Study Shows B2B Marketers Do Better with These Ten Skills

An article in this week’s B2B  reports that corporate marketers have 10 key roles in the organization:

1. Devise a marketing plan that’s flexible, but tight.
2. Act as your brand's advocate, articulating the organization’s big vision.
3. Bring the voice of the customer into corporate strategy and planning.
4. Help technology-trained staff understand business marketing.
5. Deploy specialist teams within established business units, as needed.
6. Share marketing perspectives with staff coming from a scientific or engineering background.
7. Make sure “internal integration” means aligning the entire organization to an overriding objective.
8. Communicate during a crisis.
9. Keep up with and introduce new trends and tools to the staff and the organization.
10. Master funding and measurement skills and work with the CFO.

Source: B2B article by Kate Maddox based on a study conducted jointly by the Penn State Institute for the Study of Business Markets  (ISBM) and Blue Canyon Partners, Evanston, IL.

No Registration Required, So I, Too, Must Be a Segment

A few weeks ago, HubSpot offered me a report. They had me at “Hi, Nancy,” saying:

The best-performing email campaigns don't always have great subject lines. Or email copy. Or even calls-to-action … The experts at MarketingSherpa have discovered that two specific components greatly impact the success of your email campaigns: integration and segmentation.

I loved that copy, but the REAL treat was THIS Line: Get the Report Now (no registration required).

I’ve downloaded dozens of HubSpot’s great content over the past 18 months, but this was the first time I haven’t had to register all over again.

Perhaps I’m now in a “regular customer” segment. Whatever … it was sweet. And that was just the dessert. The meat followed: The report itself had great advice about how to segment your list, including these tips:

1. Be prepared to make your case and be patient. Email researcher Michael Wexler advises, "There's a high cost to entry for classic segmentation testing; it costs more than a simple test. However, this investment helps a lot. It stems lowered results, reporting of spam, unsubscribes, and it results in higher lifetime value per name."

2.  Gather your assets, namely these three: your email database, your process for testing, and great content.

3. Collect Data. MarketingSherpa identifies four types of data : endemic data from the subscriber; transactional data, behavioral data, and computed data developed from calculations performed on one or more variables.

4. Base your segments on long-term behaviors, for example:

    a) Were your customers brand-sensitive or price-sensitive?

    b) Do customers self-segmented based on the particular product purchased?

5. Identify segmentation types, for example: geographic, product type, lifecycle, personal data (self-reported, appended or behavioral).

6. Consider a variety of segmentation approaches. Even simple segmentation by customer profile or email activity can reap considerable rewards.

7. Start with a single segment (for example, subscribers). This tactic enables marketers to manage unforeseen challenges, adjust strategy, and prove the value of segmentation before getting too complicated.

8. Treat inactive subscribers as a segment, too.

9. Keep it under control; excessive segmentation can be wasteful.

10. Leverage and repurpose content to keep up with the demand of segments.

Download the full Special Report, “How to Segment & Integrate your Emails for Better Results,” from HubSpot. 

Quickie Revelations for Better Blog Results

I downloaded HubSpot's "6 Deadly Marketing Myths Busted." Author Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s award winning social media scientist and author of Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness.

This free HubSpot download turned out to be a great analytical gem and I suggest you get your hands on it. In the meantime, here are seven revelations that popped at me while reading:

1. Zarella's research has found no significant correlations between the number of comments a blogpost received and the amount of traffic that blog post got. In the words, conversation doesn't drive traffic. Attracting visitors takes interesting content and "broadcasting" [letting everyone know about the content].

2. Zarella concludes that, on Twitter, “engaging in the conversation” doesn’t work to increase reach. That requires broadcasting more interesting content. Highly-followed accounts tend to share more content.

3. When it comes to blogging, more posts equal more traffic.

4. The words "please retweet" do work. Zarella concludes, "Make sure that your tweets, and all social media updates, contain verbs that prompt your readers to take an action and learn more about your organization."

5. Weekend emails have a much higher click-through rate (CTR).

6. Which self-descriptors (that is, which titles) garner the most Twitter followers? [In descending order]: officials, founder, speaker, expert, guru, author.

7. Remember The Seven Year Itch? Your new subscribers love you best. The longer a subscriber has been with you, the lower the response rate.

Education Is Flooding the Marketplace and Customers Are Winning

Not long ago, “associations” were the prime purveyors of how-to marketing information. Every industry had multiple trade shows, seminars, and workshops design to help “members” market to their customers. It didn’t matter whether the product was landscaping services or laundry. Every vertical and sub-vertical showed members how to market. No more.

Today, the best educators on the scene are the experts who actually do the marketing themselves: agencies, publishers, SEO experts, website designers, mobile app developers, database pros, research companies, publishers, copywriters, media coaches, PR folks, software developers – everybody is selling directly to the user.

The tools vary, but every channel is both digital and direct-to-the-buyer: blogs, whitepapers, webinars, e-newsletters, podcasts, videos, and apps. This is education when you need and where you want. Mostly, it’s free. That’s what content marketing is all about. And if my email inbox is any proof, many users get 10 to 15 shots per day at FREE “learning.”

It’s a rich time to be in business. But something has still been missing … and that’s the face-to-face, one-on-one, we’re-in-the-same-network dynamic that traditional “association meetings” have provided. Worry not, that, too, is coming for those who want it.

Blogger, writer, and business icon Rohit Bhargava hosted a "likenomics" webinar to celebrate publication of his new book by the same name. Since Likeonomics is a book about why we trust people we like, and how to be more trusted in business, life and work, the virtual event was conducted using a new platform called Shindig. Registrants were encouraged to enable their own webcams so everyone attending the event could see everyone else. Or, as the announcement noted, “Instead of having a one-way boring conversation with powerpoint, the session is fully interactive - with video chatting on both sides.”

Check out shindig.com for any number of fascinating groups to join and chats to embrace. For example, on May 16 at 6:00 p.m., Leslie Poston presents "From dummy to genius, monetizing social metrics,” a session based on her book Social Media Metrics for Dummies.

Cash Mobs: Going from Bad to Good, One Flash Mob at a Time

The term "flash mob" used to have mostly nefarious -- well, okay, criminal -- connotations. But social media changed all that.

Flash Mobs have turned into Cash Mobs .. and that's a good thing.

Unlike groups incited to hit a retailer for an explosion of shoplifting, cash mobs have an altruistic intent: to support local retailers with consumer-supported shopping splurges.

That's the concept behind Cash Mob day organized by Cleveland lawyer Andrew Samtoy. His idea was to get 100 people to gather on March 24, with the goal of spending $20 each at The Nature's Bin, a local organic grocery store. As the happy recipient of Samtoy's spend-a-thon, Cornucopia, Inc., the nonprofit that runs Nature's Bin, couldn't be happier. "The cash mob made us all, once again, realize that we have a great story to tell, which anyone can relate to, and that it is our story that separates us from the competition."

How did Samtoy market the concept? One customer at a time. "We have a very limited marketing budget and [this effort] brought in people who wouldn't have been here. It sounds corny, but we really build a base one customer at a time," he added.

The cash mob concept is growing nationwide. The first on record happened a few months earlier in Buffalo, New York, organized by blogger, Christopher Smith, who calls cash mobs "a sort of reverse Groupon."

Cash mobs are organized via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter: San Diego Cash Mobs, for example, with 798 "likes," and Vermont Cash Mobbers.

Rich with innovation and new chapters on how to organize and motivate people, social media remains a marketing event waiting to happen.

Anxiety: Statistics Say You Probably Have It and It's Probably Growing.

Google the phrase "growing anxiety" and you get 68,200,000 hits. Try Bing and you get 30% more -- that's 99 million references to "growing anxiety."

Interestingly enough, go with "anxiety" alone and the results double in Bing's case and triple in Google search.

From whence commeth this troubling state of mind? Some says it's pervasive and unstoppable, stemming from the very lives we lead -- lives full of stress.

What is anxiety disorder? Many things. Everybody seems to be suffering, say experts, who often have more questions than answers.

Who is suffering? Children, young women, men, dogs, you, me everyone

Workplace anxiety is growing, too. Ann Lemley has written Work Makes Me Nervous, a book about it.

Do we want to get all this anxiety under control? The sufferers do, but I'm not so sure about the those who claim to cure it. Anxiety is big money… colossal money … global money.

Do you have anxiety? There's a test for that. (And yet, does anybody need a 7-minute test to determine whether or not they are anxious? I doubt it).

The solution? Different people offer different cures.

• nature

• gardening in the office

• more sleep

• accupuncture

• drugs

• mind control tactics

• expert advice

• nine natural remedies

Do you have a favorite anxiety calmer? Please share!

-- scrubbed by MarketingBrillo

Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How "Shaky, Shaky" Could Evolve to "Thought Leadership"

The CMO Council reports that marketers want an agency partner who can "do it all" -- mobile, social, multi-channel, web, search, CRM. Ouch!

Is this demand reasonable? It may not matter, since 58 percent of marketers say they aren't happy -- and disgruntled marketers lead to shaky vendor relationships. It happened suddenly last summer when quite a few big guys switched agencies. United Airlines. Monsanto. S.C. Johnson. Sprint.

Industry observers are taking note of the shake-ups. Some say the shift is away from traditional "advertising" to a marketing platform that emphasizes talking with -- not at -- customers . . . like Facebook, for example.

On Leap Day 2012, Facebook evolved from an advertising to a marketing platform. Central to the switch was Facebook's determination to ramp up engagement with current fans and back-off the push for new fans. Facebook is betting that a deeper focus on "storytelling" can turn content into a word-of-mouth recommendation. They call this switch to storytelling a "sponsored story."

Marketing Prof's February 29 "Marketing Smarts" podcast featuring Mike Levy explains the essential component of this storytelling. Levy says "thought leadership" naturally emerges from the unique experiences, insights, and abilities that set one company apart from another. "The stuff that fascinates you and that you found helpful and the stuff that helps you live your life...there is a population out there that will find the same things fascinating and the same things helpful."

A personal story brought this concept home to me: ifixit.com.

Because I work on a Mac, I discovered this company years ago and fell in love with their dedication to helping me "fix it myself." They posted videos and detailed instructions on how to get inside the Mac to add memory and do other self-maintenance. Ifixit paved this road to repair because the founder believed in it profoundly. A few years ago, they took the concept even bigger, stretching their beliefs to self-repair of anything and everything. Not only is ifixit's philosophy eco-friendly, it's empowering to those of us who are frustrated that simple repairs evoke migraine headaches. I really love ifixit and the people who founded and run it. That's how they've built their business: by being who they are and letting the marketplace "find them" … in short, by exercising "thought leadership."

Erika Napoletano agrees. "Popular is the last thing smart business people should want to be … By pursuing an unpopular path, you are actually narrowing down and refining your notion of the audience with whom you truly want to be popular after all."

Reflection, authenticity, storytelling, outreach: Shaken by the poisonous atmosphere of political advertising, will 2012 move our marketing toward thought leadership? I believe it will.