lead nurturing

February 26, 2014 by Marc Hausman

Crossing the “Last Mile” in Content Marketing

The last mile in content marketing is the alignment with measurable sales metrics. (Photo source: http://aws.amazon.com)

I often compare the sales enablement component of Strategic Communications Group’s (Strategic) client campaigns to the last mile that has historically bewitched cable, television, telecommunications and Internet providers.

For telcos, it is this valuable final stretch of network that is the speed bottleneck for the customer and (ironically) the most expensive to upgrade.

For corporate and field marketers, it’s the alignment of content with sales metrics (i.e. lead generation, prospect nurturing, deal capture and sales intelligence) that provides the most measurable return, yet proves the most daunting.

Why?

There are a couple of entrenched obstacles a marketer must circumvent to deliver on the sales ROI of content marketing:

1. Foster an open and collaborative relationship at all levels of the sales organization. Sales leadership must be convinced to champion the program and promote its importance to enterprise and inside reps.

Then, reps must be educated about how they can actively participate in the program by providing guidance on editorial/content strategy, serving as a content distribution channel and, most important, taking an action based on intelligence generated from analytics.

LinkedIn recently published an excellent blog post with suggestions about how to train old-school sales pros in the art of social selling.

2. Capture analytics and translate it into actionable sales intelligence. Reporting on quantity and quality of readership and audience engagement is an indication of brand awareness, credibility and thought leadership. Yet, these are the all-too familiar benchmarks marketers fall back on, even though they lack true ROI.

The modern marketer recognizes how critical it is to make recommendations about a tactical sales activity to be taken based on analytics. This demands the marketer have intimate knowledge of sales messaging, the status of opportunities in the sales pipeline, product developments and enhancements, and competitive threats.

I provide more insight into the changing role of today’s marketer in this four minute video produced by the Pulse Network.

3. Set realistic expectations and then measure program ROI. What if we bring opportunities to the sales team, make actionable recommendations and things don’t pan out?

This is a real and legitimate concern among marketers because of how tenuous the relationship often is with sales. Waste a rep’s time chasing a prospect, and you’ll lose respect and support.

Plus, in a corporate environment, no one likes to be associated with failure when they have personally championed a new approach. It’s not good for job stability.

Set expectations upfront when it comes to the opportunities identified from an integrated content marketing and sales enablement program. Not every lead or nurtured contact will produce immediate return. That’s true of any type of sales or marketing program.

The appropriate success benchmark is programmatic, and needs to be evaluated at quarterly or semi-annual intervals.

How much opportunity in the sales pipeline did this program touch during the past three months? And what percentage of those deals turned into revenue?

Those are the questions executive leadership, sales management and modern marketers need to ask (and answer).

January 29, 2014 by Marc Hausman

How to Avoid “Wasteful Futility” in Content Marketing

Pundits and prognosticators share a common view about how corporate and field marketers will allocate resources this year. Marketers are all in when it comes to content creation.

The rise of the enlightened buyer coupled with the shift in influence to social and online communities has created a gap in the market. That is where organizations committed to crafting thought leadership, best practices and trend analysis content can step in.

There’s limited business appeal to tap dance with the dwindling number of trade journalists and analysts when a company can itself be a credible source.

A successful content marketing program must have time and budget committed to two equally important tasks – create and distribute. Most marketers get the creation part. Distribution? Not so much.

Simply put, the most elegant and carefully constructed content that fails to attract and engage the right audience is an exercise in wasteful futility.

Audience is more than a quantity benchmark. Sure, attracting numbers is important in terms of overall awareness and brand building.

Yet, in business-to-business and public sector, it is more critical to appeal to higher value decision-makers and influencers. They are the ones who play a lead role in vendor selection.

Here are three tactical approaches you can employ to improve content distribution:

Be strategic in social networking. Collaborate with your sales team to identify decision-makers at existing customers and prospects. Map where they are engaged online and then appropriately use social media as a channel to share your content.

This process cannot be automated without the risk of being perceived as spammer. Repeat…it cannot be automated.

Repurpose content for lead nurturing programs. Market automation platforms like Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot and eTrigue require lots of exceptional content to power lead generation and nurturing campaigns.

By linking to your thought leadership content (rather than marketing oriented white papers and case studies), you can educate and inform, while growing readership with the right targets.

Establish co-distribution relationships with like minded groups and partners. Throwing up a blog roll is merely a start. Connect with other organizations that have a desirable following, and offer to share and cross-promote content.

Will they be receptive? You bet. In fact, Strategic Communications Group and Bizo recently announced a content collaboration agreement that focuses on both organizations’ publications – Modern Marketing Today and Digital Marketing Remix.

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Want to learn more about content distribution strategies? Join me on February 13 at 11:30 AM ET for an exclusive Q&A with Sean Callahan, former editor of BtoB Magazine. Our session is entitled “Understanding the Content Marketing Landscape: Reflections of a Former Business Journalist.”

December 20, 2013 by Marc Hausman

Very Best Of: 5 Most Popular Reads in 2013

I recently visited with my 99-year-old grandfather and asked him if it had been a good year. His reply, “I’m still here, feeling good and looking forward to the big one hundred.”

Inspiring words indeed and I share his positive outlook for the future. Enthusiasm permeates the market. Innovation is celebrated. And most organizations are invested in growth.

Today, I pulled up the analytics from my “Strategic Guy” blog to identify the five most popular posts of 2013 in terms of readership and engagement. Each focuses on best practices to align content marketing with sales enablement:

5 Best Practices to Rev Up Lead Generation: straight forward tactics to identify high value prospects who may be on the path to buy.

“Intelli-gize” Sales to Ramp Up Lead Quality and Revenue: gleaning intelligence from Web analytics to help the sales team craft prospect-specific messaging.

5 “Go To” Approaches for Content Creation: a proven methodology for constructing a content marketing program that attracts the attention of customers, prospects and partners.

Priorities of the Modern Chief Marketing Officer: key skill sets and attributes of the person who owns the marketing function at a growth oriented organization.

Sharknado’s Brilliance: 3 Lessons for Corporate Marketers: the Syfy Channel’s hit movie teaches us plenty about effective corporate and field marketing programs.

Have a wonderful holiday season and best of success in 2014!

Lessons learned from the SyFy’s Sharknado scored a top read in this blog.

December 2, 2013 by Marc Hausman

The Two Cs that Derail Native Advertising

Cost and conflict dampen the appeal of native advertising. (Image source: Pardot)

UBM Tech calls it Create. Forbes Media dubs it BrandVoice. And Time Inc. refers to it as Watercooler Live.

If you’re a publisher, a native advertising service is the hot thing to have in your portfolio.

Need to read up on native advertising? Check out this blog post I wrote in January, as well as this piece my partner Chris Parente penned in late summer.

I’m all in when it comes to the attraction, credibility, influence and sales metrics a company can achieve through the production and distribution of high value, thought leadership content.

In fact, the alignment of content creation and measurable sales outcomes was the topic of my keynote address at the Inbound Marketing Summit this past October. You can see a brief video of my presentation here.

Do you need a publisher though to realize these benefits?

It can certainly help because organizations like UBM, Forbes and Time are very much in the business of content creation. They also bring access to a community of readers which can accelerate interest in a content-rich campaign.

My issue with publishers getting into the marketing services business is related to the two Cs – cost and conflict.

Let’s look at cost. I question whether the value and ROI delivered by a publisher is worth the premium they tend to charge for association with their brand and access to their readers. Targeted content distribution can be achieved through home grown search, social and digital channels.

Moreover, there is an inherent distrust and dislike in the news room for anything that strays from the core journalistic mission of the publishers. That’s the conflict.

A publisher will produce content for an advertiser, yet it sure isn’t coming from the well respected and prized journalists who adorn the masthead.

My take is that it’s a more effective and cost efficient model for a company to lead its own content marketing initiative. Plus, the tie-in to critical ROI metrics — such as demand generation, lead nurturing and deal capture – is easier to achieve through a close interaction with sales reps.

Use publishers as an advertising channel. That’s probably what they prefer anyways.

Note: My consultancy provides integrated content marketing and sales enablement services that compete with native advertising offerings from publishers.

November 21, 2013 by Marc Hausman

“Intelli-gize” Sales to Ramp Up Lead Quality and Revenue

Uninformed sales teams are ineffective. (Source: Charles Atlas, US Weightlifting Association)

If knowledge is power, then today’s sales professional is the proverbial 100 pound weakling.

Consider these sobering statistics from a recently published report entitled “Know More to Grow More” that was issued by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council:

–Only 9 percent of surveyed marketers said their organization has a customer intelligence system to deliver real time, account-based news, social insights and customer developments to the sales team.

–Just 37 percent reported they have access to a system to integrate and share customer information between sales and service, support, channel, in-store or field assets.

OK…so let’s translate. It appears that in most companies the sales reps — who typically have frequent interaction and touch with customers and prospects – have little (if any) insight about how these critical audiences are engaging online, in social environments and even with their own company.

Not surprisingly, the CMO Council’s online poll of 230 corporate marketers also found that eight out of 10 respondents are dissatisfied with the current level of conversion of prospects into customers.

Again, translation: our company invests a lot of resources to identify and nurture leads which we then do a poor job of actually turning into revenue. Ouch!

Of course, the argument could be made that an effective sales professional will glean intelligence from direct and in-person conversations with a prospect. That hope is and will remain unrealized because of two significant and accelerating trends.

The first is what I often refer to as the “enlightened buyer.” Customers, prospects and partners now conduct a significant amount of due diligence about a company and its solutions through Web search and social interaction prior to speaking with the sales team.

Think about how you make a purchase decision – on the job or at home. Do you pick up the phone and call the company? Do you respond to a promotional Email? Probably not. You research, talk to colleagues or friends, form an opinion and, only then, initiate a conversation.

The second trend is an age-old truism. Prospects ignore and lie to sales reps. Why? Because no one likes being pitched. And it’s uncomfortable to tell someone “no.”

We’ve identified the problem: a company’s sales team is often woefully uninformed about customer and prospect needs and requirements. The solution is fairly clearly, right? Marketers need to spend more time communicating with sales – in-person, electronically and through scalable enterprise systems.

Executing on that solution is where the challenge lies.

Admittedly, no one has landed on a sure-fire way to “intelli-gize” sales. (Yes, I made up that word.)

However, here are a couple of resources to check out for best practices on how a marketer can effectively collaborate with a sales team.

Bridging the Gap Between Brand Awareness and Sales (24:28)

An Exclusive Q&A with Helena Brito of Mandiant

Content Marketing 360 Webcast: Rev Up Your Lead Generation Programs in 2014

Featuring Marc Hausman, Strategic Communications Group

Scheduled to Broadcast on December 10, 2013

“Intelli-gize” Sales to Ramp Up Lead Quality and Revenue

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