Entries from April 2008
Pros and Cons of In-Person Events for B2B Marketing
Here’s a follow-up to my previous post Pros and Cons of Remote Events. Even in today’s hyper-connected world, there are good reasons for in-person marketing events such as “lunch-and-learn” seminars. The traditional style of building a relationship with a potential client required you to get in your car, get on a plane, or pick up the phone–and that’s what you need to do for an effective group discussion or simply to connect more directly with prospects.
If you’re choosing between remote or in-person, factor in the time needed to present the information, the needs of the customers or prospects you’re targeting, and the physical locations of attendees.
Live events can include:
- Executive briefings
- Breakfast meetings
- Lunch-and-learns
- Seminars
Pros of In-Person Events
- You can hold your audience’s attention longer. Remote events should last no more than an hour, but with a live seminar or briefing you can provide more in-depth information. Users or technical decision makers who want to dive deep into the details of your solution may want that extra time. Live events are also effective for prospective buyers who are further along in their purchase cycle–they’re more willing to commit the time to attend.
- You can show attendees more. Have an on-site tour, show how your product is made, or let attendees see how services are provided. If your facilities are impressive, prospects absorb the atmosphere of your company’s success. Alternatively, you can invite prospects to events at your customer’s site to see your products or services in action.
- Your audience can meet you and your team, and vice versa. A live event gives prospects a chance to meet and make a personal connection with you, and to vet you and your staff.
- Attendees can interact with your happy customers. You can invite satisfied customers to your live event and have them mingle with hot prospects. These customers often act as your ambassadors and help sell the prospect on the benefits of selecting your products or services.
- You can gauge audience reaction. Are attendees staring into space? If so, you’re either moving too slowly or too fast. Switch your gears and now you’re connecting with them. At one seminar I gave recently, I saw two attendees whispering and nodding to one another when I made a key point. When I caught their eye, they told me that they understood the value of the recommendation but didn’t know how to “get there from here.” Their immediate feedback let me outline specific strategies and tactics, and it created the opportunity to talk later about how my services could help.
- Your venue can be a draw. If you’re holding an event at an attractive facility–at a casino or on a yacht, for example–attendance may be higher simply because the venue itself is a lure.
Cons of In-Person Events
- Live events can be more costly. Expenses for travel, meeting rooms, audiovisual equipment, attendee meals, and parking can add up quickly. You’ll also need personnel to staff registration tables, meet and greet guests, and oversee event logistics.
- They require a larger time commitment. Unless the event is being held at your site or your customer’s, you’ll both spend additional time traveling to and from the venue.
What factors do you consider? Please post a comment with any other pros and cons that have helped you decide to either hold a live event or “go virtual,” and I’ll let you know if I’ve got ideas on the topic.
Tight Marketing Budget? A Strategy to Make the Most of What You’ve Got
If you’re like most B2B marketing professionals, you’ve never got enough money for all the marketing you’d like to do. I recommend focusing on driving leads and sales rather than on branding. 
By investing one-third on online marketing, one-third on database-driven direct marketing, and the remaining one-third on “everything else,” you’ll be able to provide demonstrable results when it comes time to determine whether your budget will go up or down.
Focusing on leads and sales
Yes, brand image is important to your company’s success. But unless you can spend a half-million dollars or so on brand advertising, such efforts probably won’t move the sales needle much.
The good news: If you spend a fraction of that amount on marketing designed primarily to generate leads, you should see a big impact on sales. And responding quickly to inquiries while maintaining the quality of your website and marketing materials also helps enhance your company’s image.
Invest one-third of your budget on online marketing
Your website is probably the initial stop for prospects who are new to your products and services. Invest time and thought into improving the messages to prospects and clients who are currently visiting your website. Stay cost-effective by focusing your goal on moving prospects from awareness to inquiry to consideration to purchase. Don’t just aim to give it more window-dressing. Instead, (more…)
The Definition of Marketing?
Have you seen the new definition of marketing from the American Marketing Association (AMA)? I just came across it again while doing some research on the Web and it made me laugh:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
On January 14, 2008 The American Marketing Association announced in a press release that this new definition “…will be used as the official definition in books, by marketing professionals and taught in university lecture halls nationwide.”
Sorry. Not by this marketing professional!
If it sounds like something created by a committee, it was. According to the press release,
“The committee formed in late 2006, under the leadership of Donald R. Lehmann, the George E. Warren Professor of Business at Columbia Business School in New York. The committee used qualitative insight generated through an evaluation of the 1985 and 2004 definitions of marketing to craft a new definition that better serves the constituents of the American Marketing Association. As part of this process, Association members (A second, much bigger committee?) were asked to provide input on what they liked best about the previous definition, and what they would change. Members were later asked to offer feedback on a draft of the revised definition. At the end of the revision process, the American Marketing Association found that more than 70 percent of their membership viewed the new definition as an improvement.”
I guess I am one of the 30 percent that think the AMA’s latest definition of marketing is worse than the one it replaces. And that one, announced in 2004, wasn’t great either:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
Maybe George E. Warren and the others on the committee should try to explain this new definition of marketing to a couple of CEOs or CFOs. Do you really think the CEOs or CFOs will say, “I get it! Now I understand why we need to invest in marketing.” I doubt it.
I think that us B-to-B marketers have a tough enough job of convincing the folks in the C-suite that marketing is an important ingredient in the company’s success, without the AMA making it our job even harder by confusing people with their latest marketing definition.
If you are one of the AMA committee members that developed this new definition of marketing, please let us know if you are 100 percent satisfied with this new definition, and why so or why not?
And you, the person reading this right now: What are your thoughts? Does the current definition clearly communicate to you what marketing is? If not, do you have a better definition of marketing to share?
April Fooled? Tips to Beat Content Thieves
You spend time and energy crafting the right marketing messages and content to connect with prospects and clients. Then you find it littered throughout the Internet on trashy websites–or worse, on a competitor’s.
Time to wage war on the offenders? I found a useful blog post listing “100 Tips to Defeat Content Thieves“. Some highlights:
- Set up Google Alerts for key phrases in your content — You’ll get regular emails with search results showing who else has your content on their site
- Add a message in your feeds asking people to email you if they are reading your content on someone else’s website.
- Put a spy image, a small image link, in the HTML, and watch your log files to see where it is being called from.
- CopyScape helps you find other sites with your content.
There’s lots more as well, including whether you have the rights to go for them and resources about how to go about it.
