Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/08/17

Some great posts last week from the marketing automation and B2B marketing blogging community. I've enjoyed a lot, so it's hard to pick out just 10 as favorites. It's interesting how trends tend to surface as the "Cash for Clunkers" theme seems to be present in a few posts this week.


Scott Gillum (LinkedIn) from B2B Sales & Marketing Knowledge Sharing thinks about the future of articles in print publications and magazines as the formats, lengths, and chaotic flows of Twitter, blogs, and online communication become more mainstream:
http://b2bknowledgesharing.blogspot.com/2009/08/future-look-of-articles-blogs-and-im.html



Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) from the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog with a thought provoking piece on the changing nature of branding in a social media world. Social media may be exposing various instances of mismatch between a brand promise and its reality, but there remains a compelling argument for brand relevance:
http://www.chiefmartec.com/2009/08/branding-is-dead-long-live-branding.html



Tim Wilson (@tgwilson) from Gilligan on Data looks at data inaccuracies and how they add up – some great thinking on the risk inherent in bad data vs the risk of inaction and data paralysis - and a strong argument not to strive for absolute perfeaction:
http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/08/10/rare-x-rare-x-rare-in-customer-data-management/



Carlos Vidal (@cmvidal) with a guest post on Demand Gen Report looks at the need to included the time taken to close a deal as a key part of a Cost per Opportunity metric:
http://demandgenreport.blogspot.com/2009/08/lead-source-effectiveness-allocate.html



Tom Pick (@tompick) from Web Market Central talks about Aquent's combination of Email marketing and social media, as an example of one company "doing it right" in combining the two styles of marketing:
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/social-media-email-marketing-one.html



Amy Hawthorne (@ahawthorne) on the B2B Lead Blog makes an argument to look at your marketing database to see if it's more of a clunker than you might have realized. The requisite cash-for-clunkers sales offer is of course there, but it would have been odd if it was missing...
http://blog.reachforce.com/database-marketing/got-a-cluncker-of-a-leads-databasetrade-up/



Paul Dunay (@pauldunay) of Buzz Marketing for Technology raises an interesting thought in a "Cost Per Advocate" model to replace cost per click or cost per impression. Advocates are key, but are we just buying targeted ads, or really winning them over as an advocate?:
http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/2009/08/cost-per-advocate-new-cpa-model.html



Heather Foeh (@heatherfoeh) from Marketing Insights looks at using a marketing automation process not just to create leads for the channel, but also to follow up and make sure that your channel partners have worked with each lead effectively:
http://marketinginsights.eloqua.com/2009/08/12/checking-up-on-the-channel/



Steve Kellogg (LinkedIn) from Crowds2Crowds with our second Cash for Clunkers piece - an analysis of progressive landing pages on various motor company sites, which makes a great point about visitor interaction:
http://crowds2crowds.blogspot.com/2009/08/cash-for-clunkers.html



Jamie Wallace (@suddenlyjamie) from The Savvy B2B blog makes an argument for thinking in terms of a buying process, not a selling process, through her push to drop the "hunting" metaphors we tend to use, which imply a selling process:
http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/202551/social-media-reality-check-you%E2%80%99re-not-a-big-game-hunter



I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did. There are a lot of great writers out there in the marketing automation and B2B marketing community, and they each have an interesting perspective to share.

What is B2B Marketing?

What exactly defines Business to Business (B2B) Marketing?

It’s an interesting question, as marketing is a discipline that is common across both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) organizations. However, beneath the surface, there are significant differences in how B2B and B2C marketing is done in today’s environment. It’s worth exploring what B2B marketing entails.

Let’s look at a few of the areas that differentiate a B2B buying process:

Information Exchange

In B2B marketing, you are often dealing with a buying organization that requires a significant amount of information during their buying process. Unlike in many consumer marketing situations where the need for clothes, food, or cleaning products may be well understood, in B2B marketing, that may not be the case at all. Early stage education on industry transition, technology changes, or regulatory changes can be needed in order to best understand why your solution’s category even exists in the first place.

This need to exchange information continues throughout the buying process. Buyers, when convinced that a potential solution exists to their business challenge, will then need to know which solutions to evaluate, what criteria to evaluate them on, and what evidence exists that one solution is better than the others. B2B marketers need to understand where in this education process their largest marketing challenge exists in order to better educate the buyer.

Social media becomes a critical part of this information exchange in a B2B environment as social media forms a great medium through which to educate, converse with, and build relationships with prospective buyers who may be interested at a point in the future. Over time, a great social media strategy in a B2B organization will improve market perceptions of your organization in ways that other brand investments never could.


Multiple Buyers

In B2B marketing, the most common situation is one in which multiple buyers are involved. Each buyer may take a different role in the buying process, whether it’s a technical evaluator, decision maker, or economic buyer. Each of these buyers needs to be educated at each stage of the buying cycle to ensure that they facilitate moving things forward. This leads to a need in B2B marketing for a significant amount of content. Each buyer in the buying committee, at each stage of their buying process, has specific educational needs. Mapping marketing content to the buying cycle is key in ensuring you have the right assets available for each of the buyers involved.

Whereas in B2C marketing, there may be a husband and wife both involved in a buying decision, the unique roles that are played by B2B buyers allow very clear differentiation of buyer roles. By carefully monitoring buyers’ digital body language, B2B marketers can identify buyer roles based solely on their actions. This allows messaging to be catered precisely to the unique needs and interests of each buyer role.


Sales Involvement

The complexity of most B2B transactions means that there is usually involvement of a sales team prior to a deal being finalized. This may be an inside sales team, a field sales team, or a channel partner’s sales team, but the direct involvement leads to another unique aspect of B2B marketing. One of marketing’s main roles in a B2B organization is to provide sales with a steady flow of qualified leads. Given the length of the buying process, this is a challenging undertaking. First, the marketing organization needs to understand the digital body language of buyers in order to see indications of who is ready to buy, both on their main web properties, and also as seen being referred in through the social media “periphery”.

With this insight, B2B marketers can then establish a lead scoring system that identifies and ranks prospective buyers. Those that are ready for sales involvement can be passed on to sales, those who are not yet ready can continue to be nurtured until they do show the signs of being ready. This active management of the top of the marketing funnel leads to unique challenges for B2B marketers, as there is a need for rich thought leadership content of interest to prospects at the top of the marketing funnel in order to effectively nurture leads until they are ready to consider a purchase.

Marketing needs to work on not only a steady flow of qualified leads to sales, but also needs to provide the insights needed to sell better through sales enablement techniques. Sales enablement involves providing insights into which prospects are actively interested, who within an account is a key influencer, and which accounts within a territory should be focused on.

Length of Buying Cycle and Challenges for Marketing Analysis

The length of the B2B buying cycle also causes significant challenges for marketing analysis. Given that buying cycles can last months or quarters, if not years, the analysis that can be performed on marketing’s effectiveness is very different. B2B marketers must take a top-down approach to marketing analysis that looks at an overall lead funnel, where each prospect is within it, and what changes in the lead funnel have been made within the last period of time.

When looking at individual campaigns, each campaign can be analyzed, or even A/B tested against results, but often should only be analyzed against tactical results such as the creation of marketing qualified leads or inquiries of a certain level of qualification. Analyzing individual campaigns contribution to revenue can only be done in B2B marketing with the acknowledgement that many campaigns will have contributed to one revenue event, and that the resulting revenue must be attributed across the contributing campaigns.

Concluding Thoughts on B2B Marketing

As today’s buyers continue to evolve, and gain more of their education online, through social media, or through any other form of online information exchange, the role of the marketer continues to evolve. Whereas the classic role of marketing (as described by Peter Drucker), to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself, has not changed, the techniques for doing that in a B2B scenario are different from those used in a B2C scenario.

Lead Scoring Best Practices

I sat down with various folks on the Eloqua Customer Success team to hear their experiences on what it took to build out a highly successful lead scoring system. Jocelyn Brown (@jocebrown), Chad Horenfeldt (@chadhorenfeldt), and Adrian Chang (@adrianchang) are the folks who help clients with implementing lead scoring at organizations of various sizes and within a variety of industries, so they have the experience to know what it takes to achieve success. Here is their take:




Some key takeaways:
- get buy-in from sales management in order to best align goals
- use a matrix of A-D for fit and 1-4 for engagement
- define what will happen with each lead, based on that matrix, from lead nurturing to sales hand-off
- define an SLA with sales on how long is allowed for follow-up
- don't be shy about lead clawback if too much time passes
- sales cherry-picking leads is a sign of mis-alignment between marketing and sales
- lead scoring is one of the most valuable things a B2B marketing organization can do

I hope you enjoy the video, I always learn a lot chatting with people like Jocelyn, Adrian, and Chad, as they deal with organizations who are wrestling with these challenges on a daily basis.

The Map is not the Terrain: Marketing Analysis and the Non-Linear Funnel

The conceptual model of a funnel is a great one for understanding buyer stages. At the top of the funnel is the broadest universe of suspects who may at some point have an interest in your product or services, but currently do not show significant interest. There are usually the largest number of these potential buyers, hence it being the widest part of the funnel. Further down the funnel, closer to being an actual buyer, interest levels increase while, in most cases, the number of individuals decreases.

Marketing’s overall role is to facilitate the buying process, through which people progress from mildly interested to active buyers. Lead nurturing is the process that we use, and we think in terms of how that nurturing builds awareness, interest, and then purchase consideration. As such, the funnel forms a great representation of the situation, and acts as a very good map. However, as with any map, it is only a representation of the situation, and is not exact.

The biggest difference in the B2B marketing realm is in the linearity of the buying process. The map that a funnel represents is often taken to be linear. Buyers progress through a buying process as neatly as one can draw a funnel, moving through increasing levels of interest, and then ultimately purchasing. However, this is not a reflection of reality. Realistically, most buyers move up and down the funnel in a very non-linear manner.

For many months or years, a potential buyer might move in and out of being interested, occasionally showing a brief spurt of interest, and then falling back into being inactive for long periods. At certain points, a deep amount of research and a significant amount of activity may show that a buyer has moved much further along in their buying process, but then can be followed by a quiet period as internal business changes temporarily pause the project that had led to the heightened interest. This can lead to a perception of a leaky funnel as leads that may seem almost ready for sales shift back to an earlier phase in their buying process.

Overall, the funnel model works; generally buyers progress through increasing levels of interest towards purchase. However, at an individual buyer level, the movement is much less linear. This leads to the challenges with defining a “perfect path” as talked about earlier, each individual passes through a unique path towards purchase, making it impossible to define a single path that can push a buying decision.

Similarly, this non-linearity means that the most workable way of looking at marketing analysis looks at the marketing funnel from the top down. By analyzing a funnel from a top-down perspective, you can see high level trends in terms of how healthy your marketing funnel is, and whether buyers are moving in the right direction within it, but you are not constrained by the behaviors of individual buyers, which may be much less linear.

Much like a map providing an accurate description of terrain when viewed from a high level, but missing the details at a more micro level, a funnel is a great model of the marketing analysis terrain from a high level, but is not an exact view of individual buyers’ behavior. This is a concept worth keeping in mind in designing nurturing programs - one can't assume that buyers progress linearly down a funnel, so one can't sequence marketing content in that order. Instead, buyers at each stage should be nurtured in a way that is specific to that stage, but watched for signs that they are progressing to more advanced stages.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/08/07

There are so many great writers in the field of demand generation and marketing automation out there that create fresh and interesting content each week. Some are entertaining, some are practical, some are thought provoking, and they are all worth a read. Here are some of the posts I have enjoyed over the past week or so (in no particular order):





Tom Pick (@tompick) from Web Market Central questions the quest for "Return on Investment" in social media with the concept of "Return on NOT Investing". An interesting read and definitely another way of thinking about the opportunity costs involved:
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-media-roi-vs-roni.html





The Savvy B2B Sisters (@Savvy_B2B) provide a detailed guide on the how and the why of writing eBooks for B2B marketing and thought leadership: http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/194051/5-things-you-should-know-before-you-write-an-ebook





Robert Lesser from Acquiring Minds gives an entertaining (but surprisingly accurate) run-down of the Top 10 Signs that Sales & Marketing are Mis-Aligned:
http://www.directimpactnow.com/leadgentools/blog/2009/07/10-signs-that-sales-marketing-are-mis.html







Chad Horenfeldt (@ChadHorenfeldt) from Anything Goes Marketing posts a very comprehensive set of ways of using Twitter for B2B marketing and sales:
http://anythinggoesmarketing.blogspot.com/2009/08/tips-on-using-twitter-to-boost-your.html




Brian Carroll (@brianjcarroll) from Start with a Lead reviews the book “Professional Services Marketing” that talks about the marketing and selling of professional services, and why it is that clients buy:
http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/08/good-advice-for-growing-your-company-from-industry-experts.html




Laura Ramos (@lauraramos) from B2B Marketing Posts dissects a stat that shows that social media use is soaring in B2B marketing, and makes some great comments on "use" vs "success" in social media for B2B marketing:
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/08/04/social-media-use-soars-among-b2b-marketers-really/




Mike Damphousse (@damphoux) from Green Leads made a compelling argument for lead quality over lead quantity. Mike's coming at it from the appointment setting business, but the argument still holds water in regular demand generation circles. Quality will pretty much always trump quantity:
http://www.damphousse.org/2009/07/sales-ready-leads-quality-vs-quantity.html





Steve Kellogg (LinkedIn) from Crowds2Crowds wrote an entertaining obituary for batch & blast marketing. I can't agreee more, the sooner we move away from batch & blast campaigning towards truly understanding our prospects, the better we all do. RIP batch & blast: http://crowds2crowds.blogspot.com/2009/08/for-those-still-using-batch-blast.html






Britton Manasco (@brittonmanasco) from Illuminating the Future writes a very thought provoking post on whether the "Guidance Economy" is the next wave. Lends a new imperitive to thought leadership initiatives:
http://www.brittonmanasco.com/2009/07/confronting-the-guidance-imperative.html





Jep Castelein (@jepc) from Lead Sloth breaks apart the various types of "free trials" that are used in B2B marketing and discusses how they can best be used and what they are appropriate for. Worth thinking about before a mad rush to offer a free trial:
http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/free-trials-arent-what-they-used-to-be/






Mac McIntosh (@B2B_Sales_Leads) from Sales Lead Insights posts a comprehensive list of decision criteria for lead qualification from demographics and firmographics to activity and interest profiling. A good discussion starts in the comments:
http://www.sales-lead-insights.com/2009/a-list-of-b2b-lead-qualification-criteria-by-category/