B2B Marketing Automation | The Marketing Fortune Cookie

Make your social media accountable

Your prospects and customers are spending more and more time online researching you, but not necessarily on your site.  As dispensing company and product information through blogs, reviews, and social media sites becomes more and more prevalent among b2b companies, the need to track your customers' and prospects' activity becomes increasingly important.  Many organizations have spent countless hours and dollars building out social media strategies, but struggle to keep track of the impact.   Fortunately, social media guru / blogger / web 2.0 activist Marcus Tewksbury of Alterian is hosting a webinar to help guide you. After all, those social touches are just as much part of a lead nurturing cycle, and should be tracked like anything else.

 

Marcus will investigate tools and techniques that will help you track and measure your efforts. In his

webinar, you will learn about:

 

• Digital lead sourcing
• How to meet a prospect in the social space and track them through your funnel
• Asset-level tracking
• How to extend distribution of your content and map it to the buying cycle
• Social media monitoring
• How to use 3^rd party measurement as a predictive proxy for forecasting
• Revenue correlation
• How to use return on assets (ROA) as a way to monetize lift of top performing content 

Making Social Media Marketing Accountable
Thursday, December 17, 2009   
10am CT / 8am PT / 11am ET / 16.00 GMT

Click here to register

 

If you are struggling on tracking your social media impact or are working on building out your strategy, I’d encourage you to attend.  At the end of the day, it’s about proving the value of social media. In these tough economic times, ROI is king and to prove that, you need to hold social media marketing accountable. Check out the webinar and let us know what you think!

 

Customer Nurturing

 

One of the benefits of taking a vacation is that it can provide you with perspective.  When we’re up to our necks in building a business, it’s difficult to recognize opportunities to further engage with your customers.  Getting away allows YOU to be the customer and the service you receive might provide insight to what your customers may be experiencing.  Unfortunately, my insight came from a less than optimal customer experience.

After few years away, my wife and I decided to return to a Caribbean resort we’d been to several times before.  In the past, our repeat trips felt  like returning home – we were greeted by name, found special gift baskets in our room, were invited to special events for returning guests, and offered further discounts for returning – but this trip we received none of that treatment, despite stating it was a return trip when we made the reservation (on-line) and when we checked-in.  I didn’t think much of it until I spoke to other return guests around the pool – they had all received the “usual” treatment.

Feeling a little hurt, I inquired with the hotel manager about the oversight – “We’re sorry sir, we just overlooked it,” she said.  Isn’t it in your computer system and the orders automatically generated?  “No sir, we keep track of it on paper and the manager on duty is required to make the appropriate phone calls to set-up all the arrangements.”  I was shocked, to be honest.  To make matters worse, nothing was done to rectify the error.  Just, “Sorry”.  We will NOT be going back to that resort.

So, what does this have to do with marketing automation?  Many businesses take the approach that the marketing automation system is only for nurturing leads and prospects.  Once they become customers, the responsibility for nurturing the customer belongs to someone else, usually a person.  However, the same systems that are used to nurture leads can be used to automate customer nurturing as well.  You can automate follow-up e-mails, set reminders for phone calls, track customer activity and tie that into your cross-sell/up-sell programs.  Most importantly, it takes an error prone, people-based process and automates it, eliminating the risk of things falling through the cracks.   

Don’t forget to nurture your current customers as you did when they were prospects.  They (and you) will be glad you did.

Can Social Media help us build better products?

We all understand that Social Media is another tool in your arsenal to improve your sales rep success, but it can be used for more than just delivering marketing messages and keeping customers engaged with sales.  As a product manager, I started thinking about how Social Media could help me communicate with the customers more directly and build a better product. Traditionally, the role of a product manager is to collect customer feedback and enable engineering to update the solution based on customers’ needs.

Integrated in appropriate sources and communities, the requirements collection sample now becomes much larger than traditional sources. Social Media give product managers the ability to collect the requirements and customer/user feedback on much larger scale.  This new communication channel is direct – with no middle man (sales, field engineers, executives and other good faith advisors), who think they know exactly how to re-phrase what customers want. In Social Media communities, all product-feedback-censorship is removed from the conversation, and the best part - it costs much less than traditional sources. Of course, it will take some time to become part of the communities as subscribing to RSS feeds will just not do it.

Social Media will not replace traditional sources of requirements any time soon, perhaps never. But with careful planning, avoiding typical traps and proper prioritization of information sources, it could help us build much better products at a reduced cost.

Marketing Automation or Sales Automation?

 

At Manticore, we think a lot about the value that is derived from our marketing automation platform.  We’re continually asking the question, “Who benefits from our services and how?”  One of the interesting aspects of our discussion has concerned the value delivered to the individual sales person by marketing automation.  At its core, a lead nurturing program is really about the sales process. 

 

In Sales 1.0, lead qualification and prospect education was done by a sales person (or perhaps a tele-prospector) who either called or met face-to-face with those leads who fit the demographic profile of a good prospect.  Presentations, demos and discussions over lunch were all key to establishing the need for the solution, how your product or service was the best fit, determining if there is budget available and if there is a real timeline for the project.

 

With Sales 2.0, lead nurturing programs delivered by a marketing automation platform can take on many of these functions.  Most prospects prefer to start their purchase process online, doing core product research, building their business case, and doing competitive comparisons.  A good lead nurturing campaign can track the lead’s progress through this process and deliver the right content at the right time to advance their education.  Furthermore, inferences can be made about how qualified the prospect is based on the content being viewed.  Most importantly, once the prospect has fully self-educated and self-qualified, an alert can be sent to the appropriate sales rep so that the sale can be closed.

 

Replacing lots of phone calls and face-to-face meetings with automatically delivered content and detailed tracking?  Sounds like Sales Automation to me.