marketing.  But it’s not as simple as just loading these inbound leads up and hitting the send button.  To get the results you’re looking for you have to be more deliberate about your outreach.

We all know that in any typical B2B sale there is more than one person involved in a buying decision.  An inbound lead is a good sign someone is interested but chances are high they are collecting information for a team to evaluate.

Instead of waiting on the entire decision making unit to announce themselves, identify the roles you know to typically be involved in the decision and kick up your Outbound Marketing with messages tailored to each of their pain points.  This can only help your marketing results and conversions and getting everyone to the table at the same time also speeds up typical sales cycles.

While Inbound Marketing may be all the rage, you need a targeted Outbound Marketing program to reach all of the decision makers.  So as you are getting ready for 2010, make sure you have set up your Inbound Marketing to fuel your Outbound Marketing programs.

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.

The success of any business endeavor is dependent on one thing; execution. Even the best marketing strategy will fail if the organization is incapable of executing. In the context of marketing effectiveness, execution has to do with the tactics and processes an organization utilizes to market a product or service. With limited resources and finite budget, marketers need to make sure that all marketing activities are both influencing and driving demand. While it’s critical to have access to a robust centralized marketing database, the database is of little value unless marketers use the data to increase revenue.

In order to improve marketing effectiveness, marketers need to start using the data to build more intimate relationships with prospects and customers. Research proves that mass untargeted email blasts yield an average 1-2% conversion rate.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve marketing execution. Remember to check out the marketing automation category for more about marketing automation vendors that can help you here.

Read each question and write down the appropriate points based on an honest assessment of the current state of your marketing operations.

Do you have clearly defined segments and targets?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you currently customize marketing campaigns for unique segments of prospects/customers
• Yes, but we could do a better job- Award yourself 1 point if you segment your database, but you feel you could do a better job creating customized marketing messages for these segments
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not currently segment or target unique segments of prospects/customers

Do you currently use any personalization in outbound marketing campaigns? Award points for each applicable answer then add up all the points at the bottom (this question could award a total of 21 points)

• Mass Email (1 Point): _______

• Segmentation and Targeting (2 Points): _______

• Personalized- Name in Salutation (4 Points): _______

• Personalized- Using other database criteria: purchase date, product purchased, etc.

(6 Points): _______

• Event Triggered- Marketing interactions are triggered by customer behavior (8 Points): _______

• Total Points:_________ (Enter in b.)

Do you have one or more lead nurturing campaigns that are designed to educate potential buyers that are not yet ready to make a purchase?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have exclusive marketing campaigns designed to nurture and educate prospects
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not use lead nurturing

Do you know which marketing channels result in (or influence) the highest number of leads?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Can you name 3 companies that visited your website this week?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____ +e._____ = ______

How did you score?

With the right tools and processes in place, marketing execution can be quick and painless. Without those tools and processes, it can be painful and yield poor results, possible causing you or your programs to get the ax.

• 0-6 Points: You don’t quite have the hang of it - A final score between 0 and 6 indicates you could increase marketing effectiveness considerably by increasing the use of personalized email campaigns or even basic segmentation of your marketing database. Consider lead nurturing campaigns to increase the number of sales-ready leads that are passed on to sales.
• 7-18 Points: You’re getting there, keep on hacking away - A final score between 7 and18 indicates you are using a moderate level of personalization or segmentation and probably achieve average conversion rates on outbound campaigns. Consider tracking prospect performance across multiple channels (the web, email, landing pages, keywords, etc.) By tracking prospect behavior you can more accurately predict propensity to purchase and relevant materials that will have the biggest impact on driving revenue. Automation can help deliver highly relevant marketing interactions that are triggered by prospect behavior. This increases the likelihood of delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time.
• 19-29 Points: You’re killing it - A final score between 19 and 29 points indicates your taking full advantage of your marketing database to build more intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers. The question is, are you measuring performance over time to constantly improve marketing execution?

We all work long and hard on our email marketing.  Crafting the perfect attention getting subject line, choosing just the right images, editing and re-editing concise and relevant content.  After all that hard work, no one wants their email to get caught up in a SPAM filter or relegated to the Junk folder.  Many of our recipients are using Microsoft Outlook.  In case you haven’t checked it out before, here is what Micosoft says about the filter that pushes your email to the cyber graveyard known as the Junk folder.

The Junk Content filter works by looking for key words. This file is a description of exactly which words the filter looks for and where the filter looks for them:

First 8 characters of From are digits
Subject contains “advertisement”
Body contains “money back ”
Body contains “cards accepted”
Body contains “removal instructions”
Body contains “extra income”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “$”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “free”
Body contains “,000″ AND Body contains “!!” AND Body contains “$”
Body contains “Dear friend”
Body contains “for free?”
Body contains “for free!”
Body contains “Guarantee” AND (Body contains “satisfaction” OR Body contains “absolute”)
Body contains “more info ” AND Body contains “visit ” AND Body contains “$”
Body contains “SPECIAL PROMOTION”
Body contains “one-time mail”
Subject contains “$$”
Body contains ”
Body contains “order today”
Body contains “order now!”
Body contains “money-back guarantee”
Body contains “100% satisfied”
To contains “friend@”
To contains “public@”
To contains “success@”
From contains “sales@”
From contains “success.”
From contains “success@”
From contains “mail@”
From contains “@public”
From contains “@savvy”
From contains “profits@”
From contains “hello@”
Body contains ” mlm”
Body contains “@mlm”
Body contains “///////////////”
Body contains “check or money order”

Be sure to check out this list before you hit send on your next campaign.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been highlighting some of the most well known Marketing Automation players out there.  This week we’re profiling MarketBright.  Thanks again to Caitlin and Mike Pilcher for the previous blog post.

So now that you’ve read about and studied up on each, what’s next?  Just getting the right technology in place isn’t going to solve all of your headaches.

MarketBright’s whitepaper, Tips To Improve Your Lead Management Strategy, has some great ideas on creating and building out your lead generation strategy.

Here’s a few things that caught my eye…

When getting started here’s a few things to think about:

• Who has ownership of each stage of the process?
• Is there a defined lead management flow that exists today?
• What essential performance indicators or ROI measures are associated at key points throughout the process?

Just like taking a road trip, best practice says you should have a map before you take off.

Lead Generation/Acquisition – the following elements are absolutely necessary to provide QUALITY leads:

• Have you agreed with your sales team on what a qualified lead looks like?  Any of these sound familiar?
• Clearly define and know your target market.  An effective lead generation process always begins and ends with knowing the audience.
• Use effective lead generation tools.
• Optimize landing pages and forms.  Be clear on the action you want your audience to take and focus the content on just that action.
• Use accurate and reliable campaign metrics for tracking, reporting and testing.  This keeps everyone involved in the process honest .

Remember – the secret with any lead management system is to maximize the efficiency but not lose the impact of a personal customer experience. I think this is a great point!  As we continue to use automation to be more effective and efficient we have to remember that people buy from people.

Thanks again to MarketBright for contributing this week.  Now go download this whitepaper to ensure you are set up for success.

After reading Leigh Anne’s post on Sales 2.0 for Dummies, by David Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Genius.com, this got me thinking…

I think David’s funnel left out a big piece of the active funnel – outbound marketing.  This part should be between the attract and interact parts of David’s funnel.  We’re calling this piece – Outbound Marketing 2.0.
If only 3% of people fill out forms and announce themselves, you’re either going to have a skinny funnel or have to do a TON of inbound marketing to drive enough activity to keep the top of the funnel full.  Here’s where the outbound marketing 2.0 comes in.

While keeping your inbound engine running, and pushing the hand raisers to the appropriate sales person or marketing program, there are economic factors that may also lend to considering new verticals (i.e healthcare has $$ to spend but the financial services industry is still struggling).  Also, don’t forget about where you’re already winning.  Take a look at your current funnel and see what’s moving and what’s not and ultimately, what your new customers look like.  And finally, 97% of visitors that are not announcing themselves,  with a robust analytics tool you can identify the companies visiting (shameless promotion ahead) and ReachForce can help you discover the right buying roles for your business.

From there, you’re ready to execute your outbound programs using a marketing or email automation solution.

Here’s what I think the top of the funnel should look like:

Written by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of the recent book Digital Body Language.

Amy was kind enough to ask me to write a post to the B2B Lead audience to answer a question that frequently comes up.  What is the relationship between Demand Generation/Marketing Automation, such as what we provide at Eloqua, and Targeted Contact Discovery, such as ReachForce’s service.

It’s a great question, and the answer touches on a number of areas.

The key relationship is the critical importance of understanding your target audience.  The cost of raw, untargeted data continues to drop.  With various social or data scraping services in the market today, the cost of a raw name, even a name with title information attached, has been reduced to pennies.

However, this has led to a market dynamic where untargeted marketing messages are prevalent, and the ability to precisely target the right buyer with the right message at the right time is the most important differentiator.

Role-based contact discovery is a crucial step in understanding who is a potential buyer of your product or services.  Going beyond title to discover actual functional role allows you to precisely identify the individual who would, when the time is right, progress through a buying cycle and purchase your product or services.

And this is where demand generation, such as the platform we provide at Eloqua, comes in.

The key synergy is that by using a demand generation platform to understand the digital body language of our buyers, we can identify the critical second piece of the equation – where each buyer is in their buying cycle.  By understanding the stages of a buying process for your product or service, and then using scoring to map each potential buyer to the stage of the buying process he or she is at, you can see whether they are at the education and awareness stage, are discovering potential vendors, or are validating a vendor as their final choice.

With a clear understanding of the “who” (based on role-based discovery) and the “how interested” (based on reading their digital body language), targeting the right message to the right person at the right time becomes possible.

However, there is another crucial link.  Even though the differentiated value of understanding role, vs just title, is clear to most marketers, the difference may be lost on the CFO.  Demand generation processes allow you to paint a much clearer picture of the value of one name over another.

With Eloqua, you can rethink your marketing analysis around the full buying funnel.  By taking a top-down view of your marketing analysis, you can begin to get a clear picture of where each buyer is in their buying process.  As you do this, you can begin to push your analysis of the value of a name further down the buying funnel.  Determining, through using lead scoring, which source of names actually turns into Marketing Qualified Leads and revenue opportunities allows you to view the value of the incoming names more clearly.  If a targeted name costs more by a factor of 5, but converts into revenue opportunities at 10X the rate of untargeted names, it is clearly more valuable.  Demand generation allows you to prove that value further down the buying funnel.

A third critical link is in sales understanding.  Sales needs to engage with individual buyers in individual conversations.  The only way to do this is for them to understand the interests of each buyer.  Targeted discovery allows you to provide your sales team with insights into what the potential buyer’s role and major focus areas are, while Eloqua allows you to provide your sales team with insight into their area and level of interest through giving them insights into the buyer’s digital body language.

With these approaches in place, it is even possible to reverse the standard approach of seeking, through targeted lead discovery, folks in the right roles, followed by using lead nurturing to cultivate and generate interest.  Interest may already exist, and can be identified through seeing individuals from ideal target companies anonymously visiting your website. In this case, these companies, where interest has already been seen, can be passed automatically to Reachforce for targeted lead discovery.  This provides you with an immediate win, as you have a person in the right role, at a company that is already showing interest in your product or solution.

Together, targeted lead discovery through Reachforce and demand generation through Eloqua form a powerful combination that allows you to find the right person, at the right company, showing the right level of buying interest.  For your sales team, there can be no better lead than that.

I am always looking for ideas on how to stand out in the crowd, so when I saw this idea on two different blogs, I had to share it.  In case you missed Dianna Huff or Drew McLellan sharing this interesting direct mail they received themselves, both were sent a FedEx package with chocolate covered grasshoppers inside.

The package said, “You’re a risk-taker, a dream-realizer. What’s left to do that you haven’t already done? Eat a grasshopper. They’re farm raised, covered in chocolate and rich in protein. So, not only will you be breaking boundaries, but you’ll be eating healthy, too.”  A note was attached with the real promotion, “Entrepreneurs can change the world. Join the movement now! grasshopper.com/idea”

According to a Fox News video, a company in Needham, MA sent the grasshoppers to 5,000 “of the most influential people in the U.S.” in the hopes that these people would then talk about the company and its campaign.

Drew and Dianna seemed to have different takes on the success of the campaign.

Drew loved the campaign – Bottom line — it worked.  3-D mailings may cost a little more money — but they deliver big results when they are done well.

The folks at Grasshopper.com decided to send out 5,000 of the attention-hopping packages to entrepreneurs, bloggers, celebrities, journalists and customers.  They spent 3 months assembling the list and made sure the packaging and cross promotion (Twitter, YouTube, bloggers, their website, etc.) were all in order.

This was a very well thought out and executed campaign.  Bravo to the Grasshopper gang.

While Dianna seems to have mixed thoughts – So, the company got me and lots of other people to write about its campaign — which according to the Fox News video, was the company’s objective.  But, it didn’t get me to buy — or even consider its service. Is the campaign a failure or success?

To me, 5,000 doesn’t seem to be a particularly targeted audience but it did seem to get the company the coverage they were looking for.  After all, I didn’t even get the chocolate covered grasshoppers, and I am writing about them.

Obviously this campaign worked best because the name of the company is Grasshopper but the idea of a bold direct mail piece is possible for anyone.  Something else to learn from the campaign is to not just focus direct mail on prospects.  You might get more bang for your buck with bloggers and thought leaders.

Photo credit: Drew’s Marketing Minute

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.

Remember 1999?  The tech bubble had yet to burst, times were good and our biggest worry was Y2K.  Back then marketers had a positive attitude and spent time tailoring messages to their audience around how the benefits of their product would help the prospect.

We all know that times have been tough this year, we don’t need to be reminded in every email, direct mail, blog post and webinar invitation we get.  If I want to be reminded, I just look at my stock portfolio . This is a plea to all marketers out there, STOP talking about the recession.  Don’t remind your audience that their budgets have been cut or that they are now a man down.

If your prospects have had budget cuts and layoffs, there is no need to remind them of the current economic state; they live with the reminder every day.  Instead, now is the time to focus on the positives.

Here are some reasons why you should NOT highlight the recession in your next marketing message:

• Stand out from the crowd.  If you are sending out the same  ways to recession-proof your X, as everyone else, your message will be lost.  I automatically delete any email or webinar invite I get that has the word recession or economy in it.
• You are subtly reminding your prospects that their budgets are shrinking and that they should be spending less.  FYI- your goal is to sell them something meaning you want them to spend more.
• Now is the time to really highlight how you are going to save your prospects time and money.  Make them feel like your product is the one thing that cannot be cut from the budget.
• Perception is reality.  As long as the media and we as marketers continue to propagate the idea that we are in a recession, then we will be in one.  We can all do our part to be more positive.

My point is that we all know we are in a recession and although things are beginning to look up, we don’t need every marketing message to remind us of our budget cuts and staff losses.