Web Marketing

A New Paradigm for Telesales – Introducing Myndnet

by Sridhar Ramanathan

I’ve written a lot about lead generation harping on the issue of poor lead quality and disappointing lead handoffs between marketing and sales. One of the solutions to this “alignment” problem is hiring a good telesales or inside sales firm that can do the job of filtering “raw” leads generated from marketing efforts and delivering only well qualified leads to the sales organization. And usually these “brick and mortar” firms are well worth the money costing about $2000-$3000 per sales opportunity they deliver assuming an average initial selling price of at least $50K. The only challenge is that these firms have downsides—ramp up can take six months or more, fees are too often not tied to performance, retainer contracts lock clients in for at least one year, and employees of these firms are cold calling experts rather than warm introduction producers who are one or two degrees of freedom away from your target decision-maker.

Enter Myndnet. Rather than hire telesales employees, they post client requests for quality leads (or business opportunities) on their website and to their membership of hundreds of individuals in the marketplace who signup to be Myndnet Pros. These “Pro” individuals that Myndnet screens rigorously might be freelance HR recruiters, sales/marketing professionals, IT employees, consultants, editors, analysts, etc who want to make a little extra money by providing introductions to people they know who might be actively looking for the client’s product or service. Think of this as the “open source approach” to telesales, a truly different paradigm than the call center model.

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Posted May 29, 2008 | Permalink

The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing to Bloggers

by Elise Bauer

Article cross-posted on elise.com.

Why is marketing to bloggers a good idea? Inbound links from blogs improves Google rank, which increases traffic from search engines. Exposure from bloggers can land a company's website on a social bookmarking site like Digg or Del.icio.us, driving thousands of new visitors to the site. Bloggers are perceived to be more "authentic" than traditional media, making them disproportionately influential given their size. They can also be highly targeted, engaging the very audience that a marketer might want to reach. But bloggers are a more fickle bunch than most traditional media people. Marketing to them appropriately can yield great results; approaching them the wrong way can backfire.

As someone with a well-trafficked blog and a high Google rank I get bombarded with marketing requests every day. "Your site would be great for my SEO, would you please link to it?" "You obviously love food. I would love to send you some of my ice cream for dogs and you could write about it if you wanted to." (Both real examples.) Most pitches receive a cursory glance and get deleted without a second thought. A few get a response from me, especially if the pitch is respectful and polite. Even fewer get the response the marketer was hoping for.

So, what's the trick?

If you are considering reaching out to bloggers, here are a few guidelines that may help you be more effective in your approach. Note that marketing to bloggers is sort of like selling vacuums door-to-door in a neighborhood where almost everyone knows each other, and most are chatting with each other over their fences. In any strong blogging community there is a lot of back-channel talk going on. This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you approach the bloggers in the first place. Now for the guidelines, let's start with the "Don'ts".

Marketing to Bloggers Don'ts

1. Do not send obvious form letters. Did you know that we bloggers share the form letters we receive from marketers with each other? We do. This is a great way to get nowhere with the very people you are trying to influence. It also demonstrates that you have done practically no research whatsoever on your audience. Form letters result in promoting pork sausages to vegans or pitches for ready-to-eat cheesecake filling to gourmet scratch cooks.
2. Do not ask for links, unless you are willing to pay for them, at which point the conversation turns to advertising policy and rates. This whole reciprocal link thing might be barely tolerable on a blogger-to-blogger level, but is considered annoying spam when it comes from a company pushing products.
3. Do not leave blog comments plugging your products. Talk about generating ill will! It's called blog spam. As a blogger I don't really care that you think my readers would be interested in your ready-made lemon syrup. I'm not interested in allowing a company to promote its products on my blog without my permission. If you abuse comments, eventually you'll generate such bad feelings that people will start writing in their blogs about how your company is spamming the blogosphere. Then the next time someone looks your company up in Google all they'll see is a litany of complaints. Not exactly the intended result, eh?
4. Do not come on too strong. If you send out product, you can follow up with a "did you receive it?" but not a "when are you going to write about it?" Do not insist on anything. And if someone doesn't want to promote your product, please don't argue with them. Thank them for their time and move on.
5. Do not put the blogger on your mailing list (unless they have requested it.) This should be obvious, shouldn't it? But clearly it isn't as getting put on some random marketer's email newsletter or mailing list happens all the time. Bloggers hate it.

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Posted April 3, 2007 | Permalink

Selling to the CFO – A Dinner Conversation

by Sridhar Ramanathan

“Make it a double” barked Chris to the bartender to be heard above the restaurant din.

“Guess your boss came down on you pretty hard, huh?” said Jo.

“Well, I’m angry with myself more than anyone else for not being able to keep a two hundred thousand deal from evaporating” replied Chris.

“That’s why I wanted to buy you a drink, Jo” said Chris with a note of humility.

“I know you’re CFO of a publicly traded company and I figured you could coach me. You know…how to sell someone like you” whispered Chris as he began sipping his martini.

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Posted March 4, 2007 | Permalink

Seth Godin at Google

by Elise Bauer

Author and Internet marketer Seth Godin gives a talk at Google on marketing. The talk is 48 minutes long and includes questions and answers from Google employees.

Bottom line? If you can't make something remarkable, don't even bother to make it.

By "remarkable" Seth means, something worthy of being remarked upon, or talked about. Your best marketing comes from word-of-mouth of your most impressed customers.

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Posted March 5, 2006 | Permalink

Blogging for Business

by Elise Bauer

Ten years ago every business leader had to have an Internet strategy. These days the question making the rounds is "Should we get a blog?" To help you answer that question for your business let's review what a blog is, and look at the different ways that a blog could help your business.

What's a blog? At its essence, a blog, short for weblog, or web log, is a website. Blogs differ from most corporate websites in three important ways. First, unlike most corporate websites that don't change often, the content on the front page of a weblog is updated frequently, sometimes several times a day, and usually several times a week. Second, blogs are highly personal. Who knows who writes what you see on most company websites? On a blog, you almost always know who the author or authors are. Their names are attached to specific articles or postings, or background information is provided about them in an About section. Third, blogs are often interactive - they (usually) invite feedback, or comments, from their readers, which are then published alongside the article or entry about which the comment is made.

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Posted December 9, 2005 | Permalink

Location, Location, Location - Findability on the Web

by Elise Bauer

In a retail environment, we are taught that location is everything. Foot traffic, accessibility from major roads, proximity to anchor stores all greatly contribute to in-store sales. What does a good location imply? 1) Convenience for customers to physically get to where you are, 2) the ability to be known in the first place – the fact that your name or brand becomes associated with a product or service, and 3) the ease with which a potential customer can find you, when she is looking for something you are selling.

On the web, these three parameters also matter, but the overriding web marketing “location” equivalent is the ability to be found. At any one instant, there are many times more people looking for what you are providing online than you could possibly economically reach if you tried to find these potential customers through advertising. Over the last five years, search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN have completely changed the dynamics of web marketing. A few years ago Overture (now part of Yahoo) sponsored a study that determined that far and away the most common way to find a product online was to use a search engine. (Source: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/srch_ks.php)

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Posted August 22, 2005 | Permalink

Be a Thought Leader!

by Elise Bauer

Small companies have to work hard to get visibility, especially when the market is crowded with competitors all vying for the same business. In high tech they face the added dilemma that IT departments don’t want to buy from a small unknown vendor, and the vendor can’t become large and reputable unless it has major customers. So, how does a company become better known with limited resources? By becoming an industry thought leader.

What’s a thought leader?
A thought leader is a recognized leader in one’s field. What differentiates a thought leader from any other knowledgeable company, is the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates.

Trust is built on reputation and reputation is generally NOT built on advertising. It is built on what others say about you. Become a thought leader in your field and it won’t matter as much how big you are. Companies will look to you for insight and vision. Journalists will quote you, analysts will call you, websites will link to you.

How does one become a thought leader?
Before one takes the first actionable step, a fundamental shift in mindset is needed. Thought leadership requires a spirit of generosity - generosity of one's time, intelligence and knowledge. It requires a trust that by being open with what you know, and by sharing your time and knowledge, the world will reward your efforts. With that in mind, here are steps that will help you on your way to being a thought leader:

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Posted November 10, 2003 | Permalink

Search Engine Optimization

by Elise Bauer

Article cross-posted at Elise.com

10 Steps to Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The single most cost effective web marketing practice is to optimize your web site for search engines.

What does "optimize your web site for search engines" mean? When a person types a search term into Google or Yahoo for example, the search engine delivers a list of websites, ranked by relevance to the word that was entered. Your goal as a web marketer is to have your site rank as high as possible when potential customers are searching for products or services that your website delivers. The higher placed your site is in the search results, the more easy it will be for customers to find your products and services.

How is SEO "most cost effective"? In contrast to spending money on advertising, PR and direct mail, marketing efforts that try to get potential customers interested in you, optimizing your site for better search results just makes it easier for those already interested in your business to find you. You could potentially see a hundred-fold increase in the traffic to your site by following good SEO principles.

SEO matters. A study conducted in 2001 by Jupiter Communications revealed that 42% of respondents indicated that using a search engine was their most common way of finding an online vendor, the vendor’s URL taking second place with 23%. A 2001 study by NPD, comparing search listings to ad banners, found that respondents were 7 times as likely to read a search listing than an ad banner, and 20 times as likely to click on a search listing. These studies were conducted in 2001. Since then search engines have become even more popular, especially Google. So if you want customers to find your site, you need to show up high in the search results.

You can pay money and buy search terms from the major search engines so that your listing appears prominently on the page when a search is performed using that search term. But why pay money when you can make simple changes to your site so that your site naturally ranks higher? Anybody can do this, simply and easily, and small sites can rank above larges sites if they just follow some basic guidelines.

So, what do you do to optimize your site for search engines? Here are some guidelines:

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Posted October 9, 2003 | Permalink