SMB Marketing Blog

This is a true story from my days as a sales rep for a Hospital Information Systems vendor.  As we were driving on the way to a sales call, my colleague gestured at a street sign and laughed, “See, our customers are so easy to find there are even signs pointing the way there!”  As healthcare industry vendors who focused on the multi-million dollar operations known as hospitals, HMOs and clinics, our situation was the opposite of most B2B companies whose main challenge is generating new prospects.

Which begs the question, if all prospects are known, why bother with a marketing automation solution if you are a healthcare industry vendor?  The main reason is probably timing.  A Sales 2.0 solution will identify which of those institutions are sales-ready at the exact moment in the sales cycle.  As a sales rep it is very advantageous for me to be notified when a hospital had downloaded a particular white paper, watched a video, or visited a certain page on our corporate website.  And more importantly, have that information delivered directly to my Salesforce.com account and with email at the moment it happens.  It goes without saying, that this would give me a huge competitive advantage due to knowing their TIMING. Hospitals and their constituent departments each have their own budgeting cycle so it helps to be alerted when funding might be kicking in.

Another reason is INTELLIGENCE.  Even if a hospital isn’t ready to purchase your healthcare product or service, an advanced  marketing automation solution will tell which ones are researching your offering.  And if you have multiple products, it will identify which of your products have attracted their attention.  Better products will even give you contact names, size of institution, location etc. This helps to qualify opportunities. You can even to put them on a ‘watch list’ so that you can tell when they re-visit and alert the right sales rep.

Today, leading healthcare industry vendors use Sales 2.o tools like this to be more competitive, more productive and more timely. They’re the guys who seem to ‘know’ where there are deals, and when they’re sales-ready.

Wondering if you’re wasting sales time or marketing budget? Or likely, both?!

In this free companion webinar to the eHow To Guide A Marketing Automation Guide to Lead Scoring, join Paul Uppal, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, as he speaks with  his customer, Tim Lawler – Lead and Demand Generation Consultant at LMG Consulting, on how Tim successfully implemented closed-looped lead scoring systems with Active Conversion for his clients.

“The key is getting the user to click through the email to a landing page with the Active Conversion code.  That starts the lead scoring process (a download is not necessary).  After the first landing page visit, the user web activity is tracked  and scored going forward.”

Tim Lawler

Tue Mar 9, 2010 at 1:00-2:00PM EST, 10:00-11:00AM PST

Learn best practices on how to implement a lead scoring process, automatically manage leads, and focus your time on the best prospects to increase ROI by 30% or more.

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

See real world tools and examples to help you shorten your sales cycle and make intelligent sales and marketing decisions.

This is the fourth of ActiveConversion’s very popular “How To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to score the behavior of website visitors, and those who click through on emails, so that they can be automatically sorted for prioritization.  From the summary:

Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

In establishing your system you should;

• Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness
• Assign point values to each of those behaviors
• Establish a score that defines “Sales-Ready”

With a contemporary marketing automation solution like ActiveConversion, today’s B2B marketers can reduce costs and increase revenue through prioritization with lead scoring.

To download this eHow To Guide on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead scoring plan for your business, click on the image!

The title of this article from BizReport is “92% SMB owners recommend business-focused online networking“, which is a great stat.  But in my opinion the bigger result from the survey conducted centers on ROI:

59% have won customers or done business as a direct result of online networking sites.

Furthermore, as business networking (the survey definitely shows a divide between “social” networking such as Facebook and “business” networking such as LinkedIn) shows significant ROI, the love is returned:

78% are open to purchasing from contacts made on such sites

While these results are from a survey conducted in the UK, I’m going to say that empirically they are valid for the business environment on this side of the pond.  For those of you who are skeptical of the power of social networking, some powerful numbers are starting to make a pretty strong case, all the more so when you can start measuring the result.  It’s one thing to engage in social networking on a gut call, it’s another to get measurable returns that justify the investment.

Wellesley, Mass. - January 25, 2010. THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that ActiveConversion has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies as an initiative aimed at bringing greater attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of eHow To Guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, click on the image!

The folks at Forrester Research have updated their Interactive Marketing Forecast out to 2014. 

The table of contents has some predictable headlines:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters – Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS – Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

It’s a very good read, and a few points jumped out for me.

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

What was also interesting was the the potential for more growth; interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spend online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of  DemandGen Report. Check it out. Your marketing future may depend on it!

At the end of October Google released the latest PageRank (PR) updates. Has your Google PR gone up or down on your website? One of our brand new product websites, ActiveProspects, has gone from PR0 to PR5 in just two months and we are excited about it.

In an earlier post, I described how Google PageRank is based on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be. It is also calculated on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.

Here are my tips on improving your Google PageRank:

1) Create professional and useful content on your website. When people find your content valuable, they will likely link and reference to your web content.

2) Provide client testimonials to your vendors. They will be happy to post your testimonial on their website and link to your website to show that its legitimate and credible (format the testimonial with a link).

3) Post insightful comments on blogs related to your industry (like this one!).  Avoid simply commenting with just “good post” etc. You’ll have to show that you understand the post; in your comment demonstrate a  shared experience or even challenge their idea with relevant sources.  Make sure in your profile your name links back to your website.

4) Your partners and clients are also good sources of relevant inbound links. Work hard at getting links from them.

5) Does your business have other websites. Make sure you create links to your website from your other web properties (but make sure these are not mirror sites).

There are many more ways to get credible inbound links, including outsourcing a link building campaign. Building up Googe PageRank through a link building campaign requires creativity and hard work. The upside is once you’ve earned a good Google PageRank for your website, the payoff is long term.

So the question circling of late, over the past weeks for me but arguably it probably goes back months for some, is whether there is true business, or more specifically marketing value for B2B within social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  “It’s about tapping into the network, it’s about building brand, it’s about SEO”, -  I’ve read it all. Facebook is more social, LinkedIn is for the business professional, and well Twitter … a fad!

As an executive in a SaaS based start-up in B2B marketing automation for SMB’s, I’m looking into how to capitalize on these mediums and so I have been exploring and evaluating all of them. And for me it came down to -  Can you make money on your investment, albeit in this case the big investment is time. That being said, isn’t that what all business decisions come down to?

So in cutting to the chase and as the title proclaims, I’m a sceptic turned convert. My first experiences were frustrating to say the least. How could this possibly add business value through marketing, it’s noisy -I didn’t care what people were eating at that moment (albeit amusing at times), physically doing, etc.- and it consumed way too much time and I wasn’t getting any immediate return. But with time and invested effort (ie don’t follow those Twitter’ers that post what they’re doing, literally), it started to fall in line.  As they say, patience is a virtue.

The decision for me was about going back to the fundamentals of marketing.

The definition on Wikipedia states: Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Seems straight forward and obvious. Social media clearly presents a medium for communicating, delivering and exchanging of offers, the question is whether you can identify YOUR customers, clients and partners within the membership. Hey, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it … the opportunity lies for those able to “crack the hard nut” and find the customers in the communtity.

So again, it comes back to Generate, Manage and Convert – generate your leads through inbound marketing activities through the social media groups. Manage and nurture the leads with an automated marketing solution. And in the end you identify qualified leads ready to convert to sales. An investment with a measurable return – Business value!

So I began the process as a sceptic and now confess I’m a convert. And who wouldn’t be …. A large community, green fields, many challenges, but apparent opportunity and a clear demonstrated value for a start-up business like ours by using Social Media to drive our inbound marketing. An apparent ground swell there for the taking. So we’re currently using social media to raise awareness, build brand and grow the top line through new customer acquisitions.

We’ll see where this adventure takes us ……..

You can find me on;

Twitter - www.Twitter.com/tsydoryk

FaceBook - http://www.facebook.com/people/Terry-Sydoryk/884015014

LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/028/648