Category Archives: Marketing Technology Reviews and Tips

09.01.15
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Where is everybody? Where’s my ROI?

You have a great concept – you have great speakers – you have great sponsors. You have buy-in and strategic advice from worldclass thought and business leaders. So why did nobody turn up for your conference?

By now, you have been discussing internally whether you should charge a fee and how much. You have wrung your brain about how you can guarantee the sponsors that the audience is who they are targeting. And because you can’t share the delegate data, you really need people to be there.

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Maybe you need help?

Marketing and strategic planning are there for a reason. They pave the way for your success, be it a campaign, a product launch, or an event. So make sure to get your marketing teams involved before you even set a date.

keys

Here are my three keys to successful events:

  • Content (hey, you’ve got that covered)
  • Consistency
  • Communication

Naturally, there’s more to it but if you don’t have those three Cs under control, you may just end up with a room that may be full, but not with the people you really wanted to share this experience with.

Over the years, I have seen many examples of fabulous conference who never reached the intended audience, because there was no consistency in how the event was promoted, and there was no strategy in the communication to the intended audience. So in panic mode, just to fill the room, organizers at the last minute started forfeiting fees and/or asking friends and relatives to show up to fill some chairs.

Actually, …

What organizers sometimes forget is that it’s not the size that matters. Bigger is not better, if the addition is irrelevant. On a side note, conference guests actually sit more comfortably and breathe a lot easier if the room is not cramped. If you host a dinner party at home, you make sure your guests are comfortable and are able to move. So half empty is not half bad.

So…

Use your marketing and communication experts to remain consistent, persistent and agile. Select your theme and make it relevant and timely. Partly, it’s something you can buy. Tools such as email marketing automation can help you build an engagement ladder that starts with alerting your audience to what is coming, and continues to add teasers and more content to finally compel them to not just sign up – but to be there on the day.

Oslo

Next time you plan a conference, make sure to plan with the end in mind:

On the day you want a room with an audience that is pleased with what they came for and therefore open to engage with you and your speakers and sponsors.

Because that is the real ROI of  your event.

03.05.14
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A diary of #anywhereization – working on the iPad with Salesforce1 and various office tools

It wasn’t planned, but necessity made it happen: stuck in extremely busy times working entirely off the iPad (and a mini at that). So what’s all this about mobility, on any device anytime, anywhere? Can we be productive?

Short answer: yes.

Slightly longer answer: read my notes below to understand what worked, how it worked, and what didn’t (at least for me).

By the way, I am sure if I had had the bandwidth to search for solutions/apps when I encountered challenges, it could have been solved. But I didn’t. Simply too busy. So I invented new ways of getting things done.

Day 1

My plan was to stop carrying my laptop when travelling on short business flights for meetings – the iPad mini fits into the handbag and does not even have to come out when passing through security, as it is seen by the scanner as a mobile telephone. So I downloaded Office-To-Go from Nexscience and created my first document during a flight which I could later email to myself, edit and forward/send to the people I wanted to email. Creating a straight forward text was easy and intuitive and it did not reformat when moved between applications.

Getting back to the office,  my laptop – died. No time wasted, turned to Chatter on the Salesforce1 platform on my iPad to update my co-workers on the project in the appropriate Chatter group. It saved me having to write meeting notes! In fact, I could share more information more directly – because you get lazy when you have to type it all on the small iPad mini keyboard. Within 20 minutes, all the details discussed in the meeting were shared with those co-workers working on the project who would then be alerted to them in their Chatter feed.

  • Less is more – direct messages in a collaboration tool gets the information directly to your co-worker who does not have to open yet another document and read through a lot of prose. And can respond right there in the same  feed for everyone else to see. No “reply-all” –  it’s a need-to-know only solution
  • Productivity indicator – saved 30 minutes – no need to organise your notes to  write a structured report. And immediate sharing, instead of another dreaded set of meeting notes lying around that need to be written “when you have a moment”.
Running your business from an iPad

Running your business from an iPad

And then I logged a ticket with our IT hotline – also in Chatter – to get help fixing the laptop. Obviously, as I could not log it from the laptop. Duh… Considering I work offsite (#anywhereization) and it being a hardware issue, I braced myself to be stuck with the iPad for at least another day.

Day 2

Opening emails as the first thing you do makes little sense if most of the interaction you have is in the Chatter feed – including just getting an overview of what happened overnight in a global company that never sleeps.

Working on the iPad mini means you can work everywhere, so why not right there with coffee and a toast without even getting up – and it is not nearly as uncomfortably hot as a laptop on your knees. Who hasn’t had a “laptop-burn” on their thigh at some point – or fried a battery charger under the covers.

  • You end up working in the most awkward positions.
  • Productivity indicator  – Down at least 60 minutes, as I should have been up and in the office instead.

In preparation of a new project briefing to be kicked off in a conference call later that day, I had planned to create a fabulous Powerpoint slide deck with nice images, amazing graphics and charts. But that was not an option with just your index finger and an iPad mini screen size. So I opened Keynote which I knew was a cool app. But since I am not a Mac-User (yes, my laptop is in fact a PC) I never checked it out. Now was the time. It took some trial and error, and I never figured out how to import the cool graphics and charts and nice images. But all the information needed for the briefing suddenly fit into 5 slides – just text and itemized lists and links to other sources of information. No fancy stuff that is nice to look at but not really carrying any information.

  • Keeping it simple also gets the information out.
  • Productivity Indicator – Saved 60 minutes of searching for the perfect graphic, the perfect photograph, creating the perfect pie chart and reformatting into the perfect colour scheme.

But what about the conference call? We mostly use GoToMeeting so that was a fast and free option to download to the iPad and then log into my existing userID. But I never figured out how to schedule a meeting for later, so had to open one in meet now and then let it beep in my ear until the meeting started 20 mins later. I experimented to be sure it all worked once the co-workers were joining to save everyone the frustration of a failed conference call, but it meant I had to live with the beep. Honestly, folks at GoToMeeting, could you not give us some music, instead? The beep eats my brain cells. I had sent everyone on the call my fantastic Keynote presentation with only 5 slides for them to read, which was greatly appreciated – so it all started off on a really nice note and we had the most agreeable session where everyone agreed, and we agreed on who should make it happen:  me – but that’s another blog, I fear.

  • Learn how to SCHEDULE a GoToMeeting on the iPad as soon as you can to avoid the beep.
  • Productivity Indicator – saved 30 minutes, as everyone had the clear, short itemized briefing and we did not share any slides on the call to go through in presentation mode where everyone wants to comment (at least in Sweden) and knocks you off track. No questions asked = agreement was quicker and based on the facts only.

Day 3

Laptop fixed, off into the office to plug it into the docking station…. and it died again. Motherboard fried. Back to the iPad. My eyes were swimming – also because the iPad mini screen is so small that it is really tiresome to work for 8 hours squinting like that.

By now, I found myself checking Salesforce1 notifications continuously rather than checking emails – it is just quicker to get the issue/request sorted within the app, so that any links to information that is already part of Salesforce is there without having to copy/paste it into an email. As a matter of fact, I find copy/paste very difficult to execute on the iPad – maybe my fingers are not the right size.

All is not well  when you really need to get your head down to business, though. When a process is not designed intuitively for the mobile interface, some things just cannot be done. Such as updating Google Docs. Painfully, I realised that I had to start writing apologetic Chatter posts to my co-workers that dealt with the more logistical aspects of our ongoing projects – you know, budgets and stuff. The beauty is, that the apology posted on one co-worker’s Chatter feed actually resulted in two others reading this post and offering to help with completing all the steps that I cannot currently take care of from the iPad. So – in fact – I did not ask for help, but help was offered. And saved me the humiliation of casting the towel and delaying the process impacting everyone in the chain of events. Running complicated projects on a tight timeline requires a well oiled machine where every link is the strongest link. And I am the weakest  link when unable to complete my own tasks.

  • Until all business processes are intuitive and integrated in  the mobile interface – not just VIEW but also CREATION, you need friends when stuck on the iPad.
  • ProductivityIndicator –  Lost at least one full day in the progress of the project. Not a good thing.

Day 4

Waiting for my replacement laptop got me another day on the experiment – and made me realise that a big screen is probably a better choice when I need to write more than just a few brief messages. So I ended up working in a hybrid – and perhaps a little less smart – but hey, it worked.

You just need a bigger screen, sometimes

You just need a bigger screen, sometimes

My private laptop is big – really big. I use it for playing computer games. You need a big screen to find all those monsters in the dark. Today, I created long documents (including this blog) on this fantastic device with a proper keyboard and ergonomic mouse – and emailed them to my company email to process on the iPad either as another email now going where it was supposed to go, or as a briefing/post in Chatter. It’s backwards, but at least my eyes are not swimming. And easier to make sure there are no typos – or unintentional bloopers – in the information that I share.

  • You are physically challenged if you work intensively and long hours on an iPad – need more meetings or other  non-computerrelated activities to break the spell
  • ProductivityIndicator  – Minus 50% productivity on the day, having to send documents back and forth between devices and formats requiring reformating/editing.

Looking forward to my laptop tomorrow, you are still my best friend. But iPad Mini – you saved me and will always remain close to my heart. Or in my handbag.

Please excuse any typos – as this was proof read on an iPad Mini.

09.09.13
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The ROI of Social Media – or how to convince your boss

Social Media is engagement – if you don’t get it yet, I hope you will very soon. But engagement is very hard to measure, so even if you do get it, your boss might not appreciate the value of your efforts.

That is why you need to create a social media engagement strategy around metrics and value add = ROI. You need to have a conversation.

The traditional way of counting is through “fluffy” things like Facebook Fans/Likes or number of retweets – which I think is just a natural extension of marketing’s best friend: click-through rate on email blasts. It’s hard to leave your comfort zone, even if you are an innovative marketer who really wants to embrace social.

What does it cost you, if you do NOT have a social media engagement strategy?  Here is a link to a free eBook with some good statistics and methods.

At Sweden Social Web Camp (SSWC)) on Tjärö island in August, we tried to look at ROI benefits versus costs. What it boils down to, is tangible, measurable and very convincing:

Source: Salesforce.com

Email marketing on its own is not engagement. And it’s getting harder and harder to use on a large scale.  Let’s talk instead.

Soft and Hard: Facts & Figures

Finally, here is a link to all the slides I presented at SSWC – there are some wonderful charts and hard numbers from salesforce.com’s extensive customer research. You can use them in your own context. Or  take them to your superiors to get at least as much – if not more – budget for your social media engagement as your colleagues in traditional email marketing.

07.26.13
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Cut through the noise

There are simply far too many emails in the world – you do not want to add to the noise. And with Google’s new Gmail interface with a tab entirely devoted to sale updates and coupons, where all emails which includes an unsubscribe link get lumped together, it gets even tougher for email marketers to get through.  So here are 9 great tips on how to create a successful email campaign. First, 25 mind blowing stats about email marketing:

Email marketing is cost-effective and the results are easy to track. But it needs to be part of a holistic marketing strategy to generate great ROI. Shouting is not enough.

  1. Create target lists – Segment your audience into target groups by creating lists. Use such as location, company, industry or size, job titles, past purchases and demographic information.
  2. Personalize your content – Tailor your message and content to appeal to each audience by using short, personalized messages with industry-specific key words to speak to the audience in their own language. You can also include a call to action by providing a link to an article, whitepaper or something else valuable for the receiver. Try to experiment with both rich text HTML and plain text formats to see which gets the best response.
  3. Don’t forget the subject line – Because it is vital! A survey from Salesforce shows that the open rate increases with 58 % if the subject has fewer than 10 characters, so try to nail a perfect line and this will help out a lot.
  4. Alert sales – Be sure to alert sales when you execute a campaign so they’re ready to respond quickly to the resulting leads.
  5. Integrate with your web – By using Web-to-lead forms you can capture prospect information from visitors to your site. And check out the marketing automation apps on the AppExchange to find other ways to shorten the time between an inquiry and response.
  6. Develop a social media strategy – To increase your visibility and establish yourself as a trusted advisor and expert, develop a social media strategy on how to be present in different social media channels. In my next post I will give you some more detailed tips on how to use social media tools for business and how to build a successful strategy.
  7. Don’t spam – Respect you prospects and don’t spam them with emails, it’s important to give them the information and content they are interested in. Your goal is to have a conversation over time and to build a relationship between the prospect and your company and spamming includes neither one of them.
  8. Track results – Measure how users respond to keep refining your tactics. Think about what you want to measure and then identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to track.
  9. Nurture campaigns – Lead nurturing can have a dramatic effect on your sales pipeline so it’s important to alert your reps to follow up on leads being nurtured. You can for example use lead scoring as you can read more about here in my earlier post.

Get the right look

If you want to reinforce the look and feel of your emails and ensure your messaging always is consistent, try using an email template. At Salesforce.com you can find templates for text, HTML with letterhead, custom HTML and Force.com pages (Visualforce). This is not only great for the marketing department, it is also a great tool for your reps so that sales and marketing can speak with one voice. And it saves them time – time to spend on more selling. With Salesforce templates there’s also a built-in dynamic tracking feature so you can track which emails were opened, how many times and when each recipient last opened the email.

Remember to keep your templates up to date and easily accessible. For more detailed instructions on how to create your own email template, go to Help & Training. And if you need inspiration and want to see some great examples of email marketing, you should read this report from MarketingSherpa where they announced the winners of email marketing 2012.

 

Customer Company Tour Nordics 2013

Sign up for a day packed with exciting new sessions and breakthrough technologies during Customer Company Tour Nordics 2013. Come and meet us the 15th of October at Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Sign up here!

07.18.13
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Turning leads into loyal customers

If you read my last post you may have learned how to increase the flow of high quality leads. But you really do not want to leave them out there in the void: If you manage them in a systematic and structured way, you can increase both the number of leads and the conversion rate: How many of those you turn into loyal customers.

By following these five steps you’re going to increase your pipeline and at the same time making sure you’re focusing on the right leads.

  1. First of all, just as Joe Pack explains in his article about Smarketing, you must align your sales and marketing teams to ensure no lead is overlooked. It’s a team effort. Map out your sales process and define clear hand-off criteria between marketing and sales. You have to define when a marketing lead is passed to inside sale and also when an inside sales lead should be converted into an opportunity, account and contact.
  2. Define your success metrics up front to be sure you’re not missing any important information when your leads move through the funnel. For example you can measure your pipeline by industry and then use a lead history report to show the number of open opportunities by converted lead industry.
  3. Now that you have several options to increase your leads (post) such as using your Web properties, SEM campaigns and social media, you can also import lists from Excel spreadsheets or from email applications such as Outlook and Gmail.
  4. Keep your data clean and avoid duplicate leads by using the “Find Duplicates” button in Salesforce CRM frequently. Also, create rules to avoid converting leads without email address or phone number.
  5. Track your lead-generation efforts and find out where you get most of your leads and which marketing tools that works best for you. By using a lead history report you can analyze revenue and pipeline to find lead criteria such as lead source, industry or annual revenue to opportunity amounts. You can also use campaigns with metrics like # leads, $$ pipeline and ROI. And at last, make it easy for yourself and get a clear view of your funnel by defining the stages of your sales process by using categorizing # sales qualified leads, # opportunities and # closed revenue.

It’s a team effort – so take a look at this video on how to establish an effective sales and marketing methodology:


Add lead scores to close the deal

Lead scoring helps sales to focus on hot leads and those most likely to result in a closed deal:

  • If you’re just getting started with lead scoring, use BANT (budget, authority, need and timing) data as a preliminary assessment of lead quality.  Then start to categorize your leads into levels of priority by using a point system to assign values to characteristics that align with successful sales. For example, you may assign 10 points to a CEO and 3 points to a manager based on the experience that CEO prospects result in more closed deals.
  • Categorize your lead data into explicit and implicit where explicit is the information you get from your own channels or by direct interaction, while implicit includes online behavior such as emails opened, click-throughs and downloads of marketing material. To come up with the best possible lead score you have to evaluate both types of data together because just knowing someone has repeatedly engaged with the corporate site is not enough. You also want to make sure the prospect’s profile shows if he or she can make purchasing decisions.
  • Once you identify qualified prospects with lead scoring you should automate the process by adding workflows and alerts, you can for example set up an email alert to notify a sales rep to follow up immediately.
  • Revisit your scoring criteria’s regularly as you learn more about how various characteristics correlate with success. And when you’re ready to take lead scoring to the next level you should check out the scoring applications in the AppExchange directory!

Just like the weather in Ireland, if it’s cold today, it can get hot tomorrow, so don’t disqualify a lead only because it’s not right for the moment. Update your fields with details why the lead didn’t qualify and keep an eye on it for the future.

Good luck!


Customer Company Tour Nordics 2013

Sign up for a day packed with exciting new sessions and breakthrough technologies during Customer Company Tour Nordics 2013. Come and meet us the 15th of October at Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Sign up here!

07.08.13
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Become a customer company and turbocharge your lead process

During this summer I will share some best practices on how to become a customer company and how Salesforce CRM can help you optimize your marketing strategies. This first post is about how you generate more leads, since few things are more vital to a business than generating leads and future sales. And it doesn’t have to be as hard as it sometimes feels. Here are some great tips on how to become a customer company and connect with your customers in a whole new way.

Get to know your audience

If you haven’t by now, it’s time to take your marketing to the next level. Today, companies have to be more social than ever to create engagement and likeability.

  • By using a real time channel such as Twitter, you can capture leads by promoting your products and services, but most important, you can build relationships with both clients and prospects.
  • To know what to tweet about you have to do your research. Don’t underestimate the faithful old servant, your website, to find out what your prospects are interested in. By using Web-to-lead forms you can automatically capture information from visitors who already have an interest in your business.
  • Although, there is a few things to keep in mind before you create a form. Define what information you want to collect, consider where you should place the form and how much information is legitimate to ask for.
  • As soon as you have these parts in place, don’t be afraid to multiply your forms to capture different types of information!

Optimize and evaluate

But there is one problem, it doesn’t matter how great your website is, if just a few knows it exists.

  • Make sure to be where your prospects are looking by using for example Google Adwords.
  • To further search optimize your website there are also some great apps to use. Check out the AppExchange app SEO for Salesforce which automatically connects to intelligence data through Google Analytics. With the app you can also track your lead origins and report by search engine, keywords and campaigns through your entire sales cycle.
  • And remember! Evaluate your lead sources to see which one performs the best and gives you the best results.

By following these best practices you will soon increase the flow of high quality leads and at the same time build up your database of valuable information.

Customer Company Tour Nordics 2013

Sign up for a day packed with exciting new sessions and breakthrough technologies during Customer Company Tour Nordics 2013. Come and meet us the 15th of October at Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Sign up here!

Take a look at the keynote from the Customer Company Tour last year with JP Rangaswami talking about Business is Social: