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B2B Lead Generation Articles on direct marketing
- Measuring the Value of Relationship Marketing
B2B Marketing Confidential | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
Relationship marketing, unlike direct marketing, is about cultivating a customer (in the case of B2B, this could mean many different audiences inside one company) over the long-term, and ultimately driving loyalty. Customers’ attitudes change in a positive direction; they become satisfied with the brand; they ultimately perceive the brand to be high-quality, caring, etc. and will stay a customer for life. At least, that’s the idea. The problem with relationship marketing is that you can’t try too hard. The dangers of spamming, coming across false or fake, engaging in only one-way communication, or being too pushy have sunk many well intentioned relationship marketers.Measuring relationship marketing can be a good way to get a handle on how to do relationship marketing right. I’ve seen a...
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- Customer Insight Three Ways
B2B Marketing Confidential | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
Customer insight is important to marketers for many reasons. Understanding your customers helps you in formulating market strategy. It helps in campaign design. It helps the sales force understand how to approach acquisition targets or retain existing customers. It is the raw material out of which great marketing happens. In the B2C space, customer insight is well understood, and whole industries and many great companies have made it their business. Segmentation schemes that provide predictive lift in product design, creative design, and direct marketing campaigns make billions of dollars a year for companies like Axciom and Claritas. However, in the B2B space, customer insight still has a long way to go. The reason is simple. Companies are a lot more complex than individuals or househo...
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- Three Ways to Track ROMI
B2B Marketing Confidential | Nov 20, 2010 | Permalink
In keeping with this week's "three ways" theme, here's a framework to track ROMI (return on marketing investment) that can pretty much solve any problem. It's high-level, but it's been very helpful for me over the past couple of months in thinking about a very complex, multi-channel marketing measurement problem.First, Test vs. Control. This means for every direct tactic that you launch, hold out a control group. The control group can be small, but should be selected from the exact same list that you used to generate the campaign. Otherwise, bias can (and will) creep in. Hold out the control list in a "stimulus table" somehwhere in your database. When the tactic has been in market for a long enough time, take a look at the performance of test vs. control customers against a baseline. A...
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- Are you investing enough in Sales Research?
ReadyContacts | Jun 02, 2010 | Permalink
B2B demand generation is getting tougher than ever before. Mass marketing is dead. Direct marketing is ignored. Email marketing has turned into a spray and pray tactic. But sales quotes have remained the same and are growing. In this situation, its imperative for every marketer to think outside the box – I know everyone says [...]
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- Measuring the Value of Relationship Marketing
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 over the long-term, and ultimately driving loyalty. Customers’ attitudes change in a positive direction; they become satisfied with the brand; they ultimately perceive the brand to be high-quality, caring, etc. and will stay a customer for life. At least, that’s the idea. The problem with relationship marketing is that you can’t try too hard. The dangers of spamming, coming across false or fake, engaging in only one-way communication, or being too pushy have sunk many well intentioned relationship marketers.<br/><br/>Measuring relationship marketing can be a good way to get a handle on how to do relationship marketing right. I’ve seen a lot of companies troll around for best practices and never truly understand what impact they’re making on customers until they start truly tracking spend, engagement and resultant attitudes.<br/><br/>There are three important components of measuring relationship marketing:<br/><br/><div><ol><br/><li><strong>Develop an RM taxonomy and track spend.</strong> This is basically carving out your vehicles into meaningful categories. It is not tracking campaigns. In fact, a relationship marketing “campaign” is a bit of a misnomer. The goal of RM is to keep consistent engagement going, with no gaps longer than six months. So you want to divide your vehicles up into things that are really different in the mind of customers. I’d also recommend using a hierarchical approach. A simple example is shown below. Once the taxonomy is established, start tracking spend, by audience, at a granular time scale. Weekly is good, but monthly is probably fine too.<a href='http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SYzGICU_vHI/AAAAAAAAAEw/jz-t4v1vKks/s1600-h/ExRelMktgTaxonomy.jpg'/></li><a href='http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SYz9GKRQViI/AAAAAAAAAE4/6yO4QvzzBqk/s1600-h/ExRelMktgTaxonomy.jpg'><img src='http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SYz9GKRQViI/AAAAAAAAAE4/6yO4QvzzBqk/s400/ExRelMktgTaxonomy.jpg' id='BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299889143786001954' border='0' alt='' style='width: 400px; cursor: hand; height: 216px;'/></a><br/><br/><li><strong>Track engagement.</strong> Engagement is different than spend. Spend will be really useful to track ROI, but engagement tracks two-way interactions. Use the same taxonomy you use for spend, but this should be the actual interactions with the customers. Engagement is an “in process indicator” for the success of relationship marketing. It is a good leading indicator for success, and can be tracked frequently, giving marketers frequent updates on their efforts. Important: Don’t just track outbound activity—track both inbound and outbound. People in relationships talk to each other, at least those whose relationships last. It’s also a good idea to track reach over a total audience.</li><br/><br/><li><strong>Track core attitudes and the ultimate attitude.</strong> Core attitudes and perceptions need to be determined by market research. I talk about SEM and how to do this <a href='http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2006/10/media-mix-part-2-long-term-effects.html'><strong>here.</strong> </a>But once these attitudes are defined, these should be considered as the ultimate goal of RM. Advertising has an effect too, so these metrics will be shared, but people in good relationships feel good about their partners. It’s important to track both the “ultimate attitude”—something like net promoter—and predictor / component attitudes that marketers can message too. Once again, the goal is to provide guidance back to marketers on where they should be re-mixing their efforts.<br/></li></ol><p><br/>With the three above metric families in place, relationship marketing can become much less of a mystery. Tactics can be chosen on the basis of empiricism vs. gut feel, and companies can truly improve their relationships with customers. After a time, you’ll realize that your taxonomy for parsing out vehicles can be improved. Core attitudes measured will also change with changing business objectives and customer landscape.</p></div><div class='blogger-post-footer'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/36395142-209319693321086707?l=b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com' height='1' alt='' width='1'/></div>
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![](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/07/customer-insight-three-ways.html&title=Customer-Insight-Three-Ways&bodytext=Customer insight is important to marketers for many reasons. Understanding your customers helps you in formulating market strategy. It helps in campaign design. It helps the sales force understand how to approach acquisition targets or retain existing customers. It is the raw material out of which great marketing happens. <div/><br/><div>In the B2C space, customer insight is well understood, and whole industries and many great companies have made it their business. Segmentation schemes that provide predictive lift in product design, creative design, and direct marketing campaigns make billions of dollars a year for companies like Axciom and Claritas. However, in the B2B space, customer insight still has a long way to go. </div><div/><br/><div>The reason is simple. Companies are a lot more complex than individuals or households. For one thing, companies can be very small--say one worker--or very large. For another, companies have different locations with different functions. Capturing all of this diversity is difficult. </div><a href='http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SmXJkkFy8YI/AAAAAAAAAFI/5Uz11VofPzo/s1600-h/ThreeAudiences.jpg'><img src='http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/SmXJkkFy8YI/AAAAAAAAAFI/5Uz11VofPzo/s400/ThreeAudiences.jpg' id='BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360912561454903682' border='0' alt='' style='width: 400px; height: 242px; cursor: hand;'/></a><br/><div/><br/><div>A good way to start simplifying the customer insight question in B2B is to focus on three key dimensions. First, <strong>what products are companies buying</strong>? Second, how is the company structured from a <strong>decision making perspective</strong>? Third, what <strong>information channels</strong> do decision makers and influencers in the company use to make decisions? This simple triad--product / audience / channel--can be very helpful as a "check off" list when thinking about marketing strategy. How would this approach work in a simple marketing campaign to say, sell a new type of tool to construction companies?</div><div/><br/><div>First, the <strong>product dimension</strong> kicks in. What companies currently have similar tools? What types of industries would need this tool? If the tool is very expensive, is there a lower bound on company size? A marketer could use data on product sales to build a predictive model of the most likely firms to purchase this new tool. It's important to note than in most cases, the product dimension is relevant at the firm and not the contact level.</div><div/><br/><div>Then, the <strong>audience</strong> <strong>dimension </strong>comes into play. Who is going to make the decision to purchase this tool? Are there key influencers to the purchase, the actual users of the tool? What are the features of the tool that will be most appealing to them? A marketer could create a contact strategy that hits each audience with the selling points that make the most impact--price on the buyer, value on the CFO, features on the users, for example. </div><div/><br/><div>Finally, the <strong>channel dimension </strong>is used to understand how marketing and sales should be executed. Do buyers and influencers read a specific type of publication to understand more about this family of tools? Are there influential communities that they listen to that we need to plug into? Are there key distributors that must carry the product for it to penetrate the market?</div><div/><br/><div>Of course, getting customer insight--the raw information--across these three dimensions is difficult. Doing this requires at the very least a qualitative market research study. However, by beginning to think in terms of these three dimensions, marketers will make better decisions and begin to collect information on their B2B customers that they can use over and over again.</div><div class='blogger-post-footer'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/36395142-959196577683935418?l=b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com' height='1' alt='' width='1'/></div>
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![](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/07/three-ways-to-track-romi.html&title=Three-Ways-to-Track-ROMI&bodytext=In keeping with this week's "three ways" theme, here's a framework to track ROMI (return on marketing investment) that can pretty much solve any problem. It's high-level, but it's been very helpful for me over the past couple of months in thinking about a very complex, multi-channel marketing measurement problem.<br/><div/><a href='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/Smm8FzeuzbI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/1-QE7wVPc-E/s1600-h/ThreeElementsofEffectiveness.jpg'><img src='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_30veOO2AATQ/Smm8FzeuzbI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/1-QE7wVPc-E/s400/ThreeElementsofEffectiveness.jpg' id='BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362023639265758642' border='0' alt='' style='width: 400px; height: 239px; cursor: hand;'/></a><br/><div><strong>First, Test vs. Control. </strong>This means for every direct tactic that you launch, hold out a control group. The control group can be small, but should be selected from the <em>exact same list</em> that you used to generate the campaign. Otherwise, bias can (and will) creep in. Hold out the control list in a "stimulus table" somehwhere in your database. When the tactic has been in market for a long enough time, take a look at the performance of test vs. control customers against a baseline. A good baseline to use is "90 days prior". You can also use "vs. last year" but here you have to watch to make sure that there isn't a disproportionate percentage of customers in either list that weren't active in that time period.</div><br/><div><strong>Second, Opt for Customer Lifetime Value or Customer Data When Measuring Return. </strong>It's always better to take a look at customer dynamics vs. simply total sales. For example, if I'm doing test-control analysis, I'm much more interested in understand how many customers I acquired, lost, what my impact was on average transaction size, and ultimately what my impact was on CLV than just total sales for the population for that period. Disaggregating gross sales performance into customer-specific data yields huge insights. This is particularly true of subscription or repeat-order businesses. </div><br/><div><strong>Third, Econometric Forecasting with a Marketing Component. </strong>Putting all of your data into a time series database and understanding the contribution of each marketing tactic to return is the final step. This can work in a direct marketing, advertising, or "mixed" environment. The first step is to leave the marketing stimulus out--build a forecasting model for key independent variables, namely total revenue, new customers, lost customers, and average transaction size (and potentially price as well). Explain as much of the variance as possible using autoregressive terms (seasonality, etc.) and extrinsic data (competitive actions, GDP, business confidence, etc.) When you have a good model, add in marketing stimulus, using appropriate adstocks / decay rates. This should yield a good model for understand what elements of marketing are driving what elements of return.<br/></div><div>Taken together, these three marketing measurement techniques can enable a "test and learn" culture at your organization.</div><div class='blogger-post-footer'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/36395142-3024653615985211931?l=b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com' height='1' alt='' width='1'/></div>
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