Flash Now Searchable by Google and Yahoo

By Susan Pascal Tatum | July 2, 2008

I’m a little sad today because I’ve lost one of my most effective arguments against the use of senseless Flash on websites. The developers at Adobe have come up with a way for search engines to recognize text buried in Flash animation and to index that information.

This is not all together a bad thing. Flash is a very handy technology that makes it much much easier to present complicated concepts as we technology marketers often need to do. But like most cool things it has been so overused that more often than not it’s just noise – a distraction.

Study after study has confirmed that flash animation – particularly on a homepage – is at best distracting and at worst a catalyst to bounce visitors right off a site. Why then do so many technology marketers and their bosses insist on using Flash?

I have a theory.

When Flash was new, technology types were still controlling websites. That was before we figured out that a website is actually a communication medium the purpose of which is to a) sell stuff or b) generate leads for the sales team. Back then we let developers do whatever they could do – and we all were a little mesmerized by the coolness of it. We didn’t bother to think about whether it was effective or not.

Now we’re making great strides towards developing websites that actually assist in the selling effort, but we’ve created a whole generation of marketing decision makers (or their bosses) who think Flash equals professionalism. The prevailing comment I hear from website clients goes along the lines of “the big guys are doing it, so should we”.

Perhaps flash isn’t the single most ineffective thing you can do on a website home page (unless we’re talking about a splash page and then I can’t think of anything better to drive people away from a site). The big problem with Flash – now that it’s searchable – is also one of its advantages. It’s highly distractive.

Motion – usually of words and pictures changing – draws the visitor’s eye and makes it hard to concentrate on anything else. This is very effective if you want to pull the visitor’s attention AWAY from whatever else is on the page. So, it’s a good thing to use in an advertisement.

But why would you want to pull the visitor’s attention away from the content on your homepage?

I’m still going to advise anyone who will listen to use Flash only when it really helps you communicate. Not just because it looks cool. But since I know from personal experience that Flash is a hard habit to break, I’ll offer these two pieces of advice:

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Searching for C-Level Executives – Update

By Susan Pascal Tatum | July 1, 2008

Reaching C-Level executives is a high priority – and a big challenge — for many technology marketers. A couple of months ago I questioned whether or not C-Level executives use search engines. I believe they do, but the most recent research I could find was not very recent.

Yesterday it was brought to my attention by the Center for Media Research that Forbes.com and Gartner sponsored an online survey of C-Level execs as recently as November and December 2007.

The study revealed some very useful information, including the fact that 82% of C-Level executives use search engines.

Here’s what else they learned that might be of interest to you:

If you’re interested in the details, you can download the study highlights here: A Day in the Life of C-Level Executives - Part VIII.

Have you had success in reaching executives with search marketing? Let’s hear about it here.

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Designing a Lead Nurturing System – Part 4: Tactics and the Program

By Susan Pascal Tatum | June 24, 2008

In previous articles on the topic of lead nurturing, I’ve looked at developing a universal lead definition, installing a marketing database, and understanding your prospects’ buying process. These are all key parts of an effective lead nurturing system.

Now we get to the good part – the program itself.

Objectives

There’s a good choice of tactics you can use to nurture and develop leads. And there are several different goals to meet with these tactics. As you design your program, keep these in mind:

Tactics

In business technology marketing, email is consistently the best overall channel of communication – especially because it can be easily automated.

Telemarketing can be useful as the prospect moves deeper into the buying process. It also plays a big role in increasing attendance at webinars and other events. Some companies add direct mail to the mix with good results.

Information continues to be the best offer during the nurturing process. Your prospects are trying to solve a problem and the more you can do to help them, the better your chances of being selected.

Technology marketers commonly use these tactics to help nurture their prospects:

Multiple Paths

Lead nurturing can get complicated because of the complexity of the buying process and the different types of “buyers” involved. Eventually you’ll want to establish different paths for different types of buyers and buyers in different stages of the process. For example, a C-level executive is probably looking for different information than an IT manager or the person who is likely to actually use your product.

But one path is much better than none. If you haven’t been doing any kind of formal lead nurturing, you’ll find that the addition of a single program will increase the number of leads the marketing delivers to the sales team.

Frequency

What’s the best frequency for contact? That depends on what a) you’re selling, b) the length of the normal buying process and c) which buying stage the prospect is in.

Early in the buying process, once a month may be plenty. Once a month is also good as a slow-drip system for prospects who aren’t responding to your messages.

As the prospect moves closer to a buying decision things begin to heat up and you may find that weekly or even daily communications are needed.

A few reminders

Include a call to action in every communication – and give the prospect a good reason to take that action.

When you’re using an automated response system, be sure to move your prospects out of the current nurturing program if/when they contact you. In other words, if the prospect decides he or she is ready to speak with a sales person, it’s time to stop the automated messages.

Be ready and able to move the prospect back into the nurturing program if the sales communication doesn’t pan out.

And finally, remember that 80% or more of your best prospects won’t be ready to buy when they first come into contact with you. Research – and experience – shows us that most of this 80% will eventually buy. But they won’t buy from you if you don’t stay in touch with them.

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Technology Marketers Need a Systematic Approach

By Susan Pascal Tatum | June 19, 2008

Since I’ve been on a streak of writing about designing a great lead nurturing system, I was especially interested in Laura Ramos’ recent interview in BtoB’s 2008 Lead Generation Guide. Laura is a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Here’s what she has to say:

If you have time, read the complete interview.

At Tatum Marketing we work hard to help our clients and our blog readers put together marketing programs and systems that do exactly what Laura is suggesting. If you want some one-on-one help, don’t hesitate to contact us. At minimum, keep reading our blog!

[tags]technology marketing, marketing system, lead generation, whitepapers, webinars, email marketing [\tags]

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Designing a lead nurturing system Part 3: How Your Buyers Buy

By Susan Pascal Tatum | June 17, 2008

This is the third in a series of articles about designing a great lead nurturing system. So far I’ve talked about coming up with a universal definition for the word “lead” and the marketing database you need to house your prospects’ contact information and communication history.

Now let’s look at the importance of understanding how your buyers buy. Anyone who has been marketing or selling in the business technology world lately doesn’t need me to tell them that it’s tough out there. More people than ever are now involved in your prospects’ purchase decisions. Selling cycles are getting longer. Response rates to most types of lead generation programs are going down. And buyers don’t want to talk to sales people until much later in the game.

It’s the buyers that I want to talk about in this article because they are firmly in the driver’s seat. They control what information is required, when it’s required, and how it’s going to be accessed. They can find out nearly anything they want to know about you, your products, and their options without your help.

This is very different from the sales and marketing world that many of us are used to, and it takes a different approach. Since the buyer is in charge here, the best move on your part is to clearly understand the entire buying process and carefully map your marketing and sales efforts to meet the buyers’ needs. In other words, you can become the equivalent of a buyer’s GPS – providing the exact information the driver needs to move toward his or her destination.

Mapping the Trip

This exercise calls for active participation by your best sales and marketing people. Other customer-facing departments such as client support are good to include too.
You can chart your customers’ buying process by following these steps:

  1. First, talk to your customers and - if you can - talk to some prospects to find out what they went through when deciding to buy your solution. Seems obvious that you’d start with the customers, doesn’t it? But a startling number of marketing programs are based on input from everyone except the customers.
  2. Next, gather your sales and marketing experts, draw a spreadsheet on a whiteboard and list each of your buyer’s decision points (one per column) across the top of a chart.In a typical multi-stage buying process you’re likely to have decision points such as: establish need, research options, create a preliminary (long) list, cut to a short list, select and negotiate, and delivery or deployment. Remember, these are the steps in the buyer’s process – not the steps in your selling process.
  3. Down the left-hand side, give one row to each of the following:
    1. Who is involved in the decision at this point?
    2. What are their business issues and obstacles?
    3. What questions do they usually ask?
    4. What answers will move them to the next stage?
    5. Where do they go for this information?
    6. What marketing and sales tools do you need?
  4. Now fill in the boxes, answering each question for each decision point.

I first ran across this process in a book called Rivers of Revenue by Kristin Zhivago. It works.

Bonus Benefits

This exercise gives you a picture of your prospects’ decision-making process that will help accelerate just about any marketing or sales program. And it also creates a new level of understanding between your sales and marketing people. By charting the buying process you will have taken a big step toward aligning your marketing and sales team – an accomplishment with such great benefits, I can’t begin to do the subject justice here.

Once you’ve mapped the process and identified marketing and sales needs, you have a great tool to select the best marketing tactics, develop the most effective messaging, and get rid of any waste. If you’re spending money on marketing efforts that don’t meet a requirement of the map, stop. Eliminate them and focus your resources on efforts that support the map.

We are highly unlikely to return to a time when companies control the selling process, so you might as well get used to letting the buyer drive. However, by understanding the process and providing the right answers at the right time you can make sure you’re in the car – and not underneath it.

This article was originally written in 2005.

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Designing a Lead Nurturing System: Part Two – Your Marketing Database

By Susan Pascal Tatum | June 10, 2008

If you’re going to consistently develop prospects into sales-ready leads or customers, you’ll need a good marketing database. Even if you have a relatively small number of prospects, the cost of an online system to manage data and communications is so low (as in “free”) you’d have a hard time convincing me it isn’t worth it.

Why do you need a database? Organization really. A marketing database lets you:

Ideally, your marketing database and your sales database are shared. All of the correspondence notes on a contact are in one place. This contact history helps both marketing and sales people select the next communication tactic.

Unfortunately, most salesforce automation software (CRMs) are very lite on marketing management capabilities – although they are improving. Still, a CRM is a good place to start. I’ll take a look at marketing automation software in a future article.

What information goes in the marketing database?

This requires some thought. You’ll want your database to contain the attributes that are specific to your ideal prospect. The perfect database contains all the data you’ll actually use and nothing more.

Conveniently, much of what you’d put in a marketing database is the same as what you may already have in a sales database. You’ll definitely want to include the following general information:

Other helpful marketing information:

Making it work

Our clients universally struggle with keeping a clean, up-to-date database. It’s boring and tedious. But business people tend to move around a lot. They change jobs and a new person comes in. They get a promotion. The company gets acquired and everyone’s email address changes.

You can avoid wasting time and money trying to communicate with prospects who have moved on by keeping your database up to date. Depending on how many prospects you have, you might be able to assign database maintenance as a part time responsibility or you may need to hire someone full time for it.

You’ll may also have to require that marketing and sales people use the database. Sales people in particular often resist this. I believe that’s because most CRMs are set up to make “management” easier and necessarily to make “selling” any easier. You can avoid this by including both sales and marketing teams in the development of the database as well as the entire marketing system.

This article got a little longer than usual so let me summarize. The important points of this article are:

  1. You need a marketing database.
  2. Everyone must use it.
  3. Someone must be in charge of updating and maintaining it or the information will soon become junk.

Did you miss the first article in this series about Designing a Lead Nurturing System? If so, you can read it here: Designing a Lead Nurturing System: Part 1.

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Designing a Lead Nurturing System – Part One

By Susan Pascal Tatum | June 5, 2008

What’s the best way to get the most mileage out of your traffic or lead generation dollars? Convert those leads to customers! Lead nurturing plays a big role here, and you need a solid system - if for no other reason than to make sure it happens.

If you need reminding why lead nurturing is so important, you’ll get a good overview by reading There’s Gold in the Middle of the Funnel.

By “lead nurturing system” I mean the component of your marketing system that focuses on those 75% to 80% of your prospects who aren’t ready to buy when you first meet them.

Lead nurturing systems can range from relatively simple website based conversion point optimization to complex multimodal, multi-year programs. (I know that sentence is racked with marketing jargon, but I can’t help myself). The point is that sometimes lead nurturing occurs entirely on a website – as in the case of a pure ecommerce site. More often than not, there are other communication channels involved.

Setting up a lead nurturing system involves several steps:

  1. Reaching universal definition of a lead.
  2. Establishing or cleaning up your marketing database
  3. Devising a system for ranking or scoring leads
  4. Understanding your customer’s buying process
  5. Deciding what lead nurturing tactics and activities you will use.
  6. Establishing a sales hand-off, feedback and closed loop process

Let’s start with step #1 – reaching a universal definition of a lead.

You’d think that everyone involved in marketing and selling your products or services would share the same definition of a lead. And you’d be wrong.

Unless you’ve gone through the process of developing a company-wide lead definition, you’re likely to find that sales and marketing people have very different ideas about what is a lead and what is junk.

So, sit them down together – figuratively if not literally – and talk about the following:

Once you’ve got agreement on a universal definition of a lead, you’re ready to take a look at your database. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have examples of good lead definitions, share them here.

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How to Design a Solid Technology Marketing System

By Susan Pascal Tatum | June 4, 2008

Last week I wrote about the five fundamentals of successful technology marketing in an overview of how a complete marketing program fits together. This week I want to give you a more tactical approach to designing a solid marketing system or improving the one you have.

Sometimes new clients approach us knowing exactly what they want to work on. But often, especially with marketing coaching clients, the big question is what to do first.

If you’re just beginning to market your technology product or service, there’s a certain order in which to address things:

  1. Get a good website.
  2. Generate traffic or leads.
  3. Optimize your conversion rates.
  4. Increase your customer value.

If you already have a marketing program in place, you’ll want to identify your weakest link and work on it first. (Hint: It’s probably not #4 in the above list).

Whether your marketing program is all new or in update mode, there’s a logical reason for starting with your website and working your way up to customer value.

Your website is – or will be – your marketing hub. Virtually every sale you make will involve someone visiting your website. If it sucks – as many do – you’re wasting money if you focus on sending traffic there.

One of the easiest ways to figure out whether or not your website is doing its job is to look at your bounce rate.  Any web analytics program will give you this info. If you’re still not using web analytics, I can almost guarantee your website is ineffective – or you’re just incredibly lucky. Go ahead and add Google Analytics to your site NOW.

If your bounce rate (not counting traffic from paid search advertising) is higher than 50%, don’t spend another dollar on marketing until you fix that problem. I’m being generous with the 50% cut off. Google analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has said, “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

Once you’ve got your bounce rate under control it doesn’t mean you can stop worrying about your website, but you’ll have some comfort in knowing that you’re not alienating everyone who comes to your site.

Next up is generating traffic or leads. Take a look at the results from your current marketing programs to find out if they’re driving enough traffic to your website site or generating enough inbound inquiries. How do you know that?

You need two numbers: 1) the number of leads or amount of traffic you need to generate and 2) the current level of inbound inquiries or traffic. In How Many Leads Do You Need, I provided a formula for determining the first number. If you’re measuring website traffic your analytics program will provide the second number. (Yet another reason to get analytics on your site!) If you’re tracking inquiries from a number of sources, finding the second number will be a little more time consuming but definitely worth it.

So, what if you’re generating plenty of traffic? Take a look at your conversion rate. What percentage of website visitors actually buy your product. Or, what percentage of inbound inquiries become a sales-ready lead? Is this number what you think it should be? Probably not.

A word of caution here. Start assessing your conversion rates before you spend too much time and money driving traffic or generating leads. More than a few technology marketers have wasted big bucks sending leads into a system that can’t turn them into opportunities.

The three factors of website, traffic/lead generation and conversion rates are more integrated than this article might make it sound. There aren’t really hard stops between working on traffic/lead generation and improving conversion rates. And, improving conversion rates often means working on your website.

I guess that’s what makes it a system.

Tomorrow we’ll look at lead nurturing.

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Tech Marketing Fundamental #5: Make Sure Sales & Marketing Are Aligned

By Susan Pascal Tatum | May 30, 2008

You may think the subject of this post – the importance of aligning sales and marketing teams – is pretty obvious. After all, marketing and sales are vital parts of the same process. Cooperation should be automatic.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the case in most business technology companies. Instead, sales and marketing are two siloed functions, with differing outlooks and generally employing two very different types of people that are often at odds with each other.

And this leads to a major disconnect that makes both marketing and sales efforts far less effective – which can cost you boatloads of money.

Marketing and sales disconnects hit your bottom line in several wasteful ways. The worst, in my opinion, is burned leads. There is agreement among a variety of sources that sales teams in general fail to follow up on 80% of the leads provided to them by marketing. 80%! Imagine what that does to your conversion rate.

You can eliminate or avoid that problem right now by sitting your sales and marketing people down together and coming up with a single, agreed upon definition of a sales-ready lead. That means identifying the qualities a lead must possess before marketing passes it on to sales. Make a check list that marketing follows and get a commitment from the sales team that they will follow up on every lead that passes the test.

But burned leads aren’t the only bad effects of a marketing and sales disconnection. Marketing people today are often pretty far removed from actual customer interaction. Sales people are a valuable source of understanding buyers’ issues – which is critical for creating effective marketing programs. So why don’t they talk more?

If yours is an ecommerce firm without a sales force – and you’re still reading – there’s a message for you here too. Business technology purchases are complex – with or without a sales team. Buyers have a jillion questions that you (or your website) must address. Your marketing people alone are not the best source of understanding those questions. Call on your customer service, technical support and any other customer-facing groups for input.

This article is the last in a series of posts about the fundamentals of technology marketing. Some might argue that I haven’t covered ALL of the fundamentals of marketing, and they’re probably right. But I assure you that if you follow all five of my fundamentals, you’ll go a long way toward beating the pants off your competition.

If you have other “fundamentals” you consider necessary, share them with us in the comments box.

If you missed the other four in the series, you can read about them here:

#1: Create Sales Opportunities

#2: Marketing is a Process

#3: Mine the Gold in The Middle of the Funnel

#4: Make Marketing Accountable

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Tech Marketing Fundamental #4: Hold Marketing Accountable.

By Susan Pascal Tatum | May 29, 2008

Not too long ago, marketing practitioners had everyone convinced that marketing was not measurable. Marketing specialists, execs and experts felt no pressure to prove their “magic” worked.

Those days are gone, and the people who are in charge of spending your marketing investment should be able to show you solid results or at minimum show you they’re working on figuring out how to measure it.

To be fair, some aspects of technology marketing really are hard to measure – and those are exactly the tactics and programs I suggest you avoid.

Sometimes marketing efforts take a while to show results. Until then, you can measure activity just to be sure things are really getting done.

Successful marketing programs have quantifiable objectives; and, if you read this blog with any regularity, it won’t surprise you to read that I believe marketing objectives should be based on revenue goals.  For more information on setting sales-based marketing goals, take a look at How Many Leads Do You Need?

We have repeatedly found that establishing clear and measurable marketing objectives does wonders to focus everyone’s thinking and actions. Often within weeks of establishing these objectives, our clients see the number and quality of inbound leads increasing.

What kinds of things can you hold marketing accountable for?

Traffic generation, inquiry generation, and lead conversion rates for starters. Software trials, online demos, webinar attendance, press and blog coverage are also predictable and measurable. There’s a nearly unlimited number of things you can measure. So much so that I also caution you not to go overboard.

Start slow and measure only things that have a direct effect on sales and only things that you intend to do something about. But set real objectives for every marketing program you undertake and stay on top of it.

Going back to Tech Marketing Fundamental #1, if you focus your marketing efforts on creating sales opportunities you’ll find yourself utilizing direct response marketing methods. This means that each of your marketing programs will have a specific call to action – and therefore a measurable result.

The bottom line is, successful marketing requires that you know what’s working and what isn’t.

What are you measuring?

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