B2B Haiku Bots Mining Poetry Now!

Inspired by Haikuleaks, Jacob Harris, senior software architect of New York Times, rolled out an algorithm that captures fragments from stories published. Times Haiku, as Harris notes may be ‘a machine with no aesthetic sense’ but the ‘algorithm is its muse’. It basically is a script built to mine stories for ‘haiku-friendly’ words and then rearranges them to form poetry. While some haikus drudge along, the interesting ones are picked by the editors and published.

Automation is creeping in at a greater speed, much to the discomfort of marketers. If bots are used in a right way and sensitively, the outcome can be great. A Twitter bot that automates and schedules posts is beneficial only if the tweets are original, if the content is not relevant; it automatically is categorized as spam. 

While it is inevitable to automate, marketers today cannot escape the magic of personalization. With customers becoming more conscious, demanding, vocal and powerful, keeping it real may seem the only way out in the future.

Whatever said and done, the Times Haiku is an interesting initiative. We couldn’t resist trying it out. Here’s our streak of Zen on data mining: 

Data mining hurricanes

soothing seas of the P2P touch

gold and dollars rain.

While content marketing is going bots, we also need to keep it real, keep it simple and keep it relevant to our target audience. ‘The Big Marketing Activity Coloring Book’, is an interesting example of unadulterated marketing, where having fun is serious business.

P.S. - Fingers crossed that bots don’t become the only ones writing, as our essence is hard to replace!

Have 'Big Data' Sand Boxes Become Sand Traps?

Virginia Rometty, CEO of IBM aptly stated that “data is the new natural resource.”

With 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data we create every day, has Big Data become a become mess? Have sand boxes turned into sand traps?

Big Data is still a vague concept for businesses, a concept they sort of understand. Most companies have either no idea or a partial understanding of what big data is and what it does, let alone managing and capitalizing on it.

Many organizations have initiated pilot projects to manage and utilize Big Data. However, in almost all cases, it hasn’t gone any further. While they begin with great energy, procure tools and create sand boxes to learn and understand how to make the most of unstructured data, they eventually lose their way, diminishing the value of the project. What’s missing is end-to-end data management to protect assets and enable compliance. Many companies fail to use the right processes and tools to manage huge volumes of data collected from various sources.

The solution as per the experts is to manage the beast of Big Data by harnessing its power, with a shift in culture, attitude and discipline. What is required is a combination of traditional and new and advanced data management capabilities.

While Big Data is a big market,

Let it not become a Big Mess,

Manage it before it manages your business!

Get to know how to integrate Big Data with your business goals

Why Big Data is the Big Boss from InfoCheckPoint

Tracking Your Customers’ ‘Digital Body Language’?

Do you drive your lead generation program to create demand?

Or

Do you drive demand generation to create interested leads in your product?

You cannot combine demand generation and lead generation; you can however enable the two systems to work simultaneously. Demand generation is:

• The alignment of marketing and sales teams around customers with focus on building an integrated lead management system.   
• About identifying sales-ready leads, lead nurturing, marketing automation and content marketing.

Demand generation is quite literally about generating demand! Aren't customers the source of demand? How much do you really know your customers and their personas? Understand your customers’ interests, buying behavior and process in order to materialize marketing efforts effectively.  First things first:

• Know your customers’ story, 
• Track their ‘digital body language’ 
• Identify their stage in the buying cycle. 

You will then be ready to launch a customized program specific to your customers’ persona, interests and stage in the sales cycle. One way to know the success of your efforts is through measurement. Evaluate performance of your Demand Generation campaigns through the Demand Generation - ‘4V’ Approach:

• Volume - Number of clicks, impressions, registrations, deals, SQLs, MQLs
• Velocity - Rate of conversion of each unit to the next level
• Value - Value of revenue and pipeline 
• Viscosity - Measurement of obstacles that prevent lead conversion from one stage to another

Generate sales-ready leads.

Let sales teams focus on closing deals.

Drive demand through conversations not campaigns.

Boost your demand generation programs with segmented databases

Don’t report spam when you can unsubscribe!

Consider this scenario,

You open your Inbox

In the hundred thousand mails you receive, you find some which you’re not interested in receiving.

What do you do?

Check them and ‘Report Spam’?

Or open the mail and “Unsubscribe”? 

For those who unsubscribe, you have all the right to do so. If the unsubscribe link is inactive or doesn't work, you then have all the right to report spam. However, if you can unsubscribe to a mail you do not wish to receive, why would you report spam?

Through our nurturing programs we’ve made an observation. A few people who receive our mails choose not to be included in our list. We respect their choice, and provide them with an ‘unsubscribe’ link. We ensure this link is carefully placed in every mail we send out. We wonder, why then should they report spam, when the choice is theirs.

It surely is an honest mistake by many of us, but it will be in best interest of all, if we distinguish the ‘spamsters’ from those who take time to create and share beneficial information.

We value your time and put in much effort to develop engaging, interesting and relevant content. It is a great feeling that we still have your attention, and if that is not achieved, we always give you a choice to unsubscribe.

Organized Your Marketing Team into TOFU, BOFU and MOFU Yet?

No, this is not a post on a tofu recipe. It is although a post on how you could categorize your marketing team (as formulated by Mike Volpe, CMO of Hubspot).

• TOFU (Top of Funnel) - This team will focus on strategies to attract prospects. Strategies ranging from blogging, search marketing, using social media channels to paid ad campaigns. This team’s goal  is to find new contacts or leads and build a marketing database.
• MOFU (Middle of Funnel) - This team will focus on strategies to build trust. They will initiate nurturing programs to build a relationship with leads and also be involved in scoring to qualify them for the sales team. This team’s goal is to classify leads generated by the Tofu team, to score them and forward qualified prospects to the sales team.
• BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) - This team will focus on strategies to create a bridge with the sales team to increase conversions. They will create content that will help sales teams close deals. This team’s goal is to generate the maximum of leads that convert by working closely with sales teams.

We plan on implementing this is great yet simple approach to optimizing our marketing team efforts. What about you? Are you ready to organize your marketing team into Tofu, Mofu and Bofu? We are keen to hear how it goes.

Kick-start your process. Begin with finding new leads. Ask us how

From Contacts 

Through Content 

To Conversion

Is “Buyer Persona Backlash” Retarding Your ABM?

Based on a B2B marketing survey, only 50% of marketers possess an understanding of their target market and only 36% actually keep buyer personas in mind while creating content.

And then they wonder why they are constantly challenged with the “right person, wrong company” situation. What marketers need to do is to get their context in perspective. For instance, consider a marketer identifies the target market as enterprises. However, there is a high level of response, interest and engagement from SMBs. The context of the content here (created for enterprise customers) would be totally off. How SMBs address business issues and situations is quite different from enterprise customers. 

It takes a second to do basic research on people and companies online. Why then would marketers and sales people think they can just pick a phone or personalize content without understanding the context the persona will resonate to? This counterproductive approach is not only a waste of time it’s not going to win anyone any customers!

Here’s where Account Based Marketing (ABM) comes in. 

Jason Stewart of Demandbase interestingly spoke of creating an ‘Account Persona’. He said, “The point I was making about the efficacy of buyer personas was not that they were ineffective, simply that there needs to be an account-based component to the evaluation of our prospects that relying on buyer personas (or buyer role demographics like title/department) alone as a targeting mechanism could lead to trouble.”

Account based marketing is a business marketing approach that includes communication with individual customer accounts or prospects within the context of the market or industry they operate in. For budget challenged marketers to get ROI on their efforts through ABM:

• they need to understand strategic priorities of their target market, 
• they need to identify the role of individual influencers and decision makers within the company and industry, 
• they need to map their services to the needs of their audience and 
• then they need to customize their marketing plan around their target market.

As marketing functions rapidly evolve, it will pay to pay attention to the latest B2B marketing practices. And while marketing approaches may change,

Your prospects and customers are still people.

Know them,

Relate to them,

Converse with them,

Engage them

And then think about converting them to customers!

Want to connect with your target market?

Get To Know How

You got 60 seconds before people close your video!

Imagine this…

• Every month, more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube 
• Every month, over 4 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube
• Every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube 
• 70% of YouTube traffic originates from outside the US
• YouTube is localized across 53 countries and in 61 languages

Source: - YouTube Statistics 

So how do you get people to view your brand above the noise, connect and resonate with it through your videos? With ‘YouTube marketing’….

• You don’t have to be viral, tell a story – While viral videos do generate millions of visitors to your video, they may not necessarily visit your website. Instead everybody loves a good story. Telling your story, about the passion of your business, about the history of your brand, will create a better brand connect than unrelated videos of dancing monkeys.
• You got to keep it short - Attention spans of your audience are down to a few seconds. While the receptiveness of people has shifted from words to visual content, even videos nowadays fail to capture their short-wired attention span. Maybe the number of devices a person owns and uses, at a single point of time has something to do with this distracted interaction. A 30 second video is definitely more preferred than a 20 minute one.
• You Have to Personalize and Customize - YouTube is localized across 53 countries and in 61 languages and 70% of the traffic originates from outside the U.S. If you are not customizing, personalizing and localizing your brand message, it may not resonate with the global audience. 
• Get Real, Use Live Streaming – It is always exciting to watch something that’s happening miles away in real-time. Live streaming, used by big brands such as Coke and Intel, has brought the brand experience to millions, transcending geographical boundaries. Get real and share your brand experience with your audience. This definitely makes your brand personal and helps in building trust.
• Analyze and Get Insights, Don’t Speculate – With YouTube marketing it’s not about the number of visitors, it is about who are the visitors. Similar to any lead generation effort, it’s not about the number of people who visited your page or liked your video, it is about how many of them are interested in your business, how many of them can buy and how of them are willing to become customers. 

With video marketing and YouTube marketing, it is important to know the objective and goal of your video first before creating it. It should be aligned with your overall social media strategy, so that all channels are effectively utilized and your audience gains an overall brand experience through various touch points.

Here’s an interesting article we came across on, "How YouTube can be a Marketing Tool for Small Business” 

What you think of our video? Did you close it in 6 seconds?

There Ain’t No Crowd in Crowdsourcing Without Curation!

Crowdsourcing is a business model that aims to leverage the power of many. It involves ‘outsourcing’ tasks or problems to a group of people to gain answers or solutions. In terms of B2B marketing, it involves a group of people who are motivated enough to contribute relevant business data meaningful in developing extensive databases.

How Does Crowdsourcing Help?

• Crowdsourcing is a cost-effective solution to completing defined tasks rather than employing a dedicated professional for the same.
• It provides a better platform to gain access to a wide range of expertise and contribution easily.
• It serves as an extension of an earlier model of decentralized or global workforce.
• For tasks that are simple and require minimal management, crowdsourcing is a great source of data.

Crowdsourcing is not an industry – it is a management process that augments current processes. A popular saying is that, “there is no crowd in crowdsourcing only virtuosos or highly talented people.”

Here’s How You Can Get It Right

• 
  
• Set clear expectations – You have to be open to incorporating ideas from ‘crowd’ or co-developing one with them. Discounting or limiting their contribution at later stages is only diminishes the essence of crowdsourcing.
• Define roles of participants – You need to be specific about what role participants should play. Whether it is contributing data, updating information, developing new marketing ideas or creating ad campaigns.
• Take a risk – You can use crowdsourcing in unique ways beyond asking the crowd to vote or submit videos. As an important touch point, information from the crowd can be creatively utilized in marketing campaigns, product and service features and branding.
• Involve employees - This is important as employees will be able to guide the process, will be able to accept feedback through collaboration and will provide participants a real face and voice of the company they are contributing to.
• Recognize if not monetize – Crowd-sourced information is contributed by individual motivation. To continue with the trend, appreciation is important. Accolades, social mentions or badges are good ways of showing your gratitude.

Crowd Curation

The ‘curated crowd’ approach is the moderation of crowds to identify people who will be able to provide relevant information. Curation is usually conducted by introducing a survey for users to participate in to understand if their profiles fit and meet the criterion of database requirements. 

• It does not imply authoritative selection. It is individual choice of singular items. 
• It is not about creating bigger crowds. The information your contributing users provide need to translate to better results. 
• It is not about dictating, it is about moderation.

Anyone can be on the crowd, from a monkey with a crayon to a child with a lot of time on hand. The best way to filter everyone who wishes to join your crowd; is a quick survey or questions that can establish their credibility, authority and relevancy to the project.

While you may provide specific instructions for contributions, do not expect people to obey them.  Always verify data before integrating with house lists. Marketers need to realize that they need to listen more. Crowd curation provides a platform for the audience to engage and ‘do the talking’. 

Take Crowdsourcing to the next level. Curate Crowds on the Cloud!

Gain instant access to high value leads with Info CheckPoint on Salesforce

Personalize with Personality, Make Emails Click Worthy!

59% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel in generating revenue, according to BtoB Magazine. Why is email marketing, still a preferred digital marketing tactic by marketers worldwide?

• Because it will be profitable - For every $ spent, email will bring $35.2 and revenues worth $2.5 billion by 2016 - Direct Marketing Association (DMA)
• Because emails are accessed more now through various devices - 98% of adults online use email, 96% of the US market are on mobile phones, 64% send or receive SMS messages, 44% of the US market are now on smart phones, 29% of the US market own a tablet or use an eReader - Forrester Research, The New Email Messaging Mandate, eMarketer, US Digital Media Usage Report, & Pew Internet Report
• Because mobile optimization is the order of the day - 85% of U.S. adults own a mobile phone, 56% of U.S. mobile phone owners access the Internet, more than 50% of them access emails on their phones, 88% of them check emails on their phones daily - The Pew Internet and American Life Project, Knotice

29% of consumer inboxes comprise of e-newsletters and 60% of spam trap hits comprise of marketers - Return Path, EmailIntelligence Report. “Over half of all emails are deleted within 2 seconds without ever being opened” - A USA survey

How do you plan to "Stay Connected, Above All the Noise"?

Personalize with Personality 

Send Emails to Readers than Inboxes 

Remember the R Word - Relevancy

Earn Email Campaign ROI! 

Why EMAIL MARKETING is STILL the Preferred Digital Marketing Tactic from InfoCheckPoint

Don't Hear It From Us, Listen To What Our Customers Say!

Thank You Jake Haws for this!