Author: Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization.

Marketing Attribution – Worth the Effort?

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Challenge: Considering the Challenges of Marketing Attribution, How Deep Should You Go?

Marketing attribution is a hot topic. You need to know which programs are worth the effort and expense and marketing must demonstrate its contribution to revenue. In fact, both marketing and sales must both carefully plan and measure their unique contributions to more accurately predict revenue.

However, Sergio Maldonado’s recent guest post on Scott Brinker’s Chief Martec blog raised some very important questions about the veracity of marketing attribution. The article challenging various aspects of marketing attribution is timely and worth a careful read. It also caused me to re-evaluate my ongoing efforts to focus on attribution.

The journey starts with developing a standardized way to tag Leads, Contacts and Opportunities to marketing campaigns, followed by a methodology to differentiate sales from marketing contribution (as well as sourced versus influenced). Adding various program costs and labor investment to the formula provides a more complete picture. However, this tells just part of the story as it analyzes attribution from first ‘form conversion’ to closed deal, without consideration for pre-conversion activities.

Tracking and attributing the activity of all stakeholders before form conversion is more difficult. Furthermore, attribution-to-revenue calculations only provide results for Contacts associated with a closed-won Opportunity, whereas other Leads and Contacts not associated often influence the deal. Therefore, this methodology ignores Leads and Contacts that influence but are not associated with the opportunity as well as all awareness phase marketing touchpoints that positively affected the opportunity.

By focusing only on campaigns with direct attribution, marketing may erroneously optimize for those programs only – at the expense of awareness and early stage funnel activities where attribution is much more difficult. The resulting focus on ‘directly attributable campaigns’ that occur at or after the first form conversion can easily result in a decreased ‘share of voice’ and ignore important early stage touch points. Often, sales prospects are unaware they have a problem or they’re unfamiliar with solutions better suited to their challenge. Awareness programs focusing on the earliest stages of the sales cycle are key to growing sales in the long run.

So if strict adherence to attribution metrics will lead to sub-optimal marketing resource allocation, should marketing invest time and resources in it? Unequivocally yes. At the highest level, Lord Kelvin was right when he said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.” The attribution process is not at fault here (though it can and will certainly improve), rather the issue is how this data is used to make marketing investment decisions. Even though early stage program investments are not measurable in the same way that later stage programs are, they remain an important part of the marketing mix. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the marketing team to explain and defend these ‘awareness’ investments for the long-term health of the organization. The marketing team should also look for important correlations to justify these programs (correlations of direct/organic traffic with various programs, for instance).

In my opinion, marketing must continue to pursue attribution while keeping in mind the limitations of the current systems. Marketing investments should be made recognizing that the team cannot measure all aspects of the marketing mix, and more importantly, additional attribution effort investments should be made with an eye on overall effectiveness. While imperfect, I am reminded of the saying, ‘Even one candle sheds a lot of light in a dark room.’ Without attribution, marketing has no guidance about future investments.  But at the same time, marketing programs with impacts that are difficult to measure must not be ignored.

[Important note: Management should also look at the costs and benefits of the attribution process itself to ensure it is worth the effort. Tracking every last ounce of attribution adds significantly in terms of labor and cost, and at some point, these programs reach diminishing marginal returns. How a marketing team should optimize its spend on marketing attribution is a discussion for another time.]

Lesson: Spending time and resources on marketing attribution is critical, but it is just as crucial to realize program and system limitations to make truly optimized investment decisions.

 

Your Message has Left the Building

Challenge: Ten years ago, companies controlled almost all of their messaging because there were so few additional or alternative channels from which the general public could gather information to form an opinion.  Social networks didn’t exist and media outlets controlled the majority of the print and online content (outside of comments, editorials, and letters to the editor sections).  With the popularity of social networks, readers today share their own product reviews, seek out opinions, post personal blogs, and comment on articles that draw numerous additional links, references and likes. As a result, customers are engaging peers first to learn about new solutions, read reviews, and evaluate products.

Forrester estimates between 66% and 90% of the customer journey is completed before ever even engaging with the vendor.  If customers get most of the way through the sales process without engaging the vendor, do vendors really control their message? It is the leading advocates on social networks who control much of the early stage buying experience.  So what’s a company to do?

Customers are continuously evaluating your product and sharing their thoughts on the web. They have more information earlier in the sales process. Consider Amazon.  It is a great ecommerce site that also makes it easy for shoppers to look at reviews in support of making a purchase, which is crucial in the customer buying process. In the enterprise space, there are IT communities dedicated to sharing reviews with colleagues, such as Spiceworks and IT Toolbox with millions of members. There are also LinkedIn groups and well-informed bloggers who focus solely on these topics. With the abundance of well-researched, end-user generated content, it is no surprise that the majority of the customer journey happens before customers engage with your website.

So what is a company to do to control the message its customers and prospects get? Employ active social listening to hear what is being said about products and services. Think of this as continuous customer engagement: Engaging with customers before, during and after they purchase your products. In many ways, this is back to the basics of developing products customer really want by carefully listening to their needs and desires.  (See my post on developing a customer persona.) As you review this straightforward and truthful, often in-your-face customer feedback, look for the common themes, words, and phrases.  The comments that keep rising to the top most often are those that customers value most from your product or service. This is gold and should be a core part of your outbound messaging.

Does your outbound messaging need to match this precisely?  Certainly not.  Your messaging should lead your customers from your current product offering to your planned product direction. However, by leveraging the same words and phrases your customer’s use in your outbound messaging creates a virtuous cycle in which what customers hear from you is what they they later experience with your product. This alignment propels and extends your activities. It also fortifies your brand by delivering on your promises.

Lesson: Messaging alignment between what your customers are saying about you and what you are saying about your own products creates a virtuous messaging cycle and builds brand trust and authenticity.

Know Thy Customer Persona

Challenge: Drive inbound leads with content focused on your target customer? Of course. But what does it mean to really know your target customer?

At the heart of every marketing organization is the knowledge of the target buyer.  But what does it mean to really understand your customer buyer persona?  Certainly this includes demographics like age, income, and education.  We can add in firmographics like industry, company size and location.  Is this what we need?  Well, it’s a good start but far from complete.

Building detailed customer persona’s for all of the buyers and influencers in your product’s purchase process is an essential starting point.  Your organization needs to spend time and effort here developing a detailed profile for each role.  This profile should include:

  • A ‘day in their life’
  • Their fears, frustrations and aspirations
  • The ‘customers’ they serve inside their organization
  • How they are evaluated by their boss
  • What they find funny
  • Their office and work environment
  • Their biggest challenges
  • What they do outside the office

One way to think about this is to understand the persona of your target buyer to a depth where you could purchase the perfect gift for them.  By understanding their daily challenges, work environment, current methods of operation and more, then you can correctly create content that they will find interesting and relevant. Your materials need to be helpful, funny, interesting, interesting, thought provoking, etc..  With a detailed persona, you can demonstrate you truly understand their needs through the materials you create.  Therefore you earn the right to be read and have an ongoing conversation with your buyer – online, via email, in print and more.

In my experience, I have been targeting the IT professional.  This person is:

  • Generally male
  • Technically astute
  • Generally less socially outgoing
  • Enjoys finding clever and simple solutions to complex problems
  • Completely out of time dealing with break-fix items
  • Frustrated by end users who can’t his systems correctly
  • Would rather experiment with a new technology than engage with people to answer his questions
  • Enjoys gaming and science fiction (Star Wars, Dr. Who, etc..)

How do you get this information?  Take every opportunity to get on the phone or get in front of customers to learn more about them.  Review materials created by other vendors targeting this market.  Participate in the social media channels where these customers search for information.  Survey your existing customer base.  Run contests to see what captures their interest.  Bring in focus groups of your customers to brief on your product direction and get feedback.

Now what?  Time to publish a detailed persona description internally and get your entire team up to speed on common definitions of your customer.  Create a poster with a picture and key details.  Build a short slide deck explaining key attributes of your persona’s with names and roles.  Educate all new employees on the persona’s you are targeting – so everyone is on the same page.  Test all new campaigns against the persona to ensure they are consistent.

Lesson: Know your destination before you leave.  Take the time to develop a detailed understanding of your customer persona’s and drive this through your organization to better focus and target your outbound programs.

Want to Improve Your Program Effectiveness by 10x?

Challenge: Companies promote their products and services via direct marketing, advertising, events and more – but still can’t achieve the impact they need. How about a 10x boost?

We are all bombarded with messages every day – online, offline and even when we are on the sidelines.  Therefore buyers have been desensitized to vendors claims – faster, better, cheaper and will even make you more attractive! First off – we make every attempt to ignore ads thrust at us: we skip ads with our DVR, we try to ignore banner ads on websites and we page quickly past print ads. When we want ‘real’ or ‘untainted’ advice, we look for online reviews by other users.  Amazon’s use of product reviews has completely transformed the buying process. We reach out to our social networks to find feedback from customers just like us. What is the value of a positive review? Huge. Just check out all the controversy about Yelp recommendations – because the reviews matter.

Depending on the study, analysts report that 70% or more of the purchase process is made before the buyer visits the vendor’s website. The dramatic rise of social media use by companies further explains this trend as they try to reach up further into the buying cycle. There are an increasing number of social groups for B2B as well.  Certainly LinkedIn has many groups targeted at various professions.  PracticeFusion and Spiceworks are focused social communities serving medical IT professionals. These are communities where professionals can get answers to their questions and read reviews of products.

In the end, any vendor claim is just that – a claim.  However a claim made by an actual user is trusted and valued.  Hence, in my math, vendor claims are worth one point and user claims are worth ten points.  While not scientific, I think we would all agree that real user feedback is the real deal.  So how do you facilitate and support these reviews, comments and posts?  You need customer advocates – customers who love your company and product so much that they are willing to spend time telling others.  The experience of using your product must be so compelling that they want to raise their own reputation by talking about it. The customer service and other support you provide around your product must surprise and exceed your customer expectations. Your customers need to think –  ‘Wow, that was great!’

So how do you give your customers this goose-bump moment? You need to open your company and your product up to your buyers by doing some or any of the following:

  • Give them free product or other recognition in return for product feedback
  • Be honest and humble when they give you candid feedback
  • Listen and respond to their input; more importantly update your product with their feedback
  • Show them you care – by giving them first access to your next product
  • When you stumble, acknowledge it and correct it
  • Make your product dramatically better than anything they have seen before

In sum, give them reasons to be so excited about your product or company that they want to share their experience. Help them reinforce their status as mavens in the community by giving them something new to share with the community.  Show your lead customers the respect they deserve.

Lesson: You post about your product – 1 point.  Your customer posts about your product – 10 points.  Find ways to create groups of advocates who will support and amplify your efforts.

Branding vs Lead Gen – Can’t we just get along?

Creating an Umbrella for both Branding and Lead Gen

Challenge: Corporate brand guidelines can often stifle tactical lead generation

Every company lives by driving revenue.  In the case of B2B technology companies, marketing ensures revenue results by driving the quality and quantity of the prospects in the pipeline in order for the sales organization to reach its sales targets.  Marketing provides the fuel with which the sales organization can meet and exceed business plan targets.

Many times brand guidelines can be seen (or enforced) in a way that limits pipeline creation.  This can take the form of narrowly interpreting brand principles that stifle advertising innovation or can limit more tactical/direct messaging that drives advertising response rates.  That said, the marketer needs to protect the brand and ensure that every outbound message reinforces key tenets and principles. Color palettes and visual IDs are frequently not the issue here. 

A formal messaging ladder that encompasses key product differentiation is what can really drive alignment.  Messaging needs to be detailed enough to enable the prospect to understand capabilities and differentiation while being consistent with higher level brand promises.  This can be challenging for large organizations with wide product portfolios,  where the messaging ladder also needs to be updated (sometimes frequently) to support the product portfolio.  There needs to be a clear set of messages that marketers can use to create and execute programs – while remaining brand compliant.  In the ideal scenario, the marketing group clearly understands the messaging platform and all creative is developed from the ground up in a way that is consistent with the overall brand. 

Scenarios where brand trumps demand generation must be avoided, and brand guidelines should be broad enough to support product and solution messaging that drive awareness, interest and consideration.  The purpose of the brand guidelines is to leverage messages over the long run and not limit pipeline in the short run. Brand should serve the needs of pipeline creation – while ensuring consistency of overall message, voice and visual structures and constructs. 

I am reminded about a time many years ago when my kids were little and they asked me what I did at work.  What is ‘marketing’ after all?  My answer at the time was, “marketing helps sales people sell.”  Focusing on brand purity at the expense of pipeline development seems to be putting the cart before the horse.  So brand guidelines need to provide a framework where demand generation can survive, grow and become increasingly effective.     

Lesson: Brand guidelines should serve product marketing and demand generation – not the other way around.

Drip Email Nurturing – Who Wants to be a Drip?

Challenge:  Drip email campaigns often are not customer responsive

It is common for marketers today to identify customers with common characteristics and drop them into a drip email program because it’s easy and can automate outreach to thousands of customers.  The drip campaign creative can be tightly tied to a product or specific value proposition.  However, all too often the process is something like this:  ‘Prospects with this criteria/engagement are ideal for this product so let’s drop them into the ABC drip series.’  On the surface, it sounds like good marketing: targeted list, customized messaging and marketing automation. 

However, this process neglects the fact that these prospects are not uniform in any way.  No matter how tightly we segment our lists, each prospect is truly unique.  In common practice, drip email campaigns are static, having a fixed number of messages at somewhat fixed intervals with fixed messaging.  Those that operate at a higher level have some activity-driven content to alter the messaging throughout the drip to more tightly align to the prospect, but this is as far as most drip programs have progressed.  However, with effort, we can aspire to much more targeted marketing.  Take Amazon, for example, where recommendations are made based on recent purchases and web visits.  I love Amazon because it is timely, relevant and easy to use.

What we need to strive for is something much more responsive.  We need to integrate a broader set of inputs to drive a more relevant set of messages for each prospect.  These other areas of input may include: last website visit date, website pages visited, other contacts at the same company visiting the website, organic/paid search terms, previous products purchased, industry, and more.  Unfortunately this creates more complexity for the marketer, but it creates a more relevant and timely set of messages for the prospect, which is far more important. Additionally, marketers should consider alternate outreach vehicles like a call or mailing. 

While the typical drip program is better than ‘spray and pray’ email marketing, the goal should reach higher.  Think of prospects who look forward to receiving email messages.  Imagine doubling open and click-through rates.  This can only happen with significant changes that make your messages much more relevant to your audience.  What this takes is monitoring key data elements available in your marketing automation system and leveraging these to send the right message with the right offer at the right time.  This is certainly a tough task – and one that will increase complexity over a static drip program.  However the result will be dramatically higher engagement levels.  

So drip nurturing can make the sending company look like a real ‘drip’! 

Lesson: Let’s strive to optimize our outbound programs by including a variety of inputs driven by the actions of the prospect to ensure timely and relevant contacts that move the relationship forward.

Freemium and Frictionless

Challenge:  While companies are chasing freemium and frictionless sales motions, they are missing the main point.

It’s clear that the freemium sales model, where prospects can download products for free, has taken off.  Successful companies like Dropbox are clear winners, but will this work for enterprise B2B marketers?  Well Box, Zendesk, Atlassian, Splunk and others prove that it certainly can.  It’s obviously a marketing model that works.  Prospects try a free version and upgrade to a more robust, paid version easily and seamlessly. This breathes life into ‘see-try-buy’ or frictionless sales models.  So is that all we need?  Freemium sales model is our salvation?

The challenge is that you can’t automate or accelerate a bad experience.  What is important to deliver is a positive and engaging customer experience, and it must be enticing very quickly.  Your prospect must be able to easily understand how to use your product and find it engaging right away.  If they need training or other have requirements to meet, you may be setting yourself up for disaster.  Your prospects will freely download your application only to be confused and wander off – not upgrading to the paid version.  In this outcome, you have just proven why yours is not the right solution.  Even if you convert a small portion of users, you’re building up a base of prospects who now ‘know’ that your solution is not the right one.

So you need to consider a few things as you pursue a freemium strategy.  First, do you have a process where your prospects will be highly successful in their free trial of your product?  If the product is not immediately intuitive and usable, can you provide supporting materials to make their usage successful?  Then, do you have a process either inside the product or as a separate communication path to help them explore your product and ensure a successful outcome?  Finally, what is your process to monitor usage and outcomes from your trial/free users?  How will you know if the process is working?  To quote Stephen Covey, “Start with the end in mind,” or in this case, start with a plan to measure success.  This may be tracking trial usage, getting usage surveys, measuring conversion rates and more.

Strangely enough, your path down a freemium model may start with improving or adding components to the product itself.  A more fool-proof usage process will drive greater success.   Constant learning and adjustment will yield great results and hopefully drive that hockey-stick growth curve we all seek.

Lesson: Charity starts at home.  Give a hard look at your product before chasing a freemium model.

Money for Nothing and Leads for Free

Challenge: Turn your customers into your best lead generators.   

Salespeople have very short memories.  Certainly the old adage, “what have you done for me lately” springs to mind.  Unfortunately, lead generation programs often have diminishing marginal returns – meaning that as you look to drive more leads, often the conversion rate to sales will drop.  So just driving more leads will not necessarily drive profitable growth.  So what is a marketer to do?

No one can better advocate for you than your customers.  Leveraging your customers to speak to your prospects is an ideal way to drive new leads.  Current customers understand the challenges prospective customers face and exactly how your solution can address their needs.  The materials coming from your company are ‘discounted’ in terms of their value.  Prospects come to your website for data sheets, demonstrations, solutions and even customer case studies and videos.  However, even case studies sometimes feel ‘produced’ by your organization.  Prospective customers are looking for ‘the real story’ about your organization, and they’d rather get it from other customers.  But how can you systematically gather the details about your current customers in terms of their deployment, usage and benefits?  You need information like industry, geography, use case, competitive comparisons, deployment, integration, value realized and other key dimensions related to your outbound and inbound marketing. 

Gathering data is the first step, and encouraging specific groups of customers to take certain actions on your behalf is the second step.  Both are challenging tasks, especially the latter because these customers are busy and have many other things to do BEFORE helping you!  The solution – make it fun and competitive.  There is a new social media tool that encourages your customers to become advocates – it is called Influitive (www.influitive.com).  This tool uses gamification to make it fun AND easy to be an advocate for your company.  The concept of gamification (gam(e) +‎ -ification) is hot (http://gamification.org/) in B2B marketing.  With Influitive, you create challenges for your customers and reward them with points as they meet those challenges.  For instance, you might reward them for Liking you on Facebook, re-tweeting one of your posts, commenting on a blog post, serving as a customer reference, taking a customer reference sales call, or any number of other actions.  Your customers can use these points for value added items like training, time with executive staff, access to a product roadmap presentation, company apparel or any number of other items.  You’re limited only by your creativity!

The result?  You’re able to create your own competitive environment for customer advocates to earn points by advocating for your company and its solutions.  You turn your best and most loyal customers into an extension of your marketing team.  They can take natural steps and actions that fit within their interest and ability.  This product is currently in beta – so stay tuned to see more developments.

Lesson: Leverage your most valuable asset – your customers – to drive new prospects!