Blog

Apr 02
1

Have you Been Buried by the Marketing Technology Explosion?

By | B2B, Integrated Marketing, Web/Tech | No Comments

Recently I’ve seen a slew of articles about “modern” marketing and the explosion of marketing technology and data-driven systems.  These two images below show the sheer magnitude of the issue facing “modern” CMOs.  And it seems to be accelerating as evidenced by the fact that every week someone on my team sends me PO for some new must-have software/system/tool. I did an inventory and found that we use well over 120 different things [by way of background we’re a $500M company with 20+ in marketing]. So on a regular basis my small team [mainly creative/content folks] has to install, configure, use, monitor, analyze and update over one hundred systems.  And that’s just the table stakes since the real trick is to integrate these systems together and extract the insights we need to run our programs, measure our ROI and optimize our efforts.

So as a “modern” CMO you need to ask yourself the following questions:

  • How many different systems do you have installed? How many do you use?  What does right look like?
  • How do you integrate the various systems across your channels and down your funnel?
  • Do you have the right people on your team with the right skill sets?  How/where can you find employees with these new skills?
  • How do you get accurate, quality data and insights out of the systems in order to make good decisions?

marketing technology landscape

marketing tech 2

Jun 03
0

My Modern Marketing Presentation at CeBit

By | B2B, Integrated Marketing, Lead Gen, Presentation, Sales and Marketing Effectiveness | No Comments

I really enjoyed giving this presentation at the CeBit show in Sydney, Australia where I provided my POV on the 7 pillars of modern marketing. 

1. Change Your Mindset – always be helping 
2. Be Useful – make marketing so useful people would pay for it 
3. Use the Trio of Owned, Earned, Paid Media – need integration of all 3 to drive the best results
4. Leverage Marketing Automation – great content is the essential element
5. Integrate the Sales & Marketing Teams — create one dedicated “Smarketing” team with one mission, one dashboard and one reward 
6. Continuously Measure, Test and Optimize – optimization is everything and everything is optimized
7. Build Product that markets itself – the UX must recommend other products automatically based on data

Nov 03
0

The World’s First Site Devoted to the Deplorable Problem of Lead Leaks

By | B2B, Demand Generation, Integrated Marketing, Lead Gen, Web Marketing | No Comments



DLL Home

Our goal is to make marketing so useful that people not only seek it out but stick around once they visit.  Toward that end I’m proud to announce our latest effort aimed at helpfing businesses solve the deplorable problem of lead leaks. What the heck are lead leaks? 
Essentially they are the places in your sales and marketing process where
you are losing potential customers to competitors because your marketing,
website, or follow-up isn’t up to par.  Or stated another way, the places where you are throwing away customers and revenue. 

Two quick examples of lead leaks:

  • What percent of your website
    visitors leave without contacting you? Not having a fresh, professional,
    conversion-friendly website is like turning away potential customers at your front door.
  • How many of your calls go to
    voicemail or are after hours? Waiting too long to follow up with new contacts
    (even just more than an hour) usually means they choose someone else.  

These are just a couple of common lead leaks, but there
are so many more.

Anyway, it was driving us crazy to see so many businesses
waste so many of the leads they’re working so hard to get – without even
knowing it. So, we created an entire website dedicated to educating the world
about lead leaks and helping businesses get more customers from their marketing.

Check out the site at www.dontleakleads.com for helpful info
like:

  • Candid “leaks on the street” videos with real
    consumers that will open your eyes to the problem
  • Ebooks, articles, infographics, and
    presentations explaining the most common ways businesses leak leads (and what
    to do about them)
  • A Marketing Math calculator that enables you to
    calculate the number of customers and amount of revenue you could get by fixing
    lead leaks
  • Other fun stuff like videos and memes you can share

Feb 13
0

How Consumers Buy – The Infographic

By | Advertising, Integrated Marketing, Web Marketing | No Comments

My team created this infographic to give an example of the consumer buying journey for a need-based service like plumbing.

Even in this simple scenario you can see the complexity involved in trying to get a new customer for your business. You must continuously build your web presence with fresh content across all the places consumers go to discover and research before they buy.  Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth.  I call it imperative to stay in business today.


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!