The Lonely Marketer

I’ve come across a new site recently that I’m using more than I expected. In their words they are a, “…social content site designed for business geeks“. That’s me. Add anything social media or related to business and you’ll grab my attention.

DailyHub is not too different than sites such as Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, but is more tailored towards the LinkedIn crowd (business networking). From what I can tell so far, content is based less on a popularity contest and is more focused. I typically come away with good information.

Check out their manifesto for more information and a chart explaining how they’re different.

I’m a big believer in online marketing being used for lead generation in BtoB environments. If you’re not using e-commerce on your website, any online marketing efforts should focus on gathering information from those visitors. That can be done via click path trending, keyword analysis, lead generation, etc.

An article from BtoB magazine on lead generation got me thinking about lead generation statistics. Here’s the excerpt in which I was most interested:

The survey found that more than 50% of buyers said they provide a valid name, e-mail address, industry, job title and company name when they register; although less than 40% provide accurate phone numbers. As for e-mail addresses, in many cases marketers may harvest personal e-mail addresses rather than corporate ones (43% of users said they gave personal e-mail addresses). Respondents said they did so to better manage information rather than hide from follow-ups.

Perhaps most interesting, Lohman said, was what type of content users said they were willing to register for. White papers came out on top at 80%. Demos lagged at 38% and webcasts at 31%. That’s somewhat surprising, Lohman said, as marketers themselves ranked demos (77%) and webcasts (64%) as two types of content they most often require registration to access.

Whether your getting customers to fill out a form for podcasts, white papers, or just a call for more information, this is important data. I get quite a bit of lead forms with gmail.com or yahoo.com email address, but a correct phone number, which makes me believe these numbers are accurate. As a gatekeeper for registration forms, you need to give leads every chance to be passed on. That may mean ignoring some false looking data.

The second set of data revolves around what types of information registered for are most popular. This does not surprise me either as I think people will register and download bits of information that they can absorb on their schedule. Over time, I think downloadable webcasts and podcasts will close the gap on white papers.

What are your thoughts on lead generation and registrations?

I caught an article announcing the news that FedEx has rolled out a new ad campaign. Ad campaigns can be so varied these days so I was curious to dig in and learn more. It turns out that the branding campaign by the shipping company contains a fair amount of social media with videos and employee stories. From the article:

It launched with TV spots that drive users to a Web site at www.fedexstories.com, where online videos feature FedEx employees telling stories of how they have helped customers.

Needless to say I wanted to check this out. I found some positives and negatives to the campaign, but overall I give FedEx an “A” for effort. They’re trying to create a brand image of a global, yet personal service. From the screenshots below (of the TV spots and of a story) you can see what I mean - visually you get the feeling that although they are a global company, they want the shipping of your package to be personal.

Screenshot of a customer story:

Screenshot of a TV spot online:

The stories are engaging and show everyday workers making a difference. The TV spots are quick snippets of stories with the distinct message to visit the website for more. Like I said, they did a good job of presenting the stories and drawing the viewer in.Now, the other side of the coin is execution. The main site is built in Flash so your computer needs to be updated with Flash - not a big deal as most computers are equipped. But, the Flash presentation took close to a minute or more to load. I understand that the site just launched and traffic is probably high, but they should have been more prepared for that. If I wasn’t writing about this topic, I likely wouldn’t have waited around to see the site. Next, it wasn’t 100% clear what I was supposed to do when it loaded. I finally located the icon on the top left of the screen and pressed it launching the next step.

See, I think to really pull off a campaign like this, there can be absolutely no work for the user. Seeing the content is not mission critical to the user and they’ll abandon at the first instance of resistance. Waiting for load and searching for the first step are not good.

I should note that I closed my browser and went back in and it loaded quickly so maybe that was a one-time thing.

I’ll be curious to see how the TV spots look on screen and also to see how strong the call to action is in the upcoming print ads. But, they have the potential to drive large amounts of traffic and I think the “Shipping is Global yet Personal” brand theme plays real clear.

What are your thoughts?

If you’re ever curious to see what I read and bookmark, just visit the Lonely Marketer. I’ve placed a del.icio.us widget in my right sidebar so everytime I bookmark a post or news story that I want to reference later, you’ll be updated as well. Typically, I bookmark information that would be of interest to the readers of the site.

For those of you not familiar, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site popular with bloggers and others that participate in social media. You can bookmark web pages, posts, or sites that you want to keep and then you can access those bookmarks from any computer. Plus, you can tag them for easy searching down the road. I actually use the site outside of blogging as well. It’s great for bookmarking market research and other job-related information.

Over the last few months, I’ve read about Google Alerts and listened to people tell me that it’s a great way to track topics in which you’re interested. Well, I’ve just recently woken up and taken people’s advice! Alerts is fantastic. If you’re like me and hadn’t started using this tool, here’s a quick overview and some suggested uses.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Go the the Google Alerts website.

2. Fill out the short form

3. Hit Create Alert and you’ll start receiving emails with your alerts! Simple.

It’s that simple. The Type dropdown let’s you choose from News, Blogs, Web, Google Groups, and Comprehensive. The Comprehensive option will search all options. You can also select How Often you wish to receive the alerts. Once a day, as-it-happens, and once a week are your options.

If you look closely, there is a link at the bottom left of the image above that you can click to manage your alerts. All of your alerts are listed there for you to edit or delete.

So, how am I using Google Alerts?

• For this blog, I track blog topics about which I write such as small business marketing. I’ve always liked learning from other bloggers in this niche and this allows posts to come to me in my email inbox.

• I also track my name and blog name to see what others have to say about me.

• For my company, I track our company name to see what news we make.

• I track our competitors to see what kind of news they’re making.

• I follow news on our core products and related technologies which makes doing market research that much easier.

And it all appears in my inbox once per day or once per week depending on the topic. How are you using Google Alerts? Any unique uses?

Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute never ceases to amaze me. He’s always coming up with practical activities that serve a purpose. His newest venture, Help me build a new blogger toolbox, is no different. There are so many new bloggers jumping onto the scene every day and this is a great way to give them resources that encourage them to come up with engaging, well-written content.

I had plenty of help from other bloggers when I started and I’m sure you did too. Even if you’re not a blogger, I’d follow this list as you’ll probably find incredible content you didn’t know was out there.

Here’s how this works:

1) Anyone who is interested, create a post listing a few blog sites (and maybe give a word or two as to how you’d categorize them) that:

• Are chock full of practical tips
• Act as a living lab on how to write compelling blog posts
• Demonstrate how to build a community
• Teach marketing tools
• Are welcome wagons - bloggers who spotlight newbies

2) If you want, use the photo above as the graphic - great, gotta love consistency

3) Link back to Drew’s post, so he can find yours and add it to the master list

4) If you think its of value to your readers — why not grab the list before yours and just top it off with your new additions

5) Encourage your readers to do #1-4

New Bloggers Toolbox

Here’s The Toolbox List with my additions. More on why I added them below.

Converstations (chock full of practical tips)
CK’s blog (compelling blog post examples)
Viral Garden (demonstrate how to build a community)
Lonely Marketer (teach marketing tools)
Successful & Outstanding Blogs (bloggers who spotlight newbies)
Techno//Marketer
Internet Marketing Monitor
The Marketing Technology Blog
Create Business Growth
Modern B2B Marketing

My Additions:

Techno//Marketer (very compelling posts about new media and technology)
Internet Marketing Monitor (On top of practical tips in the Internet Marketing world)
The Marketing Technology Blog (Great site for teaching and creating marketing and blogging tools)
Create Business Growth (Have done an excellent job of reaching out and building community)
Modern B2B Marketing (Compelling blog posts that contain tips and tricks on Internet Marketing)

I encourage you to jump in and participate - someone just getting started will really appreciate the help and encouragement!

Before you dig in to start another week, here are some posts and related articles from last week. If you get a minute, I think they’re worth a read.

• How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes: Matt McGee has a very informative post outlining his steps to putting together an SEO snapshot. This is not only good to put into practice yourself, but if you’re considering hiring an SEO firm, keep this list handy and make sure they address his points.

• Top ten tips for writing PR articles: Catriona Pollard has put together a must-read list of questions to consider when putting together PR articles.

• B2B Marketers Beware: More of Your Customers Use RSS, Blogs and Social Networks Than You Think: Small Business Hub has a quick post outlining some interesting percentages describing BtoB customers. You may be surprised what you find.

• Harnessing Social Media - Web 2.0 Grows Up - Free Internet Traffic: Marketing Experiments has an interesting article comparing social media optimization with pay-per-click advertising and how both relate to driving traffic.

• Building a Large Audience For Your StumbleUpon Account: For those of you interested in using more of social media sites like StumbleUpon in your marketing, here is a good post about making the most of your effort.

That should give you some quick reading as you head into the week ahead. If you see articles you think I should feature, please let me know! I’m always looking for good information to share.

Mack at the Viral Garden recently wrote about companies being more responsive to commentary and news they read on blogs. I had the opportunity today to come across a company that not only was listening but was concerned and very responsive to what they heard. Yesterday, I wrote about a Genalytics releasing news that was of interest to me, but being unable to find more information on their web site. Well, they were listening.

I was contacted by their PR department right way this morning and was given all the information I needed. I was very impressed. They were courteous, honest and diligent about making sure I was informed. Hats off to them.

Now, I can get down to why I wrote my post yesterday in the first place - I wanted to highlight a company who has created on demand targeting tools for businesses wanting to target audiences and discover new markets. Their news yesterday was about a new offering for BtoB direct marketers. Here’s an overview from their press release:

Andover, Mass., June 19, 2007 – Genalytics (www.genalytics.com), a leading provider of data solutions that assist companies in targeting customers, announced that it is now offering On-Demand Targeting for business-to-business campaigns. On-Demand Targeting for business allows marketers to leverage automated predictive modeling techniques to identify prospective business customers.

With Genalytics On-Demand Targeting, organizations are able to leverage advanced predictive modeling, profiling and list scoring without the overhead of traditional analytic approaches, to identify customers and businesses that are most likely to respond to a marketing campaign. Because On-Demand Targeting is automated, agencies, data compilers, list brokers and marketing service providers can offer advanced business targeting for every campaign.

I’m a big fan of any solution that helps me zero in on my target market. Genalytics does just that by using their predictive modeling to help business marketing campaigns identify prospective business customers. This tool could be a huge aid to small businesses who want to ensure that valuable budget dollars being used on a campaign are being used wisely.

Great new product from a very responsive company. Check out more on their site. Thanks to the folks at Genalytics for getting me all the info I needed and pointing me in the right direction. If they provide that kind of service to customers, I can imagine they’d be a great vendor!

I opened my BtoB Daily News Alert newsletter and caught the headline, “Genalytics offers on-demand targeting for b-to-b“. Here’s what I saw in the newsletter:

Genalytics offers on-demand targeting for b-to-b
Andover, Mass.—Genalytics announced Tuesday it has launched On-Demand Targeting for b-to-b campaigns. The product is designed to enable marketers to leverage automated predictive modeling techniques, profiling and list scoring to identify prospective business customers.

I’m instantly interested. But, no link to more information? So, I head to Google and search on Genalytics. I’m sure once I get to their site, I’ll be hit with more information that will make me pick up the phone and call. I get to their site….and….nothing. I can’t find anything. The latest news is on the left, but nothing in June talking about BtoB tools. Is the information there and I’m missing it?

I could be missing the obvious…maybe someone from Genalytics will chime in and show me what I missed or maybe BtoB Daily News ran the wrong information. Nonetheless, this is a problem I see often with alot of news releases. People create buzz and don’t back it up on their site.
If you’re going to pump news out to the marketplace, expect interest. Here’s what I like to see as a buyer of online marketing and related tools when I see news:

• Show the news on your site so I know I’m at the right place
• Show me you’re serious about your news by expanding on the release with more information pertaining to the subject. I want to believe you’re an industry expert
• Provide a case study or tutorial showing your new product or service in action
• Finally, show me how to get more information. Typically, this means some sort of contact form.

Obviously, this type of news is going to strike my interest as a BtoB marketer. Genalytics could be a great company - my intention is not to show them in a bad light. They just happen to have an example of something I don’t understand…not backing up public news with information on your site.

Do you have any other tips and tricks for press releases and providing information to interested prospects?

As with any good marketing plan, you should know the behavior of your target market. You’ll want to know when they research, when they make decisions and when they buy. This theory applies very closely to paid search campaigns. In fact, it can be the difference between being successful and throwing away money.

The use of ad scheduling (or dayparting) in PPC campaigns allows you to select the days of the week and even the time of day that you want your ads to run. Not only is this a great way to get the attention of your audience at the perfect time, but it also saves you money.

For instance, when I first started PPC many years ago I ran my ads 24/7. I figured why not - any click is a good click, right? I soon learned that this was not the case! My clicks on the weekend were still high, but my conversions were much lower than during the week. After a review of keywords that led to our ads, I found that the wrong audience was clicking. My BtoB customers were obviously not searching and clicking on the weekend. I was wasting money! Then I saw the light and started using the ad scheduling function in Adwords.

Here is where you can find it in your campaign settings screen:

Click the Ad scheduling option and then click on edit times and bids. You’ll see a screen like this:

You can see in this example ads are paused on the weekend. Now, if you want to take ad scheduling a step further, click on the “switch to advanced mode” button on top. Here, you can select to bid a percentage of your max bid at certain times.

For BtoB advertisers like myself, it might make sense to only offer a percentage of your max bid in the evenings since many of your customers are not making buying decisions at that time. If you try this, make sure to take into consideration time zones. If you’re on the East coast, you don’t want to cut short the time people on the West coast can see your ads. The same theory should also be applied if your ads run in a different country.

Keep in mind that these changes you’re making affect a whole campaign - not just one ad group. Another reason that running multiple campaigns for multiple audiences and countries is a must!