Creative Commons by JerryFeist

Last week, Justin Gray (@myleadmd) posted a great commentary on the growing number of skills needed by Marketers moving forward.  We have been blogging about this for as long as we’ve been blogging.  Through the years, there has been almost Luddite-like pushback from a dwindling number of clueless Marketers, but as we like to say, the the arc of marketing and business is long, but it bends to efficiency and sensibility.

To underscore what Justin Gray is saying and what we’ve been saying, look at these two recent job postings for Marketing professionals.  Company names have been omitted for privacy reasons; boldness is included for our emphasis.:

“Marketing Operations Specialist – ABC Company is seeking a Online Marketing Systems Administrator for a freelance-to-hire opportunity. Under the supervision of the Director of Operations and QA, this position is responsible for the day-to-day management and global support of key marketing systems including SalesForce.com, Sitecore, Eloqua, Kayako, and WordPress. This is a great position for an entrepreneurial individual, who will work with business leaders and develop mission-critical analytics.” 

Wow.  That’s a lot of platforms to run and as many people know, Eloqua is one of the most complex Marketing Automation platforms in the market.  Salesforce by itself generally needs a individual to administer it; but relying on a “freelancer” at a “specialist” level (read:  we won’t pay fair rates for a real “expert”) to know about and keep all your Marketing and Sales applications running?  Tall order.

Here’s another one.  Disclosure: We’ve done some editing to reduce verbage related to traditional marketing responsibilities; however, we feel we have not altered the context of the content relative to digital responsibilities.  Additionally, we know the hiring manager and the company, and have solid respect for them and mean them no ill will by mentioning this job posting, but are they being realistic in looking for a lower-level “Super Marketer” that will already have this broad set of skills and will actually last within the organization with such demands?

“Marketing & Sales Administration Coordinator - This position helps lead XYZ Corporation’s awareness and lead generation efforts. Candidate is responsible for brand building efforts, sales tool development, website/blog/social media management, HTML landing page/email creation and tracking, salesforce.com management, public relations and event planning.

Essential functions include:

Aid in overall goal of executing inbound marketing strategy and ultimately drive the development of new, qualified leads;  manage SEO & PPC programs; manage content creation for blog, emails and other HTML templates, and webinars; work with writers and XYZ specialists to create white paper and benchmark studies.

Social Media Support - Create content, distribute and track efforts for XYZ’s social media accounts

Salesforce.com Support – Be a knowledge resource for Sales, Marketing and leadership; create custom reports; drive adoption efforts through coaching/training users; develop proficiency in CRMfusion; upload new prospect lists from Data.com, D&B and Hoovers, assign prospects and track through the campaigns; perform mass updates and maintain data hygiene.

Marketing automation management (Marketo) – Lead scoring; ensure data synchs properly with Salesforce.com

Must be proficient in Microsoft Office applications, Salesforce.com and Marketo.”

Double Wow.  Remember, this job description was whittled down to emphasize digital responsbilities;  That is a lot for a lower level staffperson to manage.

Now, don’t get us wrong when we ask if those are realisttic expectations of the employers – we do not doubt for an instant that they need those skills and believe that they have honestly communicated what they want. The question is can one person at slightly above entry-level experience and rates actually possess those skills?

The reality is, that’s what is needed.  Marketers who are technologists – who understand systems analysis, linquistics, analytics, and the language of finance- are rare..  Many current Marketers will not be able to make this transformation.  They are “right brained” and not trained or have otherwise been socialized into a Marketing culture that does not understand this tectonic shift due to the Internet Age.  For the near term, demand for “transformed” Marketers will exceed the supply.  Someday, there will be more IT-focused people in an organization’s Marketing department then there are in a normal IT department!

If you are reading this, then hopefully you understand what a great career opportunity there is for younger Marketers to embrace Marketing Automation and other web based technologies that help organizations gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data that drives revenue.  The next few years will be successful and lucrative for those that prove they master these skills.  If you are an older Marketer, encourage a younger one to heed this advice.  If you are younger Marketer, then bootstrap your professional development and master the skills that will be needed for years to come.

You are in a golden era of Marketing career opportunity!

From time to time, Allinio has blogged about startup companies in the Marketing technology space, asking the same five basic questions for a founder or other executive to answer. This time is a little different. We’re talking to another interesting company, SocialToaster, and its Founder and CEO, Brian Razzaque (@razzaque). But not only as an interviewer…

SocialToaster has a unique story in the Marketing Automation space. Its platform leverages the social networks of your stakeholders: customers, employees, vendors, or anyone else that could potentially and voluntarily be “Ambassadors.” By opting into a program as an Ambassador, participating stakeholders can help to drive traffic to a site and increase a company’s the marketing reach.

When a company creates and publishes a message, Ambassadors are immediately given the option to re-publish, without re-formatting, that message onto their Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. Each SocialToaster post appears to come from the Ambassador themselves, which influences their followers to click through at a higher rate than online advertising. And since each Ambassador posting contains a unique URL. SocialToaster can then track the process from click to lead capture to sale, which is reported in a dashboard format.

We mentioned earlier that this is no ordinary interview- Allinio is also a partner and customer with SocialToaster and wholeheartedly recommends this great way to get your content out. Through using the SocialToaster platform ourselves, Allinio can attest that the Ambassadors have driven an majority of its website traffic with each blogpost that is configured to go to those Ambassadors (you should judiciously determine what posts you want to go through the Social Toaster network, because you don’t want to bother your Ambassadors too frequently).

Now on with the interview!

Allinio: How does your product/service allow Marketers to better gather, analyze, share, and act upon data?

Razzaque: SocialToaster is a unique product for Marketers from the data perspective in that it is one of the few tools that allows marketers to truly understand who is sharing what on their behalf, and to subsequently close the loop in terms of tracking to be able to relate subsequent traffic and engagement back to the individuals who helped to promote that content. Additionally, when an individual signs up using SocialToaster to help promote an organization, we provide detailed demographic information about that individual to the organization so that they can understand who the person is, and importantly who they can reach. When coupled with our reporting around content promotion performance, SocialToaster becomes extremely valuable in terms of determining the following:

• Who can you potentially reach with your content.
• Who your direct audience is, and how are they helping you promote your content.
• What content is most effective in terms of engaging your direct audience in the act of sharing.
• What content is most effective in terms of driving extended engagement and traffic, once shared by your network.
• Which individuals are benefiting your organization most in terms of their program participation.
• What is the ROI that the use of SocialToaster is providing.

Allinio: Please explain to us the value proposition of your product/service to Marketers?

Razzaque: Although the reporting and analytics are extremely valuable, SocialToaster’s primary value proposition is that it is one of the only solutions that allows a Marketer to proactively promote content out through a large network of people at the Marketer’s direction, but to subsequently have that content shared through personal social networks in an organic word-of-mouth fashion.

Allinio: What is a common misconception that the market has about your product/service?

Razzaque: We are often mistaken for either a social analytics tool, such as Radian6, a social content publishing and management system, such as HootSuite, Argyle Social, or Vitrue, or an ad-hoc passive promotion tool, such as ShareThis, AddThis, or even 500friends or Zuberance. Social analytic tools tend to monitor the streams for engagement around a specific search term. Social publishing systems tend to make it easier for a Marketer to manage their existing social properties, such as a Facebook Page or Twitter account, or to manage the people within the organization tasked with managing those properties. Finally, ad-hoc promotion tools rely on existing traffic or activity on a page or site to prompt an individual to share or participate in some sort of engagement activity. The resulting activity then happens arbitrarily over time, and generally is not concentrated around a single focus. SocialToaster is unique in terms of trying to help promote specific pieces of content through a large audience over a short period of time–the problem of “going viral” or amplifying specific messaging.

Allinio: What is the most successful or innovative use of your product/service by a business to date?

Razzaque: Unfortunately we’re not at liberty to disclose our most successful client, but you can see some examples of our other highly successful clients in The Baltimore Ravens fan program RavensReps  and The Detroit Lions’ Lions Pride.”

Allinio: What is your greatest challenge as a marketing organization?

Razzaque: Our greatest challenge is educating our consumer on what our product is and how it is different. The social media space is exploding with a number of interesting an innovative solutions, but the typical consumer is still at the phase where there primary concern is growing their Facebook Fanbase or getting more followers on Twitter. Sophisticated organizations are learning that this should not be a primary end-goal, as growing fans and followers doesn’t generally translate into activity or action that benefits the organization. These are the organizations that are best suited to evaluate the new solutions coming out, but they are few and far between. As such, it is a challenge for us to identify which organizations are most suited to adopt our product, and to educate potential customers that are not quite there yet.

Allinio: Brian, thank you for your time and good luck with SocialToaster in 2012 – we LOVE the results from it!

Creative commons by Muffet

Last week’s Content2Conversion event was top-shelf; kudos to Andrew Gaffney (@agaffney) and the crew at DemandGen Report (@DG_Report) for getting a great venue, great speakers, and distilling it all into one day.  Besides the timely content regarding content (snicker), there was something else that made this event a home run in our eyes.

It was something that one of the speakers said.   Ruth Stevens (@RuthPStevens) was the thought leader that gave us the warm and fuzzies when she brought up the name of a book that we hadn’t heard anyone mention in years.  As a matter of fact, not since before “B2B” was an everyday acronym in the Marketing lexicon…

She was referring to various ways to segment your audience in the context of content marketing and mentioned a book called Segmenting the Industrial Market by Thomas Bonoma and Benson Shapiro.    This divine manuscript was read by Allinio’s President, Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc) as he went through the joyous and non-stop fun experience of graduate business school.  (Joe is living proof that anyone can earn an MBA  ;)  ).

While Ruth Stevens did warn that it was very precise and taught about segmentation data points that can be extremely difficult to collect, it was still a great thing to hear again.  The book came down from the heavens in 1984, so it was relatively new when a young Joe was aspiring to be the next Gordon Gekko.  It was one of his favorite books and had all sorts of highlighting, yellow stickies, margin notes, and dog ears within it.

Equally  highlighted, yellow stickied, margin noted, and dog eared and from the same time period is Joe’s copy of Barbara Bund Jackson’s  Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers.  In this sacred tome are secrets of understanding buyer behavior and the buying process, including models for understaing accounts’ behavior, keys to understanding switching costs and exposure, how the long-term customer buys, strengthening customers’ commitments, and cascaded demand.

Since these most wondrous volumes were given to Marketingkind, much has changed in the world.  Industrial Marketing is now B2B, but the truths emanating from their hallowed pages remains.  We urge you to get a copy of these rare business bibles.

Here’s another event worth going to if you are involved with demand generation and lead management for your organization.  Andrew Gaffney (@agaffney) of DemandGen Report is producing an event to be held on Tuesday, April 24th in New York City.  According to DemandGen Report:

• More than 90% of B2B buyers start their purchasing process by engaging with content.
• More than 40% of B2B buyers do not initiate a contact with a solutions provider until after downloading content from their site.

Clearly this poses a challenge for under-staffed, under-budgeted, overworked B2B Marketers who must devise and execute a content strategy on a hyper-speed basis.

Dubbed “B2B Content 2 Conversion,” the conference will be a one day event that focuses on helping Marketers develop stronger ties between appropriate content and revenue conversion.  Among the thought leaders speaking are some of our favorites:  Ardath Albee (@ardath421) of Marketing Interactions , Jim Lenskold (@jimlenskold) of Lenskold Group, and Mac McConnell (@macmcconnell) of Blue Bird Strategies.

Allinio’s President, Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc) is going to the event, and encourages you to go too – it will be worth every dollar.  We hope to see you there!

Creative commons by rpongsaj

The Boys of Spring have returned to hallowed stadiums throughout the nation this week, and with much anticipation professionals will be playing hooky to celebrate and watch this unique American Pastime.  In these stadiums will be advertisements, vendors, jumbotrons and all sorts of marketing efforts to get fans to buy food, souveniers, and perhaps more tickets to future games.  Young men and women will be sweating in silly looking mascot costumes, and the bugle call of “charge!” will rally the faithful of both the visiting and home teams. Double digit priced beer and the traditional fare of hot dogs, peanuts, and cracker jacks will continue to please the young initiates in their cute outfits brought to the ball park for the first time by their doting parents.

So, in full Friday and baseball spirit, here are 5 tongue-in-cheek reasons why Marketing Automation is better than baseball (and don’t get us wrong, we LOVE baseball and there aren’t that many things that are better!)

1.  Marketing Automation allows you to have more than three strikes.  Mistakes in your campaigns are a given.  You will have “strikes” against you, but will be able to quickly recuperate and fix the wrong assumptions you had in your subject lines, design, content, timing, scoring, etc.

2.  There are no “blind” umpires.  With Marketing Automation, the analytics tell you exactly what is happening, no second guessing.  No need for replays in slo-mo, no reason for anyone to throw beer bottles at you.  Someone may not like the call that a platform gives you, but you will not have to kick dirt in anyone’s face either.

3.  Marketing Automation professionals don’t need steroids.  They are overworked, underbudgeted, undertaffed and generally underappreciated, but with Marketing Automation, they can look like they’re on steroids without having to lie under oath.  While they also aren’t exactly heroes of American culture, they are nevertheless important to the survival of a company.   They are people in the background who matter:  the base coaches, the bat boys, and the statisticians, who give the folks at the plate what they need to make it to home.

4.  Each contact in your database can supply a treasure trove of information.  With the right content, you can get revenue opportunity related information in return.  You can’t rely on everyone that walks through the ballpark gates to give you information you need just because you gave them a free miniature bat, especially after six beers or six innings, whichever comes first…

5. The cost of a Marketing Automation platform and salaries of its users are far less than an MLB player salary.  The average 2012 Major League Baseball annual salary is about $3.4 Million.  And they don’t even work a full year.  You can extract a whole year of hard labor from a Marketer using a Marketing Automation platform starting at way less than $100K, and they won’t embarrass you off the field.

Play Ball!

Allinio’s President, Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc), will be speaking at an SMEI event on April 10th.

SMEI asked him to help make a commercial to promote the event; the professional team of Coyle Studios in Baltimore helped alleviate Joe’s stage fright and did a great job directing him and editing out his bloopers (there were many).  Here is what they produced.  The real star of the show is not Joe but Zachary Arellano, a young gumbah of his who sweated in a blindfold trying to hit the piñata.

Creative Commons by FeatheredTar

Allinio is not nor has it ever purported to be a search “expert.”  We farm out that skill and spend a lot of time vetting the charlatans, pretenders and buffoons that claim to be SEO and/or SEM (or PPC) “gurus.”   As in any heirarchy of talent, there are few at the top and a lot of sloppy wannabes at the bottom.  It always is amusing to hear some business owner claim that he or she has a “top” search vendor, only to learn that the “vendor” is frequently a son or partner’s nephew whose name is Jason, Justin, or Jared, complete with a goatee or otherwise unshaven face.  Leave it to Google to put in another obstacle that will leave these companies scratching their heads when Jason, Justin, or Jared don’t get them the search rankings that they were hoping for or promised.

Apparently Google is adjusting its algorithms to suppress sites that “over-optimize” for higher Google results. (Over-optimize?  Isn’t that some sort of oxymoron?  How can you over-optimize something if it’s optimized?).  Oh, we get it… Google believes that this effort will level the playing field between sites that “game” their system with painstaking detail and sites that rise in rank via well written, germane content for their readers.

So is Google really championing the folks that simply put out good stuff and penalizing those that think they have to “game” the system since the game indeed changes regularly?  That’s a nice thought, except you could put out the greatest content in the world, but are you that confident that Google will “reward” you with better rankings?  Just how will it work?  Supposedly Google is planning the integration of semantic search capability, giving them the power to better answer users’ natural language questions and queries instantaneously, rather than merely point them to a list of websites that might contain the answers they seek just because they contain the right keywords.  Not doubting Google’s amazing capabilities, we still recommend a content distribution plan that gets your content where it needs to be – don’t hope for Google to save you.

So what does this mean for Jason, Justin and Jared, Uncle Mike?  Well, chances are they are not content savvy.  They know how to game Google, some better than others, but the rules are changing so that professional Marketers need to truly step up to the plate and deliver on the content side.  We already know that content is key to starting conversations with a B2B audience, but now here’s another compelling reason to have a sound content strategy- because it drives SEO and ranking, not the other way around.

Google’s game change is going to accelerate the separating of the wheat from the chaff to almost Biblical proportions.  Jason, Justin, and Jared are not going to be able to deliver Uncle Mike the top rankings, because he hired them to save money and neither he nor they have a holistic clue about digital marketing.  As a result, Uncle Mike and his competitors, who found balanced, objective search vendors and had a good content strategy, will also be separated like wheat from chaff.  Only Uncle Mike won’t be the wheat…

Over the weekend, there was an announcement regarding the acquisition of one Marketing Automation platform by another, and we were scratching our heads from the lack of Twitter buzz.

Bill Nussey (@bnussey), CEO of Silverpop, announced on March 18th that Silverpop acquired Atlanta neighbor CoreMotives for an undisclosed sum.  CoreMotives is another Marketing Automation platform, but it was founded by experts with years of Microsoft Dynamics CRM experience and was developed from day one with unsurpassed integration into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.  All CoreMotives solutions are based on the Windows Azure cloud, which means that for Marketers there is no software to install or maintain.  CoreMotives runs completely within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so marketers can begin executing their campaigns almost immediately without complicated set ups or learning a new application if they are Dynamics customer.

Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc), Allinio‘s president, dined with CoreMotives Co-Founder Rhett Thompson (@Rhettu) two years ago and recognized that he was filling a significant need in the marketplace; now operating for only three years, CoreMotives has quickly grown internationally to more than 800 accounts, and has proved itself to be a powerful tool for Marketers in Microsoft shops.  Making a big sponsorship splash at Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Convergence 2012 conference, they are now surely going to experience event further, accelerated growth.

Silverpop may have done something very smart – a long time player and one of the leaders in the Marketing Automation arena, they have secured a well talented team that addresses a distinct need in the marketplace.  While Microsoft Dynamics CRM may not overtake the Salesforce 800-pound gorilla anytime soon (as if anyone ever will?), as a smaller, competing platform, its newest release has become more user friendly and possesss greater functionality.  Silverpop’s acquistion will hopefully give it an edge in this growing segment.

Good luck to Silverpop with the new strategic edge and congratulations to Rhett and his team for a job amazingly done!

Marketo has come out with a great infographic depicting the characteristics of “Right Brain” and “Left Brain” Marketers.  This insight is interesting.  Traditional, pre-Internet marketers have generally been “left brain,” and even many contemporary Marketers, although they are utilizing tech tools that enhance creative productivity, still depend on a “Right Brain” approach.  While this approach remains important to the  firm, it is slowly and necessarily being eclipsed by Marketers who are more “Left Brain,” and as Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) has coined, “Marketing Technologists.”

We’re going to leave you with the infographic here, but be sure to check out our post on the blog run by the Marketing Automation Institute which will expand on the “Attitude” of “Left Brain” Marketers.

Know anyone else pulling their hair out over their Marketing Automation platform?  Are your pupils dialating and your heart stopping  over the thought of the mountain of content that you have to create?    Well, here on the East Coast we’re trying to do something about it…

Now there are serveral of other national organizations that are fantastic professional development resources for the Marketing Automation user.  The first is the Online Marketing Institute, which has been around a few years and broadly addresses online marketing.   The second is MOCCA, which is a growing membership organization for the broader discipline of Marketing Operations.  The third is the Marketing Automation Institute, which is run by Marketing Automation luminary Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo) and has a comprehensive certification program that will help your career.

However, regardless of these great organizations, we felt that it was necessary to institute a local meeting for Marketing Automation professionals to encourage dialog and support and will be starting a free series of monthly meetings for Marketers to gather.  Since the Baltimore/Washington DC market has one of the highest penetrations of Marketing Automation purchases by business in the United States, Allinio thought it would be good to faciliate meetings between Marketing practitioners who already have these platforms but need to network with peers on their usage.  Therefore as a prototype for these meetings, we have instituted the Marketing Automation Professionals Roundtable, to commence in March.

This meeting is open to any Marketing professional in the Mid-Atlantic region (we have expansion plans for other cities) whose enterprise already has a Marketing Automation platform, regardless of vendor.    It is not meant to be a forum where anyone tries to convince you to buy a Marketing Automation  platform; you already should have traversed over that learning curve; now comes the real one!  This will also be a vendor-free environment, and Allinio will not be “pushing” its Marketing Automation consulting services at these events.  We are thankful to PSA Financial Services for providing the meeting space.

Depending on how it goes, we will hopefully be facilitating these meetings after the spring and encourage you to spread the word to people you know who could benefit from these meetings.  We hope to see you there!