End of the High School Football Season, the Thanksgiving turkey, inbound marketing and the rhythm of life.

As I sit here in front of my computer, my son is getting ready for the last football game of his sophomore high school football season, our Thanksgiving turkey is happily thawing out on kitchen counter and I am in a very Zen mood, thinking about rhythm of life, changes in the marketing industry and how all this change reflects on the way I make my living.

This time of the year always puts me in a reflective mood. This week there were few blogs I read that sort of tied it all together for me. The first blog I want to mention is this week’s Marketo blog. Jon Miller offers a very succinct and poignant summary of how marketing evolved in the last three decades…from mass communication to internet search dominance to contemporary social media brand building. He suggests that marketers are now focusing on social media, search and content marketing to build brands. Jon states:
…”More and more information is available off the official corporate website and on social media sites ranging from LinkedIn and Twitter to YouTube and SlideShare. As buyers tire of “marketing speak” and over-aggressive marketing tactics, they search social sites as part of their research, and interact with other prospects to get and share word of mouth recommendations”.

The next blog that I want to note is posted by Shannon Sweetser to Inbound Marketer’s Blog. Shannon states:
…creating meaningful content such as whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts that “concretely describe solutions to problems” is a much more effective way to get found by your customers than sending an unsolicited sales message via email.”

Finally, one of my very favorite blogs, the Digital Buzz Blog posted a fantastic slide presentation by Aden Hepburn that talk about the Basics of Social Media ROI. The presentation is written in CEO-speak; smart, funny, interesting and very informative. Social media is not a transactional sales tactic that translates into immediate sales increases the same reporting period that you start implementing the strategy. That is like inviting people over to your house for drinks and whipping out the Tupperware catalog while people are engulfed in a conversation. Instead, what it will do is gradually enhance non-financial indicators like increased website visitors, WOM, social mentions, impressions, positive press, blog comments as well as an upsurge in click-throughs and perhaps more visitors to your brick & mortar sales floor. We just have to make sure we using the right tool and the appropriate time span to measure its effectiveness.

As I said, I am in a very reflective mood. I see the changes in our industry and I am excited for the possibilities ahead. Being a marketer and staying true to my principles as a human being sounds simplistic. But I firmly believe this is the authenticity era in marketing and I am happy to be part of it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Why demand generation works where traditional advertising and marketing falls short?

Let’s focus on the basics. Marketing is all about selling stuff. We know this and our customers know that we keep the lights on by selling. So, why marketing has become the black sheep in the family? Why is our advertising and direct response programs are no longer bringing the results they used to?

We need to think in terms of demand generation and not simply soapbox style message distribution.

Here is why:

Interruptive marketing stopped working: We have all heard the adage that only 50% of advertising works. Well, we can actually now measure which half is working and why. It is a continuous process of testing, measuring and tweaking. Relevancy is the key and customer focus is an absolute necessity. Demand generation programs test, measure and help you develop marketing content that is sure to resonate with your target audience. The result is customer engagement and continuous flow of qualified leads.

Every sale is a complex sale: Gone are the days of marketing managers with annual marketing budgets that are only called to question at the end of the year. We live in a world where every business decision is made by a committee of executives with various priorities and business challenges. Organizations need to create messaging that speaks to various angles; many touch points with different channels.

Sharing knowledge is cool: Internet has brought the age of free content to our lives. Sharing best practices and your organization’s accumulated knowledge in your field is a sure way to bring you to the thought leadership position. The tools are out there for you to accomplish this and become a publisher of quality content in no time. Organizations that see themselves as content publishers are very successful at inbound marketing where leads come knocking at their door, instead of the other way around.

Being human is cool: The C level decision maker is a busy executive. She could fill it up with back to back 15 minute meetings if her day can be 36 hours. She does not want to be interrupted by cold calls. But this does not mean she does not want to hear from someone who is on her top 5 list. The trick is to know if you are on her list. You know this because your demand generation program has been following her activities on your website. You have been sending her truly relevant content that she forwarded to her team. She participated on your LinkedIn discussion. Three other people from the same company signed up for your webinar. You sent her tips and tricks white paper and she twittered it (or tweeted it, one or the other…but you get my point). So when you call her, all you have to do is be human and ask if she is ready to talk to you.

To summarize, demand generation programs enable marketers to work more effectively. Generating results is fun and data can be really sexy too.

Path analysis and buyer profiles can help you come up with a better process map for your demand generation program.

By now in every industry marketers fully acknowledge that we are living in the age of empowered customers who will use every tool at their disposal to come and find you when they have a need. But try to push your message onto them when they are not interested and you will quickly find yourself and your precious marketing investment completely ignored or worst yet, in the spammer abyss.

The key is to use marketing tools to build relationship and only pass a lead to sales when they have expressed a need and are able to make a decision. If they are not the decision maker, marketers needs to keep nurturing that relationship. When the prospect expressed a need and they want to learn more about your product or service, then the sales teams need to know a whole lot more than name-rank-serial number to be able to close the sale. One of the methodologies used in demand generation programs to help guide the interaction around customer needs is clearly defining the path customers walk in their decision making process.

In his popular blog Brian Carroll has been repeatedly highlighting the benefits of walking in the customer’s shoes as you are setting up lead nurturing program. Brian states: “Walk IN your potential customers’ shoes means thinking like your customer and considering the questions they will have for you and your company.”

Another good tool to gain intimate understanding of your customer is to create customer profiles, we sometime refer to these as buyer personas. Groundswell blog has several of these profiles that consumer marketers use. In recent weeks Forrester also came up with B2B profiles.
The tool is called Social Technographics Profiles of business buyers. B2B marketer now can use this tool to integrate buyer behavior and social media into their marketing tool set.

Demand generation programs have come a long way from just using email and list building to create demand. With these types of tools we can now more precisely define our audience and have a better chance to influence their decision making process.

Demand generation basics Part 2: Segmenting your audience (don't ignore hidden gems)

Last week I talked about building a database and explained what sort of information must be collected on prospects. This week I will go into segmenting and targeting. This activity is often reduced down to slicing and dicing the database to uncover lowest hanging fruit for the picking. Well, it is a bit more complicated than that. The main purpose of segmenting your audience is to understand priorities of each group and serve relevant content so you can better engage them. Here are some basic strategies for segmenting your database to achieve just that:

-Email: Sounds simple but email is your best ally when it comes to figuring out how best to segment your list. Testing subject lines will give you a great indication about what triggers interest by each group. If you test the headline of your email message and find out that one headline performed much better with CMOs, you can customize content accordingly to better engage this particular group.

-Web analytics: Great listening and measuring tool. You can examine traffic, time of day people visit your site, what pages they spend more time, which path they follow. If you match this information with email campaign results, you can design better landing pages to bring in more qualified leads. This is achieved via behavioral targeting. Professional service firms that use behavioral targeting and web analytics in their segmentation strategies are able to generate impressive results.

-Search: Looking at what keywords people use to find your site is also a very good way to segment your prospect list. For example if you are trying to build hospitality industry client base and you find out that prospects in that industry find your site by typing in keywords like “tax attorney and hotel management” you can then generate a white paper loaded with those keywords and develop a multi-touch campaign specifically for that audience segment.

-Repurpose your content: By segmenting your audience you can repurpose your existing content according to your prospects’ criteria that you determined by analyzing all of the above tools. The idea is to custom design your marketing messages according to the needs of your audience.

-Hidden gems: As you segment your audience and learn more about their behavior you might discover that there is a specific group that is gobbling up every piece of content you put out there but are not in a position to buy your services. They download your white papers, sign up for webinars, e-newsletters and podcasts but they clearly don’t have the resources to hire you. These people can be your evangelists; don’t ignore them just because they are not likely to bring you short term revenue. Ask them to contribute to your blog or webinar. They can also be potentially a good source for referrals. Share the spotlight with them; this will only help cement your position as a thought leader in your industry.

Segmenting your target audience is one of the foundations of demand generation programs. By creating specific groups based on more than “name-rank-title” you will empower your marketing with growth opportunities, not just leads that may only bring in short term results.

Next week, I will talk about process mapping and creating content to match milestones in your customer’s decision making journey.

What can service marketers learn from consumer brands?

Designing a demand generation program from scratch is a great opportunity to examine which best practices can be borrowed from other disciplines. I am working to develop a demand generation program for a packaging design firm and I wanted to look at successful consumer brands for ideas.

Here is a short list of ideas that struck my interest at a first glance:

Sample the goods: I had the privilege of serving P&G as an account executive many moons ago. One of the lesson’s I learned from that experience was to always consider consumer insight as the anchor of all sales and marketing related activities. For a professional service firm, having your customer at the core of your business means you need to genuinely care about solving their problems. Your new business acquisition strategy has to demonstrate that you understand their world. The way to do that is to deliver relevant content and do it consistently. Your demand generation program has to deliver value in order to build trust. This means sometimes you have to share your expertise and knowledge with your audience for free. You will become an expert in their eyes before you even pitch for their business.


Develop familiarity: I love Target stores. They are like a home away from home when I travel. I can always count on the store layout to be exactly as it is in the store near my hometown. I go there to buy few items that I might need but I come out from the store feeling grounded because everything is so familiar. Service firms are faced with the constant challenge of having to go between “feast to famine” when it comes to work flow. No matter how strapped for time you are, it is essential to keep your content consistent. You can hire a demand generation professional or run the program yourself but avoid interrupting the flow, changing look and feel or the tone of voice of the content too often.

Build an emotional bond: You may be a purchasing agent at a manufacturing firm looking to buy a multimillion dollar machine but the same relationship discipline applies as in the way you select which dentist to take your kids for their dental appointments. People like to do business with people they like. If the approach of your demand generation program is cold and calculated, you are telling your customer to treat you like a vendor instead of a trusted advisor. You must breed life into your content and make sure it reflects personality, not only expertise.

There are a number of tools and strategies out there to continuously improve performance of your marketing efforts. These few basic best practices will help keep your demand generation program humming along, generating leads while establishing your service brand.

Why include social media in your demand generation program?

We all know sales is a transaction oriented discipline and its focus is on targeting efforts to close more sales. Marketing on the other hand is brand oriented so everything is around building awareness, equity and persuasion. Demand generation campaigns are perfect bond to aligning these two disciplines.

Marketing collects content ideas from search engine key words from incoming traffic, blogs, point of view articles and identifies hot button issues to highlight on the demand generation outreach campaign materials. This ensures that the content created for the demand generation program is relevant and timely. Enter social media.

Social media can be a powerful tool to include in the mix of demand generation campaigns. But, one thing to remember is that social media is best to create online communities and monitor discussions, not necessarily for generating leads. It is relationship oriented not transaction oriented. Companies have to resist the temptation to cross the line. An overzealous insurance salesman friend someone brings to the party can totally suck the air out of the room…we have all been there. Social media works just like that. However, if I can be a relevant resource for you or I can make you feel good somehow, you would like to talk to me. Similarly, social media provides an outlet for you to build powerful and long lasting relationships.

Here are some reasons why you should include social media in your demand generation and lead nurturing campaigns:

1. Left brain meets right brain: Web is a big component of demand generation efforts. It requires strong analytical ability to crunch numbers and tweak levers. However, don’t forget consumer insight and persuasion psychology when you are creating content for your demand generation program. Today’s empowered, online savvy customer can smell a sales pitch a mile away. By monitoring the discussion you can determine relevant content.

2. If you don’t claim your spot on the stage, someone else will: Social media is here to stay. If you don’t claim your voice on the forum, your competition will. You can’t afford to hide under the blankets while everyone in your space is out there, perhaps making mistakes but also learning to do it better and building online relationships. If you are out there, at least you are in the game.

3. Help sales see the value of social media: Once you have an active online community your sales team will appreciate the attention it is getting and talking points social media forums can generate. Sales people are always starving for ideas to strike up a conversation with prospects. Someone can raise a question or complain about a competitor’s offering that can help the sales reach out and start a conversation.

The best part is social media gives B2B companies opportunity to engage and listen to genuine conversations with customers in a timely fashion. It is all about relationship building and being there when the customer is ready to buy.

But don’t just take my word for it. Here is a great blog on the subject that is written by a sales guru. The subsequent discussion provides great insight into how other B2B professionals are now finding value in including social media into the mix.

Are you in sync with your customer's purchasing journey?

Here is a scenario we are all too familiar with: Sales teams follow a tried and true road map yet lately sales pipeline provides few and far in between qualified opportunities. You may have a desired product or service and your research shows your marketing message is compelling. But there is still a disconnect between the leads that marketing generates and your sales closing rate. A possible reason for the disconnect might be that your sales cycle is no longer aligned with your customers’ purchasing journey. Here are some of the reasons why this may occur:

- Customers have many tools at their disposal to get information about products and services to help them make purchasing decisions. They conduct online search, study buyer’s guides, view online customer advisory boards, sign up for webinars, monitor online chat forums, look at magazine ads and read company newsletters before they even express an interest in you. It is very likely that they may have already formed an opinion about your offering before you even get a chance to speak to them. Your sales team needs to be armed with the knowledge of all the touch points the customer interacted with before they connect with the prospect.

- My 15 year old son is the internet search guru at our house. I would not dream of making a major purchase without consulting with him. Consumer trends change. Millennials are now a powerful influencer segment in variety of categories. We recently changed our car insurance provider because he found an online comparison tool that gave us a much better rate on our car insurance. You need to be aware of who the influencers are in your category and where they get their information from.

-Sales is a transaction oriented discipline. Sales reps move on to the most closeable opportunity after few attempts. However, in today’s economic conditions most purchasing decisions are very susceptible to daily fluctuations so the decisions can stall longer than you anticipated. You may have uncovered a hidden need but did not stay in touch with a prospect long enough, only to have your competition move in to close the sale because they worked diligently to build a stronger relationship with your prospect.

The good news is that demand generation programs offer an excellent opportunity to ensure that your sales efforts are in sync with your prospect’s purchasing cycle. This is possible because of the close monitoring, content relevancy and measurement that a carefully designed demand generation program offers. At every touch-point you have the opportunity to probe, measure and adjust your next steps.

Knowing your customer’s purchasing journey will help you design content, frequency and relevancy of your marketing outreach so your sales reps can successfully walk the fine line between being annoyingly persistent and providing the right amount information to help your customers decide.

Matching the right tool to the job.

Marketers use variety of methods to bring in new business. But often it is not all that clear what is really working and why. To maximize marketing efforts, not to mention hard to come by budgets, it is important to match the tool to the purpose. This is where demand generation programs are most effective. These programs include different methodologies that can be designed to serve different marketing issues.

Here is a set of specific programs to consider:

- Lead generation campaigns. The purpose of these campaigns is to attract new names to your prospect database. Lead gen campaigns are also useful to re-activate dormant leads. Before any tactical elements such as emails, search campaigns, direct mail pieces, landing pages and call scripts are produced, it is important to carefully segment your list. Once the campaign is moved to implementation phase, the key indicators like conversion rates can give you the wrong signal if the message is not delivered to the right audience. You might think your program is not working but the truth may be that you are offering an exquisite chocolate cake to someone who is just looking for a quick sandwich.

- Lead nurturing programs. These campaigns are designed to maintain continuous contact with your prospects with the purpose of moving them through the sales pipeline. After all, the objective is not to repeatedly call on people and push your sales message, but rather send them relevant content so that when they are ready to buy they turn to you. It involves sending messages to inform prospects about your company, products and services, and gathering information about their behavior so you can understand their needs better. Important element of lead nurturing programs is to provide continuous supply of fresh and relevant content.

- Lead scoring. Final element of successful demand generation program is lead scoring which is useful in managing the actual transfer of leads to sales reps because it indicates when the lead is sales ready. Typically, companies that have complex sales cycles and dedicated sales teams benefit from complimenting their demand generation programs with lead scoring and tracking element.

Demand generation programs offer variety of tools to measure, track and optimize marketing efforts. A comprehensive program will match the tool to the specific business need. But it is important to remember that this is a cyclical process that requires several trains running on time on different tracks. The good news is that results are measurable.

Turn your customers into new business evangelists.

This week’s blog topic idea comes from a question that a colleague had asked me. I was explaining to her the scope of our demand generation program and I mentioned the need to address prospects and customers separately. As part of our services we suggest to our clients that they should run a targeted communication campaign to their existing customers distinct from their prospect lead nurturing efforts. She said “why would I need a targeted program to talk to my existing customers, I already talk to them on a daily basis?” This is a valid question. Demand generation programs are usually designed to uncover new leads and nurture relationships with prospects with the intent of turning them into customers. Why should you spend time and other resources to come up with a program to target existing customers?

* Customers are best referral sources. Nothing says you excel at your business better than having your existing customers endorse you. But we all know that if someone is happy they may talk to one or two people but if they have something to complain about they talk to 20+ people. You need to maximize the effect of your evangelists to help you generate more business. A targeted program like opinion pieces or industry trend reports will help you become a thought leader. Providing a way to your customers to interact with you on a regular basis will help you generate more business.

* People move around. Today someone might be working at company A but tomorrow they may move to another firm which can be a potential source of business for you. It is always a good idea to keep regular check points with your existing contacts. It is much easier and cheaper to keep your database fresh on a regular basis.

* Ensure minimum of 5 touch-points for repeat business. It is a generally an accepted fact that it takes minimum of five contacts at a company to secure repeat business. Once you sign on with a customer it is good practice to ensure more people at the same firm know about you and your services. It will help you stay top of mind and carve the path for repeat business.

These are few of the reasons why customers should be part of your demand generation program. The important thing to keep in mind is that targeted communication going out to your prospect requires different dynamics than the one you send to your customers. Customers’ priorities and information needs are different. Your expectations and success metrics from a deliberate customer communication program is also different. But they should both lead to the same overall outcome; business growth. Therefore, your demand generation outreach must include both segments. Customers are an important segment in your new business efforts and they require a deliberate and targeted outreach.

What are some of the best ways to keep nurture relationship with existing customers? Share your thoughts.

Can we please communicate less?

I am back to the blogosphere after a year long hiatus while I finally finished my MBA. What a tough business environment we are swimming in! But all is not completely bleak out there in the marketing land. We just have to learn to be smarter and more relevant to our customers.

Take global communications for instance, Jim Ylisela so eloquently outlined in his blog today that organizations have way too much communication, but poorly applied. Let’s remember that effective communication takes place if only the sender and the receiver are on the same page. Just because marketing department is busy churning out emails, newsletters, blog entries all over the map, does not mean the audience is influenced by what is being put out there for their reading pleasure.

Well, have we ever asked the customer what they really want to hear?

Email is one area less communication is badly needed. There is a lot of debate about email being dead, everyone complains about hundreds of emails they receive and how much time they spend cleaning up their inbox each day. Therein lays the opportunity. Email expert Jeanniey Mullen said: “The days of standalone e-mails, with no integration or support for other channels, are over.” The key is to listen…listen to your audience, learn about their world, their priorities, their worries, pain points and aspirations. Let’s not make email just another mass medium that is used to shove hordes of sales messages down people’s throats.

Listening allows marketers to become smarter and more relevant to their audiences. Thankfully with proliferation of social media, we have so many new innovative ways to listen and build strong and lasting relationships with our customers.

Here is a winning formula to boost your sales pipeline with constant stream of qualified leads:
1. Listen and learn what the customer wants to hear from you
2. Modify your value proposition and if necessary, even your offering
3. Be there when they want to hear from you with relevant content
4. Scrub, rinse and repeat

Let’s not be afraid of less communication. Less is more if we achieved relevancy.