Blog

Mar 04
0

How do you measure PR – objectively?

By | PR | 5 Comments

The "Good" – building a simple PR dashboard that measures your effectiveness without costing a lot

Pr_dashboard_5

We’ve been challenged by our CEO to ramp up the effectiveness of our PR efforts. Given that many execs view PR effectiveness subjectively, and with a recency bias as to whether we/they got good coverage, the team decided to create an objective-based dashboard.   We’ve used outsourced PR metrics in the past, but given our given our limited resources we wanted to spend our budget on coverage producing tactics instead of tools. 

That said, you can’t manage what you don’t measure so the PR team came up with a simple homemade dashboard (see graphic) that tracks interviews, bylined articles secured, coverage, press releases, speaking engagements, and pitches across the business, government and trade press.  The first tab provides a summary of all activity and each subsequent tab contains the underlying details.  For example, the feature coverage tab contains the details of all coverage including publication, headline, reporter, spokesperson quoted and URL of the article.

We’re just getting started with this tool but I find it to be a great way to set goals for each tactical area of PR and then track the effectiveness of our efforts…all without costing us much except for some staff time.  Now we can measure our effectiveness on a week to week basis and make course corrections more rapidly. 

I’m interested in what metrics you use so please shoot me an email with any suggestions.

Jan 26
0

Marketing is a Pit Crew

By | Sales and Marketing Effectiveness | 16 Comments

Choreographed_to_perfection

The "Good" – fostering sales/marketing partnership using the analogy of a champion auto racing team.

I just finished presenting the 2008 marketing plan at my company’s global sales meeting and I used an analogy that really resonated with both marketing and sales.  If you’re trying to more closely align with Sales then try thinking of the combined unit as an Indy Racing team, and marketing as the Pit Crew.   Here’s the analogy…

Team Owner (President/GM) – Owns several teams (sales regions) and expects a return on his investment in the form of racing championships (exceeding revenue targets).   

Driver (Sales Representatives) – Competes aggressively in weekly races in order to earn points toward the championship (exceeding quota).  Must be able to perform on his own out on the track, but also needs the pit crew (Marketing) to make adjustments to the car and provide fuel at regular intervals.

Auto Shop (Product Marketing) – Works with the engine designers (R&D) to build the car (product).  Must have regular input from the driver in order to enhance the design and make the car competitive week-in and week-out.

Business Manager (Corporate Marketing/PR) – Builds brand awareness with the fans by promoting the driver/team through all media outlets.

Pit Crew (Corporate Marketing) – Provides race strategy (marketing plan) and supports the driver throughout the race by delivering fuel (leads), changing tires (sales tools), and making adjustments to the car (competitive comparisons/demos).

  • Crew Chief – VP/Director of marketing that analyzes the competition, develops the race strategy and regularly makes tactical adjustments to the plan.  Also develops relationships/deals with other drivers (channel partners) to work together against other teams.   
  • Fuelers – Integrated marketing managers that execute lead generation programs via the web, events, direct marketing, teleprospecting, etc.
  • Tire Changers – Field marketing managers that develop/deliver sales tools, collateral, demos, RFP responses, etc.

The pit crew must work seamlessly as one unit in order to be faster than other crews and give their driver a competitive edge.  Moreover they must be in constant communication with the driver in order to make real-time adjustments to the strategy and tactics.   The bottom line is that the driver can’t win races without the pit crew and there is no reason to have a pit crew without a driver.  Sales and Marketing must partner to win the race for revenue.

Jan 18
0

It’s about relationships stupid

By | General Marketing | One Comment

The "Bad" – marketing to companies not humans

Marketingexperiments_4 I just read an awesome post by Dr. Flint McLaughlin of MarketingExperiments.com.  The post called "The Prospect’s Prostest" lays out an issue that is endemic in the marketing world…treating prospects like inanimate objects/companies instead of as humans.  In Flint’s words, "I am not a target; I am a person: Don’t market to me, communicate with me."  The bottom line is that we need to scrap all the marketing fluff and communicate with honesty and integrity in order to develop a relationship of trust with the customer.  (take note all ad agencies and PR firms)

Dec 31
0

B2B New Year Resolutions

By | General Marketing | 4 Comments

Nye_pictureThe "Good" – taking time to think about how to improve in the new year — some simple resolutions that will benefit all B2B marketers (in no particular order)

Review the events plan for 2008 and cut all the shows/conferences that you have to go to because "we have to be there".  Then review the rest and cut the ones that aren’t highly targeted since events take a big chunk of the budget and you’d rather spend the money on higher ROI tactics.

Get competing bids from web agencies to do a total health-check on your web sites including benchmarking them against leading tech sites and top competitive sites for usability, content and use of the latest tools.  Simultaneously ask the product management team to review all the product content for freshness and relevance. Then use the results to develop the 2008 web action plan and budget.

Review the marketing/customer database for completeness … do you have the right contacts (with email addresses) in the right verticals in the right countries.  Then challenge the database team to purge the junk and find new data sources that reach your target audience.

Do a deep dive on your SEO and pay-per-click results for 2007 and set stretch goals for 2008 traffic and conversions.  Challenge the team to evaluate your list of key words to make sure they are still relevant to your marketing goals and then cut/add where necessary.  Challenge your SEO agency to deliver higher page-ranks.  If they have been in place for longer than a year get some bids from other agencies since your current one may have already exhausted their toolbox.   

Carve some budget out to post your most valuable white-papers, webinars and technology guides on industry sites (for example Ziff Davis and TechTarget/BitPipe) so you generate awareness and leads when buyers are searching for products in your space.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Meet with the Sales VPs to review their needs by region.  Then review your lead-generation machine to see where it needs tuning (or in my current case where the engine needs to be rebuilt).  Encourage the regional teams to give you their territory plans with lists of top verticals/prospect accounts and then tailor your 2008 lead-gen programs accordingly.

Work more closely with your inside sales team…create a joint plan for executing a regular series of highly focused installed base up-sell programs. This is low hanging fruit that often gets overlooked in the push to find new customers. Also, make sure you jointly create a plan for lead nurturing with at least one useful (non-salesy) email per month to each contact plus a phone call. 

Go through your collateral cabinet and see which boxes are empty and which are full.  The empty boxes represent useful pieces to sales and the full ones are clearly not valued.  Empower your staff to rationalize the collateral to only the useful pieces and toss the rest since collateral can be a time and money drain.

Challenge your PR team to layout a proactive plan for getting you coverage in the new year since it is too easy to get sucked into a reactive/damage control mode.  The plan should include a list of industry issues that you want to be thought leaders on, the key pubs/reporters/bloggers covering the issue, the messages you want to get across and the assigned execs who will be the spokespeople. And, most importantly the plan should be in calendar format with the tactics to be completed in each time period (e.g. media tour in February on new product launch, exec speaking slot at trade show in March, CTO comments on industry expert blogs every week, etc.)

Dec 23
0

Are you forgetting to partner with Sales?

By | Demand Generation | No Comments

The "Good" – driving more true sales opportunities out of your demand generation program by partnering with Sales

I just rejoined a software company after a 2 year stint elsewhere. As such, nearly all of the sales execs are new.  As I started to re-establish the demand gen engine at the company I made sure to spend lots of time with the Sales team to mutually identify the targets, outline the lead process/flow and create detailed lead definitions.  We’ve only just gotten started but already I can notice a huge difference in the effectiveness of the joint teams over prior regimes that remained in separate ivory towers. 

It really is quite simple but so often we get too busy/lazy to communicate what we are doing, or are hindered by disparate locations, but we must make the effort to engage Sales upfront and on a weekly (if not daily) basis. Kirk Crenshaw at DemandBlog wrote a great post that summarizes some simple steps that will get you started.

Dec 23
0

Calling all integrated demand generation agencies…

By | Demand Generation | 2 Comments

The "Bad" –  trying to find a full service integrated demand generation agency.

I just took over marketing at a small software company and want to create a demand/lead generation engine in order to help build the sales pipeline.  The problem is that we are very light on marketing staff and don’t have decent marketing automation or CRM systems.  My choices are to buy a slick system (e.g. Eloqua, NetSuite) and hire a staff to build the capability in house, or I can go the outsource route by hiring a full service integrated demand agency who can run the programs for me.  The problem I am running into is that there are lots of B2B teleprospecting firms and even more direct marketing agencies but very few vendors who provide both…i.e. integrated demand generation.  I’ve talked with many of the top B2B teleprospecting agencies, and while they are quite good at dialing for leads they have virtually no real direct marketing capability.  Most say they do, but I found that it usually means their tele-agents send emails to the people they just spoke with.  That is hardly what I would call direct marketing. 

I’m looking for a firm that can provide a truly integrated capability where they profile the segments, build the database, develop the messaging/communications strategy, and then execute the demand gen programs (themselves, not through subcontracted partners) utilizing the full spectrum of channels including a minimum of email, direct mail, web, and call center to drive qualified leads.  Moreover, the firm I’m looking for will develop and execute a lead nurturing program for the other 90% of the prospects that are not immediate sales-ready leads.  And, they will use their CRM system and its inherent analytics to refine and optimize the campaign messages and tactics on an ongoing basis.

Maybe there are some firms like this out there and I just haven’t found them yet. There certainly is a market need for this type of outsourced marketing since there are lots of other companies in the same boat as mine that would love to utilize best practice integrated demand generation programs but can’t afford to build it themselves.  If you know of any vendors that fit this description please shoot me a note.

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May 12
0

Who else thinks that most press releases are a waste of time?

By | PR | 6 Comments

PrThe "Bad" – thinking that B2B press releases get read, or in the remote chance they do, that it’s by a
customer

As a B2B marketer whose worked in numerous technology companies I’ve worked with people who think that a marketing launch consists of a press release and a brochure.  I’ll bet most of you have had the same experience.  As if that isn’t funny enough, these same people think that customers actually read press releases.  Maybe a few financial analysts who track the stock scan the releases for relevant info (usually finding nothing of any real consequence) but customers, come on, who are we kidding?  How many times do you read the releases of your suppliers?  Hardly ever I bet, and sadder still, when you do read them you find loads of vague claims, industry jargon, and silly superlatives.

Kuddos to my buddy David DeRosa, a true PR professional, who sent me this article by Scott Baradell in MarketingProfs … 8 Telltale Signs Your Press Release is Bullshit.  A must read for any B2B marketer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slamming PR.  It is an essential tool for marketers.  Rather, I’m pointing out the folly of focusing so heavily on releases.  I’d rather get one good bylined article placed than crank out a dozen press releases that few, if any, customers read.  This seems like pretty simple logic to me so I’m continuously amazed by the fact that senior execs spend incredible amounts of time word smithing releases over and over (and over) again.   

Apr 09
0

The Launch and Marketing of Microsoft Vista

By | B2B, Integrated Marketing, Web/Tech | 2 Comments

Msft_vista_3





The
"Good" – developing and executing the marketing plan for one of the
biggest new product introductions in history … WOW 😉

I
attended an interesting presentation about how Microsoft launched Vista and Office 2007. John Roskill, Microsoft’s US
Business and Marketing Officer gave an overview of the marketing plan (audio,
video and slides can be found here).  As you can imagine with a launch of
this magnitude the marketing team faced many challenges including:

  • Reaching
    and persuading an incredibly wide range of customers from novice consumers to
    developers, IT gurus and business decision makers in the largest enterprises
    and governments. (B2C, B2G, and B2B)
  • Covering
    a wide range of product lines with an extremely broad value-proposition
    (Windows Vista, Office desktop, Office System Server, and others).
  • Managing
    the timing of multiple staggered launches on a global basis.
  • Competing
    against a large and determined group including Apple, Open Office,
    Apache/Linux.
  • Overcoming
    the "good enough" mentality of current Windows owners.
  • Managing
    a wide array of partners including hardware vendors, software developers,
    systems integrators, VARs and resellers.
  • Changing
    market perceptions such as "its been a long time coming" and
    "weak security."

The
launch objectives are similar to what you and I have written in numerous
marketing plans … Ready the channel, Build awareness, Create enthusiastic
advocates, Generate revenue opportunities / sales pipeline, and drive
partner-customer connections.  However, the execution of the plan was
anything but business as usual as they "touched" over 100 million
consumers in less than a month in the U.S. alone and developed 15 million
enthusiastic advocates that spread the message. 

Mr.
Roskill shared great insights on the strategy which are too lengthy to describe
here, but one thing that I took away was the need to move beyond transactional
marketing to relationship marketing.  Microsoft has finally gotten it and
this launch marked their shift from…

  • Point
    in Time Marketing to Continuous Conversion
  • Single
    Product to Solution Stack
  • Hitting
    the Masses to Targeting/Sub-segmenting/Measuring
  • Generic
    Call-to-Action to Customized Call-to-Action
  • Disconnected
    from Sales to Connected with Sales/Partners/Services
  • Offline
    to Online (blogs, wikis, reviews, etc.)

These
are good points to keep in mind as we develop our own marketing plans.
Its easy to stay true to the old way of doing things, especially since
relationship marketing is a lot more work.  But, as professionals we must
continually look for ways to take our game to the next level.  If we
don’t, our competitors will!

Mar 24
0

Did you know?

By | Web/Tech | No Comments

The "Bad" – trying to apply current/old marketing approaches to rapidly shifting markets

Not my normal type of post, but this video really made me wonder how I can keep up with the pace of change and how markets and marketing will be impacted.