Bad Marketing

Holiday eCards - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It's that time of year again when we are inundated with the the good, the bad, and the ugly Holiday eCards.  Here are some I've received in reverse order....

The "Ugly" – creating negative brand perception with a holiday eCard so unimaginative and uninspired that it turns people off.  I’ve received a lot of these this year so maybe the cost-cutting started with creative departments.  I’ll spare you the pain of seeing all of them and use MS&L’s card as the poster child for “ugly” marketing.  Clearly they get paid by the word, but do people really want to read about arcane renaming updates in a holiday card.  I expect a top tier global PR firm to be savvier than this.

 

The "Bad" – wasting the time and money to produce a boring holiday eCard.  The companies in this group at least put some effort into their cards, but clearly not enough to make them enjoyable.  They want to do a nice card but just don’t put enough creative energy into making it a positive brand experience for the recipient.  The card from lead-gen firm Madison Logic exemplifies a “bad” card with no music and some scrolling images of the staff…yawn!  Check out the screen shot below, or if for some masochistic reason, you want to see the “live” card then click here.

The "Good" – using imagination and creativity to make a holiday eCard that entertains the recipients and conveys a good impression of your company.  My favorite in this group is the one from The Loomis Agency which uses sock puppets singing a parody of The Carol of Bells.  PMSI created a cool card by mixing holiday tunes and a sketch artist drawing Santa. Check it out here.   And Eisenberg Associates offers up a simple but fun game in their card. 

More mindless marketing

The "Bad" - capturing interest, raising expectations and then not delivering

I know this isn't a B2B example but I had to share it given my last post on mindless marketing. I got this email from CitiBank last week.

The subject line caught my attention..."A Message from Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citi" and got me to open the email which I rarely do.  It must be important if the CEO is sending it to me.

The first sentence kept me interested ..."I want you to be among the first to know about the bold steps we are taking at Citi to be the premier, global, fully integrated financial services firm."   Wow, this really must be good stuff to follow.  I can't wait to hear what bold things they are going to do for me the customer!

Oooooops, no bold steps, just their lame marketing drivel ...  "Our objective is to create for our customers an experience in which services are seamless, payments and transfers effortless, and distances meaningless."  Truly inspirational stuff ;)  I'm so happy to be a customer of a company that delivers bold services like seamless payments and transfers! 

Seriously, what was the Citi email marketing team thinking when they put this together?  Why in the world would they use their precious CEO equity to send this type of lame message?  What did they want me to take away from this?  Where are the calls to action?  Even assuming they thought this was a meaningful customer communication, why waste the opportunity to take me to a landing page with some cross-sell / upsell offers?  Or, at the very least a customer feedback survey on what services I'd like more info on.  So instead of the intended effect, this email actually gave me a worse impression of the company.

It just goes to show you that even the big companies with the best dedicated staff and agencies can practice mindless marketing. 

Email Newsletters: Calling a Foul on My Own Team

The "Bad" -  sending a newsletter to your customers/prospects that is all about you instead of them

I just reviewed our corporate newsletter today and was disappointed in the approach we are taking so I'm calling a "Bad Marketing" foul on my own group.  This problem is that it is a one-way push of news about us with little useful content for the reader. Here's the link so you can see for yourself, and below is my email to the project manager of the newsletter.

"The formatting looks good but I question the content plan.  I didn't realize you were going with captions from press releases, awards, white-papers, etc. versus writing new content/articles.   We need to re-evaluate the objective of the newsletter.  I think it makes more sense to have customer-focused content on how we help them solve business issues/pains.  We want/need to be perceived as thought leaders and I don't think we'll get there by just pushing out updates on our news releases and white-papers.  Sorry to be so harsh, but these articles beg the questions "so what" and "what’s in it for me" by the reader.   Once they have that reaction I doubt they will open our next communication.

 

Let's discuss the content strategy of the next newsletter and work toward a more educational/thought leadership approach.  For example, we could have done a lot more on the TreasuryDirect story, explaining the pain/solution/results in a way that would have helped others see how they could apply the strong authentication in their businesses.  Another example would be to build a story around the pain point of data leakage and explain how one or several of our customers solved it with our technology.  Then the reader can resonate with the pain and get tips on how they might address it...hopefully contacting us to find out more.  We should have 2-3 of these customer pain stories and then the sidebars can be used for updates on press releases, awards, and calls to action.

 

Make sense?  I think a good first step would be for you to identify the couple of newsletters you really like to read and ask yourself why?  Then take it from there."

Coincidentally, I just received the MarketingSherpa report "Dirty Dozen:  Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes."  Mistake 5, "Institution to One Messaging," really hit home with me given my recent post "Its about the relationship stupid."  We are definitely need to change the voice of our newsletter and write as an individual to an individual.   There are other great tips in the Sherpa study so be sure to check it out and optimize your own email campaigns.  Also, I'd appreciate if you could send me some B2B newsletters you think have a customer-focused content approach and tone.  It will help my team with our makeover project.

It's about relationships stupid

The "Bad" - marketing to companies not humans

I just read an awesome post by Dr. Flint McLaughlin of MarketingExperiments.com.  The post called "The Prospect's Prostest" lays out an issue that is endemic in the marketing world...treating prospects like inanimate objects/companies instead of as humans.  In Flint's words, "I am not a target; I am a person: Don’t market to me, communicate with me."  The bottom line is that we need to scrap all the marketing fluff and communicate with honesty and integrity in order to develop a relationship of trust with the customer.  (take note all ad agencies and PR firms)

B2B New Year Resolutions

The "Good" - taking time to think about how to improve in the new year -- some simple resolutions that will benefit all B2B marketers (in no particular order)

Review the events plan for 2008 and cut all the shows/conferences that you have to go to because "we have to be there".  Then review the rest and cut the ones that aren't highly targeted since events take a big chunk of the budget and you'd rather spend the money on higher ROI tactics.

Get competing bids from web agencies to do a total health-check on your web sites including benchmarking them against leading tech sites and top competitive sites for usability, content and use of the latest tools.  Simultaneously ask the product management team to review all the product content for freshness and relevance. Then use the results to develop the 2008 web action plan and budget.

Review the marketing/customer database for completeness ... do you have the right contacts (with email addresses) in the right verticals in the right countries.  Then challenge the database team to purge the junk and find new data sources that reach your target audience.

Do a deep dive on your SEO and pay-per-click results for 2007 and set stretch goals for 2008 traffic and conversions.  Challenge the team to evaluate your list of key words to make sure they are still relevant to your marketing goals and then cut/add where necessary.  Challenge your SEO agency to deliver higher page-ranks.  If they have been in place for longer than a year get some bids from other agencies since your current one may have already exhausted their toolbox.   

Carve some budget out to post your most valuable white-papers, webinars and technology guides on industry sites (for example Ziff Davis and TechTarget/BitPipe) so you generate awareness and leads when buyers are searching for products in your space.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Meet with the Sales VPs to review their needs by region.  Then review your lead-generation machine to see where it needs tuning (or in my current case where the engine needs to be rebuilt).  Encourage the regional teams to give you their territory plans with lists of top verticals/prospect accounts and then tailor your 2008 lead-gen programs accordingly.

Work more closely with your inside sales team...create a joint plan for executing a regular series of highly focused installed base up-sell programs. This is low hanging fruit that often gets overlooked in the push to find new customers. Also, make sure you jointly create a plan for lead nurturing with at least one useful (non-salesy) email per month to each contact plus a phone call. 

Go through your collateral cabinet and see which boxes are empty and which are full.  The empty boxes represent useful pieces to sales and the full ones are clearly not valued.  Empower your staff to rationalize the collateral to only the useful pieces and toss the rest since collateral can be a time and money drain.

Challenge your PR team to layout a proactive plan for getting you coverage in the new year since it is too easy to get sucked into a reactive/damage control mode.  The plan should include a list of industry issues that you want to be thought leaders on, the key pubs/reporters/bloggers covering the issue, the messages you want to get across and the assigned execs who will be the spokespeople. And, most importantly the plan should be in calendar format with the tactics to be completed in each time period (e.g. media tour in February on new product launch, exec speaking slot at trade show in March, CTO comments on industry expert blogs every week, etc.)

Dell Finally Gets It ... Will Others?

The “Good” -  figuring out that listening to your customers (really listening, not just holding focus groups) makes good business sense.

I’ve been a Dell customer for years, and have also used Dell products at several companies. I’ve had mainly good experiences as a consumer but have listened first hand to the trials and tribulations of my IT department as they tried to deal with Dell service issues and got nowhere since Dell wasn't really listening. I’ve also been a Dell shareholder but sold all my shares a couple years ago … not because of any deep financial analysis but simply because of a gut feeling that they had lost their edge. That premonition seems to have been true since HP has outsold them for the last couple of quarters.

So, when I read about Dell's new program in Lewis Green’s blog bizsolutionsplus I was impressed to see they finally realized that they need to listen to their customers criticisms.  Check out the official announcement on Dells’ blog.

IdeaStorm enables customers to post ideas and issues that they want Dell to address. Then the entire user community can vote on the ideas. The ones with the most votes rise to the top and then hopefully are addressed by Dell engineers. As a marketer I love this win/win approach. Dell gets immediate market research and lets customers set their priorities. Customers get their biggest issues fixed. They better, because if this is just a PR gimmick then Dell will really have a mess on their hands.

 

StudioDell allows customers to post their videos of how they use Dell products. A good idea that certainly helps Dell gather market research and marketing testimonials but not quite as rewarding for customers as IdeaStorm. 

As we all know, PCs are pretty much commodities these days (as evidenced by the dozens of identical machines in the Sunday paper circulars). So this is a great first step by Dell in trying to re-establish differentiation by listening to customers and delivering better products and better service than the competition.

Top 10 B2B Lead Generation Marketing Mistakes

The “Bad” – being a lazy marketer who doesn't focus on the details of execution and doesn't regularly  test/tweak  to improve effectiveness and ROI.       

I just re-read this great report by MarketingSherpa and thought I’d share the list of “bad marketing” as a public service.  The full 10-page report is available for free (note the short reg form).  I've listed their ten mistakes below and added my commentary ...

1. Calling a monthly email newsletter a “nurturing program.” Leads are so valuable that you should score the newest/best ones and contact them personally versus just sending them a generic one-size-fits-all newsletter.
2. Phoning leads to qualify them … days later. Leads go cold so fast that you need to call them the same day, and even within an hour if possible which is when your product is on their mind. If your company has enough lead volume you’ll need to hire a dedicated phone rep but the ROI will be worth it.
3. Big booths at the big national shows. The bottom line is that the ROI is terrible. At my last company I tracked big show leads for years and can honestly say I never saw one of them convert into revenue. You are much better off sponsoring a dinner off-premises or conducting a regional series of breakfast briefings with key customers/prospects.
4. Using a free trial or free demo as your mainstay offer. You need to have other offers for people who are further up the funnel and not ready for a free trial. Though boring, I’ve found issue-focused whitepapers and guided presentations get great conversions.
5. We, us, our. If your collateral or web copy uses these words then you are talking too much about yourself and not enough about the customer. I’ve seen this when a marketer takes the easy way out and relies too heavily on the product manager for content.
6. Art-Director-Itis (stock photos, hard to read type). Rather than boring stock photos, why not use some decent pictures of your own lab, your own people and your own customers. Take some yourself for cheap or hire a pro, but either way your materials and your brand will be more authentic. And, there is no excuse for having small, unreadable fonts, but it happens all the time when agencies get caught up in trying to be stylish (e.g. I’ve seen lots of grey fonts lately). Don’t let them put form over function.
7. Not working referrals. Everyone is talking about word-of-mouth marketing these days but very few B2B companies are doing anything about it. Why not poll your user group for referrals? How about having customer service reps and CRMs ask for referrals if the situation is right?
8. Lack of investment in PR. Prospects trust trade journals and analysts way more than any ad or direct piece you can ever put out. Don’t spend too much time on press releases since they mean very little to customers. Instead focus on getting speaking slots at major shows, mentions in influential blogs, articles in trade pubs, product reviews in magazines and best of all mentions in analyst reports.
9. Blocking search engines from your best content. This is a no brainer.  You probably have tons of older whitepapers, technical docs and recorded webinars that are behind registration forms. Why? Take away the form and pump up your Google rankings. Moreover, isn’t it better to have satisfied prospects who got what they were looking for with minimal hassle? They just might become leads later!
10. Registration forms that appear daunting or too time-consuming. Do you really need all that info or can you get it later after you engage the prospect? Test a short form for 30 days and I’ll bet your abandon rate drops significantly. Wouldn’t you rather have more leads?

Power-full Marketing Blog

The “Good” –  creating a site that provides the marketing community a one-stop-shop for insights and thought leadership

I highly recommend that you checkout Todd And’s Power 150 that ranks the top marketing blogs based on their Google PageRank, Bloglines Subscribers, Technorati Ranking and a subjective rating of the quality of their content.

The 3-Legged Stool of Sales & Marketing Effectiveness

The "Bad" - developing and implementing marketing plans/programs with product-focused messaging and one-size-fits-all sales tools.

The American Marketing Association just launched a great new resource focused on driving higher sales and marketing effectiveness. The Marketing and Sales Alignment (MSA) Forum is divided into three practice areas: demand generation, sales effectiveness and customer messaging. I really like the AMA’s structure since it represents three-legged stool of great B2B execution.  I’ve seen too many excellent marketing strategies collapse due to failure to execute on one or more of these areas.

· Demand Generation – In my experience, this is a B2B marketer’s primary objective (driving revenue) and is also the primary concern from sales reps, who always want more leads and higher quality leads. Therefore, it is essential for marketers to partner with sales/sales operations to jointly create a lead management system. And critical to that system is Sales defining their EXACT criteria for targeting and their EXACT criteria for an A lead vs. a B lead vs. an inquiry.

· Customer Messaging – Foundational to all great marketing and sales programs is the right message.  I’ve seen too many marketers that develop inward-focused, product-centric messages that talk about how great they are, how well their stuff works, and why it’s better than the competition. Instead, they need to create messaging that shows the customer how they can help them accomplish a goal, solve a problem or meet a need.  Customer focused messaging is essential to power compelling Sales meetings/proposals and compelling demand generation campaigns.

· Sales Effectiveness – Hitting revenue goals requires that marketing properly equip the sales force to build customer solutions, communicate value, and clearly differentiate from the competition.  As described above, standard product brochures and presentations are a complete waste of time. Marketing has to develop tools that the sales force will actually want to use! For starters, marketing must develop a library of presentations that addresses each of the top pains customers have (i.e. helping them solve a problem). In conjunction, there should be a well-written business case for each pain, including a customizable section where the sales rep can leverage an interactive TCO / ROI calculator to model the customer’s unique situation. The icing on the cake is proof-proof-proof in the form of customer case studies and video testimonials.

These three areas might not be as sexy as branding, advertising or viral marketing, but they are where B2B marketers should spend the bulk of their time if they want to impact the top and bottom line.

Bridging the Sales-Marketing Gap - Part 2

The "Good" - forming a true partnership between Sales and Marketing where both parties have skin in the game.

Continuing from my last post, here are some of actions I’ve used to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

When you join a new organization spend the first 2-3 weeks out in the field with as many account executives and customers as possible before doing anything else!!! You want to get real customer input before being biased by headquarters thinking.

• For both reps and customers ask about their business challenges, what they value in a company/vendor, how the company compares to competitors, etc.
• Ask the reps what marketing support they really need. If they had limited money and could only pick one thing what would it be (leads vs. awareness)? Have them define their ideal lead … i.e. what makes an A lead different from a B lead? Get tons of input on this and then publish the lead-scoring criteria to all reps for comments. This is essential before you start shooting leads to the field!  (I'll write lots more posts on this later)

You must also spend a couple of days double-jacking with Inside Sales reps, CRMs and Customer Service reps as they complete the picture of the customer experience. Ask them the same questions and you’ll likely get different answers from the field reps.

Work closely with the Regional Sales Directors to get their honest assessment on marketing and what needs to be improved. Attend their regular staff meetings to keep them up-to-date on changes you’ve made and solicit their feedback. Once a rapport is established you gain valuable real-time feedback on plans and tactics.

Create a formal Advisory Council with representation from each region and the CRM group but try to keep it manageable in size … about 6 members. As mentioned in the last post, make sure to have senior management establish the council as recognition/reward for top performers or it will fail.

• Fly the council into headquarters for a full-day strategy and brainstorming session on the product mix, segment priorities, competitive threats, value-proposition, positioning, best marketing tactics, etc. (do this twice a year at a minimum).
• Then include the council as formal reviewers as you progress through the marketing plan development. Use a Wiki or online team-room where council members can post their comments/plan edits for all to see and modify.
• Once you’ve finalized the plan, have several of the members present it to the rest of the field via web conference. Then it becomes everyone’s plan not just Marketing’s.
• Once in execution mode, have each council member take ownership for reviewing / improving one specific tactic. For example, one rep can review/edit the customer presentation, while another can review/edit the direct marketing materials. Keep it focused on one tactic since they don’t have much time and need to stay focused on sales not marketing.
• Systematically communicate the recommendations of the council to the broader sales force (a bi-weekly summary email works well) as this recognizes sales contributions and helps with buy-in.

Obviously this is just a cursory overview of a very involved process, but in my experience, it is absolutely worth the investment. When I joined Pfizer I followed a process similar to this that enabled me to develop a true partnership with Sales and marketing plans/actions that really hit the target. In contrast, when I started at another company, marketing worked in an ivory tower and you can guess how that impacted relationships with sales and the efficacy of marketing plans.