5 Tips On Selecting a PR Agency

  PR is dead, right?  Not really.  It has just morphed into something with much stronger social media and inbound marketing components.  

Unfortunately, many PR agencies / pros did not evolve, which makes it hard for marketing executives to decide whether their agency is effective or not, as well as picking the right one to partner with.

As we revamped our messaging and had several major announcements coming up, we decided to shake things up a little and went through the process of finding a new PR agency.  Here are tips that worked well for us.

1.  Set your goals.  What is the primary reason behind PR efforts in your company?  Is it to bring new business?  Raise money?  Get acquired?  Get noticed?  The primary reason will define the type of agency you will go after.  

In our case, the primary reason was business expansion.  We had over 500% growth last year and we are gearing up for more this year!  We wanted to augment our SEO and inbound marketing activities with increased social media, relevant industry press, blogger and vertical community campaigns.  We have also a major launch coming up.  All that made it a good time to look for the right PR / social marketing agency.

2.  Understand your target markets.  Who is your buyer and how do they find products / services like yours.  If you are marketing to SMB segment, it probably is not the most effective strategy to go heavily after top industry analysts and major publications.  A better strategy may be going to after tier 2 / 3 analysts that blog a lot, as well as vertical communities, bloggers, etc.   

3.  Define success criteria.  How do you recognize the right PR agency when you come across them?  Here is my high-level checklist:

- Industry experience.  It is much easier to work with an agency that has experience in your market segment.  They typically know your sub-segments, market trends and competitors.  They would probably  have have ideas what worked and what didn't in terms of messaging and launch / marketing strategies.  They would most likely have relationships and a database of contacts with key industry figures, analysts, bloggers, and journalists.

Otherwise, you may find yourself spending lots of time bringing your PR agency up to speed in all these areas.  It would take time for them to build a database of contacts, build relationships, etc. 

- Inbound marketing / social media experience.   You would be surprised how few agencies "really" have these skills.  Most claim they do.  70% of the ones we looked at, did not have these skills.  20% thought we would win if only we could be active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  Clearly, we don't need a PR agency for that level of social media presence.  Finally, 10% really understood what it took to win the "inbound marketing battle" with detailed plans and tools that went far beyond the typical social media efforts.

- Track Record.  We wanted to see previous success stories with other clients.  In all fairness, there is only certain level of success even the best PR agency can bring to a company.  However, you can look at their past / current clients' press releases, media coverage, SEO rankings, and messaging and get an idea on how creative is the agency.

- Available Resources.  If a great PR agency is slammed with work and more clients than they can handle, you may not get the attention you need for your success.  So, it is critical to find an agency with enough resources and time to dedicate to your success.  It is also important to find out who specifically will work on your project.  You would want to be comfortable with that person's background, attitude, availability, etc. 

- Proximity.  In this day and age, proximity seems to be not important.  There is Skype, email, IM, and social media for effective remote communications.  That is mostly true.  

All other factors being the same, I much rather work with an agency that is local.  For example, we have spent two days with our new PR agency in person to kick off our upcoming launch planning.  I can't imagine having the same interaction quality, chemistry and results via Skype, con call or email.  

- Attitude. It is critical to find a PR agency that REALLY wants your business.  There  are plenty of stuck up, unfriendly agencies out there.  It will be very ineffective and frustrating to work with them.  

For example, one of the finalists presented really well at the first pass.  However, during the second meeting their attitude turned into, "we get enough business without you" and "you should feel lucky that we are taking you as a client," "sign the agreement now and don't waste our time."

There is no place for an attitude like that.  If they are acting this way before getting the contract, imagine how difficult would be to work with them through the launch when you need their presence most.

- Budget. There is a wide spectrum of prices - from a few thousand dollars a month (typically from PR contractors) to tens of thousands dollars per month (from "high end" PR agencies.)  More expensive does not necessarily mean better quality.  It could mean overhead, bloated infrastructure or just arrogance.

The "stuck up" PR agency was double the price of its competitors.  They "justified" it by more services they provide.  However, after looking in-depth, they were offering half of what others were providing.  

This said, I would warn against the "nickel and dime" approach.  You have to recognize a good deal and know when to stop the bargaining process.  PR agencies are in business to make money as well.  If we are not being fair to them, the relationship may not last.   

4.  RFI. After you know approximately what you are looking for, try to obtain a list of PR agencies that are active in your segment, as well as the ones you have worked with before.  Send out an RFI (request for information) outlining things you are trying to accomplish and what kind of help you are looking for.  You can easily find templates online.

5.  Proposal / Selection.  We ended up with around 50 RFIs sent out.  We got 12 responses.  Picked 3 finalists.  We invited each one of them to pitch the final proposal with expected results, resources, dates, plans, etc.  This step brought some surprises too.  The strongest candidate at the RFI stage turned out to be a "fluff" agency. 

However, #2 agency came in very strong.  We were very impressed with every single attribute of their final proposal.  And we made our selection.

Once the selection process was over and we signed the contract, the winning PR agency came into our office the following week for a 2 days kick-off session.  We refined out social media / inbound marketing plan,  brainstormed on the messaging,  and assigned specific action items.  So far, we are very happy with our choice.  

The proof will be, as everything in Hack Marketing approach, in our launch success and the delta in the overall metrics we have identified.

Marketing to SMBs: Lead Generation, Conversion Rates and Sales Tools

This post is the continuation from 8 Key Elements for SMB Marketing (Part 1).  In this entry, I would like to focus on effective lead generation and nurturing practices, sales tools, as well as an integrated sales and marketing approach.

Lead Generation.  With small deal sizes and large number of customers, enterprise-style 1:1 marketing is usually ineffective.  Instead, I have seen great results with marketing into communities, such as Spiceworks.  Many IT professionals from SMBs use such communities to exchange ideas, to learn about new offerings and ask questions to peers.  It is important to identify and establish presence in these communities - engaging participants, answering questions, working with customers and prospects, as well as running cost-effective marketing campaigns.

Another very effective way for generating high quality leads is creating unique and relevant content.  You can use it for blogs, IT community posts, social media, and PR.  In my experience, this has been one of the most cost-effective and sustainable sources of strong leads with very high conversion rates.

A lot has been said about the importance of PPC and SEO.  I usually like to experiment with PPC for SEO messaging before putting lots of effort into SEO.  This way I can get good results from a small PPC effort short-term, while SEO is gaining strength.  Once SEO is strong, I still keep a small budget for PPC for experimenting with new keywords, ideas and marketing messages.

Call center lead generation campaigns can work well for certain offerings.  However, to make these campaigns successful, there is typically a sizable upfront time and money investment - finding the right vendor, creating training materials and scripts, training agents, listening to calls and having an ongoing QA process.

One huge benefit of listening to lead generation and sales calls is the ability to witness your marketing and sales messages in action, see what works and what not, change as necessary and try again in real time.


Lead sorting and nurturing.  With thousands leads from different sources and at different stages of buying cycle, it is virtually impossible to keep up with all of them manually.  I have had success with designing a "funneling logic" for lead nurturing, where the leads get identified and categorized based on various factors and how far down are they in the sales funnel. Some types of leads get matured and closed using online tools (landing pages, content, emails, online store, chat, etc.) with minimal human interaction, saving sales lots of time.  Other types get passed to the sales team for closing.

I have been using Marketo for lead nurturing.  However, we quickly ran into the need to customize landing pages for further lead nurturing and "heating" to drive prospects closer to the purchase decision before handing them to the sales team.



Marketing and Sales Tools.  I try to have a minimal set of marketing collateral with an emphasis on online tools, especially for cloud-based services.  Many SMB IT folks don't have time to read through complicated materials.  They prefer seeing and experiencing the actual product.  Tools like screenshots and sandbox environments have been extremely useful for me, providing very high conversion rates.  I also use podcasts, brief videos, blogs, datasheets, customer testimonials, and industry press articles as necessary.

Patience.  With all these elements built properly, SMB sales can indeed be lucrative.  However, these efforts require a dedicated team that is experienced in marketing and selling into this space, willing to stay engaged and transform along with the industry.

It also may take some time to get the messaging and programs right, people trained, see what works and what not in your environment, before you can start seeing results.  However, the results can be great in terms of a strong revenue stream, high customer satisfaction rates and lower marketing costs.

8 Key Elements for SMB Marketing (Part 1)

Mysterious SMB market.  For many years, I have been hearing the same story, "SMB market is lucrative and really fragmented.  It represents a tremendous opportunity for us."   Yet, I have witnessed many companies enter this space over and over, just to fall short of their expectations.  So, what gives?

The challenge is that neither enterprise, nor consumer programs alone are effective in this market.  I spent last 1,5 years on finding effective approaches for marketing and selling IT products and services into SMB.  Here are my findings:

1. Market Definition.   First, how do you define SMB?  I break it down into 4 segments:
     
           a. Small Office / Home Office (1 - 5 employees)  Consumer-like buying behavior.
           b. Very Small Business (6-30 employees).  No dedicated IT.  Use of consultants.
           c. Small Business (31 - 250 employees).  1-3 IT employees.
           d. Medium Business (251 - 1,000 employees).  1-5 IT employees.  More sophisticated network / apps.  Elements of the enterprise IT.


2.  Analyzing Strengths.  If you already have presence in this space and analyze your historic sales, you probably will discover that sales have been coming from one or two of the sub-segments above.  This exercise will point to success in certain types of your activities or channels.  And, visa versa, you may see opportunities in sub-segments that are not performing well.  You can also define which of these sub-segments are best matched for your product / sales force / channel presence.  This is critical, because even if you have the best product, but lack the right sales force type, your efforts may stumble.


3. Different Target Audience.  IT folks in SMB find, purchase and consume products differently than their peers in large enterprises.  SMB IT employees are typically generalists.  Having to compete with much larger companies, IT departments with only a few people have to take care of everything from fixing computers to maintaining the network infrastructure and deploying applications.  This often means no time for a deep dive into any area.  This also means no time to read fancy white papers, or try every product feature, or attend industry IT mega shows.  These characteristics make enterprise-type marketing fairly ineffective.


4.  Product Approach.   Ease of use is the name of the game here.  I have seen many simple and easy-to-use cloud services beat out complex, difficult-to-use and deploy, yet feature-rich products.  When building a product or a service for SMB market, it is critical to keep ease of use in mind.  It is a somewhat difficult concept for enterprise software vendors, who customize products to the needs of very large customers.  For these vendors, it may make sense to have a simpler and cheaper offering with reduced functionality that is easy to use, fast to deploy and doesn't require lots of support.  That is one of the reasons behind success of many cloud services in SMB space.  It is a worthwhile exercise for product managers, especially the ones with little SMB experience, to hold several focus groups to understand the simplicity requirements.

5. Messaging.  Since simplicity is so important, most of the enterprise (complicated and long) messaging approaches won't work.  SMB IT folks have absolutely no time to translate complicated technology of fluffy marketing messages into benefits.  Product Marketing has to create a message that connects quickly and uses their target market's language.  The reward can be huge - quick decision-making process and faster time to revenue.  A successful example of such messaging is what we did for Panda Security: www.forgetsecurity.com


More... Not to bore you with too long of a post, I broke it down in two entries.  In the second part, I  discuss lead generation, lead sorting and nurturing, sales approach and channels, and marketing / sales tools.

7 Steps for Turning Twitter Into an Effective Market Research Tool

Twitter:  Waste of Time or a Business Tool?
I used to think that Twitter represented no significant value for business needs.  Just to be familiar with it, I opened an account a while ago, and tweeted here and there.

That all changed as I began working on a startup, developing a technology to prevent cyberbullying.  In that process, I discovered very effective ways of using Twitter as a practical tool for market research.

Challenge
Many business executives, product managers, marketing professionals and sales reps find it hard keeping up with  industry news, competitive info and market trends.  Even though there are plenty of tools, keeping up with the news still requires hours of finding, sorting and reading articles.  People are usually busy with tens of different tasks, leaving market research as something that often gets pushed down in priority.

Enter Twitter
There are armies of people who are tirelessly tweeting 24 hours a day.  Tweets are brief.  It takes less than a minute for us to determine if they are useful or not.  We can use Twitter as tool to quickly get up to speed with the relevant news, spending just 5-10 min a day.  Here is how I do it:

1.  Create a Twitter account that contains the words of the main business problem you are trying to solve.  In my case, it has "Cyberbullying" in it.  This will be useful later, when you would want to use Twitter for marketing needs.

2.  Find people tweeting on the subject of your interest.  You can use the search bar for that.  Play with multiple keywords to get the content you want.  Then check profiles of people you found and make sure they fit your needs.

3.  Create your Twitter list.  Follow as many relevant users as possible.

4.  Get a mobile app.  It may be easier to get quick updates on an iPhone or Android.  I am using TweetCaster on Android.  It gives me updates in a very easy format.  It takes me only 5-10 min to go through the daily news.  I often discover news before they show up in RSS feeds or other major news sources and tools.  The most relevant ones get lots of retweets from many people.  It is sort of "crowd voting."

5.  Trim your list.  As you are finding people who are tweeting irrelevant things for whatever reasons, unfollow them, until you have a "golden list" of sources that bring you the best quality news.

6.  Check few times a day for 3-5 minutes each time and you will be abreast of the latest industry news.

7.  Augment this with your more in-depth research from various sources when you have time.

That's it!  
In military terms, Twitter became my Special Forces team for getting the dirty job done quickly and effectively.  Other tools are like my regular military units for thorough, longer-term type projects.

8 Steps for Creating an Effective Main Message

 It's a familiar situation.  A company or division is formed.  It develops a product, then races to launch.  Somebody throws together an initial message and a web site.  Product launches.  Revenue starts flowing.

It's time to hire a marketing exec and build a team.  Founders emphasize leads and conversion rates.  Good things like SEO, lead nurturing, online marketing get implemented. But one fundamental is often missing.

Sin #1.  Positioning / Main message.  Let's look at the main message from two companies web sites:

-  Zoho

- Workday


Are these accurate and good in the eyes of these companies?  Probably.
Is this the way their customers think?                                      Probably not.
Do these miss a chance to communicate the true value?          Yes!

A strong main messages gives the best opportunity to grab prospect's attention... the right way. It also flows into the rest of messaging, impacting  PPC, SEO and the conversion rate.  In fact, vague main message  results in wasted money and ineffectiveness of marketing campaigns.  This is especially painful for startups with little brand recognition.

Here are examples of effective and clear messages from Pandora and AppAssure:







How do you develop a strong main message?  Here are some key principles:

1.  Grab attention.  It has to be unique enough to grab visitors attention and encourage further browsing.
2.  Differentiate.  Has to communicate at least one unique angle or a customer benefit.
3.  Specific. The benefit has to be specific.  Statements like having "all-in-one," "complete," "best" are often subjective and indicate vendor's point of view.  In the examples above, the word "complete" may have a very different meaning for target customers vs. the vendor.  It can discredit the message.  What I like about the message from AppAssure is that is specific.  "Recover in Minutes" sets a pretty specific expectation.
4.  Believable. It is important to keep the balance between reality and outrageous statements that prospects discount as zealous or exaggerated.
5.  Language.  The message has to be in the language used by target customers, which is often different from the vendor's language.  If your target customer is CIO, too technical of a message may be a mistake.  If you are targeting sysadmins, you may want to be fairly technical and specific.
6.  Easily understandable.  The prospect has to be able to quickly grasp the message.  Don't make them think too long - often people don't have time or desire to do that.  They will just leave the site.
7.  Customer tested.  It is critical to test the main message with a number of customers and prospects before going live.  You can start with a qualitative test via customer conversations.  Then, you can finish with an online survey.
8.  Not Perfect.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  You don't have to spend months on this.  It OK for some internal folks to struggle with it.  It can be work in progress, however you don't want to change it very often.  It just has to be effective.

To summarize, a strong main message could drastically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and ROI of your marketing spending.  I will discuss the sin #2 in the next Hack Marketing blog entry.

Here is an example of a message that we developed about 6 months ago: www.forgetsecurity.com

How To Generate Leads Without Pushing Products

My friend George owns a mega insurance brokerage, as well as a ridiculous number of apartment buildings in LA.  His success formula is very simple: "I never sell, I help people buy."

His agents are probably the most relaxed group of sales people I have ever met.  They never "close hard." Instead, they spend time understanding prospects' needs, then explain why certain plans would work better.  The conversion ratio is very high.  So is his referral business.  Below are my recommendations on applying this principle to online content strategy execution:

1.  Great Content.   Create relevant and interesting content that helps prospects understanding  and solving their challenges.  Brief, interesting articles / blog entries several times a week can help transforming your site into an industry "water cooler," where people can find news and practical information on their challenges and the ways to solve them.

2.  Content Mix.  Try to have a mix between industry news, industry "guest speaker" opinions / interviews, customer stories (not too product focused), industry event commentaries and "non-marketing articles".  This will provide a variety necessary for visitors to stay interested in keeping coming.

3.  "Non-marketing Articles".  Find a specific challenge that your market really cares about and your products help to solve.  Write about this challenge and best practices for solving it.  Then talk about the approach your company took to solving it and why.  This should be an "approach discussion," and not a product pitch.  Not mentioning the product name often is a good idea at this stage.  At the end of the article, you can provide a link to solutions and tools.  That link will lead to a landing page with product info and a call to action.  This way your article is credible, interesting, and actionable.  And it is not pushing products.

4.  Landing Page.  The landing page picks up the discussion and shows how your product or service solves this specific problem in details.  Later, you can add other features that you think the reader may find interesting.   Finish the page with a call to action, such as a free trial, purchasing options, etc.

5.  Promote The Content.  Since the article is fairly neutral and is not talking about products, you can promote it at industry communities, social media and forums, generating a lot of traffic to your web site that you can turn into leads, opportunities and sales.

To summarize, with this approach your prospects are learning more about their challenges, ways to solve them.  Once they decided on buying your product, they feel like they are making a purchase decision vs. somebody forcing them into buying something they may not need, understand or may not be ready to buy.  So, they are more enthusiastic and excited about their decisions and your products they are buying.

5 Practical Steps For Increasing Website Conversion Rate

Congratulations!  Your web traffic is good!   Now what?  How do you convert visitors into business?  The 5 approaches below came as a result of my own experience of running marketing in several companies, as well as from the practical feedback from my marketing colleagues.

1.  Understand your traffic.  Most likely your web traffic is coming from many different sources.  For example, some people may be visiting your site as a result of reading a blog; some - from a banner ad at a community forum; some may be responding to an email.  Each traffic type has unique characteristics that are important to understand:

• Function.  IT Manager vs. CIO vs. BU Manager, etc.
• Buying cycle.  Research phase (traffic source: just read a magazine article, realized had the same challenge) vs. shopping for a solution (source: read a customer testimonial at an industry forum while looking for a solution to a known problem) vs. ready to buy (source: responding to a price promotion.)
• Topic / Trigger.  Visitors came to the web site after reading a blog entry on a nasty Trojan Horse vs. an article about disaster recovery vs. a  promotion on your product, etc.  

2.  Multiple landing pages.  Each traffic type requires a unique conversation with a category of prospects  (based on function, topic, etc).

For example, let's say you have a group of IT managers that came to your web site as a result of reading a blog entry on the complexity of managing file servers.  Sending them to the main page may disrupt that conversation.  Most of them may feel tricked and will probably end up leaving.  Instead, a simple landing page continuing the discussion, perhaps explaining how this complexity can be solved with a practical implementation, would retain them and encourage to continue exploring the site.

It is important to have as many landing pages as necessary for a meaningful traffic segmentation (based on unique types of conversations) and driving them to a logical conclusion (more info, trial, contact, purchase, etc.)  Many content management and marketing automation tools (like Marketo,) can help in accomplishing this quickly and easily.

3.  Unique messages.  Each landing page requires a specific message to continue the unique conversation started at the lead generation phase.  The message should take into account all the factors from above.

For example, if visitors are coming as a result of reading an article on the risk management in CIO Magazine, you want a landing page with an "executive" look and feel, focused on best practices for solving this problem, and not getting into too many technical details.  It is also a good practice to speak to several of your CIO customers to craft this message.

For a number of webmasters coming from a blog entry on solving Apache web server performance issues, you may want to have a landing page that is be fairly technical and specific.  Again, I would suggest talking to a couple of webmaster customers to craft the message.

4.  Unique elements.  You probably already have a collection of elements, such as videos, podcasts, white papers, blogs, customer testimonials, etc.

Each landing page needs the elements that are appropriate for its audience.  The best way to find right elements is to talk to your existing customers fitting the profile.  This can be an eye opening experience.

For example, one of my customers told me that most of the elements we were planning were irrelevant for him.  He told us that many SMB IT Managers typically look for product screenshots first.  If they like them, they continue browsing.  After verifying this point with a few other customers with the same profile, we ended up giving screenshots a very prominent position on the page.  Very quickly it became the most visited element for the whole site.  The landing page ended up having a great conversion rate.

Another very successful element we added as a result of a direct customer feedback was a "sandbox" for a cloud product we were marketing, where IT managers could play with the product in a "sandbox" environment.

5. Unique call to action.  For this step, it is important to understand prospects' phase in the buying cycle.  If they are just researching, a big red "BUY NOW" button will most likely turn them off.  However, "watch a video" or a "free trial" may work well for them.  Alternatively, if the traffic is coming as a response to your "30% off" promotion, you may want to have the "buy" button in a more prominent location.



These are just 5 ways of increasing your web site conversion rates.  These steps require a bit more planning and execution from your marketing team than usual.  However the conversion rates and revenue results are well worth it.  

There are important steps like monitoring, measuring, and adjusting pages and campaigns that I did not discuss in this entry.  I will try to cover these in a future hack marketing blog entry.

Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions of other conversion approaches that have worked for you.

Is "Good Enough" marketing good enough?

The "good enough" concept is valid and important in many areas, including product management.  There is never a perfect product, so a good product manager knows when the product is "good enough" and ready.  This is based on many factors, such as customer feedback, quality, R&D reality, roadmaps, competitive data, etc.  This subject is taught  in Pragmatic Marketing and is widely used in most PM organizations today.

But does this principle work in other marketing areas?  Not in my experience.  For example, the difference between "good enough" and great for PPC and SEO is drastic.  Lots of PPC campaigns never work and exec teams stop believing in these as valid lead gen tools because marketing never puts the right level of effort on finding out what are the exact keywords their prospects use at different buying stages, from the research to purchase.  This is not an easy process.  And good enough usually = failure.  This is where you use "Hack Marketing" to find the right keywords.  The results of these extra steps are the difference between success and failure of PPC and SEO.

The same goes with the rest of messaging.  It really pays to conduct research and understand what are the exact words customers and prospects use.  There is no "good enough" here.  For example, we changed one word describing how the product category is referred based on customer feedback.  Lead gen campaign results shot up 67% in one week.

Finally, "good enough" marketing materials in my experience are useless.  I rather have a great web site with all the right messaging and use it as the major marketing tool instead of  tens of mediocre white papers just because it is "the right thing to do" and "everybody does it."

So is "good enough" marketing good enough?