If we’re lucky, someone finds the bottle, reads and is excited by the note and writes us a letter (email) in response.

More often, not.

If not, it could be the content but more likely it’s the vehicle. A content strategy addresses both. Most importantly it establishes guidelines that  will not only ensure your content will be delivered to its audience in a boat rather than a bottle but also increase the chances that they will read and indeed write you back.

Most of my posts come from information gleaned from interviews of other experts. This does two things: allows me to learn something new while also giving me something new to pass onto the Marketingprofs.com audience. Twofer!

Interviewing, however, is just one way of generating ideas for content. Check out “100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration” – http://bit.ly/drOUeD This resource came my way via Twitter and content marketer @michelelinn, whom I met at a breakfast roundtable at the Marketingprofs B2B Forum this past May.

The other resource I wanted to make available again, less transiently, is this blog post by @therisetothetop “5 Predictions On The Future Of Marketing, PR and Advertising Agencies.“  http://bit.ly/bGma2T

Also check out my new coaching program: Unique Great and Visible: Coaching for Marketing and Technology Thought Leaders. It’s a super cost effective solution for individual consultants and very small businesses. Longer white paper  here.

[Image from io9.com in promotion of "Welcome to Monster Isle," a cool kid's book.]

I have a press release to write, two to post on pitchengine.com; another content strategy document to draft; numerous pitches to get out, another Marketingprofs Daily Fix blog post to create based on notes from an interview I did with someone three weeks ago. 

Add to that, I have added expertisePR coaching to the services I provide, and need to communicate that to my network, as well update this website to explain what it entails.

So, as you can see, I have no time. Except, what’s this? A blog post. Oh.

This realization, courtesy of the first 48 pages of Clay Shirky’s new book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.” The Penguin Press: 256pp., $25.95. 

Read it.

(Image by Robbert van der Steeg  www.rvandersteeg.nl )

The best place to learn how to do this, bar none, is Third Tribe. Third Tribe was founded by Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Darren Rowse of Problogger, Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communications, and Chris Brogan of New Marketing Labs.

It is THE place to get information about truly effective Internet marketing techniques, information that comes not only from the Clark-Rowse-Simone-Brogan quartet, but also from others they think exemplify the Third Tribe mindset (not too spammy, not too soft). Read more about the Third Tribe mindset. (Note: It’s an affiliate link, so if you join I get credit. Yay!)

How do I know Third Tribe is the real deal? Because about five years ago, I flew round trip from Chicago to L.A. in one day to take a class with one of the best known names in “First Tribe” Internet marketing.  I also spent hundreds of dollars on the “supporting” materials, which he had available “in limited quantities” at the event. But once I got everything home, I found I wasn’t able to do a thing with it because (besides not being comfortable with the communications approach, which is based on manipulation and fear rather than service) there was no support. No one to explain the steps. Just me, cognitive dissonance and 37 CDs. Fail.

What you will find at Third Tribe is information. Tons. You can take the info and run (go it alone) or if you want some hand holding (that would be me) there is a robust community that you can tap into.

How much? $47 a month. A steal, considering the resources. That’s why it’s going up to $97 a month on June 1. Still a steal, by the way. Anyway, check it out. Those of you who know me know I give endorsements very sparingly.  If you want to build a successful Internet business, Third Tribe Marketing will help you. Here’s the link again: Third Tribe Marketing. Let me know what you think in the comments.

I’m currently obsessed with lead generation and nurturing as most of my clients are marketers, and so are, in general, not as attuned to the sales process as they (admittedly) probably should be. Since the whole purpose of undertaking an expertise PR program is to make getting the door opened easier, I’m naturally concerned that they know how to do that. And so, I am here, at “Lead Planning & Nurturing that Converts More Customers.”

Our speaker:  Carlos Hidalgo, President, The Annuitas Group. Annuitas is a process consulting and technology (marketing and sales automation) company whose mission is to help clients get measurable return on their sales and marketing practices.

The changing B2B Buyer

Buyers are much, much more educated now and usually won’t talk to sales person until develop a short list based on Internet-based research. There is also more than one buyer, now are dealing with “buying units.” (Like a committee. Each person looks at project differently) We’re all turning to each other to share information. New dynamic is that the buyer is now driving the process. Buyers are more informed and seek information independent of sales.

Today’s B2B Marketer

There are issues with measurement and acquisition. 70-80% of leads never get followed up. (Not surprising – .Ed) 52% of marketers say lead gen is their biggest challenge. More than half can’t track ROI on program spend. Shrinking budgets, pressure to justify spend, shifts from traditional to new tactics, increased use of technology. And…marketing is being asked to assist in pipeline acceleration and sales enablement. Sales is asking for this, and it’s good for marketing. So, we need to adapt.

Think lead management not lead generation. Managing a one-to-one relationship. Remember you are marketing to people, and they want the individual relationship. Technology is increasingly enabling this. Will dramatically change our roles, bringing sales and marketing closer together, particularly in buyer interaction and communication. It also will change the way we think.

Lead Management, defined
What it’s not: just scoring. It’s a process, supported by technology that allows you to respond to the buyer’s power. Includes: data; lead planning, qualification, nurturing, routing and metrics. Be careful about buying a system, because it’s really easy to “automate chaos.”

Lead generation is different than lead management. Visual: sales funnel  The problem is that most leads (read money) start to leak out of funnel somewhere between the marketing and sales focus. Process based lead management approach (lead nurturing) “plugs” the leak.

Nurturing and Planning

Why nurture? Eliminates “one-off” exercises. Functions based on integrated, best practice approach. Keeps you from putting all eggs in one basket. It also allows you to target a specific audience and build a continual stream of qualified, interested contacts. Marketing must have quotas and pipelines. Must show sales (their customer) that we’re feeding them a stream of qualified leads. This will drive higher conversion rates, etc.

According to MarketingSherpa statistics, 70% of initial leads are not ready to buy. (Tons of people using the dating scenario regarding relationship building. -.Ed) 17.50% not qualified; 12.5% sales ready now. Buyers will let you know – do not miss that signal. Rank signals, ex. prospect that downloads whitepaper less ready than executive attending breakfast. Develop and be guided by ideal customer profiles.

Aberdeen study: Leads that were nurtured recorded 47% higher order value over those leads that were not nurtured. Achieving that number is a matter of marketing sophistication, needs to be worked at, but is possible.

How to Plan and Nurture

Start with revenue number (looking at the “waterfall”) can have several iterations based on biz unit, etc.  Back that into number of deals that need to be closed to achieve that and continue to work backwards. In one example, marketer had signed up for $2.M in revenue/month. When the number was backed into, turned out need 3,000 responses to achieve that. Caveat: You cannot do this without sales buying in.

Waterfall should be checked frequently. This will allow you to pinpoint problem areas, or the weak links in the chain. Process takes time, and spending some time with sales to define the different steps.

Once planning is done, you can start running nurture campaigns to start to qualify leads. Nurture campaigns can address the delta between valid responses and marketing qualified leads. Nurture campaigns not just for marketers. Once leads are handed off to sales, we need to help them accelerate the deal by developing ways to help them communicate with buyers (with their buy-in). With new tools, can be personalized and automated. It doesn’t end with the sale, however, to help them navigate the inevitable “buyer’s remorse” phase.

Whoa, huge, detailed (but pretty) process flow chart “Prospect Nurture Plan.” Leaves nothing to the imagination. Helps keep sales from beating you up as the leads ebb and flow. Next, another, equally colorful, Post-Sales Nurture Plan.  Process is vital, though. It’s what allows you to maximize profitability (at every level) and create efficiencies. You need to block out the process, don’t build it on the fly. If you have it blocked, you can sit down with sales and walk through it. Marketing should go on sales calls and ask them what’s important to them.

Prospect Lead Nurturing Strategy

Know the intended purpose. Where is the prospect in the flow? Who are they, what role? (This will impact how you talk to them.)

Understand the dependencies. What is your available content. Repurpose your content (Repurposing is another mantra at this forum -.Ed) Create an offer map that denotes call to action that is tailored to where they are in (what stage) the buying cycle. Content is key. Work together with sales to determine the right approach.

Finally, automate the process. (This is targeted to a big company, obviously.) Still, especially now, having a sales process in place is absolutely essential, no matter what size the company is. And even the smallest company should have some type of contact management application so that everyone gets the attention they need.

And next, the wrap up. And then dinner at The No Name Restaurant, a Boston institution!

Kicking things off: Stephanie Tilton, Content Marketing Consultant, Ten Ton Marketing

Buying cycles are long and getting longer and there are a lot more people involved in the decision making process. Prospects are bypassing sales until very late in the cycle. The irony is that a lot of time prospects are not finding information they want. Companies who are delivering that content are winning — bigtime.

This puts even more pressure on marketers, as prospects are not engaged with sales reps like they were before. Need to develop content that engages until they’re ready to engage with sales.  David Meerman Scott “Create the kind of online content that your buyers naturally gravitate to.”

How to do this? It’s called Content Marketing.

Book recommendation: “Get Content, Get Customers,” by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett

On developing a strong content strategy:

You need first to know what your customer’s concerns are. Monitor Twitter, Google Alerts, Google blog search, LinkedIn Groups, etc. for intel. Spend time where they are so you can understand what are their concerns. Then take that information and develop “buyer persona.” That’s an archetype of ideal customer. Talk to anyone who has contact with who you think that person is. Find out as much as you can; what keeps them up at time, what is their role, involvement in buying decision, who do they turn to for advice. What phrases do they search on to find what they are looking for? This information can affect everything, including what the title of your white paper should be. BPs help you keep in mind what ideal customer wants to hear about.

Map the buying process, and understand their content preferences. Do they prefer to receive information via papers (PDF) or video, etc.? Check out the industry research. Then pull it all together in a matrix to identify the buying process. Also make sure you understand current customer’s content needs and address them, as well.

Once this is done you can start to map content, in other wise determine the format, length, theme and buying stage.

Now for: Michele Linn, B2B Content Strategist for Linn Communications.

On getting organized:

Think like a publisher. Set up an editorial calendar. Make sure the ed cal is as long as your customer’s buying process is. Be consistent, commit to your content and map it out (move people through buying cycle, don’t string random pieces of content together).

Create content that is relevant — and valuable. Make sure that each piece has a call to action. Informal audit of white papers found only 12 of 40 reviewed contained call to action. This is your opportunity to move prospect to next stage.

What to create? Competitive comparisons; case studies (shake it up by including implementation best practices). Then repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. A white paper can become a blog post can become a series of Tweets or inspiration for a video. Don’t just publish the same content in different channels. (I call this making brownies from cake ingredients. -.Ed)

Now that you have content, make it easy to find, access and share. Think about the different platforms your audience is using and make sure content is available there. View: CMO Guide to Social Landscape.

About registration pages: If you’re early in the buying process, you want the information to be totally ungated. Later in the buying process, you can begin to ask for information, A-B test pages to see how much information your prospects are willing to give up.

Finally, make sure you can measure the impact of your content. Test it constantly. Change it frequently.

Next up: a case study by Pam O’Neal, VP Marketing at BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. BreakingPoint is a cyber security company, whose customers are cranky IT engineers who don’t trust marketing. To connect, they embraced the cynicism and developed content designed first to align, then to earn the trust of prospects by generating communications that were frank and even self effacing.

Followed by Amy Black, Sr. Marketing Communications Manager, Kadient, Inc.

For sales audience, avoids calling things “White Paper,” which sales finds boring. Calls paper “guide” instead. “New Rules of Sales Enablement,” most downloaded on site. Works to uncover provocative, unique thinking in company. Has moved over to e-book format (still do white papers). Video also has been great for them; they focus on creating attention-grabbing humor: “Confession of a Sales VP,” as well as a series of “Playbooks.”  Kadient also uses a FlipCam at shows; feels more natural, customer talking to peers about how they use “Playbooks.”

Whew!

Q&A (select)

Audience: How do you develop buyer personas? O’Neal: It’s about building relationships first, and run questions from a template Ex. How did you learn about company, what blogs do you read, where do you go to get info to do your job, where do you go for help, problem, approach, solution (case study). A lot of it comes out of relationship building, that’s when you get the meaningful data. Sales is good about passing on anecdotal data, as well. This also will help prioritize the focus, and resources, in order of sales ops.

This is a long post that discusses everything tradeshow, soup to nuts: booth, pre-show promotion, in-show promotions, giveaways, sweepstakes, events, data capture/date rules, and follow up.

Bob says the most important thing to remember is that the show is not about the booth, it’s about the relationships. Everything needs to be done with the goal of building the relationship. For best results, you should start to do this long before you get to the show, with marketing and PR promotions that will raise your profile with the show audience.

In terms of booth size, a big booth is good, but it’s not absolutely necessary. If you have strategy in place in terms of touch points in and around the show, booth size becomes less important. A good strategy will take you to places a booth can’t. A good looking booth does not close deals; that happens (or not) as a result of what happens inside the booth.

Key points:

1. It’s more important that your booth be memorable than informative. And the people working the booth should be actively collecting information that will provide some context for the follow-up contact. Bonus: Soft floors to sooth aching feet.
2. Set up levels of engagement. Put one person in front to hand out stuff and draw people in to be scooped up by a “demo person” who will then hand them off to a “closer.” This process will create a sense of motion even in a small booth. Think “theme park.” When you’re in Disney, you go from one world to another.
3. Sell to sales before you sell to the customer. If you can “pain sell” to your sales people, you can sell to anyone. (Pain selling: Identify customer’s pain, commiserate, then show your solution to pain.)

Think of your booth as a web-experience. Before people leave page their eyes will go to the right column, so you want to make that sticky. Create a “destination” experience; manufacture involvement. More effective than just handing someone a brochure. From the audience: “Decision makers don’t want stuff to carry, but they may want an experience.” Consider putting information on jump drive; it’s a premium, and easy to carry.

Next up: pre-show promotion or, the most important thing you can do to ensure your success.

Postcards – come to our booth, see us “at.” This is where a having developed a recognizable brand can help a lot. If you don’t have a strong brand identity, the visual cues become critical. Make sure people can connect your promo to YOUR booth, otherwise it’s a waste of money. Audience example: “I have a card with lightening and that also is in my booth. No mistaking it.”

Don’t worry about drawing generally (unless at a targeted show), you can qualify people in the booth. Three ways to qualify, forms, card swipe and business card. B-card is the most reliable because people LIE on forms.

Buy advertising in hot industry newsletter, before and after event.

In show promo ideas: Buy a wrap for the show daily. Buy door hangers. Buy video loop on shuttle buses. All kinds of ops in-show to drive people to booth. Purchase paid ads in social media (i.e., Facebook page), mention ad and get premium. Bad example of using Twitter, spamming key word “visit us at booth #999.” Good example: “Come to booth #999 and ID woman and red, you get (premium).” What every you can do to get your name to turn up frequently.

Recon teams: You can collect all kinds of competitive information. Sometimes your channel partners or customers can collect things for you, too. Allows you to change things on the fly, if your competitor is giving away the same thing.

As for giveaways, make sure it’s relevant. Audience: “We do a bright orange bag with our logo;  bags end up displayed all over the show. (I’m liking the MPB2B grocery bag profile, myself. -.Ed)

Most importantly, make sure you’re doing something with the information you’ve collected. Give sales people specific things they can bring up in the follow up call, i.e., what they mentioned they were doing at the event, if they mentioned their kids, etc., some kind of personal data so the contact is an enhancement of the relationship.

Today I will be spending about half my time in a classroom and half on the floor interviewing and drawing helpful information off the show floor.

First up, Veronica “Niki” Fielding, CEO, Digital Brand Expressions speaking on “SEO—Now More than Ever, a B2B Marketer’s Best Friend.” She actually talked about a whole boatload of stuff, but here are some key takeaways pertaining mostly to content:

Take heart marketers, if copy works for human beings, will work for search engines. Write for people.

Also think about starting to incorporating multimedia, as all other things being equal, Google will rank your site higher, because it wants to serve up more than text-based content.

More and more, it’s about refreshed content so you need to keep your website current. Again, all things being equal, meaning compared to a competing site that is just as optimized, continually refreshed content will train search engines to come to site more often.

Another tip: Every key word should have its own page of content on site that supports that keyword. Rule of thumb: For ever 250 words of copy, your keyword should appear five times,  written in a way that makes sense to a person. Search engine practices are always evolving but their goal always will be to create an ideal experience for person doing the search.

Blogs: Is it better to be host them internally on your website or externally, on a separate website? Answer: When it’s separate, it will be another site that will show up in the search rankings. However, if you don’t have a great way to continually refresh the other content on your site, then your blog should sit on your website.

Larry Davis, VP of Marketing, PTS Data Center Solutions

SEO has helped to increase sales — website search is #3 lead source (20% of leads). Number one source is from our sales folks. DBE also has been instrumental helping to improve experience for user once they get to the site. Hot point: The ongoing battle of visual appeal vs. content. Who wins? The answer:It depends on your audience.

For example, PTS customers are essentially engineers, CIOs, VPs of IT, etc.  They want content; information and education. The PTS website has over 300 pages of content, each optimized to a key word. (Over 300 roadside stands! –Ed) Does it work? If you search on “data center consulting” PTS comes up first, over much bigger companies.

Trend worth watching:  Content syndication: content from partners that is syndicated on privately labeled web pages.

Caveats: Real SEO takes time to take effect. It’s an investment. Think months, not weeks to start seeing a return. Black and white hat techniques may provide instant gratification but might not serve you long term.

Also, most SEO organizations don’t optimize their own sites because they don’t want their competitors to go to school on them. Check out their client’s sites instead. Similarly, if you do a good job, your competitors will steal or “scrape” your content, sometimes wholesale. To deter them, you can provide an abstract and make people log in to get the whole article. However, be sure to leave enough content outside the wall for the search engines to play with.

In the interview, David focuses on the bottom line benefits of narrow positioning, which is to say, making your business less relevant to most clients so that you can maximize efficiency and profitability working with a select few. But from an expertise public relations standpoint, narrow positioning also makes it a lot easier to become known for something and recognized as an industry expert on it.

The biggest problem with being general is that to gain recognition, you have to be more places, all the time. Imagine the difference between having to work a crowd at a big party of 100 people versus an intimate cocktail party of 15. Getting to those 85 additional “people” takes a commensurate amount of additional effort. And because there are so many more people competing for everyone’s attention, the probability of them remembering you is dramatically diminished.

The moral of the story is: You either need to narrow down your positioning or be prepared to work 10x harder (and/or spend 10x as much money if you want someone to help you) to raise your profile among prospects and influencers who are monitoring 10x more information outlets.

P.S. If you are a narrowly positioned marketing thought leader attending the Marketingprofs Business to Business Forum 2010 it in May, contact me — I will be there live blogging/tweeting the event and will be doing brief interviews and a round up on this topic for some of my live blog posts and as fodder for follow-up article on the conference. If you haven’t registered yet, click the badge below for a $200 discount. See you there!