Develop User Generated Content Via Surveys

Here are some quick tips on how to develop more content to support campaign automation and segmentation:

(1) Review your current content for applicability, identifying when and how to use and who to target. Exploit what you have. Identify content ‘gaps’ by audience, marketing/sales lead level, etc. and what you need to fill these gaps.

(2) Develop an Annual Thought Leadership Plan to include Public Relations, Media Relations, Social Marketing, etc. Ramp up thought leadership content to publish white papers, article, blogs and press releases. Look internally to your product management and product marketing teams to develop. Look externally to engage analysts, authors, consultants and other thought leaders to develop or co-develop. Choose topics that are ‘top of mind’ to these audiences but are also relevant to your product or service. Turn yourself into a ‘thought leader’: the ‘go-to-organization’ to obtain information, knowledge and ‘solutions’.

(3) Survey….survey….survey….Take every opportunity to survey your constituents. Again, choose survey topics about industry issues/challenges that are of strategic (preferred) or tactical interest to your audience (and again apply in some way to what you market.) Use survey results as content for research or point of view white papers, articles, press releases and even another campaign to share analysis of the survey results. Encourage survey participation by ensuring every participant is emailed an early copy of the research results. This provides opportunities to get email addresses, demonstrate your understanding of your prospect/customer’s business problems and become a ‘consultant’.

a. Develop an Annual Survey Campaign Plan based on audience, topic, business issue, etc. Be sure to integrate this with the rest of marketing (remember…integrated marketing is what we want to achieve!).

b. Post on-going surveys on your website (home page) or blog and drive participation.

c. Use every customer/prospect touch point as a survey opportunity. During a webinar, break up the PowerPoint presentation and pause to poll the audience on relevant issues. At the end of a Webinar, include relevant ‘industry questions’ with any survey you may provide that evaluates the event itself.

d. At trade shows, conferences and seminars, advertise and provide opportunity in the booth or at the event for individuals to participate in surveys. You can use this as an additional draw to encourage dialogue with the ‘walk-abouts’ on the conference floor.

e. Build out your contact database by using telemarketers to phone survey. Consider hiring industry analysts to perform these surveys if targeting senior level management. Segment your current database and develop survey questionnaires and execute methodically targeting x number of segments per quarter, etc.

f. Provide quick surveys to your internal telemarketing and telesales organizations and encourage them to use these as a way to initiate dialogue when cold calling. Prospects are more willing to talk to someone who can provide knowledge than someone who wants to strictly sell.

g. Build out your database so you know the survey history of every contact.

h. Over time, develop a ‘trending analysis’ where it makes sense on survey topics and publish.

These are some examples of what I have done in the past and I welcome other ideas on this topic. Here is a link to a recent blog that goes into more depth on how to gather feedback from social media.

Capitalizing on Campaign Management = Yikes, We Need More Content!!

One of the greatest demand generation challenges that I have seen with every software company is the company’s ability (or lack thereof) to continuously develop compelling content to support campaigns. In many cases, lack of content is ‘thee’ showstopper.

And now, as more companies invest in campaign management systems such as Oracle, Eloqua, Aprimo, Unica, Market2Lead, etc., (refer to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multitchannel Campaign Management 2009 for an entire list), many of these companies have the ability to (1) automate campaign generation, (2) better (or in some cases, start to) segment their market(s) and target audience(s) and (3) nurture leads (for the first time!), which will further exasperate the ‘content’ problem.

Consider these “as is” scenarios - before campaign automation.

(1) Before automation, we manually launch all campaigns, however simple or complex.
(2) Before (improved) segmentation/targeting, we don’t segment or we segment at the highest (limited number of) levels (e.g., target IT professionals versus LOB managers).
(3) Before nurturing, we don’t know where a prospect is in the ‘marketing pipeline’ so we treat all prospects equally and throw the same campaigns (and content) to everyone without regard to their interest level.

Consider these “to be” scenarios - after campaign automation.

(1) After automation, we can schedule campaigns to execute automatically, freeing up headcount to work on developing and executing more complex campaigns. By default, we can run more campaigns with the same resources, maybe even less.
(2) After improved segmentation/targeting, we can better profile a prospect by title, industry, interests, behavior, preferences, etc. and execute campaigns that are more specifically tailored to an individual (by grouping or segmenting like-kind prospects). This increases the number of campaigns.
(3) After nurturing, we know where a prospect is in the ‘marketing pipeline’ because we can ‘score leads’ and identify what campaigns/content to provide along the way from prospect first contact thru close (and beyond if we are up selling/cross selling into our existing customer base). Now, we can execute campaigns specific to the target, segment AND lead score, increasing the number of campaigns by another x factor.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s assume we are targeting IT professionals. In the “as is” scenario, we develop a number of campaigns with messaging and content that is the same for every IT professional regardless of industry, title, interest level, etc. In the “to be” scenario, we segment IT professionals in Financial Services/Insurance from IT professionals in the Manufacturing segment or the Health care segment and so on. Instead of a one-size-fits-all message to all IT professionals, we can now tailor each campaign to talk to the strategic issues each IT segment experiences (and hopefully play into how our software product/solutions address those issues). With Financial Services – it may be compliance. With Manufacturing, it may be ERP. With Health, it may be integration and so on.

We can further segment based on 'title' executing campaigns that talk to more operational benefits targeting managers and campaigns that talk to more strategic benefits targeting the VP level. Once we execute lead scoring, we can further segment and develop separate campaigns to first time visitors, xx time visitors, etc. and nurture that lead along.

Yikes! We need more content says the head of the demand generation team and begins dialoguing with Product Management, Product Marketing and outside consultants to line up campaigns and the unique content that is required.

Next post provides some ideas on how we can generate the content we need to support an increasing number of demand generation campaigns….

Some interesting links:

Top Ten Marketing Automation Software Vendors
Set Expectations by Scoring Your Lead

Integrating Social Media Marketing

I had a series of interesting conversations these past few days with several individuals about the importance of integrating traditional marketing techniques with social media marketing. As I work with a series of different B-to-B clients, I notice that one company typically excels at traditional marketing techniques while another excels at social media. Many organizations are looking for the right marketing talent to integrate the best practices of each.

Marketing Sherpa published a good article this past week about Social Medias Place in the Elite Marketing Trio, which you should read to make sense of the remainder of my post. Here is the chart with the results of a survey asking marketers to rank the importance of social media. I voted (unofficially to myself) and chose that in a pure integrated marketing model, social media marketing can (1) complement existing tactics, (2) be a standard marketing tactic and (3) have its own budget line item. The answer for your organization will have something to do with the target audiences and products/services that your team is marketing.

For example, with a company that has multiple products or lines-of-business (LOBs) targeting different segments and/or audiences - you might choose a social media marketing tactic exclusively for one segment and perhaps integrate with existing tactics when targeting another segment/audience. Your choices may be driven by (1) your desired outcomes, (2) where a segmented audience is in the lead nurturing cycle (or the impact on brand as an influencer or thought leader), (3) how 'social' your audience is and (4) your budget and the need to balance and execute more comprehensive marketing tactics (including social media) to your top priority segments/audiences, while spending less dollars via social media exclusively for segments that are a secondary focus.

I think it is also important to note that the "trio" analogy the author discusses talks to interactive marketing tactics and if a non-marketer reads this article, it can leave an impression that oversimplifies the power (and complexity) of marketing. While interactive marketing tactics are important, there is more to marketing/lead generation than dropping emails, SEO and social media particularity for enterprise software companies. Most enterprise software companies have multiple "messages" and target audiences as discussed above. For those organizations targeting C-suite executives and Vice Presidents, in particular, marketers need to integrate an array of different marketing mediums including direct (dimensional) mailings, executive events (such as a breakfast event, cocktail hour, dinner, etc.), email, webinars, SEO/SEM, social media, tradeshows/conferences/thought leadership events, telemarketing, etc. - those that entice more "face-to-face" interaction and relationships.

The good news with this survey is that marketers realize that social media is here to stay. I think it would be interesting to survey non-marketing executives to get their point of view. I sometimes think that all the hype about social media marketing is confusing non-marketers who already grapple with what marketing really is....

Here are some relevant links/sites on this topic:

http://elektrik.com/blog/2009/07/integrated-marketing-strategies-are-even-more-important/

http://masterful-marketing.com/social-media-marketing-one-component-of-marketing-plan/