LinkedIn as a Guerilla Marketing Tool

Do you have a LinkedIn profile? If you don't, you may be missing one of the best and most targeted methods for building awareness for your business. Here are just a few ways small tech firms can use LinkedIn to marketing advantage. Some might take this as a shameless pitch for LinkedIn. I promise you there is not affiliation here - but I am a big fan of this "self-sustaining rolodex."

1. If you are looking to build your profile as an industry expert, build out and enhance your profile to the fullest extent, fleshing out content with links to blog postings and other thought leadership tools. Change it frequently and adapt the content to enhance and refresh it. Try googling on your own name - if you are building out your profile sufficiently you'll find your linkedin infomration will be right up there at the top.

2. Seeking to build relationships or prospect with buyers in a specific sector? Explore LinkedIn Groups. There are any number of targeted groups devoted to all forms of subject matter - joining these groups will give you visibility into other LinkedIn members with shared interest. The most challenging part of prospecting is finding people with specific and targeted interest in your products and services - LinkedIn groups can help point you to these individuals.

3. Do the upgrade - InMail, an upgraded form of LinkedIn gives you the ability to step outside of your "network" and reach members with whom you have no contact today. Great prospecting tool. But remember, lead with value - if you are cold calling (or cold emailing) the message should be about solving a problem -- not a blatant sales pitch.

4. Have a compelling article or whitepaper you think is of value to this community? Try posting a link to the piece to a relevant group for a bit of guerilla lead generation. One of my clients used this approach quite recently and drove hundreds of interested people back to their site and to their new paper.

5. Follow and respond to the discussion threads. Remember you are an expert in your field. Many of these groups have active discussion threads where members actively talk about their challenges and solicit answers. Providing insightful and rich responses will position you as a thought leader and your firm as a go-to expert in the industry.

Happy New Year All!

Getting Exposure for Your Company - PR Basics

• Exposure for your company and products in the media is a highly credible and lower cost form of marketing. A feature article referencing one of your customers, a product review, or a news coverage on your new product release help to build “buzz” about your brand name and can be transformed into highly effective tools for your sales force. In this blog posting, I’d like to impart some of the knowledge I’ve acquired over my 15+ years as a software marketing executive and closet PR pitchster.
  
  Press releases and news coverage
  
  Journalists receive a massive volume of press releases each day from companies seeking coverage for themselves or their products. There are some releases that will elicit coverage – the vast majority will fall on deaf ears – but still have value (more on this a bit later). Here are some general rule of thumb pieces of advice about press releases:

• If your press release is centered on a new product release, think hard about the news angle – what is fresh, different, a first for the market – this might be the release that catches a news editor’s attention. But even with a news angle, you need to package up your story to make it very easy for the editor – they are just too busy to chase down the details. Reach out and schedule briefings with key news editors at least a week in advance of issuing the release and offer them a draft version. Understand who you are targeting and what they are writing about and make sure you align. Have customers they can talk to (some product editors will insist on this before they will accept a briefing with you on your news), as well as industry analysts who will provide comment, screenshots of your product and if possible industry data points and research that can be wrapped into the story.
• If your release isn’t “picked up” by an editor, don’t despair. Inclusion of stock trading symbols if you are a public company will allow your release to be picked up by online vehicles such as Yahoo Finance so the ‘buzz’ reaches investors. Press release frequency also contributes to natural search engine optimization – helping your company to rise in the rankings on Google, MSN, Yahoo and other search engines. High rankings tend to put you at the top of a prospect’s search list so this is a very good thing.
• And finally, don't annoy editors by calling and asking them if they got the release. That'll guarantee you end up in Bin13.
  
  Feature article coverage
  
  Feature articles are lengthier stories that investigate a topic in depth, and may run multiple pages in a magazine or online. By monitoring editorial calendars of target publications you can get a general sense of topics the editor wishes to cover. The trick is then to develop a pitch for that story that offers the editor a fresh angle, or all the ingredients (customers, analyst research, access to an executive for an interview etc) to help figure you prominently in the story. Keep in mind this is not about you. Even the very best pitch and all the ingredients in the world do not guarantee you inclusion. You have to serve the editor better than any other contender. And feature stories – particularly in technology media will focus on the end user, not the vendor. So your customer will receive the exposure, and your technology hopefully is mentioned as the solution to a specific business challenge. R
  
  Submitted articles
  
  Technology and vertical industry publications are often very lean, have a small editorial staff, and depend freelancers for story writing, and even for conducting product reviews. By checking the editorial mast head online, you can often quickly determine if a publication is open to editorial submissions, and if this is the case, this offers you an opportunity to contribute a full article to that publication under a by-line of someone in your organization (CEO, VP Product Strategy etc). Once again, you develop a “pitch” to the editor for a story. The angle and subject matter must be topical, informative, and not a commercial for your company or technology. The exposure for you comes through the byline, and the thought leadership.
  
  Product reviews
  
  In the good old days (gee about ten years ago) most of the technology magazines employed a full staff, and maintained a large lab to perform testing on software products and hardware devices. They still do exist, but more often than not, your product review will be performed by a consultant outside of the publication who has offered to be a freelance ‘reviewer’. If you decide to pursue product reviews for your technology here are some words of advice. First, think about developing a reviewer’s guide, to help bring the reviewer up to speed quickly on your technology. This should outline the positioning for the product, list key features and functionality, offer installation and implementation instructions and contact points. I used to go one further step with my reviews as our product was quite technical and assign a dedicated support rep to the reviewer to assist with any necessary troubleshooting. Also if the reviewer is willing, coordinate a call with the product manager before the review begins to go through the reviewers guide and deal with questions up front.
  
  And a final word on targeting your message and plain old customer service
  
  Journalists are crazy busy people, with email in boxes bulging with press releases and phones ringing off the hook. First and foremost, invest in some serious targeting of your message. Do your homework. Has the journalist written on this subject before? How recently? How do they prefer to be contacted? Make sure your information is aligned to the and their publication’s focus. Think rifle shot, not carpet bombing. Next, invest in building a relationship. Not easy to do in a virtual world, but when given a opportunity for story participation over deliver on customer service. Have all the ingredients at hand before you reach out and be ready to stand and deliver. Go the extra mile, make the reporter’s life easy and you’ll become a valued source for future writing efforts.

Focus. Focus. Focus

I have been thinking and talking a lot about bowling alleys lately. And I’m not talking about ten pin and funny looking shoes, but rather the marketing and sales strategy set out in Geoffrey Moore’s book, Inside the Tornado. Moore’s theory is in my mind, one of the most compelling marketing strategies I have seen for small companies or start ups with limited resources, and I fully grant to him all the credit here for this thinking. Many of the clients I work with today are in these strata of development, and I often find myself coming back to Moore’s theories and recommending to my clients these three words – focus, focus, focus.

With great apologies to Mr. Moore, let me summarize in my own words my understanding of a bowling alley (or niche marketing strategy):

Take inventory of your customer successes and double down where you have had success. This requires (shock and awe!) listening to your customers (easy peasy – bet your competitors aren’t doing it). Interview them. Understand their business, their industry, their regulatory environment. Get a handle on the reasons they began looking for products like yours in the first place. Intelligent niche marketing is not about feature function wars, but about understanding the customer’s problem and uniquely solving it. This is the fodder for your marketing efforts and fuel for your sales team. Then look for prospects of similar profiles and show them you’ve done it before and how.

Position your product or service (my background is technology so I will use that frame of reference) as a unique solution to a business problem. This requires you to have a sound understanding of the challenges in a particular market segment, understand the consequences (financial, reputational or otherwise) of failure, and position your offering as something unique and better than your competitors. In my last company we had great success positioning our technology as a remedy for Sarbanes Oxley compliance. We took the time to understand the pain IT staff were experiencing in meeting SOX compliance, the regulatory requirements and kinds of IT controls necessary to meet COBIT standards, and then mapped the capabilities of our software as a remedy to this problem. We also understood the consequences of non-compliance. This background knowledge + positioning drove a lot of business to our door.

Aim your focus and messaging on a distinct market niche – in Moore’s words – a beach head segment. This might be a type of buyer – for instance IT operations groups, or a vertical market – financial services, or better yet, a combination of the two. In the example cited above, we learned all we could about the IT organization and the influencers surrounding SOX compliance. This led us to build messaging and positioning for CFOs, CEOs and CIOS as well as IT auditors, external audit firms, IT control advisors. We also leveraged our own CFO as a credible thought leader on this topic.

Play where you have experience. I see too many companies chase a segment because they think they can solve a problem there – or worse, spread themselves too thin trying to position themselves too broadly. Customer experience and reference accounts are absolutely critical in executing a bowling alley strategy. Enterprise buyers of software systems – especially IT shops -- tend to be pragmatic in their decision making and somewhere in the buying cycle they will want to speak to references. By focusing on a particular segment, you and your sales guys are given the opportunity to deeply understand the challenges and pressures of that sector. This allows your sales teams to lead a deep discovery with their prospects uncovering hidden business challenges beneath the surface. And finally focus on a particular niche is fertile soil for (the nirvana of marketing in my humble opinion) word of mouth marketing as happy users of your product migrate between companies, attend local networking meetings and generally talk amongst themselves. Can you hear the other bowling pins falling?

Critical mass has a fly wheel effect. You have established your company as a thought leader in a niche segment. And you have built up a solid base of customers and reference accounts. This in itself will create a gravitational force that will bring prospects to your door.

Don’t think this is a forever thing, or misunderstand this means you are only a vertical play. Nice marketing is about focus. It is about acquiring deep understanding and the development of expertise to enable true enterprise solution selling. It does not mean you cannot opportunistically sell into other segments or refuse business. It’s just about turning up the volume in one particular area. It’s about solving a clear and present problem that is acute in that nice better than your competitors. And it’s about building that reference arsenal and knowledge that drives leadership in a segment.

Going for the Money Shot – Leveraging e-Marketing to Drive Leads to Your Sales Person’s Doorstep

In my mind, one of the most effective mechanisms for lead generation today is the area of online, or e-marketing. Yet I’m consistently surprised by the number of companies who stick only to traditional marketing methods such as tradeshows and print advertising to attract and build the prospect funnel.

I would like in this blog to explore the field of e-marketing and discuss some of the methods I and my team have used successfully over time to drive and sustain successful lead generation activity.

There are a number of tactics one can leverage when engaging in e-marketing:

Banner Advertising

Probably the most familiar tactic, banner advertising allows you to both brand and engage in active lead generation in the online area. Just as the case with print advertising, investments in banner advertising can not be a drop in the bucket – one must aim for consistency of look and feel, frequency and reach in terms of eye ball views. That said, the online e-zine and blogosphere community, and specialized online communities of interest offer you a generous array of placement possibilities and for those seeking to do highly targeted marketing, some excellent communities specialized by role, or by interest area. Just make sure that you have a value added offer – a compelling whitepaper or a piece of independent third party research works well – as your offer to entice the viewer to click through and give you their contact information.

Electronic Newsletter Sponsorships

Where there are banner ads, there are typically electronic newsletter sponsorships as well. Where banner ads are a pull tactic – requiring the visitor to travel to the site, electronic newsletter sponsorships is a push tactic, with the newsletter (and your sponsorship ad and offer) out to a segmented audience of the site. For online magazines, electronic newsletters typically showcase the latest news and new feature stories. Through targeted PR efforts, you can actually double your visibility by placement of a sponsorship in a newsletter that features a story on your company. Again, the offer when sponsoring a newsletter is everything. It needs to be of high value and enticing enough that the reader clicks through to accept the offer.

Now there’s One Caveat …

With both banner advertising and newsletter sponsorships, a marketer should be aware that while these tactics may generate a volume of contacts, most of those accepting your offer should be considered “suspects” not “prospects.” It is vital that these leads receive further qualification attention as most are not advanced in the marketing funnel, and are not ready for a sales person’s call. Leads from these sources however, do allow you to build up a sizable database of contacts to regularly touch and work, and with a marketing campaign system such as Marketo or Eloqua, these leads can be matured and the wheat sorted from the chaff.

Search Engine Optimization

I’ll get this on the table now. I love search engine optimization. Fully and completely. Its painstaking work to achieve, but SEO provides that perfect intersection point between the buyer that is looking for a specific product or service, and the vendor who has exactly that ware to offer. SEO is achieved through pay for click advertising (PPC), auction bidding on key search terms, and most importantly, and most difficult natural optimization of your site (which affects rankings in the middle of the page where really, honestly, everyone looks). Some of our largest opportunities, and most rapid sales cycles came through leads from search engines. But again, the offer at the other end is critical to snag that prospect fully. Now find yourself a genius at SEO who has a passion for detail – because natural optimization is really valuable, but also really particular work.

Webinars

While all of the above tactics I view as primary lead generation tactics, Webinars are in my mind, a secondary – or advancing – tactic. We used to traditionally market our webinars to the pool of contacts we collected through the above sources in our leads database. They were then segmented and offered via an email invitation (HTML or text) a value-based Webinar (i.e. think about featuring a thought leader in the industry, or a customer to tell their success story). Our sales folk consistently shared with us that leads who had accepted an initial offer, then attended a webinar were more mature, and more ready for a discussion about our products. If the topic of the webinar is really compelling, or the speaker very well known there can also be a viral component to your marketing efforts. I remember one particular webinar we promoted to our database featuring an analyst firm, brought in a range of contacts from a banking organization representing six different locations, and all with similar titles and/or organizational responsibility. Clearly the topic had touched a nerve in that organization and the sales person responsible for that account now had a critical mass of interest to which to respond.

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

I’ve spent a great deal of time of late looking into the issue of measuring marketing effectiveness, specifically looking at the return of investment for marketing expenditures. Marketing is often accused, and sometimes guilty of its inability to measure and map to bottom line effectiveness. In this post I thought I’d share with you my findings on ways and means to measure marketing returns, and discuss the critical importance of the sales & marketing relationship in this effort.

Lead generation is the bread and butter of the marketing department and typically the area of most significant investment area. If marketing folk are to gain respect from the business – specifically their sales colleagues – and build an effective business case for

The role of the marketing team is to generate interest in the company’s product through a range of tactics including online advertising, print advertising, tradeshow participation, seminars, webinars and search engine optimization or pay per click (PPC) advertising, as well as investments in PR and analyst relations. The objective here is to turn high quality leads over to the sales organization, which if all goes well, ultimately generate sales opportunities and revenue. The key here in measure ROI is to focus on quality, not quantity. The number of leads returned from a campaign or event is not a reliable metric. What marketing teams must measure is the conversion ratio of those leads as they move through the sales funnel. How many leads result in a meaningful conversation with the sales person? How many of those transform into opportunity? How many make it to the proposal stage? And finally, what revenue is driven from these investments?

I cannot understate how important the the marketing/sales partnership is in successful marketing ROI measurement. A united sales and marketing organization and joint ownership and responsibility for these metrics is absolutely fundamental to a successful lead management and measurement process.

At every stage there must be a well defined, closed loop process. There must be well understood criteria for lead acceptance (ideally agreed business rules set out jointly by marketing and sales), and there must be joint management and ownership over metrics produced. Marketing can feed the funnel, but if sales is not communicating constantly the results of the campaign efforts the whole system fails. There must also be a system in place that provides for an accurate, empirical measurement of these investments. Software tools such as Eloqua, married with a CRM system such as Siebel or salesforce.com provide marketing and sales professionals with the ability to measure and report consistently on lead generation performance and ROI.

Managing (and if lucky) controlling your circle of influence

I’m a great believer in six degrees of separation. It amazes me that you can be sitting on an airplane somewhere far from home, strike up a conversation (well, I would but that’s just me) and find that there’s some connection point between you and what you had believed to be a perfect stranger.

The six degree of separation rule absolutely applies in the world of marketing.

Just think for a minute about the sphere of influencers a marketer touches in their daily job. There are your customers, of course. There’s also your own employees and executive – who if you’re lucky, see their role as one of a thought leader for company. Then there’s media, industry analysts, financial analysts, authors, bloggers, the list goes on. Each of these individuals or groups forms a spoke on the circle of influence, and in the middle sits the marketer.

In my job as a marketer, it was my and my team’s responsibility to establish a positive and open communication with each of these influencer groups. But these relationships do not exist in parallel – or I should say – should not exist in parallel. A truly optimized circle of influence is an interconnected circle of influence – where each of the influence groups is connected to the other.

This connectivity between the circle should not be left to chance. Rather the marketer should directly facilitate connection points between the spokes of the wheel acting as the relationship broker. Here are some practical ways to connect your circle:

1. Connect customer to customer – cultivate reference accounts (both private and external) who will speak to prospects or allow their stories to be told. Encourage the formation of local user groups and grassroots networking events allowing customers to connect to each other. Establish social media type vehicles on your own site allowing customers to connect to each other virtually.
2. Connect industry analysts to customers – if you want to place “up and to the right” make sure the analysts covering your company are taking to customers. Facilitate private conversations (some customers are reluctant to talk on the record), bring analysts to keynote customer events such as user conferences, and seek out opportunities for your customers to speak at analyst conferences. Customer evidence gives analysts confidence you have executed on your strategy.
3. Connect media to industry analyst – when a reporter is doing a feature or news story, they need to generate a thoughtful article with depth and dimension. In addition to providing customer references for the journalist to speak to, consider supplying the reporter with an analyst contact for third party opinion or research on the technology or market. Analysts and their firms are interested in thought leadership exposure.

These are just a small handful of ways you can facilitate your circle of influence. This process, managed in an ongoing way can translate into better exposure and ‘buzz’ for your company and its products in your core market.

Cheers!

Welcome to Marketingfluence

Welcome to our inaugural blog, which I hope will serve as a interesting conversation pivot point on marketing topics. As a long time marketer in the high tech sector, I have found myself on many occasion searching the Web for topics of relevance to marketers, and particularly practical advice from one marketer to another. I hope to fill the gap with this blog, where I'll post in future on a variety of marketing topics ranging from lead generation and closed loop measurement, to managing the circle of influence that surrounds a company, to planning and executing an effective analyst relations strategy.

Tune back, tune in soon.

Cheers,

Ellyn