News about News Releases

Disintermediation. I love trying to say that word. I love the concept.

It basically means "taking out the middleman" and this is happening in many industries today due to the internet and to the benefit of consumers.


And that is what is happening with news releases, AKA press releases. Now, your prospects can read news releases directly, without the content having to go through a PR agency, journalists and publication.

The old model-the release is targeted to journalists:

A news release is written by a PR agency in stodgy PR lingo and sent to journalists in hopes of obtaining media coverage. This only happens a few times a year when there is big company news that journalists will want to write about. The wire services cost about $2000 a pop in addition to the fees of the PR agency to write the news release and follow up with journalists. Prospects will only see the information if a journalist of a publication they read chooses to publish the story.

The new model-the release is targeted to prospects:

You write your own news release targeted to your prospects in language friendly to them. You write news releases frequently (e.g. twice a month), whenever there is even modest news prospects would be interested in. (e.g. a promotion, a webinar, exhibiting at a tradeshow). You write the release to be search engine optimized to your keywords and include links to appropriate pages on your website. You publish them via the new breed of wire services (e.g. PRWeb) for about $200 a pop. These wire services make sure your news release makes it to the new breed of news sites like Google News and Yahoo! News which are regularly crawled by search engines. When your prospects search for what you offer, your content and links show up.

Think of yourself as a publisher

Basically, this is another way for you to publish relevant content about your business (like blogging or Facebook groups or Twittering) where the content is fresh and will increase the chances that your business will be found by your prospects. Think of yourself as being in the publishing business with news releases as a very good way to publish your content.

At Loyalty Builders, where I last worked, our second greatest source of web visits for many months came from news releases, placing after organic search.

To be fair, the old school method is still very important. For most businesses, a hybrid strategy will be best-publishing directly for prospects and getting media coverage from journalists and bloggers. Find a PR agency that's good with the new and the old. I worked most recently with Version 2 Communications in Boston who was a great partner in creating direct to prospect news releases, generating media and blog coverage, evaluating new social media channels and generally keeping a focus on whatever it took for effective lead generation.

Here's an insightful eBook from David Meerman Scott, "The New Rules of PR ," to help you get started.

And here's a useful tool from Hubspot called the "Press Release Grader" which will help you make sure your release is search optimized.

What is Inbound Marketing?

You may have heard the term "inbound marketing" floating out there in the digisphere. It is a new fundamental marketing approach the WRM should know about and likely be implementing in some way in the marketing mix. Here's a brief primer on what it is, what it isn't, why it is good and when to use it.

Let's start with what it isn't. It's not the old school marketing, AKA "interruption marketing" or "outbound marketing" that we grew up with although these tactics are still widely in use today and can still be economic. "Outbound marketing" is the set of marketing approaches that actively put messages in front of prospects, usually without permission. These tactics include:

• advertising
  
• direct mail
• trade shows
• email blasts
  
• cold calling

"Outbound marketing", although the longtime standard, is not ideal for the marketer or the prospect as collateral damage is a matter of course-it's the carpet bombing of marketing. Many experience the message who shouldn't or don't want to, eroding brand image and creating extra costs for the marketer.

In contrast, "inbound marketing" is designed to have the prospect willingly come to you. This is because of the web wide framework you have set up that allows them to easily find you when they are looking for what you offer.

It sounds like SEO but it's bigger. The framework you have set up includes a comprehensive set of search engine optimization, social media, thought leadership and tools initiatives to insure that your prospects find you immediately whenever they are looking for what you offer via search engines or social media. Yes, you have search optimized your website and created lots of quality inbound links but you also have become an aggressive and consistent publisher of content, also search optimized, including blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, slide shows, videos, podcasts and news releases. You have continuous presence on the social media vehicles your prospects are likely to use, e.g. customer forums, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And you've created useful, relevant tools and/or fun viral media to also draw prospects to your website.

The beauty of inbound marketing is better targeting and greater efficiency-only those who are likely to buy actually come to you.

Now read this: "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of "inbound marketing" written by David Meerman Scott.

There's also an energetic Boston based company, Hubspot, which provides an inbound marketing methodology and services and who is a thought leader and evangelist for inbound marketing. David Meerman Scott is an advisor to their board. Check out their website and notice that they do eat their own dog food...all their marketing is "inbound marketing."


My personal dream would be to create all my marketing around "inbound marketing" and I tried to at my last company, Loyalty Builders. However, what I discovered was that for the B2B customer set we targeted, having solely "inbound marketing" wouldn't work for two reasons:

1. not enough of our prospects were active users of social media or even of search engines(see the first post of this blog for more on this).
2. not enough of our prospects knew that what we offered existed, i.e. they wouldn't be searching to fulfill a need they didn't know they had.

But we did effectively mix "old school" and "new school" marketing effectively and I'm sure the shift will be to more "new school" over time. It's more efficient for everyone.

Here are some actual results from another B2B company from 2008:

• 78% of initial inquiries were from paid outbound efforts, 22% from "free" inbound efforts
  
• 2% of the outbound inquiries closed, 12% of the inbound closed
• net, the inbound lead close rate was 6 times more efficient
• net, 65% of the total customers came from inbound marketing

So why wouldn't this company use "inbound marketing" exclusively? Because they wouldn't get enough leads to support their business model. But you know they will be pushing hard to maximize inbound leads at every turn.

So "inbound marketing" should be in every WRMs arsenal. If you have customers who use internet search or social media, you should be using it now as part of your marketing mix. If you have "long tail" customers, it's especially efficient versus outbound marketing. It will be more efficient than your outbound efforts although it may not fill your pipeline. You are likely to get your best cost per lead by build the best inbound strategy you can and filling in the rest with outbound.

Using the 7-S Framework for planning

Way back in 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, from the McKinsey consulting firm, published one of the most widely read business books ever, "In Search of Excellence." In the book they presented a planning model which I find timeless and useful to this day for any kind of planning-tactical, strategic, marketing, corporate, etc.

It's called the "7-S Framework" and contains seven interrelated mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive attributes of any organization that should be considered in any strategy or project planning process.

Here's a visual representation:



Let's briefly review each one. I find it preferable to go through them in this order:

Shared Values
At the center of the model are "shared values" also called "superordinate goals". These are the core values of the company in terms of how you operate with all your constituencies-employees, customers, vendors, and shareholders.

• Are these written down for your organization?
• Do all employees know them?
  
• Are they practiced consistently?
• Should any be changed or added?
  

Strategy
Articulate your objectives and the ways that you will achieve them.

• Be quantitative about objectives-revenue, market share, profit, share of voice, etc.
• Be sure to address value proposition and competitive advantage
  

Skills
This includes skills of individuals but as important, it includes organizational skills. If you are trying to plan a new customer service initiative and your organization has been poor at that you must address that skill at the macro and micro levels.

Systems
This does mean "hard" systems like networks, computers and software. But it also includes "soft" systems, human processes and procedures. It might include a reporting schedule, meeting schedule, communications requirements, training or monthly reviews.

Staff
How many and what kind of people do you need to realistically execute this strategy? Since the 7-S's are interrelated, you must address their skill sets and values too.

Style
What's the appropriate personality of this endeavor? Is it fun? Is it buttoned up? Is it collegial?

Structure
I've listed this last as it tends to get overemphasized and tends to get political. Structures should be fluid and constantly tweaked to best serve the business. What structure will best accomplish your business goals? Are there appropriate leaders in the right places with accountability and empowerment?

If you go through all 7-S's in a thorough manner and make sure they reinforce each other, you will have the basis for a solid plan for your initiative.


(thanks to Doug Burgum, an ex McKinsey consultant, my ex CEO at Great Plains Software and ex Senior Vice President at Microsoft for imparting the 7-S Framework to all of us many years ago)

How the WRM can Use Tag or Word Clouds

A tag or word cloud is a powerful way to visually understand large amounts of data. And one can be easily generated by you or me.

note: a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information like a photo or file to help it be found by searching. Notice that there are tags ("labels")at the bottom of this post.

Here's a tag cloud from Flickr, the photo hosting site, showing the all time most popular tags for the photos on the site. You'll notice that the "cloud" of tags is in alphabetical order so it's easy to find words you may be looking for. The words are of various sizes, the larger ones indicating that there are more photos tagged with those terms. On Flickr, all the terms are hyperlinked so that you can click on it and go right to the photos with that tag.

You can quickly see that the number one category of photos is "weddings" and that most photos seem tied to travel and various locations around the world.



A word cloud is similar to a tag cloud except that it visually shows the relative occurrences of words rather than tags. These can be useful to marketers who have large amounts of written customer interactions (e.g. forums, blogs, Youtube video comments, Facebook groups) and want an easy way to discern the sentiments of the customers without having to read and categorize all the comments.

There are free tools on the Internet to generate word clouds. A good one is Tagcrowd , created by a doctoral student at Stanford University. It's very, very easy to do-just put in the url, upload a file or paste the text to be visualized.

Here's a word cloud I created of this blog:












I'm pleased that "marketing" and "customer" are the strongest themes and that "testing" and "social" show up strongly. If words showed up that I didn't intend to be major themes for this blog, I would know to change my writing.

Cool Websites: Internet Archive and WayBack Machine

Occasionally, I'll point out some cool websites to expand the mind of the WRM.

Have you visited the Internet Archive and it's WayBack Machine?





The goal of the Internet Archive is "universal access to human knowledge." That's ostensibly Google's goal too, albeit from a commercial perspective. The Internet Archive is a non-profit focused on building a digital library of Internet websites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Sort of the Library of Alexandria of the 21st century.

The WayBack Machine let's you browse through 85 billion web pages archived since 1996. So you can see websites at previous points in time.

As a marketer, it could be useful in a variety of ways-looking for past content from your own websites that you can't find internally, looking for nostalgia to use in new campaigns, looking for past competitive insights, positioning, etc. And of course, it can just be fun looking around in the past like looking at dusty, old magazines saved in the attic.

For example, here's Apple's website from October 22, 1996. You can get totally excited seeing the new PowerBook Family announcement with a 117MHz processor and 16MB of RAM for only $3500.


Since you were wondering, the Internet Archive is a huge database-2 petabytes so far, growing at 20 terabytes per month. You can link to old pages on the WayBack Machine as shown above. And the name comes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.

note: a petabyte is a thousand terabytes which is a thousand gigabytes which is a thousand megabytes. A typical PC sold today comes with 500 gigabytes of storage so the WayBack machine would require 4000 PCs worth of storage. As an additional aside, it's been estimated that the entire works of mankind in recorded history amounts to 50 petabytes of data. Next in line is the exabyte, then the zettabyte, then the yottabyte.

Testing-Sample Size and Power Analysis

As I mentioned in another post, most marketers, including yours truly, do not test nearly enough.

Why? There are many reasons-it's intimidating, we haven't been trained in it, it takes more effort and time, it's too hard to get the necessary data from corporate systems, it's not ingrained in the marketer or corporate culture, etc.

Testing should be a regular part of a marketer's routine and virtually everything-including headlines, content, and offers via website, direct mail, advertising, and email-can and should be tested on an ongoing basis.

Multivariate testing can ultimately be faster and cheaper and tell you more but even simple A/B testing over time will make marketing strategies more efficient.

One obstacle for marketers is either figuring out how big the sample size should be or if they can rely on the results of the sample they've used (power analysis).

There are a variety of useful calculators on the Internet to do this but I thought I'd point you to a favorite, on the website of Longbow, a predictive analytics and direct marketing SaaS from Loyalty Builders (my old employer). It's a favorite because it is fast and easy to use and has robust documentation for all levels of users:

SAMPLE SIZE AND POWER ANALYSIS CALCULATOR

Here's a sample output computing sample size. Note that it shows the curve of the relationship between sample size and power allowing you to quickly see the trade offs of choosing different levels:




One final note-this calculator became a great viral tool for us. It shows up on the first page for a "power analysis" search and became the second most visited page on the Longbow website after the home page.

Recession Marketing-Part Two

What's a marketer to do during this recession? In the last post, I suggested looking hard at shifting spending mix from new customer marketing to existing customer marketing and then to consider several ways of improving existing customer marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

There is another asset that you have that could also be worth looking at in new ways-your existing leads and even your "old" leads.

Many companies get into an inefficient cycle where marketing provides too many unqualified leads, sales doesn't qualify all of them and good ones get thrown away. In one company I worked for we went back to past leads to do a win-loss analysis and discovered that 40% were still alive!

So a good starting point, depending on the nature of your business and the length of the sales cycle, would be to not only go to your existing leads but include leads from the past 6 months or year. Do a win-loss analysis on a sample of them to decide if there is still opportunity there.

Consider scoring your existing leads to better determine how to allocate resources. Assign weighted scores for various behavioral and demographic attributes and then focus marketing and sales efforts on those that exceed levels significant to your business.

Below is the "Automated 21 Day Lead Lifecycle" flow chart from Marketo, a smart company that provides a lead scoring and management SaaS that integrates with Saleforce.com. Once a lead scores 65 according to their model, it is ripe for sales force contact. Leads below that level are kept in an "active prospect database" for marketing.



Here are some sample demographic and behavioral scores for Marketo-yours would need to be tuned to your business.

-visit a webpage: 1
-visit more than 8 pages in one visit: 7
-open an email: 1
-register for a webinar: 5
-attend a webinar: 5
-visit pricing pages: 5
-visit career pages: -10 (not likely to be a buying prospect)

If you are interested in more on lead scoring, here's an insightful presentation, "Marketo's Secret Sauce for Demand Generation."

5 Suggestions for Recession Marketing

"Can a recession reshape marketing habits?"

"Recession-Busting Marketing"

"Focusing Your Marketing Spend In An Economic Downturn"

"Recession marketing: be brave or be gone"

"Social Media to Weather Recession"

There's a proliferation of articles, blogs, webinars, podcasts, etc. about what to do about marketing during the recession. As one of the headlines above implies, there's more of an imperative now than ever to find more effective and efficient marketing habits. But most of the recession marketing recommendations I've seen are ones that can and should be implemented at any time. Now the business and the jobs are really on the line.


So I'll throw in 5 solid suggestions. They can be used at any time but perhaps they will be especially helpful now:


1. Evaluate New Customer vs. Existing Customer spend mix

Most companies spend multiples more on customer acquisition vs. retention, typically 5-10x more. Many lose money on customer aquisition. And for most, existing customer revenue is multiples larger than that of new customers.

It's likely in this environment, gaining new customers has become even more difficult and more expensive. And it's likely that you can build existing customer revenues by spending more, or at least spending more smartly.

Look carefully at your new customer vs. existing customer spending and ROI metrics over the past few years and look for places to reduce spending and other places to increase it.

Exception: Some companies may be the gorilla in their industry and have cash reserves. For them, this could be the time to sweep up market share on the customer acquisition side.

2. Focus on Measurable Activities

Unless you are one of the few very large companies that can truly benefit from pure "brand marketing", all your marketing can and should have some measurable direct response mechanism. It may not be for a purchase but it can be for some call to action. Don't ignore email because "it is free". That too should be measured, not to save money but to save your customers from receiving unwanted communications.

If you can measure it, you can make a data driven decision if it's worth it. If you measure it you can also test it, the next recommendation.

3. Test Everything

A marketer should constantly be testing and should test everything possible including content, headlines, offers, pricing, and timing. I can't say this strongly enough and continue to be astounded how little marketers do test. Web testing is more prevalent because the tools are unusually easy to use, e.g. Google Analytics. But A/B testing can be applied to almost any marketing activity and new tools are now available to apply multivariate testing.

4. Find your "true" best customers

Many marketers look to their "heavy user" customers (top buying quartiles or tertiles)as their best customers. Others segment by recency and view the most recent buyers as best customers. I'd suggest that you look for the customers that have the highest propensity to buy and who wouldn't have bought without being touched. These are probably mid tier customers and your best way to find them is via testing and by using more sophisticated segmentation techniques like predictive analytics and uplift modeling.

5. Find customers in danger of leaving

Too many marketers accept churn rates or don't market to customers on the way out until it is too late. Look carefully at your customer lifetime models and your churn rates and the reasons for churn. Can you develop an ongoing marketing strategy that attacks those whose behavior indicates that they are in the early stage of dropping off? It's likely that reviving these customers will cost far less than a new customer acquisition.

A Good (but Temporary) Reason to Use Video for SEO

I've read in several places now that videos are far more likely than text to get on the first page of Google's search results. This is big news for those trying to get those coveted search results, especially those with scrappy budgets.

Google has been supporting "blended" or "universal" search for over a year now and according to Jupiter Research (now owned by Forrester Research) 60% of searches return a blended result with some media other than text, 28% of them with video.



Due to the current nature of Google's algorithm and because there are far fewer videos than web pages, a video is 53 times more likely to end up on the front page.

This may not get you on the first page with high volume search terms but I suspect it will make a noticeable difference with the mid and long tail.

You'll still need to have good SEO practices with video (e.g. include key words in titles, tags and file names) and you'll still want to make sure your video production values and content support your brand. From what I've read, it's best for SEO purposes to have the videos hosted on Youtube.

As a test, I'm going to include a tagged video in this post (hosted on Blogger) and see how it affects search results for "Scott McComsey" and "Well Rounded Marketer". I'll update with results in a week or so.

Update 3/10: This blog now shows up on the first page for both search terms and it didn't before this post.

Be a Social Media Early Adopter but Market with an Early Majority Strategy

The first premise of this entry is that a marketer should be an Early Adopter of social media technologies. The second is that the social media technologies actually used to go to market should match those used by the Early Majority of the customer base. The third is that presumed actual use of social media is overblown for most market segments.

Let's start with you, the marketer. Do you know what these are:

Twitter. Facebook. Ning. Blogger. SMS. Podcast. Linked In. Plurk. Pounce. Delicious. Jaiku. Skype. Orkut. Second Life. Yelp. YouTube. Cuil. RSS. Stumbleupon. Digg. Flickr. wetpaint.

Does not knowing make your marketing heart flutter that your marketing plan is behind the times?

As a marketer of almost any sort, you need to know what these are. You should be using some regularly, whether you really need to or not-pick the ones your customers are likely to use and consider it professional enrichment. You should take time each week to update yourself on facets of social media and tinker with what is relevant.

Now, what do you know really know about the social media usage of your customers? Let's start with a quick refresher on a typical technology adoption curve. The vertical axis shows number of adopters of a new technology, the horizontal axis shows time. Generally, it's most efficient to time technology marketing, in this case social media marketing technologies, for the early majority.

What social media are your early majority users of social media really using? Some may have Linkedin or Facebook or Twitter accounts but are they really using them? Your mission is to ignore media hype and find real data on what your customers really use.

The good news, the reality, is that in most cases, for most market segments, the actual use of these social media tools is over hyped. That which is exciting naturally gets disproportionate press.

Most recently, I have had the pleasure of marketing to marketers. I spent a good year crafting a marketing strategy mixed with new school and old school marketing tactics. The new school tactics (e.g. Facebook group) provided a progressive company image and some brand awareness but the old school tactics (e.g. trade shows) provided virtually all of our leads. My dream was to shift fully to a social media and inbound marketing strategy, but not enough of our prospects were embracing those channels, not even a majority as far as I could tell.


And so I was not astounded to recently learn from Forrester Research that "social media use in B2B is early stage; it's not well understood". Consider these statistics from a recent Forrester/Marketing Profs survey of B2B marketers:

• 32% use blogs; of those only 32% find them effective for brand building (about 10% of the total)
• 30% use forums/social communities; only 30% of them find them effective for building brand or generating leads (about 9% of the total)

(More from Forrester on that here .)



I was astounded however by a customer anecdote indicating that this market might even be more in the Dark Ages than I had thought. I asked a power user of the product we marketed-very sophisticated direct marketing software-how often he searched the Internet and what types of terms he searched on. This guy is a seasoned, sharp six figure marketing manager in a demanding $1B company.

His response-"I don't really have time to search. I don't search on anything."

We're not even talking about social media here...we're talking about basic internet search! This affirmed our difficulty in reaching corporate marketing people via paid or organic search. Many of them don't even search let alone participate in social media. My conclusion-the culture and pace of American business in many places do not allow for active social media participation or even regular use of the internet for information gathering purposes. Our perception of the use of social media, especially in the business markets, is based mostly on the very visible early adopters (e.g. some 3 million Twitter users).

So to recap-

Pay attention to social media and learn how it works and use it-find it's real value firsthand. You, as the marketer, must be an engaged Early Adopter.


And pay very deep attention to the social media habits of your customers. Find or build real data about usage and talk to your customers firsthand. If most of them aren't yet engaged in social media, it's not time to invest heavily. Craft your marketing strategies to fit the Early Majority of your customer base. The WRM will be strive to efficiently time the use of old school and new school marketing strategies...not too early and not too late.

Finally, social media adoption rates are growing quickly. Keep in touch with current data. Dig in to understand not just sign ups but actual usage. I'll leave you with a good site for marketers on Facebook usage including these charts showing growth by age group .