Once upon a time, I had a client that invested a major portion of its budget on Pay-Per-Click but about a year ago, the organization decided to invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To that end, I was engaged to develop a series of landing pages to help increase the number of individuals visiting the organization's website. Last week, I caught up with the SEO analyst, who showed me some very interesting statistics on how the landing pages were working.

As all marketers know, it takes time for SEO to kick in — usually about six to nine months. Sure enough, the results this analyst showed me clearly demonstrated that. She chose a specific landing page that I developed that was getting the best results. 

The landing page was first published mid-January 2017 and as predicted, it took about six months to show results. Starting in July 2017, you can see the number of daily visitors growing. By September 2017, the page is getting 1,300 views EVERY DAY! 

Imagine the page views this organization is getting across all landing pages! Needless to say, the company is very happy with the SEO program and continues to make an investment.  The program has brought many new visitors to their website.

Isn't it wonderful when you see content marketing make an impact! 

Spring is here on Cape Cod. I can tell because my daffodils are starting to come up and the Cape Cod air smells sweet. Life on the Cape is turning full circle. This spring, I am making a new resolution. I will start blogging again!

For me, blogging on a regular basis hasn't been my strength. While I love blogging, my clients come first and my lack of posts is certainly an indication that McGee Marketing Consultants is doing well. Most of my business comes from referrals so I had to prioritize my time and put my website and blogging on the back burner. But, I am a marketer and I must practice what I preach. As they say in other industries......"Physician....heal thyself!" I am the cobbler's child with no shoes.

When I first launched McGee Marketing Consultants five years ago, I had a broader message than I have now. Specifically, I did anything that was B2B software marketing, whether it was demand generation, public relations, content development, analyst relations, social media - you name it! And while my team and I have expertise in all of these marketing disciplines, I soon discovered that we had to specialize. B2B software marketing was just too broad a category. 

When I reflected on what I enjoyed the most - helping organizations with positioning, messaging, content development, and PR - it so happened that the discipline of content development, in particular, was becoming a core element to drive the success of any B2B marketing organization. As any CMO will tell you, success is about generating quality leads for sales via inbound and outbound lead generation.
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You can only generate leads if you can talk about the value your product or service brings to prospects and customers and - just as important - you must also offer up something of value (some form of content) just to demonstrate that your product or service is of value. Hence - content marketing was born!
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And so it goes even with businesses such as mine. My customers will tell you that McGee Marketing Consultants excels at content marketing but how would you know that if I didn't find a way to reach out to you. That is why blogging is important!

  

Blog Post: 4 Must-Have Digital Marketing Core Competencies by Vala Afshar, April 27, 2014

Synopsis: Vala wrote an excellent blog post boiling digital marketing compentencies and best practices down to a focus on 4 'things':

1. Customer engagement strategy: Since 60 - 70 percent of the buying process takes place before the buyer contacts a vendor, executing more campaigns just isn't enough. Instead, you need to focus on delivering content that engages the buyer and initiates a conversation, a dialogue.
2. Influence marketing: Because of the change in the buying process, you need to find ways for the buyer to find you versus you finding the buyer. This is about content. Vala writes, " According to B2B Magazine, 'content marketing' is one of the top priorities for marketing in 2014. Content marketing was listed as a top priority by the Altimeter Group. In a recent survey, 78 percent of CMOs think content is the future of marketing. 
3. Data-driven marketing and the power of contextual intelligence: The focus on data is increasingly important as marketers move away from 'mass marketing' towards a segmented approach - even to achieve the 'segments of one' - micro-segments that target each buyer in a unique way so you can convert them into a long-term, high-value customer. Data provides us with the information to better know our buyers and engage in developing an authentic relationship with them. Marketers also need data to know exactly what is working and not working so they can prove success and makes changes for continued success.
4. Marketing automation (lead nurturing, marketing campaign influences, sales enablement): It is difficult, if not impossible, to do segments of one without social listening skills that come from integrating social CRM and social listening technologies into marketing automation tools.You can't respond to customers in real, or near-real time without these tools. Sales and marketing automation tools have also done much to dramatically improve the adversarial relationship between sales and marketing. With these tools, you can answer questions like, 'Do we have the right content?', 'Do we have the right skills to market in this new world?,' and 'How are we integrating this process throughout the entire organization?'. You can't consider yourself a digital marketing without these automation tools.

M2C Point of View: Excellent synopsis of what digital marketers need to do but I'd like to add / emphasize a few points.

With influence marketing, it is important to include industry 'influencers' in the equation; that means finding ways to reach out to more just just the media and analysts but industry subject matter experts that cover your technology areas. Look for bloggers who may have an interest in your content and invite them to collaborate with you on thought leadership content - invite them as a guest blogger or key speaker at a digital or live company event. The marketplace looks to these individuals for counsel and advice so make it a priority to build appropriate relationships just as you would with the media and industry analysts.

Point 4 above talks to the relationship between sales and marketing. If the leadership between sales and marketing is not aligned, neither will the team members be aligned. In addition to leveraging marketing and sales automation tools to help improve the relationship, also consider using consultants to assist. For example, many organizations call in sales training consultants such as Sandler Training to assist in building out sales teams and scale up sales training. Many times, these organizations are working with the sales team coaching them on how to better drive business, follow-up on leads, drive deals through the pipeline. If your sales team is constantly complaining about the quality of the leads your marketing team is providing, you may want to consider bringing in an organization such as Sandler to asses real-time the quality of the marketing leads and the follow-up techniques your sales team follows. To assure success of such an engagement, make sure your CEO is committed.

Your thoughts???

In speaking with executives of SMB enterprise software companies (tech companies with less than $1b in annual revenues), one top of mind issue that prevails is how to improve messaging so that it better resonates with the audience. While some software companies have been successful staying with an extended horizontal play – one message for everyone – (Microsoft as an example), eventually even these organizations needed a segmentation approach.

Segmentation and targeting is not a cookie cutter approach. What works for one organization probably does not apply to another.

So here are some tips…

For most organizations, segmentation means “going vertical”. The reason is simple. If you are looking to refine messaging to identify business pain points, companies in the same segments have the same problems and pain. Other organizations tend to focus on what I call “cross-company segmentation” – focus on “like-kind” departments such as legal, marketing, finance, etc. regardless of the vertical.

So how does a small enterprise software company go vertical? The answer is…slowly and deliberately. The first step - get agreement across the organization what “going vertical” means because there are different approaches and or phases:

1. Segmented messaging: Collateral and online content are developed to address specific vertical market(s).
   
2. Segmented marketing: Uses segmented messaging to execute marketing communication and/or lead generation campaigns.
   
3. Segmented sales: Some or all of sales force and/or channels focus on specific verticals.
   
4. Any combination of the above
   

'Segmented messaging’ is typically a first “baby step” that many SMB software organizations choose when “going vertical”.

The challenge you face is: where do I get the content? The answers are:

1. Identify company personnel who have specific industry expertise and/or
   
2. Hire part time consultants who have the domain expertise you need as an interim step and/or
   
3. If you have already defined your longer term roll-out plan for verticalization and plan to move to “segmented marketing”, you may want to consider hiring marketing professionals with domain expertise.
   

‘Segmented marketing’ means that you plan to target your marketing messages directly to a given segment by developing an 'integrated marketing' model and I emphasize the word “integrated”. In the past, I have seen organizations move to segmented marketing but in a fragmented way, e.g., they run segmented lead generation campaigns but do not segment the message in media, public or analyst relations. I have never seen a fragmented marketing model work. In fact, every like-kind approach was an abysmal failure forcing the organization to revert back to the former “horizontal” model. (And typically try a vertical approach again a few years down the road).

Marketing messages need to be consistent. If your PR team is talking a different talk than your lead generation team, you will more than likely waste marketing dollars and never realize an acceptable ROI on segmentation.

‘Segmented sales’ occurs when the sales force is verticalized but this is not an all-or-nothing approach. In fact, in most cases, sales verticalization is localized. Metropolitan areas may realign sales over verticals where there are large concentrations of companies whereas rural geographies might identify multiple verticals or not verticalize at all. In some cases, both sales and pre-sales technical support may be verticalized or just sales. In other cases, (and this is prevalent in initial phases), sales will not be initially verticalized but sales “domain experts” - what we call “rain makers” - work with sales as an “overlay” function.

Unlike segmented marketing where only an integrated approach will work, there are many successful segmented sales models.

If you are a B2B marketer with a SMB technology company, please share your experiences as to how you perfected targeting and segmentation....