B2B marketing is going through drastic changes with new information and new tools to support nurture or "drip" marketing.  The challenge, however, is the voracious appetite this creates for content in many forms and for many types of buyers.  How can we build and sustain a content engine?  Here's five steps and one bonus thought that should help.

Step 1 – Identify your “thought leadership” messages…what is unique, what is important about the value you provide your customers?

A common statement inside of many organizations (especially BtoB organizations) is that they are a "sales led" organization.  Interestingly, depending on who is making this statement, this is seen as either a strength or a weakness.  If it is coming from the CEO or head of sales, in most cases, this is a considered a compliment.  They view this as an organization focused on the front lines of building a successful business vs. a business distracted by internal obstacles and debate. 

However, when spoken by leaders in marketing, this is often considered a weakness.  They see this is an organization driven by the "deal of the day" and not necessarily a holistic view of the market and the needs of the customer.  They would like to see the organization become "market led" vs. "sales led."

While this debate has raged for a long time, I believe the web is changing the face of this debate.  Rapidly, the web is becoming such a dominate force inside a company's business development process, they simply cannot ignore its' strategic importance to the lifeblood of the company.  Whether this takes the form of email marketing, social media strategies, banner ads, SEO, or search engine management, it all affects the core of how many companies are attracting their prospects today.  Given marketing is almost always the owner of these various web strategies, with the rise of web based marketing, there is also a rise in marketing's strategic position within the enterprise.

You might ask how this is different than any other marketing strategy of the past.  Didn't marketing always play a role in finding new prospects within the business development process?  There is one huge difference.  The prospects of today have dramatically different expectations of the sales process.  In mass, the prospects of today simply do not want to be sold.  They expect to find what they need, when they need it, using their desk top, a few search terms, and a trillion web pages almost all controlled by individuals outside your company.  With this expectation, they cannot be "sales led" because, at the beginning, they now expect to lead themselves to the right solution using far more resources then your sales team to make that decision. 

The group responsible for them finding the "right solution" and resources during this critical early search is marketing.  Therefore, if your new prospects cannot find you on their own terms using today’s expectations, they will probably never be around to be sales led no matter how many times you call them or have your reps send them a letter.  Hello new world.  We are all going to have to become market led or potentially become isolated to just serving our existing customers because the new prospects are leading themselves to the right solutions on their own being effectively influenced by web based marketing from other "market led" competitors.

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

As a company, Aprimo spent many years in a software category (marketing resource management) that most marketers knew little about.  This category focused on the "back office" of marketing, helping the marketer manage their projects, their budget, and their marketing assets.  However, most marketing organizations 10 years ago did this with spreadsheets and file systems (and many of them still do today!  p.s. we still would like to talk to you!).

When you live in a category for a long time that does not have general awareness, you get addicted to outbound marketing.  This is because you are constantly having to "reach out" to educate someone about what you do, why it is important, and why they should care.

Times have changed at Aprimo, and now we are serving many markets that have ready, willing buyers looking to solve the problems they have today with software we offer.  However, it is interesting that our marketing was slow to change.  We became addicted to outbound.  Even though there are many marketers now looking to solve problems like email marketing, search engine marketing, campaign management, and more, we have built an engine that tries to "call everyone" asking if they want to solve the problem vs. putting up a sign saying "we solve this" and letting them find us.

Ok, a sign is a simplistic example.  However, effective PPC campaigns are just not something we think first about.  For instance, there were 700,000 people looking for "email marketing software" this month.  However, we never seriously tried to win that search term.  Instead, we will place millions into channels calling people about email marketing hoping they happen to be one of the 700,000 that already told us they were looking via search.

Times are changing at Aprimo and so is our marketing approach.  In the coming months, we are going to be investing more and more on inbound channels.  However, habits are hard to break and this change does not come easily.  I imagine we are not the only company struggling to break such habits!

 

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.

• http://www.aprimo.com/marketingstudio/splash/splash.html (a 3D Marketing Studio splash introduction)

Purpose of Marketing Studio Splash Page

• Blender 3D (blender.org) - create Box Animation: Output Targa
• Adobe After Effects  - import TARGA & animate icons; output FLV
• Adobe Flash - used to embed FLV and actionscript was used for the lights in the background

Challenge

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. 

There is a debate raging (well, at least in my head - which happens more then I care to admit!) on whether the web will turn out to be a channel or "the" channel within marketing across the majority of business types.  Understanding how the web has influenced buyer behavior for your business has serious implications for the modern marketer and the marketing software they will require.  This understanding will change the way we view the role of search engine management, organic search, social media, landing pages, email, and more in the context of our overall marketing mix.

The most dramatic difference causing a change in buyer behavior, in my opinion, is the radical reduction in the cost of research the web has facilitated.  What would have taken a staff of researchers months to pull together 20 years ago, can now be done by the average buyer in less than 10 minutes using search and the web.  This simple fact has caused a sea change in buying behavior.  The modern reality is that virtually nothing is too small or too inexpensive not to be researched.  If it takes me a few minutes to make a better decision, why not spend those few minutes on the web and research that decision?  Today's buyer is much more educated about their purchases because the barrier to that education has been radically reduced via the web.

For marketing, we must go where our buyers are present.  Our buyers, in mass across the globe, are going to the web because the instant, global, and diverse information it provides has given them the power to educate themselves at extremely low costs.  For many of us, that means we must meet the majority of our future buyers on the web or we risk never meeting them at all as they climb the education curve around our products and offerings.  That, to me, provides the basic recipe for why the web will become (or has become) "the" critical channel for many of our businesses regardless if we sell our products directly on the web or not.
 

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!