OMNI-CHANNEL

MARKETING Getting started on the road to

Always-On Demand Generation

ABSTRACT Omni-Channel marketing can generate a steady stream of prospects to your sales teams; why then are 97% of SMB’s still yet to embrace this approach?

Helen Rutherford Lead a Market

OMNI-CHANNEL – YOUR ROUTE TO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE Omni-channel, always-on marketing campaigns combine digital, social, tele and DM channels, underpinned by a single view of the customer. As 74% of decision makers undertake more than half of their pre-purchase research online (Forrester, 2015), why are only 97% of SMBs, according to AdAge (2015) embracing the benefits of this approach?

NOT QUITE OUT WITH THE OLD AND NOT QUITE IN WITH THE NEW

In the last few years, it has been clear that the traditional ways of delivering B2B marketing leads have become less effective. Once, we could expect 2 leads a day from telemarketing, nowadays it’s half a lead. So, when tele marketing days cost upward of £300 a day or £600 a lead – that’s a fourfold increase in cost. Why is this happening?

Buyers of technology aren’t tied to the desk like they once were. They may be working at home, using Skype or using their mobile where they can screen calls. They are also far more likely to research their needs online, bypassing the need for introductory meetings with a sales person – in fact Forrester (2015) found that 74% of B2B buyers do more than half of their research online.

As a proposed remedy to this, there is no shortage of people banging the social media drum, heralding the end of telemarketing and even email. However, return on social media investment remains notoriously difficult to measure and with the number of channels available, it still feels like navigating a minefield to many.

This leaves SMBs and many of the technology manufacturers who invest in their marketing campaigns, with a problem. Neither the new way or the old way is working; however, leads need to be generated for new business sales teams who, in an ever more competitive market, find it increasingly difficult to reach prospects by phone.

RE-FRAMING THE SITUATION As we’ve come from an era of single tactic marketing – we might employ 20 days of telemarketing or run a pay per click activity or place an advertisement – its hard to move away from this notion.

However, rather than tele being wrong, or email being old hat and social being the holy grail, it is in fact how these tactics are used together; integrated to achieve business goals. What we call omni-channel marketing.

The challenge however is that the heritage of many marketing suppliers and agencies is as a single service provider – they may have an amazing print capability, or an award winning design studio, or a loyal and experienced team of telemarketers. Rarely, however, do all of these functions exist in one place and more importantly, few people will design a campaign that integrates all of these tactics to be used in the right way at the right time. That means it falls to the buyer of marketing services to design an omni-channel campaign and then select several suppliers, schedule them into a comms plan and then stay on top of the co-ordination of them all with frequent communications. This is not to mention the level of internal stakeholder management they have to deal with.

This isn’t just a case of of bandwidth. Few marketers have been encouraged or supported to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to orchestrate and run omni-channel campaigns. As with the introduction of any new capability, it takes time to see results and business stakeholders often get impatient waiting for the leads to flow through. So with knee jerk reaction, we see businesses revert to mass untargeted marketing using traditional tactics. How do we break the cycle?

If you are looking to achieve competitive advantage, now is the time to embrace it. Over the coming weeks I will be sharing my experiences on implementing omn-channel campaigns that deliver results. In this article I will focus on the first issue: Getting Started.

GETTING STARTED: OMNI-CHANNEL CAMPAIGN SET UP Until now, a campaign that consists of telemarketing involves the marketing team giving a briefing to an existing agency who is already familiar with their product or service.

A campaign brief and call guide can be adapted and off we go. Of course the approach in itself might be why telemarketing has been less successful in recent years, the subject of a future article.

Omni-Channel success requires pulling together key inputs of data, content, messaging and suppliers and creating a integrated marketing communications plan that delivers the right tactic at the right time.

Where’s my stuff?

Frequently, at set up, these inputs are missing or inadequate. Marketers will buy or build data, search for suitable vendor content or create it by interviewing in-house experts. Then they need to get microsites designed and built, emails written, and tele follow up scheduled. Yes! Tele has a firm place in omni-channel campaigns, to convert interested prospects that have been nurtured online, rather than cold calling over-canvassed 3rd party lists.

All of this work takes time and marketers face the constraints of sales teams chasing for leads and rules around the timely spending of budgets. So marketers have to factor in stakeholder management to their list of omni-channel tasks.

Of course, this pain is associated with the set up of anything new. My first complex omni-channel campaign involved a nightmare first quarter of weekly reporting to stakeholders to tell them that a few more people had visited the site. However, a year in, they were generating more than 600 marketing ready leads per quarter.

SO HOW DO WE GET THROUGH THE SET UP STAGE? 1. Get your facts together

Back in 2010, after I had just joined a large UK IT services company to run marketing, we introduced marketing automation and the omni-channel approach. Up until that point, demand generation had taken place in siloed business units with no central view of spend or results. So we went about collecting some data which included the total spend on marketing services the previous year and the number of un-progressed leads in the CRM system (s).

We found that in the previous year, £240,000 had been spent on standalone telemarketing and there was, to date, 9000 “leads” in the CRM system which I don’t think had been progressed or cleaned since the dawn of time!

What is crazy of course, is that this is nearly one lead for every UK company above 250 employees in the UK (The ONS reports there are 11,000). We actually had all the leads we ever needed, but we were allowing them to wither on the vine, whilst spending more money on generating new leads to add to the pile.

It was these two data points – the atrophied leads and the amounts going into demand generation- that allowed me to build the business case for change.

2. Recruit your supporters

With my ducks in a row, I was able to get a serious hearing from the CEO and MD and persuade them, using hard data, hat the old model wasn’t working. Once I gained acceptance of that, they were receptive to ideas about what might work and so I asked them to consider investing in a centralised always-on marketing programme. I needed them to agree to help me navigate functional siloes. I was heavily dependent on IT who would need to customise CRM and integrate it with our new marketing automation tools. I also needed executive air cover to broker an agreement with the sales directors that we needed to move to this model.

I handled this by investing in relationships with the IT Director and Sales Director, ensuring they were bought into the change.

3. Signpost the destination

With executive backing and the right stakeholders on board, we needed to communicate a vision to the sales teams about how lead generation would work. We recognised quickly that if sales were not bought in, we would be on the receiving end of marketing campaign requests from more than 100 individuals.

So we created an E-Learning module, “Marketing at your Service” and with the MD behind this, we used his weekly all hands email to launch the new concept and invited sales to watch it. We also presented at sales team meetings, sharing the fact we had buy in at board level, and educated them on the future of marketing as omni-channel.

Cross-FunctionalAlignmentSalesandMarketingalignmentMarketing ran workshops with sales in order to introduce the concept of the buyer journey and how marketing would look to target prospects at each stage. To help set the agenda for the workshops, a survey was undertaken in advance so that the sessions could directly address any misconceptions, concerns or worries that the sales function had about always-on omni-channel campaigns.

Through a workshop process, it became clear that sales and marketing teams had very different definitions of how a lead should and could be defined. Sales wanted demand to be generated but they needed sales ready opportunities. Those that needed nurturing for a time weren’t viable, as the team simply didn’t have the resource to dedicate to this activity.

Yet these leads were the ones that offered the business the most commercial value, getting into the customer decision making process earlier with the chance to influence and shape requirements. With this in mind, we agreed to become smarter about how leads were generated and nurtured before they were handed over to sales.

ITandMarketingalignmentBy getting IT engaged right from the off and being clear about what the lead generation outcomes were, they understood that the changes we were requesting were central to business success. For us IT wasn’t simply a provider of tech, but a critical enabler to a business objective.

IT needed to have a very clear brief for what marketing wanted to achieve from lead nurturing so that they knew about the tools that were being selected and why, together with the resources that would be needed to support them. For example, in order to better target customers and prospects, marketing needed IT to implement some changes to the way that data was segmented within the CRM system. A connection to marketing automation tools had to be built so that the two applications could share information, rather than replicate it which would allow for better customer insight.

4. Tell them a thousand times…

Of course, the launch out of the way, we couldn’t stop there. Rather, we ran an ongoing internal communications programme to visually remind people of the change.

Reinforcement of change is critical due to a phenomenon known as effective frequency which advertisers understand very well. The grandfather of advertising psychology, Thomas Smith, wrote in his 1885 book “Successful Advertising” that people do not even read an ad until the 5th time they see it and it isn’t until the 20th time they see an advertisement they buy (or in this case buy into) what it’s offering.

Using posters, roller banners and weekly emails on project progress, we continued communication of our new way of working to everyone in the company.

5. It’s a team effort

Omni-Channel marketing is dependent on two critical inputs: accurate contact data that includes relevant decision makers and helpful content to stimulate interest from prospects.

Marketing need good inputs if they’ve a chance of producing decent outputs

However, these inputs are often like hen’s teeth. Sales people know the exact profile of who they want to target, but it isn’t written down. Similarly, pre-sales and delivery teams know exactly what differentiates you and makes you stand out from the crowd in the customers’ eyes, but that is rarely documented either.

Simply asking sales to send their spreadsheet of contacts, or asking delivery teams to articulate the benefits of your service offering, will not yield results. The barriers to contributing need to be lowered and people need to be enabled to provide help.

The process of getting sales, pre-sales and delivery teams involved has always resulted in more buy in and commitment. They become excited about the campaign going live and seeing the results of their input.

6. Find quick wins and celebrate them

Initiating any new system can feel like a slow process, so its really important to identify even the smallest achievements and shout them from the rooftops. You’ve got the database to 500 contacts from zero – WHOOP! That’s 500 more people that can hear your great message. You’ve written an opinion piece and blog based on a great customer story told to you by the delivery team- YAY, that story is unique to your organisation and adds real value to marketing and sales efforts as well as brand equity.

Be sure that you have the right channels in place to share this; if not create them. Writing a weekly email for the MD or CEO to send to everyone that recognises a key contributor is quick to do, will keep momentum and will delight your contributors. Win! Win! Win!

Building Inputs with Commitment DatabaseBuildingAfter years of buying 3rd party data and cajoling sales people to share their little black books, I developed a different approach; database building.

Purchased databases are a great starting point, but are often fraught with two problems. First is the level of job role classification, which often reads, in our sector, as IT Manager. If we are targeting SMBs with managed services, then it’s unlikely there will be an IT Manager at all; it’s probably the business owner. Again, if we are targeted the enterprise, then we need a much more detailed level of classification – infrastructure manager, network manager and so on. The power of the internet now allows us to research our buyers much more carefully and, believe me, you are much better to target a list of 500 relevant contacts than 20,000 names, if only to keep your unsubscribe rate down!

The next issue is that the people on purchased lists are over-canvassed. There are more than 5,500 IT services companies in the UK with more than £2M turnover (ONS, 2015). How many times do prospects want to read emails from them about infrastructure if each message has nothing new to say?

So, ask your sales teams who they are really targeting and, if it helps, get them to tell you a story about a win and the decision makers that were involved. This will guide you towards building your own database of relevant prospects.

CapturingContentHere, I have also used a capability capture approach, a semi structured interview that takes about one hour. I use this with pre-sales and delivery teams and this established methodology guides the interviewee in such a way to tell the benefits of your offering through personal parables. This information is gold-dust – it’s your know-how, the intangible assets that differentiate you from your competitors. The results of these interviews usually provide you with enough material to create a series of assets from opinion pieces and blogs to product descriptions and sales guides.

7. Don’t stop moving

Now everyone is on side - you’re getting a database and content together - then knock down the next challenge. Frequently, though not exclusively, I find that a lack of strong call to actions that get prospects into a buying cycle prevent marketing leads getting progressed by sales.

So, now you’ve made best friends with your pre-sales and delivery teams by a) taking an interest in them and b) getting their contribution recognised, it’s easier to go back to them and ask them to work with you to design a call to action.

The great news is that your capability capture document, will form the basis of a webinar that you create once and prospects can consume on demand – the asset that keeps giving.

Perhaps you want to offer a half day or one-day readiness workshop? Well, no doubt your pre-sales teams are repeatedly delivering the same kinds of engagements that can be productised, promoted and turned into a chargeable revenue stream.

Maybe you have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to CTAs. Well, in this case, create more content for the website and step up the drive to. Reporting increases in web visits is a great way to show progress along the journey to generating more leads.

8. Make the new habit easy

Old habits die hard, and for changes to really stick people have to practice new behaviours until they become the new normal.

One way I have achieved this is to introduce a simple way for sales to engage with the marketing team when requesting campaign support. If this process isn’t clear, it will feel as if sales teams approach marketing ad hoc with requests for activities.

So, make it easy. Create a marketing email address with an SLA to respond to requests. Design a campaign form template, that takes a requestor through the necessary inputs - where will the data come from, where will the content come from and so on.

DOES THIS REALLY WORK IN PRACTICE? – CASE STUDY Is all of this worth it? I ran one omni-channel project last year that resulted in generating more than 600 marketing ready leads during its 4th quarter, which converted to 75 sales ready leads. Assuming that 1 in 3 sales accepted leads will close, at an average of £100,000 per deal, that’s £2,500,000 of revenue.

What was most interesting about the levels of engagement were those engaging with the content on the campaign website. Many financial services companies are opted out of receiving telemarketing calls as they subscribe to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). However, they became the most engaged sector online. It was also interesting to see what types of content they engaged with – thought leadership and case studies.

This allowed us to become more targeted when reaching these decision makers that could not be contacted by telephone. We analysed the data and found that a high percentage were within a 5 mile radius of Liverpool Street. So we created a targeted event in that area, producing a high quality direct mail invitation as part of the drive to efforts. The event theme was taken from the content that had proven to be most popular on the website.

This resulted in an over-subscribed attendee list, and we ended up running two events, with more than 30 decision maker attendees who could never have been reached by phone.

WANT TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ADOPTING OMNI-CHANNEL MARKETING?

Contact helen.rutherford@leadamarket.com