Lessons from the Obama Campaign

Just heard a great presentation given by David Plouffe, Obama's Campaign Manager at the Digital Marketing World virtual conference. Here are the keys to success based on his presentation:

1. Keep a consistent message
2. Repeat the message
3. Reach out to people through multiple channels (web, e-mail, text, twitter, etc.)
4. Use “real people” (i.e. not your standard company spokespeople) to deliver your message
5. Make information available: there is no such thing as too much information
6. Don’t be afraid to innovate
7. Measure everything you can

Simple, well-known, but it works!

Marketing in a Downturn

The first thing that comes to mind when you think about marketing during an economic downturn is why bother. Nobody buys anyways, so why do we need any marketing?

On a second thought, is this really the case?

We now know that the US has been in a recession since the end of 2007. Does it mean that nobody bought anything? Not really. From the small sample of software companies I am aware of, most have done pretty well. Even now that the recession word is out, companies are still closing a good amount of 2008 business. And this holds even in market segments that are making headlines littered with words such as “crisis”, “losses”, “slumping”, and their synonyms.

So while I agree that we all have to be cautious with our spending as we plan for 2009, we also have to be careful not to bring about our own demise by shutting down our marketing presence.

So what should a software marketer do?

First order of business is to use this opportunity to become more efficient and effective in your marketing operations. Marketing is one area where you don’t necessarily get what you pay for. You can pay a lot of money for things that don’t get you much, and you can do many things that cost very little yet have a huge impact.

For years, advertising and tradeshows have been my two poster children for ineffective marketing. Guess what? They still are, because companies are still spending too much money on them.

Take tradeshows for example. The cost of exhibiting in a tradeshow keeps going up, especially when you consider the travel costs involved. All this while the returns keep going down, as buyers are cutting back on their own travel expenses.

At the same time, there are many more inexpensive ways to reach buyers at our disposal today than ever before.

There are many things you can do to make sure you get the most out of your marketing budget, but if I had to pick my top three “getting ready for 2009” initiatives, they would be the following:

1. Fine-tune your website

Your website is the key to marketing effectiveness. You want to make sure that your message is not only crystal clear but also tuned to the concerns of your buyers given the current economic climate (although you don’t want to overreact to it).

Speaking of your website, you can spend a lot of money on fancy search engine optimization (SEO), but you can do some pretty amazing things with a low cost SEO effort that will drive more relevant traffic to your website.


2. Communicate often

Use your e-mail list to continue communicating with your market. Make sure you deliver value in your messages. This is something that is always true, but even more important when many are not necessarily in the mood for buying right now. Use (and reuse) educational material to keep the conversation alive and maintain top-of-mind awareness so buyers turn to you when budgets free up (and they will!)


3. Use “old” and “new” media to spread the word

PR is no longer about reaching the press. It is also no longer reserved just for “big news.” You can use your PR to bypass the traditional media and reach your buyers directly, and you can do it with very high frequency at extremely low cost (see a good example). In addition, you can use “old” media like blogs and “new” ones like twitter to reach your buyers through multiple opt-in vehicles and communicate your messages even more frequently.

But so far we only discussed defense. Now let’s move to offense.

How about taking advantage of this downturn to gain ground on your competition? If you can maintain or even increase your market presence, you may be able to move ahead of competitors that are cutting back and are not as effective as you are with their marketing spend. This may be a good time for competitive upgrades and other offers directed at the competition’s soft belly. And remember: they can do the same to you if you cut back too much or if you don’t make the most out of your marketing budget.

Post a comment and let me know how you are handling your 2009 marketing budget. And check out our no-risk offer to help you fine-tune your 2009 marketing budget.

Starting the Year with a Bang

Conventional wisdom says that as far as marketing activities go, the first quarter is a big ho-hum. January is typically eerily quiet, as the marketing department struggles to recover from last year’s holiday parties and finalize the new year’s budget and work plans. This is also how January looked in past years at Cimatron Technologies, Inc. (CTI).

Does it have to be this way? CTI’s Director of Marketing Lisa Sterling was determined to prove the contrary.

It all started back in 2006, when Lisa and Sam Golan, CTI’s President and CEO, set to outline the 2007 marketing plan. Over the past couple of years, CTI has developed a respectable portfolio of marketing activities that generated satisfactory results. Even the salespeople were hardly complaining about the lack or quality of leads (can you believe?!). But rather than just duplicating last year’s plan with some minor modification, Sam has challenged Lisa to raise the bar for 2007.

The ingredients of the plan Lisa and Sam came up with remained similar to what has proven to be a winning formula: direct marketing activities focused on the company’s target customers, and emphasis on activities that deliver educational value to the audience. The difference was the frequency and reach in which they would execute the program: they decided to take the activities that have been successful so far and turn them from one-off campaigns into a systematic year-long program that would significantly increase the frequency and reach to new prospects as well as the existing customer base.

Here is what Lisa and CTI were able to accomplish during the first month of 2007:

• CTI has been publishing a newsletter focused on topics specific to the tooling industry, aptly titled Tooling Times. The newsletter has been published on schedule each and every month for over three years, and this January was no different when issue number 39 hit the inboxes of over 4,500 subscribers (up from less than 1,000 three years ago).
• A little over a year ago, CTI has started publishing a second newsletter called Tooling Tips, with technical information directed at product users. The newsletter has been a great success, with open rates topping the 40% mark. For 2007, Lisa has decided to further leverage this success and launch a monthly Tooling Tips webinar. Needless to say, the first webinar was conducted in January…
• CTI has been conducting solution-focused webinars for a number of years, but these have been sporadic in nature as Lisa often struggled to line-up the resources required to support these events. While drawing the 2007 plan, Sam has committed the application engineering resources required to support two solution webinars each month. The first two were successfully conducted in January.
• To top it all of, CTI ended the quarter with a webinar hosted by one of the industry premier publications. The webinar featured a CTI customer that described the adoption of Lean Manufacturing practices and how Cimatron’s products support the Lean processes. The webinar attracted over 600 registrations, with over 300 attending the live event.

That’s the way to start a new year!

If reading this story makes you envy of CTI’s vast marketing resource, I should probably mention that Lisa serves as a one-person marketing department. And if you thought that Lisa was busy this past month, I should complete the picture by adding that all these activities took place in parallel to the many other “routine” tasks that occupy Lisa on a day-to-day basis, including two new press releases, tradeshow preparations, ongoing sales support, and none less than the implementation of a new CRM… and just in case you were wondering, the February checklist looks no less impressive!

How has your 2007 started? If you have a story to share, I’d love to get your comment!

Top 13 Marketing Budget Wastes—and How to Avoid Them

This article was recently published in MarketingProfs.com.

Once again, it is that time of year... when marketing departments are busily preparing next year's budget. As we all know, chances are you won't be able to get everything you're asking for. But, believe it or not, this may actually be a good thing.

Take it as an opportunity to re-evaluate what you have been doing and how you have been investing your marketing dollars. There is always a way to do more with less.

To help you get started, here are some common marketing budget drainers to avoid.

Marketing Waste No. 1: Spending money to reach the wrong people

The biggest waste in marketing is spending money on activities that reach the wrong audience. This is especially an issue for B2B companies that have a limited target market (how many Global 2000 companies are there?). Advertising and large tradeshows tend to be the biggest budget items, yet much of the audience is often off target. You will get much higher return for your marketing dollars by going directly to the companies and individuals that can purchase your product.

Building a database of your target market prospects is not an overnight proposition, but it will be the best marketing investment you've ever made. See more about it in "Reverse-Engineer Your Marketing."

Marketing Waste No. 2: Generating leads that Sales doesn't want

The second-largest waste is generating leads that Sales will never follow up on. It is way too common to hear Marketing complain that Sales doesn't follow up on its leads, while Sales complains that Marketing leads are a waste of time. Both have to agree on what constitutes a good lead, and both sides have to be accountable for their share of the equation: Marketing for generating "good" leads, Sales for following up on them.

It's the CEO's job to make sure that Marketing and Sales are in synch, and lead follow-up is where the rubber meets the road.

Marketing Waste No. 3: Failing to follow up on leads

Invest in lead-development personnel. Some call them Inside Sales, others call them Telemarketing, but both fail to describe the role that will give you the most for your money. The lead-development function is the guardian of the agreement between Marketing and Sales. Its role is to make sure that every good lead generated by Marketing is passed to Sales, and save Sales from wasting time chasing leads that are not a good fit for the company.

Marketing Waste No. 4: Killing the conversation

Provide Sales with follow-up tools and templates. Even when Sales is willing to follow up on the leads it gets, the conversation often dies once the lead is handed over to the salesperson. The easiest thing for salespersons to do is copy an old email or use the same opening sentence they always use when calling on a prospect. This is like starting all over with a new pickup line rather than continuing the conversation that has already begun.

So don't leave it to chance: If you're putting together a campaign, make sure you provide Sales with the follow-up scripts and email templates they can use when the leads start coming their way.

Marketing Waste No. 5: Overemphasizing new leads

While Sales might dismiss some leads as "old," those are actually the best leads you can give them. Software buyers require multiple touches before they are ready to engage in a serious sales conversation, so your best chance to make a sale is to someone who has already been in touch with your company.

If you continue pursuing only new leads, you will soon find yourself out of companies to go after, and even sooner out of budget.

Marketing Waste No. 6: Targeting new leads with late-stage offers

While lead nurturing is crucial, you still need to acquire new leads that have not heard from your company yet. Since you have to buy access to these leads (in the form of list rental, newsletter sponsorships, tradeshow booth, etc.), lead acquisition is expensive.

Good lead-acquisition activities are those that appeal to a broad audience of early-stage prospects, such as whitepapers and webinars that are focused on industry issues, not on your product.

Marketing Waste No. 7: Direct mail and rental lists

Email promotions to your permission-based list will usually generate response rates that are 5-10 times higher than email to rental lists and 10-15 times higher than direct mail, at a fraction of the cost. As a result, cost per response from your email list can be over a hundred times lower than for any other method. In addition, turnaround time for email promotions is shorter, which means you can communicate in a more timely fashion.

A good permission-based email list is your company's biggest marketing asset and your best lead-nurturing vehicle. At the same time, if your email is not permission-based, you run the risk of breaking the law and alienating your audience.

Marketing Waste No. 8: Failing to use your permission-based list

You don't want to inundate your prospects with too much communication, but most software companies fail to communicate enough. Newsletters and blogs are great vehicles to keep the communication flowing.

Your customers are eager for knowledge; so, as long as you keep your content relevant to your audience and tone down the sales pitch, most of them will welcome your emails. For those who don't, offer ways to opt out of specific items so they don't have to remove themselves entirely from your list.

Marketing Waste No. 9: Failing to get the most out of your email marketing

A well-designed message (not necessarily a pretty one) can increase response to your emails by up to 50%! That's a huge difference in the return on your marketing dollars.

There is no magic formula for a good email message. To make sure your message is well designed, you have to test every element of the message—from the subject line to the placement of the links and the call to action.

Marketing Waste No. 10: In-person seminars

Webinars are much more effective than in-person seminars. They cost less—and you can draw a national and even an international audience to a single event. The typical seminar will draw 25-50 people, but it is not uncommon for a webinar to draw hundreds.

A webinar can also be easily recorded for future use as an on-demand presentation, extending the lifespan of the event months or even years beyond the initial take and generating up to twice the responses of the live broadcast.

Marketing Waste No. 11: Losing people on your Web site

All roads lead to your Web site. Any serious prospect will be looking at your Web site multiple times throughout the interaction with your company—before, during, and after the purchase decision.

The first thing you need to make sure is that your Web site content is of interest to your prospects. The second thing is to have calls to action that will get your Web site visitors to engage—view a webinar, download a whitepaper, fill out a survey.

Last, you need to make sure that you can track these interactions. With this information in hand, you can fine-tune your follow up to match your prospects' interests and avoid wasting valuable marketing and sales resources.

Marketing Waste No. 12: Failing to double (and triple) dip

Creating new content is often the bottleneck to new marketing initiatives. Once you have created some good content that will engage your customers, don't let it go to waste. Your prospects process information in different ways, so you can take the same content and repurpose it in multiple ways.

For example, turn your webinar into an article, post it in your newsletter and blog, pitch it as a PR placement, or offer it as a podcast.

Marketing Waste No. 13: Not knowing what you get for your money

Every marketing activity should be attached to a measurable goal. If it's not, you probably shouldn't be doing it. A measurable goal could be number of leads, number of new contacts, number of meetings, opportunities, deals, and all the way to revenue dollars. See more about it in "How to Measure Your Marketing" and "Measuring Marketing ROI—How Low Can You Go?"

The key to marketing optimization is continually weeding out the budget drainers while seeking new ways to deliver greater market impact at lower cost. If you're looking to do more with less, you must be willing to embrace change. As the saying goes, "You cannot continue doing the same things and expect different results."

Three Approaches to Your 2006 Marketing Plan

With the start of the New Year, marketing executives are busy crafting new plans. The easy way out is to copy last year’s plan, move some dates around, and call it a day. However, this approach will not work if you operate in a dynamic environment, as most software companies do.

Here are three approaches you can use to come up with new and improved marketing initiatives for your 2006 plan:

1. Analyze and Repeat Success

A clear-cut strategy for generating more leads is to do more of what you have already been doing. This does not necessarily mean that you have to spend more money. By analyzing the results of your past activities, you can focus on those that worked best and fine tune your marketing mix moving forward.

There are three things to keep in mind for this strategy to be successful:

• Define your metrics to reflect your marketing goals. Whether your main objective is to generate more leads, achieve the lowest cost per qualified response, or something else altogether, use the corresponding metrics to measure the success of your past marketing activities and the return on your investment.
  
• Focus on measurable activities. The more measurable activities you have in your marketing mix, the better you can optimize your results based on your previous track record. E-mail and web-based marketing vehicles provide you with almost immediate feedback, allowing you to alter the message, design, or concept to maximize the results of every campaign.
  
• Use measurable tools. Make sure your e-mail tools, website infrastructure, and campaign management systems provide easy-to-use tracking of click-through and response rates that are granular enough to decipher the most beneficial sources for success, such as a specific list or message.

For more information on measurements and marketing metrics, you may be interested in reading Marketing by the Numbers and How Low Can You Go.


2. Find a Shortcut

If the first strategy for leveraging past success utilizes quantitative metrics, a second strategy applies a more qualitative approach. The idea is to find out what makes your customers tick and emphasize the factors that made them buy from you in the past in order to increase your success moving forward.

The first step is to establish a profile of those who became your customers in the past year or two: Do they come from a certain industry or segment? Are the companies of a certain size? Who were you competing against? Most importantly, what were the reasons they chose your solution over the competition?

Once you uncover some common threads, you can incorporate them into your marketing mix. Use the reasons people chose your solution to fine tune your messages. If your message resonates better with specific vertical markets, focus on these verticals. If you have more success against a certain competitor, go after their customers and expose their weaknesses.

Your customers will be happy to share this information with you, but listening to your customers requires a proactive approach. Strangely enough, while many companies claim to be "customer-driven", very few use this strategy-- all the more reason why you should!


3. Become a Knowledge Beacon

Many industries still lack efficient media for knowledge exchange. This vacuum is your opportunity to become the facilitator of such a community – a place to share knowledge with industry peers. In doing so, you position your company as the “go to” place for industry knowledge. This is probably the most effective form of branding you can do.

Here are three examples of knowledge-based communication vehicles that you can employ, even with the limited resources of a small company:

Best Practices Survey
Putting together a benchmark survey allows you to provide the industry with useful, relevant, and current information. At the same time, it gives you insight into market needs, industry challenges, current practices, and future plans. As a valuable byproduct, it can also generate new leads, which can be easily qualified by their responses to certain survey questions.

A web-based survey requires little effort and cost, and it can be used in multiple ways. You can use it in e-mail campaigns, banner advertising, and at tradeshows. See an example of such a survey, the results, and the subsequent publicity.

Newsletter
Publishing an industry-focused newsletter is an easy way to start gathering an audience for your knowledge-based communication. A company that started a newsletter two years ago has since seen its subscription list grow 200%. The newsletter has also helped the company position itself as an industry thought-leader. Stories published in the newsletter have generated interest from industry publications and led to ten articles published in the past year—all with no PR agency, no PR budget, and little to no advertising.

Blog
Blogs provide a new channel for customer interaction. They allow executives and other employees to communicate directly with customers without the confines of PR formalities (although I am not sure how long this freedom will prevail). You can turn your blog from a monolog into a dialogue by inviting comments and responses from your customers. Companies such as Microsoft and Sun have hundreds of such blogs, but even smaller companies are starting to experiment. Ex Libris, for example, started a blog by getting employees involved as a grassroots movement, with the hope that it will eventually take off to engage its customer community.

For your knowledge-based marketing to be successful, it has to be credible, so keep your sales pitch out. If the effort to create the content seems daunting, it doesn’t have to be. There are many creative ways to reuse existing content and generate new material with a reasonable amount of effort.

For example, you can take a web seminar and turn it into an article to be published on your website, newsletter, or in an industry publication. Since your customers have different preferences of how they like to process information, reformatting and repackaging the material may generate new interest. One company that tested this concept sent an e-mail campaign to their house list, announcing a collection of recent webinar recordings. Since no new content was created, it took little time and virtually no cost. By merely remarketing their existing content, the campaign generated 45 “free” new leads.



These three strategies are not mutually exclusive, and I am also sure they are not the only strategies you can apply. Post a comment or drop me an e-mail and let me know what you’re doing in 2006.