Web marketers are usually more interested in developing ‘front-end’ web strategies than discussing ‘back-end’ integration into their business processes. And so am I. Unfortunately, failing to implement the processes and systems that are supporting it may durably hinder the most brilliant web strategy. The devil is in the details. And among those painful details, I stumbled today across the issue of integrating web-originated data into our new CRM system.
The idea is to wire forms from different websites into a single CRM database to help manage prospects’ inquiries consistently across business units. I realize that “the idea” sounds very much like a basic requirement in the era of “smart businesses seeking conversations with customers through social media”. However, it might be a basic worth to explore for the rest of us.
Integrating multiple data sources into one system inevitably creates a risk of duplicate entries and inconsistency across the system. Born in the era of direct marketing, most CRM systems are designed to manage duplicate entries effectively. By using postal codes, phone numbers and street addresses as a key, they keep a clear track of contacts for telemarketing and mailing purposes. CRM systems are keen on detecting that John Smith, Ohio, does not share much with John Smith, Arizona. But what if the address is missing? Some systems simply avoid the challenge by making THE postal address a mandatory information for new contacts. Including contacts from your website.
Unfortunately, only few Web users are likely to disclose their street address and phone number to access a free download or subscribe to a news feed. Understandably so, they don’t see the point of giving a physical address to get information that can be delivered electronically. More importantly, they don’t always value the information they’ll get at the price of completing an endless form.
As a result, most businesses rely on disparate systems to capture — and nurture — the fragments of information that they get from potential customers such as newsletter subscribers, PDF downloaders and other Facebook fans. If they capture anything at all that would not pass the ‘CRM compliance test’. But without a coherent system able to manage traces of interest from the early stages of the decision making process, they don’t leverage the full potential of their web marketing investment.
One (important) thing is to strategize a multi-channel, closed-loop marketing approach with the objective to nurture the interest of as many visitors of your website as possible. But executing the plan promptly and properly is as much as a challenge. In some cases, it starts with implementing a CRM system flexible enough to consider e-mail addresses, Twitter accounts and LinkedIn profiles as valuable targets for marketing operations as street addresses and phone numbers!
The Day The Mouse Will Be Dead
It all started with a mouse… and it was not so long ago!
How are we going to interact with our digital world in 5 or 10 years?
Watch this (short) conference, and start dreaming!
“How To” articles are a great way to drive traffic to your website. It’s probably the primary type of content that professional bloggers and their sponsors are pushing on the Web today to grow their ranking in search engines. There’s an army of teachers out there ready to teach you ‘how to’ do things like looking good in skinny jeans, overcoming chronic laziness, or—as I just learned on YouTube today with my daughter—how to thread a circular knitting machine! And as the social marketing sphere grows, web marketing sites get filled with How To’s as well. Unless you never bothered to search, there’s no way you’ve not been prompted to learn how to improve your blog, write great posts or use Twitter for business by now.
So I hesitated to add to this overwhelming learning agenda and teach you how to use Facebook as your press room. But I decided to go for it because:
- This is actually something I find valuable for the many small businesses my company is partnering with.
- It’s a pragmatic use of Facebook for BtoB marketers (and I did not find so many others).
- How To’s are great way to feature bulleted lists in my posts, which is something that was highly recommended in the latest “How to make a great blog” lesson that I’ve read.
- I don’t have many How To’s in my blog, and this is supposed to drive more traffic to it.
- It won’t cost me much as I found a great article to re-post about this recently (not sure “re-post” is a word. I’m assuming it is, since “re-tweeting” became mainstream!).
So here you go: Read this article by Josh Peters on Mashable and you’ll have a newsroom up and running on Facebook in no time! I’m joking about How To’s—many of them are not worth reading—but this one should really be considered by the “all-in-one marketers” as I like to call marketing generalists, who are struggling with a thousand priorities and rarely get a chance to dedicate time to PR.
What How To’s do not teach you though, is WHAT to do with the “thing” you learned to do. And Josh’s article is no exception. But what you’re going to do with your Facebook newsroom is essential to its success. You’ll probably have to spend some time to think it through before jumping on this great social opportunity. Where are you going to find frequent and interesting news to publish about your business? What makes a news interesting to your customers, prospects and partners? Can you commit some extra time to this?
There are many ways for a small business to increase awareness at low cost with a good PR strategy. Even if you’re thinking that you don’t have ‘enough news’ to sustain a current newsroom, and I’m sure that you have, give it a second thought. Consider your business in its environment: your partners, your suppliers, your customers, your industry! Beyond your walls, there’s a lot that you can leverage to demonstrate your business expertise and provide interesting news to readers. Facebook is just a vehicle. Don’t jump on it if you’re not ready. But it’s a great vehicle to consider when you’re a small business that does not get natural attention from journalists and industry analysts.
While most companies are playing defense—or keep silent—to cope with the launch of new products by competitors, playing offense is often a better strategy. There’s always some benefits to gain from change, even when change does not look to be in your favor in the first place, provided you’re flexible and creative enough to play around a well-built competitive battle card.
Since their first appearance in 2006, Apple’s PC-Mac commercials successfully positioned the brand as the most innovative in the industry, with remarkably simple, effective, and funny ads. Playing the Innovation card against Microsoft’s Leadership has been a successful strategy. That was then: As Microsoft is catching up on innovation with its new ‘Mac-like’ Windows 7 operating system, there’s little exclusive features left to Mac OS X. Time to revise Apple’s battle card: Against Innovation, play the Trust card. And play it loud!
Remarkably effective. The more so as it remains simple, and funny.
Where Can I Donate a Car in Dallas?
Great content matching popular keywords is the key to online traffic. A basic for first graders in web marketing. Yet it’s also an area of least focus for many (not to say most) small and midsize businesses (and even larger ones). Not that they don’t spend a lot on keyword advertising and so-called search engine “optimization”. But let’s be honest, only few businesses are going beyond hiring an SEO agency and reviewing the initial list of 20 to 30 keywords that the agency is submitting once a year, when it comes to renewing its contract.
Developing relevant content for your website, going through lists of hundreds of possible keywords, and then back to ‘optimizing’ your content to better match the keywords is such a painful and unrewarding process, that you don’t want to go through it more than necessary. Unfortunately, ‘necessary’ can be ‘very often’ when it comes to keep a website attractive. The best SEO agency can’t do a good job without some insight into your market, your business, your products. More importantly, as good as it can be in leveraging your current ‘assets’ (the content of your website), it most likely won’t add to it and keep it current. Scheduling monthly meetings with your agency to review traffic results and conversion rates is great, but not enough. Monitoring the search volume for your keywords, taking one out and putting one in is good, but not enough. You know it: great content matching popular keywords is the key to success. And like it or not, it all starts with relevant content, that only your company can provide.
The November issue of Wired Magazine features an interesting article about Demand Media and the success of this company in overwhelming the Web with millions of cheap articles and videos matching popular searches to maximize advertising revenue. The story opens multiple debates – including ethical – about the quality and reliability of information that this kind of “content factory” is dumping on the Internet. But from a business perspective, it is a stunning reminder of some basic keyword advertising principles: web search is about demand, not offer. Yet very few BtoB sites are ‘optimized’ this way.
I named this post after the most valuable search topic uncovered by Demand Media so far (apparently, a lot of people are searching for car donation in Dallas, and advertisers are willing to pay a lot for it). However, I doubt that it will make me either rich, nor popular. The title does not really match the content of this article, and more importantly, it might not be great enough (let’s face it!). But how better could I make my point? The best keyword strategy can’t do more for your website without more, better and current content!
Imagine. You just produced a great video for your company and pushed it on YouTube to go viral. But as you browse YouTube to proudly show it live to your staff, it turns out the original movie has been altered a hundred times by angry customers who embedded signs advising viewers to stay away from your product. Of course, the altered versions ended up being more popular than the original video. Unrealistic marketing nightmare? Not so sure.
While it remains pretty hard for non-professionals to edit a YouTube video and modify its content, this will no longer be the case with the era of ‘open video’ about to start. Videos are the last all-sharable frontier. With minimal knowledge and tools, it’s easy today to copy, alter and post text and images from about anywhere to about everywhere. Right click on a jpeg picture and your done copying it from the web. Double click on the copy and it will open the picture in your favorite free photo editing application, enabling you to modify the image, add text and save it as a new picture, ready to post on the Internet. But that’s not the case with videos. Videos are coded in tens of proprietary formats, causing insurmountable barriers for the average user willing to edit part of the content. And worse, popular so-called ‘video sharing’ sites like YouTube simply make it impossible to download the original video file without sophisticated hacking software. Technically, “sharing” videos on the Internet is much like traditional “broadcasting”: a one-way communication. And that’s why marketers love it. Broadcasting our commercials, whether on TV or on the Internet, is a practice we know and can control. The challenge is to achieve maximum exposure. But we control the message. We control the positioning. We control the brand image.
Open Video is about to change the way video can be shared and edited on the web. Mozilla’s latest Firefox 3.5 browser already enables users to play back videos without the need of proprietary plug-ins such as Flash (the proprietary format used to play back most videos on the web). The next step is to get rid of proprietary encoding formats, and allow viewers to edit video content as easily as they would edit a series of pictures. Right from their browser. Have a look at this short demo (http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/videos/ogv/DCI.ogv) and imagine this is a commercial featuring Steve Jobs playing with two iPhones. What would you like the Firefox logo to be replaced with? A Google Android Phone logo? Just go for it!
If you think that it’s already a challenge to moderate your message board, follow your tweets, and to keep some consistency across your social media initiatives, be prepared to the real challenge of open video combined with social media: the ultimate consumer-empowering tool about to rise. How are marketers going to deal with it remains an open question. I personally like to think that it might help us go back to the essence of communication: building promises that make sense to consumers and that can be kept. If you’re scared about angry customers spoiling your viral ‘open video’ campaigns, a good start should be to understand why they’re angry and improve their experience of your products before building any kind of social campaign.
Dig deeper:
>> Open Video demo
>> Technology Review: ‘OurTube’ (Sept/Oct 2009)
If you ask a web-agency about the best way to grow your website, there’s a good chance that they’ll get back to you with some idea of social media campaign and urge you to consider including some sort of “social features” to your website. This is Web 2.0 era, and leveraging social media tools to reach your audience is the mainstream strategy for successful web marketing today.
The September cover story of Wired Magazine – “The Tragedy of Craigslist” – caught my attention because it did not match that trend. Based on an insightful interview of founder Craig Newmark, the article by Gary Wolf explores Craigslist’s conservative philosophy and atypical strategy in the Internet space.
Excerpts:
If you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation’s greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can’t easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn’t worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors’, because at this scale there are no competitors. [...] With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation’s adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it.
The article continues digging into Craigslist’s history and managing principles, but unfortunately did not answer my primary curiosity: Why? How come that this website, stuck in the Stone Age of the Internet, remains so popular and growing? So let me venture an opinion.
I think that Craigslist is successful BECAUSE it managed to keep an amateurish look & feel – intentionally or not? – , staying away from the features that makes an e-commerce website look like… yet another e-commerce website! The great purpose of Craigslist is to bring together occasional vendors and occasional buyers for a gigantic garage sale, with the underlying promise of the lowest prices on the Internet. The rudimentary design of the website makes it credible that no professional – with high margins in mind – would ever interfere in the transactions. Unlike eBay, Craigslist does not segregate vendors. Posting an offer does not require special skills to make it look more attractive or easier to find, and those who may want to make their ad look better can’t. There’s no vendor rating of any kind, which gives first-time sellers a chance to stand out. The minimalist design of Craigslist is a level playing field. It fosters the feeling of a philanthropic market place, where vendors don’t make profit and buyers don’t pay for marketing (although Craigslist’s annual revenue exceeds $100 million!). Paradoxically, the amateurish design of Craigslist is developing trust!
Craigslist might be a unique example of amateurism fueling growth and profit. But its success against all odds is worth a thought when considering modernizing your website. Start by looking into your audience profile. Visitors might well value some level of amateurism over a fashionable design, as an evidence of human-managed business. In some cases, good enough is good enough!
Dig further:
> The Craigslist article by Gary Wolf
> Gary Wolf’s blog
> Wired Magazine
How to Leverage Social Media and CRM
I started this blog two months ago as a way to structure my mind around social media and its applications for b-to-b marketing. I’ve been looking at trends, usage, challenges, strategies and tools. But so far, I uncovered few concrete, straight-forward applications for businesses. I mean something operational, simple to implement with limited resources, and that would show immediate return. But that was before I met with Larry Ritter last week. He gets it!
Larry’s heading the development team for ACT! by Sage, a successful CRM software application for small businesses. As we shared views on social media, he showed me how the features included in the newly released ACT! by Sage 2010 can help small businesses leverage social media tools to improve their marketing operations. In addition to tracking contacts and managing marketing campaigns, this CRM software package now offers turnkey integration to leading social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, which provides useful background information on “socially active” customers. Immediate benefits include the ability for telemarketers and sales reps to mention common interests or hobbies when contacting new customers, knowing that it will help them “break the ice” and create a more personal relationship. In the longer term, the addition of information about social media usage into the CRM database can help companies build an accurate ‘Social Technographics Profile‘ of their customers and define their social strategy accordingly.
A CRM system such as ACT! by Sage provides small businesses with a pragmatic approach of social media marketing. With minimal investment, it helps your business develop customer intimacy right from the implementation, and build insightful social media strategies as your database grows. I realize that it sounds like a marketing pitch, but I’ve seen it at work with my profile! It is impressive.
Dig deeper:
> More about ACT! by Sage
> Visit Larry’s Blog
> Building a Social Technographics Profile of your customers
