This is a great albeit crowded graphic of the marketing technology landscape put out by the smart folks at Luma Partners. Innovation is happening rapidly in the on-line marketing world and there are lots (and lots) of technology choices to support you strategy and processes. Let me reinforce that point – use technology to support your strategy and processes. This means having them in place prior to wading into the world of marketing technology.
Having been a VP Marketing/CMO in a variety of companies over the past 10 years, I understand both the priorities and pressures the marketing department faces. Build awareness, drive the sales funnel, demonstrate ROI, properly package and position the company/product. Starting with technology will only confuse the situation so understand what you are trying to do (the outcome) then choose the technology that supports you getting there.
We, of course, are excited to be on this landscape in the marketing automation category and, with our Nearstream offering, cover social marketing management needs laid out here.
“Social selling” is getting quite a bit of coverage and discussion these days and I suppose this blog post is evidence of that. Sales (and marketing for that matter) have always been social disciplines because they involve interacting with other people directly and in a meaningful way. The presence of technology in the mix is designed to make this human interaction more efficient for both buyer and seller as well as enhance the time together – not about replacing humans with machines.
So how do you implement a successful social selling program? Start with these three guidelines and you’ll be off to a great start.
1. Be helpful, answer questions
The great thing about social media is that it gives a voice to an individual that can be shared as they choose – to their social graph, to a group, or to the world. This creates a great opportunity to engage in a helpful and meaningful way when a question is broadcast or need identified. This is not the place for a sales pitch. If you can help answer the question or otherwise prove you are knowledgeable, then you are headed down the right path. The time for “the pitch” will unfold naturally and, in many cases, without you having to formally deliver it based on the prospects own research.
2. It’s all about timing
Social signals go stale fast. You should aim to respond in minutes if not hours. Wait for the weekly report and you are toast. Respond in a real-time format like Twitter days late and you are completely out of context. Q&A sites like Quora are a bit more forgiving but always best to answer early rather than late. To do this, you have to either have a program in place to monitor these channels and act as they come up or use something like our Nearstream offering which is specifically designed to give you the most actionable social signals via Twitter with minimum effort (we’ll even send you a daily summary for you to act on).
3. This is just the beginning
Back to the point about sales and marketing always being social pursuits for this one. Rarely does one interaction lead to a sale and social is about beginning conversations that lead to meaningful relationships. Take the long view on social as a place to find and acquire customers and it will pay huge dividends. But, just as importantly, be vigilant to balance the time invested with the results you are generating. Steer clear of vanity metrics like followers, favorites, or likes as evidence of success. They are delivered at extremely low transaction cost and have very low meaning as it relates to true customer engagement.
If you run a recurring revenue business (SaaS, etc.) then this article by Jason Lemkin is well worth reading. He points out that the best leading indicator of sales pipeline performance is your Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) which measures your growth in qualified leads month over month. Jason knows a thing or two about this having been the co-founder & CEO of Echosign which is now part of Adobe Systems. Here’s a great quote that drives the point home:
“But there’s a better metric, your Key Metric, you should track and score yourself to, and hold your VP Marketing and marketing team to – Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR), your growth in qualified leads, measure month-over-month, every month. It’s real time, not lagging, and it clearly predicts your future revenues and growth. And it’s more important strategically than your revenue growth this month or this quarter.”
We had a great event last Friday covering best practices around social lead generation including an engagement framework plus some ground rules as well as a deep walk through of Nearstream and how it can be used to surface buying intent via social media. Interested in trying Nearstream? Click here and either Sign Up or enter your current LoopFuse credentials and you’ll step through the process to set up your first social campaign. We’re still in beta release with it so any and all feedback is welcome and wanted!
Please join us on Friday, February 8 at 2:00pm ET/11:00am PT for a discussion about how to use social media for lead generation.
Social media is a great place to begin conversations that can lead to meaningful customer relationships. The challenge is to engage with the right person at the right time with the right message.
We’ll be covering best practices for social customer engagement and how to use our Nearstream capabilities to identify, score, and respond to buying intent in social media.
Marketing is changing both in terms of the technologies available to reach a target audience as well as the expectations that audience has on how they are marketed and sold to. That said, there are some things that have remained the same from the beginning of commerce. Focus on things like the customer’s needs, your reputation, delivering a quality product/service, and reaching your target customer in the most cost effective way.
Online marketing tactics like websites, social media, videos, pay per click ads, search optimization all are important but are just a combination of methods of reaching your audience and optimizing how you do it. At the simplest level, it is not that much different than offline marketing activities like the location you choose for your business or where your booth is at a trade show. Can people reach it? Do you have capacity? Are you easy to find? How do you get people through the front door?
As pointed out in the Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations so keep that front and center as you approach your marketing activities. Real, authentic, and genuine goes much farther than stale, contrived, and gimmicky. For every successful on-line viral marketing campaign there are hundreds that go nowhere because sharing and popularity are more about people than technology. Don’t forget that there are real people on the other end of your marketing activities whether you are choosing to exhibit at a trade show or creating a new website. Keep the wants, interests, concerns, and questions of your potential customer front and center. Online vs. offline marketing options then just become tactical decisions about “how” you will reach this group. They are not ends in and of themselves, rather a means to the end.
Keep in mind that no matter what the “new, new thing” is in marketing that the basics of the marketing playbook remain the same. Want to launch a marketing campaign? Have an offer you want to share with an audience, craft a compelling reason for them to try it, and track who converts. The technology that drives this is a secondary consideration and, in some cases, the realm of agencies or consultants. Be cautious in using a complete outsourced mindset as often those professing expertise have a marginally better understanding than you do especially in new or emerging areas. There is both art and science to on-line marketing just like offline so be aware that there are no sure things in either case.
We are excited to announce that LoopFuse and Nearstream are merging into one company. Combining the two companies adds full featured marketing automation to innovative and unique social marketing capabilities.
Social media in many ways represents the greatest opportunity for true one-to-one prospect engagement and communication. Rather than a focus on quantity, social engagement is about personal connections and Nearstream provides the ability to surface the best opportunities for engagement in an efficient and timely way. Watch the quick video below to learn more about Nearstream:
We will continue to offer our marketing automation platform under the LoopFuse brand and will be adding an integrated offering going forward.
Nearstream is currently in a limited release beta and you can sign up to try it by clicking here. All of our current LoopFuse customers will be receiving details shortly on getting set up with their Nearstream accounts.
We are very excited about the future and our goal of making people better marketers. Great things ahead!
Robert Pease, CEO & Bradley Young, CTO
Below is the full press release:
Nearstream and LoopFuse Combine To Offer Next Generation Social Customer Engagement with Marketing Automation
New company offers marketing automation plus an innovative social engagement approach to identify sales opportunities based on buyer intent.
Seattle, WA, January 8, 2013 – LoopFuse, a cloud-based marketing automation software company, today announced that it has completed a merger with Nearstream, a provider of social engagement software. The combined company to be called Nearstream offers an integrated customer engagement and automated marketing platform spanning web, email, and social.
Nearstream uses social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to identify and engage based on buyer intent and LoopFuse provides marketing automation to manage sales prospects through the buying process – website visitor tracking, email lead nurturing, lead scoring, CRM integration, and conversion analysis. The combined products create a unique offering covering web, email, and social in a way that puts the buyer and their needs first and helps business better find, engage, and close sales opportunities.
“Social media is an increasingly important part of B2B marketing, ” said Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse. “Combining LoopFuse’s marketing automation platform with Nearstream’s social engagement capabilities gives marketers a true end-to-end marketing system for today and the future.”
“Nearstream helps companies better identify and engage with people based on their stated needs, ” said Robert Pease, CEO of Nearstream. “Bringing Nearstream’s ability to identify buyer intent via social signals together with LoopFuse’s automated marketing capabilities helps sales and marketing professionals better engage the right person at the right time with the right message.”
Nearstream is based in Seattle, Washington and LoopFuse operations will continue in Atlanta, Georgia with the products being offered under their respective brands with further integration planned. Robert Pease will lead the company as CEO along with CTO Bradley Young. LoopFuse CEO Sean Dwyer joins the Nearstream board of directors.
To learn more about LoopFuse or sign up for a free trial, please visit http://www.loopfuse.com
Nearstream is a B2B social lead generation product that identifies on-line demand signals. By applying intent detection, automated follow up, and analytics, companies are able to take advantage of social media to acquire new customers. Nearstream is a privately held company based in Seattle, WA. For more information, please visit http://www.nearstream.com
About LoopFuse, Inc.
LoopFuse offers a B2B marketing automation platform that tells you who is visiting your website, helps you capture their information, sends lead nurturing emails, scores the best opportunities, and integrates it all into your CRM system with advanced reporting. Once in place, you’ll see more qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, increased marketing and sales efficiency, and the automation of once manual and repetitive tasks. In short, we help you generate revenue faster. For more information on, please visit http://www.LoopFuse.com.
There are many different dimensions to the marketing discipline and no shortage of pundits who expound on the merits and complexities of brand, position, etc. but in reality, the only thing that matters about your marketing efforts are their impact on customer acquisition.
Regardless of the business you are in, you have some type of sales pipeline whether that is someone walking into your store and browsing around or someone entering a long and complex sales cycle to make a capital investment.
Marketing is often thought of as a cost center and, to a degree, it is a cost of doing business but the closer you can get to revenue generating activities and the better you are at connecting the dots between marketing activities and booked sales the better for you and your company.
Go and look at your last three new customers. Where did they come from? How did they find out about you? How long were they in your sales cycle? How and when did they touch your company either in person or via some on-line path (website, social group, etc.)?
Now take a look at your sales pipeline. How many opportunities are there? The sales pipeline is the focal point of the market-facing side of your organization. So, anyone in sales, marketing, customer care, product management, etc. should have access to this on a real-time basis and understand how won, lost, and stale opportunities impact their job and day-to-day activities. This forces a level of transparency that may make some uncomfortable as sales shares their ups and downs, marketing is held to account for their budget, and product sees the results of feature priorities but it will add a focused discipline to your company and the priorities of everyone on your team.
As a marketer, you need to be maniacally focused on the source of an opportunity. The source is the marketing activity that introduced the prospect to your company. This could be a simple web search in which case you need to know what they searched on to more proactive efforts like inside sales outreach. Regardless, knowing this is a critical component to measuring the return on any marketing activity. Where it gets more complex is understanding attribution. Attribution is sort of like putting a puzzle together to understand the activities taken to go from first contact (source) to becoming a customer. After that search, what did they do? Read a section of your website, request more information, or talk to someone?
Once you have this understanding, your job is to reproduce it at scale and cost effectively. Ultimately you are seeking a predictable, repeatable, and cost effective way to find, engage, and close new customers. That is the job of marketing and don’t forget it.
View marketing success through the sales pipeline.
[This is a guest post by Caffeine Performance Management, a LoopFuse partner & Calgary-based business development agency that helps B2B businesses by increasing pipeline velocity]
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever worked a trade show before that attendee behavior affects the quality of leads generated.
Ever been stuck in a dead-end corner?
How about next to a coffee area?
Exhibit Surveys published interesting data that showed, when combined with an average number of booths per show of 312, that the average amount of time per trade show attendee per exhibit is just under 2 minutes.
Meanwhile, the Center for Exhibition Industry Research notes that only 30% of firms collect detailed data from their visitors – with just under 2 minutes per visitor – is it any wonder why? Conversation quality will by necessity be low, and the expectation of collecting detailed demographics and purchase-cycle qualification data at he show is slim.
Realistic objectives are critical, supported by clear instructions to the exhibit team.
Trade-offs that might be considered include:
1. Speed of follow-up vs data thoroughness. Would you rather have your follow-up package delivered to your prospect, or detailed demographics and purchase-qualification data pre-entered for the convenience of your sales team? Data will be collected at some point in the future (pre-contract) anyway – is the busy show floor the best place to collect it? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Software is available to help you maximize this process at either stage.
2. Evaluating the use of the show management’s lead retrieval system could reduce ‘collection-pressure’ on booth staff, and free them up to ask the one, two, or three qualification questions that you’ve smartly designed, and trained your exhibit staff to ask of their visitors.
3. Beating the competition to the lead. CEIR’s data shows an average post-show follow-up time of 2 weeks. If your firm plans to collect business cards, transpose them manually into a CRM system, and still get fulfillment and follow-up information out the door to get onto the desk of your prospect before your competition, you must have a huge support staff. Challenge your system – look for efficiencies within existing processes – consider smartphone apps to move your data fulfillment to real time.
4. If the context of the show is viewed as ‘B2B speed dating’, the focus changes from ‘must-collect’ to ‘must-ask enough questions to develop a meaningful relationship with high-likelihood targets at a later date’. With effective exhibit-team training on your key-question set, you may just find that the shackles of the exhibit team are removed.
The Loopfuse platform provides an affordable, robust engine to assure follow-up from your trade show investment is timely. Additionally, the platform provides an excellent method to qualify your leads before turning them over to your sales team.
The infographic below outlines the average sales productivity from trade show attendance, and suggests ideas to maximize sales productivity from these event (click the image to download as a .pdf).
[This is cross-posted from Sam Stern's mHealth Marketer blog. Sam is Partner & Chief Strategist at Modallic, an mhealth marketing and communications firm, and a LoopFuse partner.]
In my last blog, I discussed how mHealth companies need to rethink the way they integrate marketing, information and technology. One way would be to develop a hybrid position called a chief marketing technologist. Some technology brands already have people in this type of position, although they may use different titles. But the idea is the same; the person would be technologically savvy, know his or her way around social media and its development and measurement, have knowledge of traditional, new and emerging marketing techniques and understand data collection, compilation and analysis to increase interactions with target audiences and generate leads and ultimately sales.
A chief marketing technologist today would face a vast amount of data availability (Big Data and Business Intelligence) that seems to be increasing exponentially, it seems, by the hour. New metrics, new platforms, new information aggregators, news feeds, social media management systems, and new ways of filtering, finding, collecting, measuring and responding to the data makes this job even more demanding.
As an mHealth marketing firm, we have explored much of the available software and platforms already, and can offer some tips to help ease the information overload mHealth brands face. Here are some things to consider:
1-Automate There are many automated marketing systems on the market, and new ones appear every time you turn around, so the best thing to do is try a few on for size (some offer a free or trial version). Do you want to automate your Twitter posts, your blog posts, your Facebook posts, view your press release impressions, your email blast opens or examine your overall online marketing efforts? There is a solution for all of that, but you must decide which one works best for you and your brand.
According to Sean Dwyer, president and CEO of LoopFuse, “Marketing Automation continues to gain traction among small- to medium-sized businesses, especially as they seek to engage more potential customers online.”
“Within such a dynamic marketplace,” he added, “cost and complexity are no longer barriers to adoption and allow any company to realize the clear benefits of marketing automation.”
But you still have to be on top of your marketing efforts every day.
2. Hire someone like a chief marketing technologist
If you can, find someone with all of the abilities mentioned above. Having some of your systems automated doesn’t mean much if there is no one to interpret that data for you! You’ll need to know why the statistics are what they are, and what that means, and then what to do about it. This is not a job for an intern. You’ll want someone who can take that data and create meaningful strategies from it.
According to a recent study of high-tech providers by Gartner, 72 percent of those companies already had a chief marketing technologist on staff, and 87 percent expect to have one in place by 2014. While these companies may be ahead of your average company, mHealth brands would be wise to consider these numbers carefully.
3. Be willing to try new technology and adopt new processes
Become more agile in your processes and look into the newest marketing technology before your competitors do and adapt quickly to these new opportunities. This is something marketers have to accept as technological advances outpace the ability to manage them. IBM published a study of chief marketing officers last year and 79 percent of them expect a high to very high level of complexity in marketing over the next five years. But only 48 percent felt they were prepared for that complexity.
Gone are the days of the 5-year structured marketing plans of the past. In today’s market it means marketers will need to develop agile processes that can be created and executed in weeks or days–not years–unlike the nicely laid out colored spreadsheets we’ve become used to. It also means mHealth firms will need to become even more specialized in order to stand out in the crowded mHealth field.
