As has been stated in works ranging from the Bible to the Beatles, there is a time for every purpose. Sometimes the best course is to persist and push through the obstacle and sometimes the best course is to apply a little dose of patience.  Here are some examples of when to practice persistence.

Be persistent in setting goals for your marketing programs.  Better yet, make them intentions. How many unique visitors will you have at your website?  How many inquires will you generate and how many of these will turn into legitimate sales opportunities?  How many opt-in inquiries will you add to your database?

Be persistent in doing something every day to move your marketing and sales programs forward.  You can always do a bit more to optimize the website, create more content, tighten your message, or figure out how to better add value to the selling process.  My last blog post: 10 Minutes to Marketing Success will give you some additional ideas.

Be persistent in learning the new skills necessary to succeed in a changing marketing world.  Since the web is such a powerful awareness and lead generation tool, anything you can learn about how it works is helpful.  So are specialized skills such as search engine optimization (SEO) and lead generation techniques like pay per click (PPC).

Be persistent in your social media initiatives. Write that blog post, update your LinkedIn, or send some tweets, even when you don’t feel like it.  Results in social networking don’t usually come quickly, but they will come if you stay the course.

This is plenty to be persistent about for now so let’s move on to the subject of patience.

Be patient in knowing that much of what you do will not have immediate impact. For example, it takes some time to set up a lead generation and follow-up machine that will crank out good results month-after-month.

Be patient in sticking with your marketing message.  It may feel like it is old and stale to you but that is because you are exposed to it daily.  You need to practice consistency and repetition until your prospects and customers are very familiar with your message.

Be patient in letting prospects buy at the pace they deem appropriate. You can cut your effective sales cycle dramatically by having a great website full of useful information, and by presenting all the information necessary to help them make the right decision (buying from you of course).  But there are times when pushing too hard, too quickly, will push would-be buyers away.

Be patient with others’ impatience, especially when they demand more than you are able to deliver, more quickly than is feasible.

Although vastly different attributes, patience and persistence are definitely a winning combination in marketing.

I was attending a fitness class at my health club this past weekend and the instructor was talking about how full the club was in early January and how many of the people were “New Year’s resolution” exercisers who would probably be absent within a month.  He said that many people have noble intentions and set major goals, but they take an approach bound for failure, by overdoing it in the early stages – for example, exercising every day for an hour or running six miles. This is an unpleasant way to start on the path to fitness, and many drop out.

In fact, most of us in this situation are better off with a slower and more reasoned approach — starting our program by exercising for 20 minutes or jogging around the block for 10 minutes.  It is easier to build success by starting small and increasing effort over time.

So what does this experience have to do with marketing?  Simply this: a small investment in time and energy, repeated consistently, can lead to impressive results over time.  In this spirit, I suggest you simply spend an extra 10 minutes each day on concentrated effort in one or more key areas.  This 10 minutes should not replace any work you are doing now – the point is to make it incremental, either by coming in 10 minutes early, staying an extra 10 minutes, or knocking this time off your lunch break.

So what types of incremental activities can you undertake in 10 minutes that can lead to big results?   Here are a few suggestions:

1. Make these 10 minutes “smart work,” not “hard work”.  In other words, don’t just do the same stuff you did the rest of the workday.  Speaking of hard work, I like what Robert Half said: “Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.”
2. Use your 10 minutes to do something unpleasant. Let’s face it, most of us (especially me) put off doing that which we find uncomfortable, especially if there is possible conflict involved. But the truth is, the thing you dread doing the most may be the one thing than contributes most to your success.  Let’s say that you have a problem with a client. You could spend hours or weeks agonizing, brooding and feeling afraid, or you can confront the issue, come to a resolution (hopefully) and move on. More often than not, the pain of procrastination is worse than the pain of addressing the issue.
3. Make two more calls or send out two more emails.  Assuming you are at the office or in a place to do these things 220 days per year, this will give you 440 more touch points with your customers, prospects, partners, colleagues, etc.  And a lot of good things will come from 440 more personal touch points.
4. Get in touch with an important person.  10 minutes is plenty of time to initiate contact with someone who is in a position to help you. The most personal way to do this is with a telephone call, followed by an email. The least personal, but still effective, method is to connect with the individual via LinkedIn.
5. Make an existing marketing campaign more effective.  Tweak the copy one more time.  Look for a better offer. Scrub the list. Come up with a better headline.
6. Start that big project or attack the big issue you have been putting off. As the noted author Brian Tracy has said, “If you have to eat two live frogs every day, it is best to start with the biggest and ugliest one.”  Likewise, resist the temptation to spend your extra 10 minutes on the mundane or trivial. Make it count by tackling something that contributes to an important objective.

It’s only 10 minutes, but this small investment of time can reap rich rewards for you and your organization in terms of discipline and results.  Why not get started today?

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketer, B2B Marketing, Marketing Process, Marketing Strategy

The Fusion Marketing Partners team got together last week to do our year end recap and strategize plans for 2012. The bottom line is that we had a good year.  As part of the discussion, we talked about some guiding principles (mantras) for how we will conduct business in 2012. Here is a sampling that might give you some ideas for improvement in the coming year.

1. Focus on the three marketing measurements that probably matter most to your organization: boosting awareness, generating leads and driving revenue.
2. Continually improve the results that you deliver.  Be better tomorrow, next month, next year. Work with your colleagues in marketing and sales organization to make this happen.
3. Whenever possible, say yes to your customers/clients.
4. Find new ways to add value, even when there is no fee attached.
5. Consistently provide value that exceeds your client’s expectations.
6. Turn your objectives and goals into actions and reality. Like Yoda said, “There is do or do not. There is no try.”
7. Have fun at what you do and work with other people who have fun at what they do.
8. Resist the urge to become overextended. Make sure to always leave time to take care of existing clients and your family.
9. Learn the newest social media techniques and apply them with relentless consistency.
10. Produce lots of quality content for your website and make sure it is optimized for organic search.
11. Measure, measure, measure. What you can’t measure you can’t improve.
12. In the end, it really is all about people – keep your team together and give them a chance to do great things.

Hope you have a great start to 2012 and make it your best year ever.

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy

I just read an interesting article by Dan Pollatta in the Harvard Business Review, with the clever title I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore.  The premise of the article is that business people speak with so much gobbledygook and industry jargon – it is hard to understand what they are talking about.

The topic of communication is important to us at Fusion Marketing Partners because we have to either create compelling messages for our clients or coach them on how to do so.  And whether or not a message is “compelling” should always judged by how prospects receive it, not how someone at your company writes it.  We always tell our clients that it is their obligation to present their message in a clear and comprehensible manner, and not the prospect’s obligation to figure out what in the heck you are talking about.

To state this in a different way, clarity is always the responsibility of the communicator, not the one being communicated with.  I once had a copywriter tell me that “if the prospects are too dumb to understand the way I wrote the message, that’s their problem, not mine.”  This is an attitude that caused unemployment for that particular writer but is sadly, all too common in B2B marketing.  Yes it is true that some prospects are not as smart as we are, but amazingly, some of them are even smarter. But it is our mission to communicate in a way that is understandable to all (or most) of them.

The purpose of good marketing is to first attract, then educate, and then persuade the prospect that he or she needs to take advantage of your offer. And while being too cute, too clever, or pretending to be something you are not may appear to be enticing, it is important that you portray yourself accurately.   Buyers, both B2C and B2B, can spot dishonesty a mile away.  They want to be told exactly what you can do for them and how they will benefit. The hyperbole, industry jargon and confusing language are counterproductive.

Like the title of this blog post states – say what you mean and mean what you say.  And for good measure, don’t say it mean.

Happy New Year

Technorati Tags: Content, Copywriting, Writing

With only about three weeks to go in 2011 I hope you are turning at least some of your thoughts to what you will do in the coming days to ensure that 2012 is your best year ever.  I know it is tough to close out the year strongly while simultaneously planning for the future, but it vitally important that you do so.

Year-end planning reminds me of the cartoon where the guy is standing in waist deep water swatting at large alligators with a paddle.  The caption reads: “When you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember the original objective was to drain the swamp.”

So how do you go about keeping the marketing alligators of 2011 at bay while preparing for B2B marketing success in 2012?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Know where you want to go.  Set specific, aggressive (but reachable) objectives for awareness, inbound inquiries and qualified leads.  My recent article titled Just how many sales leads do you need? can help you calculate your 2012 sales lead requirements.
2. Know your current Marketing costs and return on investment by campaign.  Using the old management adage, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.
3. Have a plan for shifting some of your marketing efforts and spending from higher-cost push marketing to lower-cost pull marketing methods.
4. Resolve to drop three ineffective media/programs and replace them with three new media/programs that have good potential.
5. Tie your 2012 marketing initiatives to revenue.  Make sure the plan you put together has a clear connection to revenue attainment.  Marketers who tie their activities to revenue have much greater job security.
6. Have a plan for what you will learn in 2012, hopefully something that will make you more valuable to the organization.

And good luck with those last-minute alligators.

Technorati Tags: Marketing Plan, Marketing Process, Marketing Strategy

Last week, I was seated next to a guy at a business breakfast who told me he was embarking on a second career and becoming a writer.  The speaker at the event mentioned social media and the guy immediately stated, “I hate social media.  I know social media would be good to help me sell books but I’m not sure if I can bring myself to do it.  What do you advise?”

The first thing I thought of was to tell him not to spend any time doing anything he “hated.”  But since he himself acknowledged that it would be good for his business, why wouldn’t he do it anyway, or hire someone else to do the work. After all, all of us business owners have to do things that are unpleasant or not in our comfort zones.

So how does one choose whether or not to embark on the social media path?  Here are some of my thoughts on the subject:

DO participate in social media if:

1. It will benefit your business.  By this, I mean that it will contribute in a meaningful and measurable way to growing awareness, generating leads or boosting revenue, or hopefully, all three.
2. You can reach your prospects through social media.  There are still a few industries where social media is not utilized as an information gathering or networking tool.  But do keep in mind that the list of non participating industries is getting smaller since most young workers come into the workforce somewhat social media savvy.  This is particularly true in the business-to-business (B2B) market space.
3. You have something worthwhile to say and someone willing and able to say it. Many people have a hard time coming up with content and lack the discipline to be consistent social media practitioners.
4. You have a limited marketing budget.  Social media is time consuming but it is not expensive. It is something that you can start slowly and accelerate as you get more experience.

DON’T participate in social media if:

1. You can’t find a good business reason.  Although it is extremely cost-effective, social media is time consuming.  And since time is a zero-sum game (you only have a finite amount), there is always an opportunity cost – something else you could be doing instead of blogging, updating, tweeting, etc.
2. You don’t have a designated person to be your online spokesperson.  Some companies try to split the social media workload but this seldom works.  Good social media can be accomplished in as little as three to five hours per week but it should be the responsibility of one person, and that individual must make it a priority each and every week.
3. You plan to give it a quick trial. I wrote a recent blog post titled Social Media is a Marathon, not a Sprint. If you can’t make a commitment of at least six months, don’t bother starting down the social media path. Results seldom quickly, but persistence and consistency have a big cumulative payoff.

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Social Media Marketing

With apologies to my excellent English teachers over the years, the headline of this post illustrates why attention to detail is so important in marketing.  All of us make mistakes, and I have made many.  But keep in mind the old carpenter’s expression, “It is better to measure twice and cut once.”  Likewise, it is always better to prevent mistakes in the first place, as opposed to correcting them after the fact. We practice this at Fusion Marketing Partners and I suggest that you do the same.

Here are some examples of details that can cause unpleasant problems:

• Misspellings and grammatical errors: In the era of texting, IM and Twitter, many of us have gotten sloppy when it comes to spelling correctly and the rules of grammar.  But prospects do notice and more than an occasional error will cause them to doubt your professionalism.
• Incorrect contact details:  This category includes web links, email addresses, and phone numbers.  Nothing is more frustrating to a potential customer than to click on a link, send an email or call a phone number, and find either no one, or the wrong person/company at the other end.  It will cost you
  business.
• Incorrect date or time:  What if you held a webinar and nobody showed up?  This or even worse, can happen if you get your date and/or time wrong.
• Missing critical information:  Do you ever find yourself at a product website, decide you want to make a purchase, and then have trouble locating the
  buying instructions?  This is just one example of data that you must include to be successful.  Here are a few more:

1. What your company does
2. Your primary benefits
3. Your specific offer
4. Tax and shipping details
5. Return and privacy policies

In the mid 1980’s, when I was a young director of marketing at Group 1 Software, I made one of those mistakes that provided a lifelong lesson in paying attention to details. In those days, direct mail was the big producer in lead generation and mailers would buy multiple mailing lists and then eliminate the duplicates (also known as merge/purge) so that each person would receive only one mailer.  Duplicates on multiple list mailings can run as high as 50 percent.

Now for the painful part of the story – I decided to do a very large mailing to businesses to generate leads for our merge/purge software program.  The only problem was that I forgot to ask our IT manager to run the combined mailing list through our own software before we sent out the mailing.  Some people were getting 3 or 4 of the same mailer telling them how we could eliminate their duplicates. I actually had calls from people insulting my intelligence. Needless to say, this did not make my “Best Moments in Marketing” highlight film.

Whether your purpose is to boost awareness, generate qualified leads or sell products, don’t forget to slow down, focus, and pay attention to details (e.g. measure twice).  And when possible, have a second pair of eyes review what you do. The mistakes you prevent can help you avoid embarrassment and contribute to your bottom line.

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing, Marketing Process, Writing

Today’s post was motivated by an unsolicited email I received from an outsource payroll company, that made the following two claims:

• If your business has fewer than 20 employees, statistics have shown that you can save money by outsourcing your payroll operations.
• On average, 40% of the entire administration time of a small business deals with payroll processing.

Both of these claims suffer a credibility gap because neither is attributed to any independent source.  The company sending the email could claim that the moon was made out of green cheese, but since they are not exactly an unbiased purveyor of facts, their claims cannot be taken at face value.  Unless the claim is obvious on its face (e.g. for most small business owners payroll is a pain in the rear), you should always provide an outside source for statements that
involve numbers or statistics.

My second problem is that only the first of these claims is believable.  Most business owners would probably agree that money can be saved by outsourcing a specialty task like payroll.  However, based on my own experience in doing small business payroll, it was unpleasant but did not take 40% of the entire administration time of our business.  In my opinion, unless the author of the email had outside attribution for the claim, she would have been better off using a more realistic and believable number, perhaps expressed in a range such as 20-40%.

Myron Berg, partner and web marketing guru at Fusion Marketing Partners, is effective at creating trust and credibility on our clients’ websites.  He accomplishes this with customer testimonials, industry trust references, and security credentials like SAS 70 and SSL.  However, all of these credibility boosters can be busted with even one unbelievable and unsubstantiated claim.  In our personal lives, we all realize that catching a friend or family member in one lie often leads us to suspect everything else they say. This is equally true when dealing with companies.

I started with the example of the payroll company but there are many other specious claims that come across our websites, email inboxes and television sets:

• Use our software and double the productivity of your workers.
• Buy our bottle of pills and lose 30 pounds per month.
• Use our SEO outsource service and immediately vault to the top in search rankings.
• Buy our clothes, cologne, sports car, beer, etc. and have a great love life.

As a long-time marketer, I know how important it is to aggressively sell benefits and put everything in the best possible light. But you and I need to remember that there are only two major rules to ensure that our marketing claims are believable.  First, they really should be believable.  And second, whenever possible, they should be substantiated by an independent authority.

Technorati Tags: Copywriting, marketing message, Writing

I just read an interesting article at Web Ink Now, titled New B2B Lead Generation Calculus.  Noted marketing thought leader David Meerman Scott revisits that often-debated topic of whether it is better to collect opt-in data before allowing people to download your content, or to make that content available without requiring anything from the website visitor.

As Scott explains, “There are those who believe in making content like white papers totally free without registration in order to spread the information as far as possible. For these folks, value comes from many more people being exposed to the content and spreading the free content via social networks. My research suggests that between 20 and 50 times more people download free content. But you get zero traditional “leads”.

Scott has a point and at Fusion Marketing Partners, we often deal with this issue.  If you ask a sales VP or CEO what they want out of marketing, they will say something like: “lots of high quality leads.”  And one of the attributes of a high quality lead is full information about the prospect.  What they fail to understand (until we show them the numbers) is that there is an inverse relationship between lead quantity and lead quality.

Our testing has shown that each additional piece of data required on a web landing page/lead capture form will depress the response rate by 10-20 percent.  To illustrate this, if, by using Scott’s formula, you get 2000 downloads (and no traditional leads) by offering a whitepaper with no registration requirement, our data suggests the following response rates:

• Name and email only:  100 responses
• Company and Title:   70 responses
• Company, Title, Phone: 50 responses
• Company, Title, Phone, Address:  42 responses
• Company, Title, Phone, Address, Qualification Info:  25 responses

As you can see, asking for lots of data can undoubtedly generate leads that are more qualified, but there will be much fewer of them.  Of all the data fields, people are most sensitive about providing a phone number, and this is why the drop off in number of responses can be as much as 30 percent from requiring this one data element.  These numbers are average and your mileage may vary.  The relevant point is that you need to make an informed decision about your lead requirements and design the right information collection strategy. Here are a few factors to consider:

1. How many leads do you need?  This is a critical piece of information – visit this article for full details on how to calculate this number.
2. Your sales process.  Are you using a one-step process, where the transaction is immediate, or a multi-step process, where there are two or more steps involved, from initial contact through the close of the sale?
3. Lead nurturing capabilities. Do you have inside lead qualification and nurturing capabilities as well as the ability to re-market to contacts that are not yet ready to purchase?  If so, you will probably want to ask for less information to generate more leads since you will only distribute qualified leads to the sales force.
4. Strength of your website.   This is a biggie.  If you have a well-developed website, with lots of relevant information about your products and/or services – your prospect s can educate themselves and come to you whenthey are ready to engage in the buying process. In this case, you can get by with asking for little information or no information.  This is the essence of pull marketing and something most companies should strive to achieve.

You can read David Meerman Scott’s original post at www.webinknow.com.

Technorati Tags: B2B Leads, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing

Do you want to make a big difference in your B2B marketing and sales performance?  If so, adopt the practice of “intending” instead of “trying”.

Most of the time, when I ask a marketing manger to do something, I get an answer like the following:

I’ll try to find you the information you need to make this campaign work.

I’ll try to generate some leads.

I’ll try to help the sales force make their sales targets.

You get the picture.  The common thread is the use of the word “try”.  When someone uses this word, it means that while they are going to make an effort to do something, there are no particular expectations for the outcome.  Lots of people try things that never come to fruition.

When you replace the word try with the word intention, it shifts your mindset from a focus on the effort to a focus on the outcome.  Here are some intend statements to get you started:

1. I intend to craft a brand promise/value proposition that is unique and powerful.
2. I intend to write promotional copy that will wow the reader and motivate him or her to take action.
3. I intend to achieve my lead generation targets for this campaign, month and quarter.
4. I intend to see that every inbound sales lead is followed up with a personal call within 48 hours.
5. I intend to do everything in my power to help our sales reps achieve their sales revenue numbers.
6. I intend for my company to have the most informative, compelling and conversion-friendly website in our industry.
7. I intend to create a fresh stream of relevant website copy to attract and convert prospects.
8. I intend to stop using the word “try”.

In the immortal words of Yoda, “Do Or Do Not, There Is No Try!”  So start intending (and doing) and stop trying (and not doing).

Carpe Occasio

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Marketing Strategy