DMA Webinar: Tracking Online Buyer Behavior in B2B

January 8, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Next week I have the pleasure of speaking to several affiliate groups of the Direct Marketing Association about demand management. Please join me Wednesday, January 13, 2010, for a webinar-based panel discusison about: How to Track a Buyer’s Online Purchase Research Behavior: and then send appropriate messages to influence that buyer’s purchase.

As we see it, the Internet empowers buyers to research products and services long before engaging in a formal sales process — leaving marketers to guess when and how to engage with prospects. This almost guarantees that marketing messages will be sent to the wrong people at the wrong time — filling sales funnels with unqualified leads — a poor formula for permission marketing.

Smart marketers are harnessing digital technology to monitor and track buyer research behavior long before the formal sales process begins — to estimate buying stage — to predict buying intent — to evaluate buying influence — to send appropriate marketing messages to the right people at the right time — and to more accurately score leads for sales funnels. This yields a better formula for permission marketing.

The DMA invited two top industry experts (and yours truly) to help B2B marketers clearly understand how they can improve demand generation process by identifying, monitoring, and evaluating the online research behavior of prospective buyers.

Joining me are:

Steve Woods – Eloqua – Chief Technology Officer / Co-Founder. Author – Digital Body Language.

Debbie Qaqish – The Pedowitz Group – Chief Revenue Officer. Demand Generation Agency – Digital Buyer Behavior applications.

I hope you will visit the DMA Northern California site and join us for this educational, lively discussion!

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Making Your B2B Marketing Work — Better!

September 1, 2009 — Laura Ramos

A worldwide recession and social media have swept up B2B marketers in a perfect storm, tossed between tighter budgets and the demand to do more online without guideposts or established benefits. Opportunities and challenges abound for marketers targeting other businesses through a direct sales force or channel partners. Before 2010 planning — and the push to pump up the pipeline to make year-end revenue goals — hit full stride, now is an excellent time to step outside your daily routine, tune up B2B marketing strategy, and learn new best practices.

Sound intriguing? If so, have I got a deal for you!  (Oh, c’mon, you suspected a pitch was coming, now didn’t you?)

On September 17, 2009 (Thursday) I am leading a full-day workshop in Cambridge, MA on “Making B2B Marketing Work”. This workshop brings B2B marketing peers together to explore and discuss how marketing has changed in light of the digital/social media shift and the pressures imposed by the current economy. It will help you think through a number of issues — how to stretch budget dollars by better integrating digital and physical tactics, tap into social media, drive healthier pipelines, target and qualify your best customers, and create a marketing technology infrastructure that increases efficiency through automation – just to name a few of the top takeaways. You will also gain hands-on experience assessing your integrated marketing accumen and lead management maturity while hearing “tricks of the trade” from our expert panel (who join us at the end of the day.)

You may want to check out Forrester’s site for further workshop details if you need answers to the following questions:

  • How do I optimize my marketing mix in 2010?
  • What are the best practices for generating, and managing, demand?
  • How do I better integrate digital and social media into my campaigns?
  • How do I improve marketing’s working relationship with sales?
  • How do I make my Web site generate better leads?
  • What are the best social media tactics to use?
  • What technology investments should I make in 2010?

In my rather “un-humble” opinion, I’ve found participants feel that the two best features of this workshop are:

1) Networking and interpersonal interaction. The workshop is intimate (typically between 7 adn 15 participants) which gives you the opportunity to spend time with peers (and the analyst, of course!) talking about what matters to you and how you have been making B2B marketing work. Participants from Tech and non-Tech industries share experiences and learn from each others’ successes and mistakes.

2) Talking with the panel of experts.  Plan to stick around to enjoy the wine/cheese reception for further networking and to meet with our expert panel. I’m gathering the invitees now, but past participants included experts in search marketing, community development, demand generation, and marketing automation. The discussion is lively and really gets to the heart of “what should you do in practice to make B2B marketing work?”

Will you join me?  Hope to see you there!

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Change Management: The Key to Successful Marketing Process

August 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Digital marketing is a double-edged sword for B2B marketers making it a bigger part of their marketing mix. On the one side, digital is more targetable, addressable, and measurable than traditional channels like advertising, promotions, and tradeshows. Online, marketing now has more data to help them “know” more about prospects and buyers. On the other hand, the options available in the marketing mix have exploded and executives want to hold marketing more accountable for program results and campaign spend. Given these turbulent times, marketing challenges increase exponentially and marketing automation moves from a “nice to have” to “essential” investment. But technology implemented without a clear understanding of process typically gets many marketers into hot water. Face it, many of us have tremendous experience running campaigns and programs, but little experience with the change management needed to move process from ad hoc to repeatable and disciplined.

The August quarterly MOCCA meeting looked a little closer at the marketing operations community experience implementing process. Brenda Kring, Director of Demand Generation for CyberSource (who hosted the meeting) and Membership and Content Chair for the MOCCA steering committee, presented the results from the July association survey on marketing process. The audience then listened to a panel share their stories on how change management impacts processes, automation, applications and people and talk about the specific challenges each experienced rolling out automation. The conversation and questions reinforced for me how minor a role technology selection plays in operationalizing marketing and how automating poor process only results in long term problems.

Here are a few of the findings from the survey that stood out:

1) Process is important, but not approached in a systematic way. Of the 36 members who responded, 2/3 said they only apply process rigorously in a few key areas. Just 6% said they had a “very process-oriented culture” where they worked. Of those who implemented process, 2/3 said they did not use a formal methodology or defined their own as they went along.

2) Top management must push change. 44% of respondents said the key factor that led to a successful implementation top executives drive change from the top. 30% said getting stakeholder buy-in was essential. This underlines how people is the essential ingredient in change management, and marketing is no exception to this rule.

3) Marketing operations wants more accountability in process change. Almost 80% of respondents said their experience with process change was neutral or unsuccessful. Integrating accountability – making sure folks adhere to the new process or changed state – was the change 29% of respondents said they would make in retrospect. (This would also relieve executive management from spending times getting the troops lined up and marching in the right direction.)

(A few statistics about this group of respondents:  72% hail from the tech industry, 61% are in firms over 1000 employees, and 53% work at companies that earned $1 billion or more in revenue — so a very interesting sampling, especially to my research.)

If you’d like to see more information about the survey, check out the MOCCA and look up the Q3 meeting. I’d be interested to hear what you think are the top issues that keep marketers from implementing process successfully. What do you think achieves – or holds back – success in marketing process automation and change management?

(Disclosure: I back-dated this post to correspond closer to the timing of the meeting.  Sorry folks, just so much to do!)

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See You At Forrester’s Marketing Forum – April 23, 24 in Orlando

April 22, 2009 — Laura Ramos
Forrester Markting Forum 2009: Orlando, Florida

Forrester Markting Forum 2009: Orlando, Florida

 

 

Tomorrow marks the start of Forrester’s third annual Marketing Forum.  I am thrilled to be presenting here on three key topics, but I have to admit that this forum still feels more like “Consumer Forum Redux” for my B2B-centric tastes. (Forrester hosts a  forum targeting retail, CPG, customer experience professionals in the fall — and has for years. I feel like there’s more content and topic overlap between the two events than there should be to strongly differentitate them.)

Overall, Forrester does a decent job of addressing B2C and B2B audiences in a single venue. It’s intimate: 300+ attendees and we invite our FLB members to spend quality time together the day before the conference kicks off. Maybe the problem is this: I’m not seeing a lot of events, forums, or community sites dedicated exclusively to the CMO/executive marketer in B2B. Where is the content and interactions that deal with issues like fitting social media in the B2B marketing mix, sales alignment/support best practices, managing demand and nurturing leads, measuring marketing impact when a sales force is involved, and setting marketing strategy in a product-driven environment?   I’m not seeing much; are you?

Here are some of the session topics we will offer (well, me, in particular) to benefit B2B marketers:

1) How B2B Direct Marketers Are Weathering The Current Economic Storm. My buddy Dave Frankland, who covers database marketing services and direct marketing best practices, and  I are teaming up to put this question to top marketers from United Stationers, Avocent, Analog Devices, and Microsoft. We’ll tackle an interesting blend of tech, non-tech, enterprise and SMB issues in this discussion.

2) The Social Technographics of Business and IT Decision Makers.  Oliver Young and I will take a deeper dive into the tech buyer social behavior survey we ran earlier this year, that I blogged about previously. This session looks to answer the “so what” question for B2B marketers wanting to know how to engage with socially active technology buyers. (We spent a full day with a group of B2B marketers today working through the ins and outs of setting social strategy.  Too bad the workshop didn’t FOLLOW the forum session… I’ll work to get that right the next time.)

3) Community Marketing: A New Discipline For Shaping Business Marketing Leadership.  Presenting with Peter Burris, I think I’m most excited about this presentation. Pete and I will look at how social media, and the social Web, will reshape the “4 Ps” of marketing and what B2B marketers should do now to capitalize on these fundamental changes and come out ahead when the economy turns around.

4) Catching The Next Wave: Emerging Markets And SMBs Will Rise From the Sands.  Jennifer Belissent and Tim Harmon are teaming up to look at why non-US, non-Euro, and SMB firms will be the first to break out of the current, worldwide economic slump.  Interesting implications for B2B marketers who target emerging geographies and firms with less than 100 employees.

5) Strategic Sales Enablement: Rethinking Traditional Siloed Product, Marketing, and Sales Relationships To Compete In the New Economy.  Hold onto your hats: Scott Santucci and Eric Brown team up to argue that marketing should better engineer sales conversations that help close business faster and easier.  Probably a talk the VP of Sales will appreciate more than the CMO, but the perspective is particularly provocative for firms with long-standing sales/marketing conflicts.

The one key note that I would love to see (but will likely miss due to customer 1-1 meetings) is Craig Dewar, Director of Community Marketing at Microsoft, talk about Driving B2B Customer Engagement Through Community. I hope his content turns out to be as thought-provoking and insightful as it sounds. It risks becoming cheerleading form yet another community marketing enthusiast hyping that every company should create its own communities as the “the future” of firm-to-buyer communications.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll capture my reactions to the forum here and give you a taste of the event from my (atypical?) B2B perspective. You can compare it to posts from my Forrester colleagues who will blog their impressions as well.  Or follow the proceedings on Twitter by searching for the #FMF09 tweets.

In the meantime, let me know which venues, associations, blogs, community pages, etc. you find particularly useful for the B2B executive marketer. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this topic and how Forrester could better capture attention in this arena.

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