Posts Tagged ‘accountability’

Of Trade Shows and Sailboats

Monday, August 9th, 2010

How are trade shows like sailboats?  They are both black holes into which you throw money.  Only a trade show is supposed to give you a return on that money.

In a recent IPC post, Trade Shows and Black Holes, Terry Costlow cites a study that says nearly 70% of sales leads, many of them from trade shows, are not pursued by the sales force at all.  I assume that does not mean that 70% of leads are not quality leads.  Rather, I’m guessing no one has done the research to find out if the leads are quality or not.

It’s also possible the leads are junk.  Perhaps the “leads” are a collection of cards or names gathered at a trade show that were never quality to begin with.  Trade show attendees exchange their business cards for whatever trinket the exhibitor is handing out, without any thought to actually trying to connect with a viable prospect.

Regardless, companies that invest in trade shows need to invest a tiny bit more to have a lead generation and follow-up strategy.  Some considerations might include:

  • getting the attention of your target market, rather than every Tom, Dick and Harry that passes by your booth;
  • training your salespeople to bring prospects over the carpet line and qualify them on the spot;
  • capturing the qualified leads with enough detailed info that tells you whether prospects should be sent a letter and targeted collateral material or whether they should get a phone call pronto from the right regional salesperson;
  • nurturing the leads that are not yet sales; and
  • documenting the results so you can calculate the return for each trade show.

And speaking of follow-up, in my last blog I promised to post some blogs I follow on my blogroll, but ugh.  Ran into technical difficulties.  However, I also promised to share some viable EMS blogs with you.  One is the IPC blog mentioned above, and another good one is Technology Contractors Daily News’ blog.  Which ones do you like?

Now that we’ve talked about getting a return on trade shows, how to get a return on a sailboat?  I have a little Butterfly sailboat that must be 25 years old, requires almost no up-keep and every time I take it out I’m delighted with my investment.

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Virtually as Good as a Trade Show

Monday, July 12th, 2010

As a B2B marketing person I’ve always loved trade shows.  Where else do all the trade press and your competitors and customers converge in one place—all with common interests?  People who are looking to buy are all in the same room with people who are looking to sell.  Trackable sales leads are flowing like a river from an identifiable source.  Gotta love it.

But according to a Forbes article, trade show revenue in the U.S.—about $12 billion annually—was expected to contract nearly 7 percent last year.  Trade shows require significant investment—booth space, exhibit design, videos, collateral materials, and most expensive of all—travel and expenses for the sales team.  No wonder people don’t think they can afford trade shows.

There is, of course, a cost for not participating—lost opportunity.  You can’t get sales leads from trade shows if you’re not there.  But now, with virtual trade shows, you don’t have to be physically there.  You can “man” your booth from your office computer, or, well, any computer anywhere.  That saves a bundle in T&E.  Other things are cheaper, too, in the virtual world.  Entry fees, exhibit design and build.  All you need is one representative from your company to be on deck to instant message visitors to your virtual booth.

I do still like the visual, physical, meet-and-greet trade show.  There’s no substitute for seeing faces, talking to actual people in person.  But if it’s a luxury your company can’t afford, check out the virtual shows.

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ROI Is King

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

At least that’s what “roi” means in French, “king.”  What does “ROI” mean to marketers?

I just saw the term used loosely again, in a feature article of B2B magazine.  A sophisticated marketer referred to his program to measure marketing effectiveness as his ROI program—you know, click-throughs, webinar sign-ups, landing page hits.  Aaaugh!

Why do marketers insist on using this term incorrectly?  It has a very specific meaning. Basically, ROI is the profits generated over and above the initial investment and expressed as a percentage of the investment. It’s a financial gain—not an increase in awareness, not market share, not the number of leads you get or click-throughs to your web site.

As marketers, we should be aware of the importance of language.  We should understand that precise wording makes meaning clear.  We should know that it’s critical to be accurate with words if we want to communicate with the best possible results.

Yet, we continue to misuse this term, Return on Investment.  Worse than sloppy language, its misuse demonstrates—no, trumpets!—our ignorance.  We must use the term carefully, because we need to interact with people in our finance department if we want to calculate ROI according to best practices in our own company. We need guidance from finance to determine what constitutes gross margin, how to define what our investment is, and so much more.

How can we ever hope to work with our finance department if we persist in using finance terminology incorrectly?  It’s a problem I’ve been kvetching about so long that I wrote a book, www.marketingroitruth.com.  Okay, I’ll get down off my soapbox.  For now.

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Chicken or Egg Metrics

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Which came first, easily measured marketing or a mandate for metrics?  It seems there IS more measurement just because there is more online marketing, where every transaction or event is trackable.

What has always worried me is that people are not necessarily engaging in the best integrated mix of marketing tactics, but rather, are skewing their mix toward online marketing because it’s easily measurable.  At least it was easily measurable before social media.

But in fact, I think people are skewing toward online marketing because it’s comparatively cheap.  And that’s not all bad.  Every indication is that traditional print and broadcast advertising—and also collateral material—is declining significantly as a percentage of marketing budgets.  These are historically high-ticket items that are also difficult to measure.

But even though online marketing is trackable, it’s still not that easy to collect pertinent data, analyze that data and apply that analysis to helping you achieving your objectives.  In other words, using data to help you move the needle.  Because data, we got.  Lots of it.

But do we have it for social media as well as web sites and e-mail campaigns?  Can we identify useful data and discard the rest?  Do we know how to use data to integrate our picture across all online channels?  And if we can get that picture, just how do we make it work for us?

If we can get those answers, it probably doesn’t matter which came first, the chicken or the egg.

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2010 Top Marketing Trends, Starting with Cautious Optimism

Monday, March 1st, 2010

According to BtoB magazine, my fellow BtoB marketers are “cautiously optimistic” about the business environment in 2010. This is the first of the top 10 trends for the year. If I may say, this doesn’t seem new to me. It’s in our DNA as marketers to be optimistic. Have you ever met anyone who professes to be a marketer who did not think things would change for the better? If you did, he or she was not in the right profession.

The “cautious” part, though, might be new. At least it’s certainly warranted in this still-shaky climate. Budgets remain tight, and the need to prove results is ever more present. We should always be cautious about spending. In fact, we should be investing, not spending, with a solid rationale for doing so. That means measuring our performance, basing our future decisions on past measurement.

Which leads me to another top ten trend: Increased focus on accountability. See? There are good things that come out of the recession, and one of them is a greater emphasis on data analytics and accountability.

Other top ten trends:

Positioning for a recovery. Which is another way of saying, “taking advantage of the recession.” Recessions can provide you with an opportunity to increase your market share. You can especially gain by differentiating yourself from competitors who have remained silent throughout, while you build awareness.  Recessions can be game changing, and if you’re still standing, be sure to get your story out.

Integrating social media. This is more than a marketing tool. It’s a way to really interact with and thoroughly understand your customers. Apparently social media can galvanize your whole company to focus on customers. I dunno. I’d love to see it, but so far, I think we have enough trouble just trying to integrate marketing communications.

Lower-cost content marketing. Yup. Thank-you, social media, for making it possible. We really needed this as a way to get our message out there during hard times.

So those are the top five of ten big BtoB marketing trends: cautious optimism, more accountability, positioning for a recovery, integrating social media and lower-cost content marketing. Are these your top trends too?

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