When it comes to your marketing, sometimes it’s important to stop doing what you’ve been doing. And start some new things. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins says that great leaders are disciplined – they not only have a to-do list, but they also have a stop-doing list. Here are some marketing things to stop doing and some you should start.

What Marketing Things You Should Stop Doing

(Because doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.)

1. Stop anything that doesn’t yield results.
2. Stop pay-per-click ads – your money could be better used elsewhere.
3. Stop paying for SEO (search engine optimization). Spend it on content.
4. Stop using proprietary platforms and technology for your website.
5. Stop running those ads/attending trade shows just because you always have.

What Marketing Things to Start Doing

1. Start understanding your customers – create marketing personas and use them.
2. Start tracking engagement of prospects and customers.
3. Start tracking conversions of prospects-to-customers.
4. Start becoming a part of the social media conversation.
5. Start creating great content, including a company blog and videos.

What’s on your marketing do and don’t lists?

There are several trends bubbling up to the top for B2B Marketing right now. If you’re not addressing or implementing them in the near future, you could get left behind by your buyers and your competition.

Online content is more important than ever in getting found on the Internet.

Now is the time to write articles, start blogging, create video, write whitepapers and eBooks, post slideshows and presentations. Not only should you write and post them, but you should share them and get your contacts buzzing about them. Google loves that.

New website programming languages make it easier to get found online.

Your legacy website may be holding you back from getting found on the Internet. If your site isn’t taking advantage of the latest website programming code and features, the search engines will have a more difficult time finding it. In old or legacy sites, the code is predominant or “heavy”, which makes it tough for search engines to find text, figure out what your site is about and index it for the right keywords and phrases.

Transparency and telling your story engages prospects and helps them trust you.

Do you believe that the less you tell your prospects the better? Have you left off your physical address because you don’t want to limit your audience? Do you have no employee photos and bios on your site? You must subscribe to the mushroom “keep them in the dark and feed them sh*t” approach to marketing. Let me tell you, in today’s world of total transparency and people who buy because they like your story – you are not establishing trust with your marketing presence.

Mobile shopping and buying will dominate marketing within the next few years.

When you update your website, make sure you include compatibility with mobile devices or a capability to create a mobile version or application. From what the marketing gurus are saying, you’re going to want to offer mobile sooner than you think.

So, B2B marketers, will you get left behind? Readers – feel free to add other trends that you think could put B2B Marketers in a position of getting left behind.

Now more than ever, online content is the key to attracting and engaging qualified prospects online. According to a study done in August of 1092 B2B marketers, 60% plan to increase content spend in 2012 (compared to 51% in 2011) and 62% plan to outsource content creation (it was 55% in 2011).

But, the biggest challenge B2B Marketers have with content is figuring out what kind engages prospects.

There are new forms of content emerging constantly, and many B2B marketers are new to online content creation. Here are some ideas for how to identify what content you should create.

1. Use a website analytics to track downloads and visits. This give you clues as to what media visitors to your site prefer and what topics are most popular.
2. Leverage the most popular page topics on your site. If an article you wrote gets tons of visitors, build on that – create a video or a more in-depth eBook on the same or similar topic.
3. Re-purpose great content into multiple media formats and track the results. Sometimes you just have to resort to trial and error. Put a bunch of content formats on your site about the same topic and see which is most popular. Learn from the results and build on your successes.
4. Better yet, survey or interview your customers. What media do they like the most? Do they want a smart phone app from you because they’re so mobile? Video, because it’s engaging? Audio, because they’re so busy they want to listen while they drive or exercise?
5. Research your customers. Find published studies that detail the demographics and psychographics of your customers – online publications will track this information for advertisers. Combined with some interviews this information will help you develop marketing personas about them (see my previous post on marketing personas – Why B2B Marketing Personas Rule) that include their content media preference.
6. Ask your sales and customer service people to track common questions and issues. Then, answer the questions or address the issues in your online content.
7. Watch and listen on social media. What are your prospects and customers engaging in with others? How can it be applied to what you offer?

These are just some ways to answer the question, “What Kind of Content Should We Create?” How do you answer this?

B2B Marketers need to confront and act on today’s brutal reality, but they must never lose faith in the end result.

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

–Admiral Jim Stockton, about his 8-year imprisonment in the Vietnam  War

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins wrote about how great companies confronted the brutal truth, yet never lost faith in their vision of success. Called the Stockdale Paradox after Admiral Jim Stockton’s ability to survive eight brutal years in a Vietnamese prison camp, the concept is that you have to face reality head-on.

What does this mean for marketing? Marketers need to do everything they can to understand their options and to take actions based on that knowledge.

Understand your customers. If you think you know your customers, you better really understand their needs and wants. Assuming you know or thinking you know isn’t good enough. Survey, interview, study your customers to gain more intelligence about them.

Test new tactics. If you think you know what marketing tactics work, verify it. Don’t just fall back on marketing the same way – times have changed and marketing is constantly evolving. Try something new in the coming year, such as social media or video marketing, on a limited basis. Measure each activity so you know your return on investment (ROI).

Track your results. Running marketing on intuition is not good enough. Back up your feelings with cold hard facts. Now more than ever you need to justify every dollar you spend on your marketing. Invest in systems and dashboards that help you do this.

Above all, don’t give up the faith. If you ruthlessly look for opportunity, carefully test new ideas, and measure results, you can prevail. How will you apply the Stockdale Paradox?

Blog entry excerpted from the Marketing chapter written by Jennifer Beever in The Book on Business from A to Z

When you budget your marketing dollars, it’s important to understand where you are in your  marketing life cycle. The marketing life cycle can relate to a product, service, or an entire company.

In a previous post, What Do I Spend on My Marketing Budget? Part 1, I blogged on how to calculate your marketing budget by understanding the buyer cycle. This post, Part 2 of the series, focuses on understanding another factor – your marketing lifecycle.

The marketing lifecycle includes several phases: Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline. There are appropriate marketing tactics for each stage and corresponding marketing tactics that can help you define your budget.

Introduction. In this stage of the product, service, or company, you need to get the word out so that your buyers know you exist and understand the solution you provide.  Budgets for launching new products, services or companies have a wide range and depend upon how competitive your marketplace is. If you have the funding, go for it! If you are strapped for cash, use low-cost tactics such as social media, email marketing, and online press releases.

Growth. You’ve launched and the industry is heating up! Grab as much market share as you can in this phase – your marketing is critical! If you can afford it, spending more and/or smarter than your competition can really pay off here.

Maturity. You’ve made it; now you have to keep it. In this phase, competition has matured. One way to gain market is by finding new or leveraging existing niche marketplaces. In this phase, your marketing costs might plateau or decrease.

Decline. At this stage, your product or service should be viewed as a cash cow. Milk that cow for whatever you can get! Your budget should be much less than in all the other stages.

How do you budget for marketing?

In today’s economy, every dollar you spend on marketing must produce results. Are you sure that the marketing you spend money on is working?

As a new year approaches, this is a perfect time for a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a cost-effective review process where an expert looks at your marketing strategy, tactics, and results to make sure you are getting the best results possible without wasting money. Here are some of the things we’ve found in marketing audits:

No marketing integration. Sometimes marketing programs grow one tactic at a time. A business creates a website, and then begins a separate effort to send out email newsletters to customers. The messaging and the graphics on the website don’t match that of the emails. Sometimes the reason for this is because the website was created by a vendor,  email campaigns are created in-house, and there is no one to coordinate the efforts. Without a plan to integrate the look, feel and messaging of all marketing tactics, you cannot reap the proven benefits of integrated marketing programs.

Bad strategy. Many companies want to market to a broad audience or the wrong audience. In a broad marketplace there is intense competition, and it’s hard to stand out. One of our clients decided to position themselves in a big marketplace, when in fact they were the leading experts in a niche market within that big marketplace. The dollars they spent trying to compete with the big guys would have been much better spent on marketing their niche expertise.

The wrong results. We’ve seen businesses that use tactics that get a lot of response, but they generate unqualified leads. For example, one of our B2B clients published blog posts about popular events, hoping to increase readership. We found that while visitors would land on their blog, they rarely stayed or looked at more information, because they were interested in the events not in our clients’ business.  In B2B marketing, quality of the leads is more important than quantity.

Are you doing the right marketing, to the right people, getting the right results? New Incite offers marketing audits – a shortened version of our Marketing Situation Analysis – as a cost-effective solution for today’s business owner.

Blog entry excerpted from the Marketing chapter written by Jennifer Beever in The Book on Business from A to Z

Business owners and marketing managers often ask how to figure out what their marketing budget should be. Here’s a classic marketing consultant answer:

“It depends.“

Your marketing budget does depend on a variety of factors, including your lead generation return rates and lead-to-buyer conversion rates. These factors constitute the science of calculating your marketing budget – without them you will have to resort to art in the form of estimates or guesstimates.

The Science of Calculating Your Marketing Budget

Yes, marketing can be scientific! If you understand your buyer’s buy cycle, you can calculate exactly what you need to spend in order to generate the revenues you need.

Start with the end in sight – how much revenue do you need to generate? Then, knowing your average sale and conversion rate, figure out the number of leads it will take to generate the science.

Don’t know your buyer cycle or have historical data like conversion rates? Unfortunately, you are not alone – many companies don’t. Your science is about to become more art, in the form of a guesstimate. Guess or estimate these rates and numbers, but make a change and start today to track your actuals. Next year you’ll be in a better position to be a marketing scientist rather than an artist.

Finally, you need to plan the right tactics to generate the right number of leads. Again, use your historical data – what tactics produce the best return on investment (ROI)? If you don’t have that information, hire an expert who does.

New Incite offers strategic and tactical marketing planning services.  Contact us today for more information!

There’s a perfect storm brewing in successful marketing campaigns these days, and there are three key components: great copywriting, optimization, and use of technology.

Just like in the book The Perfect Storm, in which author Sebastian Junger describes the confluence of three critical weather factors: warm air from a low-pressure system coming from one direction, a flow of cool and dry air generated by a high-pressure from another direction, and tropical moisture provided by Hurricane Grace, so too is there a perfect storm of marketing skillsets that accelerate results for your marketing efforts.

Marketing Copywriting

There are two things that copywriting is critical for today – social sharing and content. The more compelling content you have online that people can relate to and share with others, the more chance your business has of getting found online. And, it’s not just about writing “OK” content – it’s about writing great content – great stories with valuable information and compelling calls to action that get people to share their content.

Content Optimization

Your content needs to include and be tagged with the right  keywords and phrases. You need to know which are the most frequently-used when your target prospects search for your products or services. This is both science and art. There are certain places where you can include keywords and phrases that the search engine algorithms respond to. It’s constantly changing, including the shift from SEO (search engine optimization) to SMO (social media optimization).

Marketing Technology

Today as a CMO, marketing consultant or agency, you need to understand and use technology. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, websites, SEO (social media optimization),  marketing analytic dashboards, lead nurturing systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are all technology products that you need to use to be efficient and cost-effectively track results.

At New Incite, we think we’re in the perfect marketing storm. Our lead marketing consultant and CMO for Hire, Jen Beever, came from the software industry in 1997 to start New Incite. A great writer, Jen’s classmate and fellow English Major at Colby College was Linda Greenlaw, the captain of the Andrea Gail‘s sister ship, the Hannah Boden, who was featured in The Perfect Storm.  And, finally, Jen applies her software background as a techie – she has been getting results from websites and search engine optimization since 1998.

Are you in the Marketing Perfect Storm? Swimming strong or sinking?

Photo from Flickr. The Perfect Storm, Some rights reserved by bernavazqueze

Does your online content make your phone ring? It did mine recently – I received a call about a post I did in 2009 from an executive at a financial services company on the East Coast.  He was trying to make a decision about how to launch a technology product and saw that I had written about his issue.

Quality, online content (even if it was written years ago) is the key to getting found online today. This means that you need to be strategic when you plan your content. Write about what you do and include keywords and phrases that will attract new customers and prospects. Provide quality information that solves problems, answers questions, and gives you credibility.

What kinds of content will fuel your online marketing machine? Here are some ideas:

1. Blog posts
2. Press releases
3. Tweets, LinkedIn and Facebook status updates
4. eBooks
5. Whitepapers
6. Articles
7. Videos
8. Podcasts

Once you post your content online, tell your followers on social media about it (see my previous post about this, How Social Media Feeds Your Online Marketing Machine). Provide a link so that they can easily access and read/listen/watch it.

How do you produce all this content? Have a plan and follow it with discipline. Repurpose your content to leverage your time and effort (see my previous post on this, Re-purpose Content with a Purpose). And finally you can hire outsource resources to either support your efforts or do the work for you. New Incite provides outsource content creation. For more information, please visit our Content Creation service page.

Are you thinking of  implementing the newest marketing tactics, such as social media, in your next marketing campaign? It’s important to look before you leap, and have a clear understanding of your customers and your industry when you plan your marketing.

“Good to Great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies on bravado.” – Chapter 6, “The Hedgehog Concept,” Good to Great, by Jim Collins.

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins writes that leaders of great companies understand their customers and their industry. This is critical to successful marketing planning. Here is an example of how it applies to today and social media.

A client came to me and said one of their customers told them, “You need to be on Facebook!” The client was both intrigued but also overwhelmed by this statement. Until that time their only use of Facebook had been cursory – to connect with family and follow news about their grandkids. While from a technical standpoint it is not difficult to create a business Facebook page, businesses should have a strategy and an understanding of their customer’s behavior on social media before acting. What do their customers do on Facebook? Would they be interested in receiving news from the business on Facebook?

We created a simple online survey and sent it via email to my client’s customers and prospects, explaining the purpose of the survey and how long it would take to complete. We had to send a couple of reminders, but over time got a 30% response rate from my client’s list. The answers to our survey questions showed a pretty lukewarm response about Facebook (only 40% even used it, and most only for personal use), but 70% used LinkedIn and mostly for business purposes.

My client made a decision to invest in improving and optimizing their LinkedIn profile, and then increase their LinkedIn activity by making more connections to customers, colleagues and prospects, answering questions related to their products and services, and participating in LinkedIn Group discussions. By understanding their customers, they were able to make practical decisions about where to spend their precious marketing dollars and time.

How well do you understand your customers? Your industry?