Happy New Year from Demandbase!

As I am sure many of you can relate, I love data.   We want to see our numbers rise, web traffic, social media activity, webinar attendees….but you have to wonder, am I bringing in the right people? Are they in my target industry? My web traffic is up 20% but who are these new visitors?

I have recently been setting up our Google Analytics instance with my team here at Demandbase.  The added bonus working here, is being able to use our own Demandbase RTID data as additional custom variables to the mix,  which adds a new layer of fun.  The ability to add in this additional firmographic data puts a face to the data so to speak, converting even non data geeks to believers.  Instead of getting yawns at my marketing metrics meeting for reporting out the average page views for Browser386, eyes are all a flutter to know that Cisco Systems checked out 10 pages including 2 case studies.

For our install, we chose to add in the custom variable data:

• Industry
• Revenue Range
• Company Name
• Account Status…….and last but not least our newly released
• Audience Classifications

AUDIENCE CLASSIFICATIONS

Now when my CMO raves about the 20% spike in traffic from our site and wants insight into the who? I have it… I can answer the who by slicing and dicing between any of my custom variables.

Taking it one step further….at Demandbase we have a target profile for our prospects as most of us marketers do. These are the people who are important to us, in our case a company size and subset of industries that are our target market.  We created a custom segment that bands together the key attributes of our target company and allows us to report out data on just the companies we WANT visiting our website.

Results?   Now instead of focusing on when we have a 20% spike in web traffic we want to know when we have a 20% lift from our target segment. This in turn curbs our behavior as marketers to focus our marketing activities on the right audience, not just volume alone.

The topic is the Zero Moment of Truth in buying, that online decision-making moment when an individual decides to make a purchase.

In the Google context, this seems to be mainly focused on that moment when a consumer decides to spend money, but as BtoB buyers are beginning to make buying decisions and research products while utilizing the same methods they have become accustomed to while shopping for themselves, there is a tremendous amount of applicability of this “ZMOT” when considering Buyer 2.0.

In BotB, the Zero Moment of Truth is when an individual has done enough research about a product or service on their own and decides to make the commitment to a company by filling out an online form and making the transition from a web visitor to a lead. No money changes hands, but it is often a harder transaction to complete than a simple purchase.

At Demandbase we are focused on ways to help BtoB marketers accelerate that Zero Moment of Truth by helping to ensure that web visitors see content that is relevant to them before the identify themselves. That when they are faced with the decision about filling out a form, the number of fields on that form are reasonable enough to eliminate any friction without making sacrifices to the data quality that your company requires. We want to ensure that your top prospects are welcomed with strategically offered chat invitations, and that your web analytics include information about the offers and content that performs the best when it is shown to the companies and industries and prospects that matter the most.

Please join us on Friday 12/9/11 for the Zero Moment of Truth webinar, or click here to learn more about how Demandbase can accelerate the Zero Moment of Truth for Buyer 2.0.

You can register here, but the session on Website Conversion Optimization starts at 2PM pacific time. This is an interesting session to me because it takes a slightly different approach to content strategy and targeting than much of what is discussed in BtoB marketing today. Instead of strictly building buyer personas and mapping content to where “identified” individuals are the the funnel, it looks at how to convert more of the “unidentified” traffic hitting your website by focusing on account-level descriptions and offers.

Here is a description:
Learn how Adobe Systems uses real-time visitor identification to enhance the performance of their marketing automation, web analytics, and A/B and Multivariate testing tools in order to deliver relevant, personalized, account-based content to the most valuable prospects hitting their website.

Full Event Details

Register Here

There will also be a virtual trade show floor, online chat and networking, and all of the benefits of a trade show directly from the comfort of your desk. If you have never been to a virtual show before, this is a great introduction to the space. And remember, as host Brian Wilson says … fear the beard, not the technology!

Demandbases' David and Tamara

Congratulations to our 11 customers who are Markie Finalists. And a special call out to the following Markie winners:

• Rally Software- Best Lead Nurturing Program
• NetApp – Marketing Center of Excellence
• McAfee- Clean House
• ArcSight- Marketing Visionary: Meagen Eisenberg,
• Isilon Systems - Event Nirvana
• Progress Software – Connecting in the AppCloud

Rally Software and McAfee both were selected as speakers this year, if you missed their presentations, they are posted on Eloqua’s Topliners.

Customers and Friends Celebrate After the Markie's

And finally we celebrated the success this year at the Markie’s at our after party at 111 Minna. Check out the pictures of the evening on our Demandbase Facebook page.

We look forward to more fun in 2012!

Shari Johnston

• Only show this messaging to accounts where it is relevant
• Highlight our offer to do a free forms audit for Eloqua customers
• Emphasize our presence at the show, through both our booth and with added events we are involved with during the show
• Showcase our “Wake Up Your Forms” theme for the event

Clearly not everyone going to demandbase.com is an Eloqua customer — so we used Demandbase Real-Time ID for Content, as well as some Named Account Marketing to create a version of the home page that would only be visible to companies we have identified internally as users of Eloqua.

Slide one, offering an Eloqua Forms Audit to all attendees of the show

Slide 2, inviting attendees to an "after-party" Demandbase is sponsoring with implementation partner DemandGen after the awards

Slide 3, offering a download describing how Demandbase works with Eloqua and emphasizing our theme ... "Wake Up Your Forms"

We did a similar home page update for Dreamforce, only we also tagged the IP Addresses we could find around Moscone Center to try and make sure anyone visiting the Demandbase website from the show would see Dreamforce messaging on our home page:

Custom Conference-Specific messaging made possible with Demandbase RTID

Hope to see you at Eloqua Experience! And don’t forget to ask us about the number 31…

• Executives cite the website as the top online source of sales leads, but 80% of B2B marketers don’t believe their site is generating leads to it’s full potential
• While 90% of non-technical respondents felt the website has not been performing to its potential, only 52% of IT respondents felt that way
• 87 percent of respondents report that the website needs to improve on the tracking and reporting of unregistered site users
• The major challenge in website analytics is not the data itself, but the ability to act on the data

B2B corporate websites are the leading demand generation engine for new sales leads, but B2B companies are struggling to optimize site performance and analyze insights around customer behavior once they arrive. And while companies have invested heavily in the corporate website, they are doing little to optimize the Web experience for those very audiences they have worked so hard to attract.

That being said, as we have been working with the media and sharing these results we noticed an interesting trend about what our survey says about social media as a lead generation tool. The single statistic the media challenged the most was the fact that social media, as a B2B lead generation source, was outperformed by personal connections and referrals, the corporate website, email marketing, and advertising.

Heck, even “other” performed better than social media.

There have been some interesting studies about social media as a lead generation tool. For example, Eloqua released this “Chart of the Week” a few weeks back about Klout and Conversions. In it they examine the performance of content that is shared via Twitter by individuals with high Klout scores … a metric for measuring social media influence.

“Content that is tweeted by highly influential people had an 6X lift in total visitors, AND those visitors were more then twice as likely to submit a form on our site in the future.”

Generally speaking, though, most B2B content never gets tweeted by @GuyKawasaki or @MarketingProfs. And Joel Rothman from Eloqua admits that “…the content was really great, and might have performed equally well without the high profile tweets. It’s hard to say that the tweets are what caused the response, or if the response triggered the tweets.”

In the opinion of our respondents, when it comes to consistently driving conversions, social media simply isn’t as reliable and scalable as other demand generation sources for B2B. And that one statistic was the number one thing that the press and bloggers pushed back on. None of my B2B marketing friends and colleagues were surprised or found it hard to believe, but articles about the findings were full of quotes like this one from Marketing Vox:

“More than likely they also don’t integrate their social media campaigns across all channels, online and offline. This is an important step, a survey by Gallup recently found – but one that few companies take.”

And this one from ZDNet:

“…this isn’t to say at all that businesses should abandon social media. It’s really only the beginning for this realm of marketing, and other studies and analysts have shown that this medium really resonates with younger generations. Thus, these results could be vastly different within a few years.”

It’s clear that there is some resistance to downplaying the role of social media marketing. It’s also interesting (and telling) that the study ZDNet links to is that it is not from a B2B company … it is a B2C study from Ford Motors and Twitter.

Full disclosure, we here at Demandbase are social media junkies just like many of you. I know my Klout score, and regularly access Facebook and use Tweetdeck to monitor Twitter for both my corporate and my personal interests. One of the leading drivers for “net new” names for events like webinars often come from PPC advertising on social media networks. But what is the right answer here? If you are a B2B marketer, where are your leads coming from? How reliable is social media as a lead generation source? And are things like PPC advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn muddying the waters? Is it social media or is is PPC?

And why do people find it so hard to admit that social media isn’t the best source of new leads?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Look at your slides in “sorter” mode where you see them all next to each other. Does every slide look exactly the same?

If every slide looks the same from the mile high view, it’s not going to be all that better when you get close up. Make sure there is some variety in there, offering your audience a little shock to the system every now and then.

Now about that haiku….did you know I was an award-winning poet? I won a copy of Carmen Taran’s book, Better Beginnings, for my poem on powerpoint…

So many words here
Is he really reading this?
I could have done that

Demandbase will be revealing the results of the survey on Thursday, September 29th when CMO Greg Ott and Scott Albro, CEO of Focus.com analyze and interpret the results in a live webinar. You can register to hear the results here.

They will be discussing the following questions:

- What is the #1 source of new leads for businesses?
- How is the website performing as a lead generation engine?
- Which is the top area for improving and generating new sales leads from existing traffic?
- What is the single most important performance indicator for website effectiveness?
- What is the single biggest challenge around usage of web analytics?

Please join us on the 29th by registering here.

One of the biggest problems with demand creation marketing programs is that technology — such as email campaign systems and marketing automation platforms — have made it too easy to create and execute a program, especially an email program. How many times have we heard that a marketing automation system is so easy to use that anyone in marketing can quickly and easily set up and execute a program? Perhaps they have become too easy….

It reminded me of a post I wrote on our blog more than a year ago, called Marketing is a Mixtape. In it I quoted our CMO, Greg Ott who said that “…marketing automation systems have done a great job at helping people market poorly, faster.”

Unfortunately, that post doesn’t seem to have made the transition when we changed our blogging platform, so I will re-post it here.

—

Marketing is a Mixtape
For my wedding anniversary my wife bought me a really interesting book called Love is a Mix Tape, by Rob Sheffield. Then, for Father’s Day she bought me this, a cassette player with a USB plug so that I could convert the cassettes I have been holding on to since the early 90′s to MP3.

She bought these things for me because I am a music guy, and more specifically I am a mix tape guy. I have been for more than 20 years, and I still send out an annual mix to my friends and family with the music that really spoke to me over the previous 12 months. I was the guy who would, when he was interested in a girl he met for the first time, would say “I’ll make you a tape!”

Back in the day, this was a commitment. An endeavor. Several hours worth of labor, listening to each and every song all the way through as it recorded onto a Maxell 90 minute cassette. Committing to a theme, finding the songs that fit, figuring out how the songs flowed together. The end result, if it was done right, was something worth listening to again and again. The memories associated with a tape would endure as well. I can still remember who I made a tape for (even if it was just for me). The night I made it, how I felt when I did, what I was trying to say. And if it was done right, it can make you feel that way all over again, for better or for worse.

A good marketing campaign should be constructed the same way. Your theme should be clear, and the actions you take and the copy you write should fit with that theme. The best marketing campaigns are never one and done, are never batch and blast. Different tools and weapons in your arsenal should fit together. If it is an email campaign, what is your goal? What new and different message are you going to do to remarket to the people that didn’t open it? Is your sales team going to call the people who opened or clicked? What were the people who responded supposed to do? Was it easy for them to complete the goal? How is this all going to be recorded in your CRM system? Are you going to offer the unsubscribes something different, like a direct mail piece or a phone call? A constant series of “what if?” and “and then?” which should have a clear start and an even clearer finish.

It should be a good mix tape.

With the advent of MP3′s and playlists and the ability to burn compilation CD’s something changed. Making a mix tape became really, really easy.You would drag the songs you wanted to hear into a list, put them in order, insert a blank CD and burn it. Less than ten minutes start to finish. The end result would have a clear and fresh sound and would, more often then not, become boring and stale after a few listens.

Since so little time is involved in production, it became less important to plan your steps in advance. And if it turned out to be a crappy mix, then you would just make another one.

My boss told me once that “marketing automation systems have done a great job at helping people market poorly, faster.” Much like the introduction of the CD burner, marketing automation has made it easy for people to write, format and send email to tens of thousands of people in minutes.

We’ve all done it … you need to generate leads quickly so you write something up and send it to ten thousand prospects hoping that something will stick and you will get a few responses to fuel the funnel. And if it doesn’t work? Try again tomorrow. No clear plan of action involved, little effort placed in tracking response. A clear and precise decision to replace quality with quantity, and we’re all suffering.

Email is becoming less and less effective because the volume we are all suddenly able to send has become more important than the message, the theme, the plan. Volume is the plan. Instead of sending quality, carefully crafted product that is ten times as effective, we send ten times as many email because it is easy. And fast.

It is a playlist we are burning to a CD.

Imagine how well your marketing automation could perform if you treated it like a mix tape.