Direct Marketing for B2B in Digital Scenario

Even though businesses have been utilizing Direct Marketing for long, it is widely believed that not all B2B marketers have been able to fully leverage the growing clout of digital capabilities available today in the market place.

The existing digital environment today presents opportunities to convert the prospects into customers via a carefully crafted digital plan - listening, supporting and delivering along the customers purchase cycle. This in turn results in generating referrals and plentiful opportunities to deliver a positive return on marketing spend.

Even though more and more users are spending large amount of their time online, how many B2B businesses do we know who have a full-proof plan to market their products online? How many businesses are able to create an integrated offline and online customer experience for its prospects? How many businesses do you know who can confidently track their customer through his purchase cycle?

Today there are ample tools and technologies that will allow you to do this successfully.

However a strategic approach is required to understand how to apply, target and optimize the process of marketing across the various steps of customers purchase.

To understand the various tactical digital initiatives that one can pursue, we should first understand the general process. The Go-To–Market process for any B2B client can be broadly classified into a 7 step process:

1. Understanding Customer Needs

2. Communication Message

3. Fulfillment (information)

4. Generating and Qualifying Leads

5. Transaction (online or offline)

6. Relationship Management

7. Referrals

In order to drive a perfectly aligned marketing program across the various stages, the quintessential requirement is to have a tracking,measurement and reporting system in place.

Below are some of the tactics that can be utilized across the different stages.

Understanding Customer Needs:

A brief from a client is the first bit of information that can be used to prepare a basic strategic draft and define one’s approach to the problem

Other than the information derived from client brief , your website analytics and automated customer surveys can also play a part in defining a customer’s needs.

Communication Message:

You’re messaging in terms of creative and copy is equally important in closing the loop. By automatically serving a different message to your various target segments you can see visible increase in conversions and leads.Moreover, A/B testing of various creative messaging options or landing page scan help you successfully optimize your creative messaging and increase interest and engagement.

Fulfillment:

All users are searching for a certain set of information or content – it may be in form of a certain kind of whitepaper, or request for information or even a free trial. Fulfillment of any form of information draws the customer closer to eventual sale. An automated system that keeps track of user information consumption patterns will help you in re-targeting your customer and allow one to provide value to the prospect.

Generating and Qualifying Leads:

Lead generation and qualifying them as MQPs (marketing qualified) prospects is another process that can be carried out online or via a call-center. SEM or search engine marketing today is one of the most important lead generating tools out there. With more and more people dependent on Search Engines to acquire information, the search engines form a favorite hunting ground for such activity.

Webinars, Database driven marketing campaigns, Newsletters and online events they all form a powerful set of tactics to generate leads.

The other not so direct yet powerful ways of generating leads online can be Blogs, Social Media and Virals.

Transactions

As and when a transaction occurs,your prospect converts into a customer. To be able to track this transition and define the value of the transaction will allow you to tier your customer and know more about the various points of interception that he experienced. This in turn rolls back into the marketing campaign planning process and optimize future acquisitions.

Having a digital way of connecting leads to transactions and then data-mine to drill down on those transactions will provide you with powerful behavioral data of your customers.

Your messaging and treatment met to the customer at this point will make way for future referrals.

Relationship Management

Once a prospect is converted into a customer an equally important task of managing relationship with customer begins. Loyalty programs, rewards and recognition and a knowing more about your customer will allow you to build that relationship with your customer and provide value to them.

The emphasis on a relationship management is on one-on-one marketing – that knows your customer to an extent that you can tailor make your offering for him.

Referrals

Referrals are the greatest validation of a satisfied customer. Referrals can be in form of leveraging a testimonial of an expert who also happens to be a client or even someone who can pitch in with a good word for a Prospect.

In some products Referrals can also be used to generate a buzz or awareness and increase the interest levels of the prospects.

Even though the above describes the perfect set-up where one is tracking and end-to end customer behavior through his purchase cycle, a focused campaign aimed at any of the steps in a purchase cycle can be instrumental in generating leads and qualified marketing prospects and shortening the time it takes to convert a prospect into a customer. With more and more people seeking that information online, Direct Marketing is going all Digital in coming days , much sooner than we think.

by Aditi Kumar (aditi.kumar@eynamic.net)

WCM/CMS - Shortlisting Blues

It is 7:30 in the evening, a Friday, and apparently David is busy working on something critical, it must be some marketing campaign, I believe. …ohh...no.…I realize he has been asked to do a thorough analysis on finding the right-fit WCM solution for our new website project.

Well, picking out the right CMS for your website is not just about doing some research over the internet. The process is threefold, knowing what you need, identifying what different vendors have to offer and then mapping the vendor capabilities to your requirements.

Step1 - Knowing what you need – This is one of the most significant but perhaps one of the least weighed upon criteria in identifying the solution of your needs. Do you really know what you need? Perhaps you do or maybe you don’t.

This question might be a little tricky as it may have different meanings and value depending upon who this question is directed to. To me, it’s actually a further set of questions which need to be answered at different levels before somebody answers the bigger question on the needs. Some of the common questions can be:

• Are you just looking for a CMS that helps you straighten the possibly out-of-order content publishing process within your organization?
• Is there a need for a system that helps your website integrate well with other existing systems, maybe a CRM, a DAM or an ECM?
• Is there a particular budget bracket, which you’re considering for this initiative? If yes, are you ready to compromise on some functionality and user experience for price points matching your plan?
• Do you have a need of managing multiple sites and catering to multiple channels?
• Are you looking for content management solution for a portal and not a website?
• Is there any inclination towards a particular technology or framework within your organization?
• Do you want to reuse your existing web based content with the new implementation?
• Do you need a CMS/WCM which has capabilities of tracking user behavior, audience targeting and web analytics?

Yet another important aspect to need assessment is about knowing the business drivers for the CMS/WCM initiative within your organization. Forrester research in its web content management online survey identified different likely business drivers for any new CMS/WCM deployment. They included:

• Improved Web site customer experiences
• Increased sales conversion rates
• Brand consistency
• New eBusiness initiatives
• IT consolidation or cost reduction
• Web operations cost reduction
• Improved employee communication

Your business drivers for this initiative should highly influence your decision for the choosing the CMS/WCM product for your organization.

That’s about need assessment. Over here we do not take those requirements into account which would be catered by almost all the standard web content management systems.

Once the needs have been clearly identified, the next thing is about establishing what different solution vendors have got to offer.

Step2 – Identify the offerings – One may get a fair idea about different CMS/WCM vendor offerings at a high level from browsing through the different product websites over the internet. Forrester research in its CMS/WCM Wave ‘09 weighs different solution vendors based on diverse criteria, and one of those important criterions is any products’current offering/solution.

Forrester evaluates the product offerings from a content management, product architecture, and additional capabilities viewpoint.

It is very important to evaluate how a particular product handles the content life cycle? How versioning, audit trail and workflows play out? How do administrators manage and configure the system?

Also, knowing the product architecture is very vital. There may be scenarios where the package is very appealing but the architecture doesn’t stand valid with the changing face of technology. A vigilant review of products’ architecture gives good insight into its scalability and extensibility potential.

Additional capabilities like multi site/channel implementations, multivariate & A/B testing for testing content changes on audience segments should again be carefully weighed upon.

Here is a checklist of some of the common features which are available with a typical WCM/CMS product.

Checkpoint	Details	Supporting Products (few)
Content Repository
	Library services, check-in/check-out and versioning	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Authentication
	Advanced access control, permissions, role delegation	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Content Authoring
	Authoring through browser based templates, or from MS Word	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Workflow
	Workflow should support a proper approval/rejection cycle.	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Content conversion to XHTML or XML.		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Content Delivery through web servers		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Rich Metadata capabilities		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Web Analytics & Reporting
	Either integration to extrinsic analytics tools or in built functionality.	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Page Layout Design Capabilities for end users		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Professional Services Support		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, RedDot

Other than knowing the feature set, knowing the strategic path a particular product takes is very critical before finalizing on any vendor.

The question is that, how does a customer analyze this factor? From a customer viewpoint, it can be figured out by looking at;

1. The product updates/add-ons any particular vendor has planned or achieved in a given period.
2. The partnerships and associations which the vendor has made in last couple of years.
3. What existing customers have got to say about the product and its capabilities?
4. How many new customers has a vendor acquired in last two quarters?
5. The technology route which the product has taken or is going to take from an architectural viewpoint.
6. If the vendor has grown in terms of its geographical and market presence.

Step3 – Mapping product capabilities to needs – Now this might seem very straight, right? But actually it isn’t. Think about the fact that do you really need everything a good product has to offer, probably not.

To exemplify, there are products which are WCM/CMS leaders but recognized for their integration with their existing portal products. Now the question that you should ask yourself is that other than the portal integration, which perhaps is not something you need, has the product got a better value proposition than a mid-range product with much modest price points?

The point here is that perhaps you don’t need everything that’s offered by different product suites. Mapping your requirements to offerings should result in creating a traceability matrix, which should give you a clear picture of what product(s) you should vouch for.

As a concluding remark, I would say, as identifying the right WCM/CMS product is not your competency, and thus in all probability there can be mistakes, which might be disastrous from a long term web strategy standpoint. To my mind, the best approach would to engage some WCM/CMS consultant even before going ahead with the project in the discovery phase.

by Muktesh Kandpal (muktesh.kandpal@edynamic.net

Key criteria for selecting a Web Content Management system

This blog provides insight into selecting a Content Management System. This is focused towards marketers in the mid-market space. I’ve tried to keep the content as non-technical as possible.

Content Management products (CMS/WCM) have started to become commoditized. All of them seem to offer similar features, which makes the selection process increasingly difficult and frustrating.

So what do you need to think about when you are selecting a WCM system?

1. Product Strategy and Roadmap

Look at the strategy and roadmap of a product to understand the short-term and medium-term goals of the product. Understand how often the product has been updated in the past few years – history is the best indicator of the future.

Understand what medium- to long-term technology decisions have been made. For example, one of our partners, Sitecore’s, strategy has been to stay close to .NET technologies, so this makes Sitecore an ideal product for mid-market organizations focused on .NET. Similarly, Open Text Web Solutions (formerly RedDot) seems to be going through a re-architecture exercise moving them towards the .NET framework as well.

2. Technology

Your choices typically include .NET, Java or Open Source. Given .NET’s popularity with the mid-market segment, a lot of the popular products are aligned with .NET. Some products that have their own underlying languages. Getting your users ramped up and keeping them updated on these these technologies can be a challenge. Integration and development is key with products. The more ‘open’ the products are (ie. how extensively they expose their APIs), the more flexibility you have. Products that expose their API completely will allow you to integrate easily.

A question that comes up quite often with clients is whether to consider Open Source products in the enterprise. Quite often, the main consideration is cost, but you have to remember that Open Source does not mean “free”! In making cost decisions, consider the Total Cost of Ownership instead of just the license costs. Development and maintenance costs can be higher with Open Source platforms, and support has also been an issue in organizations.

The key issue with Open Source product is that you need to know the underlying technologies very well, since support is not always easily accessible. Some very mature Open Source platforms do exist though, so stick to technologies that have a strong development community behind them. Drupal is one product with a very strong community and support model. In the last few years, we’ve seen Drupal make an impact in the Enterprise. This trend will continue.

3. Content Production

When we talk about ‘content’ on a WCM, it doesn’t just mean ‘text’; it also means audio, video, and images. One of the core elements of a web content management system is producing that content. Content production consists of content creation and development, management, and publication.The blog that you are reading right now went through a simple content production process: it involved me typing in the content, my colleague reviewing and providing feedback, and then me publishing the final content out to the site.

When assessing how content is created and developed in the WCM, check that the sytem supports the type of content you need, and provides an easy-to-use editor to create it. Most content editors these days are similar in what they offer. Also, check to see if authoring and transformation features are available.

Worklow is a critical capability of a CMS. Some organizations have complex workflows, in which case a flexible worklfow is needed. For example, certain features – like the ability to enter workflow tasks into email applications or integration into existing intranets – will get people using the WCM quickly.

Once you’ve created the content, you’ll have to utilize the product’s deployment capabilities to put the content on the website. Make sure the the product can provide support and central management for multistage deployment and publishing.

4. Marketing Automation

What if you could get the right content in front of the right person at the right time – how would it impact your customer acquisition process? This is what’s making this space exciting. The ability to serve up dynamic content based on user paths and profiles allows marketers to truly control the web environment.

Marketing automation in a CMS includes web analytics, personalization, lead management, and automation capabilities. Some of mid-market products have started rolling out marketing automation and analytics capabilities – these have been available in Enterprise CMSs like Interwoven.

5. Migrating Content

Most CMS implementations are typically migrations, since you are usually moving content over from existing sites or resources. This can be both tricky and annoying.

There are two ways to migrate content: manual or automated. You probably want to avoid having to do this manually if you can, and just go with automated migration techniques and tools. However the structue of your content does not allow for automated migration, you may have to go with the old-fashioned manual copy-and-paste approach. It’s about as much fun as cleaning a house after a frat party, but sometimes you may not have an option.

6. Costs

Your budget for the CMS implementation should factor in several things, including:

• Licensing costs for the WCM system
• Development
• Training
• Content Migration
• Content Creation
• Hosting
• Other related software

Quite often, decision-makers only see licensing costs, which can be deceiving. Development costs, for example, may vary depending on the CMS. If a product is less common, or more complex, finding resources to support training and development for your project can become expensive.

7. Get an expert opinion

There is a lot of material out there on selecting content management sytems. Listening to what experts say will help you get down to a shortlist quickly. Forrester, Gartner, CMS Wire, CMS Matrix and Aberdeen are some sources you can rely on.

eDynamic has a process in place to select a WCM product that we can share with you. We work with several CMSs like Sitecore, Ekton, Drupal, MOSS and Kentico, among others, and this insight is based on our knowledge derived since 2001. Email me and I’ll send the process document across to you.

Also, we recently released a short video to guide marketers on how to WCM solution. You can find it on our website www.edynamic.net

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have, I’d love to help

by Rahul Khosla (rahul.khosla@edynamic.net)

An optimum distribution mix for your B2B marketing dollars - Part 1

I came across an exciting job post just today for Madagaskar. It was an exciting role for marketers such as me who are thirsty for unknown territory. But remember Grade 5 geography? Madagascar is in Africa right? The ‘k’ put me off just like a lot of B2B marketers around the world are put off when they see the CEO or CFO’s diktat. Reduce spend, get more ROI…branding be damned.

I swear I love ROI because I know what I would do. I would say – “You need to only spend for 4 months. That’s a quarter & a bit. Beyond that I won’t bother you with budget haranguing.” But in those first four months I would need:

1) An analyst endorsed, syndicated content piece. Industry thought leadership they call it.

2) 3 Webinars with 2 of our clients targeted at geographies we work in. The Webinars have to be necessarily in partnership with a business media of choice with the latter driving promotion of the webinars.

That is all. Once I have these, I would spend the next 2 quarters simply peddling my fare on the Internet while the Webinar leads keep my ever nagging sales team on ‘Run Forrest Run!’

Every marketer worth his/her salt needs a cushion when they can strategize on ROI. But in the real world this cushion never materializes because you are always chasing the eight ball. When I was handed this real world challenge at several places, all I asked for was a budget for 4 months that gave me the cushion to experiment without ever letting the pipeline run dry.

It is almost impossible to predict a model for lead generation that ensures highest bang for your buck. But what I have found is:

1) Organic Search can be the cornerstone for free, high quality leads from month 4 onwards since kick off

2) Paid Search should come into the mix only after 6 months into your annual marketing program

3) Social Marketing can provide the odd gold mine but only after your Organic Search is firmly in place

The day you enter the 3rd quarter, you are primed to get rich. And then come the focus groups & discussion laundering for you to sing aloud on the Web. If you are reading this piece, then I shall talk about how the magic starts unfolding from the 4th month onwards in my next dig.

by Abhiraj Banerjee (abhiraj.banerjee@edynamic.net)

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