Now more than ever content plays a dominant role in your marketing plan.  They key is not the quantity of content you produce but the quality and value to your target audience.  No, I don’t mean hire a copywriter to churn out 500 word blog posts on search term optimized topics. I mean make your content strategy central to your company and focus on both the creation and distribution of it.

Here a 3 tips for content marketing success that will get you pointed in the right direction:

1.  Put yourself in their shoes

Think about how you consume information these days then think about how and where your target audience will consume information.  Your goal is to be in those places.  If there is a blogger who is prominent, then reach out and get to know that person.  Fill them in on your company, product, and strategy.  Is there a news feed, posting board, email list, etc. that dominates the limited attention of your target audience?  Get on it as either contributor or sponsor.

2.  Don’t send marketing messages

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your content is all marketing copy.  If fact, make sure that the least amount of marketing copy finds its way into what you produce.  You are an expert at the problem you are solving for your customers so project that expertise.  Don’t tell people how great your product is or reinforce the feature/benefit matrix you labored over.  Tell them how to be more successful at their job, how to build skills that will increase their value, or provide insight that they can share with their peers.

3. Always Build Content

A spin on the ABC of selling made famous by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross for marketers.  You should always be thinking about building content and how the things you do as a company can be a source for that.  Do you have a unique way of running your business that is relevant to your target audience?  Write a blog post about it. Do you use your own product (I hope so)? Share your own tips and tricks as a customer.  Do your customers give you good feedback or advice? Share it.  Use the stage you have as a way to promote your customers.  The success of their business is based, in part, on them being your customer so give them center stage.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

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Marketing’s Expanding Complexity and Closer Role with Sales
Marketing has changed dramatically over the last 5 years, where prospects and customers need to be engaged on their terms with relevant content, engagement and respectful communication. Marketing’s role has also expanded and coexists more with sales than ever before, especially as 90% of all purchases are researched online and decision makers no longer want to talk to sales until they are 60-70% down the decision cycle.

The purchasing process has also changed significantly, and so must your ability to create and leverage your digital ‘assets’. Marketing must attract and move prospects much deeper into the funnel than ever before, intelligently monitoring and engaging them with easily accessible content and automating more self-service until they are ready to connect with sales or business development.

Missed Opportunity + Need for Funnel Management
The diagram below shows how a mix of digital and traditional marketing creates traffic to a company’s prime online asset, its ‘master’ website. Once the traffic has arrived (at the top of the sales and marketing funnel), today’s tools and techniques used to engage/capture/convert are limited and ineffective. The discipline of digital funnel management is foreign to most companies, but is essential to generate strong ROI from marketing investments. Generating 25%, 50% even 100+% more business from digital traffic is absolutely possible with intelligently placed content + innovative conversion tactics/tools (such as Loopfuse).

What Limitations with Today’s Online Conversion Strategies Do We Need to Overcome:

• Few attempt to engage visitors/prospects at all stages of the funnel. Engaging only at the bottom (ACTION step) of the funnel via a phone number and Contact Us form misses 80% of the opportunity to capture/nurture prospects until ready to close.
• Few automate the nurturing of prospects until they are qualified leads ready to be closed by sales, and most allow leads to slip through the net due to human mishandling.
• Few effectively enable access and distribution of marketing content at the right stage of the decision cycle.
• Most websites are ‘leaky’, losing prospects that would like to take a next step but are not ready to contact sales, and have no other available call to action or engagement step.

Create an “Engagement Zone”

One way to overcome these limitations is to create an “Engagement Zone’ that integrates content access, next steps, calls-to-action and marketing automation.  This zone is so much more than a ‘Contact Us’ form as it should include all the possible options for connecting with your company, with the prime intention of allowing a visitor to select a next step or piece of content that would enable them to identify themselves to you.  That is the lowest conversion stat of them all; 2-3% of websites earn the respect of a visitor so they identify themselves and become a contact.  Execute this effectively and a greater % of those contacts will be genuine and not mickey@mouse.com.

Rather than try to explain in words what an engagement zone is, take a look at a couple of examples out in the real world.  Click on the “Take Action Now” orange button at http://www.mikewittenstein.com/ and see an engagement zone appear.  There are 7 menu options which provide ways for a visitor to take a next step and educate themselves more.  Another example is at http://www.banyancapital.com where the zone is accessed via the ”Quick Info Access” green menu option.  This one has 8 options for a visitor to engage.  Tying marketing automation behind this type of  engagement and capture solution ultimately creates more business out of the bottom of the funnel.  It connects with visitors, prospects and leads no matter where they are in the funnel, as it can be designed to deliver content at the appropriate funnel stage. For example, you could have a menu option called “Competitive Benchmark” for someone evaluating your product(s) or service(s).

Once you have your engagement zone in place, take the next step which really can supercharge your contact and lead generation …. engage people from any digital location, placing links to your zone directly in content delivered via:

• Company Blog(s)
• Thought Leadership
• LinkedIn/Facebook
• Feeder/Community Sites
• Online Ads/Adwords
• Emails/Texts/QR Codes (e.g. add links back to the zone from inside emails for next steps or additional content)
• Links in Current Website (e.g. for a PDF download link on a product page, point back to the zone)
• Links Inside Collateral

An important point to note here … by bringing a visitor/prospect/customer into your zone, they are able to see other engagement options and may well connect in additional ways, increasing the acceleration down your funnel.

The idea of an engagement zone makes sense in many ways, so consider designing one for your organization, and let me know the improvement in your capture and conversion stats!

Regards to all,
Andy McCartney
andy@imccmarketing.com

Lean Startup Principles

When Eric Ries first pitched the idea of a Lean Startup in his September 2008 blog post, he listed three essential characteristics of current trends influencing the evolving landscape of startups. These characteristics include:

• The use of open source and free software
• Application of agile development methodologies that support creativity
• Rapid customer development

The underlying premise of the entire Lean Startup concept is the elimination of any waste during business development while decreasing the time it takes to deliver a product or service to the end user.

Customer Development Reduces Waste and Increases Efficiency

Based on the ideas presented by Eric, the answer to the question of when startup marketing needs to begin is simple – customer development and marketing is an integral part of the Lean Startup process. Entrepreneurs need to consider rapid-deployment marketing as part of their business development plan, and integrate the concept of customer development into all aspects of product development.

Customer Needs Drive Business

In his July 2010 blog, Daniel McKenzie discusses the concepts of Lean Startup, Design Thinking and Customer Development, focusing on the paradigm shift that has occurred among businesses that now focus on customer needs.

Daniel points out the similarities between these three business development concepts, and the common focus of integrating customer development into product development. He further discusses that the customer development method suggests that startups have two interdependent teams, one focused on customer development and the other on product development.

For entrepreneurs looking to follow the Lean Startup method of customer development, startup marketing begins on day one. A marketer is an essential part of the business plan, and hiring a startup marketer will lead to reduced waste and increased revenue by providing valuable customer research and recruitment to drive targeted product development.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

This is a guest post by Robert Pease who was most recently Vice President of Marketing for Seattle-based Gist, Inc. which was acquired by Research In Motion, Inc. in February 2011.  More on Robert can be found on his Reply To All blog or you can follow him on Twitter.

In order to grow a successful business, he explains,  test all assumptions with actual customers; otherwise, you may end up with a product and/or business strategy that simply doesn’t sell. This coincides with Hiten’s mantra for startup success: align product development, marketing, and sales right from the start.

To learn more, tune into the full interview, part of our “5 from 5″ video series.

Someone that knows a thing or two about marketing automation, having installed and trained some of the earliest implementation of said tools is Don Dalrymple, President of AscendWorks.  Beyond his deep knowledge of the inner workings of many marketing automation tools, Don is also extremely well versed in training marketing organizations to focus on the customer rather than the process.

Marcus: Don, to jump right into it, can you tell us about the common misconceptions or issues you sense that people have about marketing automation.

Don:   Sure.  Our team at Ascendworks are typically sought-out to implement campaigns for organizations that are just starting out with marketing automation or are looking to retool their existing ones.  Some of the problems that we typically face are that a lack of strategy or understanding how the specific steps in a marketing automation campaign affects the buyer.  We provide a lot of strategy and consulting around what the roadmap and decision tree and cycles are for those buyers.

Marcus: Where do you see that lack of strategy?  Is it a lack of understanding?  What’s the source of the problem?

Don: I think most organizations start from a fundamental difference.  Most organizations are asking, “How do I sell?” and that’s a very different approach from what we do at Ascendworks.  We’re asking, “Why does that person buy?”  So if you have something of value in the marketplace you will have a buyer, but thinking like the buyer is very difficult for most people.  Starting from that one single premise you’re able to make a different type of approach in how you’re going to do marketing and what you should be looking to automate.

Marcus:  What a great perspective.  You’re not trying to sell in the marketplace; you’re trying to locate your buyers.  You need to find the buyers and you need to engage with them and relate to them on their level.  Do you find parts of the organization struggle with this more than others?

Don:  The concept is missing because there’s a gap in the thinking between how the buying experience today works.  It’s completely different from ten years ago, even five years ago.  When a buyer starts thinking about purchasing something, they’re doing something way ahead of time.  They’re doing a lot of research and education and becoming aware.  Putting yourself in a buyer’s shoes; it’s something that I don’t think a marketer is adept at today.  Previously it was more of a numbers game.  They were used to sending out mass mailings or direct mail, contacting people in a very disconnected fashion, where marketing automation is causing a lot more intimacy and thinking through the various steps.

Marcus: So the marketing automation is martial aid for the marketing organizations of the world, or something like that.

Don: Yes, yes [laughs].

Marcus:  Do you find anyone to be resistant to this?  Anyone getting their heels dug in resisting change?

Don: I would say yes and no.  I think that because of the new economy and how it’s structured, buyers are in control.  As consumers, we have all the information we need to make a decision to buy anything we want.  We can Google it, right?  So the rules are completely changed for marketers.  They have to think through, “How do I nurture and convert somebody who is educating themselves and servicing themselves?”  I think that going into an organization and speaking to someone who is speaking in an old mindset and is not realizing that the game has changed- they are resistant.  Some of the old breed are not going to make it.  They don’t understand pain and they are disconnected from the buyer.  We can provide the roadmap to attracting and nurturing that buyer, but it’s up to the individual marketer to upgrade their approach and skill set.

Marcus:   Is this something you can really train people to do?  Can you teach someone how to grow relationships with their customers?

Don:   That’s a great question.  I think typically it really depends on the type of talent you’re dealing with.  I think inherently marketing automation is highly sophisticated.  It’s not something that’s simple, like a general marketing campaign.  You can have a junior level person running that.  It really takes someone who thinks like a strategist, executes, and is a technician as well.  I would use an analogy to mechanical engineering.  The whole space is dependent on the CAD/CAM systems.  They started at $30,000 at one point and you had to have a specialist, and then they moved down to $5,000 at one point, now you can get them for $1,000.  You still need an engineering background to be able to design, but it is way more accessible.  I would say marketing automation systems have the promise of changing the revenue opportunity dramatically but you do need a fighter pilot-type mentality, someone who is able to be fully committed and talented at thinking through the various parts of the buying cycle.

Marcus: Is this all wrapped into one person?  Do these skill sets need to be shared across a team?

Don: Possibly, but for us, we depend on a team.  Ours consists of various skill sets.  There’s a strong project management component, there’s an overarching decision and strategy that has to be driven, and then going down into the tactics, everything from graphic design to software development to analysts who can parse the data to systems integrators, they’re all a part of our team.  You could possibly have that in one person.  I know a few people who could do the whole job, but typically I see that being parsed out amongst a team.