B2B Marketing - Open for Business

Aretha Franklin on Marketing: R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

2009-11-12T10:36:00.001Z

How do you feel about the marketing profession? Are we the good guys or the baddies?

Of course we all come into work every day intending to do the best possible job that we can, but are we actually in a profession that we can be proud of? Are we helping people or simply trying to flog stuff?

There are good marketing practices and there are terrible marketing practices. Unfortunately the bad practices tend to live in the memory longest. Few of us wish to be associated with the practices of the double-glazing salesman or the caller who interrupts you when your preparing dinner to ask "This is not a sales call, I wonder could you spare just 2 minutes to answer a few questions for our survey". (Two lies in one sentence - it IS a sales call, and it will take more than 2 minutes!)

I often speak about the requirement to align marketing better with sales. If our marketing activities are not aligned with what the sales organisation perceives they need then we are doomed. I still believe that, however we also need to be better aligned with the client, or more importantly with the individual human being that we are engaging with through our marketing activity. I think we need to build RESPECT

To this end I offer a first pass at a Respectful Marketing Manifesto - a brainstorm of some of the attributes of marketing activity that we need to adhere to better. I'm sure the wise owls across the blogosphere have got plenty of suggestions to add to the list - I'd love to hear them:

Humanise your responses. Responses are from people - they are not just digits on a spreadsheet. They responded for a reason - why was that?
Every response counts. As Seth Godin once said, when someone engages with your campaign that is a privilege not a right. While its very tempting to skim off the responders from the largest companies or with the best job titles, you do so at your peril. You could easily miss key influencers, and more significantly not meet the expectations of the person who was taking the trouble to engage with your campaign.
Deepen your client insight with every interaction. Even if your engagement is as naked as a telephone call asking "would you like to buy my product" (let's hope it's more sophisticated than that) - if the response is "No" (which shouldn't surprise you in this example!) you could ask what their key interest areas are.
When a client honours you with insights - record it and act upon it. You'll be much more successful engaging in a dialogue that is aligned against their personal agenda. So capture it and use the insight.
Invest in capturing interest areas. Interests can be explicit (ie the client tells me verbally or via web form) or implicit (he's responded to my activity on topic x, so the chances are it is of some interest to him). Knowing and acting upon these insights will not only increase your returns on marketing expense, but will also enhance your value in the perception of the client
Revisit how you use Newsletters. Do you use newsletters to push the latest things that are important to you (who cares?), or to provide the latest news and insight that you know is relevant (because he told you or implied it through previous behaviour). A Newsletter strategy linked to a contact self-profiling tool so that dynamic newsletters can be created feels like the core of a respectful marketing system.
Stop sending so much stuff! If someone has taken the trouble to provide you all this insight into their agenda, why on earth would you want to drown them in other stuff in the how that they might be interested? Most of it is a waste of your time and a waste of your recipient's time. Better to refocus your efforts on understanding your intended clients' own agendas and figuring out how you can best serve that.

At the core of all of this is a change in the way we capture and leverage client/prospect data in our activities.

Traditional Marketing

Craft a message
Select a target audience
Blast off

Respectful Marketing

Determine your client/prospect's own agenda
Assess where they are on their journey
Develop offerings/activities to help them progress on their journey

Isn't that how you'd like to be marketed to? "All I'm asking for is a little respect"

Thanks Aretha - Sock it to me, Sock it to me, Sock it to me, Sock it to me!

Organic Gardener's Guide to Lead Nurturing - 2009 Edition

2009-10-14T09:56:00.002+01:00

It's taken me a couple of weeks, but I've finally posted my presentation from the B2B Marketing Magazine seminar on Demand Generation/Lead Nurturing onto Slideshare. I hope you find it useful. It contains 10 areas to focus on to improve the yield on your marketing campaigns.

You can also find the deck from Will Schnabel at Silverpop here

Organic Gardener's Guide to Lead Nurturing

View more presentations from PeteJakob.

Visualising your responses

2009-10-05T17:49:00.000+01:00

Something's bothering me. I keep on reading about response scoring, response-lead conversion ratios, click-thru rates, ROI. I've nothing against these discussion points but there's something missing - the human touch.

Think about the responses from your latest campaign. What's your mental picture of those responses? Are they digits on a spreadsheet - depersonalised, abstract, numerical. Or do you picture real people with a todo list as long as yours, struggling to find a way through some tricky issues. Imagine what might happen if you asked him "how might I help?" rather than "why haven't you bought something yet?".

So the next time you're looking at the reports from your campaign, stop for a moment. Do you want to help him, or simply want to count him?

God Bless Steve Woods!

2009-09-30T22:36:00.003+01:00

It's not often that I bestow blessings on colleagues but in this case I have to make an exception. I have to confess, I've been particularly rubbish at maintaining my blog over the past few months. I don't do this blog on behalf of my employer, and am not driven by publishing deadlines or other events that force me to write. I simply do it because I'm passionate about B2B marketing and am genuinely interested in making a contribution to improving the professionalism of B2B marketing.

My only excuse is that I've been busy - pathetic, I know, but there you go. I'm deploying a marketing automation system at the moment and that's keeping me busy. And when I have a few spare moments I have to confess I prefer to choose to spend them with my family rather than with my laptop. But I've recommitted myself to spending more time posting content.

Today I spoke at an event chaired by Joel Harrison and B2B Marketing Magazine. I'll link to the content in the next couple of days when Joel publishes it. I was covering 10 ways to improve your marketing campaigns. Item 10 was about keeping yourself fresh with new insight. RSS feeds are great but better still is clever people you respect doing the filtering for you. Hence my gratitude to Steve Woods. Steve is CTO at Eloqua - I had the good fortune to meet him at an event in London earlier in the year. His blog on "Digital Body Language" is always thought provoking and I've learned a great deal from him. Best of all, he's started providing a digest of good content that he's come across from various luminaries in this space. His latest Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-Up contains links to new content from Laura Ramos at Forrester, Sirius Decisions and Brian Carroll - three individuals/organisations from whom I've learned a great deal. So thank you Steve - I'll continue to use your blog as a useful filter on what's new.

Biggest Mistakes in B2B Content Marketing

2009-09-28T16:38:00.002+01:00

Over on ClickDocuments blog - Connect the Docs there's a good collection of insights from a number of B2B Marketing luminaries (Brian Carrroll, Mac McIntosh, to name two) on some of the most common B2B Content marketing mistakes to be avoided. The key ones listed are

Avoid the One-Off Send Syndrome
Avoid Me, Me, Me Marketing!
Not being relevant to your audience
Not cariing about your audience
Not finding multiple uses for your content
Missing the opportunity to create content specific to buyer personas

Some nice examples in here, but it all points to the same issue - nurturing a relationship with a potential client does NOT equate to sending them a brochure, or asking regularly if they're ready to buy yet. Simple.

Seth Godin Sermon at Westminster Abbey

2009-02-18T19:49:00.001Z

Well almost...

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a talk by Seth Godin in the beautiful surroundings of Church House by Westminster Abbey - in many ways an appropriate venue for an inspiring and slightly evangelical afternoon. The session drew on many of the themes from Seth's many best selling books (none of which I've actually read, in all honesty, but I've followed his blog for a couple of years!). The agenda consisted of a 60 minute presentation and then at least the same amount of time devoted to a very dynamic question and answer session. There were some great and very challenging questions and some of Seth's answers were brilliant. I particularly liked his answer to the question about how he gets so much done - "I don't work anything like as hard as you think", he said. But he doesn't go to meetings and he doesn't watch TV - that buys him around 6 hours a day, during which he can get a lot done.

About half the audience were in the B2B marketing space, but there were an astonishingly diverse set of participants - drawing from advertising and media types, the music industry (suits and talent), students and even a Vicar from the Church of England! For me the message that came through again and again was

Be authentic - if you fake it you'll be found out
Be remarkable - mediocre products (or people) cannot win any more
Focus on the possibilities that the web industrial revolution is producing, rather than clinging onto yesterday's model
Don't expect to win over everybody immediately (or even ever) - focus on the influencers and let the "nay-sayers" feel left out
Identify and lead tribes who will willingly spread your ideas for you

If you've read Seth's books these messages will be already familiar. If your bookshelves are littered with unread books (like mine), then go to Youtube and you'll find a multitude of video clips.

What impressed me more, however, was the authenticity that came across in his own brand. He clearly believes that it's more important what you do than what you say, is driven by a well-developed set of values and wants to help change the world for the better. Perhaps it was not so odd to find a vicar there....

2009's Top 50 Marketing Blogs

2009-01-21T10:05:00.001Z

There's always a plethora of lists of "this years blogs to watch" around this time of the year. I just stumbled across one from Evan Carmichael (a new author to me - but creating lists is always a good way of promoting your profile in the blogosphere). Some old faithfuls in here (Seth Godin, Marketing Sherpa, Guy Kawasaki) plus several that I've not come across before. Helpfully they've divided them in to different sections.

What additional ones would make your list of must-read blogs - particularly in the B2B space?

Personally I would add Chris Brogan, Marketing Profs Daily Fix and Web Ink Now for starters.

David Meerman Scott's new ebook made me angry - please read it too!

2009-01-16T09:42:00.001Z

If you don't know of David Meerman Scott, you should change that. He wrote "the New Rules of Marketing and PR" which is a great read, full of challenging thinking. As a pre-cursor to his new book "World Wide Rave" he's just published a free and easily digestible ebook called "Lose Control of your Marketing! Why marketing ROI measures lead to failure"

You should read the ebook - it's got some really great ideas. However reading it made me cross. His suggestion is simple:

Make your information on the Web totally free for people to access, with absolutely no virtual strings attached: no electronic gates, no registration requirements, and no email address checking necessary.

Meerman Scotts assertion is that marketing's role is to spread ideas, and that putting ANY barrier in the way of that simply reduces the number of people that experience your content. Amongst other things he asserts that you should not put web contact forms (name, email capture) onto websites.

While applying these forms of measurement might be appropriate offline, using them to track your success on the Web just isn’t relevant; they don’t capture the way ideas travel. Worse,the very act of tracking leads hampers the spread of ideas. People know from experience that if they supply their personal information to an organization, they’re likely to receive unwanted phone calls from salespeople or to find themselves on email marketing lists. Most won’t bother. In fact, I have evidence from several companies that have offered information both with and without a registration requirement that when you eliminate the requirement of supplying personal information, the number of downloads or views goes up by as much as a factor of fifty.

I hope he's wrong. Many of us have been schooled in the principles of "if you can't measure it, don't do it". We are increasing our efforts to capture names of people who engage with our content so that we can continue to engage with them. This approach flies in the face of that: if we give away something of genuine value with no barriers, people will share it with each other and ultimately connect with us.

What really makes me angry is that I think he may be right.

What's your thoughts?

Demand Generation Summit - the Movie!

2008-11-24T11:16:00.004Z

My last post referred to the Demand Generation Summit at the beginning of this month. As I was saying in my presentation on the day, it's essential to plan for how you will build upon an activity to maximise the return.

In my opinion, the Demand Generation Summit itself provides a super case study example of post-event activities that many of us could leverage in our own campaigns. We all know that marketing events are expensive - venues, lunches, visiting speakers etc. There are 2 questions that frequently come up in event planning:

How can we ensure that the event is the beginning of a conversation and not the end of it?
How do we engage with people who weren't able to make the event, or that we don't engage with until after the event has happened?

Against Question 1, the organising team have created a Linked-In group. Great move - people who attended can join, people who are referred by colleagues can join, people who stumble across it on Linked-In can join. YOU could join - as the time of writing this there are 73 members. Next step is to really get a dialog going within that group - that is more difficult of course because it requires people to participate rather than just observe.

To answer the second question, BrightTALK was one of the sponsors and the presentations were professionally captured and edited on video and are now available from a separate Demand Generation Summit webinar site, along with the slides. Congratulations to all those involved - I think they've done a great production job. Check it out!

Demand Generation Summit - London November 4th

2008-11-05T13:07:00.001Z

Yesterday I had the honour of speaking at the first Demand Generation Summit held at Altitude in the Millbank Tower in the heart of London. The event was organised and sponsored by Banner, Google, Eloqua, BrightTALK and MarketOne. Details of the event can be found here.

A few observations from the day...

I think the team did an outstanding job in the preparation and execution of the event - list cleansing, audience generation, pre-event materials, venue selection, catering , agenda were all very thought through and flawlessly executed - hats off to everyone involved.

Amongst the attendees there was a clear desire to exchange ideas and opinions. At one level I think that many of the attendees found it a positive cathartic experience to recognise that the challenges around aligning marketing with sales, creating appropriate content, nurturing conversations, and measuring ROI are shared amongst all of us in the B2B marketing community. We may all have distinct challenges within our own individual organisations but the fundamental issues are very similar.

There is a significant opportunity to continue the dialogue amongst the attendees, and indeed build a community to encourage further discussion and exchange. On the back of the summit a Linked-In group has been setup called the Demand Generation Network. I'd encourage you to join and participate - could be fun and develop into a truly valuable resource.

Several people asked for copies of my slides, and so I've posted them on slideshare. As I said yesterday, I'd hope that you can use some of the content to assess what your current state of health is around conversations with pre-customers (still not comfortable with that word!) and to help you identify those areas that are under your control and those areas where you need so influence other parts of the organisation.

I'd very much appreciate any feedback - either here or in the Linked-In Group.

Using LinkedIn as a Lead Generation Tool

2008-10-03T10:25:00.001+01:00

A friend recently asked me "We all periodically do this LinkedIn stuff - but what's it actually for?" Linking up with past colleagues and friends has some value, making yourself available to the advances of recruitment agencies may or may not interest you. But is that it?

However I'm increasingly seeing people use LinkedIn as a way to generate new leads - primarily by creating and joining LinkedIn Groups and developing a profile for your "personal brand" by answering and asking questions within those groups. There's a good article on this by Prashant Kaw over on the Hubspot blog

If you want to keep tabs on the conversations within the groups without having to remember to go to LinkedIn you can have an email delivered to you on a regular basis with a summary of the most recent topics being discussed in the groups. Unfortunately there's rather too much of the "Fabulous marketer seeks work in the Des Moines area" type in many of the groups but there are some useful connections to be made here.

Which LinkedIn Groups do you find the most valuable as a B2B Marketer? What have been your experiences?

An Organic Gardener's Guide to Lead Nurturing

2008-09-24T11:28:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I spoke at a seminar organised by B2B Marketing magazine. Rather than use the traditional analogies of dating/marriage that we all use to describe the nurturing approach, I used the topic of vegetable gardening (it's the new rock'n'roll!).

Marketing campaigns produce seedlings, but that's only the start - we need to feed, weed, water, prick out etc at the appropriate time. We also need to ensure that the sales teams want to eat vegetables and are not just red meat eaters. You get the picture?

So my 9 tips for a bumper marketing crop have now become:

Grow the right stuff (Align marketing activity with Sales)
What's growing and What isn't (Record all your Responses in a client contact-centric view)
Follow the instructions on the Seed Packet (Develop "nurturing blueprints" of standardised processes to develop a relationship from an initial response)
Apply the right Feed at the right time (Align your nurturing content to the stages of the buying cycle)
Are the nutrients being absorbed? (Implement activity-based scoring)
Make it easier with a little machinery (Automate the most appropriate processes)
Share your knowledge (Integrate your marketing insights with the CRM system)
Monitor Progress Regularly (Measure key indicators)
Apply plenty of Mulch (Refine and keep learning)

You can find the complete presentation on Slideshare.

Flickr Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tico_bassie/120810354/

7 Starting Points for Marketing Automation

2008-09-23T10:36:00.001+01:00

I just read a fascinating piece by Chris Koch at the ITSMA on some suggestions regarding key marketing processes that you should look to technology to automate. Chris suggests the following which seem to be an excellent place to start:

Get a single view of the customer. Collect data from multiple places to improve analysis of individual customers.
Model the behavior of the customer so you can predict which ones are the best to do business with.
Collect and manage conversations about you online and offline.
Contact customers when and how they want to be contacted.
Organize marketing content so that it can be targeted at a specific customer, delivered at the right time and in the right context. Automate the delivery of content that supports different customer interactions—call center, sales call, for example—and different events that occur, such as high number of transactions.
Improve interactions with customers on your Website. Can you make your site respond to the customer’s actions and history on the site?
Better measure and manage marketing activities.

I can't overstate the importance of getting a single view of the customer. Without that it's very difficult to get the management information you need to tune your demand generation and lead nurturing. Today you may have multiple marketing activities engaging with any individual customers, and many of these touches may be from external agencies and business partners. If you can take a customer-centric, rather than just a tactic-centric view of the activity (either in your existing CRM or elsewhere) then this is the first step towards seeing your activity from the client's perspective. Investment in this now will pay dividends in the future.

Coming on September 22: Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting? Four Viewpoints

2008-09-09T12:58:00.001+01:00

Reading Brian Carroll's blog this morning I see an interesting debate coming up later in the month. What's most effective when maintaining and developing relationships with clients - email, telephone, face-to-face?

I often wonder about this one myself: is the telephone too intrusive when someone's only downloaded a whitepaper? Is it really a question of the tone used? does email force us to be too structured and miss other clues? Can we afford face-to-face for developing relationships? Do our sales colleagues have the skill or motivation to develop relationships rather than close deals?

Will be interesting to see the arguments from 4 distinguished bloggers...

Details here.

5 Ways to make B2B Lead Management more Effective

2008-09-08T14:27:00.000+01:00

Catching up on some reading today I came across this article from the ITSMA - an interview with the excellent Brian Carroll. It offers the following common sense advice to improve your lead management:

Create a marketing funnel
Create a universal definition of a lead
Use the phone
Ask about goals - don't sell
Define lead nurturing - and the right people to nurture

All good stuff - you can read the full article here.

50 Ways Marketers Could Use Social Media

2008-09-04T13:28:00.000+01:00

I recently came across this list from Chris Brogan that looks like a one-stop IDP on Social Media for IBM Marketers! Frankly there are many aspects here that I simply don't understand - but it's clearly full of some crackerjack practical ideas for us marketers. Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester has then taken this list and grouped them under 5 objectives which I think helps the list become even more practical. These objectives are:

Listening: Gleaning market and customer insight and intelligence
Talking: Engaging in a two way discussion to get your message out (and get messages in)
Energizing: Letting your customers tell your prospects on your behalf (viral, word of mouth)
Supporting: Getting your customers to self-support each other
Embracing: Building better products and services through collaboration with clients

Powerful Stuff - check it out.

Announcing Project Dogfood - an innovative approach to Event creation

2008-09-01T13:24:00.001+01:00

Was just reading the following post from the excellent David Meerman Scott on his Web Ink Now blog entitled OK smarty-pants, why don't you show us? Announcing Project Dogfood!

As part of the event preparation for the New Marketing Summit in Boston in October, he and his collaborators (Chris Brogan and Paul Gillin) have opened up "the development of the event Web site to your scrutiny, advice, and comments. The main thrust will be a revamp of the New Marketing Summit site to transform it from the current one-way placeholder "brochureware" into a social media driven interactive site."

I think Project Dogfood is a great Web 2.0 experiment that will be interesting to follow...

Expanding Your Sales Outside of Core Clients

2008-06-23T13:47:00.002+01:00

If you want to grow your business, you either need to sell more to people who've bought from you previously, or identify more people to buy from you. I think that's obvious.

Equally obvious is the requirement to identify growth markets and invest in those.

But if you're the marketing exec responsible for an existing mature market, and your sales force would rather just develop opportunities from within their existing clients. You're already struggling to get someone in sales to pick up the leads that you're generating outside of the core clients.

Sound familiar? Have you got experience with these challenges? What did you do? What were some of the challenges?

Notes from IDM B2B Marketing Conference - London (April 8th)

2008-04-09T11:48:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I attended the 5th annual B2B Marketing Conference organised by the Institute of Direct Marketing.

To be honest, much of the day was a little disappointing. However as always there were a couple of interesting elements outside of the opportunity to network with peers. For myself the highlight was a presentation from Rob Watt at Avenue A / Razorfish who opened my eyes a little more to the use of cookies in marketing campaigns. His fundamental question was "would you consider paying a £300 cost per thousand (CPM) for display media?" Of course not, I hear you say. But he then went on to expand upon how, if you could use cookies and other digital techniques to target your customers and prospects, and ONLY your customers and prospects, then all of a sudden this starts to become a really good deal.

We all appreciate that cookies can be used to track return visits to our websites in order to pick up additional behavioural information from repeat visitors without having to present additional annoying registration forms.

But consider the following: our prospects are blending their work and home online personas. Increasingly people will look at Facebook and SkyNews and the website for their favourite football club during the day, and similarly will look at their work-related sites during evenings and weekends. The two spaces are not as distinct and separate as was the case just a few years ago. And Rob's contention was that to place "work-related" advertising (provided it's relevant, of course) in front of this person within Facebook or the Liverpool website, would not be considered inappropriate.

So here's the thought. If I capture a "pool" of cookies for my prospect from my digital activities (web, RSS, podcast, widgets etc) and then pass this cookie pool over to one of the adserving networks, I can ask for my display ad to be served whenever the adserving network detects the presence of that specific cookie, irrespective of the specific media. So in other words, the adverts are triggered by cookie presence rather than by media selection. I hadn't come across this concept before, and it seemed to me to be very powerful.

And furthermore, once you have a critical mass of prospects being targeted in this way, you would be able to do some propensity modeling to infer what web titles your target market is spending time in, and hence use this to refine your overall media planning.

Sounds to me like a really interesting approach. Anyone got any experience of doing this?

50 Networking Thoughts Everyone Should Read

2008-02-14T09:53:00.001Z

One area I am trying to focus on at the moment is increasing my network and networking skills. This morning I stumbled across this excellent list of 50 tips to improve your networking from RainToday.Com. Some are really obvious, but I'm sure everyone can find a few helpful takeaways amongst them. My own personal favourites include

Come to every networking event with three great questions ready to go. Be sure they begin with, "What's the one thing?" "What's your favorite?" and "What was the best part about?"
When you read an article you like, email the author. Tell him what you liked about it and introduce yourself. He'll usually write back.
Have an awesome email signature that gives people a reason to click over to your website. Just be careful not to have too much information included.
Every time you meet someone, write the letters H-I-C-H on their business card: how I can help. Then think of five ways to do so.

Read all 50 here

Are you a Marketing Fundamentalist?

2008-02-11T10:30:00.001Z

I've often spoken about how I feel that the 2 qualities that I consider that the best marketers possess are PASSION and CURIOSITY.

Passion is infectious - if you feel strongly about something then it's obvious. You talk with enthusiasm, you're excitement shines through, and you inspire others.In my work life my two main passions are lead nurturing and social networking. Lead nurturing has become a passion because I realised that a focus on improving the dialog that we have as marketers AFTER we've run the event or sent the email campaign could have a profound effect on our performance. And my passion for social networking is driven by the hope that technology could finally be used to help unite people both at work and in their broader lives.

If you can't find something in your job to get passionate about, then perhaps you should think about trying some other job - your days must just drag along with monotony and mediocrity

Both of these passions have been developed as a result of Curiosity. Twelve months ago I did not feel as excited by either of these areas. However by exploring what is possible and taking an informed view on what could work for me (and what couldn't right now) by passion is stronger. Consequently I feel I could not operate without RSS and the world of Blogs, but am less enthused (for now) about Twitter, Facebook and SecondLife - however I will remain curious.

Last week I came across this 5 minute video featuring Seth Godin via a colleague. For me, what he says about Curiosity resonated very powerfully.

By the fact that you're even looking at this, I guess your demonstrating that you're at least somewhat curious!

Are you a Pico-Marketer?

2008-01-17T15:56:00.001Z

I recently stumbled upon a couple of ex-colleagues, Roger Warner and Stan Woods who are now running a Marketing/PRgroup called Velocity.

There was a great article the other day on their blog on Pico branding which is well worth a read (as is the rest of their blog). The net of it is that today's marketer needs to focus on participation in the little projects as well as the big mega-bucks corporate campaigns. In other words it's about capturing peoples interest via the "new" channels that they will be passing by - blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook etc, and using that to drive them towards some of your more polished content. Here's a quote from their article

Pico-branding is not about building grand audience destinations (like the mega-bucks web site of yesteryear), because if you spend lots of time and money building it there’s no longer a guarantee that they’ll come (there’s every chance they’ll be polishing their Facebook profile instead).

No, Pico-branding is all about building smaller, more discrete stopping points across all of these new online outlets, with the aim of capturing your audience’s attention and either complimenting (and informing) what they’re doing or diverting their interest towards a destination that you do own (ie, something from your Mega-brand bucket of work).

A good analogy is with the board game Monopoly. Everyone knows it’s a bad strategy to invest in only one area of the board. Too random and not enough traffic. A better way to generate cash is to buy lots of smaller properties at all of the places that people visit regularly, as well as investing in the big stuff: so, collectively, a bunch of houses on Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road can add a great deal of strategic, money-making value to those expensive hotels on Park Lane.

I think this is an area that we need to focus more attention on . As reported in Wired some while ago - "Attention has become the scarce resource of the information economy". While we continue to invest in large scale activities - large events, plush web presences, etc let's spend a little more time figuring out how we can attract people to these investments. The mantra of "be where the people are looking" has been espoused for some while, but often this only translates to a plan to increase Google search word investments. Don't get me wrong - buying Google words is a powerful tool and warrants a significant part of our spend. But there is much more that we can do, and much of it requires focus more than it does cash.

My own experimentation in this space with this blog has been quite instructive (for me at least!). I use Google Analytics (a free tool) to analyse the traffic that is coming to my blog. I'm frankly astonished by the huge amounts of insight it provedes about the audience coming to my site and where they're coming from.

In an effort to drive up traffic I've tried a few things. From my analysis here are some personal tips:

Blog comments drive visitors. Use Google to find a few Blog sites that have a broad readership in your subject area. Comment in those blogs and link back to your own content. Technorati can also help here to find the sites with the greatest influence. This can drive significant traffic, provided the comments you make are relevant and authentic. This has been the biggest contributor of new visitors to my site.
Social Bookmarking. By tagging entries appropriately in Del.icio.us, Digg and other social bookmarking sites, I was pleasantly surprised to see an uptick in visitors coming from Delicious in particular.
Twitter. Personally I'm not a serious user of Twitter. I haven't figured yet how I can use it to add value to what I do, rather than act as another interruption. But I know many people are passionate about it. Signing up with Twitter and "following" a few people who are interested in some of the same areas as myself has also brought quite a few new readers to my site.
Linking all your activities. By trying to have my mail closing, my linked-in profile profile, and any other elements of my online presence all point towards the blog allows additional traffic to be driven with no incremental effort.
Keep at it. If I don't blog for a few days I can see the traffic start to tail off. So frequency is clearly critical

I guess I should also do something on Facebook but simply haven't got around to it yet.

Of course this is only the beginning of the journey. Having brought people to your page you need to provide a reason for them to come back. But that's a topic for another day.

What has worked for you? Please share.

Advice to all Marketers - Do it Wrong Quickly!

2008-01-09T17:03:00.001Z

I was reading and interview today with Mike Moran, the author of the Book "Doing it Wrong Quickly". Mike also writes the Biznology blog that I regularly follow.

This particular quote resonated with me

"Marketing has traditionally been a high-risk endeavor. If you tape a series of TV commercials and buy the time up front, and then the ads bomb, it's a disaster. You don't undertake that kind of risk lightly. Instead, you constantly try to mitigate that risk by testing spots with focus groups, getting buy-in with all the key execs, hiring consultants to provide feedback, and making sure you have the best minds in the ad agency working on doing something that gets attention.

Succeeding in marketing on the Internet, however, in many ways requires the exact opposite behavior. You can write the copy for a paid search ad this morning, try it out on Google, and see by lunch time that no on is clicking. It cost you a couple of hours and a few dollars and then you tweak the copy and try again. You're not stuck with your decisions, they cost very little, and you know immediately whether they are working. Internet marketing demands that you experiment to get the best possible outcome.

You can imagine, however, that years of avoiding risk can make this kind of change a difficult proposition. Many marketers avoid risk automatically without knowing why, so it's wrenching for them to change their behavior. In the book, I spend a couple of chapters working through marketers' personal objections, and objections they'll run into when they try to float this approach in the rest of their organization."

However anyone working in a large marketing organisation will know it's difficult to take risks. We try to control our Brand message with a religious fervour (quite understandably), but as a result end up with a Brand image that is not all that we want it to be.

So here's the challenge: How do we take more risks in our marketing communications without damaging the positive aspects of our brand image?

50 New B2B Marketing Blogs

2008-01-04T14:02:00.001Z

I've written before about how we as marketers need to stay fresh on the latest new thinking in B2B Marketing. Of course the world of blogs is an obvious way to do this and when used in conjunctions with a decent RSS reader it can be done really easily.

Those nice people at Marketo have just compiled a list of another 50 new B2B Marketing blogs bringing their total up to 138.

Even better, they've even published the OPML to make it even easier to follow all of these in one easy go.

Please let me know which of these blogs you find particularly useful.

Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New

2008-01-03T16:39:00.001Z

I was reading extracts from the Tapscott and Williams' fabulous Wikinomics book just before Christmas (Chapter 1 is available for free online), and much of it has been on my mind ever since.

Wikinomics does a great job (in my opinion) of setting out the difference between the old corporate business model and the new collaborative model which is evolving. I've tried to paraphrase the key points below about the key attributes of the different models:

Old World

Knowledge is Power (It's your key corporate or career differentiator - so protect it all costs)
Hierarchical Management Structures (use organisation charts to to define teams - and expand to matrix management when that becomes too rigid)
Command and Control management system. Heavy emphasis on measurement and reporting, especially when the going gets tough)
Bestowed authority. (I'm the manager, so I know best.)
Routes to success
- Employ brighter people than your competitors
- Protect intellectual capital
- Focus on customers
- Think global, act local
- Execution excellence

New World

Community is Power. A united community will be stronger than any individual
Collaboration. Openly sharing the knowledge we have and collaborating to apply that knowledge will deliver greater innovation
Self-Organisation. Teaming together because we buy into a common vision allows us to reach outside of the conventional hierarchical structure.
Earned Authority. Authority comes from the value you contribute,not from the rank you've been assigned
Routes to Success
- Being Open
- Peering
- Sharing
- Acting Globally

I particularly like these 4 suggested routes to success in the New World, and will aspire to apply them to my behaviour at work in 2008.

Happy New Year - I look forward to working and learning with you in 2008.

Pete