Its Not the Same Game Anymore!

Posted on July 27, 2011 by admin

The Rules of B2B Marketing are Changing…

While most online marketing automation efforts continue to focus on traditional email marketing and lead nurturing the rules of the game have changed… And are changing as we speak.

With the proliferation of channels and sources and the rise of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud offerings, B2B prospects have more options and more information than ever but they have less time. Their concentration span narrows.

We live in a real-time culture where information is created and updated every second, 24 hours a day. It is created in various media channels but especially in the online, mobile and social channels creating a constant stream of reports, videos, news, events, opinions, analysis etc. Your B2B prospects expect real-time interactions and while the number of interaction channels grows, interactions themselves are broken down into short or even momentary events (tweeting, replying to a post, foursquare update, writing on a wall,…).

Now, there is a very positive side here however, the amount of valuable information a single B2B prospect produces as a digital trail in these interactions, is enormous. If you could leverage your prospects digital body language to adapt your online assets you could optimize your existing resources and ongoing efforts and boost your success in the modern world of B2B marketing.

The amount of time and attention your prospects can put in to evaluating your solution is getting smaller by the day and they expect to receive or find the relevant data almost immediately. The B2B marketing challenge becomes focused on attracting mind-share – getting your prospect’s awareness to your products and their attention to your message; and then – presenting the most effective, highly targeted message you can present to every specific prospect based on his or her business potential and intent.

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Engaging in context – why Only 13% of organizations in the business technology sector find direct mail to be a very effective marketing tactic…

Posted on March 1, 2011 by admin

In a recent survey by Sherpa regarding the good old direct email campaigns the majority of 57%  state that they find direct email campaigns to be only, and I quote: “Somewhat effective”. This is understandable since we all used this technique and we know that indeed it sometime works but may not be worth the effort and may have some negative effects that cant be measured regarding “nagging” your prospects with a constant flow of emails (that tend to repeat themselves after a while). 21% found direct email campaigns to be “Not effective” and 22% found them as “Very effective”.

The most interesting piece of information to me however was this:”Only 13% of organizations in the business technology sector find direct mail to be a very effective marketing tactic”. Sherpa’s Jen Doyle explains that this might be due to the fact that these companies sell complex products where emails may be less effective or relevant.

I’de like to add another explanation based on the same logic: Yes, these companies usually sell complex products with multiple features and these products require the prospects attention. If the prospect receives an email out of nowhere while he or she is doing something else the chances of them delving into the details is very small. Its like talking to someone who isn’t really listening, your trying to catch them when they are “Out of context” and if your solution is more then a bit complex, you need them to be in context and in focus, with all of their attention on their complex problem and how your product might answer the various challenges.

Whether our customers are using simple email tools or Marketing Automation Software we urge them to use ActiveInsight to react to their prospects while they are on-site and in context, while they are thinking of what they need, of the various parts of the challenge they are facing. That is when the relevant message can be more effective, while your audience is actually listening.

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Landing Pages – How to Optimize the Next Step

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

Many B2B companies are investing in SEO and landing page optimization . While landing pages vary in their focus and goals the main idea is obviously to provide relevant content when a visitor arrives after using a specific search term or after clicking an ad.

So, lets say everything worked well and the efforts put in to SEO and landing pages creation were successful and the visitor does get to your pre-defined landing page, is that enough?
Well, not really.
That’s just the first step the online prospect takes in your conversion funnel and you want to ensure that the next step are just as relevant, just as good.
Behavioral targeting helps you optimize the following step or steps in your prospects visit. Instead of focusing only on the first step which is the landing page you can offer your visitor recommended steps for further investigation of your products or services. Thats right, you can “walk” your prospects through your website by offering them directions or behavior based content recommendations at specific points. The recommendations can be based on the search term the prospects used, their location, organization and the actual pages they are currently on.

In many cases the landing page is an introductory page for a specific solution or a page describing how your product meets a specific challenge. Once your online prospect reads that page and continues to browse you can recommend advanced materials such as specific customer use cases or advanced technical information aimed to complete the prospects understanding of your solution and its advantages.
By using Real-time Behavioral Targeting you can optimize your whole prospects experience and strengthen the message put forth by your landing page.

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Landing Page Optimization – Improving the First Step

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

Optimizing landing pages to assure that the right prospect see the most relevant content is extremely important in any online marketing strategy. Landing page optimization has been around for quite some time and creating good landing pages is not too difficult these days, using various automation tools and wizards. However, it takes a lot of effort, time and money to assure that specific search engine keywords actually drive traffic to the relevant landing pages.

Ongoing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts may solve some of the problem, at a high price but its almost impossible, with reasonable resources, to ensure that EVERY relevant search-term combination gets directed to your relevant landing page AND gets a top rank..

Behavioral Targeting offers a simpler solution to complement and enhance landing page optimization.
Instead of focusing on SEO efforts alone to try to “convince” Google that a specific page is the best fit for a specific search-term, you can use real-time behavioral targeting to offer the right landing page to the right prospect based on his search terms (or any other behavioral data for that matter).
So, if you have a landing page built specifically for prospects looking for “AS400 security solutions” and other similar search terms, you can spend a lot of money on SEO or you can optimize your effort by defining a reaction scenario in ActiveInsight stating that visitors that searched for any search term combination that includes “AS400” and “Security” and did not land on the right (landing) page will see a real-time reaction offering them a link to the relevant landing page (“You might find the following page very interesting > Click Here”).
Leveraging Behavioral Targeting for landing page optimization helps you improve the efficiency of your content and leverage your online assets.
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The Technological Challenges in Behavioral Targeting

Posted on February 1, 2011 by alex

As the online channel houses an increasingly fragmented audience, the challenges of real-time behavioral targeting grow; A behavioral targeting platform must be able to process, correlate and aggregate extreme rates of various online event streams, detect relevant online visitors based on multiple parameters and produce the appropriate reaction in real-time.

The ability to correlate different, high-throughput event/data feeds will have a direct effect on the number of parameters that can be calculated and thus effect the accuracy of targeting. Delivering a precise and relevant message to the right person at the right time while handling massive event stream rates and correlating reference data will require low-latency and highly scalable technology that can leverage distributed processing over the cloud.

In today’s real-time social culture understanding your customer needs and interests is getting more and more challenging and requires correlating growing  amount of visitors, relevant tweets, “likes” and real-time behavior. Online marketing strategy based on pure analytics and marketing automation would miss-out the true potential that lays behind the “dry” statistics and trends.

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5 Golden Segmentation Rules for Behavioral Targeting

Posted on January 28, 2011 by admin

The relevance of the content and message you present to your online prospects has a significant effect on your conversion rates.

Real-time Behavioral Targeting offers the ability to target specific messages and content to specific visitors while their in your site. So, if you have your real-time behavioral targeting product ready, here are the 5 golden rules for conversion-driving messages and offers.

1. Target by Prospect Source:

Did this prospect visit your web site directly, was he referred from a search engine result list or from any other referring site like an online magazine or a blog? The online source of your visitors can tell you a lot them. A direct visit means they are already familiar with your company, coming from a search engine tells you they are looking for something (and what that something is) and a blog or magazine referrence can explain the visit context and even defer between business and techi visitors, based on the post or article that convinced them to visit you site.

2. Target by Lead Stage:

If this lead came after searching Google, Bing or Yahoo, and you can target by the search-terms he used (very easy with ActiveInsight), you can categorize visitor’s sales maturity level (Where are they in the sales process) based on their search terms. If your an Enterprise Grade  Wireless Solution Vendor, visitors searching for general or vague search terms (Such as “Wireless Solution”) are not as interesting the ones searching for specific and more descriptive ones (Such as “Wireless Solutions for large warehouses”). The visitor looking for the longer, more articulated search term has already covered some distance in the sales process and is a lot more mature or sales-ready. You can use the search terms itself to offer specific content (e.g. A Large Warehouse customer use case) to improve the way you funnel these visitors and generate more qualified leads.

3. Target by Actual Behavior

The actual way your online visitor’s behave on your web site or what is also referred to as their digital behavior offers you great insight to their interests, potential and even the type of role they play in their organization. Is this visitor browsing many pages? Is she looking at specific products or solutions? Is this visitor looking at technical specs and FAQ’s (A Technical Decision Maker)? Or is she looking at ROI and TCO pages and white papers ( A Business Decision Maker) ? Other important parameters of actual online behavior include # of previous visits and # of clciks in current visits which can also help to auto-determine visitor potential. Actual online behavior tells you a lot about your visitors but since they are usually anonymous, you must be able to react to them immediately and automatically , via your website. With Real-time Behavioral Targeting, you can do just that.

4. Target by Visitor Demographics

Demographics is a fairly easy parameter to understand and would usually accomodate one of the other targeting parameters to provide relevant messages or calls to action. A visitor’s country or region can help you target messages more relevant to these visitors such as offering customer use cases from their region (and the solution they were looking for in Google), it enables you to offer localized content or offers (“Would you like to meet our local representative”), offer targeted invitations to conventions you appear in etc. you could also use demographics information to alert relevant sales teams to HOT leads in their region.

5. Target by Visitor Organization

Especially when leveraging Real-time Behavioral Targeting for Qualified Lead Generation, the visitor’s organization is extremely relevant. With products like ActiveInsight you could actually react to visitors from specific organization thus enabling you to offer very specific and relevant offers (A personal meeting, a demo, a use-case from the relevant sector). Reacting based on organization name can also assist when hunting specific organization where you don’t yet have a relevant contact or see which organization of the ones you met in the last convention actually followed up and visited your website as well as seeing what they found interesting.

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Optimizing Online Campaigns

Posted on January 27, 2011 by admin

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of organizations putting time and effort into product or sector specific online campaigns. But while hopes were usually high, results were not always as positive.

As organizations strive to focus their marketing efforts on specific and measurable goals they often launch focused online campaigns aimed at a specific product region or market sector. These campaigns often use a combination of an email campaign, SEO and PPC ads focused on driving relevant traffic into a specific mini-site. These mini-sites are in turn built with a predefined conversion goal such as a trial version download or setting an on-site technical assessment .

Dedicated online campaigns often fall short of their expectations due to two main problems:
1. Online prospects may not always follow the “ideal” mini-site flow or funnel
2. Later stages of the campaign’s funnel, usually taking place on the main website are neglected or overlooked.

Lets take, for example, a semi-fictional software company that wishes to raise adoption of their software development products.The company, Star SW, has defined a full-featured, free, 1-user version of its product and  is launching a focused campaign aiming at early stage programmer. Star SW believes that students and young programmers would like using their product and hopefully raise adoption for Star SW products with current or future employers.

After running the campaign for 3-weeks, Star SW noticed 2 problems: the first is low conversion rates on the mini-site, although clicks per visit were relatively high. the second problem was that only a few of the programmers that downloaded the software actually went through with the first few product examples necessary to get started and acquainted with the software.

Using behavioral targeting and real-time reactions in dedicated campaigns and mini-sites can be extremely effective as it can automatically detect visitors that are not following the desired path and funnel them back on track. behavioral targeting can also be used to strengthen the campaign’s message on the company’s main website and followup on relevant steps taken after the preliminary goal was accomplished.

Lets briefly review how StarSW could have used behavioral targeting to improve the results of their campaign.

Optimizing Mini Site Conversions
After reviewing visitor click-streams to the mini site, Star SW’s Online Marketing Manager, Matt,  realized that while visitors were expected to download the product after 3-4 clicks on the mini site, many of them browsed more then 7 pages and many of them visited the mini-site twice. Matt realized that these visitors were hesitating before downloading and were looking for more information and education regarding the product. Using ActiveInsight, Mat defined 3 real-time reactions proposing additional educational material to hesitating visitors. Since Mat didn’t want to interfere with the flow of visitors that do download the product after 2-4 clicks, as expected, he set the “educational” reactions to appear only after the 5th click or the second visit. He further added regional targeting to offer additional educational material in specific languages. So, Matt leveraged behavioral targeting to improve both top-funnel and mid-funnel conversions on his mini site.

Improving Campaign Efficiency
Matt also recognized another problematic area in the funnel. After users downloaded the software they were redirected to technical resource pages on Star SW’s technical WIKI. The problem was that the existing WIKI was somewhat overwhelming for newcomers as it provides a wealth of information for Star SW’s various products and is not focused on the 1-user edition. While Mat thought its important for new users to recognize the rich technical information available for them it is best that they initially receive a few simpler resources, mainly instructional “quick start” videos that have been previously prepared and uploaded to youtube .
Mat used ActiveInsight to detect visitors that were redirected to the WIKI from the mini-site download page or from the links in the actual product help module and present them with the “quick start” instructional videos aimed to ease their initial usage of the product. Making the WIKI adaptive to different types of visitors made it more efficient and supported the goals of that specific campaign without effecting every day usage by existing customers.

To summarize, using behavioral targeting to boost conversion rates can be especially easy in focused online campaigns since targets are clear and the effect of improvements based on behavioral reactions is substantial.

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Accelerating Marketing Automation

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Mike T
Marketing Automation software has become very popular with B2B organizations. Most of these organizations use marketing automation software to nurture and (hopefully) generate leads from their online traffic. Since Marketing automation tools focus their engagement and nurturing efforts on email campaigns, their effectiveness is limited and while they cost quite a bit and require substantial implementation efforts, they still miss out on a significant portion of relevant prospects. The two main obstacles in the effectiveness of Marketing Automation tools are:
1. Engaging and converting top-funnel, anonymous prospects.
2. Interacting and engaging prospects at the right time, while they are still on-site and focused on you.
Why do these obstacles exist?
Well, to start with, If you are a B2B organization, most of your online prospects are anonymous visitors or what’s referred to as top funnel prospects. These prospects do not identify themselves and you have no previous knowledge about their interests or potential. All you have is their online behavior and demographics. Real-time behavior and demographics can actually provide you with a wealth of knowledge regarding prospect interests and potential but can only be useful if you can react to these prospects automatically and in real-time – that’s right, while they are still in your website . Once top-funnel anonymous prospects leave your web site you have no practical way of reaching them. You lost your prospects.
The second obstacle is engaging prospects with the right message and at the right time. In many cases you might have the prospect’s email address in his cookie, generated during previous visits (after downloading a white paper or registering for an event). While this case seems to be the classic scenario for marketing automation tools (email + previous knowledge + current behavior = email response) it has several shortcomings. The main one being that you are trying to engage your prospects while they’re already doing something else. They lost focus, and are doing something else. You didn’t deliver the relevant message (be it a targeted marketing message or a sales engagement offer) when they were actually on your website but rather a few minutes, hours or days after that, when your prospect has already browsed your competitors site and is probably busy with other tasks. You had their attention and you lost it. You knew what you wanted to tell them (a relevant use-case, latest product news, invitation to a local conference, etc.) but you couldn’t.
That’s why behavioral targeting and real-time reactions are so effective. It provides the ability to target and engage top-funnel, anonymous prospects based on current interests and potential and the ability to use current and previous knowledge to auto-engage mid-funnel prospects at the right time, when they are focused on their problem and reviewing your solution.
ActiveInsight actually complements Marketing Automation tools by providing real-time behavioral targeting for targeted marketing, sales intelligence and qualified lead generation. It can react to specific prospects whose interests and perceived potential are high and display specific product/region/campaign specific messages to improve conversions.
That’s why Real-time Behavioral Targeting is your Marketing Automation Accelerator.
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Next Generation Web Analytics

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Mike T

Several new and existing Web Analytics tools have been offering real-time Web Analytics as the next big step in this market. While I strongly believe in real time analytics I would argue that this is just half of the big step required to take web sites to a new level and enable real leverage of online behavior.

Real time analytics, and for that matter any type of analytics are most useful if they help you understand the situation and enable you to take action in time to improve it.
Turning insight into action has two main pre-requisites:
  1. Get the data and the insight in time to improve the final outcome
  2. Offer the means by which one can define and implement automatic actions based on the insight

Being able to process data and analyze it, even if its in real-time, is mostly irrelevant if a human has to review it and take some kind of action. If you recieved an amazing alert that you had a visit from a prospect in a very relevant organization, it already too late, by the time your on site, using chat or other means to engage its too late… your anonymous prospect is gone. If you have a few hundred visitors a day or more, your even in a worse situation as you cannot review them all manually. Thats is why I focus on the need for easily defined, automatic and adaptive reactions or calls-to-actions to online behavior.

Your online prospects have little time and a short concentration span, you have to hit the iron while its hot.

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Don't just analyze, React. Turning behavioral insights into action.

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Mike T

One of the most amazing features of the human brain is its ability to recieve and analyze large amounts of data and react accordingly (ex. fight or flight). As analytical information systems evolved over time it seems that emphasis has always been on the ablity to process and analyze data rather then react to it. The result is a lot of information about what happened and even why it happened but little ability to effect and improve what is actually happening now.

So we always have explenations and excuses and perhaps ideas for improvements but we lack the ability to effect the present in order to change the future outcome.

Well, as you may have guessed, I think this should change. I think we should focus on what our applications can do with data rather then just displaying it in various manners. Dont get me wrong, the analysis offered by tools in the BI, web analytics and fraud detection fields is important but as a step towards action, not as a goal of its own. We should focus on predictive and reactive analysis to leverage the value of the data and the events around us.

I belive in “Turning Insight into Action” – and that is the heart of thinking Reactive. Nowadays, when there is so much information flying around, changing in an ever growing pace we should all think of how to turn this information and it analysis to actions that would help us achieve our goals whther they are selling more, securing better or improving service.

A report is really valuable if you have the means to turn its conclusions into actions while the relevant objective can still be reached. Here’s an example: If I review daily reports of online trafic to my web site and can detect visitors location, organization and the pages they have viewed but cant interact with them (preferably automatically) to achieve my goals (get leads, sell, share…) based on these facts its not worth much since they are out of my web site by the time I read the report. They may or may not return and I might not recognize them if they do. Valuable data is waisted due to lack of ability to react on time.

Think Reactive! Dont waist your time on interesting insight that you cant turn into effective action.

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