How to Make Supply Chain Management (and your product) Funny

Killer content must be:

• Relevant
• Interesting
• Informative
• Entertaining

Entertaining? Yes, according to the new book "Content Rules" by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

I couldn't agree more.

Think about it, as more and more companies adopt marketing automation, more of the content we all start receiving will be relevant. Geez, when everyone is relevant, now what? Now how do you get their attention?

 
Get ahead of the curve as an early adopter of marketing automation by ensuring your content is interesting, informative AND entertaining.
 
WHERE TO BEGIN?
So question #1 is which content should I focus on making entertaining? The answer is, which content is currently converting the best? (For those who have adopted Revenue Performance Management, which content is producing the most revenue?
 
I took a poll of our own Astadia marketing content and here's what I found.
 

Video outperformed all other types of content by a large margin. In fact the least-watched video still outperformed the best viewed non-video asset by a mile. In addition, we found that:

• Those watching a video watched more than 1 video
• Video links got higher SE results than whitepaper, case study or other asset links

Which of your assets currently work the best? Is it video as well?

So why are videos so popular? I think for two main reasons:

1. They take very little effort to watch (unlike Case Studies or Whitepapers)
2. Smart Phones make it very easy to watch video, and Smart Phone useage is exploding

So how do you make an entertaining video? Here's a perfect example:

• COMPANY: Kinaxis, Inc. A Supply Chain Management Company
• CHALLENGE: Tell potential customers how simple their Supply Chain Management Solution is to implement
• POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Write a white paper or a case study.
• FINAL SOLUTION: Create a funny video instead:

https://community.kinaxis.com/docs/DOC-5353

 

 Once you've watched the above video, check out the follow-up video. It's even funnier!

https://community.kinaxis.com/docs/DOC-5415

I would very likely forward these videos to friends and colleagues (just like I'm forwarding to you).

As more and more B2B companies begin to "see the light" and adopt marketing automation, it becomes more important than ever to stand out. Being relevant won't be enough anymore - it's probably not enough now.

I highly recommend reading Content Rules. It's an excellent tactical how-to guide in creating your own killer content.

Visit my brand new website and learn more about content marketing.

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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Share the IT Love This Valentine's Day

Sending flowers or candy to your IT Department may not be on your love radar this Valentine’s Day but you might want to consider it. Why? Read on:

According to a recent survey by Alterian, 67% of marketers experience friction with IT in both selecting and implementing social or online marketing tools.

So why all the friction? Well, look at your requests from IT’s perspective. When IT receives your request, they have to consider:

• Reliability issues
• Duplication of existing processes or effort
• Compliance issues
• Incompatibility issues
• Security issues

You can’t blame them, since they will usually end up owning and maintaining your requests ongoing. Unfortunately, this usually means delays in implementation, push back in functionality or outright refusals to move forward.

I see the results of this quite often in a registration form. Marketing wants a simple registration form to download a whitepaper. IT wants to incorporate the company’s existing registration process to comply with all the concerns listed above. So marketing ends up with something like this:

Download your complimentary Whitepaper here:

If you don’t already have a login, you have to create a new account, which often includes creating a new username and password. This is usually emailed to you. So what should have taken less than 15 seconds ends up taking 5-10 minutes. Geez, all that just to get a whitepaper?

IT is happy. Marketing is unhappy. Leads are very unhappy. Win/Loose/Loose.

I recommend a compromise.

For these types of activities:

• Trial software downloads
• Customer Portal access
• Support access
• Etc.

 Use IT’s existing form process.

For marketing-specific assets, such as: 

• Whitepapers
• Videos
• Webinar/event registrations
• Etc.

Use Eloqua’s built-in form/landing page functionality.

Now, where it gets tricky is where the form field values on the marketing form are different than on the IT form. For example if you want to ask a lead scoring question such as Job Title on your marketing asset form, you’ll likely use a picklist. This same question may also exist on IT’s form but it may be and open text field. So you’ll have to go through each form field for both forms and make sure they are all in sync. You’ll also have to consider form update rules – which field from which source overwrites existing values in CRM.

So make an effort to share the love with your IT Department this Valentine's Day. They don't get much recognition so you'll win big points. And acknowledging their own pain can help you alleviate some of your own.

BTW: Check out Scott Brinker’s Chief Marketing Technologist post about shadow IT. He makes some interesting additional recommendations.

P.S. In February of last year, I wrote a blog called Share The Love This Valentine’s Day which was about sharing the love with sales. To be honest, I think sharing the love with IT is actually the priority, otherwise you won’t have enough form submissions to give sales the BIG love.

Visit my brand new website and learn more about Data Management.

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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What's Wrong with This Picture?

I was surprised when I saw the results of a recent Email Benchmark Survey from Marketing Sherpa. It shows the effectiveness of email marketing at achieving objectives. The top 3 were:

1. Increasing website traffic
2. Building Brand Awareness
3. Increasing Sales Revenue

I realize that these may not have initially been the goals set out for email marketing, but the trouble with these top 3 is that they are all typical results of batch and blast email marketing.

 #1. Increasing Website traffic – I'm surprised this was #1. While generating known visitors back to a website is always good, it would not likely be #1 for those who have adopted marketing automation. Email recipients have likely been to the website at least once. So generating the same eyeballs to your site is probably not as ideal as generating net new eyeballs to your website.

Email is not the best solution for this. Social media, Blogs, PCC and organic search will get you further every time obviously. Don’t get me wrong. Getting someone to click through an email to a specific, relevant landing page with a form on it probably counts as increasing website traffic, but increasing website traffic wouldn’t be my #1 objective. Yet it was the #1 most successful email objective in the survey.

#2. Building Brand Awareness – Yikes, this is #2? Someone once explained to me that even though 80% of their emails never get opened, the brand awareness that emails generate from exposure to the FROM and SUBJECT lines were effective at building brand. Can you imagine telling your CEO, "Unfortunately most people won't open our emails, but at least they see our name." You might as well start clearing out your desk. Marketing automation practitioners would likely focus on sending more relevant messages that actually increase opens and subsequent click through rates.

#3: Increasing Sales Revenue – A worthy objective but the measure of success may be suspect. Sending an email to sell a widget might generate a temporary lift in widget sales but as soon as the widget emails decrease, so do widget sales. This is a common B2C scenario. In B2B, it obviously takes more than email to drive sales. There’s usually a whole host of assets that contribute: webinars, white papers, video, tradeshows, etc. And of course the holy grail is an accurate method of attributing revenue across all marketing touches.

So what might this survey look like if B2B marketers who have adopted marketing automation were to respond?

Top B2B Marketing Automation Email Objectives: Align with the goal of the CEO. How?

1. Use email to drive form conversions
2. Use email to drive segmentation (through topic click throughs and/or progressive profiling)
3. Use email as feeders to nurturing and scoring programs
4. Use Autoresponder emails to fast track the next call to action

What are your top 3 email objectives in 2012?

Visit my brand new website and learn more about Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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When Holiday Greeting Cards Go Bad (a marketing spoof)

Since this is my first video blog post, I wanted it to be a funny one, so here goes:

Watch as I create what I thought would be a beautifully rendered, extremely customized personal online holiday greeting card.

The result? Let's just say that the final output was not what I expected! Its pretty funny.

Watch the 3 Minute Video: When Holiday Greeting Cards go Bad!

A marketing spoof

P.S. Feel free to pass it along to anyone in marketing!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

From one marketer to another!

P.S. If you happen to be thinking of actually setting something like this up, this video is proof that I thought of it first :)

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions - #6

Marketing Automation New Year's Resolution #6:
HARVEST THE UNKNOWN VISITOR

Congratulations! If you’ve implemented the first 5 Marketing Automation New Year’s Resolutions, you moved from Demand Generation to Demand Management – a major and significant evolution!

You now control every square inch of the funnel and are able to fully report on each funnel stage’s contribution to revenue. All leaks are plugged, all metrics fully in place, data standards in place and your funnel is now fully aligned with both sales and marketing.

So what’s next, a vacation? You certainly deserve one! And when you return, get ready for the final frontier -- the universe before the funnel.

There are 4 steps to this:

Step 1: Inventory All Pre-Funnel Feeders

Leads live a double life. The life you know about as they become known to you (through tracked implicit and explicit indicators) and the life you don’t know about. The specific journey that got them introduced to your neighborhood. LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Buzz, Twitter, PPC, Wikipedia, organic web searches, blogs and a number of other sources we may not even know of, all play a role in crafting an invitation to your party.

It is this journey, this universe of unknown activities that we need to understand and then harvest in order to provide a perpetual feeder into our now healthy, happy funnel.

Step 2: Establish Dashboards That Determine Influenced Revenue of Each
Build Dashboards that focus on mapping the pre-funnel journey. Find and track every single freeway, side street and back road that leads to your website and begin to make a connection to these initial pre-funnel activities and resulting influenced ROI.

Step 3: Prioritize Initiatives That Consistently Influence the Most Revenue
As you gain insight into the pre-funnel sources that ultimately contribute the most to influenced revenue, you can begin to rank and prioritize the major pre-funnel influences. This ultimately gives you the metrics you need to support increased efforts and resources on those influences.

Step 4: Focus Resources on Expanding Those Initiatives

From here it’s just a matter of focusing resources on what is working while abandoning the support of pre-funnel efforts that don’t pay off in influenced revenue.

There you have it, a complete 2011 Marketing Automation Roadmap.

Can you implement all 6 Resolutions in 2011? It’s possible. But don’t get frustrated if it takes longer than you’d like. As you’ve heard many times by now, marketing automation is a journey, not an event.

But if your organization is ready to start tackling each Resolution one at a time and in the order prescribed, you are on your way to being added to that very elite group of "Best in Class" performers.

Updated: 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing

See all 6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions:

Resolution #1 - Establish Corporate Alignment
Resolution #2 - Establish One View of the Truth
Resolution #3 - Establish Data Standardization
Resolution #4 - Fill in the Content Gaps
Resolution #5 - Tighten the Plumbing
Resolution #6 - Harvest the Unknown Visitor


Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions - #5

Marketing Automation New Year's Resolution #5:
TIGHTEN THE PLUMBING

There are 4 parts to this:

Step 1: Identify all funnel leaks

There are typically 3 areas of the funnel that leak:

• Sales Ignored Leads
• Sales Rejected Leads
• Customer Retention and post sale Cross-Sell/Upsell opportunities

Tighten your funnel metrics to provide insight into all 3 of these typical leak sources. Institute a deadline for sales to either accept your MQL or reject it, within a certain period of time. Find out how long sales really needs to make a decision about these and then develop a process that manages these leads after the cutoff period. Consider reassigning the lead or drop them into a sales-rejected lead nurturing programs. I wrote about this in a recent blog post called Funnel Goo.

Step 2: Build/Modify Nurturing/Scoring Programs to Plug the Leaks
If you discover a significant leak where sales is rejecting or ignoring an unusually high number of MQLs for example, build a specific nurturing program just for this leak. If a relationship has already been established with a sales rep, marketing can continue to own the conversation but can, through marketing automation make it appear that the message came directly from the sales person.

Sales people love this, since they don’t have to do much except answer their phone or their email, should the lead reach out. Marketing loves it because they regain control of an already nurtured lead, one that marketing has already spent time and money to acquire and nurture.

You might also consider creating a separate sales-rejected lead scoring program just for this group. For example, say you are getting lots of web leads who turn out to be college students. Sales rejects these, but marketing can nurture and add them to a long-term scoring program, tracking their activities all the way through graduation and onto their initial career path.

By the time they have the ability to make a purchase they already have a great long-standing relationship with you! Granted it’s a long-term approach, but what better way to grow your own leads who are often literally raving fans by the time they reach career readiness.

Step 3: :Leverage Better Data to Drive More Relevant Conversations
If you followed and adopted Resolution #3, you’ve repaired your data to the point that you can start to really start taking advantage of it. Target your new found segments to take relevance to an even higher level. Your segments will get smaller and your messaging more precise. This is where you can really start to make traction towards right time, right person right message targeting.

Step 4: Communicate What’s Working

Larger companies in particular sometimes work in Silos. Different regions or verticals generate a particularly successful campaign without word of it getting out to the rest of the global organization. China might have tremendous success with an SMS campaign combined with email that could be re purposed and replicated elsewhere for instance.

When something works, especially if it beats your existing benchmarks, don’t keep it a secret. Make sure there is a vehicle that communicates the wins on a regular basis. Maybe an internal marketing newsletter or “Win of the Month” internal email. Often teams end up competing for Best Metric awards.

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Marketing Operations

See all 6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions:

Resolution #1 - Establish Corporate Alignment
Resolution #2 - Establish One View of the Truth
Resolution #3 - Establish Data Standardization
Resolution #4 - Fill in the Content Gaps
Resolution #5 - Tighten the Plumbing
Resolution #6 - Harvest the Unknown Visitor

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions - #4

Marketing Automation New Year's Resolution #4:
FILL IN ALL ASSET CONTENT GAPS

There are 4 parts to this:

Step 1:

The first step is to inventory all your existing marketing assets. Make a complete list of everything you've got. Videos, White Papers, Recorded Webinars, Product Brochures, even content-rich web pages.  If you have different Geos or marketing groups, make sure they all contribute to the list. You might discover assets you didn't even know you had.

Step 2:

Identify which stage of the buying cycle each asset belong in - Early Mile, Middle Mile or Last Mile. Each stage requires a different conversation, along with a different set of assets.

For example, when a lead first enters your universe they may be just kicking the tires, wanting to learn more about your capabilities. This is typically the Early Mile, so the content they receive should focus on things like Thought Leadership. Start the conversation by establishing your company's credibility as a viable solution provider. It should answer the question, "Why Buy?"

The Middle Mile focuses on "Why Buy from Me". So assets that differentiate your company's services/products is best. Prospects may not be ready to review specific product specs just yet, but they usually want to know the specific benefits of your company.

The Last Mile is the final evaluation period. Spec sheets, pricing promos, etc. It's finally all about you. Focus on answering the question, "Why Buy from Me Now."

Step 3:

Once you've done a complete Asset Inventory and mapped out which buying stage each asset belongs in, it will be very clear where you are asset rich and where you are asset poor. You may have plenty of assets in the Early Mile and Last Mile, but not much in the Middle Mile area. Wherever your gaps are, the next step is to fill those gaps ASAP.

Step 4:

Once you start delivering these assets you can determine which ones are contributing the most to revenue. There are usually a few solid winners and some solid losers as well. Map out the most effective at contributing to revenue and create more just like them. This keeps the focus on New Year's Resolution #1, Align with the Goal of the CEO.

Updated 5-8-12

Visit my brand new website and learn more about Content Marketing

See all 6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions:

Resolution #1 - Establish Corporate Alignment
Resolution #2 - Establish One View of the Truth
Resolution #3 - Establish Data Standardization
Resolution #4 - Fill in the Content Gaps
Resolution #5 - Tighten the Plumbing
Resolution #6 - Harvest the Unknown Visitor

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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