Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

Web analytics show us that most people arrive at a website by clicking on a link somewhere – usually from a search engine – and not by typing in the URL. This is important for a couple of reasons:

1. It means that most visitors enter your site at some point other than your home page.
2. It presents an opportunity to improve conversion rates by paying attention to the “intent of the click” and optimizing the page to give visitors what they want.

It’s the second reason that I’m going to talk about in this article.

One of the best ways to waste a lot of money in marketing is to run a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign – or any online ad for that matter – and direct people straight to your home page. This is almost guaranteed to break your visitors’ thought process and either confuse or distract them into NOT doing what you want them to do.

Let me put it another way.

When someone clicks a link on a search engine, they have a very specific reason for doing it. Something in your ad or listing interested them. If the next page they see captures and continues that interest, they will do what you want them to do – whether it’s to download a whitepaper, subscribe to a newsletter or order your product.

On the other hand, if the next page the visitors see doesn’t show them exactly what they’re looking for they’re likely to go away.

Have you ever been looking for a specific product such as a new camera for example (because I recently did this)? You google “Canon PowerShot SD850 IS” and see a bunch of ads that say “Canon PowerShot Lowest Price” or the equivalent. You click on one, it takes you to the retailer’s home page listing every electronic product known to man and you would have to first find cameras and then find Canon and then find the PowerShot SD850.

Forget it. If you have anything like limited attention span of a normal human being, you’re going to hit the back arrow and go to the next site. This time you are taken directly to a Canon PowerShot SD850 IS page with a big BUY NOW button on it. Retailer #1 just paid for a useless click while retailer #2 got a sale.

The same thing happens with software, services and any other business-to-business product. Give them what they’re looking for and they’ll stick with you. Make it hard for them and you lose them.

Fortunately for us marketers it’s exquisitely easy to understand where the buyer is coming from and what he or she expects to see on the next page. You know what your ad says. It doesn’t take decades of marketing experience to figure out what the buyer wants to see next.

This is why it amazes me to that so many companies waste so much money sending potential buyers to irrelevant web pages.

If you’re running an online ad campaign, take a look at where your visitors are being directed. Changes are very good you can make a better connection.

Technorati Tags: web site, home page, landing page, conversion rate

Yesterday I wrote about two strategies for using marketing to increase sales – 1) increase inbound traffic or leads and 2) improve conversion rates.  (Actually I wrote about three strategies, but I’m not going to talk about adding products or services anymore. At least not here.)

The next question is: How do you know where to begin? Should you work on increasing traffic or improving conversion rates?

Start by taking a 30,000 foot view and answer these questions:

1. How many new leads or new website visitors are you currently generating from all of your marketing tactics combined?
2. How many active prospects do you have in your marketing system now? This may be the number of prospects in your marketing database or it may be the number of visitors moving through your website.
3. What percentage of inbound traffic or leads is being converted to a sale or a sales opportunity?

With the answers to these questions, you can assess the overall efficiency of your marketing efforts. Every business is different and it isn’t possible for me to tell you what these numbers should be without knowing more about your specific situation. You should be able to tell, though, if these numbers are way out of whack.

For example, let’s say new traffic or leads are funneling consistently into your marketing system, but few turn into sales or qualified leads to be passed to the sales team. Your prospect database is growing but your sales aren’t keeping up. You have a conversion problem. This needs to be fixed before you do anything else.

On the other hand, if your conversion rate is at an acceptable level but your number of active prospects isn’t growing, you’ll want to focus on improving your traffic or lead generation efforts.

Once your 30,000 foot view seems well-balanced, you can begin to focus on adding or improving individual tactics and specific conversion points. More about that in later posts.

One word of caution: pay close attention to your conversion rates. It’s easy to get excited about generating more leads or traffic, but it’s your ability to convert those prospects that makes the greatest difference. Don’t fall into the trap of driving leads or traffic into a faulty system. That’s just a waste of money.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, traffic, leads, conversion, sales

Marketing’s job is to help increase sales. That’s all. I’ve said this so many times & lived it so long, it surprises me to run across people who don’t get it. Understanding – and remembering – this admittedly simple concept can make a huge difference in the success of your marketing investment. And, of course, in your revenue.

There are three ways you can use marketing to increase revenue.

1. Increase traffic or leads.
2. Improve conversion rates.
3. Add products or services.

When you invest marketing dollars in traffic or lead generation your objective is to add more people to your marketing system by driving them to your website, capturing their contact information and permission to begin a marketing relationship, or – in some lucky cases – connecting them to a sales person.

Traffic and lead generation are where most technology companies tend to focus their marketing. This includes tactics such as pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, syndicating white papers, direct mail, email, telemarketing, trade shows & referral programs.

Traffic and leads are good, but what happens next is possibly even more important.

Conversion rates refer to how well you get people to do what you want them to do once they are in your marketing system. In a business technology purchase, there are many (sometimes MANY) conversion points where prospects decide whether to continue engaging with you or to bail. Improving conversion rates is often the easiest and least expensive way to increase sales opportunities – or sales – fast.

Conversion rate improvement can be as simple as directing pay-per-click traffic to a specialized landing page instead of to your home page. It can also be a more complex effort such as thoroughly understanding your customers – their needs, decision making style and buying process – and taking the time to make sure their questions are answered before they have to ask them.

Adding products or services is pretty obvious. The more need-filling products or services you have to offer to a customer, the higher your revenue. This is not my main area of expertise, so I’ll say no more.

So, there you have it. Your marketing efforts should be focused on either a) increasing traffic or leads, b) converting inbound traffic to sales or sales opportunities, or c) developing new products and services to offer to your customers.

Any of these will increase your sales, but none will do it alone.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, conversion, traffic, sales

As you know, technology marketing is a long-term endeavor. With complex sales and decisions-by-committee, it can take months — even years — to turn prospects into customers.

So why would you want to make the process even longer? Well, patience has its rewards, provided you effectively nurture each lead from the start.

Brian Carroll touched on this in an excellent post recently at B2B Lead Generation. The gist of his message was to buck the tradtional sales practice of waiting to talk with prospects until they’re ready to buy. Instead, establish a relationship with them before they’re considering to buy.

No sales pitches necessary at that point. Just friendly conversation to familiarize yourselves with each other and lay the groundwork to what may become a highly beneficial relationship for you both. It goes back to the “people buy from people” motto. No matter how superior your product or service, the final decision almost always comes down to trust and believeability.

Simple conversations can be a powerful marketing tactic. Provide your prospects with valuable, useful insights and information initially, and save the sales talk for later. When they view you as a trusted advisor, your messages will resonate. They’ll be much more receptive to you, and more likely to ignore the typical sales pitches from your competitors.

After all, lead nurturing is a lot like courtship. You didn’t propose on the first date, did you?

If you’re doing any kind of technology marketing, you probably have some pay-per-click advertising running. And you’re right to do it. PPC is one of the most effective, efficient and fastest growing ways to reach active buyers and drive traffic to your website.

However, it’s also pretty easy to screw up. The mistakes we see most consistently fall into one of two categories:

• Failure to think beyond the click-through.
• Failure to constantly measure, test and refine the program for better results.

To improve the outcome from your pay per click campaigns, first make sure you (or your agency) are at least doing the following:

1. Testing multiple ads. No matter how good your click-through rate (CTR) may be, it can almost always be better. It’s amazing how much the smallest, seemingly irrelevant, changes can improve CTR. Companies have commonly doubled their CTR just by changing a single word or capitalizing individual words in a URL.
2. Tracking your conversion rates. CTR tells you how well people respond to your ad. Conversion rate, however, tells you how many visitors do what you want them to do after they click on your ad. Without a good conversion rate, CTR is meaningless.
3. Sending click through traffic to a customized landing page – not to your home page or product page. This will increase your conversion rate substantially.
4. Exploring the widest possible list of key words. Use key word tools – such as Google Adwords, Wordtracker or Keyword Elite - to help you generate a long list of key words. You will never (trust me on this one) ever be able to think of all the terms your prospects will use to find you – no matter how many geniuses you include in a brainstorming session.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the actions you can take to enhance your PPC results. It’s a good place to begin, though.

And one more thing. Don’t assume just because you’ve outsourced your campaign to an agency or an individual that all of the above are being handled. Most of the mistakes I run across are being made by companies who are in the hands of so-called experts.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, pay per click, PPC

Some traditions — like baking Christmas cookies — should remain unchanged forever. In the ever-evolving world of technology marketing, however, tradition should be tweaked. Traditionally.

The common mindset among marketers is to build sales cycles that drive leads and compel prospects to purchase. But here’s the catch — marketers don’t drive the process. Our prospects are the ones behind the wheel. We can’t drive them to do anything. Our goal is getting them to include us during the ride.

Rather than push them through the sales funnel, think in terms of assisting them along the way in their buying process. And be buyer-specific. Each customer segment has a different set of problems to solve. As they research a solution, it’s essential to be there for them to help educate and guide them toward a decision.

Taking segmentation even further, it’s important to consider the multiple decision-makers involved in the complex, b-to-b buying process. Personalized techniques make the experience unique. By targeting each influencer, you also come across in a more people-friendly manner, rather than treating them as part of a generic buying segment.

Remember, the buying process is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace your efforts. Throughout the campaign, provide your prospects with a good mix of content and assets that will cover the entire spectrum. Each time your prospects are given new information, they gain greater knowledge and draw that much closer to a decision.

Once they believe you have the best solution to their problem, they’ll likely become your customer. Susan presented an outline to the buying process in a previous post entitled “Buying is a Process, and, Therefore so is Marketing” (Dec. 10). She’ll break down each stage in further detail in future postings.

Now, off to the store. I’ve studied and researched the new DLP technology for weeks, and my buying process is at the reward stage. Time for our family to celebrate the holidays with a new HDTV.

Merry Christmas to all.

“Studies have demonstrated that when a person can’t connect emotionally with whatever task he is undertaking, he will not be able to make a decision.” This is an observation made by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg in their terrific marketing book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark. (Highly recommended reading for any technology marketer.)

How do you connect with a business technology buyer’s emotions? By focusing your marketing copy on the benefits your product or service provides.

As the Eisenberg brothers say “benefits are based on people; features are based on things”.

It’s relatively easy to list your product’s features. It takes a little more thinking to translate those features into benefits for your prospects. But, if you aren’t willing to take the time to figure out the benefits, how can you expect your prospects to do it?

If they don’t understand the benefits, they’re not going to buy. It’s a simple as that.

There’s an age-old saying in marketing that people don’t buy 1/16 inch drill bits. They buy 1/16 inch holes. In the same way, people don’t buy reduced footprint electronic optical components. They buy the ability to cram more components in a smaller space.

So, don’t get lazy. List your features, but don’t stop there. Tell your prospects why they should care.

[tag]technology marketing, tatum marketings[/tags]

Interested in a quick way to both distract your sales people AND ensure that most of your best opportunities never get properly developed? It’s easy. Simply pass all inbound inquiries and new contacts directly to your sales force for follow up.

It’s startling how many technology marketing programs allow this to happen.

We know for a fact that as many as 80% or more of technology buyers first contact a vendor well in advance of wanting to talk with a sales person. It’s critical that your technology marketing process takes this into account and filters inbound leads and new contacts to separate the ready-to-buy from the just-getting-started.

Here’s one way to do it. Before you pass inquiries to the sales team, do the following:

1. Review the inquiries visually and delete or archive the obvious junk. In any lead generation campaign, you’ll get plenty of unintelligible and/or fake contact information that prospects humor themselves by submitting.
2. Identify any inquiries that are clearly not sales prospects. These may be students, competitors, suppliers, media, investors and any number of other people who have a reason to be interested in you other than possibly buying your product. You must follow up with these people, but you don’t need – or want – your sales force to do this.
3. Now, use telemarketing or inside sales support staff to follow up and determine readiness to talk with a sales person. Pass the sales-ready leads directly to sales and put the others into your lead development process.
4. You can also judge the potential sales-readiness of a prospect by paying attention to what the prospect responded to. Prospects who request a product demo or actually ask to be contacted obviously go directly to sales. Prospects who download a whitepaper are far less likely to be receptive to a sales call.

Some technology marketers filter out any contacts with free email accounts such as yahoo, hotmail or gmail. If you’re lucky, your competitors will be making this mistake. Research shows an increasing number of people using personal email accounts to receive and read business information. No need to ignore them.

Too many marketing programs consist of inquiry generation programs and nothing else. A small number of your inbound inquiries can make the leap from initial contact to serious sales discussion. But many, many more require the kind of on-going development that only a solid marketing process can provide.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, marketing process, lead generation

B-to-b marketers talk a lot about integrated marketing. In theory, their plans work quite well. But executing it effectively is another story. Too often, the integration is not done in accordance with how the customer is involved with information, and at what stage.

A recent study by technology publisher CMP bears this out.

First, some numbers: technology companies spend an average of 3% to 5% of revenue on marketing vs. 10% to 12% on sales. Yet, marketing departments are responsible for generating more than 60% of sales leads.

The pressure on marketers to fill the sales funnel and shorten sales cycles is real. Scott Vaughan, VP-marketing and research at CMP, said the key for marketers is to better integrate their content into IT managers’ work flow.

Tech b-to-b web sites consistently ranked highest among the most viewed sources of information, followed by tech b-to-b magazines and vendor web sites. IT buyers are seeking credible, actionable and useful information in their processes — which are different than the purchasing process. Vaughan defines it as “click-to-learn vs. click-to-buy.”

“Emails and telemarketing to death is not the way IT buyers consume information,” he added.

The more segmented your marketing plan, the better.”You can no longer make sweeping generalizations about how people make purchasing decisions anymore,” said Wes Durow, VP-enterprise strategy and marketing at Nortel Networks. “We need to look at integration through the lens of the buyer, not the marketer. If you don’t have a segmentation plan in place, you have a plan for bankruptcy.”

“Software vendors face rough economic waters in 2008” according to Richard Martin at InformationWeek. You can read the article to find out more about Richard’s prediction. I want to talk here about what that means – or should mean – for your marketing budget.

In tough economic times, one of the first “expenses” to get cut is the marketing budget. This is a rookie mistake – even though it’s often made by companies who should know better.

When sales get tight, the last thing you want to do is make it even harder to sell. When fewer companies are buying – or those that are buying are buying less – you need a) more prospects in your pipeline or b) an even greater effort to develop the prospects you already have or c) both.

And here’s the good part. It actually gets easier to do this because the marketers who aren’t as clever as you are have cut back on their marketing efforts. You’ve got less visible competition.

It’s not a no-brainer though. In tight economic times, it’s more important than ever to make sure your marketing process is as efficient and effective as it can possibly be. To be sure you’re prepared, ask yourself or your marketing people these questions:

1. Is our messaging on target? Are we addressing our prospect’s business needs? Is there anything more we can do to help them sell our product or services internally?
2. Do we know who we want to do business with? Are all of our demand generation tactics aimed at reaching our ideal prospects – and only our ideal prospects – as efficiently as possible?
3. Are we testing all elements of our campaigns to increase conversion rates?
4. Do we hand off good leads to the right sales people immediately?
5. Is our marketing process continuing to develop prospects who aren’t ready to buy yet? Are we helping move them through their buying process?
6. Are we grabbing any non-sales-ready leads from the sales force and putting them into our marketing system?
7. Do we have loose ends – stand-alone marketing efforts that aren’t going anywhere?

For the smart technology marketer, an economic downturn can actually provide real opportunities. You’ll find you can negotiate better media rates or get better positioning or otherwise make your dollars go farther.

You may find that your messaging needs to change. That prospects need more hand-holding. That some efforts can be cut without reducing results.

I’m not suggesting that you ignore a downturn in technology purchases. I’m suggesting that if and when it happens, the worst thing you can do is shut off your marketing and go into hiding. A smart technology marketer can turn an economic downturn into a real advantage.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, marketing process, marketing system