Infographic: Digital Marketing Landscape

CMO.com recently published this interesting infographic by Adobe on the Digital Marketing Landscape. You can download it here or view below. Actually there’s to much text to be really called an infographic in my mind, but anyway…Here’s my top take aways:

1 – Tablets are here to stay, we need to adapt the user experience on the web and at the live events to allow a deeper, media rich, highly interactive user experience.

2 – Marketing and the marketers skill set will continue to evolve at a very rapid pace. Change is the only constant.

3 – Marketing will continue to drive innovation. Actually I think the data will, but marketing controls, co-ordinates or interprets much of this data.

4 – Content creation needs to be the foundation of any B2B marketing strategy.

5 – The big data challenge is only going to get worst. Mutliple platforms, mutliple sources of data, with many more variables. Combine this with the need to measure everything and we have a real challenge on our hands.

6 – We need to develop a single view of the customer.  Harder than you think when you take into account the big data challenge.

One thing that I felt was missing from the infographic is the emergence of marketing automation, which to me means the ability to leverage data and customer touch points or interactions into meaningful marketing communications to nurture customers through the sales funnel.  It may be the key to tackling the big data challenge!

Generation Flux

Fast Company Magazine is a great read if you don’t read it you should. I finally got around to reading this article from the last issue called “This is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier of Business” and it struck a chord.

For anyone starting their career out in the event business I think it has a couple of key messages that can help anyone deal with the rapid pace of change associated with event marketing and management.  Change is the only constant in the event business. And for existing managers in the business I think the article points to a number of challenges we face in finding, developing and retaining talent in this new chaotic world.

In the article Robert Safian defines Generation Flux as more an attitude than an age and it’s an important differentiation. As the attitude is key to survival in this era of fast paced changed. The changes are fuelled by technology (the web, mobile, gaming and social etc) and more access to information than ever before forces us to be constantly thinking and adapting to whats next. How do you thrive when disruption is everywhere? I think a couple of things become more critical than ever:

• Business model innovation – Companies must adopt innovation in all it’s aspects and create ways to test outside the normal controls
• Adopt a test, fail, test, fail, test, succeed mentality
• Embrace team work and a matrix org charts that empowers team leaders
• Become ‘Skill hoarders” and embrace/develop a four year career path. Set up new employees for a powerful 2 -4 year development and management experience
• Embrace technology in all it’s aspects, do not limit its access
• As individuals – Seek a variety of experiences, move into different topics, and different roles

There’s no doubt a lot more to this list, and IQPC addresses many of these problems through our Academy and Leadership Development programmes. We could always do more, and should, and will, but I also think individuals have to realise this new reality and embrace it.

The State of B2B Event Marketing

I believe it’s a great time to be in marketing and in events. Social media, social networking and the internet in general are driving sweeping changes.

So with this in mind I recently watched a webinar on the State of B2B Event Marketing put together by B2B magazine featuring John DiStefano, Research Director at B2B, and Maria Pergolino, Senior Director of Marketing for Marketo. Unfortunately it was more directed at the potential impact of marketing automation rather than the actual state of B2B events, it would have also been nice to get a few big event sponsors on the panel, but it did raise some good points based on some very good scientific research.

According to the research B2B companies invest in 26 events a year, 14 of their own company led events and 12 third-party events, representing 20% of their marketing budget. Interesting this is versus 5% on social media! Even more interesting in terms of driving results, third-party events delivered 61% of all the revenue from events.

Not surprisingly, the three top goals for B2B companies with their events is lead generation, customer engagement and branding. As a result of the focus on lead generation, the measurement of those leads through the corporate sales funnels is becoming even more important. This is where more marketing automation can kick in.

But more importantly for professional B2B event organizes, we must ensure we are delivering the right level of leads and are driving customer engagement for sponsors through our events. Even more importantly, we need to recognize this new focus on measurement and help our sponsors (or partners) gain more intelligence through the process. As sponsorship revenues become more and more important to third-party event organizers so to does ensuring we exceed their expectations.

I think this means third-party organizers also need to consider more changes:

Creating products that may be designed for sponsors customers at various levels of the sales funnel. Segmenting or streaming events to allow customers at different stages of the buying cycle to have different information and different interactions with sponsors. Creating mini events for existing customers vs new leads. Crafting the content to help drive new engagements or up/cross sell existing customers into deeper engagements. Also providing pre and post event opportunities for enhanced networking both online and off.

From a marketing point of view it may also mean crafting different messages or content marketing to the various stages of the vendors buying cycle. And as always tailoring those messages to different channels.

It also means (capturing and) providing more data to our sponsors, pre and post event. More information on who is attending, why, what they hope to get out of the event, what their budgets are etc. and then helping sponsors with the measurement and tracking of these leads post event. Providing the data and utilizing our social networks to make sure we continue the engagement for sponsors post event will mean more return sponsors.

How do you measure the success of your event?

Measuring success is critical to any endeavor, without knowing the goal you won’t know when you get there.

The goals for an event can be varied but often include a certain number of people in the room, the quality of the people, the number of meetings or sales that take place with sponsors/delegates or client testimonials post event (and sometimes a profit for the organizer). All these things seem easy enough to measure but what if your goal was to create ideas worth spreading? or to help create the next Facebook? or to drive engagement of a new product? or develop a ‘back room’ or ‘online’ conversation around the event that would last beyond the two days in a conference room? how would you measure success?

I like to keep an eye on how innovative event companies use the web and events to spread their ideas. One of the best I have seen in long time was Le Web, an eclectic web conference in Paris. Following the event on-line was very easy through any number of feeds and Fisheye Analytics posted this great breakdown on their blog including some great charts representing how much of the content was shared. It’s a great post and well worth the quick read.

I was intrigued by a couple of things from Le Web and the Fish Analytics post; namely could success be defined by  Clicks and Sharing of stories,  and how would you use the knowledge of the top sharers or the source of the sharing to transform your marketing next time. Also worth considering if the conversation will continue post event and help promote or drive attendance to next year or simply help share the ideas of the event.

I think it will do both of those things for many reasons. Le Web provided loads of cool content and ways to share it. They used video, images and cartoons all shared though Google+, Twitter, fotopedia, flipboard, flickr, Youtube, and face book often sparking and feeding the conversation themselves. Here’s a link to my favorite piece of content from the event, even though it didn’t get shared that much, I like the take-aways around the image from Live Sketching, a cartoon of Karl. They also created their own radio station and streamed the event on their own website.

The Fisheye blog post states they got over 35,000 views of their related content and another 66,000 plus retweets.

If your goal is to share ideas beyond just your conference room and drive change, the combination of social media and remarkable content can make a big difference!

Stretched to Strengthened – Event related insights from the IBM CMO study

IBM recently published the results of face to face interviews with over 1,734 CMO’s across 64 countries and 19 various industries. The results reflect the turbulent economic times we face but also give a great insight into the dramatic (and exciting) changes in marketing today. Its well worth a read and you can download the summary here.

The summary outlines five major ‘game changers’ and here’s my take on how they relate to conference and events business:

1)    The data explosion – We get data and measurement from so many different sources, web analytics, email providers, multiple free and paid social media platforms, PPC numbers from multiple sources, and our own CRM systems tracking any myriad of numbers. All of this without even looking at your actual event evaluations.

2)    Social Media – Social media may not be a magic bullet to drive your event attendance, but it could be a silver bullet that kills it. Most event marketers live with very short lead times and as a result focus on short term response rates, but social media is a longer term game and a lack of patience can do more harm than good. There are so many challenges to finding and engaging users in a long term conversation that adds value that you could write a book about it, many people have!

3)    Proliferation of channels and devices – I don’t think most event marketers have even come to terms with email being read on hand held devices, let alone leveraging some of the new devices/channels now available to them. Very few events even have mobile friendly websites, whilst that may currently be only a small percentage of our overall traffic it is certainly set to change. Some of the potential of these devices may ultimately end up enhancing the customer experience on site, which is most definitely marketing, but in most conference companies this sits in another department creating further difficulties.

4)    Shifting consumer demographics – What is the impact of the Arab spring or occupy wall street on your event messaging? The pace of social change means we have to be able to adapt our messaging and targeting in far more sophisticated ways. In the B2B event space I would also add changing and more complex purchasing decisions into the mix.

5)    Providing the numbers to illustrate the ROI for marketing – Your event team may be excited to have 1000 followers on twitter and a linked in group of over 5000 people, but can you demonstrate the value in these activities and their ability to grow the bottom line. I think this is the biggest challenge of all, we may not instinctively that our activities are building value, but you must be able to demonstrate the impact.

I would also add another challenge for the events industry and that’s finding the right organizational structure to tackle many of these issues. Drucker once said “Strategy dictates structure”, and I think whilst marketers have been quick to adopt new marketing strategies we have been slow to tackle the structural changes that are required.

The size of these 5 challenges is easy to under estimate, try mapping out the potential breaking points in your campaign tracking just for fun, but the general consensus from the report is that the majority of CMO’s believed in 3 key areas of improvement:
1)    Understand and deliver value to empowered customers
2)    Create lasting relationships with those customers
3)    Measure Marketing contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms.

Really this leads to a deeper understanding of the 1 to 1 relationships with customers which must now be had, and despite the difficulties in measuring the results, we have little choice but to adapt. The report does a much better job of crystalizing some these challenges and its well worth the read.

The Zone of Seduction

Martin Lindstrom, the author of “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy” had a great article in Time last week, entitled Zones of Seduction – How supermarkets turn shoppers into horders.

In the article Lindstrom visited what can best be described as laboratory for testing consumers reactions to various marketing strategies in a supermarket environment.  In the lab they created a “speed-bump” area designed to have the consumer spend 45 more seconds in one section leading to a 73% increase in spend. The speed-bump section had higher quality, slightly bumpy flooring that made you slow down, and some different signage. They also tested smaller carts, placing limits on the number of product and removing the dollar sign, all of which lead to a sevenfold increase in sales.

Makes you think…

A more relevant application for conferences might be the zone of referral… or the zone of group bookings… or the zone of conversion…

Does your website or communication piece help funnel people to conversion, group bookings or referrals. To often the messaging is left to the last minute and speaks to the masses rather than tailoring it to the zone of seduction. Creating landing pages for certain customers more prone to group bookings, or emails aimed specifically at certain niches within your customer profile are all very important tools that should be tested and can improve results. Better still creating additional content that creates a pathway from a complete stranger to a customer will improve your marketing results. Have you mapped out your zone of seduction?

Salespeople Don’t Like Leads!

I recently came  across this really great post by Bruce Brien from Bulldog Solutions on the Marketing Watchdog Journal which I think added some fresh insight into the whole marketing and sales alignment challenge. I’ve blogged about marketing and sales alignment in the past, but Bruce added some insight from a couple of companies who have made significant progress. I also like the controversial heading which Bruce justifies by outlining that in general salespeople don’t like leads, because it often means more work and limited results.

The key takeaways, in my opinion:

• The sales leaders and the marketing leaders need to view themselves as a team of equals and both look at the entire process, not their separate processes.
• Marketing should talk about delivering opportunities not leads, suspects, prospects etc. Salespeople want opportunities, particularly opportunities to sell to qualified prospects.
• Content alignment – By focusing the content on solving customer problems, it allows sales people to add value to the relationship.

This last point point also also reminded me of an older post from Carrie Baker over at Vovici Blog, “To create and sustain value, organizations must be aligned with the customer’s ENTIRE journey to ensure success EVERY step of the way.” Which I think highlights the need to keep the customer at the center of the sales and marketing alignment.  In this age old sales and marketing feud somewhere between “marketing handing over crap leads” and “leads not getting called by sales people” lies a new customer.

Social Media in the Military

The growth in Social Media has been both an opportunity and a challenge for most event marketers and organizations. So imagine the challenge for the military!

IDGA (a division of IQPC) has launched their 4th annual Social Media for Defense event to address some of these issues. The event is an opportunity for government and military officials to discuss the enormous potential and threat of social media, as well as meet with some of the social media experts and technology providers who can help utilize this powerful communication channel in the best possible way.

The IDGA team put together this great video on the right, just click on the image above, enter your details and watch the video for a more detailed outline of the challenges faced by the military. It’s a fascinating look at how social media challenges can vary by industry.

eBook: Mastering The Basics of Social Media (from the team behind Click Egypt)

The IQPC team behind Click Egypt, the online and digital marketing summit have put together this great Introduction to the basics of Social Media success ebook.

It includes the basic steps to get started: Management buy in, resourcing, growing bigger ears, focus, engage, learn, measure and teamwork. As well as some great tips on the major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus some links to some cool tools you can use to simplify, organise and monitor your social network presence (and they are all free!).

It also includes this great quote from Scott Cook at Intuit, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is”. Which I think highlights how control of the messaging, if ever there was any, has really changed with social media and the depth of change that will be ultimately required within organizations if they really want to use social media in their communication mix.

You can see some of the amazing speakers (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Vodaphone, Sony, P&G, Kraft, Nestle, Expedia and more) and read more about the event at www.clicksummitegypt.com or follow @socialmarketME. If you are in Egypt and interested in Online Marketing and Social Media this is a great place to start!

Interpreting Some Fascinating Event Marketing Stats

Constant Contact and Hub Spot recently published an ebook on “Fascinating Event Marketing Stats”. I haven’t seen the actual results of the survey but their presentation made some interesting reading.

Here’s my interpretation of some of their key findings:

68% of B2B companies rate events as important. Clearly still a valued marketing channel for a lot of companies. Top 2 reasons for running events, in order, are education and lead generation. Showing again how important it is to deliver a quality audience to sponsors and a strong educational opportunity for delegates.

Educational events included classes, workshops, training, seminars, and conferences. Some what conspicuously missing in my opinion are webinars or online/distant learning, this is an ever growing option for many B2B companies trying to reach time (and cost) sensitive executives.

Non-Profits host more conferences than B2B and B2C companies combined. Combined with the fact (also in the report) that most companies don’t charge for events (59% of B2B’s never charge), it highlights the need for paid events to deliver a superior networking and educational experience.

The top five promotional channels are not surprising: Email, own website, word of mouth, mail and phone calls. The phone came in only 5% more than social media, yet almost 60% said they rely on social media, showing the growing importance of being part of the conversation and integrating social media into your communication mix. The top five also show how important a solid database remains to event marketers, but interesting that database didn’t rate a mention in the report.

47% still use direct mail – Which is very surprising given the news USPS looks to be in financial trouble and the falling response rates of direct mail. Either, a lot of event marketers are sticking with this tried and tested channel or they fear replacing it with newer online channels or those online channels still aren’t delivering a strong enough response.

Only 11% use blogging? This is staggering… but probably highlights a broader content or thought leadership challenge faced by most event marketers.

Perhaps most interestingly (but not surprisingly and somewhat repetitive) the top 5 challenges for event marketers:
1.    Getting people to respond to invites
2.    Getting people to pay attention to invites
3.    Minimizing no-shows
4.    Getting people to the event
5.    Confirming who’s attending

So the challenge for all event marketers is the same, getting qualified executives to attend your event. Making it happen is part art, part science and all marketing! A quality product, with great messaging delivered via a multi-channel marketing plan.