The Real Cost of Marketing Automation (Pizza Anyone?)

We had a good number of conversations this week on online marketing and the merits of marketing automation. Within the teams here in Europe and the US, but also with our marketing agency, our through-channel marketing agency, and – last but not least – our marketing automation agency. The latter started with a quote from Forrester Research: “[We] found that most companies cited as great case studies by vendors are still at Level 1 Level 2 of Forrester‘s Marketing Automation Maturity Model.” Some quote.

Expensive email blasters
In a November 2010 blog post, Forrester’s Jeff Ernst – the principal analyst responsible for this particular piece of research – states that “too many companies have invested in marketing automation platforms, only to use them as expensive email blasters.” In the April 2011 report B2B marketers must better prepare for marketing automation, he cautions that “Small businesses with simple requirements can receive a lot of value within days by implementing basic features and may not ever need to do more. But for larger companies that serve sophisticated buyer needs, it takes time to build a revenue engine that produces a steady supply of qualified sales opportunities, and getting an email campaign out the door in three days does not ensure that you are on a path to achieving that bigger vision.”

Amen
Without having access to the actual Marketing Automation Maturity Model – with Sinterklaas and Christmas just around the corner, spending $499 on aging research papers may not be the most opportunistic of choices – one can guess that it’ll start with manually sending emails into low quality, poorly segmented databases, with zero business impact, and end up with nurturing, scoring, integrated communications based on deep knowledge of your buyer’s journey, with all the targeted segmenting, nurturing, scoring and integration between marketing automation and sales CRM that you can wish for – where the marketing system unilaterally sets the business strategy, aligns sales and marketing once and for all, and wins marketing prizes. Amen.

3 Traps
Ernst identifies 3 traps, around process, content, and skills, which keep companies from getting beyond this “batch ‘n’ blast” level of maturity. They’ll never reap the true benefits of marketing automation, but get stuck in the middle between a great vision, sophisticated platform and expert vendor support on the one side, and bloated budgets, frustrated marketers and low quality databases on the other. And the quality of leads generated and qualified by marketing is – and will be – questioned by sales.

KSFs
Ernst indeed warns CMOs (ordinary marketers should pay attention, too) that the following success factors are critical, if they expect ROI from their investment in marketing automation (source: Christine Thompson, Success Factors for Marketing Automation):

• A defined lead management process (agreed to by sales and marketing);
• A content strategy that supports buyers’ needs (not the marketer’s convenience), throughout the buyer’s journey — for each buyer role;
• Access to good contact data (up-to-date contact info for the buyer roles most likely to respond favourably);
• Access to the skills and budget needed to keep the marketing automation platform running smoothly.

Medieval cobblestones
My take: Without these factors in place, buying an advanced marketing automation platform and expect the ill-prepared marketing manager to benefit from it, is like buying a brand new Ferrari F1 race car, give it to a pizza delivery guy in Rome (with fuel and a full, retained pit crew of course), and tell him he’ll deliver pizza’s across town a 1,000 times faster (and much hotter too). All technical reports, all sports analysts, and all Ferrari fans would agree that that’s a terrific investment, because pizza’s are usually cold on delivery, there simply isn’t a better F1 race car around, and the mechanics will make sure it runs to its full capacity. Of course some of the preconditions to use the car proficiently – like a F1 Super License, access to the Autodrome Nationale Monza race track, some level of racing expertise, and a very wealthy sponsor – wouldn’t have made it into the purchase decision conversation. And hence our poor pizza delivery guy races the streets of Rome at 500+ mph, crashes his racehorse into the Fontane di Trevi, all hot pizza’s drown, and the good people of Rome starve, yet again. Stuck in the middle between a great vision and lots of medieval cobblestones.

Must be a hard game
Forrester’s Marketing Automation Maturity Model was first introduced in 2008. 3 years later, even great case study type companies still haven’t been able to make it past levels 1 and 2. You figure it out.

Pizza, anyone?

Rant on Marketing while boarding an airplane

- “So, tell me, do we have any cool new marketing campaigns upcoming?”, a fellow European colleague asked me, while we were getting ready to board our ride from San Francisco back to Amsterdam earlier today. He is one of our best technical sales engineers.

- “What do you mean when you say ‘marketing campaign’?”, I asked in return.

- “Well, you know,” he replied, “with solid price promotions, lots of advertising, events, online banners, emails, that kind of stuff – marketing campaigns!”

- “I don’t think we’ll have those types of marketing campaigns ever again,” I said.

- He: “Are you serious? So what’s marketing doing to get new customers signed up, and develop them into loyal, frequently spending accounts – if not by running cool campaigns?”

- I: “Well for one, we’ll stop shouting at them, pushing them around, pulling them in by the hair kicking and screaming. We’ll be talking to them where they are, when they’re ready to engage, delivering the right messages for that very specific person, place, time, business challenge, and conversation. To show them we understand their world, and that we’re the ones best suited to help them solve their problems.”

- “Okay! But how will they ever know that you’re the one to talk to about their pains and itches? You’d still need a conversation starter, wouldn’t you? Something to get the engagement going, like an event, email, or telephone call? Isn’t that what marketing is?

- “No, that’s not what marketing is, that’s what marketing has been turned into by people who think customers are cash cows with short memory spans. Marketing proper represents markets, customers and prospects within the company, making sure the right products and services are created, delivered, supported, and constantly improved in order to create maximum customer value and brand equity.”

- “…”

- “You see, Marketing proper drives and advocates business focus, high quality content and engagements, two way communications, and actual listening to customers and prospects. That has little to do with fancy events, bulky billboards, and unsollicited emails, don’t you agree?”

- “Uh, yeah sure, if you say so. But I bet the sales guys would disagree. They love fancy events!”

- “By no means. They’re sales guys, so this is core to their everyday reality. They grasp the value of a good conversation. They understand that high quality engagements eventually result in extended customer life cycles, deeper investment, and greater customer loyalty. They know this approach will pay off. And apropos: The days that high value conversations where taking place at industry events, have long gone. Event marketing in the B2B segment has become a business in and of its own, one which is delivering ever lower show rates and returns on investment. It’s an old school, zero conversion marketing tactic, and smart sales guys know this. Even they stopped showing up to man our stand!”

This is where we boarded our plane, and I started writing this entry.

What do you think Marketing should aspire to?

How to brief a B2B blog?

Friday Marketing Musings, 14 January 2011

Many companies have a hard time managing their blogs. You can tell by just clicking through any corporate website’s blogger section. They’re all too often not updated frequently, killed by too much “editorial guidance”, not engaging, and too inside-out in their content. Nevertheless, as I wrote last week, you don’t need much more in the online universe than a Twitter stream, some strong blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to create a rich brand experience. So I just wanted to share some considerations around blogs, and how to keep them adding value to your marketing and communications setup.

Two new European NetApp blogs
Over the last 3 weeks, we launched two new blogs for NetApp in EMEA. John Rollason’s “JR’s IT Pad” will be providing European storage industry insights, targeting analysts, press, partners and competition. Tim Waldron’s “Tim’s Tales” will be more about bridging the gap between business and technical functions within (prospective) customer audiences DMU’s, covering new technology concepts, European customer implementations, storage and data management innovations. John runs Product, Solutions and Alliances marketing for EMEA; Tim is a Business Solutions Architect in our GEO. It took them about 2 minutes to figure out the Typepad Blog Content Management System, so don’t be put off by any concerns there.

Example: NetApp @ Cisco Live Europe 2011
As a side note: Both bogs will be vital in the communications strategy around our Golden Sponsorship for Cisco Live Europe 2011 (London, 31 Jan – 3 Feb 2011). I spent some time this week creating our Virtual Booth for that event in the INXPO virtual event platform the organisation provides as part of the sponsorship agreement. If you can’t travel to London, you can gain complementary acces to our virtual booth here. It holds an event blog, Social Media streams, all kinds of premium content, a live chat box, and a API integration into Facebook Live Stream. Check out the booth during the event, and let me know what you think by sending me a DM in Twitter. Our event hashtag for Twitter is #NetAppCiscoLive (general event hashtag: #CLEU), if you want to keep track early February.

John will be talking to press, analysts and customers during the event, and sharing his insights on his blog. Tim will be part of the stand staff, and reporting on his blog whenever he has some time off from booth duty. We’ll equip him with a flipcam, a photo camera and a notebook to share whatever he thinks is worth sharing. Also, Tim and Paul Sudlow (EMEA Alliances Technical Lead) will be on the panel of an Ask the Expert live webcast that we will be hosting from the show floor. Again, our Virtual Booth is the place to be if you’re interested.

Blogger tactics
The Cisco Live Europe 2011 tactic is a good example of how corporate blogs should be positioned in the market place: avoid overlap in content, create an editorial calendar in support of major marketing communications milestones (product launches, programs, campaigns, events, channel activity), and integrate all blogs with all relevant social media streams you run out there. The blogger team should become a highly skilled team of defenders, strategists, attackers, strikers, thought leaders and educators, finding ever new ways of communicating corporate messaging to relevant audiences, referring to people and content within the corporate domain.

The Corporate Website is Dead

Friday Marketing Musings, 7 January 2010

Blogging is dead, Email is dead, Pay-per-Click is dead, hell: even TechCrunch recently got reported dead. If you haven’t announced anything dead over the last days, you’re just not much of a marketing guru. Don’t we all like to play Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – God is dead! -, just to show our authority and insight into the inner workings of our industries? So let me add another one: the corporate website, as we know it, is dead.

Let’s be fair: outside of e-commerce focused web property, corporate websites are obsolete. Who needs them? Did you recently browse through one, looking for anything other than contact information? I bet you didn’t, and neither did I. You usually already know all the relevant updates in there just by being on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and reading a couple of blogs, don’t you?

Looking at it from a vendor’s perspective: in owned media, some profiles, a Twitter account and a good mix of corporate blogs is all you need to come up with a solid communications strategy and deep audience reach. The rest is up to the people updating the streams with fresh content.

The best corporate citizen spends time representing the company out there, in social space, referring prospects, customers, partners and investors to content and contacts within the company. Nobody has time to go browsing a complete website anyway. My goodness, it’s like reading War & Peace. On paper!

Corporate websites truly are the dinosaurs of the digital age, the fossils of the future, they’re the thing your grand father is still well able to keep up with, they’re the … the… Well, they’re just dead as a doornail! Bury them, dance on their graves, and make sure to tweet while at it!

Rather than on platforms, brand experiences will be created in interaction. Alas, communications will be social only.

Relationship branding (3): Event Marketing (Offline)

NetApp, Cisco en VMware promoten hun onderlinge samenwerking onder het thema ‘Imagine Virtually Anything’ (IVA). Market Awareness en Channel Enablement vormen de twee primaire doelstellingen voor marketingcommunicatie. Evenementen worden ingezet om prospects in direct contact te brengen met direct en channel sales. Een overzicht van drie typen evenementen: Industry Events, Channel Events en Online Events.

Industry Events: VMworld, Storage Networking World
Grote jaarlijkse branche-evenementen zoals VMworld Europe, VMware’s flagship event, en SNW Europe vormen de gelegenheid bij uitstek om relaties aan te knopen, te versterken en uit te venten.

Als een van vier Platinum Sponsors van VMworld Europe 2010 (12-14 oktober, Bella Center Kopenhagen, 5000+ betalende bezoekers) maakte NetApp deel uit van elke boodschap die de organisatie deed uitgaan in aanloop naar het evenement – een uitgelezen kans om het Imagine Virtually Anything-thema onder de aandacht van onze doelgroepen te brengen.

The NetApp beursstand op VMworld Europe 2010 (Kopenhagen, 12-14 Okt 2010)

Tijdens het evenement trokken NetApp IVA-voordrachten door Cloud Czar Val Bercovici, en Virtual Storage Guy Vaughn Stewart met VMware en Cisco volle zalen. Hisam Ahmad van T-Systems gaf een presentatie vanuit klantperspectief. Een van de demokiosken op onze beursstand was volledig gewijd aan IVA, en zowel Cisco als VMware stelden mensen beschikbaar die op onze stand aanwezig waren om prospects te woord te staan. Honderden badgescans worden in de komende dagen verwerkt, gekwalificeerd en met telemarketing opgevolgd.

Channel Events
In de eerste bijdrage van deze serie noemde ik het belang van het indirecte verkoopkanaal. Het is de taak van NetApp, Cisco en VMware om het Imagine Virtually Anything-thema over het voetlicht te brengen. IVA-gecertificeerde channel partners kunnen vervolgens van de bekendheid profiteren door lokaal evenementen te organiseren. Om hen daarbij te ondersteunen, werd een event marketing kit samengesteld op basis van content, sprekers en promotiemateriaal van NetApp, Cisco en VMware. De geplande channelevenementen zijn terug te vinden op de lokale IVA landing pages, met verwijzing naar de registratiepagina’s. Alle traffic die naar deze landing pages wordt geleid door search, PPC, sociale media en email marketing komt dus direct ten goede aan de gezamenlijke parners.

Wordt vervolgd: Online Events – NetApp TechTalk, Quadia en BrightTalk

Relationship branding (2): Content Marketing, Social Media & Advertising

NetApp, Cisco en VMware promoten hun onderlinge samenwerking onder het thema ‘Imagine Virtually Anything’. Market Awareness en Channel Enablement vormen de twee primaire doelstellingen. Een geintegreerde content marketingstrategie draagt bij aan beide doelen.

— terzijde — Ik schrijf dit op weg naar Kopenhagen voor VMworld Europe 2010, VMware’s jaarlijkse evenement voor eindgebruikers. Een van de demostations in de NetApp-stand is volledig gewijd aan Imagine Virtually Anything, en er staat een aantal interessante ontmoetingen met de EMEA-marketingteams van VMware en Cisco op het programma. Daarover later meer. —

Content marketing is een relatief jonge marcomdiscipline die opgang maakt sinds de brede acceptatie van sociale media, zowel in de zakelijke als in de privesfeer. De combinatie van sociale media, traditionele online marketing en advertising, en geavanceerde database- en e-marketingsystemen levert een nieuwe, sterk geconcentreerde vorm van marketingcommunicatie op.

Mits goed ingezet koppelt deze vorm een lagere investering aan hogere conversieratio’s en gestegen herhaalbezoek.

Definitie Content Marketing
Een rake boodschap op precies het goede moment aan exact de juiste ontvanger, dat is in wezen het doel van elke vorm van communicatie. Ontvangers worden ingedeeld in doelgroepen zodra communicatie-instrumenten de verfijning missen om op individuen in te zoomen. Voor deze doelgroepen wordt vervolgens een meer generieke boodschap ontwikkeld, waardoor de respons daalt.

Content Marketing zet database- en marktresearch, nieuwe media, advertising, syndication, en CRM- en marketingsystemen in om doelgroepen net zo lang te verkleinen totdat zuivere communicatie ontstaat: 1-op-1, dus gericht en relevant.

Content voor elke fase
Ik schreef in een eerdere bijdrage over betaalde (paid), eigen (owned) en verdiende (earned) media. In een content marketingstrategie worden deze drie vormen van media-inzet gekoppeld aan een specifieke ontvanger en diens aankoopproces (informatie vergaren, afwegen, selecteren, aankopen, implementeren en uitbreiden).

• In elke fase van de sales cycle heeft de ontvanger de beschikking over op maat gesneden content. Dat kan een persbericht zijn, een dynamische landing page, een uitgewerkte klantreferentie, een e-mailnieuwsbrief, een onderzoeksrapport, een e-book, een live webinar, een blogbijdrage, een brochure, een online ROI calculator, et cetera.
• Belangrijke voorwaarde is, dat de content in elke fase van de verkoopcyclus zo relevant mogelijk is: in de eigen taal, op basis van de juiste branche, bedrijfsomvang, en andere doelgroepspecifieke aspecten.
• Met CRM- en e-marketingsystemen worden profiel, interesse en gedrag van de ontvanger op de voet gevolgd, waardoor opvolgboodschappen, telefonisch contact en gerichte uitnodigingen op het juiste ogenblik op diens deurmat kunnen vallen.
• E-mail, sociale media, search, corporate website, telemarketing, en meer traditionele vormen van paid media worden ingezet om de boodschap te publiceren of zenden.

Communicatiefunnel
Bij aanvang kan deze strategie niet anders dan vrij ongericht zijn. We weten nog niet veel van de individuele ontvangers in onze doelgroep, onze klant- en prospectdatabases zijn onvolledig, gedateerd en ongenuanceerd, en inzicht in historisch gedrag ontbreekt. Maar naarmate meer content beschikbaar komt en de systemen hun geautomatiseerde werk verrichten, gaat de machine draaien en ontstaat een communicatiefunnel die een steeds gedetailleerder beeld van de doelgroep laat zien. Dit stelt ons in staat scherper te richten, wat de relevantie ten goede komt. De respons stijgt, waardoor we meer informatie over onze doelgroep verzamelen, kortom: we zijn in een opwaartse spiraal terecht gekomen, die uitkomt bij 1-op-1-communicatie. Steeds minder contacten stromen van de communicatie- door in de verkoopfunnel, maar de kwaliteit stijgt, de feedback van sales wordt positiever en de Marketing ROI verbetert.

Vervolgens komt het aan op meten, bijsturen, verfijnen en rapporteren.

Uw marketingafdeling, overmorgen

De consument maakt het merk, niet de bedrijven. Het merk is de subjectieve perceptie in het hoofd van de afnemer, die tot stand komt in zijn omgang met de onderneming. Deze perceptie is veranderlijk en behoeft voortdurend onderhoud. Customer value vormt het doel en engagement is the name of the game. Dixit BlastRadius.

We maakten vorige week in Amsterdam kennis met BlastRadius, bureau voor interactive marketing, en onderdeel van het WPP-netwerk. Schrandere kerels, eentje kwam uit Vancouver gevlogen. CEO erbij.

Kanalen
De kanalen die de onderneming inzet om de afnemer te boeien, prikkelen, engageren, naar zich toe te halen, zijn:

• paid media, alle aandacht waarvoor doorgaans wordt betaald, zoals adverteren, search, syndication;
• owned media, de media waarover de onderneming volledige controle heeft, zoals corporate website, nieuwsbrief, webcast, magazine, maar ook Facebook-account,   Twitterfeed, LinkedIn-profiel;
• earned media, de aandacht die ontstaat wanneer consumenten content van de onderneming om niet met elkaar delen.

Funnel 2.0
Het doel is om potentiele klanten al vroeg te identificeren in de paid en earned media, en vandaar naar de owned media te leiden voor verdere kwalificatie en conversie. Het bureau ontwikkelt daartoe geintegreerde campagnes, die over drie schijven lopen, zet allerhande technologie in (dynamische CMS’sen, chatbots, analyse tools etc) en zelfs mensen die in staat zijn de kracht van de earned media ten volle uit te buiten.

Want hoewel de budgetverhouding tussen paid en earned media 10:1 is, gaat het geld voor earned media in mensen zitten. Mensen die in staat zijn te luisteren, mee te praten, prospects te herkennen en keer op keer naar relevante content en contacten te leiden.

Socionauten
Daar komt dan de impact van het sociale web op de marketingafdeling van overmorgen te zien: de paid media specialisten (intern, maar ook het mediabureau) en de emailmarketeers zijn goeddeels vervangen door een leger socionauten dat daarbuiten in de weer is om prospects naar binnen te loodsen door een sterk versnipperd,  voortdurend veranderend earned medialandschap.

Target Syndication (2): Content Marketing

In my previous post I outlined 3 trends that combine into an efficient instrument for targeted, audience-based marketing: Data Quality, Content Marketing, and Marketing Automation. This eventually will enable marketers to lower cost per sale by delivering fully prospected, profiled and qualified leads to the sales department.

Let’s start with Content Marketing, a buzz word that has been popping up all over the internet lately. For the long version, best check Junta42.

Why is Content Marketing an important trend? Audience behavior is shifting, and it’s moving away from predictable media models. Print, television, pay per click and paid search will be gone within a couple of years. They will no longer attract any audience, as audiences will gather information in social networks, from peers and trusted publishers. Corporate websites will disappear, or change fundamentally to adjust to changing circumstances. Corporations will increasingly struggle to pinpoint tomorrow’s buyers, and their media consumption patterns. To attract prospects, they will become publishers and aggregators of free, high quality content. Content Marketing is the strategy to get this high quality content into prospect audiences, allowing them to join the conversation, influence products, solutions and services, and bring in more prospects.

What is it? Content Marketing basically means to market your content like you market a product. You think about the “buyer” (i.e. reader, downloader, listener, audience), the price, the packaging, the place, the branding, channels and alliances you can leverage in your go-to-market and so on. You create a pr plan for your whitepaper, come up with a search strategy to get prospects to download your recorded webcast, and create an email campaign to push a joint customer study with your best alliance partner.

What about the content? Just make sure each and every piece of content is brilliantly written and beautifully designed, has a clear call-to-action, and is fully integrated into related other content pieces on the same topic: have your whitepaper refer to your twitter, your twitter to your ebook archive and your ebook archive to your event calendar. And vice versa. Make sure its easy to share in social networks, its coded for your e-marketing system to track, and optimised for search engines to serve it up in their organic results list.

Why is Content Marketing bringing in the right prospect, at the right time? Because you have linked your Content Plan to your company’s buyer personas, and to its sales cycle. Let’s start with the latter: Make sure you have a good number of pieces available for suspects and prospects in each stage of the cycle, and you will be able to nurture them up to the point where they are ready for your sales pitch. In B2B, “gathering information” will require a solid high level pitch, with great customer testimonials. “Consideration” will ask for detailed comparison, calculator, extended customer studies.

Then look at buyer personas. Who is influencing, who is gathering information, who is making the decision to buy? For each of these roles, line up the right number of high quality content pieces, tailored for their very specific information needs. Again, make sure you code, track, trace and learn from what works in your audiences. This is where data quality and marketing automation – the 2 next posts on this topic – will make your life a lot easier.

Target Syndication (1): Where Content Marketing Meets Nurture Strategy

Een collega vroeg me deze bijdrage in het Engels te schrijven.

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Shifting audience behavior
Audience behavior is changing fast. There’s a lot happening in the marketing and communications space to illustrate the shift. It’s not in everybody talking Social Media (instead of doing it). It’s not in Apple announcing the iPad. It’s not even in Facebook beating Google as number 1 US website. It’s much more profound – these are all just agents of a fundamental shift in information consumption, that has changed the face of marketing and communications.

In day-to-day business we already see Pay-Per-Click performance deteriorating at tremendous pace, traditional advertising and media agencies dropping out of business, new marketing services emerging every day, start-ups being able to beat established brands in pr ink shares. Smart marketers beat rich marketers across the board.

Prospective customers do not respond to traditional triggers anymore. They found new ways to gather buyer information, delaying or even suspending their dropping into the qualifying mechanisms marketers have put in place over the last 10 years: CRM, telemarketing, lead management. If we are unable to capture the prospective customers’ attention with the right message, at the right time, at the right place, we will fail. The prospect is changing the game, taking charge of the relationship.

3 converging trends enabling target syndication
Over the next weeks, I will dig in to the 3 converging trends that together allow vendors to regain control of their go-to-market, and deploy sales/marketing strategies that will bring more focus and revenues than ever before.

1. Data quality & Buyer persona definition
Advanced CRM and database systems bring rich detail to any suspect, prospect and (ex-)customer database. With the right allocation of resources, strategies for enrichment, cleansing and augmentation, corporate databases will become more powerful than anything any media agency or buyer could ever provide. Deliverable: a 360 degree view of the prospective buyer – whether that is a net new contact, a customer looking for refresh or upgrade or a former customer deciding to return.

2. Content Marketing
Marketing PR is changing from a pure mass-marketing push to a much more intelligent, laser-targeted, audience-based communication instrument, that will take on a new task: deliver the various segments of our audiences within – or outside of – our database with exactly the right content, at exactly the right time. Knowing the audience means understanding where they are in the buying cycle, and providing them with exactly the right sequence of content pieces, allowing them to gather information, discover value propositions, evaluate alternatives, consider competitive offerings, and finally decide on investing. New e-marketing technology and methodology, like marketing automation, prospect nurturing and lead scoring, will help the marketer to deliver these tailor-made content pieces when they are most effective.

3. Marketing Automation
As audiences evade traditional lead qualification schemes – i.e. attend marketing events, subscribe to e-newsletters, download fact sheets from corporate websites, call internal sales desks – new technology enables us to track audience behavior and build our databases on a unprecedented scale. Marketing Systems – like Eloqua, Silverpop, Marketo -  are taking over behavioral tracking, information delivery and follow-up, lead nurturing and scoring, opportunity hand-off to sales. Marketers will focus on data analysis and segmentation, campaign strategy, content creation, and lead reporting.

Target syndication
Knowing where tomorrow’s buyer is, is easy. She’s already in our database. Knowing where next year’s buyer is, is what marketers will be focusing on more and more. How do we home them in on our value propositions? Our databases will be bigger, broader and deeper. Our campaigns will not be 1-on-1 yet, but they’ll be targeting clearly defined buyer personas, and provide them with exactly the right content. We will syndicate this content through all available channels in order to deliver our targeted messages: landing pads, social media, search, blogosphere, 3rd party comms, online and offline events, publishers, strategic alliances – we will find our prospects, and we will tell our sales in great detail who they’ll be calling on, kind of like in the old days.

Social Media in B2B – Wie het weet mag het zeggen!

Dit is aan de hand met Social Media: Iedereen heeft ‘t erover, weinigen doen het, een enkeling snapt hoe het werkt, en past die inzichten toe op een manier die ook inderdaad waarde toevoegt aan de marketingstrategie. Niet alleen Felipo vraagt zich dus af waar hij moet beginnen. Die vraag proberen wij de komende dagen te beantwoorden.

Ik schrijf dit in de Thalys van Amsterdam naar Brussel, waar een tweedaagse marketingbijeenkomst met het voltallige Europese team zal plaatsvinden. We werken al weken aan onze presentaties, breakout sessies en workshops. Zoals gebruikelijk dient zich ook een aantal Amerikanen aan, waaronder onze nieuwe Chief Marketing Officer Christine Heckart. Iedereen ziet reikhalzend uit naar haar eerste beslissingen. Waar komt de focus te liggen? Hoe denkt ze over de Geo’s EMEA en AsiaPac? Waar gaat ze investeren? Vanavond uit eten in Brussel – wellicht de kans een vraag (of 37) te stellen…

Om een begin van een antwoord op de SoMe-vraag te formuleren, staat morgenmiddag volledig in het teken van online marketing en Social Media. Onze Senior VP of Interactive Marketing spreekt. Onze corporate SoMe-specialist spreekt ook. En we hebben het Engelse bureau voor interactive marketing Blue Barracuda uitgenodigd een voordracht te verzorgen over de stand van zaken rond interactive marketing en SoMe in B2B. Wat zijn de voorwaarden voor een succesvolle strategie, welke voorbeelden zijn navolgenswaard, welke valkuilen dienen te worden vermeden? Hun ‘Big Fish’ Martin Talks heeft zijn huiswerk goed gedaan en opent naar verwachting de ogen van de aanwezige Field Marketing Managers.

Martins inleiding wordt vervolgens in 4 parallelsessies uitgewerkt, voor de volgende Europese marketingprogramma’s en campagne’s:

1. NetApp Storage Efficiency campagne. Doel: Meer, nieuwe doelgroepen, intensiever betrekken in een campagne voor eindgebruikers.

2. NetApp Tech OnTap e-mailnieuwsbrief. Doel: Nieuwe abonnees werven, bestaande abonnees activeren, nieuwsbrief beter localiseren (relevanter maken voor lokale doelgroepen), en gebruiken om meer traffic te genereren voor lokale sales- en marketing activiteiten.

3. NetApp TechTalk live webcastprogramma. Doel: Registraties, deelname en response op opvolgactiviteiten vergroten. Doelgroepen betrekken bij de content.

4. NetApp Innovation EMEA customer event series. Doel: Registraties, deelname en response op opvolgactiviteiten vergroten. Gedurende evenementen bezoekers inschakelen om over het evenement en de content te communiceren. Elke groep presenteert in de plenaire sessie, waarna een Committee van Wijzen het programma aanwijst waarmee op korte termijn zal worden begonnen.

Dan weten we waar we staan en wat we aan Social Media gaan doen.