SiriusDecisions has updated its Demand Waterfall. Most of the buzz about the new Waterfall centres on Marketing and Sales alignment.

A much needed update to the original diagram was the inclusion of teleprospecting for inbound and outbound leads. According to Tony Jaros, Senior VP of research at SiriusDecisions, “The Demand Waterfall was created to address demand-related pain that is acutely felt in most b2b organizations. But the original didn’t account for demand that was sourced outside of marketing. It obscured the role of teleprospecting, and it wasn’t specific about the role of inbound marketing.”

The Demand Waterfall is a useful visual of lead sources and qualification journeys, and illustrates what can be tracked to judge the performance of different sources. It could probably be clearer that teleprospecting-generated leads should have been influenced by ongoing marketing communications. After all, teleprospecting should be targeting the same pool of prospects as the ongoing communications.

The latest IT trend is big data. It has joined the ranks of the Cloud and Mobility (and of course it’s connected to both of those) as a marketing buzzword.

I always have mixed feelings about these terms. Sometimes it feels like a bandwagon, with people stretching their propositions to try and ‘fit’ the audience’s problems. On the other hand, it can be useful to put a name to a broad family of challenges that buyers are facing.

When a name like this catches on, it reinforces the importance of IT within an organisation – which can only be a good thing.

The danger is that it’s one of those terms that marketers latch onto in the hopes of selling ‘the solution’. And when everyone uses it, it loses its meaning.

The perfect example is the debate that started in Computing recently. It all started when Bill McGloin from Computacenter told Computing that we haven’t seen big data yet. He said: “I think in two, three or four years’ time, we’ll start to see big data. I think that what we think is big data just now is actually quite small, and not always of genuine business value.”

The next day Fernando Lucini of analysis firm Autonomy, told Computing that all data is big data. According to Lucini all data is valuable to firms, and should be kept for analysis. “Nothing that a group of 1,000 people and above can create is small,” he said. “It is just not possible. You look at the way you create and consume information; you walk around with your mobile device. I’m totally dependent on mine. I create all kinds of things; I create business information, personal information; I create information. We’ve become machines of human information.”

Our advice is to use the term sparingly and accurately. If you are using it, you need to make sure you’re putting effort into owning a particular area.

The problem with these ‘buzzwords’ is that they date very quickly. And typically, it’s just when the big hype dies down that marketing stops talking about these things – but it’s also exactly when the early adoption phase is over and the majority of buyers are looking to buy.

What’s your job title? Does it truly reflect the challenging, ambitious role that you’re proud to fulfil?

Job titles convey rather different messages to different audiences – and there can be conflicts.

For marketers, other people’s job titles are perhaps more important than our own. Job titles are a key way for us to target our communications at the right people. We’re generally looking to communicate with decision-makers and influencers – typically C-level and D (director)-level. We want to be relevant – to talk to the right people, and not bother the wrong people.

As so often in life, things aren’t always what they seem. Marketers aren’t the only audience for a job title – one’s esteemed colleagues are too. I once worked at a company that was centralising some functions across the UK and the US. Our US co-workers were curiously reluctant to talk to their UK counterparts. Eventually we discovered that it was all down to our job titles. People called Director in the US wanted to be talking to people called Director in the UK. After a bit of job title inflation in the UK, we could all get along nicely, when we’d got used to the idea that our new Directors in the UK wouldn’t be going to board meetings. But of course it set them up for receiving all sorts of irrelevant marketing.

Another reason for thinking about job titles is recruitment. What job title in a recruitment ad will attract the best applicants? As TMP grows, we need new writers constantly. Recently we’ve added ‘marketing writer’ to our ads for ‘copywriters’. Our writers do, of course, write copy – for websites, emails, white papers and so on – but before they can start that, they create business messaging, and plan the journey each audience will take throughout long-term lead nurturing campaigns. Our writers need marketing and planning skills that go way beyond pouring out perfectly targeted, page-turning prose. What our writers actually do is produce messaging and content. But we’ve not found a nifty name for that yet, that potential recruits might search for. (If you can think of one, do let us know!)

So what about your job title? Does it really describe you? Does it send the right messages to your colleagues? Would it recruit your successor with laser precision? And, crucially for marketers, does it attract relevant marketing?

They asked us what purple looked like. I said it was helicopters filled with chocolate. I didn’t think they took me seriously – but I was serious.

And then, a helicopter arrived by my desk. With chocolate. Now THAT was purple.

The Purple Programme is TMP’s quality and motivation scheme. It’s the way we generate ideas across the business to make things even better, and the way we celebrate success.

So when we were all asked what purple looked like, we knew what the management team were looking for. The suggestions ranged from better pens and Tetley tea bags, to the need for more meeting rooms and a creativity lab.

But the helicopter thing was about something else. It was something to do with the way we think, and the way we should help our clients to think.

It probably has its roots way back in the mind of Edward de Bono, the champion of lateral thinking. He suggested the use of random, disconnected concepts to find creative answers to problems.

For example, if you’re trying to crack a new market with an established product, try thinking about how you’d sell elephants to the same market. It’s just a way of objectifying the problem – unlocking your mind from habits that might block out the good stuff.

And then there’s Bette Davis in Now Voyager. “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars…”

Well, I don’t think we should limit our horizons to what’s possible, or what we know. The history of marketing is the story of people who had the courage to go out on a limb and trust their customers to go with them. If you have the stars, why not try for the moon?

It’s not in the nature of TMP to play safe in our thinking. So my helicopter-filled-with-chocolate thing was a bid to make sure we don’t get complacent, to keep us trying for the radical answers that can lead to big, sustainable wins for our clients.

OK, so it wasn’t a real helicopter. And frankly, I could have done with more chocolate. But it’s a measure of who we are that it happened at all.

I wonder what you can see from the moon?

Stuart Constable
Lead writer, O2 Enterprise

Email is a great way to get your message across. Whether it’s engaging with customers or building interest with prospects, from driving traffic to a website or promoting an offer. It’s fast, efficient, and measureable.

But the key lies in the measureable – you need to make sure your marketing emails perform well.

After all, they’re up against a lot of competition.

An Email Benchmarking Report from the DMA showed that UK marketers sent over 1.7 billion emails in the first half of 2010, an increase of 50% over the same period in 2009.

You need to make sure your email is the one that gets heard above the din. And that once it’s opened, the content lives up to the promise of the subject line.

So, here are a few tips to make sure that your emails perform as best they can.

The subject line

This is the first thing your audience will see. It needs to be attention-grabbing, yet realistic. Research shows that people tend to read their emails down instead of across, so try to get your key words into the start of your subject line instead of halfway through, or worse, at the end. Lead with the benefit. So if you’re writing about Ten tips to better email subject lines, rephrase as Better subject lines: ten top tips. And keep them short too. Many email clients cut subject lines short at a certain character count. Avoid going over 50 characters where possible.

If you have more than one great idea for a subject line, you could always try a split test. This is where you send a small segment of your data the email, split by the two subject lines. You then monitor which had the best open rate, and send the rest of your data the email using the best performing subject line.

Tone

When writing your email, keep the tone informal and personal. People are likely to be reading their emails on their smartphone or tablet on the commute to work, or while they’re having lunch at their desk. They don’t want to be bombarded with business jargon – they’ll lose interest.

Keep it light-hearted, getting across the necessary message in as straight-forward a manner as possible.

Also remember who the email is coming from. If it’s a note from an account manager to their customers, it needs to be written in a style that genuinely feels like it came from them. And use plain text for emails that are meant as a personal note. They’re not half as believable if they are fully HTML designed. After all, do you put emails to your customers into a HTML template?

The content

When you start your email get straight to the point in the first sentence or two. Avoid waffle at all costs. While it’s nice to demonstrate to the audience that you understand their industry, you’re only wasting valuable space if you begin an email with a paragraph telling the reader about problems in their industry that they already know about. After your introduction, you can use subsequent sentences to expand on your offer, why it’s relevant to the reader and highlighting key benefits.

It’s useful to include links where possible within the email. This provides a measurable tool as well, allowing you to monitor ‘click throughs’. Rather than use up space by writing ‘click here to find out more’, simply hyperlink the relevant phrase within your email.

So, for instance, ‘I wanted to let you know about our guide on how to write a marketing email’ could be hyperlinked, so you save words not having to add ‘click here to read it’.

Call to action

This is equally as important as the subject line. The email’s purpose is to move the audience to the next step. That could be registering for an event. Reading a research paper. Or signing up for a product demo. It’s rare you’ll get a sale off the back of a marketing email, but if it does its job and gets your audience to the next stage, then the chance of a sale is that much closer.

So, make the call to action simple. Make sure it adds value and gives the reader something worthwhile. If you’re trying to get registrations for an event, consider a link in the email that simply says, ‘yes, I’d like to come’ that can be submitted with no effort. If you take the prospect off to a page with a long form to complete, the chances are they’ll lose interest.

If you are pointing them off to more content, like a webpage, make sure it tells them something over and above what they already read in the email.

And a similar rule applies as with links that I discussed previously. Don’t ask the reader to ‘click here’, change it to ‘get your free demo’.

And lastly, dropping the CTA at the end of an email might not always be the best place. If there’s a chance it won’t be seen because it’s below the fold of an email, consider putting it in the sidebar near the top of the email.

From address

Who the email is seen to be sent from is not always given enough thought – but it is important. Where you can, try and avoid sending from generic info@ email addresses. Ideally, the ‘from address’ should be a person, and you should have control over that inbox. Try to avoid using clients’ email addresses as you are then reliant on them forwarding you email responses. However, if there is an auto forward in place, this is ok.

Spam

And don’t forget those pesky spam filters. There are lots of websites available that check your content for common words that get caught up in spam filters. Oddly enough, free often goes unnoticed, but talk of reducing cost or using % have been known to cause problems.

More importantly, make sure that your emails are relevant for the audience to make sure they don’t blacklist you as a spam sender themselves!

Lessons from the Prometheus marketing campaign

If you work in IT marketing, you’re probably a bit of a geek. I know I am. Recently, nothing has tickled my nerd-fancy more than Ridley Scott’s upcoming sci-fi epic, Prometheus, a thematic prequel to 1979’s Alien.

Note to normal people: sci-fi fans have been waiting for this for 33 years…

I would go to see this if the extent of the marketing build up was the film title scribbled on the back of a shopping list. But the truth is the viral marketing buzz has been building up for months now, thanks to an innovative and creative series of updates. It continues to impress me and it can provide marketers with some useful lessons:

Influence the influencers

The first time anyone got to see anything from Prometheus was at Comic Con, which boasts a selective and critical audience of sci-fi and comic book fans. But with the criticism, you also find an audience of bloggers, journalists, forum users and fellow artists. Through Twitter, Facebook, sci-fi fansites as well as their personal blogs & tumblrs the Prometheus marketing team could harness a huge infrastructure of interested parties who would build up buzz for them – free of charge.

Get a naturally receptive audience on board, and they’ll get others on board for you.

Splash and drip

I remember seeing a presentation from John Watton, CMO of Shipserv at 2010’s Digital Marketing Conference where he discussed the ’splash and drip’ approach to marketing in the social media age. With an increasing number of customer interaction channels, marketers are no longer dictating how and when customers get information, the customers are searching it out themselves – and if they can’t find what they need, they’ll look elsewhere.

The splash and drip approach is simple. First, make a splash – a big statement or piece of content. This gets your audience on board. Once they’re on board, short but frequent updates keep them interested.

For Prometheus, the splash was the first teaser trailer, and since then multiple new trailers, movie stills and interviews have popped up (across the internet and on Prometheus’ forum, Twitter and Facebook page) drip feeding new, exciting content to them and keeping them engaged until the premiere.

Hook the audience and draw them in slowly

Create a compelling back story

If we call Prometheus a product (and there’s no doubt that it is), how can you get people interested in the product before it’s even been launched?

A key aspect of Prometheus’ narrative is the Weyland Corporation – the organisation that creates the technology and funds the expedition featured in the film. In the Alien series, little is known about the Weyland Corporation, and Prometheus plays on this.

Building unique content, including Peter Weyland’s TED 2023 talk, the Weyland Corporation website and ‘product’ launches – including David 8, an android featured in the film – has been integral in building up the buzz.

What this content does is builds a compelling back story, related to the plot of Prometheus, without directly revealing anything about the film. Why is this important? Well, when Prometheus finally launches, the audience will be bought into the concept without feeling they already know everything.

Get your audience involved

Another way to buy an audience into a concept is to get them to contribute to it, and Prometheus has done this in a number of ways. Here are a couple of standout examples:

Project Prometheus – this game encourages users to train up and see if they’ve got what it takes to be part of the crew. Naturally, you have to register, so Prometheus is collecting plenty of data…and it posts your results on Facebook, getting others involved.

Fan Art – Another thing about geeks, they’re often quite good at drawing. Instead of letting these drawings disappear into the ether, the Prometheus team gives them a platform to show off. I think you’ll agree, some of it is quite impressive.

Once again, getting a naturally receptive audience involved generates free buzz.

And finally…make a good product

Ultimately the proof is in the pudding. All the build up in the world is useless if the product’s no good. We’re still waiting on reviews, but the film’s out soon (1^st June), so let’s see what the opening audience is (it’s already taken a record £500,000 in advance ticket sales at the BFI IMAX), and what the critics say in a couple of weeks…watch this space.

Did this post get you excited about the film? Got any additional thoughts? What level are you on Project Prometheus?

Let me know: bmills@themarketingpractice.com

The great thing about technology is that it promises a number of guarantees:

1. Your favourite function will always disappear in the latest upgrade
2. Things often appear and disappear at will – like my Word cursor for instance
3. IT language is often just meaningless drivel.

Take this from Dell for instance:

For more than 26 years, Dell has empowered countries, communities, customers and people everywhere to use technology to realize their dreams.

In English this translates as: We’ve been selling computers for 26 years and are very successful at it. The fact that people may have been able to buy their computers elsewhere and still “realize their dreams” doesn’t bear thinking about.

To be fair, it’s not just the IT world that takes words like ‘empower’, ‘solutions’ and ‘integrated’ and then hammers them so relentlessly into every CEO’s speech, product web page or brochure that you’d rather get a job picking the hairs from Simon Cowell’s back with your teeth, than read them again.

As someone who writes content for tech companies – and who to my ever-lasting shame produced all kinds of well-structured but ultimately pointless pieces about the Millennium Bug – I too have been guilty of adding to the world’s pool of drivel.

Let’s be honest, tech marketing needs to work harder at explaining what it does and what the benefits actually are.

So, like a cast member of The Only Way is Essex trying to wean themselves off spray tanning I’m going cold turkey. But before I do, I’m having one final splurge. Copy and paste the text below into your next product brochure draft and see if any of the approvers notice…

Is your head in the Cloud?

As a CIO you’ll know that IT is getting complex. It’s getting faster and bigger, except smartphones which are getting smaller and leaner. And data pipes, which are getting fatter. You need to empower your people to make decisions quickly and while they’re on the move. Fast, mobile decisions have infinitely more synergies than slow, static ones. If you don’t deliver, you’re not going to make the step-change in operational cross-team virtualisation.

Acme Solutions can help you make that paradigm shift in this data-centric world so you can leverage improvements in your most valuable asset – your people. Or your other most valuable asset – your customers. Or your other other most valuable assets – your data/infrastructure. Our cross-transactional and holistic Cloud solutions promote best practice in this ever-changing commercial environment. Oh yes, they’re verticalised too, based on our deep domain expertise.

Our fully scalable Cloud is built on a vibrant ecosystem of multi-dimensional platforms, layers and technologies. It can produce a 68% more enhanced user experience in a world where 74% of people have a smartphone, 88% use email to check their email and 104% of statistics about social network use are contradictory.

All of our technology is secured using WPA, WEP, ZAP and POW encryption, giving you peace of mind in a universe where your credit card details and possible nuclear Armageddon is just one lost USB stick away.

As well as aligning your systems and applications in our multi-fertilised Cloud we can streamline your Big Data. We now have more data at our fingertips than the President of the United States had only two years ago – much of which is about celebrities. That’s why our unique user interface and portal allows your people to do less with more – unless you’re multi-billion dollar Facebook, in which case you can do more with more.

Fancy a continuous flow of high-quality leads and a conversion rate of 66%? Then read on.

Take a look at any marketing blog or event these days and you’ll soon get buried under an avalanche of discussions about how social media, marketing automation or email effectiveness are make or break issues. Now there’s not really a polite way of putting this, but they’re wrong.

The real challenge facing marketing is integrating successfully with sales.

You can create all the good-looking Twitter campaigns you want; unless you can demonstrate real ROI then all you’re doing is wasting everyone’s time – and your clients’ money. Which is never a good thing, is it?

The ideal customer exists

For a while now marketing has focused on creating ‘leads’. But all too often what is passed over to sales is just not followed up. And the reasons why can be confusing and contradictory. Sometimes the leads were too well qualified (a prospect who already has budget and timescales for a project may well have already picked a supplier), sometimes they’re with companies that aren’t on sales’ hitlist, and sometimes arcane sales compensation/bonus schemes mean that it wouldn’t be productive for sales to follow up.

Here in our barn we get up to lots of things, but the most important is ensuring our marketing is always aligned with our clients’ sales teams. It begins with planning and goes all the way through to conversion and beyond.

Spend the night with us

And the secret is – there is no secret; just a focus and willingness to step over the traditional fault lines between sales and marketing.

In June we’re running our latest Sales & Marketing Forum – Sales are from Mars and Marketing are from Venus. The evening will focus exclusively on how demand generation is improved through integrating sales and marketing. As well as learning something new, our forums are a great way for senior B2B enterprise sales and marketing executives to network.

On the night we’ll discuss how targeting, messaging and timing are all fundamental to nurturing and generating leads that deliver real, sustainable business. We’ll also talk about our Prospect Value Exchange – where we continuously communicate with prospects to position our clients as a supplier of choice.

The forum is being held on Tuesday 19 June 2012 at The Soho Hotel in London and if you would like to discover more, or are interested in attending, then please visit the following link www.themarketingpractice.com/forum/overview.php

How many of you never quite get around to asking sales what they thought of that lead you passed them? Or, do the leads that aren’t converted disappear into a black hole never to be seen or contacted again?

The reality is that closing the loop on leads generated is time consuming and unlikely to happen…understandably, if left in the hands of the sales team.

Too often leads are passed over which just sit with sales forevermore and although there may be the odd meeting to discuss processes or passing conversations about specific opportunities, the system is typically informal and not fed back into the marketing activity. And where CRM systems are in place, the reporting can be even more misleading about the quality and future of a lead.

To ensure marketing is as effective, relevant and targeted as it should be, somebody does need to be responsible for being the conduit between sales and marketing when it comes to feeding back on every lead generated. But who should this ‘somebody’ be?

Well, it could be the sales manager, the marketing manager or an appointed marketing agency…the most important thing is, it needs to be bought in to, structured and painless. It’s also key to remember that you are not ‘checking up’ on the sales team – they have enough people doing that internally – you are solely asking for feedback on the lead that was passed to them.

We have developed a style of survey that has been adopted by the majority of our clients and is successfully completed with the sales team (by phone, strictly no paper allowed!) a few days after a lead is handed over.

The survey addresses some of the following aspects:

• Quality of information provided
• Level of contact
• The ‘need’ of the client
• Business drivers
• Sales pipeline estimates – time, value etc.
• Actions

By having an effective feedback mechanism, there will be clear benefits for all parties involved.

Sales will be able to input into the quality and type of leads passed to them. They will be able to request additional useful information and can also use the feedback for internal training purposes.

Client marketing gets a really good look at the projected sales pipeline along with real-time information, including ROI and anecdotal evidence of their marketing plan, to present internally.

Finally, the lead generators (in this instance – TMP) get direct feedback on the quality and type of leads passed over so they know exactly how to focus future calls. It also gives them the opportunity to take leads not converted back into the nurturing process so the black hole stays well and truly empty!

We all know the most basic rule of marketing: don’t tell them about the features of your product, tell them about the benefits. But if you think that’s all there is to it, you’re very wrong. As marketers we need to take it a step further, we need to tell a story.

I recently came across a very good book on the subject called All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, by Seth Godin.

According to Godin, the key is to get people to buy your story, not just your products. And as the book goes on to show, the most successful stories aren’t always the most factual, but they are usually the most compelling.

So how do you tell a great story? Well, according to Godin, there are four characteristics that make a great story.

A good story is authentic

Belgian brewery Stella Artois launched their new pear cider, Cidrè, in the UK early last year.

It must have been tempting to follow what the UK cider brands were doing, but by staying authentic and true to their heritage instead of trying to be British, Stella Artois made their story stronger and more attractive.

A good story is consistent

Toyota is a good example of a company with a consistent story. They always talk about their reliability and legendary toughness. While this advert is far fetched, it captures the imagination and is consistent with the way they market their vehicles, fitting their bigger story.

A good story appeals to a worldview

This advert, which ran during the 2004 US Presidential Election, was made to appeal to people who believe in commitment and disapprove of indecision. The advert is appealing to their worldview – telling them that candidate John Kerry is untrustworthy.

It may not be true – but it appeals to fundamental beliefs of a group of people – and that’s very powerful.

A good story appeals to our senses

This advert from Thompson Holidays is very attractive. It appeals to our sense of time and plays on our emotions. The story is that “holidays are the most precious times of all” – where all of our best memories are created.

But click through to their website and it looks rather generic. It doesn’t have the same flavour as the advert did. The story you’re telling should be consistent wherever people come into contact with your brand.

Sell the story

What I’ve taken away from this book is that it’s not always about the price, or even the product. It’s about making your audience want to be a part of your brand story.

After all, is that Ralph Lauren shirt really worth what you paid for it? It costs three times as much as similar shirts from Gap, but will it last three times longer? Is it three times stronger? Or are you paying for the story that a Ralph Lauren shirt tells the world about your sense of style and social position?

This post was written by Jun Plas. If you’d like to discuss it further you can email him on jplas@themarketingpractice.com