Your customers are hungry for content, is your website leaving them starved for information?
Eighty-six percent of business purchases are narrowed down to three vendors BEFORE speaking to any potential solutions providers. How? The answer is the web, and if your website isn’t providing dynamic and compelling content, chances are you will not be on the short list.
A poorly constructed website can kill the deal before your sales team ever knew there was an opportunity. It is not the lack of flash animation or product information. Although a website’s curb appeal is important, your obstacle may be in the “nuts and bolts” of your website.
Powerful Content. Presentation Counts. Positioning Matters.
Become an expert on the subject of your website and present it to the web in a unique fashion that has not been done before or at least not too many times before.
Hyperlinks & Social Media: The web is a medium built around the concept of hyper linking. Companies who have successfully built valuable resource websites care a lot about the quality of their user’s experience. If your website offers great complimentary resources, these companies will want to link to it. In turn, link to and leverage social media sites for the purpose of promoting your business. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great starting points for building your social media network.
Presentation and Positioning: Deliver compelling content, always making the first few seconds count. Your readers and potential linkers will get bored with your content if you can’t immediately grab and maintain their attention. Creating a “buzz” about your company is essential and to do so you need to actively push your new content out into the world at large. It’s smart to have a section of your website loaded with additional content related to the pieces you post on other sites. An interested reader can then navigate to your website and see more.
Case Studies & Whitepapers – Trends and Statistics: In a report titled “Eccolo Media 2009 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report”, statistics are shown to detail how extensively “original” content influences its audience.
The Take-Away
The content needs to be professionally written and should be available online and also in print. The reward for this effort is that the web population will pass your content around and make purchasing decisions based on the information readily available to them.
The condition called Learned Helplessness, was discovered and popularized by psychologist Martin Seligman. He found that when he placed dogs into an inescapable environment and administered electric shocks the dog eventually stopped trying to escape. If the dog was placed into an environment where it could escape and given shocks it would still not try to escape. It learned to give-up. This discovery has had a major impact on human psychology.
This issue stalks the lives of marketing and marketing communications managers. In most instances they have been placed into an environment where they have been taught it is futile to prove the ROI for lead generating activities. After time passes they quit trying to prove an ROI and suffer the consequences of Learned Marketing Helplessness.
Even, unfortunately, when they change jobs and have full access to prove the ROI for lead generation, because of their “Learned Marketing Helplessness”, they don’t try to escape the confines of their past. They are afraid that if they try to prove the value of their programs, someone will shock them.
Because they will not try to prove the ROI for lead generating tactics, they spend their company’s precious assets on a crap-shoot of what works and what doesn’t with nary a look to see what created sales results.
Learned Marketing Helplessness Can be Broken
As a speaker at workshops and seminars, and in my articles and books, I focus on the subject of Marketing ROI. In most instances I am looking into the faces of marketing people who are so beaten down and restricted that they listen with hope, but have no stomach for escape.
After these events, attendees will come to the podium and ask, “Is it really true, can I prove the ROI for lead generation and will people listen?” I tell them, “You must stop asking for permission to do your job.” They must use the CRM (and marketing automation) systems for the primary task for which it was invented and prove that:
“Inquiries turn into leads and leads turn into sales in a predictable manner.”
It is easier than they think, I say to them, but first they must believe it is possible. With belief will come a determination to never again be confined by small thinking management.
Now that we know the cause for an aversion to proving marketing’s ROI, I challenge marketing management to break the bonds of Learned Marketing Helplessness and demonstrate the ROI for a tactic or program. For instance, pick a trade show or a direct marketing campaign to measure. When you prove the ROI for the first program you will be free forever from the confines of the Learned Marketing Helpless.
Six Steps to Break the Learned Marketing Helplessness Cycle!
1. Learn how to predict the number of inquiries needed to make quota for your sales channel (a simple formula). Quota $/Average Sales Price/45%/Market Share % = Inquiries 45% equals the number of buyers in a group of inquiries.
2. Create programs to support your own marketing “quota” for inquiries and qualified leads.
3. Ensure that sales is following up and reporting on 100% of the inquiries you give them.
4. Use the CRM system for one of its primary intended purposes: Proving the ROI for marketing expenditures. Report the results: The good, bad and the ugly.
5. Adjust your investment. “Marketing managers must spend money on things that work and let their competitors spend money on everything else.”
6. Repeat the cycle: Predict, create programs, follow-up 100%, use the CRM system ROI capabilities, adjust spending, and report the results.
What do you think? Is it time that marketing management breaks the bonds of Learned Marketing Helplessness?
Permalink: blog.salesleadmgmtassn.com/2010/01/25/are-marketing-managers-victims-of-learned-helplessness.aspx
The dead horse to beat is obviously the state of the economy. The usual budget cuts, spending scrutiny and department downsizing has followed suit but some organizations have found an interesting new approach in lieu of these other less attractive quick fixes. Spending. Not new spending, but instead a budget reallocation toward value. This is not a new or even a novel concept. In fact, we all like to believe we are purchasing value with every marketing dollar spent – it’s just proving it that often alludes us. Besides, what doesn’t have a quantifiable ROI is just branding, right? Right?
“Grassroots” marketing is rooted in a great concept in fact its the concept driving this paper, immediate, quantifiable value. It used to be that word-of-mouth, networking and handshake advertising was a great way to earn business and everyone could see it working. The problem is, most of us don’t interact face-to-face a much as we used to. We research our purchases online, we collaborate with friends, we network and share content through social networking, blogs and twitter. The handshake has been replaced by the friend request and our physical and digital selves no longer have a point of divergence. How then can marketers reach their audience with a message that doesn’t translate to an interactive model – the answer is “they can’t.”
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Marketing 2.0 - Social Media
Today, marketers have an array of radically new Web 2.0-based techniques at their disposal: viral marketing, social networking, virtual worlds, widgets, Web communities, blogs, podcasts, and next-generation search, to name just a few. New channels to reach buyer arise almost at a daily pace. Unfortunately, the time to evaluate each new media does not arrive with the same frequency or with the same amount of enthusiasm. This begs the question, how can we accurately respond to Marketing 2.0 when most marketers and executives are still having trouble measuring the success of the first iteration of marketing spends.
To measure ROI, marketers must follow the lead past conversion, into the real area of importance in that lovely acronym, revenue. We can argue all day about when revenue begins, but I think most would agree that it becomes most visible within that long favorite bullpen of activity, the sales floor. Where blood is shed, where tears are drawn, where leads go to die, sales is an area of accountability. Therefore, it’s all the more fitting that we look to sales to provide a closed loop look into our marketing spends. The key to this delicate equation is of course to kabosh the biggest case of finger pointing in the history of finger-pointing games. Lead quality.
For all of the new gadgets at our disposal, how many have been truly evaluated in terms of good-ol fashioned revenue production. In this economy, its no longer a question asked in front of water-coolers, it happens in board rooms, it’s beaten to death in budget meetings, it happens right before you’re asked to turn in your key card.
Track the Total Lead Lifecycle
The only way to truly leverage the latest marketing technologies is to build upon proven platform which allows you to gain visibility beyond the marketing machine and into the sales pipeline and ultimately the corporate books. True lead management has the benefit of extending beyond the marketing cycle simply because that’s certainly not where the prospect ends. By coupling the marketing platform with sales CRM tools the visibility of both business units increases exponentially in terms of the ability to provide feedback.
The Same Old Song
By never loosing sight of the result through the use of MaaS Impact or other Marketing Automation tools marketers can ensure that to right to leverage new technologies is never looked upon as a frivolous experiment by those who control the purse strings. Justification for Marketing 2.0 begins with message, consistency and timing but ends with the sales cycle and that good old fashioned yardstick of profit.
Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) allows organizations with limited budget and resources to leverage infrastructure in the cloud. Cloud Impact combines traditional marketing services like asset design and campaign strategy with non-traditional outlets like Marketing Automation, MaaS Imapct allows your business to implement high level marketing efforts with no additional (full-time employee) FTE expenses. By adding value where marketing technology providers typically stumble, MaaS Impact will have you generating more leads, nurturing sales and driving more revenue with record setting speed-to-market.
February 10th, 2010 