Author: Dave J.

Robert Rosenthal at his blog Freaking Marketing posts a little rant titled: Why Most Business-to-Business Marketing Campaigns Are Uninspired Or Just Plain Awful.

So what’s he gotta say? The truth, pretty much. He uses B2C marketing as a foil to compare B2B marketing.

“B-to-B marketers view themselves differently — Ask the CEO of the soda company what business they’re in, and she’ll probably say, “We’re a marketing business that happens to sell sugared water.” Ask her counterpart in a software company the same question and he might say, “We’re an engineering firm that has to do marketing and advertising and all that sh*t.””

Here is the rest of the list:

• Marketing managers aren’t in charge of marketing
• Sales steals money from marketing
• Accountability is insufficient
• Not enough first-rate talent

You can head over and read his comments on each of these bullets.

The last one aught to get your attention: Not enough first-rate talent in B2B marketing? Okay, I’ll agree. But if you look at the rest of his list, you can see why.

I do want to add one thing:
B2B marketing is not a consumption/demand generation process. Engineers don’t buy my products because they are cool or fulfill some previously undiscovered need that only a good ad campaign can enlighten them to. They buy because they have a new requirement or a justified reason to improve what they have.

So, Robert is right that B2B marketing campaigns suck. He’s right that we are not the drivers of our businesses. But that isn’t where our focus is. There is a lot that B2B marketing does extremely well that B2C marketers don’t even understand.

I was just sitting at my desk opening my mail. There was a small envelope from Google.

Obviously a Christmas card. What would Google send? A reward for sending thousands of dollars their way and helping inflate the value of their stock?

Nope. Just a rather plain card with ‘Happy Holidays’ in a couple dozen languages. Yawn.

Then I turn to my PC and see an email waiting from Google.

“Adwords Service Level Enhancement”.

Seems I’ve qualified for human-voice support via a toll-free number.

It was interesting how the email was a reward that arrived just as the Christmas thank-you did. I may never use the toll-free assistance, but the offer is appreciated.

Thank you Google.

This week I am sharing some of my favorite software gizmos from my Web-marketing toolbox.

This time I’m going to pimp for a couple new gizmos I’ve recently learned of. They don’t have a spot in the toolbox yet, but they are fun to play with.

Kuler is an online tool from Adobe that lets you play with and share color combinations. For non-artists like myself who need to design things anyway, this may be handy to get a cool color palette. It is all flash and the site seems to run slow.

Linked-in is one of those web tools that is cool, but I haven’t found a purpose for it yet. If you sign up, you can link to me there if you know my last name. You’ll find 22 folks with the same name…but only one from Michigan. Once everyone is linked together, I’m not sure what is supposed to happen.

SalesGenius is nifty tool that tracks when prospects are opening mail and visiting your website. It’s focused on supporting salespeople, not marketers, so its functionality and reporting is more granular. Haven’t tried it, but it has a lot of potential if your sales process is very web-centric.

JetNumbers is a ‘Skype for the rest of us’ application that establishes a local number for you in other countries. Then they connect that number to any local number you want. Now you can get clients or salespeople around the world to easily call your home office. We’re going to test it out going from China to Michigan.

This week I am sharing some of my favorite software gizmos from my Web-marketing toolbox.

Today’s gizmo: FastStats by Mach5
Tasks: Analyze your website’s log files.
Cost: $100 or $200
Get it here: FastStats website (aff)

I’ve talked about FastStats here before, so let me explain instead why I still recommend it.

I still use FastStats (FS) despite adding Google Analytics (GA) last year. FS analyzes log files, whereas GS analyzes based on a script run each time one of your webpages is accessed. Log files give you additional data about the usage of your site, such as 404 errors, image downloads, raw referral info, and more. And because the results can be outputted into Excel (FS gold version), I can tinker with the data in a way GS makes difficult or impossible. The only problem is comparing data between the two is not helpful.

Sometimes the hand-saw (FS) is simply a better choice than the power-saw (GS).

(Disclosure: Any affiliate income this week will be redirected to one of my fav podcasts, Coverville. He has a BMA license for his music to pay for and I have a couple gig of his shows. I figure this way everyone wins, and hopefully I don’t look like a shill.)

This week I am sharing some of my favorite software gizmos from my Web-marketing toolbox.

Today’s gizmo: Free Monitor for Google, by Cleverstats
Tasks: Check your keyword ranking on Google
Cost: Free
Get it here: www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm

Checking how you rank on Google can be like checking the hot stock you just bought. But why actually go through the trouble of entering each of your keyword terms and finding where your rank…there is a better way.

Free Monitor lets you enter a number of different URLs, then keyword phrases that you want to check for that URL. Then press the search button and it checks all the keywords for you. Slick!

It gives you green arrows when your ranking improves and dreaded red arrows when you sink. In the right-most pane you can review the results for that keyword, in a condensed form, showing who is ahead or behind you. The only downside is that you can’t print-out the results…I use screen shots instead.

Just today I’ve run into some problems with Google giving results out via this tool. Cleverstats does recommend registering with Google for an API key (there is a menu item which takes you to Google’s API page), which then made the tool work (but not perfectly). I assume this is just temporary and still heartily recommend this program.

But just like checking a hot stock (or other behaviors), don’t get carried away. I usually check just once a month.

Just got a call from a new keyword marketing service called Realfrases.

(Well that’s not their real name, but I don’t want to attract their attention just yet, because Googling their actual name generates just six results. If you substitute a ‘ph’ for the ‘f’, you’ll find their website.)

1. The service:
They are offering a IE7 plug-in that creates a peek-a-boo of your webpage on top of whatever search engine their users are using. The idea is that users will find this ‘preview’ of your website valuable and then you beat out the actual search results below. No idea how they are going to get their tool installed on so many browsers. The plug-in on their site is offered as an .exe, not a true IE plug-in.

2. The pitch:
Because their tools shows only one website, its first come, first served…at around $1-2K per search term for one year. Cash upfront, according to their contract. Their website is skimpy. The person I spoke to was promising a specific number of views per month.

The sales pitch and lack of supporting information smacks of other shady SEM services I have been approached about before. Regardless, there are too many questions to be taking a risk on this one.

This week I am sharing some of my favorite software gizmos from my Web-marketing toolbox.

Today’s gizmo: Irfanview
Tasks: Image viewing, printing, adjusting
Cost: Free
Get it here: www.irfanview.com

Do you hate the clunky software that came with your digital camera? Do you need to resize 34M tif files from your photographer, but hate waiting for Photoshop to load? (Or just the price of Photoshop?)

I use Irfanview every day. It opens nearly every image file type there is, and quickly. I use it as my default image-viewer. Then if I want to modify the image, the tools are right there.

Part of the secret of any software, but especially a single-task software, is knowing exactly what it can do and accessing it fast. Here is my primer for Irfanview.

(First, be sure to set ‘view>display options>Only fit large images to window’. Miss this and you will be frustrated with what you see on your screen.)

• Navigating between pictures in a folder: space & backspace…slick!
• Resizing images: ctrl-R to get a window of choices
• Adjusting color/brightness: shft-G (I use the gamma slide bar instead of brightness)
• Saving to same folder: ctrl-S (saves to folder you opened image from)
• Saving to different folder: “S” (helpful when you want your modified pics to go elsewhere)
• Printing: ctrl-P of course, but this is such an nice feature…all the options you’d want for printing the image are right there on one window, including a preview.
• Batch editing: “B”. Be sure to check out the ‘advanced’ button for resizing options.

Yes, I still have a couple 16 oz. hammers in my toolbox (Fireworks, Photoshop), but this 12 oz. hammer is the one that goes on my toolbelt.