In the spirit of being thankful

I'd thought I'd share a link to another blog with relevant and worthwhile content.

Church Marketing Sucks
A great blog--Makes me wish I was running marketing at my church...or somebody was. Here's a great recent post: (Marketing) Lessons from U2.

Note another quote from Bono: "Two crap albums and you're out. That's our deal with our audience."

Click and enjoy the feast! And cheers to all my faithful (and sometimes) readers.

If you've got it, shake it!

Got a press release in the works (I do)? Make the most of it by considering it as a SEO attempt, too. Here is a good article detailing the success of one such attempt for a new wine retailer:

Press Releases New SEO Back Door To Top Rankings

News searches rank based on how many news sites are writing about the topic of your press release, how recent or "fresh" stories are, the length of the story when covered by the press and the frequency of the search term. One element of news search algorithms that's vastly different from standard algorithms is that number of sites linking to the release is hugely discounted because news is expected to be new, and as such, won't have time to gather links.

Getting your Press Release in the "news" section of Google and Yahoo can be done through PRWeb for as little as $120. They actually offer SEO-enhanced services there, too, for a reasonable cost.

A great case study in B2B equipment online marketing

Wow, this one is right up my alley. A test equipment manufacturer, B&K Precision, documents with MarketingSherpa how they boosted sales using the internet. The difference for me is that I am selling capital equipment using reps, not 'tools' via distributors. But this is great insight on how to make the most of the web:

How to Use Search Engines to Market Engineering Equipment (Without Paying a Cent to Google)

Instead of Google, they did spend money is with GlobalSpec and Direct Industry. In this case, GlobalSpec is a great fit, and they used Direct Industry to boost international exposure.

For the search engines, they targeted their competition, which is bold move. And by tailoring the targeted pages (sample) to aid in the user's search, they had 60% click past these pages.

They were also smart to be sure to answer the questions searchers need to make a decision: features, price, and delivery. Delivery was a key component that took an extra effort to keep track of stock levels at their distributors. This saved the searcher from having to hit several distributor sites to find out about stock. It also allowed B&K to centralized lead generation, so that they knew which distributors were getting leads (helpful for negotiating co-op ad fees).

It all looks like a well run program based on aiming at the core strategic issues needed to win. Be sure to read the case study to get all the details.

Site design is important, but don't get carried away

Mike Boyink points to a great study at Consumer WebWatch showing that consumers judge the credibility of websites (and by extension, the company behind them) primarily by design and architechture/navigation. I'm sure this applies to B2B sites. Great ammo to get $$ for next years budget to upgrade the website.

But don't get to carried away, the article warns:

Slick-looking Web sites frequently received negative comments. Participants seemed to make judgments about the people behind the site on the basis of the Design Look. Many comments were indicative of this attitude: "It looks like it's designed by a marketing team, and not by people who want to get you the information that you need."

This Tuesday (Marketing nitwit)

How does the title of this post strike you? If you think it is vague, imagine that it is the subject line of an email from someone you don't know. I only opened it because I was curious how it got past my spam filter (and the fact it doesn't also say 'gummed envelope' or other odd phrase).

It was actually a follow-up email from salesforce.com warning me that they are going to call tomorrow.

The body copy commits the additional marketing sin of being all about them and not me (highlights are mine):

I'm following up on your company's past interest in salesforce.com to see if we should re-engage.

Since the last time we connected we have experienced tremendous growth. We have completed a successful IPO (NYSE: CRM) and now have over 12,000 customers and 185,000 subscribers.

This weekend we went live with our Winter 05 release which includes over 100 new features in sales, marketing and support.

CRM doesn't kill customers, only nitwits using CRM do. Its bad when the nitwit is the CRM company itself. Besides the poor email, I've already had my PO for Goldmine out a month.

CRM implementation notes

As I posted last month, we are currently implementing Goldmine as a CRM tool at our company. We have it installed now. Making it ready for use is the real task. Some commentary on the experience so far:

In such a 'flat' organization, I'm not used to asking permission to do what I need to do, so it seems I forgot to talk to the manager in charge of IT. I talked to our IT support/consultants and they were willing to help, but didn't suggest I talk to the manager. I wouldn't have known exactly what to ask for until we were installing the software. Turns out that admin access for an outsider is a big deal, I guess I should have expected that. Also a big deal is enabling remote access to the server, both for the admins, as well as my remote users. Until VPN is authorized, we did cheat and use WebEx to get some needed work done remotely.

The best news so far is that the company president has asked if he can have a Goldmine account so that he can 'peek in'. The promise of real-time forecast data has to have him excited. Cool!

We have imported customer data from our ERP system, but will start fresh with a blank system for 'prospects'. Too many of our current prospects are also listed as customers, and too many of our listed prospects aren't worth uploading. We can upload them individually, as needed.

One of our larger tasks will be to create a completely new quotation system. We will be using QuoteWerks, which integrates with Goldmine nicely. QuoteWerks integrates a price list, which will be one of the major benefits over our current Word template system. The biggest challenge is being able to present all the product information we currently do in a quotation format that is usable by clients and acceptable by our salespeople.

Populating Goldmine with useful fields and drop-down menus is surprisingly hard. It's hard to imagine how process-related fields will be used and how the data will be used. How is an 'appointment' different from a 'call' and how many categories for appointments should there be? While having a consultant helping is great, we haven't had a chance to discuss these things yet.

One complaint about Goldmine so far: its customer look-up method is poor. You have to select the field you want to search from a pull-down menu. It can be set to default to 'contact' or 'company', but by 'contact' it is starting with their first name, which can be a hard thing to search on (is it Mike or Michael?). We must have been spoiled with our software from 1996 that allowed you to search company and contact simultaneously. Holy-mackerel, there isn't a short-cut to pull up the search screen, either! When I'm in a hurry to look up someone on the phone, I'm sure this is going to frustrate me every time.

Juicy info on B2B web searchers

Its great to find good research on the dynamics of searcher's use of search engines, especially when it is specific for B2B. Here is a great report by MarketingSherpa and Enquiro:

How B-to-B buyers use Search (at the bottom of the article is a link to actual survey data/analysis by Enquiro)

Here are some take-aways:

• Google rules, preferred by 83% of users. This goes up with income/education, too.
• The first place on the web users go is search (64%), followed by going directly to a known manufacturer (19%).
• For equipment valued over $5,000, known manufacturers website are selected first 25% of the time. If you are a known manufacturer, that's a great opportunity to capture a sale.
  
• Even for equipment valued over $50,000, 11% of searching is done within in a week of a planned purchase (20% for $5-10,000). While this is not a majority, in my experience, they are the ones who can quickly be captured by having the right information and product available.
• 70% of searchers click on organic listings first, 25% on sponsored listings. This varied by search engine, but as most are using Google, that's what I'm watching (Google was 77%).
  
• The top listing got 27% of organic clicks, while the top sponsored listing got 51% of those who clicked sponsored ads. These just confirm the strength of being #1 on SERPs.
  
• The good news, if you aren't #1, is that the majority of users look at organic listings first (65%) and then 91% scroll down the page to see more results.
• More good news is that these organic-listing readers tend to select 'side ads' at a rate of 69%, which is more good news if you aren't #1.

This is great information to tune your PPC and SEO programs, targeting Google and top listings. However, the 'gold in the cracks' might be targeting the minorities in this survey. One agency, Cube management, recently reported how they found using Overture gave their client significant results at a lower cost than Google. While not true for every industry (mine is up to 16 dollars a click on Overture), it is a worth checking out, especially as sponsored listings were shown to be more effective on Yahoo in this survey.

Need a excuse to say hi?

As I am implementing CRM, we wanted to create 'touch points' with existing customers to develop loyal relationships. As we aren't currently a proactive sales organization, we aren't really sure where to start. But this article at Marketing Profs has some good, but basic ideas:

The 'Marshall' Plan (or, Customer Aftercare)

• "Thank You" letter
• Letter from "Mr./Ms. Big"
• How did I/we do?
• Happy anniversary
• At random, customer appreciation letter
• "How are we doing?/How have we done?" survey cover letter
• Birthday cards
• Hand-written "Congratulations" cards
• Thanksgiving letter

Now I can't say I would use all of these, but I especially like "Letter from Mr. Big". One of our loyalist customers was so partially because he had the phone number for our president.

Why I'm not voting for Bush

Up until recently, I was one of the many undecided voters. It was interesting to hear news stories and commentary about undecideds. The pundits wondered how we could still be choosing when the differences were so clear. They don't seem to understand what is going on in our heads.

The fact of the matter is that the candidates bellow about issues and sling accusations and none of us our listening. Recently, I complained how poorly I thought Kerry did in an interview on NPR. What we are looking for is not answers to the issues, because we find them too complex. What we are looking for is a leader who we can trust these issues with. We want to 'connect' with the candidates so we can trust them. The best part of the debates was Kerry and Bush complementing each other on their families.

So, unable to 'connect', I'm left making my choice based on facts of trustworthy leadership. Unfortunately for Bush, he has a track record to judge, and I don't particularity like it. He made a decision to invade Iraq that I trusted him to make. It may have been the right decision, but I am suspect of the reasons why.

The fact that he and Powell sound like they had satellite photos of WMD activity the way Kennedy had pictures of Cuba is upsetting now that there has been very little evidence of any threat at all. Instead, it seems that Saddam pushed him hard and he had to call the bluff. That's fine if he would admit it, but he won't. It appears that he has a chain of 'yes-men' who supported his decision with pseudo-facts and opinion. He would have been better to be like Marty McFly (in Back to the Future III) and just call him an asshole and ignore him.

And Bush failed to ignore why Saddam was such an asshole--it was the only way to keep Iraq in one piece. Now we have the threat of a real quagmire on our hands...and Bush refuses to see it as such.

(Would it have been a much better to spend the billions of dollars to help fight AIDS in Africa? Politically useless, with no real benefit for Americans, but money better spent, IMHO. )

So, based on past performance, I'm saying to President Bush "You're fired!" Or from a post at Closing the CRM Gap, that refers to the writings of Robert Heinlein:

There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.