Old fashioned marketing doesn't work

In the mail today I received the classic three-part mailing from a software company. Letter, color insert, and reply card. If it was done well, it might work, but it wasn't. What went wrong:

• The envelope doesn't tell me there is an offer for free coffee inside, but shows a 'hello my name is' sticker with my name on it.


• The letter from the CEO goes on and on before telling us what they do. And in just two sentences.


• Nowhere does the package try to explain what their product does exactly.


• The response card is in the form of a self-surving survey.

So, you can say they didn't see the forest for the trees. But the worst crime is that they haven't figured out that the world has changed. Boyink reminded me today of the Cluetrain Manefesto, which helped me realize why I didn't like this piece--it is bluster and self-serving despite pretending to be interested in me and my opinions.

Since I don't understand what they sell, why should I reply? And the questions are simply lead-qualification questions despite their statement "Your answers will help us better understand the needs of customer service professionals in your industry". Yea, right, you are just interested in understanding what you can sell me. And all I get is a cup of coffee. Thanks, Right Now.

Be honest, provide information, and start a conversation! That's what the marketing should be about these days.

Two opinions on how to spend your industrial marketing budget

Aaron Kahlow has a web-consulting business that has closely partnered with Thomas Register. I heard Aaron speak at their internet marketing seminar earlier this year and was impressed. He told the truth about what is important in a website to satisfy your customers.

This document hits some of the same points, especially making the point that you can't "ask the creative people of this world to solve your sales and marketing issues" (creative meaning artsy-types). He then suggests investing in improving your site and making is targeted toward search-optimization and user experience.

His affiliation with TR shows when we get to the suggested budget break-down for web marketing. He allows 30 to 75% (depending on four scenarios) for "guaranteed online listings". This he justifies this expense on portals and destination sites as a "constant lead source".

My real issue is that TR is now selling listing on a 'portal' type site for its ability to reach people using search engines, while Aaron is implying that users go to 'portals' separately and provide more consistant leads.

2004 Guide to Web Marketing (PDF)

And now my opinion: While web-marketing remains cheap to do, Aaron fails to make the point that the biggest investment in web-marketing will be time and effort by marketing managers to make and manage their site so that it does what it is supposed to do. Managing marketing for the industrial b2b company has become very complex now that the web is the tool of choice. Its still scary how many marketing managers don't get it!

Will I pull the trigger? How about a Zoomerang?

It's decision time for renewing with Thomas Register for 2004. While I need to look to their company for confidence in the products they are selling, I really need confidence that my potential clients are going to use them. To understand our clientele, we are running a survey of recent contacts who we have quoted equipment to.

To get the survey done quickly, we used email requests and a service called Zoomerang. Zoomerang is an online survey service whose 'zPro' package is $600 a year. We will be using it for customer satisfaction surveys as required by ISO-9001:2000, too.

Zoomerang allowed me a good control of the survey questions and made the responses easy to digest. My questions may have been amateur for the first time out, but I think they are giving me the kind of data I need.

Next time: The survey results!

Pay close attention to Google's new search tools

As I posted last week, I eliminated my plural keyword phrases in my AdWords campaign, as Google's new 'broader' matching capability is supposed to handle plurals. It didn't work. Here is Google's email to me regarding this:

Thank you for your email. Please note that if you would like your ads to show on plural versions of your keywords, we still advise that you keep these plural keywords in your list in order to track the CTRs and for times when our system does not show your ads under plural searches. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

She's right about the tracking...I've notice a difference in CTR for plural and singular terms (but to what real benefit is this knowledge). Time to go patch things up and add my plural terms again!

CRM project update

For those of you playing along at home, the CRM game has been delayed till 1Q 2004. Here's the funny thing--We are moving to a new building at the end of 4Q 2003 complete with new XP workstations. XP stations that can't run our current CRM-like program! The president just casually says "so you might be without a database for a couple months". Oh boy!

I have been hearing more about hosted CRM packages, which makes me think maybe I am missing something, as I have been considering 'real' software. This blog post from CRM Mastery E-Journal was helpful in making me feel better:

"Before investing in any new CRM solution, it is my opinion that every SMB should develop an IT strategy that will thoroughly address their approach to combining, sharing and easily being able to 'work with' and analyze all of the customer related information captured in their organization."

I really want to link our CRM to our ERP database, but haven't been satisfied with any of the solutions I've seen, even from our ERP vendor. And the manager of our ERP system is talking about changing systems in the near future, so I can't depend on any integration I do do lasting.

What to do? A true business decision--where there is no easy or right answer. My standard of measurement has been: what is most likely to be used, and used as fully as possible, while not worrying so much about the technology. But that goes back to having order data from the ERP system to make it useful. Argh!

Web advertising update

I had an email from Google with news of two new services. First is that they are 'expanding' search matches, which essentially means that I don't need separate keywords for plural terms-yea. While I was updating my keyword-phrases, I also used their keyword suggestion tool to come up with a couple terms I hadn't used before.

Secondly, they have added a 'conversion tracker' like Overture recently released. I signed up, so we'll see what results I get (Overture stands at zero so far).

Someone suggested I compare results of my different sources, but it is challenging to do. Average cost per click for September (in order of most total clicks) and my comments:

• Business.com $0.70 (less targeted, but well distributed)


• Industrial Quick Search $2.86 (clicks dropping--is their rankings at fault?)


• Google AdWords $1.51 (nearly the same impressions as Overture)


• Thomas Register $11.15 (this includes EZ sites. Better than it used to be.)


• Overture $4.47 (Could increase clicks, if I want to pay $12 each!)

BTW: The Thomas Register rep wants to get our contract signed for 2004. It's decision time...more on that later.

Get rid of the gnats--and get cheap hosting

Since the previous post, I've looked at the actual log files for my site and found the extra 'hits' were logged as 'search' commands, not 'get' commands, so it means the browser trying to find the home page. I'm moving the subsite and getting rid of the script to clean-up my stats. Keyword analysis won't be clouded with terms for the sub-site either.

Moving the site was fun. I just signed up for a multi-domain hosting account for personal use and used one of the accounts for the subsite. I'll move this blog tonight, I think. With 20 domains available, I can have fun creating new websites for the cost of a domain.

If you want a good deal on hosting, 8-95.com, a sub-unit of my current host dixiesys.com, is running a 2-for-1 special for two weeks. And if you enter b2blog's special code, DJ01, you get an extra 10% off. From what I can tell, SSL is the only thing missing (they charge $22 extra a year).

The gnats in the stats

The start of the month means wrapping up data on last month...specifically web logs. I really find that Faststats (see link to the right) does a good job, but garbage in, garbage out. Here are some things I found:

• Multiple requests for pages that don't exist, specifically ending in .aspx. I assume this is some kind of attack, looking for common pages that may offer access to the innards of my site.


• Have you heard about how Verisign is now redirecting people toward sites if they enter a nonexistent URL? Well, I now have about 20 referrals from Verisign.


• I got two or three referrals from each of three different "EZ" sites from Thomas Register. Not impressive, but TR's main referral numbers are high.


• My log files now are recording hits separately for requests of the home page that do or don't have /index.html at the end. If I add these two together, my stats go thru the ceiling for the home page. Like 2000 more hits.


• When I created a 'mini-site' earlier this year, we made it a part of our website and had a little script determine which URL the visitor was asking for. While this site is 'mini', it is cluttering my statistics. I will move it out soon (more on that later).

October ends our sales-year, so I will be summing up this and other data in early November. I'll share more then.