Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

In previous articles on the topic of lead nurturing, I’ve looked at developing a universal lead definition, installing a marketing database, and understanding your prospects’ buying process. These are all key parts of an effective lead nurturing system.

Now we get to the good part – the program itself.

Objectives

There’s a good choice of tactics you can use to nurture and develop leads. And there are several different goals to meet with these tactics. As you design your program, keep these in mind:

• Your lead nurturing program acts as a subtle reminder to your prospects that you exist. Some people call it a Stay-in-Touch program or a Drip Marketing system. Whatever you want to call it, be sure to create a slow, steady, consistent pace.
• Your lead nurturing program should provide helpful information that moves the prospect along the buying process toward the sale.
• Your lead nurturing program is a great way of creating a relationship of trust and credibility, and removing some of the risk and doubt inherent in a business technology purchase.

Tactics

In business technology marketing, email is consistently the best overall channel of communication – especially because it can be easily automated.

Telemarketing can be useful as the prospect moves deeper into the buying process. It also plays a big role in increasing attendance at webinars and other events. Some companies add direct mail to the mix with good results.

Information continues to be the best offer during the nurturing process. Your prospects are trying to solve a problem and the more you can do to help them, the better your chances of being selected.

Technology marketers commonly use these tactics to help nurture their prospects:

• Webinars
• Offline events
• Papers and reports; tip sheets
• Case studies and success stories

Multiple Paths

Lead nurturing can get complicated because of the complexity of the buying process and the different types of “buyers” involved. Eventually you’ll want to establish different paths for different types of buyers and buyers in different stages of the process. For example, a C-level executive is probably looking for different information than an IT manager or the person who is likely to actually use your product.

But one path is much better than none. If you haven’t been doing any kind of formal lead nurturing, you’ll find that the addition of a single program will increase the number of leads the marketing delivers to the sales team.

Frequency

What’s the best frequency for contact? That depends on what a) you’re selling, b) the length of the normal buying process and c) which buying stage the prospect is in.

Early in the buying process, once a month may be plenty. Once a month is also good as a slow-drip system for prospects who aren’t responding to your messages.

As the prospect moves closer to a buying decision things begin to heat up and you may find that weekly or even daily communications are needed.

A few reminders

Include a call to action in every communication – and give the prospect a good reason to take that action.

When you’re using an automated response system, be sure to move your prospects out of the current nurturing program if/when they contact you. In other words, if the prospect decides he or she is ready to speak with a sales person, it’s time to stop the automated messages.

Be ready and able to move the prospect back into the nurturing program if the sales communication doesn’t pan out.

And finally, remember that 80% or more of your best prospects won’t be ready to buy when they first come into contact with you. Research – and experience – shows us that most of this 80% will eventually buy. But they won’t buy from you if you don’t stay in touch with them.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, lead nurturing, lead development, email, webinar,

Since I’ve been on a streak of writing about designing a great lead nurturing system, I was especially interested in Laura Ramos’ recent interview in BtoB’s 2008 Lead Generation Guide. Laura is a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Here’s what she has to say:

• Whitepapers and webinars still play an important role in educating prospects, but they should be used as part of an integrated marketing program – not as a standalone lead generation campaign.
• Email is good for continuing conversations with a prospect or communicating with customers. It is not as effective for new customer acquisition or for building awareness.
• B-to-B marketers worry too much about generating higher lead volume and not enough about building quality demand.
• Marketers need to nurture buyers and engage a broader number of principals in the purchase process.
• The biggest obstacles she sees to successful lead generation are: failure to constantly score or qualify leads, under-investing in technology and process, and lack of focus on the right kinds of measuring and monitoring.

If you have time, read the complete interview.

At Tatum Marketing we work hard to help our clients and our blog readers put together marketing programs and systems that do exactly what Laura is suggesting. If you want some one-on-one help, don’t hesitate to contact us. At minimum, keep reading our blog!

[tags]technology marketing, marketing system, lead generation, whitepapers, webinars, email marketing [\tags]

This is the third in a series of articles about designing a great lead nurturing system. So far I’ve talked about coming up with a universal definition for the word “lead” and the marketing database you need to house your prospects’ contact information and communication history.

Now let’s look at the importance of understanding how your buyers buy. Anyone who has been marketing or selling in the business technology world lately doesn’t need me to tell them that it’s tough out there. More people than ever are now involved in your prospects’ purchase decisions. Selling cycles are getting longer. Response rates to most types of lead generation programs are going down. And buyers don’t want to talk to sales people until much later in the game.

It’s the buyers that I want to talk about in this article because they are firmly in the driver’s seat. They control what information is required, when it’s required, and how it’s going to be accessed. They can find out nearly anything they want to know about you, your products, and their options without your help.

This is very different from the sales and marketing world that many of us are used to, and it takes a different approach. Since the buyer is in charge here, the best move on your part is to clearly understand the entire buying process and carefully map your marketing and sales efforts to meet the buyers’ needs. In other words, you can become the equivalent of a buyer’s GPS – providing the exact information the driver needs to move toward his or her destination.

Mapping the Trip

This exercise calls for active participation by your best sales and marketing people. Other customer-facing departments such as client support are good to include too.
You can chart your customers’ buying process by following these steps:

1. First, talk to your customers and – if you can – talk to some prospects to find out what they went through when deciding to buy your solution. Seems obvious that you’d start with the customers, doesn’t it? But a startling number of marketing programs are based on input from everyone except the customers.
2. Next, gather your sales and marketing experts, draw a spreadsheet on a whiteboard and list each of your buyer’s decision points (one per column) across the top of a chart.In a typical multi-stage buying process you’re likely to have decision points such as: establish need, research options, create a preliminary (long) list, cut to a short list, select and negotiate, and delivery or deployment. Remember, these are the steps in the buyer’s process – not the steps in your selling process.
3. Down the left-hand side, give one row to each of the following:
   1. Who is involved in the decision at this point?
   2. What are their business issues and obstacles?
   3. What questions do they usually ask?
   4. What answers will move them to the next stage?
   5. Where do they go for this information?
   6. What marketing and sales tools do you need?
4. Now fill in the boxes, answering each question for each decision point.

I first ran across this process in a book called Rivers of Revenue by Kristin Zhivago. It works.

Bonus Benefits

This exercise gives you a picture of your prospects’ decision-making process that will help accelerate just about any marketing or sales program. And it also creates a new level of understanding between your sales and marketing people. By charting the buying process you will have taken a big step toward aligning your marketing and sales team – an accomplishment with such great benefits, I can’t begin to do the subject justice here.

Once you’ve mapped the process and identified marketing and sales needs, you have a great tool to select the best marketing tactics, develop the most effective messaging, and get rid of any waste. If you’re spending money on marketing efforts that don’t meet a requirement of the map, stop. Eliminate them and focus your resources on efforts that support the map.

We are highly unlikely to return to a time when companies control the selling process, so you might as well get used to letting the buyer drive. However, by understanding the process and providing the right answers at the right time you can make sure you’re in the car – and not underneath it.

This article was originally written in 2005.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, buying process, lead nurturing

What’s the best way to get the most mileage out of your traffic or lead generation dollars? Convert those leads to customers! Lead nurturing plays a big role here, and you need a solid system – if for no other reason than to make sure it happens.

If you need reminding why lead nurturing is so important, you’ll get a good overview by reading There’s Gold in the Middle of the Funnel.

By “lead nurturing system” I mean the component of your marketing system that focuses on those 75% to 80% of your prospects who aren’t ready to buy when you first meet them.

Lead nurturing systems can range from relatively simple website based conversion point optimization to complex multimodal, multi-year programs. (I know that sentence is racked with marketing jargon, but I can’t help myself). The point is that sometimes lead nurturing occurs entirely on a website – as in the case of a pure ecommerce site. More often than not, there are other communication channels involved.

Setting up a lead nurturing system involves several steps:

1. Reaching universal definition of a lead.
2. Establishing or cleaning up your marketing database
3. Devising a system for ranking or scoring leads
4. Understanding your customer’s buying process
5. Deciding what lead nurturing tactics and activities you will use.
6. Establishing a sales hand-off, feedback and closed loop process

Let’s start with step #1 – reaching a universal definition of a lead.

You’d think that everyone involved in marketing and selling your products or services would share the same definition of a lead. And you’d be wrong.

Unless you’ve gone through the process of developing a company-wide lead definition, you’re likely to find that sales and marketing people have very different ideas about what is a lead and what is junk.

So, sit them down together – figuratively if not literally – and talk about the following:

• Who is our target audience and what makes a good lead? What are their titles? What kinds of companies do they work for? Where are they located? Include all the industry, job responsibility, revenue, number of employees, type of ownership information, and any other specifics that help make a good lead good.
• What makes a lead ready for the sales team? You can call this a qualified lead or a sales-ready lead or whatever you want. The point is to agree on a checklist of qualities that a lead must possess before it’s time to involve the sales people. This checklist might include things like:

• There is an open project
• With a timeframe
• A budget
• And an executive sponsor.

Once you’ve got agreement on a universal definition of a lead, you’re ready to take a look at your database. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have examples of good lead definitions, share them here.

Technorati Tags: lead nurturing, lead development, conversion, sales ready, marketing and sales alignment

Last week I wrote about the five fundamentals of successful technology marketing in an overview of how a complete marketing program fits together. This week I want to give you a more tactical approach to designing a solid marketing system or improving the one you have.

Sometimes new clients approach us knowing exactly what they want to work on. But often, especially with marketing coaching clients, the big question is what to do first.

If you’re just beginning to market your technology product or service, there’s a certain order in which to address things:

1. Get a good website.
2. Generate traffic or leads.
3. Optimize your conversion rates.
4. Increase your customer value.

If you already have a marketing program in place, you’ll want to identify your weakest link and work on it first. (Hint: It’s probably not #4 in the above list).

Whether your marketing program is all new or in update mode, there’s a logical reason for starting with your website and working your way up to customer value.

Your website is – or will be – your marketing hub. Virtually every sale you make will involve someone visiting your website. If it sucks – as many do – you’re wasting money if you focus on sending traffic there.

One of the easiest ways to figure out whether or not your website is doing its job is to look at your bounce rate.  Any web analytics program will give you this info. If you’re still not using web analytics, I can almost guarantee your website is ineffective – or you’re just incredibly lucky. Go ahead and add Google Analytics to your site NOW.

If your bounce rate (not counting traffic from paid search advertising) is higher than 50%, don’t spend another dollar on marketing until you fix that problem. I’m being generous with the 50% cut off. Google analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has said, “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

Once you’ve got your bounce rate under control it doesn’t mean you can stop worrying about your website, but you’ll have some comfort in knowing that you’re not alienating everyone who comes to your site.

Next up is generating traffic or leads. Take a look at the results from your current marketing programs to find out if they’re driving enough traffic to your website site or generating enough inbound inquiries. How do you know that?

You need two numbers: 1) the number of leads or amount of traffic you need to generate and 2) the current level of inbound inquiries or traffic. In How Many Leads Do You Need, I provided a formula for determining the first number. If you’re measuring website traffic your analytics program will provide the second number. (Yet another reason to get analytics on your site!) If you’re tracking inquiries from a number of sources, finding the second number will be a little more time consuming but definitely worth it.

So, what if you’re generating plenty of traffic? Take a look at your conversion rate. What percentage of website visitors actually buy your product. Or, what percentage of inbound inquiries become a sales-ready lead? Is this number what you think it should be? Probably not.

A word of caution here. Start assessing your conversion rates before you spend too much time and money driving traffic or generating leads. More than a few technology marketers have wasted big bucks sending leads into a system that can’t turn them into opportunities.

The three factors of website, traffic/lead generation and conversion rates are more integrated than this article might make it sound. There aren’t really hard stops between working on traffic/lead generation and improving conversion rates. And, improving conversion rates often means working on your website.

I guess that’s what makes it a system.

Tomorrow we’ll look at lead nurturing.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, marketing system, website effectiveness, traffic generation, lead generation, conversion rate

In a perfect world, there would be no need for web conversion forms – no need to request (demand?) those bits of contact information before allowing visitors to download information, request a demo, or take your software for a trial run.

In this perfect world, your website would be so fantastic, so perfectly aligned to your prospects’ needs, they would either buy immediately or keep coming back to your website on their own.

Okay let’s wake up. In the real world, technology marketers must do what they can to get visitors’ contact information in order to follow-up. Your success in getting this contact information is a balancing act between what you offer and what you ask – and how you go about asking it.

The web conversion form plays a vital role in how successfully you capture the information you need. Its elements are continuously tested and studied by smart marketers and other experts. There are no hard and fast rules about what works and what doesn’t work, but we do know a few things about conversion forms that will substantially increase your chances at gaining your prospects cooperation.

Use this checklist to guide you as you design – or improve – your web conversion forms.

• Ask only for information you really, really, really need. Really. Of course your sales people would like to know the phone number, company, title, geographic location and budget of every visitor; but it’s not going to happen. Every single field on your web conversion form reduces the number of people who will fill it out.
• Explain yourself.  If you absolutely MUST ask for more than an email address, let them know why and make sure it’s clear what you’re requesting. For example, does “name” mean the visitor’s name (first, last, first and last?) or the company name?
• Remind them what they’re going to get. Let’s say I click on your “free trial” button and it takes me to a web form. The phone rings, I answer and 20 minutes later I find myself back at your web form. If your prospects are anything like me, they’ll need to be reminded of why they were there in the first place.
• Assure them you will not abuse the information they give you. Tell them you do not sell or share the information. Provide a link to your privacy policy.
• Give them a way to contact you. Maybe the prospect just doesn’t want to fill out the form but would happily send an email or make a phone call to get whatever it is you’re offering.
• Put a real call to action on the action button. Many forms use the word “Submit”, but that’s boring. Use something more active such as “Give me my report” or “Start my trial now”.

Other factors also play a role in how well your web conversion form works. Layout, of course, and colors, style and size of the type, and use of images all contribute. But those are subjects for a different article.

For now, review the list above to evaluate your existing conversion forms and as a guide when you create new forms. You’ll find your conversion rate may just go up.

This article was inspired by a post on web conversion forms written by Melissa Burdon at Future Now. You can read her post here: 7 Tips for Boosting Web Form Conversions.

Technorati Tags: conversion rate, website design, web forms

How much of your marketing investment do you spend creating content? Have you even thought of content creation as a marketing tactic?

It’s an interesting – and useful – way of looking at your marketing program. Publishers and web experts have long claimed that “content is king”. Yet marketers are just beginning to realize the significance of this. (And I blame the lack of prior awareness of the importance of content as the reason we all see so many horribly written websites, case studies and other marketing tools today).

Providing interesting, relevant content can make or break your website and your traffic or prospect conversion efforts.  In an ideal world, your content would be so fascinating and useful people would keep coming back to your website and marketing materials over and over again. Think about it. The prospect nurturing process would be infinitely easier.

If you’re interested in comparing yourself to other technology marketers, Junta42 (a custom publishing company) and BtoB magazine just finished a survey of content spending habits. They found that business-to-business marketers are spending nearly 30% of their marketing budgets on custom content. (29.4% to be exact).

Here’s where your fellow B2B marketers are spending money developing content (the percentages refer to the ratio of marketers using these tactics):

• E-mail newsletters (69%)
• White papers (50%)
• Case studies (48%)
• Custom events & road shows (39%)
• Internal communications via Intranet (36%)
• Webcasts/webinars (31%)
• Employee newsletters (29%)
• External newsletters (28%)
• Blogs (28%)
• Microsites & online portals (27%)
• Online videos (22%)
• External custom magazines (18%)

One thing that disturbs me about these findings is the absence of website pages themselves. Anyone who knows me knows I believe that websites are the hub of any good technology marketing program. Why are marketers not budgeting for content development?

Granted, most whitepapers, case studies, webinars and online videos will wind up on the website. And blog content ties in there as well. Microsites and online portals I assume are not the company’s main website.

So, where the heck is web page content coming from? Maybe it’s more a fault of the study than it is a fault of b2b marketers. I hope so. If your web page content is bad, who’s going to want to sit through your webinar?

Technorati Tags: website, content, conversion, technology marketing, business-to-business marketing

If you’ve been following my recent posts about pay-per-click advertising, I’m going to make a lane change on you today. Stick with me. This is worthwhile.

Lately I’ve been talking with so many technology business owners who are frustrated by the lack of results they’re getting from their marketing efforts. More often than not I find the results are dismal because they’re still using marketing tactics that were the way to go five years ago but aren’t nearly as effective now.

Before we get into a discussion of what works now and what doesn’t, let’s look at some facts and statistics that affect software and technology marketing today. If you understand & keep these in mind, it’ll make more sense as to why the conventional approach doesn’t work so well anymore.

Here goes:

1. A vendor’s website – along with recommendations from a colleague or peer - rank as the most important influencers in a B2B purchase decision. (Enquiro Research; Business to Business Survey 2007.) Gone are the days when a technology website was just an online brochure. Your website is your marketing hub. Unfortunately, in the eyes of business-to-business buyers, most sites suck.
2. Today 80% of business technology buyers go looking for vendors – they don’t wait for vendors to find them.  (MarketingSherpa Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08). Visibility will bring you far greater results than any outbound marketing effort.
3. Virtually every new technology purchase involves online research. And online research means search engines. Depending on which study you read, Google is the general search engine of choice for 77% to 93% of business technology buyers. Can your prospects find you on Google?
4. Generating traffic and leads is no longer the most important marketing function (if it ever was). You must efficiently convert those leads to customers. All business technology and software purchases are multi-step. You’re not going to sell your product with the first prospect contact. If you concentrate on generating leads and driving traffic without worrying about your conversation rates, you’re probably throwing money down a rabbit hole.
5. The voice of the people is much stronger than the voice of the company. Your users, your buyers, your employees, and a whole bunch of other people all talk about you and your product. They also talk about their business challenges and other options. Much of this talking is being done online. For a technology company, participation in the online community is both an offensive strategy and a defensive one.

If you’re asking yourself why your marketing efforts aren’t generating enough sales (for ecommerce businesses) or sales opportunities (for offline businesses), take a look at your approach.

Are you relying on outbound campaigns like direct mail, telemarketing and non-search advertising at the cost of your online visibility? Is your website little more than an electronic brochure?

Time to make a change. Go where your prospects can find you. And that would be online.

What about you? What’s your biggest marketing challenge?

Technorati Tags: online marketing, technology marketing, software marketing, search marketing

Pay per Click advertising (PPC) makes it dangerously simple to waste a lot of money. I see it happening all the time. We could blame it on Google Adwords – which makes it deceptively easy to set up a PPC campaign and leads advertisers to believe that the whole thing is a cake walk. But, even many so-called pay per click pros are taking a very lazy approach to campaign management.

Effective PPC campaign management is time consuming – especially if you’re managing your own campaign. But lazy campaign management means money is being burned – your money.

Here then are the 6 most common ways to waste money with pay per click advertising. These are in no particular order.

6 Best Ways to Waste Money with Pay per Click Advertising.

1. Buy only a few, very broad keywords. There are two things wrong with this approach. The broader and more generic the keyword, the more diverse competition you will have and the less effective your ad will be. Also, searchers use an amazing number of different keyword phrases to find the same thing. They will also vary their keywords according to where they are in the buying process. You need to think of all the phrases your prospects might use to find a product like yours. This goes beyond simple keyword phrases such as “purchasing automation” or “software development”.
2. Run one ad at a time. Seemingly minor changes in a pay per click ad can make a significant difference in click-through rates. Search advertising networks such as Google Adwords make it a no-brainer to test ads against each other. This is the only way to know what works best.
3. Send click-through traffic to your homepage. Getting people to click on your ad is ultimately useless if you can’t get them to take whatever action you want them to take. An effective homepage has many jobs to perform and therefore can’t be perfectly optimized to convert your click-through traffic. Instead of sending click-through traffic to your homepage, send it a specialized landing page.
4. Set up one landing page and let it run. Just as with pay per click ads, it’s often easy to test different versions of a landing page to find out which one produces the most conversions. There is no way to know which landing page is most effective unless you test.
5. Put all of your keywords in a single category and show every searcher the same ads. One of the most important requirements to get searchers to click on your ad is relevance. Your ad must match what the searcher is looking for. The person who searches on “project management software” and the person who searches on “task management software” may ultimately buy the same application; but at the time of the search, they are in two very different frames of mind. By organizing your keywords into separate categories you can deliver ads that are relevant to each.
6. Let your campaign run on autopilot. Search advertising is very dynamic – other advertisers change their strategies; new competitors come and go; your prospects change their search habits. You have to stay on top of this. An effective pay per click campaign manager will monitor click-through and conversion rates and will consistently update your keyword list.

These are the money-wasting mistakes I see over and over again. What about you? If you have a favorite mistake, let us all know by posting a comment.

Technorati Tags: pay per click, ppc, traffic, conversion, technology marketing

Looking for an easy way to write pay per click ads that produce massive traffic to your website? Sorry. It’s going to take some thinking. I’ll give you basic guidelines, but to be truly persuasive you have to get inside the mind of the person you want to click on your ad.

Being persuasive in a four line ad means you don’t have room for any extra words. You don’t even have room for extra characters. You’ve got to get right to the heart of what the searcher wants to see.

Before you start writing your ad, ask yourself these questions:

1. Who is the person doing the search? What role do they play in purchasing your product – user, technical expert, economic buyer, champion?
2. Where are they in the buying process? Are they just becoming aware that they have a problem? Are they researching solutions? Are they looking for alternatives?
3. What do they want – general information, specific features, product comparisons, pricing?

Stay in this mode – thinking like your prospect would think – as you write your ad.

So, what are you going to say in your ad?

There are plenty of Adwords experts out there. One of the best known of these is Perry Marshall who recommends a simple formula for writing ads that get clicks. If you take the time to first figure out what your prospect wants, you’ll find that this formula works.

1. Whenever possible, use your major keyword(s) in the headline. This is so your ad will be in context with what the searcher is thinking. Pay-per-click makes this easy. You know what keyword phrase the searcher used because you’re bidding on it. Now repeat it back to her to show her that this is what she’s looking for.
2. Put a benefit in the second line. This should be what you’ve identified as the most likely thing people want to find when they’re searching on your keyword phrase.
3. Use a feature of what you’re offering in the third line.
4. The final line is the display URL. Believe it or not this URL can have a big effect on your click-through rate. But, Google has just made it harder to use creative display URLS. As of April 1, 2008, the display URL must match the landing page URL.
   Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re writing an ad for keywords “project management software”. Your first ad might look something like this:

Simple Project Management
Powerful software, easy to use.
See a demo and get a 30-day trial
www.myurl.com

Hold on. You’re not done – and this is how you get your best ads.

Will the example ad above work? Maybe. But maybe something else would work better. Adwords makes it very easy to test ads against each other. Sometimes subtle changes make a big difference. Sometimes you have to take a different approach.

Maybe the searcher is looking for a different benefit. You could try a second version like this:

Easy Project Management
Web-based tool uses any browser
See a demo and get a 30-day trial
www.myurl.com

You can run these ads against each other and find out which one gets the most clicks. Then drop the losing ad, write a 3rd ad and run it against the winner. Repeat. In fact, you should always be testing two ads against each other. That way you’ll keep building your traffic – and learning more about your prospects.

I’ve been looking at a lot of pay-per-click campaigns for new clients lately. Many of these clients are outsourcing management of their pay per click campaigns to agencies. I’m continuously surprised at how many of these agencies are not testing multiple versions of ads. If you’re outsourcing your campaign, don’t assume that the testing is being done. Better ask.

Have you tried testing ads? Does it work for you?

Technorati Tags: pay per click, adwords,   copywriting