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If you get our e-newsletter, you already know that we’re turning our attention to goal setting and planning for 2013. We’re willing to bet that you’re doing the same now that we’re officially into the last month of 2012.
Goal setting is an essential task for any marketing department, but it’s not always as easy or straightforward as it sounds. Many companies fail to set effective goals simply because they don’t give the goal-setting process as much time or attention as it deserves. So how can you ensure that you’re setting goals that will help your organization thrive in 2013? Here are a few tips:
- Start with organizational objectives. What are the 2-3 biggest things that your company as a whole hopes to accomplish in 2013? Make sure you have a good understanding of where the organization is going and why. Your marketing goals should be directly connected with these organization objectives and should answer the question “how can marketing help us to achieve this our company’s big plans for the year ahead?”
- Look back. What were your goals for 2012? Did you achieve them? If so, why were you successful? If not, what held you back? Evaluating your performance over the past year will help you get an idea of what’s working and what’s possible.
- Mine the data. After you’ve done a top-level review of your performance against last year’s goals, go deeper and mine the related data for key insights. Did you notice a drop in open rates for your e-newsletter last July that corresponded with a concurrent drop in sales? Did you see web traffic spike after the announcement of a new product in February? Uncovering data-driven insights like these will help to develop your focus for 2013.
- Identify key areas for improvement.Based on your organizational objectives and your review of 2012, come up with a couple key areas you want to focus on in 2013. Then, evaluate them based on the following questions:
- Will focusing on this area have a significant impact on our organizational objectives?
- Do we have the manpower and resources to make significant improvements in this area?
- What would success in this area look like?
After your evaluation, it should be easy to see how you can develop goals from the key areas for improvement that you’ve identified.
- Develop a short list of SMART goals. The SMART goal acronym has been used ad nauseum, but for good reason. It’s very useful for describing what makes a good goal. A SMART goal is:
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Realistic
T = Timely
Make sure your goals meet all these criteria by attaching specific numbers that would indicate success, and a timeline in which the goal should be accomplished (i.e. increase interactions on social media by 25% by December 2013).
- Share with your team. The most essential (and most often overlooked) part of the goal setting process involves informing your team of your goals and delegating the work it will take to reach them. Schedule a meeting to go over your 2013 goals, provide context for how they relate to the organization’s objectives, and make sure your team understands what they must do to achieve them.
Are you in the process of setting goals for 2013? How is it going?
Featured image via Real Life Selling.
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Can you believe November is already coming to a close? We know you’re busy getting ready for the year ahead, but hope you’ll take a couple minutes to check out some of our recent favorite B2B marketing content from across the web
The CMO Guide to Building a Data-Driven Marketing Team via Marketo
Metrics, analytics and big data are going to be the name of the B2B marketing game in 2013, and CMOs are scrambling to assemble highly effective data-driven teams. This post from Marketo is a great resource that will help you identify the best ways to do just that, from recruiting people who have a bias for experimentation to developing a culture that is focused on insights rather than data alone.
Three Poisonous Metaphors in B2B Content Marketing via Velocity Partners
Jargon and metaphor are commonplace in most industries, and B2B marketing is no exception. We’re loving this Slideshare from Velocity Partners that pulls apart common B2B marketing metaphors (think sales funnels and the customer journeys) and challenges us to rethink them.
Modern Marketer Mission via Eloqua
The marketing automation giant has outdone itself with this new microsite, which takes users through an exploration of the “new world” of B2B marketing. Interactive destinations like the content moon and social solar system include infographics, guides, videos, research and other rich content that will help you understand the future of our industry in new and interesting ways. There is a lot to explore here. See for yourself.
What are you reading/watching/listening to this month?
Featured image via: Mass Transmit
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We all like predictable routines and fail-proof formulas. But sometimes, what worked in the past simply becomes ineffective. Sometimes, we encounter a shift so great that everything we knew to be important in the past simply ceases to matter. Such a shift has been taking place in B2B marketing for the last several years.
Last week, Search Engine Journal posted a nice roundup of various B2B marketing trends that experts have identified for 2013. Included in the list are things like more customer centricity, the rise of responsive websites and advances in marketing automation. We’ve been moving toward these changes for the last few years, and the way we reach and interact with our customers is shifting as a result. But the most fundamental shift of all is the prediction that 2013 will bring the death of push marketing.
In reality, push marketing has been on the way out for some time. It has been dying a slow death for years. But if we really hope to see push marketing disappear entirely in 2013, there are a few key areas we need to focus on this year. They include:
- Content. If we really want to make a clean transition from push marketing to pull marketing, high quality, useful content can’t be an exception any longer. It needs to become the rule. Nothing pulls the customer close to the business better than effective content.
- Social interaction. Most B2B companies have been “doing social media” for years, but simply putting up a Facebook page or occasionally tweeting a blog post isn’t enough to facilitate a full transition away from push marketing. To make this transition possible, B2B marketers need to focus on social interaction. We need to make it a priority to find our stakeholders on social media and have meaningful, authentic conversations with the individuals who matter most.
- Marketing automation. Pull marketing simply won’t work without a smart marketing automation strategy. After you’ve pulled your prospect in with useful content and meaningful social interaction, it’s imperative to keep them engaged and involved until they are ready to make a purchase. And nothing does that better than marketing automation.
Are you ready to see push marketing die in 2013?
Featured image via: Media Solve
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Now that Thanksgiving is over and the holiday season is officially upon us, most marketers are turning their attention to planning for 2013. But before you jump into next year with full force, there are a few things you should do in order to make sure 2012 comes to a smooth end. Here are our recommendations.
1. Clean up your email marketing lists. Most marketers make list maintenance an ongoing priority, but every email list could use a deep clean now and then. What could be better than kicking off next year with an email marketing list that is in top shape? Begin by preforming a simple data check to correct misspellings and typos that occurred in the data process. Then, remove distribution list addresses (customerservice@example.com) and any addresses that look fake. Most email marketing programs have tools that make this process simple. Finally, address your bounce list by removing addresses that have generated hard bounces, and eliminate any subscribers who have flagged your messages as spam.
2. Revisit your goals. If you’re like most marketers, you set goals for the things you hoped to accomplish in 2012. Now is the time to determine what you’ve achieved. Spend a few hours gathering the metrics you need to evaluate your success in various priority areas. Doing so will help you identify what’s working so you can do more of it in 2013.
3. Identify pain points. It’s just as important to determine which marketing activities have underperformed in 2012 as it is to identify the things that have worked well. Take a look back at the year and make a list of your top five pain points. If you’re like most B2B marketers, lead generation and content marketing may top the list. Then, begin strategizing about how you’ll address these pain points in 2013.
What are you doing to wrap up 2012 and get read for the year ahead?
Featured image via: 123RF
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By this time tomorrow, we’ll all be cooking up big meals in our kitchens, eating turkey and falling asleep while watching football. Many of us will also partake in a Thanksgiving tradition of going around the dinner table and saying one thing we’re thankful for this year. In the spirit of holiday, we’re going to join in on the tradition share a few things we’re thankful for as B2B marketers right here on Get There.
1. The advent of content marketing. Content marketing might not be a new concept, but its popularity has grown enormously over the past year. We’re thankful that many B2B companies are recognizing content marketing as a highly effective way to engage with and provide value for their customers. We’re also thankful for the opportunities we’ve had to devise winning B2B content strategies and develop great content for our clients.
2. Advances in marketing automation and demand generation. Marketing automation technology has come a long way in the last few years. We’re thankful that new developments have improved targeting and segmentation results, and that new solutions have been introduced that make marketing automation more accessible for smaller companies. It has been exciting to see a shift among B2B marketers from a lead generation mentality to a demand generation mentality as a result of these advances.
3. Social media. You knew we had to mention social media. We’re thankful that the B2B world is embracing social media with open arms and discovering new business applications for social technologies. It’s not just about building awareness or running special promotions any more. B2B companies are leveraging social media to provide customer service, nurture leads, learn about their target market, recruit employees and much, much more. We’re thrilled about the possibilities that social media presents for our industry and we can’t wait to continue to find new ways to leverage it for our clients.
What are you thankful for this year, work-related or otherwise?
Featured image via: Deaf Lion
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If you’re searching for a job, Facebook probably isn’t the first place you’d think to look. But Facebook wants to change that. Last week, they released their brand new Social Jobs Partnership app, which functions as a job posting aggregator, pulling job postings from other sites like jobvite.com and monster.com. The Social Jobs Partnership app comes out of a year-old partnership between Facebook, the U.S. Department of Labor, The National Association of Colleges and Employers, DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce agencies.
Many media outlets have questioned whether this new development presents a threat to LinkedIn. At this point we believe it does not.
Why? By nature, Facebook is a personal social media site. As soon as Facebook hit the college scene in 2004, people began sharing a great deal of personal information on the site, from photos to political views. As Facebook has grown, most users have become more cautious about their privacy settings and the content they post, but the site is still seen by most as a place for personal interactions. LinkedIn, on the other hand, has always been a place for work-related interaction. Most users build their profiles knowing full well that potential employers and colleagues will see them, and they present themselves accordingly.
Wouldn’t you rather interact with your next employer through a site where you’re intentionally presenting yourself as a great candidate than one where you’ve been sharing many aspects of your personal life for years? We think most job hunters will say yes.
We can certainly appreciate the fact that Facebook is dedicated to improving the job market. We even understand their logic that the strong social connections that exist on Facebook might be advantageous when searching for a job. But we simply can’t imagine that many LinkedIn users will forgo the privacy and professional nature of LinkedIn in order to risk putting their personal lives on display for potential employers on Facebook.
Featured image via: WebProNews
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With the biggest shopping day of the year just one week away, we have our minds on unique opportunities that exist for B2B companies to take advantage of the spike in shopping and spending that is about to take place.
While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are typically thought of as consumer-driven events, we believe that B2B companies can get in on the action with a few clever strategies.
Back in 2010, Matt Heinz wrote a post on Social Media Today encouraging B2B marketers to break through the clutter by sending marketing emails over Thanksgiving weekend. He noted that recent studies have shown most people check their work email over the holidays, and yet the volume of inbound marketing email is much lower on typical “days off” like Black Friday. While Matt recognized that it might not be easy to close a sale over Thanksgiving weekend, he maintains that marketers will be more likely to get a contact to sign up for a webinar or download a case study when they aren’t in the office fielding a never-ending stream of emails. It’s an interesting idea that we’d like to experiment with in the future.
We also think that more B2B companies (especially those with an e-commerce component) should experiment with Cyber Monday promotions. In 2011, nearly half of all Cyber Monday purchases were made at work. That means your customer is likely already in online, searching for deals and ready to spend. Why not add a special promotion for your B2B product to the mix? While making a personal purchasing decision is obviously quite different from making a business buying decision, it can’t hurt to get sales promotions in front of your customers at a time when they are already highly receptive to deals and special offers.
Are you doing anything to take advantage of the upcoming holiday shopping season?
Featured image via: Time and date
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One of the biggest challenges that most companies face when it comes to content marketing is developing enough high quality content to feed their various channels and keep their audience interested. Content creation is a lot of work, and typically requires coordination between several different departments or practice areas. But what if content creation wasn’t the only key to content marketing success?
We believe that the best content marketing programs are built around a simple, two-part formula:
Content Creation + Content Curation = Content Marketing Success
While some companies feel that they have to create every piece of content they share from scratch, we disagree. We think that a combination of original content and curated content is the way to go.
High quality, original content cannot be beat. It positions you as a thought leader and adds new ideas to a marketplace that is already overrun with copycats and repeats. But it is also extremely labor intensive.
Devoting approximately half of your content marketing time to content creation and the other half to content curation means you’ll be able to focus on making your original content the best it can be. It also means that you’ll be able to keep your community interested and engaged even when you don’t have a new piece of original content to share. Finally, sharing interesting content from others that’s related to your area of expertise shows your community that you have your fingers on the pulse or your industry, and are looking outside your own company for ideas, inspiration and best practices.
So next time you feel overwhelmed about all the content you need to develop, remember that you have the option to curate just as much content as you create.
Featured image via: Top Rank
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For most companies, social media is all about generating awareness, building relationships and providing customer service. But for B2B businesses, social can play another important, but often overlooked role. It can help you identify and gather intelligence about your prospective customers that your sales team can use in the field.
Any good salesperson knows that learning as much as you can about a prospective customer before going into a first meeting or sales pitch improves your chances of closing the sale. Here are a couple steps that will help you do just that using social media.
1. Use social media to find your most promising prospects. If you have a list of target companies you’d like to do business with, social media can help you narrow it down so that only the most promising prospects remain. Begin by doing a quick search for your target companies on LinkedIn. From there, you’ll find a list of the company’s employees from which you should identify key decision makers you would be likely to do business with. Then it’s time to go a bit deeper. Plug the names of the decision makers you’ve identified into a social CRM program if you have one, or simply search for them on key social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and in the blogosphere using google.com/blogsearch. The goal here is to find their public social profiles so you can listen in on their conversations and determine whether they have a need for your product or service. After you’ve found their profiles, look for past comments they’ve made about a problem they are experiencing that your company can solve. For example, if your business sells enterprise-level security systems to tech companies, and someone you’re researching has tweeted, “our security system had another false alarm this morning. So frustrating,” you’ll know it’s worth pursuing their business. This might not happen all that often, but when it does, it’s like striking gold. If you aren’t having much luck with your target list, you can also do a simple search for keywords related to the problem your company solves on social networks like Twitter. Doing so might turn up prospects you didn’t even realize existed.
2. Start a conversation. After you’ve identified your most promising prospects, it’s time to start talking to them. The trick is to make sure you don’t come off as overly self-promotional in your first interaction. In the security system example above, you might start a conversation by saying “Always hate when that happens. What type of security system do you use?” Asking a question like this will position you as interested and helpful, and will open the door for more conversation. If your prospect responds, keep things going by offering ideas that will help her solve her problem, and when the time feels right, go ahead and ask if she would like to learn more about your product or service. You could follow up by sending more information, directing them to your website, or providing a video or case study.
3. Ask for the meeting. Most B2B sales still take place after an in person meeting. After you’ve built a relationship with your prospect, it’s time to make that meeting happen. Simply ask if you can send someone from your sales team (or schedule a phone call) to tell her a bit about your product or service. If you’ve put time into building a relationship, your prospect is likely to be more receptive to this ask.
4. Arm your sales team with background information on your prospect. Before you send a sales person into a meeting with your prospect, make sure you’ve used social media to help them learn everything they can about the person they will be meeting with. The conversations you’ve had since identifying your prospect are helpful, but they represent only a fraction of information available about the person you’ll be meeting with. Dig deeper into your prospect’s social profiles to learn as much as you can about her. How many children does she have? Where did she go to school? What sports teams does she root for? All this information (and much more) can be found through social media, and tidbits like these present great icebreakers for in-person meetings.
5. Deliver a customized solution. This is perhaps the most important step in the process. Your chances of closing a sale will be much greater if your sales team uses everything you’ve learned about your prospect through social media to develop a solution that is custom tailored to her needs. Does your prospect have four kids, all of whom are involved in year-round extracurricular activities? Then emphasize the timesaving nature of your product and the fact that it will give your prospect more time with her family. Do you know that your prospect is working with a tight departmental budget? Develop a payment plan that will make your product or service more affordable. It’s all about using the data you have to create an offering that is a perfect fit for your prospect.
Do you use social media to identify and gather intelligence about prospects? Tell us about it in the comments!
Featured image via: RJH Solutions
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Your company’s website can fulfill many different purposes. It can raise awareness of your brand, provide information on your products or services, and even make sales. But even if your site does all of these things, it won’t be living up to its full potential unless it includes one element that is more important than anything else. That element is an opt-in.
What’s an opt-in? It’s simply the place on your site (ideally on your homepage) where you ask your visitor to give you their information in exchange for something valuable that you’ll give to them in return.
Why are opt-ins so important? The hard truth is that most people aren’t going to buy from you the first time they visit your site. Especially in the B2B world, it can take a long time and a lot of research for your target customer to make a buying decision. But if someone has visited your site, they’ve expressed at least an inkling of interest in your product or service. You don’t want to lose them. You want to keep in touch so you can make a sale. An opt-in allows you to do just that.
By asking your visitor to provide their information in exchange for something useful (like a newsletter subscription, white paper or free trial), you’re giving yourself an opportunity to connect with them while they’re still in the decision making process. You’re giving yourself an opportunity to nurture your visitor toward a sale.
How you go about that nurturing process is another subject for another post, but the most important part of the whole thing is capturing your visitor’s information to begin with. And you can’t do that without a powerful opt-in.
So, what makes for a powerful opt-in? We’ll answer that question next week right here on Get There. Stay tuned.
But even if your site does all of those things, from helping you get discovered, to showcasing your products or services, to moving people through your sales funnel. However, even if your site does all those things, it might not
Get discovered
Clarify products or services
Move people through sales funnel
Get info on prospects
People aren’t going to by the first time they visit
