Going Big Works

Pardot did bronze sponsorships in 2008 and 2009 and a silver sponsorship in 2010. This year we decided to leapfrog the gold level and do a platinum sponsorship (the largest sponsorship level available to us). Although it was a significant increase in commitment (roughly 10x the cost of a bronze sponsorship) the return was an order of magnitude greater. We were also lucky that salesforce.com gave us a terrific position in the exhibit hall (center row, second from the entrance). You almost had to walk past our booth to get into the hall. In the first four hours of the event, we had more sign ups and traffic than we had in the entire four days of the previous year.

Promotional Models Work

The idea of promotional models (often known by the pejorative moniker ”booth babes”) is always somewhat controversial. On the one hand, you see them employed a wide variety of events by companies that are household names in almost every industry. On the other hand, are people who visit your booth on the basis of attractive booth staff really worth speaking to? We had never taken this approach before but I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Bringing a large number of people to your booth, even unqualified ones, creates a buzz around your display and winds up being a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of traffic.

We went with an airline theme (see below) around the marketing cloud and gave away airline vouchers. This was particularly timely given the new ABC series Pan Am set to debut later in the month.

iPads are Great for Signing Up the Masses

Most conferences give you lead scanners which are handy for signing up prospects. You simply scan a badge and can later download names, email addresses, etc. after the event. This year we decided to eschew the scanners in favor of custom landing pages, optimized for iPads (with which we equipped our promotional models). There were a few advantages to this approach:

• iPads are a lot more eye catching than scanners. People love to play with iPads. They dodge scanners.
• Since the landing pages were being submitted, prospects were entered into our marketing automation system in real time and we could send a thank you note immediately with information (much better than hoping they take home a data sheet).
• We could save the scanners for the really hot leads. The problem with scanning everyone is sorting through them later. By using landing pages for everyone and additionally scanning people that did demos, had good conversations, etc., we could easily distinguish between the leads after the fact.

Already Signed Up For Next Year

Yes, we have already signed on as a platinum sponsor for Dreamforce 2012. The price has gone up 25% but as with this year, I have no doubt that we will see a terrific ROI on the event.

So how do you staff your marketing team? It can be difficult to find applicants with significant web development experience who want to go into marketing (as opposed to development). Rather than hire for these skills specifically, I recommend hiring for everything else and then just training people on the development skills. As I said, a little knowledge goes a long way. You don’t need CSS ninjas.

At my marketing automation company we now require all new hires in the marketing department to pass a basic HTML and CSS exam within 120 days of hire. The company pays for any training resources and classes but the new hires are expected to study outside of normal working hours. This approach is fairly similar to someone in finance being expected to pass a Series 7 exam.

Here are some of the resources I recommend making available:

• Excellent tutorials at W3Schools
• Very reasonably priced interactive lessons at lynda.com
• Night or weekend courses at a local university

Are you expected to know HTML and CSS in your marketing role? I know I am.

My latest labor of love is a marketing automation primer that I have published with my Pardot co-founder David Cummings. The material assumes a strong knowledge of both interactive and B2B marketing but does not require any experience with marketing automation.

Topics covered include:

• Lead nurturing/drip marketing
• Effective email marketing
• Lead scoring/grading
• Forms/landing pages
• Metrics worth tracking

Think Outside the Inbox is available on Amazon We would love to hear what you think.

Right now you are thinking, “Great. It’s not enough that I have good content, I have to have a lot of it and update it regularly.” Unfortunately, if you want to be competitive, you’re right. We marketers at B2B organizations today are an overtaxed bunch. We’re often asked to do more now with less resources than we might have enjoyed a few years ago. Fortunately, if your organization is a products company, you probably have a wealth of content that is not currently helping your rankings, but could if you allow it.

Most companies keep their knowledge bases, customer communities, and forums under lock and key, afraid that competitors or prospects may see their warts or proprietary information. The reality is that your documentation and community sites likely contain a tremendous amount of content that can and should be indexable by search engines. Assuming your documentation is complete and your community is well taken care of, you have nothing to hide. Competitors likely already know more about you than you can imagine and prospects will likely be encouraged by having access to your community during the sales process.

Anytime one of your support reps answers a question via email but does not have relevant documentation to link to, he/she should write up an answer, post it to the site, and send the URL to the client. Of course it helps if you have a simple content management system, community management system, or forum so that your reps can do this with zero IT involvement. This allows your support team and also your user community to become content creators for you. You will find that the number of pages indexed on your documentation or community site quickly outstrips your corporate site and that you start to rank well for many long tail keywords. Who wouldn’t want double or triple their number of quality pages in Google or Bing’s indexes?

What can you start making available to the search engines?

• product documentation
• FAQs
• forums
• idea exchanges

When was the last time you thought of a support ticket as an opportunity for SEO-boosting content?

Problems with B2B free trials:

1. The prospect has little skin in the game and may not be in a hurry to implement the trial solution during the assigned peirod. Other priorities come up
2. The corporate sponsor may have difficulty getting buy-in from her internal team (salesforce.com administrator, IT, etc.) in making changes that may be temporary
3. The product is likely to be too vast for the client to be able to wander her way through it (imagine how many salesforce.com or NetSuite trials feel) without significant guidance from the vendor
4. To be most effective in terms of converting the prospect, the vendor must fully implement, train, and support the free trial as though they were a full-paying client

I have been on both sides of this game. As a B2B buyer, I am relatively poor at dealing with the free trials for which I sign up. I sign up for them and then other priotities quickly come up. Since I have nothing invested (in terms of time, money, or stakeholder buy-in), I often wind up shelving the evaluation until a later date. What typically works best for me is a situation where I am paying for the solution but I have an out-clause if I am not satisfied after a certain period. That gives me the incentive to get things integrated quickly but also minimizes my risk as a buyer.

Advantages of a Paid Pilot Approach:

1. The prospect has a sense of urgency when implementing the product –she is actually paying for it
2. The vendor has a sense of urgency when  supporting the client — the prospect in this case is actually a paying customer and could become one on a recurring basis
3. Increases likelihood of the prospect getting buy-in from other stakeholders at her company. She can tell them that she has selected a product but that it comes with an out-clause if needed.
4. The vendor is able to at least partially compensate his sales rep; making the paid pilot feel like much more of a “win” than a trial would

At my marketing automation company we do a bit of both but the vast majority of our clients are month-to-month and have the option to cancel their service at any time. This has been a tremendous model for both our sales team (reduced risk is a nice message) as well as our support team. Since our clients can leave at any time, we have to constantly be on our “A game” in terms of the level of service we provide to our customer base. In a sense, all of our clients always in a paid pilot and we love it that way.

If you are only using the free trial method currently, I encourage you to also take a look at paid pilots. You may find that it works out better for both you and your prospects.

The article Give Them the B2B Content They Want tells you how to give your online visitors just that.

According to the article, when buyers are searching for information on your site they ask 3 questions:

• Am I in the right place?
• Is there something here for me?
• Can I get to it easily?

In order to help your viewers answer these three questions with a simple yes, make sure to utilize a few simple suggestions, outlined below.

Thanks in large part to the great websites that exist, a standard for layout has been set. As a web surfer, you are used to this standard and look for items in certain locations. For example, when I go to research a lead’s company, I expect to find a brief overview of what the company is selling on the homepage. I also expect to find an About Us tab either at the top of the page or along the sidebar at the left or right hand side. Surprisingly enough, some sites I have come across make it relatively difficult to even figure out what it is they do. Not only is it important to follow the standard for organization and flow of your website, but it is also important to communicate your message clearly. By having more organizational flow to your website, you also increase SEO.

Another nuisance is not understanding the content of a website. When too much marketing fluff or too many industry words are used, it is hard for others to get the gist of the product or service. Keep the wording short and to the point. Bullet points stand out and help visitors learn more quickly. Also it is helpful to distinguish yourself from your competition. In the B2B industry, buyers will check out multiple options, so make sure to inform your audience why your product is the best.

Following the idea of clarity when promoting your product, the use of visuals also helps describe your company and product. Use key visuals to not only portray your brand, but also to quickly connect words to images. Images and videos are longer lasting memories. They also jump out and attract attention unlike paragraphs.

To wrap it up, let’s list the main points to remember when designing your number one tool to sell your product.

• Organization is key. Make it easy for visitors to locate the information they want.
• Clarity gets the point across. Define your product or service in a simple, straightforward way.
• Use visuals. Attract the eye and provide lasting memories.

The vast majority of issues come from poorly coded/authenticated emails. This can either be the fault of the email’s designer (in the case of poor HTML) or the the platform (infrastructural issue). Some common HTML issues include:

1. Too much code (in terms of your code to text ratio)
2. Too little text (in terms of your text to image ratio) — you get penalized for being succint if you also use images
3. Poorly written code (title set to “untitled”; unclosed tags, etc.) — apparently spammers cannot code well
4. Larger or smaller than ordinary fonts — stick to something similar to 10-12pt
5. “Shouting” — too many words in all caps; excessive use of red or blue font
6. Hiding the unsubscribe text by making the font the same color as the background — a shady practice that would only result in spam complaints anyway

Here are a few highlights that I often see being violated that you would never think about from a SPAM perspective. It is interesting that what is often thought of as a best practice (explaining how/why someone was subscribed  and how he or she could unsubscribe) must be worded carefully to avoid a penalty: 

1. Email contains ‘Dear (something)’ — so much for being friendly
2. Claims you can be removed from the list 
3. Talks about how to be removed from mailings
4. Removal phrase right before a link

It is humorous though quite sad that email has been somewhat ruined because of all of the bad apples who take advantage of unsuspecting inboxes. Twitter, unfortunately is likely to follow if unchecked.

See the full list of Spam Assassin Rules

When you are evaluating email vendors, I highly recommend starting by subscribing to their respective newsletters via multiple email addresses (Gmail, Yahoo!, corporate account, etc.). Then tote whether or not the messages are delivered to your inbox in major email clients. This would seem to be an obvious test but many buyers simply rely on reputation rather than experimentation when making a decision.

Measuring the Sender Score of the Vendors

Return Path, who operates the largest email accreditation service, Sender Score Certified, rates IP addresses by giving them sender scores. The score is made up of several different factors such as SPAM complaints, sending volume, amount of mail sent to unknown addresses. and the IP’s DNS settings. Anything lower than 70 should be avoided. Ideally you want to see something that is 80 or higher.

To find the IP address of the mail server for an email you receive, you will need to see the message’s original headers.

In Gmail for example, click on the downward arrow on the top right of an email. Then select “Show Original” to see the message’s headers. You can then see the IP address of the sender and check it here. You will be surprised by how many low scores you will find. You can do this in a similar manner with Yahoo! Mail and other major email clients.

Checking Email Authentication

The header also gives you other useful information such as whether or not the emails pass various types of authentication. ISPs and corporate filters use some or all of the four major authentication frameworks to help classify email. Most email clients will allow you to check your incoming emails to see if they are authenticated. Gmail for example will tell you whether or not the email passes SPF and DKIM authentication. Simply do a find for “DKIM” when viewing the header. The more levels of authentication your ESP uses, the better the deliverability is likely to be.

There is of course a lot more than deliverability that goes into an email service provider evaluation (feature set, ease of use, services component, etc.) but this should at least give buyers an objective to way measure one of the more esoteric aspects of email marketing.

One tool that I have blogged about before makes reputation monitoring on Twitter extremely easy. TweetDeck is a slick Adobe Air app that sits on your desktop and notfies you of Tweets as they come in. Set up a column that is essentially a search for your company’s (or product’s) name and will give you a little buzz anytime something comes in. This is a tremendous way to find out what people think about your customer service, what companies are evaluating your solutions, etc. If you have not done this before, you will probably find that there is quite a bit more chatter than you may have expected.

TweetDeck

If you do see something about your brand, definitely feel free to join the conversation. If someone says something negative, address it, offer to point them to support, etc. If someone says something positive, thank them for it. It encourages your clients and prospects to continue the conversation, which is definitely something that you want for your brand.

Google Alerts are important for less time sensistive monitoring but so far nothing beats Twitter when it comes to stream of consciousness monitoring.