Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Marketing is a Mix Tape

by Jason Stewart

For my wedding anniversary my wife bought me a really interesting book called Love is a Mix Tape, by Rob Sheffield. Then, for Father's Day she bought me this, a cassette player with a USB plug so that I could convert the cassettes I have been holding on to since the early 90's to MP3.

She bought these things for me because I am a music guy, and more specifically I am a mix tape guy. I have been for more than 20 years, and I still send out an annual mix to my friends and family with the music that really spoke to me over the previous 12 months. I was the guy who would, when he was interested in a girl he met for the first time, would say "I'll make you a tape!"

Back in the day, this was a commitment. An endeavor. Several hours worth of labor, listening to each and every song all the way through as it recorded onto a Maxell 90 minute cassette. Committing to a theme, finding the songs that fit, figuring out how the songs flowed together. The end result, if it was done right, was something worth listening to again and again. The memories associated with a tape would endure as well. I can still remember who I made a tape for (even if it was just for me). The night I made it, how I felt when I did, what I was trying to say. And if it was done right, it can make you feel that way all over again, for better or for worse.  

A good marketing campaign should be constructed the same way. Your theme should be clear, and the actions you take and the copy you write should fit with that theme. The best marketing campaigns are never one and done, are never batch and blast. Different tools and weapons in your arsenal should fit together. If it is an email campaign, what is your goal? What new and different message are you going to do to remarket to the people that didn't open it? Is your sales team going to call the people who opened or clicked? What were the people who responded supposed to do? Was it easy for them to complete the goal? How is this all going to be recorded in your CRM system? Are you going to offer the unsubscribes something different, like a direct mail piece or a phone call? A constant series of "what if?" and "and then?" which should have a clear start and an even clearer finish.

It should be a good mix tape.

With the advent of MP3's and playlists and the ability to burn compilation CD's something changed. Making a mix tape became really, really easy.You would drag the songs you wanted to hear into a list, put them in order, insert a blank CD and burn it. Less than ten minutes start to finish. The end result would have a clear and fresh sound and would, more often then not, become boring and stale after a few listens.

Since so little time is involved in production, it became less important to plan your steps in advance. And if it turned out to be a crappy mix, then you would just make another one.

My boss, Greg, told me once that "marketing automation systems have done a great job at helping people market poorly, faster." Much like the introduction of the CD burner, marketing automation has made it easy for people to write, format and send email to tens of thousands of people in minutes.

We've all done it ... you need to generate leads quickly so you write something up and send it to ten thousand prospects hoping that something will stick and you will get a few responses to fuel the funnel. And if it doesn't work? Try again tomorrow. No clear plan of action involved, little effort placed in tracking response. A clear and precise decision to replace quality with quantity, and we're all suffering.

Email is becoming less and less effective because the volume we are all suddenly able to send has become more important than the message, the theme, the plan. Volume is the plan. Instead of sending quality, carefully crafted product that is ten times as effective, we send ten times as many email because it is easy. And fast.

It is a playlist we are burning to a CD.

Imagine how well your marketing automation could perform if you treated it like a mix tape.

5 Tips to Improve Conversion Rates

by Jason Stewart

It's not hard to find a list of tips aimed at helping to improve your conversion rates, but it is much harder to synch these suggestions with the tools designed to make them realistic and effective. Here are 5 tips to improve conversion rates, along with links to some tools to help get the job done.

1. Targeted Lists
Simply put, the best way to increase response to send the message to the only the most relevant audience. In other words, by running multiple, smaller campaigns at a more highly refined list. Define your target profile for each product or value proposition, and focus the campaign on them.

Sometimes it isn’t easy, however. See if this scenario sounds familiar … you contact a list broker or online property about sending an email campaign, hoping to get your message out to the 25,000 person minimum required by the provider. When you put your requirements into the equation (department, title, geography, etc.) the list that comes back to you has 15,000 contacts. What do you do?

It’s hard to walk away, because those 15,000 are a great fit for your message. You will, most likely, backfill. You sacrifice quality for quantity and add another 10,000 names that aren’t really a fit for what you are trying to do. Your response rate will go down because 40% of your list is not in your sweet spot. Lower responses mean lower conversions, because some of those irrelevant contacts are going to click but not convert. Or worse yet, they will convert and you send a lot of unqualified leads to sales, damaging your credibility.

Alternatively, you consider eating the cost of that extra 10,000 names (but that makes your contact cost seem out of whack) or see if you can send those people different content than your original campaign idea (maybe something more relevant to them) … but that is a lot of heavy lifting, without much expected return.

House data is an inadequate back up because it tends to have so many holes in things like department, industry and level of contact (VP, Director, etc), and becomes out of date so quickly.

Another solution is finding a provider with quality contacts, advanced filtering and list building tools, and no minimums or subscription requirements. Your conversion rates will improve based on sending relevant offers to targeted contacts. Check out Demand Contacts from Demandbase.

2. Targeted Content
Giving people more relevant content and offers is an obvious conversion win. Targeted content can be delivered in two ways:

- Email content or online display advertising tailored to the buyer profile of the target audience -

- Website content customized based on what you know about the visitor. Most people have some success with landing pages based on the keyword used in search, but that is limited in reach and does not differentiate customer types. The real opportunity is to segment the way you plan your campaigns, using the unique firmographics of the business (company, industry, corporate revenue, number of employees, location, etc) that is about to visit.
Email content can be customized based on how well targeted your list is, how much time and effort you have spent building out and understanding your buyer profiles, and some effort centered around matching offers to those buyer profiles. However, open rates and click response frequently disappoint.

Customizing website content for specific companies or industries would be very challenging – unless you have the use of a tool like the Demand Real-time Identification Service. You still need a basic understanding of your target buyer profiles at the firmographic level, but customized web content based on details like industry or company size (such as industry-specific case studies) has been proven to increase engagement and conversion. Additionally, you can also show specific message for a visitor that is already a customer or if that business visitor is from an account flagged by sales as important. Without cookies!

3. Shorter Forms
It’s no secret that shorter forms reduce the friction in the conversion process. The less that you ask for from a visitor, the more likely they are to give your offer a try. It’s also no secret that a big problem with making it easier to convert is that more unqualified clicks do convert, again damaging your credibility with sales and falsely inflating your campaign metrics.

The additional argument against shortening forms is getting little or no discernable lead data. Marketing relies on capturing as much information as possible to both route the leads to the appropriate salesperson and qualify them as potential selling opportunities. While shorter forms might generate more conversions, quality goes down.

Marketers need to find that magic balance in their forms that makes them short enough to grease the conversion wheels, but long enough that you can capture enough information about your conversions that you can actually work with them after the fact.

Or, they can use a tool like the Demand Real-time Identification Service to decide when to show a shorter lead form, and automatically fill in the details like company name, phone number, industry, revenue, employee count, address and more so that they can shorten their forms without sacrificing data quality.

4. Remarket to Unconverted (But Interested) Web Traffic
Many marketers have tools in place to identify the IP addresses of their web visitors. If you could identify the relevant businesses that have visited your website and then cross-reference those businesses with any high-value pages they visited, you would have the beginnings of a very solid, targeted list leveraging intelligence pulled from your analytics package and CRM systems. These are businesses that, although they may not have converted, are actively searching for more information about your products and solutions. And you may very well have contacts from that company in your house list that you can start contacting. Unfortunately, most IP lookups return little usable data. This is largely because the public registries are not set up or maintained as business directories.

Demand Analytics is a tool that can do a lot of the heavy lifting here for you. It connects your traffic to a proprietary database, so it can automatically sort out the relevant business visitors from any irrelevant traffic and identify if they are in your buyer profile. A connection to Demand Contacts allows you to quickly and easily supplement your CRM system with new, targeted contacts from the business office locations that actually hit the high-value pages on your website.

5. Use What Works
The word “metrics” is almost a mantra when talking to B2B marketers about best practices. They can tell you how many impressions there were or emails were sent, opens, clicks and conversions. Standard analytics or CRM packages fall short, however, in understanding the quality of the traffic your campaigns are driving to your website.

Consider this scenario … let’s say that you are spending $5000 per month running two campaigns in Google PPC. You are burning through your budget well before the month is over, and 85% of your conversions are coming from campaign 1. Campaign 2 isn’t driving nearly as many clicks/conversions, but you are curious to dig deeper because the quality of leads coming from PPC seems to be declining.

Using a tool like Demand Analytics, you could analyze the quality of the traffic clicking through on those ads. You could very well find that 85% of the traffic driven by the campaign consuming 85% of your budget is from outside of your target markets, while the smaller campaign has a 40% hit rate. Using this information you could adjust the spend to make sure the smaller campaign is running all month long, or tweak the messaging of the expensive, click-driving campaign to reduce the clicks from companies outside of your buyer profile.

In conclusion, always keep in mind that a good conversion rate is not always the sign of a successful campaign. The single metric I like to use to measure success -- more than impressions or clicks or conversion percentage or opens -- is return on marketing (RoM).

RoM is the amount of pipeline generated divided by the cost of the campaign. For example, if I can generate $10,000 or more in pipeline for every $1 that I spent on a campaign I would consider that more important than if my conversion rate was below 2% because the conversions I did score were of a very high quality.

Using a combination of tools to drive targeted campaigns with relevant content to select prospects, grease the wheels of the conversion and then measure the quality of the traffic you drove will naturally improve conversion rates, but should also significantly impact the metrics that are even more important than conversion percentage.

One Key Takeaway from Chris Brogan's New Marketing Experience Summit

by Jason Stewart

So far this month I have attended two events, Chris Brogan's New Marketing Experience and Ad:Tech, both in San Francisco. It's a busy Spring, event-wise, as I am also running a round table on marketing technology at a brand new social media event (SocialBiz 2010 in Petaluma, CA) and Demandbase is a sponsor at the Sirius Decisions B2B Marketing Summit in Scottsdale, AZ May 12th-14th.

The Marketing Cloud is putting on a webinar with Chris Brogan on Tuesday April 27th called Understanding Thought Leadership Marketing and the Power of Trust.

Social Media is still trending hot, with monitoring and reporting tools starting up faster than marketing automation vendors in 2005. Ad:Tech seems to be improving year over year (from a B2B perspective, though, it still needs work) -- but for the second year in a row New Marketing Labs put on a great show.

Here are some tidbits from various speakers at the event (I will try to credit the quotes when possible but won't always have the name of the speaker):

• 67% of social media efforts at the enterprise level start at as guerilla efforts….classic examples of asking forgiveness not permission
• B2B is more quality than quantity. It doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers or Facebook fans you have, it matters who they are.
• The phrase "Join the Conversation!" is getting old, but it doesn't change the fact that the conversation is happening regardless as to whether or not you are there or not
• Use social media to find your competitors customers by searching on who is talking about them
• ABH (Always Be Helping) is the new ABC (Always Be Closing)
• Edison Research shared that 48% of Americans have social network profiles, half of which check their profile at least once per day.
• Slightly more than half of social network users are “status updaters” – meaning they are “contributing content” to the networks, and 1 in three do it via mobile phone.
• Don’t be afraid of asking questions when you are listening and participating, but make it consistent. Figure out your question and ask it the same way every time. 
• Mike Damphousse (really cool guy!) from GreenLeads had a great observation about the similarity between email and telesales/prospecting: 10 seconds to get your attention. Another 30 seconds to establish credibility. Then maybe 2 minutes of commitment tops. Use it wisely.
• Tweet from @Sue_Anne: It's not just about the technology. Expertise is valuable. What are you buying - technology or expertise?
• Tweet from @respres: Good content starts with "What do they want to know? Not what do I want to say?"
• Consider moving your unsubscribe link to the top of your email instead of the bottom. You might get more unsubscribes, but you will likely also get fewer Spam complaints which have a direct impact on email deliverability
• Personal Brand vs. Corporate Brand. At what point do your twitter followers become an asset? Have people been receiving resumes with number of twitter followers or facebook friends listed as an accomplishment or asset?

My one key takeaway was this: Inbound marketing (creation of good content to drive traffic) and social media still rely on an outbound component. "If you build it they will come" is great in theory, but in order to close business you will likely still be sending email or making phone calls so don't shut down your outbound efforts.

For example, Hubspot is fantastic at creating relevant content that I regularly view or read, but I still get lots of emails and the occasional phone call from them (as I should).

I even got a phone call from Chris Brogan's company regarding this event, which is actually what got me to come!

Phone calls seem to make social media people people shiver, but you need to understand that is what works sometimes. If you are selling to old school businesses then sometimes old school techniques work the best. Don't be afraid to try them.

Can't Get It Out of My Head

by Jason Stewart

I read a blog post recently that I can't stop thinking about from The Adaptive Marketer. My friend Rob Rose writes how Best Practices Produce Mediocre Results.

Seriously, how much sense does that make? If you strive to make sure all of your marketing efforts observe "best practices" how are you ever going to achieve anything other than very average results? Your conversion rate may be 2% -- but would that crazy idea you had but were too chicken to try have yielded an 8% conversion rate?

True, you might fail when you try something new. But you might not. You might just succeed. Wildly and beyond all expectations. Some of my best successes have come from adapting after a mistake. How about you?

Rob explains it much more eloquently than me. Check it out.

The Long Tail ... Of Email?

by Jason Stewart

Seamus Walsh from marketing content strategy company VAZT contacted me earlier this week to comment for a blog post he was working on ...  Email Effectiveness Down in 2010. He shared some numbers which you can see in his blog post, but the bottom line is that people seem to be committed to sending email but feel that the medium is not as effective as it once was.

I could totally identify with that, but seriously wondered if I agreed.

I still send a lot of email. I wish I had more time to be strategic instead of tactical (and many of you probably feel the same way) but I still feel compelled to send email. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I feel like I would stop doing something if it wasn't effective. So I got to wondering just how effective it was, and more specifically what my most successful campaign was during the past few months. Who was the audience, how many people did it go to, and what was the goal?

It was a targeted mailing, going specifically to marketing people in my database with the words channel, indirect or affiliate in their title. It was a short, "personal" note from the lead owner promoting the business contact side of our business which mentioned how we work with companies that sell through channels by establishing special rates and marketing list building programs for their partners, and asking for 10 minutes of their time to provide more details. It went to just over 2000 people (which is small potatoes in the email marketing world) but the response was outstanding.

After a bit of thinking, here's what I told Seamus:

Email effectiveness is definitely on the decline, at least unless email marketers learn to adapt much the same way that search marketers have. Just as the most popular search terms are hypercompetitive, expensive and often demonstrate very limited return, mass batches of generic emails just don’t cut it anymore. We need to apply the “long tail” philosophy of search to email if we want to stay alive, and serve small, specific batches of people with the targeted messages we know that they are interested in.

If you are wondering what the "long tail" is, I wrote about it a while back. In a nutshell, approximately 90% of the traffic on search engines is tied up into a small number, maybe 10% of the keywords. The other 10% of the traffic (which is still a lot of traffic) is tied up in the more specific, niche, specialized phrases and words that make up the long tail.

For example, "marketing executives" is not in the long tail, but "director level or higher marketing contacts with indirect, channel or affiliate in their title from companies with at least $100M in revenue" is.

That email went out in January but sales is still talking about it, and I just finished building a special landing page for one of the largest software companies in the world to point their channel partners to when they want to purchase business contacts or build targeted marketing lists. Targeted lists, with no minimum purchase requirements so that their partners can be very specific regarding their needs.

It's more work to craft hypertargeted messages to highly specific audiences. But the returns (and your reputation) will be well served by going after the "long tail" ... of email.

8 Questions You Need To Ask When Buying a Marketing List

by Jason Stewart

Buying a marketing list can be a stressful process. With so many vendors out there, it is important to ask the right questions when you are making a decision. Here are 8 questions you should always ask when you are in the market for business contact data...

1. What makes your data unique?
There are many data providers out there, and many pull from common sources such as Dun & Bradstreet/Hoovers, Jigsaw or InfoUSA. It is important to ask what makes the data in the list you are considering unique, and be sure it is not compiled from sources you have already purchased from recently.

Each individual business contact record you purchase from Demandbase is unique. While Demandbase partners with leading data companies like the ones mentioned above (and is, in fact, the only company to partner with all of these providers), we also pull data from many smaller publications and data companies and play to the strengths of these disparate sources. Business contact records are built from the ground up, with data gaps from one source filled in with information from other partners and proprietary rules run against every contact to categorize them according to department, specialty, industry and more.

2. How often do you refresh your data?
It’s important to know how often your data provider adds names to their database, but it is perhaps even more important to know how often they remove names from their database and what steps they take to prevent “dead” names from being added back to the system. Don’t be impressed by claims of “tens of millions” of contacts unless you can verify that they are actually removing out-of-date information from their system in a timely manner.

Demandbase runs quarterly email campaigns to contacts in our database to both verify the validity of our business contacts as well as give these contacts the opportunity to opt out of being included in the Demandbase database. We removed more than 2 million out-of-date business contacts from our system during our last run.

3. How is your data priced? Is there a minimum purchase?
If you can get a per-contact price of less than $1 per contact (with email!), then you are doing very well – but if you are required to spend at least $5K then it might not be such a good deal. The dirty little secret of many data providers is the minimum purchase size. After you run the parameters for your list, you will likely find that your actual list size falls beneath the requirements for minimum purchase which could lead to a “back-fill” of contacts that you may not have wanted (or needed) in the first place. Your response rates will drop because you are campaigning to prospects simply because you paid for their info, not because you selected them. And your reputation may suffer as well if you are marketing to people who are not in your sweet spot.

Demandbase has no minimum purchase requirements, and our filters are the most advanced in the industry. This means that lists purchased from Demandbase can be highly targeted based on the needs of our customers, and that there is no need to purchase leads you don’t need to fill some sort of arbitrary requirements. Contacts start at $2 (if you are buying 1 record), however volume discounts are awarded. 

4. How do you handle inaccurate data?
It makes no difference where you get your data, there is going to be some churn in the most accurate and highly marketed lists. Especially in a down economy. A key factor in dealing with your provider is to establish some sort of “return policy” in advance of the purchase. Ideally, the provider you use for your email campaigns will be able to differentiate between “hard” and “soft” bounces on the email campaigns you run, as proof of a “hard bounce” is a great basis for handling returns of inaccurate data.

If you send an email and it is not delivered, the recipient’s system typically sends back some sort of notification as to why. A “hard” bounce is when you receive a notification that the non-delivery is due to a permanent condition – like when the intended recipient is no longer at the company. A “soft” bounce is when the notification indicates the non-delivery was due to a temporary condition, such as a full mailbox or some sort of “out of office” situation.

Demandbase offers full credit back for all business contact data proven to be inaccurate as a result of a “hard bounce.” We then take your “hard bounce” information to help us maintain the accuracy of our database.

5. Do you remove or credit duplicates for contacts I already own?
A common frustration when purchasing lists is acquiring contacts you already have in your database. Make sure your data provider has some sort of system in place to remove or to credit back contacts you already own, and also (if you are a repeat customer) remove contacts you may have already purchased from them.

Demandbase tracks all your purchases so that you will never buy a contact from us more than once. We also work with you to credit back contacts that are already in your CRM.

For Salesforce.com customers the de-duplication process is automated, as the AppExchange version of Demandbase is set up in a tab inside of Salesforce.com and runs a duplicate check against your database before you buy.

6. How are your lists targeted? Do I need to pay for any filters to refine my list?
Some data providers charge you to run filters against their database that help you to target your list to your specific needs. For example, if you were looking for a list of marketing contacts at software companies you might be charged $300 to remove all non-software companies and another $300 to target the marketers. Data companies do this to try to discourage filters which might reduce the size of the list they are trying to sell you. Be aware of both the  costs associated with building a more targeted list, and the hidden costs to your reputation and response rates if you don’t filter your lists and market to contacts that are not in your “sweet spot.”

Demandbase actually has a white paper dedicated to this topic called Microtargeting for Macro Results (http://www.demandbase.com/white_papers.html, near the bottom of the page), and has the most advanced filters in the industry -- allowing you to zero in on contacts based on geography, industry, sub-industry, seniority (level of contact), department, departmental specialty and more. Each contact in the database is individually "scored" against your specific needs so you can build highly targeted lists without worrying about hidden “filter” charges or minimum purchase sizes for your lists -- and you can build and filter your list before you even talk to a sales rep.

Demandbase Professional subscription services help you to target even more closely, filtering your business contacts based on prospect companies and their activities when they visit your corporate website.

7. Do we own the data, or is this a list rental?
Data providers often rent out their subscriber lists for “one-time” mailings. You send them your creative, and they run the email campaign for you. They report back to you on opens and click-through, but the real measure of success is conversions – how many people filled out the form on the page that you sent them to in body of the email. This is the only way for you to capture the contact information of anyone in the list that you rented. Since it is a rental, the cost per lead is much lower than an outright purchase but you do not own the information and cannot market to them again without renting the list again. Make sure to clarify if the cost per lead is for a rental or for a list purchase.

Demandbase customers license all business contacts they purchase for multiple use.

8. Can I send email to the contacts I purchase from you? Are they “opt-in”?
If you are buying a list from a vendor and they claim that the entire list is “opt in” be very careful, and keep in mind that they have not “opted in” to receiving emails from you. Opt-in is the gold standard in email marketing, without a doubt -- but Can-Spam is the law and it does not cite “opt-in” as a requirement.

Email marketing is a very tricky business. I have received SPAM complaints from paying customers that I have spoken to on the phone, and I have closed business based on unsolicited (but legally “Can-Spam” compliant) emails. Be aware of the requirements for running email campaigns from your providers, as some may require you to be able to prove “opt-in” on every email you send while others simply require you to comply with the law. Agree on a policy internally that will both preserve your reputation, but also allow you to grow your brand and pipeline through the use of email. And consider paying extra for a dedicated IP address to handle your mailings, because if you are sharing email servers with other companies that do not observe the letter of the law as closely as you do, your deliverability numbers might suffer as a result of their bad practices.

Demandbase contacts include email addresses. Our contacts have agreements in place with our providers allowing for the distribution of their contact information, and Demandbase runs quarterly email campaigns to all contacts in our database inviting them to “opt-out” of being included in the Demandbase database.

Bonus Question: Do you carry data from companies outside the United States?
Accurate international business contact information is a very hard commodity to find, so if you find a vendor who has good international data you should keep them in your rolodex for when you might need them. Be very careful when purchasing international business contacts, and be sure to ask all of the right questions regarding freshness of the data, returns, and so on. There simply aren’t as many reputable providers of international data as there are those focused on the United States market, so you need to be cautious.

Demandbase focuses on United States businesses with revenues of $1M or more. We plan on slowly expanding into international business contacts when we identify and qualify reputable, accurate partners in the international business contact data space.

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