Archive for the ‘Customer Acquisition’ Category

Real-Time Reaction

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Think about how much you forget while surfing the internet. When you are learning about something new or searching for something you are not quite sure exists yet, you may navigate a multitude of pages until you hone in on your desired content.

If all the while you are entering and leaving storefronts, valuable content and building blocks of knowledge, you will likely forget more than you remember.  The sheer amount of information becomes irrelevant.  Very few sites are designed to engage and follow up with you.  They stop at creating awareness rather than create a process for you to engage or be nurtured with. (more…)

Unto Death Do Us Part (Go, No-Go)

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Or… at least until some critical thresholds have been exceeded (like leaving the seat up one too many times)!  Seriously though, opening a new market requires considerable time and energy and if you aren’t committed to getting yourself across the Dip, as Seth Godin defines, then your first steps are better laid in another direction.

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Look Before You Leap (Market Sustainability)

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Yes, there is a successful formula for transforming your approach to the marketplace by arming your marketing, social, and pr teams with a sales mindset that can give you unfair competitive advantage. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should be targeting all marketplaces.

Before you make that commitment you need to make sure the marketplace in question is financially viable. One of the first questions you need to answer is how big the proposed market for your offering is. Keep in mind this isn’t a mathematical proof you are trying to solve. You just need to develop a rough estimate that justifies the costs and time associated with targeting a new space.

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Size Doesn’t Always Matter (Market Size)

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

Just because a market is big does not mean it’s desirable.  When evaluating entering a new market it’s important to try and assess the space’s future prospects.  Clearly, there is a lot of masked complexity here.  What you really want to be looking for, however, is the obvious problems.

Technology innovation is often a predictive indicator.  From typewriters to answering machines, or floppy disks to CD’s there are countless markets that have faded away due to technology.  You need to ask yourself if the market is going the way of the dinosaur.

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Getting to Know You… Digitally (Online Research)

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

When you are fairly unfamiliar with your new target segment one mandatory step is to begin an online research program.  In our ubiquitously digital world there is an enormous amount of content that is easily available that can give you a head start.   The objective here is to arm yourself with a thorough understanding of the current terms and trends and a high level outlook on the market.

If you are totally new to the space and don’t even know where to start you should try setting up a social monitoring program.  Plug in the names of potential customers and competitors in the space, which you should have identified in the sizing exercise,  and start to analyze the terminology, sites, and authors that are being used.

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The Loopfuse Exchange: Sales & Marketing Best Practices

Monday, October 4th, 2010

With the highly successful launch of our Loopfuse Freeview offering in June and our innovative Partnership program in August, we have had several requests to share information amongst our community.  So today, I would like to informally introduce the Loopfuse Exchange.  The goal for the Loopfuse Exchange is to share the best practices from some of the best sales and marketing professionals in the business who give their companies a competitive edge.  The Loopfuse Exchange will be the place to visit for the most up to date sales and marketing best practices, and central to the Exchange will be a series of articles on various marketing functions — contributed by Loopfuse customers, partners and friends — that will help new and experienced marketers alike increase their effectiveness generating market awareness and demand. Topics will include Website construction and design, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Lead Nurturing and Scoring, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay per click (PPC) advertising, Social Media and Networking, E-mail marketing, Event marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Reporting and more.

Later this afternoon, we will have our first guest blog post for the Loopfuse Exchange by one of our partners, Greg Malpass of Traction Sales and Marketing.  Stay tuned for more exciting information on the Loopfuse Exchange.

Know Thy Customer

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

For a while now we’ve all heard plenty about how the emerging trend in marketing is moving towards “content marketing” or the creation of custom pieces aimed at generating a relevant engagement at a specific point of time.

What I’ve found lacking in the discourse, however, is a real pragmatic approach to leveraging this for marketing purposes.  Part of the explanation for this is certainly that it’s not an easy thing to do.  It is, however, possible to apply a methodology for content creation that will consistently outperform traditional approaches.

Over the coming weeks I will begin to breakdown the evolving approach I’ve seen work for a number of clients.  As a starting point, I’ll focus on getting to know the customer.  This is the key starting point for any content strategy.  If you don’t understand what makes them tick you can’t consistently generate interesting perspectives.  There are a lot of very tactical, very actionable steps you can take.  In fact… there are at least 15 of them!  Some of these will certainly be familiar, but on the whole hope you will take away some nuggets and a plan on how to string them all together to greatest effect.

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Q&A with Laura Ramos – Part 3: Implementation & Keys to Success

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Following up on the interview with Laura Ramos, I am releasing the third and final part of my interview:

7.  Dwyer:  Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Ramos:  Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems in the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure and the “what’s needed” to make marketing automation work.
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Q&A with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research – Part 2: Market Momentum

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Following up on my post last week, I am releasing the second part of my interview with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research (blog).

Part 2:  Market Momentum

4.    Dwyer:  What key trends drive adoption of Lead Management Automation (LMA) today?

Ramos:  Besides the economy and the need to improve sales pipelines short term, I think there are 3 more systemic changes driving lead management automation investment and use. These are: 1) the need for greater marketing accountability, 2) the need to produce not just more demand, but better qualified demand, and 3) the need to scale the sales process more efficiently (another way of putting this is reducing the cost of customer acquisition).  There are a number of macro trends driving widespread change in B2B marketing, where I see automated demand management as a key response to these trends. In short, I expect marketers to adopt lead management automation to build customer dialogue and relationships much earlier in the purchase process and counteract issues like advertising avoidance, commoditization, and social computing (which creates unprecedented transparency and information sharing that is wonderful for buyers, but challenging for sellers).

5.    Dwyer:  What impact will a Lead Management Automation (LMA) system have on the typical marketing organization?

Ramos:  I think the impact of automation on a large marketing organization can be quite different than the impact for a small one.  Both experience different issues and challenges. Let me focus on the midmarket here and refer to the three trends I mentioned in the prior question to address the question of impact:

1) Greater marketing accountability. Over the past 10 years, B2B marketers have witnessed an explosion in available marketing approaches, especially in the digital world. While this has made more channels available, many marketers struggle to execute tactics in an integrated fashion that engage B2B buyers during what is often a lengthy sales cycle. Running from tactic to tactic, B2B marketers can also fail to demonstrate marketing’s impact beyond the point of campaign execution. Lead management automation helps marketers get a handle on the marketing mix and to learn which approaches work at which points in the buyer’s journey. LMA can also give marketers more flexibility to try new approaches and experiment with new techniques because the system lets them see, more directly, the impact between marketing activity and the volume and quality of leads that result.

2) Better qualified leads. Sales doesn’t really want more leads from marketing, but they do want better ones. Lead management automation helps marketing and sales get onto the same page and to answer the critical question “what makes a great lead?” Without automation to score leads across the purchase cycle, and the capability to nurture leads – start a conversation, educate, build dialogue, persuade – marketers will fail to put the best leads in front of sales and to help sales to convert pipeline into closed deals.

3) Scaling the sales process. Many executives think LMA helps marketing.  In fact, it helps sales. And it helps the bottomline.  Starting in the last decade, trends like software as a service, virtualization, and on-demand provisioning have changed how firms deliver high technology products. The services component of any solution has become more important. And IT buyers want to pay as they go. Long-term, on-premise, perpetual licenses will decline in favor of the on-demand model.  This also means that long sales processes, backed by high-commission sales reps, must become less expensive. Marketing will become key in this transition as buyers rely more on online channels – and communities of like-minded participants – to inform and validate purchase decisions. Lead management automation can help marketers connect with these buyers long before the first sales call and make selling more efficient as a result.

I think large, multinational firms can certainly achieve these results at the departmental level.  However, the challenges associated with building a global brand, driving message consistency, and managing marketing interactions across geographies, regions, industries, and multiple product lines increases demand management complexity significantly.

6.    Dwyer:  Are you seeing a shift in focus from traditional outbound marketing activities to inbound marketing? If so, how can marketing leaders prepare themselves?

Ramos:  In 2009, we saw B2B marketers shift from traditional to digital channels in a big way as marketing budgets got the ax and as buyers became harder to engage.  Social media popularity also accelerated the digital transformation.  However, much of what I see happening online in B2B – with social media in particular – I would characterize as “outbound marketing using new channels.” For example, firms put out a stream of press releases and marketing communications, and then tweet about them on Twitter.  Little value is added and certainly not much happening there to make buyers want to strike up a conversation.

To truly move to inbound marketing, B2B marketers need to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about multi-step conversations.  They need to efficiently reach buyers at a group or individual level. Mass marketing doesn’t work in B2B, relationship marketing does. This is where I can see LMA playing a key role because lets vertical industry, product management, or local marketers in the field have conversations with targeted groups of prospects – customer segments in the truest sense – using online tools and social media to fuel the dialogue.  By tracking their behavior and interactions, marketers can then pass a rich set of “background” information – behavior, preferences, activity — to sales and help them close deals more efficiently.  When this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t always, the LMA system can now give both marketing and sales quantitative, factual information about what they need to do differently.

Next up, Part 3:  Implementation & Keys to Success

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Summary of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

And to summarize from my original post in January:  The rules of engagement are changing, but the rules of marketing accountability are changing more quickly.  Measurement and analytics bring job security to the marketing function; particularly when traditional antiquated thinking and manual systems are failing to deliver a competitive advantage in any economy.

Marketing automation tools can help automate the process of optimizing marketing effectiveness and more importantly help marketers demonstrate their impact on top and bottom line results.  The question every marketer should be asking is “How do I maximize my value to the organization?”  If the answer involves demonstrating results or linking performance to top or bottom line organizational objectives, then it might be time to start embracing a marketing automation initiative.   Don’t wait much longer to get started… it could cost you your job.  Instead, adopt marketing automation within your organization and ask your boss for a bonus based on qualified leads.

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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