Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

One of the most interesting things about marketing is that it constantly offers a multitude of choices and options. There’s never a lack of things to try or things to improve.

Sometimes that leads to paralysis. Marketers and business owners just don’t know what to do next.

But some decisions are really no-brainers. Here are three. I’ve mentioned these all many times before. But judging by the questions I get from clients, they’re worth repeating.

1. Fix your website

I’m not going to bore you with stats that I’ve already posted on this subject. Suffice it to say that you’re never going to achieve a high level of quality lead or traffic generation if your website is lame.

That fact is pretty obvious if you sell online. A bad site repels buyers. It may be less obvious to those of you who don’t sell online, but it’s equally true.

If you don’t believe your prospects are looking at your website think about your own buying habits. When was the last time you bought a complex or expensive product or service without taking a look at the company’s website?

That just doesn’t happen much these days. Your website is often the first – and last -  impression.

2. Get visible online.

Unless you’re one of very few companies that have a truly unique solution to a problem no one has thought of yet, your prospects are looking for you online. They’ll find your competitors with or without you. Which would you rather it be?

Personal referrals still top the list of the best lead generation sources for business-to-business products and services, but buyers also search. If nothing else, they’ll look for solutions to compare the referred product or service to. More likely they’ll be compiling a list of vendors to consider.

This means you need to be visible on search engines and websites where your prospects hang out. Otherwise you’re missing your best prospects – the ones who are actively seeking a solution.

3. Start with Google.

Achieving visibility on Google may be harder and more expensive than becoming visible on other search engines, but let’s face it – Google delivers the bulk of the traffic. Last April, Hitwise found that Google’s marketshare in US searches was 67%. Yahoo (at 20%), MSN Search (at 5.25%) and Ask.com (at 4%) – although not insignificant – trail far behind. Google’s dominance is even greater among business searchers.

Even if you can’t afford the click costs on Google, it’s the best testing ground because the heavier traffic allows you to figure out what works best faster.

So there you have it. Three marketing decisions you can make and act on without a lot of agonizing over whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

Technorati Tags: websites, seo, search engine, visibility, google, lead generation, traffic

Over on the Funnelholic blog, Craig Rosenburg has posted an interesting article called 3 Changes Marketers Must Make to Survive in this Post-Apocalyptic World.

There’s a wealth of information on this blog about holding marketing accountable and ensuring your programs deliver results. I won’t repeat it all here. But for smart marketers, it’s a great time to leap past your competitors.

Technorati Tags: economy, weak, down, poor, targeting, messaging, measuring, business-to-business marketing

If you’re going to consistently develop prospects into sales-ready leads or customers, you’ll need a good marketing database. Even if you have a relatively small number of prospects, the cost of an online system to manage data and communications is so low (as in “free”) you’d have a hard time convincing me it isn’t worth it.

Why do you need a database? Organization really. A marketing database lets you:

• Segment and customize correspondence. In a complex buying situation – which business technology usually is – your prospects are not all on the same page. You need to know where each one is. With a marketing database, you can track where each prospect is in the buying process.
• Store and easily access records of previous communication. This can keep you from a) looking like an idiot because you can’t remember the last correspondence you had with the prospect or b) annoying the prospect with too much communication. (Newsletters; emails; phone calls. All in the same day. Jeez.)
• Avoid dropping prospects into a black hole. Make it clear who “owns” a lead at any point in time. Is it marketing’s or sales’ responsibility to follow up?
• Reduce administrative costs. Once it’s set up properly, a marketing database is simply a faster and more efficient way to organize your prospects than an admin and an Excel spreadsheet.
• Create visibility into the lead nurturing process. Nothing like the boss looking into the pipeline to keep marketing people focused.

Ideally, your marketing database and your sales database are shared. All of the correspondence notes on a contact are in one place. This contact history helps both marketing and sales people select the next communication tactic.

Unfortunately, most salesforce automation software (CRMs) are very lite on marketing management capabilities – although they are improving. Still, a CRM is a good place to start. I’ll take a look at marketing automation software in a future article.

What information goes in the marketing database?

This requires some thought. You’ll want your database to contain the attributes that are specific to your ideal prospect. The perfect database contains all the data you’ll actually use and nothing more.

Conveniently, much of what you’d put in a marketing database is the same as what you may already have in a sales database. You’ll definitely want to include the following general information:

• Company name
• Contacts & titles
• Address
• Telephone & fax numbers
• Email address
• Phone number
• Website URL
• You’ll also want specific demographic information such as:

o Company revenue
o Number of employees
o Industry
o Type of business
o Any other factors that help determine the prospect’s specific needs relative to what you’re selling.

Other helpful marketing information:

• Status – where is the lead in the marketing/ buying process? Status includes what actions the prospect has taken (accessed a whitepaper, attended a webinar, downloaded a product trial). It might also include lead ranking criteria (also a subject for another article).
• Activity history – what communication and contact has taken place with this prospect
• Lead source – how did this prospect find you?

Making it work

Our clients universally struggle with keeping a clean, up-to-date database. It’s boring and tedious. But business people tend to move around a lot. They change jobs and a new person comes in. They get a promotion. The company gets acquired and everyone’s email address changes.

You can avoid wasting time and money trying to communicate with prospects who have moved on by keeping your database up to date. Depending on how many prospects you have, you might be able to assign database maintenance as a part time responsibility or you may need to hire someone full time for it.

You’ll may also have to require that marketing and sales people use the database. Sales people in particular often resist this. I believe that’s because most CRMs are set up to make “management” easier and necessarily to make “selling” any easier. You can avoid this by including both sales and marketing teams in the development of the database as well as the entire marketing system.

This article got a little longer than usual so let me summarize. The important points of this article are:

1. You need a marketing database.
2. Everyone must use it.
3. Someone must be in charge of updating and maintaining it or the information will soon become junk.

Did you miss the first article in this series about Designing a Lead Nurturing System? If so, you can read it here: Designing a Lead Nurturing System: Part 1.

Technorati Tags: marketing system, technology marketing, lead nurturing, lead development, marketing database

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

You may think the subject of this post – the importance of aligning sales and marketing teams – is pretty obvious. After all, marketing and sales are vital parts of the same process. Cooperation should be automatic.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the case in most business technology companies. Instead, sales and marketing are two siloed functions, with differing outlooks and generally employing two very different types of people that are often at odds with each other.

And this leads to a major disconnect that makes both marketing and sales efforts far less effective – which can cost you boatloads of money.

Marketing and sales disconnects hit your bottom line in several wasteful ways. The worst, in my opinion, is burned leads. There is agreement among a variety of sources that sales teams in general fail to follow up on 80% of the leads provided to them by marketing. 80%! Imagine what that does to your conversion rate.

You can eliminate or avoid that problem right now by sitting your sales and marketing people down together and coming up with a single, agreed upon definition of a sales-ready lead. That means identifying the qualities a lead must possess before marketing passes it on to sales. Make a check list that marketing follows and get a commitment from the sales team that they will follow up on every lead that passes the test.

But burned leads aren’t the only bad effects of a marketing and sales disconnection. Marketing people today are often pretty far removed from actual customer interaction. Sales people are a valuable source of understanding buyers’ issues – which is critical for creating effective marketing programs. So why don’t they talk more?

If yours is an ecommerce firm without a sales force – and you’re still reading – there’s a message for you here too. Business technology purchases are complex – with or without a sales team. Buyers have a jillion questions that you (or your website) must address. Your marketing people alone are not the best source of understanding those questions. Call on your customer service, technical support and any other customer-facing groups for input.

This article is the last in a series of posts about the fundamentals of technology marketing. Some might argue that I haven’t covered ALL of the fundamentals of marketing, and they’re probably right. But I assure you that if you follow all five of my fundamentals, you’ll go a long way toward beating the pants off your competition.

If you have other “fundamentals” you consider necessary, share them with us in the comments box.

If you missed the other four in the series, you can read about them here:

#1: Create Sales Opportunities

#2: Marketing is a Process

#3: Mine the Gold in The Middle of the Funnel

#4: Make Marketing Accountable

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, sales and marketing alignment, leads, buying process

Not too long ago, marketing practitioners had everyone convinced that marketing was not measurable. Marketing specialists, execs and experts felt no pressure to prove their “magic” worked.

Those days are gone, and the people who are in charge of spending your marketing investment should be able to show you solid results or at minimum show you they’re working on figuring out how to measure it.

To be fair, some aspects of technology marketing really are hard to measure – and those are exactly the tactics and programs I suggest you avoid.

Sometimes marketing efforts take a while to show results. Until then, you can measure activity just to be sure things are really getting done.

Successful marketing programs have quantifiable objectives; and, if you read this blog with any regularity, it won’t surprise you to read that I believe marketing objectives should be based on revenue goals.  For more information on setting sales-based marketing goals, take a look at How Many Leads Do You Need?

We have repeatedly found that establishing clear and measurable marketing objectives does wonders to focus everyone’s thinking and actions. Often within weeks of establishing these objectives, our clients see the number and quality of inbound leads increasing.

What kinds of things can you hold marketing accountable for?

Traffic generation, inquiry generation, and lead conversion rates for starters. Software trials, online demos, webinar attendance, press and blog coverage are also predictable and measurable. There’s a nearly unlimited number of things you can measure. So much so that I also caution you not to go overboard.

Start slow and measure only things that have a direct effect on sales and only things that you intend to do something about. But set real objectives for every marketing program you undertake and stay on top of it.

Going back to Tech Marketing Fundamental #1, if you focus your marketing efforts on creating sales opportunities you’ll find yourself utilizing direct response marketing methods. This means that each of your marketing programs will have a specific call to action – and therefore a measurable result.

The bottom line is, successful marketing requires that you know what’s working and what isn’t.

What are you measuring?

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, marketing objectives, marketing accountability, marketing measurement

Here’s a fact that sometimes surprises our new clients, but it proves to be true over and over again. 75% (or more) of your best prospects are not ready to buy right now. 25% aren’t even ready to give you the time of day. Many of the people who visit your website or inquire about your product or service will eventually buy from someone, but it won’t be you unless you keep nurturing the relationship.

Marketers often use the image of a funnel with lots of traffic and prospects pouring into the wide mouth at the top and a smaller number of customers exiting the narrow opening at the bottom.

Business technology marketers tend to focus on the top of the marketing funnel – driving more traffic to the website, for example, and the bottom of the funnel – closing the sale. If prospects aren’t ready to buy right now, they are abandoned. Sometimes they’re never even identified in the first place.

But that’s where the gold is. And the purpose of this article is to remind you of that.

The typical conversion path for an ecommerce company’s prospects differs from the conversion path for a company in a complex sale situation, but the two have much in common.

You have to engage prospects at various stages of the buying process and nurture or develop them into customers. Not everyone is ready to reach for a credit card or speak to your sales team or even give you their contact information. This doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable to you.

Take a look at your marketing process. I’ll bet you know what you’re doing to generate traffic or inquiries. And you know what you’re doing to close sales. But what are you doing between the two?

This post is part of a series of articles looking at the fundamental principles of successful technology marketing. If you missed the previous articles you can catch up here:

Technology Marketing Fundamentals. Your Best Competitive Advantage.

Technology Marketing Fundamental #2: Marketing is a Process.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, conversion, lead generation, traffic generation

Have you ever invested in a trade show, run a search ad campaign, sent out a news release, or any of a number of other marketing tactics and not been able to point to any leads or sales that resulted from these efforts?  You’re not alone.

One of the most common mistakes in marketing business technology products and services is acting as if a single tactic will immediately deliver a ton of hot leads to the sales force. Unless you’re selling an impulse item, no single marketing program is going to motivate a prospect to buy.

There are two reasons for this.

One, in conventional marketing – which Seth Godin coined interruption marketing – it takes repeated exposure to your message before that message registers with the prospect. Research indicates that today’s buyer must be exposed to your company anywhere from 3 to 9 or more times before he or she even becomes consciously aware of you.

This is one of the beautiful things about search marketing. These prospects are actually looking for you, so the 3-to-9 exposure rule doesn’t swing as much weight.

However, using search marketing tactics doesn’t eliminate the second reason why one-shot marketing efforts don’t deliver leads. That’s because the business technology buying process is much too complex for that.

In general, your prospects are going to pass through 4 or more phases in the journey toward buying your product or service. Here’s a typical pattern:

• Blissfully Unaware. The prospect isn’t really a prospect yet because he or she doesn’t even know a problem exists. Let’s say an in house website development and management team has been functioning just fine with excel spreadsheets and Outlook reminders. Until one day they get a new assignment – completely overhaul the website in a very short time frame and involving team members from across the country.
• Problem Acknowledged. Said web team realizes the spreadsheet approach isn’t going to get them where they’re going, so they assess their needs and begin to look at what types of solutions are available.
• Develop vendor list. The team conducts online research, asks for input from peers and colleagues and creates a long list of available project management software solutions.
• More research, different questions, product are tried, and in more complex cases, vendors are invited in for presentations.
• Vendor or product selected and where appropriate negotiations ensue.

Successful business technology marketing programs take advantage of a vast array of tools and integrate them to attract the interest of prospects and engage in a mutually beneficial relationship that leads ultimately toward a relationship.

Reactive, one-shot marketing programs rarely deliver much in the way of sales. On the other hand, an integrated marketing effort can double, triple, even quadruple the results of your efforts without costing you an extra dime.

Marketing is a multi-step process that requires patience and consistency. Resist the temptation to spend all your resources on a single activity.

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

This week I’m going to write about the fundamentals of technology marketing. Hey. It may sound boring but it’s a great competitive advantage. If you pay attention to the fundamentals, you’ll waste less money.

I’ve been thinking about this topic since Leonard Wadewitz of CompTIA University asked me to update one of our special marketing reports as an article for their soon-to-be-launched newsletter. He thinks the message is one his audience of information technology resellers will find valuable.

While I was looking at the report – called 5 Fundamental Strategies of Successful B2B Marketing Investment written about a year ago –I realized it’s been too long since I’ve covered these factors here. So, here we go.

Here’s the first of those fundamentals.

Marketing’s job is to create sales opportunities. Said another way, marketing’s job is to make people want to do business with your company.

When you read that in a sentence it seems pretty obvious. Marketing should 1) generate traffic or inquiries, or 2) convert that traffic or inquiries into leads or customers.

But either it’s easier to forget this concept than one would imagine or it’s harder to understand. I know that because I see far too many technology company CEOs and marketing specialists struggling with marketing resource allocation decisions that really should be no-brainers.

Some examples of marketing that doesn’t help sales are pretty obvious.

• Image (or brand) adverting with no clear, compelling call to action and no designated spot in the marketing and sales process.
• Slick, multi-color corporate brochures that end up in boxes in the storage room.
• Flash animation on a website homepage.

There are also other, less obvious, ways to waste marketing funds by buying things that don’t contribute to sales. Anytime you spend money on a single marketing tactic – a trade show, an email campaign, a blog, for example – without identifying a measurable link to sales, you run the risk of dumping money into a black hole. (More on this tomorrow.)

Before you spend a dollar on another marketing program – or your first marketing program – ask yourself or your marketing people a simple question: How will this contribute to sales?

If you don’t get a good answer, close your wallet.

Disagree? Let’s hear it.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, sales, advertising, flash, marketing collateral