This is the fourth in my series of how the Imperatives of the Marketing Revoloution apply to Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing.  This imperative is titled "Engage Customers with Conversations."   I've included a link to posts on the first three imperatives at the bottom of this post.

Engage is the new “overused” word but it sounds so right…engage, discuss, talk openly. We have to include our prospects and customers in product design and input. We have to listen to the issues they are having…not only with features and functions but with usability, services, support or maintenance. We’ve all heard that product management is changing….Communities are changing the way we get and process feedback. You have to get involved…there are free mechanisms funded with, as Jeffrey Hayzlett former CMO of Kodak and industry thought leader puts it, OPM – Other People’s Money. Of course I mean Twitter, Linked In and Facebook to name a few. Get in and start listening at least. 

Our engagement with customers used to be restricted to our annual customer event, occassional on-site visits, and fly bys at industry trade shows.  Now, thanks to the availability of networks like Linked In and our own private communities, we have the opportunity to be in almost constant dialog with our customers.  You are making key decisions on everything from Product and Marketing strategy to paid search.  Wouldn't it be great to have customer input?  I think many are concerned about tipping their hand, impacting deals in the sales pipeline or not responding to every piece of input customers provide.  But, in reality, customers feel better when you listen and they generally understand that you can't do everything.  The end result of listening has relationship benefits on a 1:1 basis and great benefits on the overall decisions you make.  I think the face-to-face events are still a key piece of the puzzle but the new online community can fill in the long gaps.

The best executed Marketing Automation tactics will fall short if they don't reflect the needs of your customers.

The tools are there...Engage!

Here's a link to the previous posts -

1. Marketing Must be Accountable
2. The CMO as a Change Agent
3. Let Go, Customers Control Your Brand

·         Bid amount does not necessarily ensure a high position.  A PPC advertiser can have the highest bid for a keyword, but the PPC ad may not rank well. Google will factor in CTR and Quality Score as well as Bid Amount to award a PPC search ranking.

·         CTR must be a certain rate, generally .05 percent, to even continue the campaign.  Google will disable PPC campaigns if the CTR falls much below .05 percent. The higher the CTR the better the chances for the top spot for your PPC ad.  Typically, the more focused the PPC ad, the better your CTR will be.  Of course, this is subjective as to the keyword and the PPC ad.

·         Quality Score: Google will assign a measurement  or grade to the overall campaign. The higher the Quality Score (from 0-10) the better chances your ad will appear in the No. 1 spot. To achieve a high quality score, the PPC ad should use the keyword at least once. And, the landing page should have considerable keyword density as well as content that directly relates to the what the PPC advertisement is selling.  For example, if your PPC ad is pushing an Email Marketing Webinar, your landing page should be focused on offering the Webinar.  Your density would go down if the Webinar is only a small part of the landing page.  If your landing page does not offer a Webinar at all, it is highly possible that Google would disable the PPC campaign, or, at the least, your quality score would be so low that your PPC would not show regardless of CTR and bid amount.

If you're like me, you are constantly wanting improve your ROI in marketing. Paid search is one of the many tools interactive marketers use to stay a few steps ahead of the search engine management circus.

But, what does one do when conversion rates start to slip? No matter how well you have your paid search ads crafted, regardless of how well you use all of the technology for marketing tools offered by Google, sooner or later, your ROI will start to lose some of its luster.

Search marketing is a larger-than life project, one that requires major planning and insight. But sometimes, it's the smallest of strategy shifts that produce big results. And, with everyone trying to do more with less, these small optimizing ideas can be golden.

As any PPC guru is well aware, Google Adwords offers a plethora of tools to manage your paid search efforts. Two that are often overlooked are ad scheduling and IP restriction.

Ad scheduling will help search marketers fine tune their paid search campaigns by limiting when their ads appear within Google searches. If, you know that your prospects are going to be searching for you during business hours, does it make sense to run paid search ads on the weekends?  You can dictate when your paid search ads appear from the campaign management tab. 

Another tip would be to restrict your ads based on IP address. This tool can make your paid search budget go even farther and increase your marketing ROI. This easy to use tool is also found in the Tools section. By excluding IP addresses that have low conversions rates, you can focus your precious search engine marketing budget on more lucrative site visitors.

So what's the big deal here? Well, here's what we know - as interactive marketers, we ...
 

• already use a collection of tools to manage paid search, search engine optimization, banner advertising, commercial email, triggered email, social media marketing, microsites, website traffic, lead management and the like.  Basically a bunch of execution tools.  Separate tools.  Disconnected tools.  And you (yes, it's safe to admit it) are the person responsible for meshing all this digital data and  producing intelligent insights (ahh yes, the elusive dashboard). 
   
• live in isolation from the rest of our marketing organization, in part because we're so different (and cutting edge) and in part because we're focused on the new stuff - the online world. 

Now let's be honest with ourselves.  As interactive marketers, we ...
 

• know it's impossible to integrate all these point tools and your customer's experience is falling short of it's potential.

• don't really want to operate as an island disconnected from our marketing mothership, as we fully realize that our online marketing activities have much greater impact when weaved into our offline marketing campaigns (and vice versa) - creating a seamless customer experience.

Yep, I agree it's a big deal - a really big deal!  So let's do something about it.  I invite you to learn about a new and truly innovative solution for managing your world of interactive marketing.  Visit aprimo.com/marketingstudio.  It's interactive.  It's integrated.  It's intelligent.  More importantly, I think it'll make our life a lot more enjoyable and bring a WOW factor to your online marketing. 

ROI in Marketing. Perpetual Motion Machines. The Fountain of Youth. All seem to be very elusive concepts. I don't have much to say about the second two items (despite my engineering degree), but I can make some comments on the first - ROI in Marketing. Aprimo's Marketing Automation software, like a Marketing department, is based on activities.  It's a simple concept...but it is a unique aspect of our product that makes the difference in allowing us to measure the effectiveness of a marketing activity.  In case you're wondering, a marketing activity could be writing a white paper, developing a microsite, writing a blog, managing paid search or coordinating a major trade show.  When it comes to managing marketing finance operations, the key is that marketing looks at the world from the perspective of these activities.  We manage our plans in groups of related activities, we assess the value of various types of activities (should we do less trade show events and more online marketing?).

By allowing the money to be tracked within these activities, we allow you to manage your marketing spend the way you manage your marketing. I've seen many estimates of ROI in Marketing that only take into account the execution costs (placement for web advertising) and forget about the design and development costs that can be significant depending on the activity.  The return on an activity can be somewhat elusive as well. There will always be an argument that multiple activities lead to a closed deal or the lift in product revenue. This will continue to be the realm of estimation and analytics.  However, accurate tracking of the entire investment will bring more accuracy to the process. 

Well, I've dwelled only on Marketing Finance Operations for my early posts.  I'm ready to talk about another passion of mine -- process (yeah, I'm a blast a parties :)).  Stay tuned!

Let me know if you have been in this situation before:
It's getting close to the end of Q3, your budget is getting thin, and yet you have to keep growing the funnel of qualified leads for your sales team.
So, what do you do?
You're one person, right?
Ah, the one-man (or woman) Marketing team......
You're labor, you're management, and you're everything in between!!!

OK, so do you try to get IT to add another call-to-action and landing page to your website?
IT is telling you it will be another week or two until they can fit you into their schedule. 

Do you make a deal with some of your media reps to "test" some online ads?
Good luck with that one!!

Start looking for some tools to help....there is a whole world out there, called Marketing Software, that can aid you in your quest to keep performing.
If you're on the Operations side of Marketing, meaning managing processes and budgets, there are tools just for marketing operations management that can aid you!  

Looking to grow or increase the effectiveness of your online marketing initiatives?
You name it, there is help for organic search, paid search, microsites, all available to help you manage your business, and manage it more effectively.