Embed this online tools for marketing executives infographic on your web site:

</p> <p><a href="http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2012/02/how-marketing-executives-are-adapting-to-online-tools.html" mce_href="http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2012/02/how-marketing-executives-are-adapting-to-online-tools.html"><img src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Executive-Online-Tool-Infographic3.png" mce_src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Executive-Online-Tool-Infographic3.png" alt="How Marketing Executives are Adapting to Online Tools Infographic by Marketo" border="0"></a></p> <p>

How Marketing Executives are Adapting to Online Tools [Infographic] was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

Outbound marketing is any paid marketing – both online and offline – used to acquire new leads.  It includes everything from trade shows to pay-per-click marketing and is critical to growing inbound marketing. Why? Well, when a new piece of content is launched, inbound marketing supports that content, for example, by sharing it in social media channels, making it faster and easier for your content to be found. The paid advertisement or site sponsorship of an outbound marketing campaign helps you further spread the word about the content, ultimately multiplying the number of new views you generate, which in turn will increase the number of shares, thus further increasing the number of potential customers viewing your content. I call this the Inbound Marketing Multiplier and it’s critical in getting the most out of your inbound marketing efforts.

In addition to generating more views, marketers can realize the following benefits through a combined inbound/outbound mix:

• Create Brand Recognition – and Business: The greater the number of outbound campaigns you execute in combination with inbound programs, the more likely that people will recognize and get to know your brand. The more they know and trust your brand, the more likely they will be to respond to your inbound marketing, and ultimately, become a customer.
• Make Prospects Speak your Language: When you run paid promotions, you choose the language used to describe your product or service. Prospects who repeatedly see these paid promotions are likely to pick up on the terms you use and plug those in when they are searching for a solution. As a result, you are more likely to appear high in the search engine results because you have optimized for these terms.
• Capture Your Target: Knowing and appealing to your target audience is one thing, reaching them is another. Let’s say your target market is Fortune 1000 companies. Through outbound marketing, you can target this group exclusively by purchasing lead-generation programs where you only pay for leads that satisfy your criteria. This makes your campaigns very efficient and keeps your database clear of names that will never purchase from you. In inbound marketing you can target specific groups in your content, but you can’t do anything to ensure that the content reaches and is consumed by your target audience.
• The Personal Touch: When you meet a prospect face-to-face, or even talk to them on the phone, you establish a relationship that can be far more powerful than one developed via any email or tweet. With outbound marketing you can build the one-on-one relationships that are not possible to develop with inbound marketing.

The bottom line is for companies to take advantage of all ways of reaching and connecting with prospective buyers by incorporating inbound marketing into a larger group of marketing tactics. Doing so will lead to much better overall results across all of your campaigns and complement the marketing strategies you already have in place.

Ready to start doing some marketing campaigns to promote your inbound marketing content?  Check out this paper on How to Amplify Your Inbound Marketing Impact.  Want to explore the marketing executive’s role in shaping a successful inbound marketing strategy? Check out the  CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing.

The Inbound Marketing Multiplier: How to Maximize Your Inbound Efforts was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

1. It’s hard to target specific audiences with inbound marketing. If you want to reach a specific set of contacts – for example, decision makers at a list of target accounts – then inbound won’t let you do so efficiently. The same is true for targeting executives; most CxOs are not spending their time reading blogs and watching YouTube videos, so you’re not going to reach them by producing content meant to be found online. To use a military analogy, inbound marketing is like an “air war” – it allows you to be very efficient by carpet-bombing broad areas, but makes it hard to hit specific targets. In contrast, you need “ground war” tactics (think marines and snipers) to target specific objectives and hold territory.
2. Inbound marketing doesn’t drive people to action. With inbound marketing, you wait for buyers to take action when they feel ready. While it’s generally a good idea to let the buyer control the momentum, there are times when you need someone to act – for example, signing up for an executive roundtable. Similarly, all good marketers know that inertia is a very real effect and sometimes people need a push, not a pull, to take action. This is especially true for targeting pragmatists and late adopters who don’t actively seek out alternatives and new solutions.

Because of the limitations of inbound marketing, a complete B2B marketing strategy needs to incorporate a full portfolio of lead-generation approaches, including events, webinars, email, and advertising as well as inbound tactics. Put another way, to extract maximum value from inbound marketing, companies need to combine it with lead nurturing, lead scoring, and other components of marketing automation.  We call this the Inbound Marketing Multiplier. (For more, see the Marketo whitepaper Amplify Your Impact: How to Multiply the Effects of Your Inbound Marketing Program.)

How does marketing automation fit in? 

Vendors who promote inbound technology like to pit inbound marketing and marketing automation against each other, vilifying marketing automation and all outbound marketing as unwanted spam. This “good” vs. “evil” debate may make good copy, but it oversimplifies the problem in favor of a single agenda.

The reality is that marketing automation and outbound tactics are tools that can be used for good marketing that people love or bad marketing that people hate – how you use it is up to you.  As Greg Head, CMO of InfusionSoft (a provider of sales and marketing software for small business) writes, “The reality is the best marketers are using both inbound marketing and marketing automation together, and they are getting great returns.”

Marketing automation enhances inbound marketing in a few key ways:

Develop relationships with inbound leads that aren’t ready to buy. According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Benchmark Report, 73% of B2B leads are not sales-ready when they first come in.  If you send those leads to sales prematurely, you’ll annoy the buyer and perpetuate the perception that marketing-generated leads are no good. So even if inbound efforts generate the right kind of leads for your business, you still need a disciplined process to nurture these leads until they are sales ready. This is more than a monthly newsletter, or a single nurture track. You need multiple tracks for each buyer persona and buying stage that listen to what the prospect says and how he behaves, and adjust accordingly  – just like a real-world relationship. Don’t settle for basic “one-size fits-all” lead nurturing.

Identify who’s hot – and who’s not. Success with inbound marketing implies a very wide top of the funnel. You’ll have lots of names coming in from people who respond to your content – but in all likelihood many of those people will not be true potential buyers for your products. You need what’s known as demographic lead scoring to separate the wheat from the chaff, e.g. the prospects who best fit your ideal profile.  You also need “behavioral lead scoring” to track what prospects do and find the hot prospects that show buying behaviors that indicate they are ready for sales. These scoring rules should be customizable to your business; don’t rely on generic rules. And finally you need a good way to let the sales team identify who’s hot, without necessarily making them wade through all the detail of every page view and open click.

Ensure no lead gets left behind. Once you’ve identified a lead as “hot”, you want to make sure they get a relevant and timely follow-up.  This means deep integration with your CRM system – the deeper the better.  And it means creating and enforcing “service level agreement” for how leads are followed-up. With automation integrated to CRM, you can ensure every lead is flowing through the system properly –without making the sales team do anything differently. (Always a good idea.)

Prove – and improve – marketing ROI. Marketing automation should go beyond process automation to help marketing executives get much needed insight into which marketing programs are working (and which aren’t) – and to give the CMO the metrics he or she needs to speak with confidence to the C-suite about marketing’s revenue impact.  Inbound marketing solutions can tell you which programs generate leads, but you need marketing automation to understand the dynamics of how potential buyers move through  the revenue  cycle to turn into qualified leads, opportunities, and ultimately customers.  These analytics should be powered by a time-series data mart to provide stable data and more importantly insights into trends over time. (For more, see my book The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and ROI.)

Inbound marketing is clearly a strategy that works and should be part of every marketing portfolio. But it’s critical to remember that inbound marketing is a strategy and not a technology. There are lots of technology solutions that can help with inbound marketing, including SEO, blog software, social media monitoring, and content management. These can sit alongside any marketing automation solution. My advice? Pick the right inbound marketing tools for your business and pick the right marketing automation solution for your business, but don’t compromise by thinking it’s an either/or proposition.

For more info on the marketing executive’s role in shaping a successful inbound marketing strategy download The CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing today.

Have you experienced limitations using inbound marketing techniques? Are you utilizing both inbound and outbound techniques in your B2B marketing strategy?  Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Don’t Believe ALL the Hype: Where Inbound Marketing Falls Short was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

B2B magazine publisher Bob Felsenthal kicked off the event with some interesting stats from a recent survey; 76 percent of marketers plan to increase their online spending and how the top areas of spending are website development, email marketing, and social. This set the stage for the expert panel of interactive marketers which featured speakers from B2B heavy hitters HP, Intel, and SAP; three companies known for being forward thinking utilizing their thought leadership to set the standard for other marketers.

First up was Scott Anderson, Vice President of Customer Communications at HP. Scott is responsible for digitally driven demand generation and he discussed how he is taking the wealth of online information available to marketers and turning it into actionable insights. By setting up listening posts around topics that are important to HP, he listens in on the conversations customers are having with their suppliers, their customers, vendors, analysts, and each other. He can then determine the pain points of customers, their needs, and how they perceive HP as a company.  Utilizing these insights he can identify hot topics and trends, and plan his editorial strategy. This data then helps to create the messaging that HP delivers in their marketing.

Scott also talked about how HP is using marketing automation to set up triggers based on prospect behaviors such as attending a webinar or downloading a whitepaper. Using the marketing automation paths they set up, they understand more about their customers and their offers and content are becoming increasingly more relevant. As HP gets smarter about what their customers are actually clicking on, downloading, and engaging with, that insight is letting the customers drive the conversation based on activities and behaviors through analytics.

Key takeaway: B2B marketers who are not utilizing analytics for insight and better decision making need to rethink their strategy.

Next up Pam Didner, Global Integrated Marketing Manager at Intel took the stage. She discussed how Intel globalizes their marketing and editorial planning. This is an incredbily timely topic as we know that it’s a constant struggle for B2Bs’ to create content, and it’s even more challenging to scale that content globally. Intel does a great job of this by generating compelling content that is scalable and relevant to their target audience. Using an editorial calendar they match their content to the industry buying cycle and enable localized versions of their main editorial calendar. Each localized calendar includes variations of the key messaging framework from headquarters keeping. By localizing their caledars, Intel can customize their content based on the specific needs of that region or country. Intel also encourages their engineers to blog around releases and events by offering incentives. Since their audience is primarily IT folks, this is a very smart way of focusing their content. Although this is not the exact slide deck she used, here is her deck on How to Globalize Editorial Planning  that includes many of the slides she presented yesterday. Great stuff!

Key takeaway: A crisp editorial calendar/roadmap that is scalable and geo-targetet is essential for a successful content strategy. 

And finally Kevin Cox, Senior Director of SAP global marketing took the stage to discuss editorial strategy and social conversations. Kevin made a very good point about how the principles of marketing are broadening from product, place, price, and promotion to experience, everywhere, exchange, and evangelism. Selling is changing as a result of buying changing and marketers need to adapt their messaging. “The barriers between B2B and B2C are going away. It’s about people selling to people,” he says. I agree completely. B2B marketers need to find their own strategy to make social work for them and making their solutions and people accessible to everyone in their target market is a good way to start. Kevin tweeted out his presentation the morning of the event; smart thinking.

Key takeaway: Selling is changing because buying is changing. The barriers between B2B and B2C are becoming less defined.

In conclusion, if you have one of these events coming up in your area, this is a must attend event. Insightful thinking and a great group of B2B marketers make for a fine event.

Did you attend this event or one in another city? We would love to hear your feedback in the comments section below.

B2B Magazine Digital Strategies Netmarketing Recap – San Francisco was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

As Facebook inevitably becomes better at lead generation, B2B marketers are going to be forced to spend more time and money on them as well as on social overall. With the unveiling of the company’s data regarding customer growth (845 million active monthly users is a staggering number) I think this is going to be the nudge that makes B2B marketers take notice and beef up their Facebook marketing strategy.

Facebook will raise upwards of $5 billion with their IPO filing. In preparation, the company released their current financials along with some truly astounding user numbers. With that being said, here are three interesting discussion points that could shape the future of how B2Bs use Facebook in their marketing strategies:

• What is Facebook  going to do with that enormous influx of cash? I predict they will go on an acquisition spree buying up companies who have solutions to problems which they cannot address themselves, as in their recent acquisition of online location service Gowalla. In addition, I have seen reports that as many as a third of Facebook employees are going to become overnight millionaires, which could lead to a new breed of startups instantly funded by employees’ personal wealth. With the insights gained from working at Facebook, I would think that some of these new millionaires would branch off and develop new apps that would refine the already highly targeted advertising platform.
• Facebook is going to be under more pressure to increase profits month over month. To me, this means they will need to up the ante in regards to advertising options, and that includes catering more towards the often overlooked B2B marketers. This could come in the form of new, innovative,  more engaging ads such as laser focused advertising based on the abundance of personal information in their inventory;  and marketing messages inserted directly into users newstreams in a non-intrusive fashion through user-validated content. I think it will lead to some type of advertising packages catered to businesses of all sizes. The announcement of mobile ads starting next month will be an essential supplement to any custom advertising options they might be cooking up.
• Identity and behavior will become a type of currency with Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows users to register or login with their existing social network accounts and share content from the site or their activities with friends on multiple social networks. This technology can also be applied to filling out forms using a Facebook sign in app. A user who chooses to login to a site or complete a form using Facebook Connect will instantly offer up a wealth of data to be passed along. One way B2B marketers can take advantage of this is by displaying content upon login based on a users social influence, behavior, and their tendency to share. A second way is by making it much easier for users to download gated resources and register for webinars with one click letting Facebook pre-populate the form. B2B marketers will be able to capture leads in a frictionless fashion and drive a more compelling social ROI.

What are your thoughts on the Facebook IPO filing? How do you think it will affect B2B marketers?

What B2B Marketers Need to Know About the Facebook IPO Filing was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

If you wait until you have enough content, or the timing is perfect, or your CRM platform is a well-oiled machine, another year will pass and you will have missed another opportunity to enhance your company’s revenue performance.  When it comes to content and marketing automation I tell people to consider the following:

• Use quality over quantity—You can effectively start your journey into marketing automation with just a few key pieces of content.  An industry analyst report, a technical white paper, and a short customer case study are enough to build out a lead nurturing campaign.  An investment into a webinar and complementary white paper would give you the opportunity to promote the live event and promote the archived event for months after.  If you have minimal resources or budget to create content, record an employee speaker presenting at an event with someone’s personal digital recorder and then post it. Use your imagination. You may have to start by pushing out links to favorable industry articles that mention your products or services.  Just make sure the content has value and is not self-promotional.
• Repurpose.  Repurpose.  Repurpose—Think big.  Start small.  With a just a few pieces of quality content you can make a big impression by promoting the content through Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels.  You can use the content as follow up with seminar/webinar registrants—both those who attended and those who did not.  Promote links to your content on materials distributed at trade shows, seminars, webinars, directory listings, and more.
• Make it engaging—Be sensitive to your prospect’s attention span and schedule and make your content easy to digest and remember.  Use videos as a change of pace.  No matter the format of your content, the general rule is keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
• Know the buyer role—As the amount of content you have grows, try to target the content by specific industry, role, and company size.  If you are an international company you may also want to target your content by geography.  Of course, if you are just starting out you may not have that luxury.  However, pushing out content horizontally through marketing automation is definitely more effective than what you are probably doing today.
• Know the buyer stage—As you become more sophisticated with your content distribution you will want to map your content to where the prospect is in the revenue cycle.  Educational pieces work well during the early awareness stages.  Industry-oriented pieces work well just as prospects start looking for a solution.  Solution-oriented and company-focused materials are appropriate for prospects engaged in an active buying cycle.

Getting started is the key.  Take small steps and implement in phases.  Build on your successes.  The wonderful part of getting started with marketing automation—even if you do not have all the content you would like—is that you will show the full impact that your marketing department has on company’s sales leads, opportunities, and revenue.  (You may even be able to justify getting more content development dollars or hiring a staff member to write more content quicker than you think.)

While marketing automation is designed to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, there may be a couple of small challenges to overcome along the way depending on your business processes.  That does not mean you should not move forward today.

When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, more than twice the number of guests showed up due to counterfeit tickets.  It was 101 degrees that day.  The drinking fountains did not work.  The warm asphalt had just been applied that morning and high heels were getting stuck in it.  The vendors ran out of food.  It was a public relations nightmare.  Walt Disney continued to move ahead, adding attractions, fine-tuning processes, and tracking visitor experiences and metrics.  Today, Disneyland has the largest cumulative attendance of any theme park in the world—with over 600 million guests since it opened.

What’s your strategy for content and marketing automation? Did you find these tips to be helpful? Please join the conversation in the comments section below.

Create a World of Marketing Automation Through Good Content—and Imagination was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

We asked Marketo employees to caption the photo below by completing the phrase “You Know You’re in Marketing When…” with a funny Valentine theme. The results were too good not to share. Here are the top 12 responses in no particular order.

“You Know You’re in Marketing When…”

 

…Candy wasn’t your first choice but it tested better than flowers.

 

…You wait until your girlfriend’s lead score is above qualified threshold before you decide to propose.

 

…You Refer to a Blind Date as “Anonymous Lead”

 

…You ask creative agencies to submit ideas for your Valentine’s day card.

 

…You track online dating success in terms of conversation rates.

 

…You ask people to participate in your Pay Per Kiss campaign.

 

…You use candy hearts as “date schwag”

 

…You met the love of your life at Dreamforce and she was referred by a friend.

 

…Your valentine’s day card looks more like a whitepaper.

 

…When you are happy with a 5% click through rate on your Valentine card.

 

…You surprise your crush by converting from an Anonymous to a Known Valentine.

 

…Your Valentine card includes an infographic, #ValentineHashtag, QR Code and a call to action.

This is an extension of our new 0utbound marketing campaign; “Marketing can make you crazy. We can help.” It’s a fun look at how Marketo helps marketers manage demand generation campaigns, generate quality sales leads, and keep their sanity in check.

Which caption is your favorite? Have one to add? We invite you to submit your own caption in the comments section below.

Marketing Can Make You Crazy: Valentine’s Day Edition was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

As marketers, the goals we set for a given marketing channel or specific campaign will inherently frame its success or failure.  Applying the wrong metrics might have us optimizing in the wrong direction, and reducing the impact of our marketing dollars.

In his guest post on the Marketo blog, Mike Nierengarten does a great job of illuminating the pitfalls of using a seemingly meaty progress metric like the mighty conversion to solely determine where you invest.  Mike takes a look at campaign investments in paid search and display advertising over a defined time period, and then traces the path of conversions down the funnel to demonstrate that it’s not the total number of leads or the cost of those leads that count — but how much business those leads create, and the implied ROI of those campaigns?

But this is only part of the picture.  We need to dig deeper to understand where and how value is really being driven.

Channels like search and email marketing are most useful for targeting and converting prospects that are lower in your marketing funnel (e.g. prospects looking for solutions to problems or evaluating vendors).  The dilemma presented by relying too heavily on these lower-funnel channels is that compared to the overall audience you’re after, you have relatively few prospects that are actively looking to solve a problem or seek out a solution today.

As I expanded on in this MediaPost article (Direct Response Marketers: Spend More Time Educating The Audience), we inherently risk handicapping every program dollar we invest and hour we spend by focusing only on that tiny part of our target audiences that is ready to engage today (think lower funnel) at the expense of investing comparable energy educating the broader market that we’re trying to reach (think upper funnel).

One of the most effective ways to access this larger audience is through highly targeted display advertising. The beauty of targeted display is that it can be deployed as a lead generator, but it is also the vehicle best-equipped for influencing the right kind of prospects at any stage of the marketing funnel. With display you can reach more of your target audience at scale, driving them into the top of your marketing funnel. But the impact doesn’t stop there—display continuously helps to educate and build trust with those not yet ready to engage with sales—which then sets up the rest of your marketing mix to do their jobs even better.  Think of it as your display advertising campaigns tossing alley-oops all day long, to set up slam dunk conversions for your corporate website and lower-funnel programs like email and search.  Just to keep it real, one of the major software brands that we support saw an 80% lift in branded search volume and conversions when a display campaign was running in parallel.

Given that display is actually lifting all boats in your marketing mix, it’s not enough to evaluate the leads that a display campaign delivers. To accurately frame the full value of an investments in display, we need to understand how many leads were directly driven by display (i.e., “post-click conversions”; a user clicks on an ad and converts during the same session), as well as how many leads benefited from a “display alley-oop” (i.e., “post-impression conversions”; a user views an ad, doesn’t click on the ad, but returns to a website later and converts).

To accurately frame the value of display, you would want to apply tracking metrics that comprehend display’s 1-2 punch.   Essentially, how many leads did display directly drive (post-click conversion) and how much lift did display create across the rest of your mix (post-impression conversions).  One way to start measuring post-impression conversions is to create a control group (users that are not exposed to the ad) and a test group (users exposed to the ad).    By doing this, your post-campaign assessment might look something like this (fictitious numbers used for this example)

What’s happened here? If you just measured display post-click conversions in Test Group B, you might conclude that your investment in display earned you 25 leads (and whatever those leads translate into in terms of downstream pipeline and revenue).  But, by getting a handle on the lift created across your other programs, the picture changes quite a bit.  Your display investment actually netted 25 incremental search conversions (and whatever those search leads translate into in terms of downstream pipeline and revenue), and 25 incremental email conversions (and whatever those email leads translate into in terms of downstream pipeline and revenue).

Here’s another way of looking at the conversions that display drove in the example above:

No doubt, tying program investment to bottom line metrics is key to really understanding the value of your marketing effort, and is critical to making smart decisions about where to invest tomorrow.  But, in a marketer’s bag of tricks, every channel and program has its unique role… so we need to resist the urge to apply the same formula for success and success metrics across the board. After all, in demand gen as in sports, there are probably only one or two players that make the highlight reel.  But, if you look a little closer, you’ll see someone in the corner setting up the alley-oop.

About the Author:

David leads Bizo’s marketing efforts.  No stranger to business audience marketing, David brings more than 15 years of B2B marketing, business development, and sales experience with him. He most recently served as vice president of product marketing at SuccessFactors, and has held positions at Instill, Siebel Systems, Thomson Japan, and MBAVision which he founded.

Don’t Overlook the Display Ad Campaign Alley-Oop, You Might Miss a Slam Dunk was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

Choose an enterprise technology brand. Now type in their URL and engage. “With what,” you ask? Exactly!

We live in a world of engagement through some of the most extraordinary and disruptive technologies. These very technologies persuade us to take risk with our personal information, our company’s financial and business data and in some cases our own well being. So why is it that we have an appetite for risk-taking with some of our most valuable business and personal assets but very little appetite for pushing the risk envelope when it comes to branding and creating a “legendary” site?

As I beat my head against the wall every day that I surf the “enterprise” web in search of extraordinary, I have come to realize that there is one key barrier preventing the most inspired executives from taking the leap to legendary.

Define then Design

It’s difficult to define a category to own. Beyond its technology categories, Apple is the standard bearer of defining and owning a brand category: exceptional design. It clearly permeates everything that is Apple, from communications to product design to experience. They left the soul in their brand by remaining ever vigilant in their quest for good design and recognizing our quest as consumers for an intuitive and delightful experience. The difficulty in most B2B businesses is building consensus for what it is you want to own in a category. The risk comes in choosing. But in not choosing, the average B2B site positions everything equally and runs the risk of owning little.

There are many companies who have defined new categories. Three examples of companies I have recently worked with come to mind. The first is Jive Software. As a collaboration tool they defined the category simply as “The New Way to Business.” Jive launched their new site in 2011 with a dramatic black background with provocative messaging and distinctive light writing. In stark contrast to its competitors, the message was spare and direct, “illuminating what matters”. The combination was effective in further defining the social enterprise.

SuccessFactors, the second company, created a new category-Business Execution Software (BizX). Business Execution Software elevated an otherwise complex human resources software suite to a business imperative. BizX aligns strategy, vision and individual goals across the enterprise to improve overall business outcomes. SuccessFactors’ site created an iconic representation of BizX with one clear message “It’s time to love work again.”

And now, Marketo. Analytics and lead gen on steroids, Marketo is transforming how companies generate revenue. The category defined is Revenue Performance Management (RPM) and this disruptive suite is changing the sales and marketing landscape. With it comes a dramatic change in their site.

Using graphic iconography to guide visitors through the value of RPM (opposed to a tome of marketing and technical content on the home page) the site engages visitors with a unique interface. Who says the enterprise web doesn’t have to entertain! The CEO, Phil Fernandez, and his marketing team dove in head first to this interactive transformation and I have to applaud them for daring to be different. Not for the sake of different, but for the sake of reflecting their own value props, “Break the Barriers of Traditional Marketing Automation,” “Own Your Seat at the Revenue Table” and “Outpace the Competition.” Transformation is a beautiful thing, whether it be technology or design.

I personally look forward to sharing these and other examples of companies breaking down the traditional B2B barriers of engagement on the web. I, for one, promise to do my part.

Can the website of an enterprise technology company really truly engage? was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

I read a recent article from Search Engine Land that talked about the link between Search Engine Optimization and Linkedin. It was a fascinating look at how a properly optimized Linkedin page, both company and employees’, can boost SEO and organic visibility. The author, George Aspland, CEO of eVision, sums it up perfectly:

“Having a company page with associated employees (each with optimized profiles) who are active with a large number of connections, can increase the visibility of your content both on LinkedIn and with search engines, while giving you an effective online networking tool to communicate with hundreds or thousands of connections.”

It got me thinking how great this would be if every Marketo employee had an optimized Linkedin profile that linking to the Marketo company page and actively sharing Marketo content and news. Pretty much every one of our employees was already on Linkedin, we just needed to help them optimize their profile and encourage them to share. As part of the Social Media Month initiative that I wrote about last week, one of the workshops that I put together was based around this very concept; Marketo picture day and Linkedin profile optimization.

“Sharing updates with these connections should help increase awareness of your messages and the Web content you link to in your updates, and possibly increase the rankings of that content as your connections share, bookmark/like, and link to your content.”

In an effort to get everyone excited and ready to put their best virtual foot forward, I hired a professional photographer to come in and take new headshots of the entire staff. The photographer captured multiple shots with several different poses of each employee. We encouraged employees to come a few minutes early with their laptops opened up to Linkedin where they could have a Linkedin expert give them tips to optimize their profile.

Click for full image.

At the end of the day we were able to give 111 Marketo employees stunning new headshots to update their Linkedin profiles and other social networks if they chose to do so.

For individuals, it’s a great way to build connections in the industry, with vendors and partners, and for Marketo, it’s a fantastic way to share our B2B Marketing Blog updates and exciting company news. Marketo requires employees to disclose all affiliations and be fully compliant with our Social Media Policy, and this effort supports that as well.

We then took it a step further by repurposing the photos as nameplates on our desks. Adding a bit of fun and personality to the project, we asked each employee to submit a fun fact about themselves along with their favorite quote.

This is a fantastic way to synergize and encourage cross functional engagement and collaboration across our different departments.

What do you think of our initiative here at Marketo? Are you encouraging your employees to optimize their Linkein profiles and share content with their networks? Are they linking back to your company page?

Utilizing Linkedin to Improve SEO and Organic Visibility was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com