Marketing Metrics, Messaging, and Madness

IWF Atlanta Wrapup

I attended IWF in Atlanta last week and it faced the same problem we've seen across the board for trade shows this year - poor attendance. The trade shows that are getting hit the hardest are the ones that attract people from a wide geographic area. The more local the show, the more we've seen attendance stay steady from past years, but if you have the expense of traveling, people are going to use the Internet to do their research.

Like it or not, long days on the trade show floor are part of the job. But 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.?  I don't understand who thinks opening a trade show floor at 8 a.m. is necessary, but they obviously don't actually attend the shows. The floor is empty for the first two hours, and anyone that is traveling from another time zone is in for a world of hurt as they get up at 6 a.m. Atlanta time (4 a.m. Denver time) to get to the show on time. Then we face ten hours on our feet. Ugh.

Even with low attendance we sold machines at the show and talked to a lot of good prospects. We sell a product you need to see in person to really experience the excitement that turns a looky-loo into a buyer, and trade shows give us the opportunity to introduce our laser systems to a whole new audience. But please!  Keep the hours in check!     

Business Directory Scams

I am sick and tired of business directory scams wasting my time. Recently it's been about one call a day which makes me wonder, whose list did I get on for this?  They are at least getting a little more creative with their directory names. It's not "US Business Directory" anymore. Today's was Saturn Direct Business Directory.

I find the best way to make sure they don't call back is to shame the caller by asking them how they live with themselves working for a scam. It tends to get the job done and I don't hear from them again.

I know everyone in my hallway gets a kick out of hearing me yell at them. Anyone else out there having fun with the business directory callers?

Ugly Marketing 101: Paid Inclusion on Blogs

Over the past year, one of the ways we've been able to build our marketing is through blog reviews. We've encouraged bloggers to stop by our booth at tradeshows and we'll run an engraving for them, give them a quick machine tour, and they can ask any questions they'd like. It's turned into great press opportunities for us because they get to see our product in person, play with it a bit, and really get an idea of what the machinery can do. By targeting the best blogs this way, other blogs link back to the original posts, and we get some great word of mouth advertising going.

All of a sudden I'm receiving more Google blog alerts for our competitor's site. I assume maybe they've seen all the great press about our company and are trying to build their own brand the same way, right? Wrong. I noticed a pattern in the blog posts:

• It had a generic description of the product.
• All of the links used the same keyword phrase.
• Every link went to the same applications page on their site.

It's paid inclusion, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. We've seen a huge marketing benefit from talking with bloggers that have the right audiences for our product and giving them a chance to write about our product, good or bad. But a paid inclusion just to get your company listed doesn't feel like clean marketing. The disclaimers tend to be at the end of all posts on the page and the blogs are just regurgitating the company line.

Find ways to get your product mentioned in the top blogs and your leads can skyrocket, but paid inclusion blogs mostly have few visitors and aren't accomplishing anything but building some weak links to your web site. There's a right way and a wrong way to use blogs for marketing, and paid inclusion just feels like the wrong way.

Making Leads Manageable - Review of Logiforms

Lead management. Some days it's the bain of a marketing director's existence. How much time and resources are devoted to managing the process? At our company, when a customer requests a brochure and sample kit, the lead would have to be routed to the correct distributor, then an email would be sent to the customer introducing them to their distributor, then the lead would be entered into the database, then sent a packet. We were desperate to reduce the time and cost of sending out leads. We were continuing to see lead growth, but I couldn't devote more personnel to the process.

Then I discovered Logiforms. If you have any lead management issues, you need to check out this service. It automatically forwards the lead to the correct distributor, sends a welcome letter to the lead (that includes their distributor's contact information), and downloads into our database each morning. The process to send out leads was easily cut to 1/3 the time.

Highs:
Lead distribution has never been easier. No human error is involved - it looks at the lead's address and forwards the leads appropriately. For territories with multiple distributors you can even set up the program to alternate which distributor the lead is sent.

Having everything handled online means that I log in from home or on the road and see where lead numbers are for the week and take a look in the submission bit to see where leads are coming from before they are even entered in the database.

Their Logibridge add-on allows us to download the leads directly into our database. A quick cleanup is all it takes now to have the leads ready to mail out. 

Lows:
Of course, there are some things that could be improved.  Creating the profiles and rules for lead routing can be time consuming. We have over 90 different profiles based on geography, and each profile needs to be set up in two places - the notifications and auto responder area. If I could create one profile that controlled both of these, that would be a big time saver. With the number of profiles we deal with, I wish I could create the rules in a spreadsheet format and upload the rules.  Also, changing the order of rules is a very time consuming process when you want to move rule 90 up to 1.

I also wish I could set the submission bin to only hold the last 5000 leads instead of having to go in and delete leads to keep us below our limit. This is only a temporary storage area for us (and anyone else using the Logibridge feature to download leads) and this would reduce our routine maintenance of cleaning out the leads.

Overview:
Trust me, these are small issues. When I try out software like this, I have the slimmest of hope that it will really do what I need it to accomplish. This blew me away for its functionality and actually does everything that I was looking for. Two years into using the system I'm getting picky, but I would suggest this software to everyone that deals with lead management.