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14 blogs for 2 weeks

January 19 2010

VLG is signing up for the Social Media Challenge. We encourage you to do the same. Check out Colin Alsheimer’s blog post for the rules. We’ve gathered a list of blogs from the folks here at VLG. Below are the 14 blogs we’ll track and promote over the next couple of weeks. With any luck we’ll learn something original. Don’t forget to bookmark and read our humble opus, too.

1. Customer Experience Crossroads
Our favorite Canadian that has on several occasions bought our loyalty with profound words about our own Dialog Marketing. Susan Abbott makes it onto the VLG top 14.

2. Servant of Chaos
Gavin Heard represents marketers from down under in a sometimes disturbing, yet informative way. Don’t let the crazy eyes headshot on his blog fool you. Australians, as you know, are good people.

3. Church of the Customer
I’ve never seen Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba speak in public. I’ve never read one of their books, but they crank out a good blog post every now and again. (Any blog that posts a PSA staring the late governor of Texas, Ann Richards, deserves a nod.

4. The Big Fat Marketing Blog
Get in the heads marketers kind of like you as they post prose about our favorite topic, big fat marketing.

5. Gaspedal “The Blog”
Brought to you by the people that gave us tidy white papers, books and conference panels and speeches littered with word of mouth and social media that matters. This is a good blog for people that communicate.

6. Unleashed on Marketing
Gary Bembridge has two passions in life. Want to guess one of them? This Londoner mixes it up with commentary and links to EMEA marketing goodies.

7. Good Is
Collaboration is very Good. Go hear for an “Ah-ha!” moment everyday.

8. ILT
John really, really loves typography. It’s blog posts by a British expat in Japan, so it has to be interesting.

9. Just Stuff I Find
We all could start a blog like this, but we don’t. This blog will find stuff for you.

10. Kottke
Jason was named after Alexander the Great and has big shoes to fill, he says. Can’t believe he didn’t see the Empire Strikes Back on the big screen. Nice little posts on his blog.

11. 37signals Blog
This blog might not fit within the SMS Challenge rule book, but it’s pretty darn good at making you think strategically.

12. Design Mind
Three times a year you can get this content in print form. Frog design takes this blog stuff pretty seriously. Always harder to make anything look easy, simple and clean.

13. Dustin Curtis is a superhero.
Dustin takes it to another level. Hard to explain. You have to check it out on your own, because I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Tell him hi for us.

14. the tortoise initiative
This six person team pulls together interesting work, design, quotes, etc in one easy to read package, very simple package. Blogger template, “sacrilege!” they say. We say bully for you.

Go Deeper

July 21 2009

Consumer and B2B marketing differ on many fronts, but one difference in particular speaks to challenges when selling from one business to another. Buy cycle.

Revenue serves up a universal measure of success. How do you divi up credit for revenue won? If a client was touched by eight different marketing programs, 10 sales call and knows someone that works at your company, who gets a pat on the back? If all these happen over the course of 12 months, how far back do you go to find out how you found that customer in the first place.

Tell us how you do it in your organization.

We talk about the web, because we build web-based marketing programs. Makes sense. Let’s look at some of the key metrics we or our clients use to assign blame. Impressions, clicks, response, lead qualification, deals closed, leftover budget, and lifetime customer value.

Where is this building located?

The most important in the minds of our customer are leads qualified and deals closed. Those are the most important, but often difficult or impossible to quantify. The fact that a qualified lead can be defined five different ways within the same organization makes success all the more difficult to measure.

You can’t go wrong with impressions, clicks and response as long as we can agree on the definition of a response. By that I mean, it’s easy to measure campaigns by these three measuring sticks. Impressions and clicks are often good enough when measuring success of SEM. Clicks and response handle outbound and inbound metrics equally well.

Think of an inverted pyramid with impressions at the top and customer lifetime value at the bottom. The deeper you go the better off you’ll be when handing out those bonuses. (Oops, I wrote this post in 2006.) The deeper you go the better off you’ll be when handing out pink slips.

B2B often has a killer buy cycle. If you can’t remember how you got introduced to a new customer, where will you go to find the next one. Pick a handful of metrics and start following them today. Go deep!

If you’re not, you should be following @wefightboredom on Twitter here!

Never Carry Wooden Swords

July 20 2009

There is a saying in Spanish that translated reads, “A blacksmith should never carry a wooden sword”. At one time or another design/development agencies like ourselves have fallen into this trap. We’re so busy doing good work for our clients that we forget to stop long enough to build a good web presence for ourselves.

Workaholics know what I’m talking about, but that’s why we have spas and gyms, right? Now and again you need to do something for yourself.

Earlier this year we opened a skunk works operation here at VLG. We found that by applying our many talents to other areas of our business we produced new products, solutions and best practices. By taking care of business at home we’re able to offer our clients more and better solutions. Integrated web apps, social media, mobile media are all in the queue. I could go on, but it wouldn’t be skunk works if I leaked everything in this blog.

Spend a little time leveraging your own internal expertise and new ideas or opportunities will percolate. Vanity drives innovation, not always, sometimes.

Like other advertising and marketing firms, VLG’s worth is often in our ability to hold a mirror in front of clients. Helping shift paradigms or capitalize on unrecognized opportunities may define our value proposition. The creative process itself essentially dictates how we see our own products/services/solutions in the market place. Microsites and Dialog Marketing are byproducts of client introspection, the steel blade of message delivery.

It’s a huge advantage over competitors that run around swinging wooden swords.

Consider your own organization. You may not be able to apply your offering to your own business. If you build a jet engine, you may not build your own airplane. Somewhere in your organization you’re carrying a wooden sword. Somewhere you have expertise that can be applied elsewhere. Find some time for a little introspection. You’ll be glad you did.

By the way, you should follow me on Twitter here!

Never Cold Call Again

July 16 2009

For many organizations the “cold call” is a necessary evil dreaded by sales and blamed on marketing. Leads pursued at the right time, in the right way, with the right offers promise higher contact, qualification, and close rates. This may not be news to many, but a recent study conducted by the Kellog School of Management produced some surprising results.

Not surprising was something we’ve been telling our customers for years. If you contact your prospects within one hour of them hitting the web your contact rates, lead qualification and ability to close all increase. Conversely, there is a huge drop off in all of these categories if you wait more than an hour. Huge!

Speed
When asked how much time it takes before a first call is attempted, the study found that 71% of companies take more than one hour to respond to inbound web traffic. This results in a 34% decline in your ability to further qualify the prospect and a 16% decrease in close rates.

We’ve been preaching for years about the need to contact prospects as soon as possible. The study found a 28% increase in your ability to qualify and 8% increase in close rates when a lead is contacted within an hour of web identification. When it comes to lead response time, it’s better to be the hare than the tortoise.

Tortoise photo by Aaron Logan & Hare by Malene Thyssen.

Tortoise photo by Aaron Logan and Hare photo by Malene Thyssen.

Time
The study concludes that the best time to get a prospect on the phone is between 8-9 am or 2-4 pm. However, that’s tough when your calls are driven by inbound web traffic and you’d like to respond within an hour. The best day to call is a Thursday. So, Thursday between eight and nine, or two and four. No problem. Let me get right on that. Call the sales team and let them know they need to block out those hours.

This actually creates a great second touch opportunity. You next email campaign should be sent out in waves on Thursday to maximize impact, but only if the leads are routed fast enough to beat the one-hour buzzer. That’s why we are such strong proponents of personalized URL campaigns that take a prospect from microsite to phone. Real-time lead deliver during these peak hours are a major hurdle to reaching your contact rate goals.

Offering
We know how fast and when to call, but how do we convince a prospect to take that first step toward lead qualification on the web. There needs to be a payoff on the web, a reason why prospects just spent five to fifteen minutes of their time getting to know your company a little better.

The dreaded white paper. In B2B campaigns we see it time and time again. Product sheets, case studies, and market surveys like this one aren’t very good at increasing your contact, qualification, or close rates. In fact, they might have a negative affect in some cases. The best offerings might surprise you, but they shouldn’t.

When talking to the right people at the right time in the right way you should offer them an eBook, price quote or proposal request. It seems prospects just want to cut to the chase. No beating around the bush, just tell them how smart you are, how much it’ll cost to leverage your smarts and a document that can be shopped around for internal buy-in.

Conclusion
A well-coordinated marketing and sales effort has a positive affect on revenue. I don’t think we needed a study to draw that conclusion.

If you work at a large company be forewarned, increases in the number of employees decreases close rates. The bigger you are the harder to close.

Don’t measure your cold calling efforts? If you don’t think you can answer questions like how long it takes sales to follow-up with a web lead, or what offer is used most often to lure web leads, you’re in a world of hurt. Companies that don’t measure don’t know what to change. Companies that don’t measure have lower contact, qualification and close rates.

We’ve been saying this for years, but it doesn’t mean we don’t walk a little taller knowing the good folks over at Kellog have endorsed a measured response to lead qual and close. (Read more…If you’d like to read the 24-page, statistic laden report follow this link to Dr. James Oldroyd, PhD and professor at M.I.T)

How Long’s Your Sales Cycle?

May 28 2009

When we ask a client how long is their typical sales cycle we get the same replies. It’s six, nine or 12 months. Amazingly everyone experiences the same sales cycle. These folks may not be totally honest with themselves. In a down economy your sales cycles can stretch a month, two months or more depending on your industry, pipeline and go-to-market approach. If you get someone into the sales pipeline today, you’ll probably won’t realize any revenue from that opportunity until December or well into 2010. There are ways to cut weeks off your sales cycle.

Do a quick Google news search for articles about “longer sales cycles“? Once you get past the obvious holes in Google’s search algorithm you’ll see many, many companies are experiencing longer sales cycles. So what’s the answer? Get people into the sales pipeline earlier, craft messaging with surgical precession, and get into “better” conversations earlier in the relationship.

belt

We’ve been doing direct marketing programs using interactive microsites to fill pipelines for years. These programs are great when the economy is booming. The value of getting customers into a discussion with your sales team is important, really important, now more than ever. In this economy it’s even more critical to stretch that marketing dollar by targeting and getting into conversations with great sales opportunities.

Our clients and prospects seem to consistently weigh a few specific marketing options with tight 2009 budgets. One is a focus on virtual events. They cut down on airfare, hotels, bar tabs, etc. Email can be hit or miss, but it’s cheap. Some are dipping their toes in the social media waters, which is not as cheap as you might think. Social media, if done haphazardly, can waste the time of some valuable in-house resources. Then there is our solution. We offer a hybrid direct mail slash personalized microsite that gives you the best of both worlds–targeted media like dimensional mail and variable messaging with behavior stats generated by a microsite. It’s a powerful one-two punch. It also trims time off the sales cycle by bringing quality discussions forward weeks.

We get it. Budgets are tight. Our clients get it too, which is why they are filling their sales pipelines with VLG’s Dialog Marketing campaigns. Don’t take our word for it. See for yourself.

VLG Dialog Marketing