Marketing Clique

Sometimes we become overly dependent on one leg of our online marketing plan. We become reliant on that one online marketing campaign to the point that it's unhealthy. We begin to ignore other opportunities because we're obsessing over one tactic in our overall marketing strategy. This obsession becomes unhealthy. We become myopic and we're unable to consider additional opportunities.

Online Codependency Defined

Online Codependency (OC) is the dysfunctional relationship that a marketer can develop with one of his/her online marketing tactics. The marketer begins to obsess over one particular online marketing campaign. This may result in an exaggerated sense of responsibility for the campaign, and the marketer may even display an inability to maintain healthy boundaries, letting the campaign become too controlling over the his/her life in the office. The unfortunate result is that the marketer becomes overly stressed, suffers from anxiety, guilt, depression, and even resentment for more successful marketing campaigns happening around him/her.

The Cure

While OC is a potentially destructive disease there are ways to cure it. In fact, there are ways to prevent it.

• Make sure you've got a balanced marketing plan. Over reliance on only one leg of the online marketing campaign is a recipe for OC.
• If you're already suffering from OC, take a step back and analyze what's working, and what's not. Many times there are missing parts. For example, if you're addicted to search marketing perhaps you should try some email marketing for awhile.
• Try bringing in some additional help. Considering hiring an outside consultant to take a look at your SEO plan. Ask for help on additional online lead generation ideas.
• If you feel yourself feeling like you need the campaign to need you seek help immediately. There are professionals who can help.

Should Marketing Automation be re-named Email Automation? Isn't it true that so-called lead management automation is really just a dressed up autoresponder?

Automated lead nurturing is one of the reasons companies invest in a marketing automation platform. The lure of slow drip marketing is that salespeople don't get bogged down working immature leads. Instead, the prospect is teased with a series of emails that maintain contact and offer different goodies [bait] along the way: invitations to free webinars; invitations to download free whitepapers (eBooks), case studies; invitations for free product demos; invitations to visit salespeople at upcoming conferences. Then, once the lead has been nurtured and is ripe for the picking, the salesperson is unleashed to lap up the new business.

Is it really that easy?

Yes, because when it's implemented correctly, lead management can translate into an increase in sales. Furthermore, the volume of leads your company can now handle increases dramatically. And sales still is, in part, a numbers game.

No, it's not that easy because success of the campaign hinges on the ability of marketing and sales to work together as a team. What's more, there is a pesky little thing called content that has to be of exceptional quality, value, well-thought-out and accessible.

What should be the goal of lead nurturing?

We ultimately want the lead we're nurturing to take the desired action, right? Right! But remember, the desired action might not be a purchase, per se. The interaction may not be solely with a prospect. And our reaction may not necessarily be an email:

• Use marketing automation to stay in touch with high value mavens. Maybe you've identified bloggers for whom you want to provide high quality and special content about your products and services.
• Put your new customers on a slow drip enrichment campaign and introduce them to the wonderful new features and benefits of doing business with you. Introduce certain types of stuff to certain types of customers.
• Before they sign on as customers, use lead nurturing to encourage prospects to interact with people at your company and begin feeling like they're part of your community. The value of community is strong. It's a powerful way to make your company more cult-like.
• Make some of the lead nurturing triggers result in something other than email! For example, one of the triggers can result in a call from a human being outside of the sales department. Use old-fashioned marketing tactics like sending the prospect a hand-written note from the VP of Marketing thanking them for attending the latest webinar. Send the prospect a FedEx package. Everyone opens an overnight FedEx envelope that's sent to them.
• If your product is distributed through the channel, set up a routine for sending the reseller special kudos when they meet certain criteria. Maybe it's an email, but maybe it's a quick congrats call from your CEO.

However you slice or dice it, there's no getting around the fact that marketing automation and lead nurturing has wiggled its way into the world of marketing and sales. The following infographic is from Forrester Research analyst, Laura Ramos, and it's useful for visualizing where lead nurturing can "plug the leak."

What's the takeaway for marketing and sales?

Be creative and avoid becoming myopic about your new marketing automation campaign. It's not only for creating autoresponder email messages to prospects!

Today, Shirley S. Wang of the Wall Street Journal published an article in the Health Section entitled Why So Many People Can't Make Decisions. The article discussed how our approach to decision-making can affect our lives and relationships. Some people make decisions rquickly, while others take longer.

• Some people are what psychologists categorize as ambivalent. They tend to weigh both the pros and cons when making decisions. And they take longer to make decisions.
• Other personalities see decisions as being more black and white. These folks tend to have strong positive or negative views, and require less time to make decisions.

The article caused me to consider both of these camps when thinking about sales and marketing campaigns, especially when we're using marketing automation applications like Eloqua, Marketo, and Sliverpop. Likewise, our general email marketing outreach should be segmented based on the different types of decision-makers. At the very least, we should be testing different messaging that appeals to these different buyer behaviors. The black and white-minded decision makers are probably going to respond more positively to a direct response type of message, while an ambivalent decision-maker is more likely to respond favorably to more information and time.

The Take Away

Always be testing. Adapt your marketing message to speak to both types of decision-makers.

• Think act now direct response messaging for the black and white decision makers: special offers, incentives, discounts.
• Use more of a progressive approach with the ambivalent people: white papers, case studies, statistics.

Our customers and prospects are everywhere. The trouble is they're not all in the same place at the same time. That's why we need to meet them where they're at.

Forrester Research senior VP of Idea Development Josh Bernoff recently wrote an article for AdAge. In it he discusses research that makes a case for encouraging workers to use technology to connect with customers. Josh goes on to recommend:

If your company shuts off access to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, that has to stop, because you're shutting off your staff from the very places that will give them ideas of how to innovate in connecting to customers. —Josh Bernoff, Marketers Are More Likely to Innovate -- and Here's Proof

Good salespeople have traditionally been adept at meeting their prospects and customers face to face. Today, with increased adoption of technology to increase the efficiency of marketing it's become common that neither salespeople nor marketers will see their prospects during the entire nurturing process. How about once the prospect signs on as a paying customer? Sure, probably. But during the six-month sales process? Maybe not.

While lead nurturing software, like Marketo and Eloqua, allows marketers to manage a much higher volume of prospects, there's still a strong reliance on email as the central vein of outbound communication. Logic paths are carefully planned so certain emails are sent to certain people at certain times, all based on certain prospect/client activities or inactivity.

My question is, will email continue to prevail as the preferred method of communication? Moreover has email already fallen by the wayside as the best way to nurture all prospects and clients?

Don't get me wrong. Email marketing is generally effective, especially when customers and prospects have opted in and indicated it's their preferred method of contact. But relying solely on email to nurture prospects and customers may be inadequate, especially with the growing acceptance of other communication forms: SMS/text, Facebook, Twitter. And don't forget about the old school methods that many people still hold onto: face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and even snail mail! By the way, if you must send snail mail, use FedEx. It's still better at getting someone's attention. People will almost always open a FedEx overnight envelope.

The take away

Try not to accept technology for technology's sake. If you can use technology to become more efficient in some areas of marketing and sales that's great. But one software solution isn't going to take care of everything.

Want to write better?

1. Hire a professional copywriter.

What? That's it?

While most marketers fancy themselves good writers, that's about all they are—good, not great.

One of the common mistakes we make as marketers is to write our own marketing and sales collateral. Sure, we're the ones who know our product. But sometimes that's what clouds our copywriting. Consider writing what you want to say, then hire a professional to make it shine. The amount of money you spend with a professional copywriter will more than pay for itself.

Subtle changes can create a HUGE impact

I once had an opportunity to view a real-time heat map displaying where the clicks were occurring on a major retailer's website. The front page was chocked full of deals of the day, and other product blurbs competing for attention. My friend demonstrated how a seemingly inconsequently tweak in the copy caused a startling increase in the click through on a high margin item. The result was that the retailer processed considerably more orders that day.

Now, consider how subtle changes in your marketing copy could cause an uptick in engagement.

Use a professional copywriter for:

• Press releases
• Whitepapers
• Marketing automation copy: email marketing
• Product descriptions
• Help section of your website
• Blog
• Sales collateral
• Proposals
• Calls to action (CTAs) on your website

Customers are happier when marketing aligns with sales

An email campaign represents an effective and cost efficient way to stay in touch with customers and prospects, providing helpful information about a company's products and services. Email also represents an ideal tactic as part of an ongoing drip marketing program. But while automated email can be a worthwhile marketing activity, there are some inherent challenges with an effective email campaign:

Ensure sales and marketing are aligned - Customers are happier when marketing aligns with sales because there is consistency in a company's message. Too often, marketing is disjointed from sales. The result is an email campaign that goes out without the knowledge of the sales department. Effective marketing organizations keep sales up-to-date with all marketing communications.

Align email content with search marketing efforts - Active email recipients are likely to go straight to Google and search on the product that is being discussed. Ensure your email communications are using consistent, branded product language that can be found via pay per click (PPC) and organic search.

Don't forget mobile and different browsers - Emails are increasingly read in mobile email readers and in different browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome. Test them all and make sure it looks right in all of them.

Consider outsourcing the email campaign - Many formatting and reporting issues arise from using integrated email campaign software. For example, Salesforce.com and Eloqua were not engineered to focus solely on email functionality. Superior results may be achieved by outsourcing the project to a specialized agency, or managing the campaign with specialized email software available from Constant Contact, Cheetah Mail, Exact Target, or Vertical Response.

"KISS" Keep it simple, stupid - Resist the urge to cram too much into one email communication.