20 loosely connected takeaways from #FlipMyFunnel Boston 2016

These are 20 loosely connected takeaway from a day at the #FlipMyFunnel Boston 2016 event yesterday.

1.     Kudos to Sangram Varje for the progress in the ABM #FlipMyFunnel movement

2.     A well produced event and the growth from Year 1 to Year 2 was significant

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3.     Although for comparison sake this is way, way behind Inbound – and not measured by scope or size, just purely on the passion of the practitioners. This will be key for #ABM going forward is to transfer the passion you hear from Sangram and Jon Miller to the customer/practitioner level.

4.     ABM is at the “vendors driving it” stage of adoption.

5.     Which begs the question, are all of these vendors eating their own dog food? Are they practicing ABM? Because the tipping point for both Marketo and HubSpot was leveraging their own products to drive growth. Which of the ABM vendors will do the same?

6.     Certainly seems like InsightSquared is because they seemed to be the case study for half of the vendors  -- which is great marketing for them!

7.     ABM means different things to different people – in spite of the good work of the folks at Terminus, Engagio and others in defining frameworks.

8.     There are a lot of companies who could benefit from an ABM approach where this is not even on their radar screen.

9.     ABM is a great landing spot for post marketing automation stars. Lots of ex Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot faces and names.

10. Engagio has a great approach to ABM metrics. A key tipping point for ABM adoption will be when marketing organizations (along with sales peers, executives and finance) adopt those metrics as their KPIs.

11. In my view the crux of ABM should be on driving customer acquisition. In Jon Miller’s own words, he turned to ABM when he realized Marketo’s demand generation couldn’t scale to support the enterprise. This is the problem that needs to be solved – how companies can most effectively dovetail outbound marketing with inbound marketing to drive customer acquisition and demand generation growth.

12. This is why the EMC case study missed the mark for me. This was centered around a massive organization managing a relationship with other massive organizations. I don’t consider that to be the heart of the #ABM and #FlipMyFunnel movements that Sangram and Jon are evangelizing.

13. To get to that customer acquisition, Jon had some good reminders that inbound principles, like being helpful and adding value to prospects, apply to outbound too (as I said here in When Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough)

14. I agree with Jon that “Account Based Everything” stands out from “Account Based Marketing” because the whole point of the account-based approach is to create cross functional alignment across an organization. In Jon’s words, “ABM perpetuates marketing silos”, and words do matter.

15. There are a ton of technologies out there. Ton. Integrating a common view of the customer is a challenge for everybody. Exciting how Bedrock Data can help here.

16. Stat of the day from SalesForce State of B2B Marketing Study 2016 via Vala Ashfar: high performing marketing teams are 14X more likely to have integrated their business systems for a single view of the customer.  A big part of the value Bedrock provides.

Excerpted from the SalesForce 2016 State of B2B Marketing Study:

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17. Personal highlight for me was meeting Scott Brinker, ChiefMarTec himself, for the first time.  Have an exciting upcoming collaboration with Scott.

18. Good also seeing Jeff Coveney, Matt Benati, Tim Ceruto, Charlie Liang, Gar Smyth, Shaun Pinney, Chris Rudnick, Adam New-Waterson, Aaron Dun, Samantha Stone, Matt Heinz & Matt Senatore. 

19. The best breakout session, by far, was the CMO Roundtable MC’d by Katie Martell, moderated by Kelly Ford and featuring Brian Kardon, Shelley Eleby and Claudine Bianchi

20. I’m really bad at naming my favorite song (you might see this in an upcoming video series from Jeff Coveney, although hopefully that gets chopped in the video edit). Hopefully I did a better job on data and ABM questions though.

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Ten Truths about Inbound Marketing vs. Account Based Marketing – What’s the Same, What’s Different and How Do They Work Together?

Update May 15 2017

The topic of this post comes front and center with news that The Inbound Marketing Company HubSpot is investing in Terminus, a key player in Account Based Marketing and the originators of the #FlipMyFunnel event series. With forthcoming product integrations, it also represents a marriage of sorts between #MarTech & #AdTech, top of mind for me following conversations at last week's MarTech Conference in San Francisco. 

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Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing are usually seen as opposite sides of the spectrum of B2B demand generation strategies – but in reality the two have much in common and complement each other well.

The best Inbound program benefits from Account Based Marketing (or similar targeted outbound strategies) to feed short-term demand until Inbound results are realized, while the best Account Based Marketing programs will leverage key principles of Inbound Marketing.

With that in mind, I present Ten Truths about Inbound Marketing vs. Account Based Marketing, to understand the differences, the overlap and how they can work together for scalable demand creation.

#1 - Once fully realized, an Inbound Marketing strategy should yield lower customer acquisition costs than Account Based Marketing…

The main business rationale behind an Inbound Marketing strategy is significantly reducing cost per lead and customer acquisition costs. Account Based Marketing on the other hand says that there is value in investing more resources and program $ to build more in depth and targeted programs that puts a premium on a very specific target audience.

#2 - …. So therefore Inbound Marketing is attractive for companies with a lower average order value.

For this reason, businesses whose economics demand low customer acquisition costs based on their AOV should strongly consider the merits of what an Inbound Marketing strategy can deliver. The threshold for this will depend on multiple factors including the company’s ability to invest $ and resources for a long term payoff; I’ve generally considered the thresholds for Inbound vs. Account Based marketing as the leading strategy to be somewhere between $10-20K average order value for licensed software or $1-2k/month recurring for SaaS software.

#3 - Account Based Marketing should yield higher conversion rates through each step of the marketing funnel.

Both account based marketing and inbound marketing make strong cases for their method to yield strong conversion rates through the marketing funnel (e.g. MQI to MQL, MQL to Opportunity, Opportunity to Win).

Account Based Marketing suggests that a highly targeted audience will yield high conversion rates because there is full alignment with sales that this account is one who has a strong fit for your product or service.

Meanwhile Inbound Marketing suggests that conversion rates will be strong because a prospect who comes to you will be already educated and more ready to accelerate through their buying process.  A counter-force on Inbound Marketing conversion rates however is that inbound marketing casts a wider net such that a lower percentage of leads will be in your true target profile. So for that reason conversion rates should be higher on the Account Based Marketing side.

#4 – The impact of Inbound Marketing is on a longer time horizon than Account Based Marketing.

Inbound Marketing is not the right strategy to drive short term results – if you are looking at driving results say within a 12-month time frame, temper expectations on Inbound and ensure there are other demand strategies to complement it while the Inbound tailwind can be built.

That said, Account Based Marketing isn’t an overnight fix -- as strategies, data, assets and programs need to be developed -- but in the category of expected timeframe for impact on Pipeline I’d rank Account Based Marketing a step ahead of Inbound.

#5 – Both Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing require a tight definition of target audience.

Now we get to some of the key attributes these two approaches share. A tight definition of target audience is critical to success for both.

In the case of Inbound Marketing, this is a market segment (usually defined by a set of people – roles, within certain types of companies) for whom there is an opportunity for the business to develop a stronger community within that segment with their brand as a central resource. Being crystal clear on that audience is a prerequisite to success.

And in the case of Account Based Marketing, working with Sales to define a set of target accounts for whom your product/service can offer significant value is a key input to build demand.

#6 – Both Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing require an in depth understanding of how customer’s buy – the customer buying process.

It’s more than just knowing who you want to target – and in the case of both of these a truly winning strategy will be differentiated by just how well you understand (and have aligned your go to market team) around how and why customers buy.

In the case of Inbound, these insights will inform what questions customers need to answer for every step through their buying process – starting with the awareness phase of just getting to understand their problems and then why it’s important to change. This content and the way it’s architected to nurture buyers through their buying process will be what creates scale and velocity for the Inbound program.

In the case of Account Based Marketing, understanding the buying process, the roles involved and how they interact – will be key for both breaking through the clutter and getting the attention of that company. And then once engaged, this will also be key for creating velocity through the buying process, by engaging the various roles to ensure they understand problems they are facing, how they are relevant to them and how to address most effectively.

#7 – High quality, relevant content is crucial to success for both Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing.

No matter how you cut it, high quality content will be required for both. In the case of Inbound, it’s the content that serves as the bait to attract your audience and move them through the buying process. The exact same principles apply to account based marketing – there is just typically more investment applied to attract the attention of that audience to initiate awareness vs. relying on them to find you when they are ready.

#8 – Both Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing require close alignment with Sales to be successful.

Another must-have for both.  Inbound Marketing is more than just generating that inbound lead – it’s every step through that buying process to ensure buyers are accelerated through their buying process. Alignment with sales is critical both around expectations for the time horizon for the impact of Inbound and how to most effectively engage Inbound leads.

In the case of Account Based Marketing, alignment on who to target and how to engage them is a fundamental – the premise is hyper-targeting will yield overall efficiencies and pay off what will be a higher cost per lead.  

#9 – Companies employing an Inbound strategy, should look to complement that with an Outbound strategy (that may or may not involve the extreme of account based marketing) to drive demand while Inbound impact develops.

Here’s the rub. For those companies employing an “Inbound First” strategy, there’s a time horizon, often more than a full year associated with seeing meaningful results – so ways to leverage their inbound content through outbound programs such as account based marketing or similar will be crucial to drive short term demand.

#10 – Companies employing an Account Based Marketing strategy should leverage “Inbound principles” for account based success.

And likewise Account Based Marketing success will require many of the same principles of Inbound Marketing –in fact much of the content one creates for an Inbound marketing strategy can be applied and leveraged for an account based marketing strategy – while it doesn’t “speak to the account” it will be effective in speaking directly to that role/persona through each stage of the buying process.

For more on the interplay between these two strategies, see my article “When Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough”.

How to Get Profitable Return on your Paid Search Program - A Four-Step Framework

Paid Search is a necessary component to a growth mix for B2B marketers. It should prove to be a source of solid cost/MQL and cost/opportunity leads, and one that helps reach Google search audiences in an important way to compliment organic/inbound efforts.

Let’s be very clear on one thing though - paid search is tough.

Unlike a well-executed organic search program, which over time can drive exponential growth and significantly reduced cost per lead metrics, the ‘natural course’ of a paid search program is increasing cost per lead.

Why?  Two reasons:

First off, Google is always looking to make more money. Google is always going to be acting in Google’s best interest, which means looking for ways to siphon off more dollars from advertisers. This past year it’s been hiking up branded search rates.

And secondly, successful terms are likely to get more and more spend from competitors. Meaning what’s working for you today, is likely to cost more money to work for you tomorrow.

So how do you get this Paid Search beast to work for you?  Here’s a four-step plan to get payoff:

#1 - Ensure you have the right measurement in place (HINT: Google AdWords is not enough).

Optimizing a paid search program for form-fills alone is a surefire way to drive a high number of ‘conversions’ (leads) that  have a high noise level for sales, and low pipeline return.

A proper measurement framework is critical to success. Specifically here's what to do:

• Setup SalesForce campaigns for each AdWords campaign to enable tracking opportunity and pipeline return
• Pass a Google click ID (GCLID) into marketing automation/CRM systems and pass opportunity values back to AdWords. This will allow for cost/opportunity and pipeline $/investment to be calculated at the keyword level – crucial for the optimization needed to drive success
• Setup ‘stacked cookies’ so that latent conversions can also be measured and attributed back to the paid search investment – to give you a full picture of the impact of your investments

#2 – Target long tail, use case driven keywords

Driving profitable pipeline from PPC investment is a numbers game – and as I mentioned above it gets harder and harder. So eeking out every efficiency is vital.

Long tail, use case driven keywords are vital to this.  Rather than investing in broad category based searches which will be expensive, and tend to be more ‘top of funnel’ research terms – the searches that will drive returns are going to be more long tail (both longer search phrases, and lower volume) which are more likely to signify "intent." and lead to action -- both conversion and follow-on engagement with sales rep. This will be lower cost, lost volume and higher converting terms.

Your job as a paid search marketer looking to optimize pipeline return is to identify more and more of these terms, and invest in those.

#3 - Tailor landing pages for these use cases

Back to the point of eeking out every efficiency, as you identify these terms, build landing pages tailored for these terms. Landing page conversion rates will go up based on having more relevant, tailored content which align ads to the specific search phrase and landing pages. 

This payoff of this work will be higher conversion rates, which therefore lead to a lower cost per lead and cost per opportunity. There will also be a double positive hit as more relevance will increase your Google quality scores and help to further reduce cost per lead.

#4 - Optimize, optimize, optimize

The above framework will give you a framework for success. Then the key is optimize, optimize, optimize.

Watch the results every single day, and align with sales on what’s working and what’s not working.

Optimize for pipeline $ and opportunities created, leveraging the reporting capabilities on #1. Constantly work #2 and #3 above to identify the right terms and take all the steps possible to minimize costs per opportunity while driving quality. 

As you identify low performers, either get rid of them or work to improve them.

As you identify high performers, invest fully in those, and look to spin off other ideas from those performers that could lead to new potential winners.

The “Google PPC pill” is a tough one to swallow – when you realize the size of the check you’re writing to Google each month – but it’s much easier to do so when you know you are running the program in a way that is driving profitable return.  Because then at least, it’s a win for Google and a win for the Marketer.

When Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough

I caught up with John Marcus at Bedrock Data last week, talking about his business’ next step of moving from an nearly exclusively inbound demand model to one that will blend both inbound and outbound and also entail selling to more enterprise businesses with buying teams.

In kicking around ideas we came up with this list of key areas you need to get right in expanding from an inbound model, often 1:1 selling to a single buyer who has found you to solve an immediate need – to an approach requiring creation of new demand.

I’ll list them in reverse order of buying process.

#1 - Create role-based content for your Champion Buyer to enroll his buying team

This is truly the make-or-break juncture of the enterprise buying process – the difference between deals which move forward at an accelerated pace vs. those that flame out due to no decision.

A relentless understanding of the buyer journey includes what types of questions, issues and objections those in different roles will have for your buyer champion. Equipping your buyer champion with this content (e.g. videos, tools, FAQs) will serve two objectives: #1 it will differentiate you in the eyes of your champion vs. any competitors and #2 it will remove potential roadblocks proactively.

Interestingly I was part of a buying process around HubSpot that did not move forward, and found that although HubSpot has a hugely successful content creation machine, this type of role-based, buying process content was not one that they had yet developed -- likely due to being relatively new to enterprise selling at that point.

#2 - As part of the sales qualification process, work with customers to identify, articulate and align around critical business issues – and make these the centerpiece of the selling process

Enterprise buying gets messy – multiple personalities, multiple agendas. Centering around critical business issues from the start of the sales process gives the vendor a way to work with the Buying Champion to align that buying team around what matters. It also serves as a qualifier to ensure you’re in fact working the right deals.

Once you’ve established those critical business issues, these should become the ‘themes’ that drive all conversations and meetings to advance that deal to close.

#3 - Create content focused on moving prospects from the Status Quo to “We Have a Problem”

This is the often overlooked step in the buying process required to create new demand.

To demonstrate this consider two different customer story videos that could be used as part of a marketing program:

Video A: Prospect Says, “Company ___ was great because they helped us solve ___ problems and got us ___ results.” - pretty typical case study / customer story featured on a website. 

Video B: Prospect Says, “What’s amazing is we thought our ___ was fine, until we got a better understanding of ___ issue. Once we realized that ___ issue was actually having ___ impact, it became clear this was a real problem we had to solve quickly. And aren’t we glad we did…. (then could proceed with Video A).”

Video B addresses that crucial step needed to first empathize with and then move early stage prospects forward in their buying process… which is from a place where you may know you have an issue, but it’s not top of mind, and it’s not the most urgent thing you need to fix. Hearing that from a customer, how they moved from that point of malaise to having this become their most important thing, is where content will make a significant impact, and that's the key step to propel buyers forward.  Most businesses have a gap in this area.

#4 - Build and Brand Teleprospecting team as value-add experts to your prospects

The Tele function is vital to creating demand through outbound (as well as moving early stage inbound prospects forward). I’ve described this as applying Inbound marketing principles of helping your prospects to Teleprospecting – so that they play the role of providing the right content at the right time to move a prospect forward in their buying journey (in exactly the same way a good website does).

I’ve covered this in detail elsewhere including this CMO Essentials article, and this was TechTarget’s take when I took them through my program.

#5 - Drive and measure outbound programs across a range of marketing channels – with the goal of initial engagement

Once you have the Teleprospecting engine in place, it’s a matter of finding the right channels to reach your audience where you can get strong return. This includes many options and I'll highlight three below:

• Webinars – becoming more and more challenging but when done right can still be very effective (Hint: that’s the right content, for the right audience, through the right publisher and promoted in the right way – I covered ideas and best practices around this here).
• Content Syndication – need to be very careful here and make sure the economics are right. It’s easy to waste money here so you need to be sure you do it right. Also Integrate is a vendor particularly effective in helping customers get content syndication right.
• Direct Mail – Often overlooked but can be a great way to breakthrough the clutter today. Especially when you look at it as…  you are trying to create that initial engagement and then have your Teleprospecting/Nurture work from there. So the job of your direct mail program doesn’t need to be to sell your solution, just to engage on an initial piece of content (e.g. a “State of Industry” or “Industry Best Practices” report)

#6 - Build and drive influencer relationships

I put this into outbound because this is something that needs to be driven in a highly proactive matter to support demand generation growth. Influencer relationships, and having them link back to your blog/website or content is doing to be a key feeder to the above as well. In addition to traditional Analyst and PR relationships, here we are talking Bloggers and anyone in your customer’s target profile (e.g. peer group) with significant online social following.

This is far from easy but executing the above gets a business to a mature steady state of demand generation covering both inbound and outbound which will then further scale with greater investment over time.

#SDSummit Takeaway: SiriusDecisions clarifies a misunderstood statistic – and opens up a whole world of possibilities for integrated digital demand generation

Today is the day SiriusDecisions set the record straight.

Jen Ross & Marisa Kopec unveiled SiriusDecisions new research on B2B buying process and in doing so made a simple but powerful clarification that should open the collective eyes of sales & marketing organizations around the possibilities of digital marketing supported sales prospecting as a competitive difference maker.

The original 67% stat was “67 percent of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally”.

However it often got spun colloquially as: “Buyers are 67% of the way through the sales process before they want to speak to a sales rep.”

The implications of the misinterpreted stat were:

• Buyers don’t want to talk to reps
• By the time a buyer wants to talk a rep, they are 2/3 of the way through their buying process

The overall message to sales was one of helplessness and disempowerment.

It was WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

Today at the SiriusDecisions 2015 Summit we learned about the recent SiriusDecisions study of over 1,000 different B2B buyers from actual purchase processes and we got clarification that: Buyers aren’t 67% through the buying process when they want to talk to a Person/Rep. 67% of the buying process may involve digital content consumption, but the sales/rep engagement is threaded throughout that buying process and spans all stages.

And here’s where it’s most interesting, as I live Tweeted as the event.

"Buyers interact with sales reps the most in the education phase" says @Jenross17 #SDSummit Why SDR/Teleprospecting program is so crucial.

— Zak Pines (@MoneyballMktr) May 14, 2015

The sales and marketing organizations who can partner and enable reps to leverage digital tools to get visibility and engage with prospects will create a massive competitive edge. What we are talking about here:

• Expanding data sources of potential prospects
• Leveraging scoring to prioritize best fit leads based on company attributes, web behavior and social interaction
• Leverage social marketing, content and teleprospecting techniques to build credibility as authority and engage with prospects as early in the buying process as possible
• Use tools to best tailor conversations and understand where buyer is in the buying process
• “Rinse and repeat” to deliver useful content to support them through their buying process, wherever they may be

The impact will come from properly harnessing reps around digital interactions. It's about Sales AND Digital and how they work together through the ENTIRE buying process.

Much more empowering for sales reps and teleprospecting.

Much more inspiring for aligned sales and marketing teams to go after this together.

And great news for all the great digital technology vendors at #SDSummit who can add value to help companies build that aligned sales and digital marketing demand generation machine.

Related Resources:

• SiriusDecisions BusinessWire press release summarizing these findings on B2B buying process
• OpenView Labs Recap - Debunking the myth that buyers are 67% through the buying process before engaging with a sales rep
• OpenView Labs Infographic - Top stats from SiriusDecisions Summit

Demand generation is about lead generation and oh-so-much-more

In recruiting for a Demand Generation Manager role I’m finding there’s a lack of universal definition of the term demand generation – it’s not broadly understood – ironic considering every business by definition needs to scale and accelerate their demand generation (at least, if it wants to grow).

I’m finding a set of people who think of demand generation way too narrowly, for example:

• Some equate demand generation to an outbound calling function (in a previous post on defining Moneyball Marketing I got into the difference between demand generation and lead generation)
• Others equate demand generation with marketing automation (I thought Scott Vaughan from Integrate did a good job of describing the differences in a recent post)

A successful demand generation marketer massively broadens from these specific functions to truly take ownership of the multiple facets of demand growth for a business. It cuts both wide and deep, but I’ll boil it down to these 10 components:

#1 – Leads (with Definitions)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t list leads first – but it’s also vital to note that gone are the days where leads are the “be all, end all.” Also gone are the days where all leads are treated equal. A crucial first step in any demand generation program is ensuring lead definitions are established, applied and measured so that you can measure both top of funnel engagement (MQIs – marketing qualified inquiries) and throughput of creating qualified leads for sales (MQLs – marketing qualified leads).

#2 – What Happens After the Lead is Generated

Although lead counts are one of the critical KPI for demand generation success, measurement needs to extend beyond leads to sales pipeline and business impact – so opportunities and wins (and the conversions rates to these) are vital. For demand generation marketers, meeting lead goals is table stakes; tracking and improving how those leads convert to meet opportunity and pipeline objectives is where you move from good to great.

#3 – Enabling Teleprospecting and Sales

One of the influencing factors to conversion rates is how you as the demand generation marketer align your programs and equip sales to follow up the leads and the resulting conversations. Part of a successful marketing program include enabling sales in what content to use as part of the follow up and how to use it.

#4 – Aligning All Forms of Media to Drive Demand

Demand creation is not a single role on a marketing team – demand creation is the culmination of the alignment of the efforts of the entire marketing team.  All forms of marketing awareness and engagement contribute to demand generation programs. Demand generation needs to partner with all marketing resources to ensure cross-channel alignment and leverage including:

• PR
• Social Media
• Events
• Paid Search
• Publisher programs (which are requiring an increased level of creativity and digital thinking to drive effectiveness)
• Email
• Webinars

#5 – SEO & Website Optimization as the Center of Demand

Inbound marketing is vital to any demand generation strategy and becomes especially vital for any business looking to scale to support high volume and low cost per lead. Thus core ongoing activities to improve website performance include:

• Ensuring the right technical setup for website & blogs
• Aligning web content to keyword strategy
• Driving high volume of relevant, engaging content creation via blog(s)
• Driving quality, relevant inbound link placement in partnership with PR programs
• Ensuring web resource center serves to engage and educate prospects and effectively capture leads
• Analyzing website usage patterns and improving website engagement and conversion
• A/B testing and optimizing various calls to action throughout the website

#6 – A Content Repurposing Machine  

Depending on a company’s structure, a demand generation marketer may or may not be the originator of core content e.g. white papers (I think more often than not, they would not be). However demand generation marketers need to be expert content repurposers, taking core content assets and getting maximum impact from those assets. Some examples include:

• Lead nurturing programs
• Taking a webinar, transcribing it, and editing and promoting the webinar highlights, also in bite-sized chunks, around sub topics (I can’t believe it was five years ago when I wrote these two posts on this topic… 7 ways to take your webinars to the next level and Rethinking ‘why do you do webinars?’)
• Turn a white paper into an interactive white paper – web-based, scannable and scrollable, can be syndicated in a measurable way – including embedded surveys and calls to action (SnapApp has been beating the Interactive Content drum)

#7 - Influencer Strategy

It’s one thing for a business to tell its prospects how great it is – it’s another thing entirely for an influencer to do that. Identifying the influencers and building programs to leverage them is a great way to stand out from the crowd. Influencers should be infused in your demand generation programs and content, and influencers can be the path to the another key to demand gen success – which is identifying which communities your prospects are participating in so that you can contribute to those conversations.

#8 – Marketing Technology Strategy

I’m finding one of the value aspects of a marketing automation system is having a single platform which can then integrate across all of the growing set of marketing technologies in building a demand generation machine. Your marketing technology strategy should result in an integrated approach, with the marketing automation platform as the integration point and including:

• CRM & closed loop reporting
• Incoming data enhancement technologies
• Data append / cleaning technologies
• Paid search
• Retargeting
• Webinar platforms
• Predictive lead scoring

#9  – Leveraging all Routes to Market Including Partners

For organizations who go to market via partners, supporting partner demand generation is critical for maximizing demand. This includes ensuring an active program to leverage marketing programs and content through the channel, with technologies, process and people in place to help partners maximize their demand and measure the impact of the efforts.

#10 – Customer Marketing (it can no longer be an afterthought)

Customer marketing can no longer be an afterthought and needs to be a core cog in your demand generation strategy. Elements of this include:

• Programs for nurturing customers – Marketo has recently put out some good content around this focused on customer activation
• Ongoing customer education e.g. a customer webinar series
• Customer advocacy – Influitive puts out great content on this subject, which should include a customer referral program

These are some additional articles I found helpful in framing and defining Demand Generation:

• What is Demand Generation? – via HubSpot
• Demand Generation on Wikipedia – yes it has a Wikipedia entry
• Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation Tell Them Apart via Callidus Cloud
• Our Definition of Demand Generation via Intelligent Demand

This is all to say, demand generation isn’t easy and requires a completely holistic and integrated view (integrated by medium, integrated within marketing, integrated with sales), a digital approach and a tenacity to get results. These are all reasons why great demand generation marketers are hard to find.

I’m going to introduce you to the best Demand Generation marketers I’ve found in an upcoming series Demand Generation All Stars – The Best of the Best.

Why I’m Thrilled that Webinar Attendance Is Down – And What To Do About It (Part 2 – A Framework for Delivering On-Demand Content)

In part 1 of this post I discussed areas to work on to improve webinar attendance. In this post I’ll outline an approach to use to compliment your webinar strategy and take advantage of the growing preference for on-demand content vs. live content.

To explain this will go back to a marketing classic – AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

And to set this up you’ll need a framework that will serve as the underpinning for this program:

• Identify the most severe pain/problem/issue that an aspect of your solution addresses
• Create five best practices or insights that advise a prospect on how to address this pain – these insights CANNOT mention your product or service in any way
• Align each of those best practices to a specific differentiator in your product (doesn’t necessarily need to be a competitor differentiator, could just be a differentiator vs. the status quo)

And with this, we create a on-demand program framework:

• Attention - Outreach via multiple channels pinging against the pain or issue (e.g. marketing emails, sales emails, social media posts, influencer mentions, text ads, banner ads, website promotion) – links to Landing Page
• Interest - The landing page starts by stating the Problem or Issue, and then shares the five best practices as insights one can follow to address the problem. There is a Call to Action – a content download (e.g. eGuide) to cover the topic in more depth… there is also a “fast track” conversion e.g. Speak to a Specialist to move the prospect directly to Sales.
• Desire - After registering for this content, the prospect will receive a series of nurture emails. These emails will take 1-2 of the best practices and map them to how the solution delivers on that best practice -- looking to cement the connection in the prospect’s mind for how this product/service will help them address that core issue.  
• Action – The emails will offer up to reply and/or a landing page to schedule a conversation with a specialist and/or evaluate the product depending on the preferred buying process.

Unlike a point-in-time webinar, this model is  an “always-on”, evergreen program that you can invest more or less in over time depending on the success that it drives and the relevance of the pain/topic. You can setup multiple programs like this pinging on different pains and see which performs better.

The framework of the pain - best practice / insight - mapped to solution will also make an impactful visual infographic to supplement the program. 

And this story around best practices to address the problem/issue can also be delivered as a live webinar, just without putting all of your eggs in that live webinar basket like you may have in the past. And so we go full circle because to make the most of that live webinar, check out Part 1 of this post if you haven’t already.

Why I’m Thrilled that Webinar Attendance Is Down – And What To Do About It

Webinar attendance is down -- and I couldn’t be happier.

Let’s start with the facts – On24 reports that the average webinar attendance rate is now down to 43% of registrants.

So why am I happy about this?

#1 – It raises the bar for webinar attendance – webinar attendance is now a higher quality metric than ever before. A prospect has to have a significant level of commitment to a topic or company to actually block out the time and show up to a live web event. So attending a webinar on a later stage topic and/or answering webinar questions to indicate readiness are becoming even more effective triggers for marketing qualification.

#2 – It demonstrates there is an increasingly stronger preference for on-demand content – which represents opportunity for marketers who can create programs that align to buying stage and help support buyers move through their buying process.

And, most importantly:

#3 – For those marketers who can figure out how to adjust in this increasingly challenging landscape -- this becomes a massive competitive differentiator.

Which gets us to the “what you should do about it” part.

I’ve grouped this into two sections – steps to take to ensure  your webinars significantly outperform the 43% average, and steps to take to simultaneously take advantage of the strong preference buyers are exhibiting today for on-demand content.

3 Keys to Driving Webinar Attendance and Crushing the 43% Attendee Rate

You need to treat the act of getting a registrant to show up to your webinar after they’ve registered with the same amount of creativity and effort as you apply to getting someone to register in the first place. And to do this, we need to move beyond the 15-year tradition of templated webinar conformation email, templated webinar reminder email without adding intrigue or reasons for that registrant to actually show up to the event.

Here are three strategies to employ to drive webinar attendance and beat that 43%:

1.  Get the registrants invested in attending the webinar

Leverage technology to give the registrants ways to contribute to the webinar programming, and let them know they have done so along the way.

Going to attend just-any-old webinar on a topic? – maybe.

Going to attend a webinar that you’ve contributed to what’s being discussed – much more likely.

This may sound hard to do at scale, but here are two examples of ways to do this – both of which can be introduced in the confirmation email for the event:

• Invite the attendees to submit questions on the topic in advance, and after they have submitted a question email them two days later to let them know their question will be addressed by the speaker during the webinar
• Create a section of the webinar which registrants can vote on which topic will be covered… e.g. invite the registrants to choose from 1 of 3 topics that they’d like to see covered at the event (maybe all three end up being covered anyway…).

The more that the prospect feels like he/she is contributing to what is being presented, the more bought in the prospect will be to the event and the more likely they will show up.

2.  Market to your registrants around “Why Attend?”

If like many companies you are using boilerplate copy in confirmation & reminder emails, you are missing a major opportunity to drive webinar attendance. Treat the webinar attendance as a program conversion, and work harder to create value for the registrants and answer the question “Why Attend?”.

Start with the reminder emails -- don’t overdo it, but the reminder emails should include content such as “3 reasons you don’t want to miss this!”.

Also consider alternative ways to reach your audience and get your reminders to stand out from the masses. Do you have a service to map prospects to social media profiles? Send out social media messages e.g. via Twitter the day of the webinar.

And lastly, part of selling the attending is to manage against the concern that “it’s just too much time”. Consider calling your webinars web briefings and let the audience know that (just like TED Talks) they will be 18-minutes in length. If there is an expectation of efficiency, quality and value… you will get more people to show up.

3.  Create an impactful and differentiated webinar experience

We B2B marketers face the same challenge as broadcasters aiming to maximize their advertising revenues via live TV audiences. How do you get someone to watch a TV show live when they can DVR it? The answer to that question is the live experience needs to be unique and “can’t miss”, and we B2B marketers need to do the same. This could take different shape depending on the type of event and your prospect preferences, but areas to consider:

• Leverage a modern platform such as On24, ReadyTalk, Watchitoo or Google Hangouts to make the online webinar environment as appealing as possible
• Use video as part of your presentation – does not need to be live video, in fact pre-recorded video will often yield a higher production value
• Leverage social conversations such as a specific hashtag to make the live event a unique experience
• Offer webinar attendees something completely unique – a limited time discount offer, a T shirt, whatever it may be – the more unique, the better

The experience here can also be leveraged in #2 as part of the “Why Attend?”, and an improved webinar experience will have a carryover impact of increasing the likelihood that prospect will attend another webinar in the future.

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The specifics here are almost not as important as the essence of what I’m saying – which is to treat the attendance at the event as important as the registration itself…. Which few marketers have (again, if you don’t believe that just look at the blah-blah confirmation and reminder emails that 99% of companies are using).

The act of attending the webinar is a much more significant step forward in a buying process than in the past -- because it is such a significant commitment and fewer are doing it. You will differentiate your brand on the experience you provide during the live event, and you also create the opportunity to ask questions during that live event and get spontaneous answers, to qualify the prospect and where they are in the buying process.

In part two of this post I describe how to create on-demand landing page experiences which can supplement your webinar programs in driving demand with an “always on” approach.

3 Keys to Making Content Syndication Programs Deliver

At a recent MassTLC DemandGen roundtable, the collective view of a group of 35 demand generation professionals towards content syndication programs was lukewarm. Jonathan Burg of Apperian described it as content advertising (to me implying the impact on metrics like MQLs are much further down the pike), and I’ve heard some of my colleagues describe content syndication as “super top of the funnel”.

Content syndication programs can be very tricky to get right; I have found these 3 Keys to Making Content Syndication Program Deliver as part of a demand generation mix. 

1.       Ensure the publishers are aligned with your metrics

Explain to the publishers you are working with that we have a closed loop marketing system which tracks programs and follows leads through to MQL, SAL and SQL and the opportunity impact, and that the way you determine future investments with publishers is based on the success of the program (hopefully this is the case or you are at least working towards this!).

This immediately aligns the publisher around your business metrics, not their publisher metrics which are typically going to be based on the volume of raw leads they are providing you.

What this also accomplishes is when running into the inevitable lead quality issues, it becomes a very easy conversation to get ‘make-goods’ because it’s in the publishers best interest to provide as much as possible for your program if they know that future investment with them is going to be based on how they perform relative to their peers.

2.       Align topics to those of prospects entering the buying process

For these cost-per-lead programs, publishers are charging you a flat cost per lead, but we demand gen professionals know that “not all leads are created equal.”

It stands to reason that the best way to drive the highest probability of higher quality (later stage) leads with highest probability of becoming MQLs and beyond, is to feature later stage assets for your syndication – Buyer’s Guides, Evaluation Guides, Vendor Landscapes.

These typically are not the first assets that publishers will recommend when constructing a syndication program with you, but that’s where it becomes vital to align the publisher with your objectives. I’ve had publishers say to me “we can use these assets, but we are going to get a lot less leads,” and my answer to that is “that’s okay.” I’d rather run, for example, 5 syndication programs across 5 different publishers that are 1/5 in lead volume but higher quality than a single syndication program of lower quality.

The key is that in a cost per lead program, your goal as the marketer should be quality and not volume. And you’ll unearth more quality with late stage assets than early stage.

3.       It’s okay to use top of the funnel assets but be prepared

If you have a limited budget and short term MQL aspirations, then focus on the late stage asset approach above, but if you have additional budget and looking to build a continuous demand gen program, then add in assets from further up the funnel – but be prepared around what’s happens next for the leads you bring in.

You will need nurture programs for the prospects, and be prepared to closely monitor, measure and evolve these programs. Like many types of programs in marketing, these are hard to get right and you will likely be underwhelmed with your initial results. You’ll want resources focused on continually improving and optimizing these nurture programs to get value out of the top of the funnel syndication leads.

If you can get all three of these pieces in place (alignment with publishers on metrics, a healthy set of late stages assets, and an MQI-to-MQL nurture program), then you can make content syndication a strong contributor to your demand generation. And the good news is you should be able to turn up he dial at that point to drive even more volume through your engine.

How does this compare to your experience with content syndication? Has it be a steady contributor for you and how have your content syndication investments been evaluated?