Dear Dave:

My company is considering using a cold call campaign to help generate leads. But it seems that everyone is so busy and also using Caller ID, and no one answers their phone these days. Can cold calling still work?

Signed,

In the Dark about Cold Calling

Dear In the Dark:

The name alone gives me the chills and I can’t say I look forward to receiving many cold calls. That said, cold calling still has a place in an integrated marketing strategy that includes multiple ways to touch your prospects.

Two important elements of success for cold calling: call on the right people and have something relevant to say.

Rather than purchase a list of names and phone numbers, use a list that already has relevance to your business and offerings. A good place to start is with an attendee list of an event where you are an exhibitor or sponsor. Or if you partner with companies that offer complimentary solutions to yours, consider trading lists with them. This way, the person you are calling may already be experiencing the business problem you’re offering to solve—and you have a natural opening. “We’ll both be at …” or “You already work with Company X, one of our partners.”

Next, rather than thinking of trying to sell someone your product or solution, simply try to begin a relevant conversation. If you get your target on the phone, offer insight about industry trends or how companies similar to the one you’re calling on are solving specific business problems. If you get voice mail, leave a brief and insightful message. You’re not going to sell anything on a single cold call, but you might be able to begin a nurturing business relationship that will lead to dividends down the road.

For Klein Marketing, I’m Dave

What is your company doing to prepare for the economic recovery? Klein Marketing recently worked with GlobalSpec, an engineering search engine and media company, to develop a white paper encouraging its customers and prospects to take action now. Waiting too long can put you behind competitors.

From the white paper …

The important question during a downturn isn’t whether or not the economy will recover-it will; it always does. The important question is whether your company will be in position to surge when the economy begins to grow again. To a large degree, the level of your success will depend on your marketing efforts and capabilities: what you have done during the downturn and what you put in place now to win business during the recovery. You will need to make strategic decisions about choosing new media, entering new markets, and positioning products.

Success will also depend on the timing of your efforts. Now is the time to establish marketing plans for the recovery-formulate strategies, design campaigns, make media choices, justify expenditures-so you are ready to go with an approved marketing plan when your company’s budgets open up and you have marketing funds to invest.

The white paper will be promoted via email to all of GlobalSpec’s customers and prospects. It will be featured in an article in their monthly Marketing Maven newsletter, and posted to the company’s blog. Link to white paper.

You should be well underway with developing a marketing budget and plan for 2010. If you wait much longer, your marketing efforts will be delayed and you could miss out on a strong start to a new year.

Consider what typically goes into a marketing cycle:

1. Establish marketing strategy
2. Identify marketing objectives
3. Define target audience
4. Research media options
5. Conceive campaigns
6. Calculate costs
7. Craft messaging
8. Gain executive endorsement and marketing funds
9. Execute campaigns
10. Measure effectiveness
11. Refine tactics

That’s a lot of work. And steps 1-8 all need to be completed before you gain any market presence.

Build Your Marketing Budget

We all know budgets can shift at any time, but you need to establish a marketing budget for 2010 to be used as a guide for your initial investments. Many managers struggle with developing a marketing budget because there is no single right way to do it.

Here are three methods that can work:

• Use the current year’s budget as a guideline and adjust up or down based on changes in strategy and results of last year’s programs.
• Allocate a percentage of expected revenue to marketing. This percentage can vary widely, depending on how well established you are in your target markets and whether you are planning to go after new markets or customer segments. Typical B2B marketing budgets are often between 4-8% of revenue. Model several different revenue scenarios, such as best case, likely case and worst case, and build a marketing plan for each scenario.
• Build your budget from the ground up based on your marketing strategy and objectives. This is the hardest route to go, yet also the purest. It also delivers a budget that is way above what you will actually spend. You’ll have to make intelligent decisions about where to cut.

I sound like a broken record (not that anyone still has records) when I endlessly implore companies to focus their marketing on a few core initiatives where they have the greatest chance of success.

For any manager having trouble focusing, I recommend this recent article in Harvard Business Publishing: “The Key to Effectiveness? Focus” — and in particular this passage:

One of the tough truths of management is that we all have trouble making choices. While older and supposedly wiser, we still often act like kids in the candy store who want everything. So we go after too many markets and too many demographics with too many products.

One of the reasons some companies lack focus is because they lack the courage and culture to make difficult choices. Managers pride themselves on multi-tasking; fiddling with smart phones during meetings is accepted practice, almost a badge signifying the user’s importance. And there’s a daring feel to the concept of throwing a horde of ideas out there and waiting to find out what sticks, or juggling a bunch of balls and seeing which ones stay up. Until it all crashes.

There are very few success stories from the ranks of companies spreading themselves too thin or trying to be all things to all customers. There are plenty of success stories from companies that focus.

Most companies engage in some form of email marketing, with e-newsletters at the top of the list. But too often companies start out with a bang and end with a whimper.

The e-newsletter momentum often lasts for six months or a year. Then the schedule starts to slip. There’s nothing fresh to write about. The people managing the e-newsletter have other, more pressing demands on their time. The e-newsletter was a group effort of the marketing department and no single person is accountable.

And so the e-newsletter slowly dies.

What’s the best thing to do? Start over.

It’s smart to do a quick autopsy on the dead e-newsletter, but I’ve already described what happens in almost every case: lack of fresh content, lack of accountability, lack of project management. Often these symptoms come back to lack of a marketing objective, which is the first question to address when starting over. Here are others:

1. What is the main objective of having an e-newsletter? Is it to educate your audience, raise brand awareness, generate leads and sales, establish your organization as an industry leader? You likely have more than one objective. Prioritize them. This will guide all other decisions.
2. Is an e-newsletter the best way to achieve your objectives? There are other ways to communicate with your audience. You can write a blog and feed it your audience via RSS or email. You can distribute a printed newsletter. You can simply update your Web site (if your audience regularly visits). You can record podcasts. Which tactic will best meet your objectives?
3. How often will you publish your e-newsletter? This is where many companies fail. They set an aggressive publishing schedule and then can’t meet it. There is no single right answer to the frequency question. Stick to what you say you will do, and deliver only information your audience is interested in. It’s better to start modest and grow strong than to be aggressive and later limp away.
4. Do you have the resources to generate content and produce the e-newsletter? Someone has to be in charge of the e-newsletter. The best candidate is an editor who can create content, find content, and wring content out of people in your organization who have expertise or knowledge that’s of interest to your audience. The e-newsletter manager must develop an editorial schedule; conduct an editorial meeting to kick off each e-newsletter cycle; and manage the production, lists, sending and tracking.

Did your old e-newsletter die? Grieve not, but learn from your mistakes. You can have a new e-newsletter. A better one.

If your Web site is old and out-of-date, you might need to replace it completely. On the other hand, you might be able to save money and time yet still create an effective new site simply by performing a Web site refresh.

I recently completed a Web site refresh for M.M. Hayes Company, Inc. (www.mmhayes.com).

Here were the five main elements of the refresh that helped the company meet all its defined objectives for a new Web site—without having to incur the higher costs and longer project time of building an entirely new site.

1. Open it up: The old site was constrained to 800 pixels wide, but most monitors today are at least 1024 pixels wide. In addition, the old font size was small and difficult to read, especially for a target audience older than 20-something. The refreshed site stretches across browser windows and uses a larger font family. Making the site wider also permitted the addition of a third column on the right for context relevant information and offers on individual pages.
2. Prioritize home page: The old home page gave equal weight to three different lines of business, one of which was no longer appropriate. The refreshed site gives priority to the main line of business, directing the user to the most important content immediately.
3. Update content: Old pages that were no longer applicable were purged from the site and navigation schema. New pages were created as needed. Navigation re-ordered. Messaging updated.
4. Search Engine Optimization: All on-page SEO criteria were added, including meta tags for page titles, descriptions and keywords; plus use of keywords in page copy and internal links using keywords. Also created: an updated site map with HTML links to all pages.
5. Plan for updates: A process was established to make updates to the site a regular and easy task to help ensure the site stays up-to-date and accurate at all times for customers and prospects.

Every company has different needs and a Web site refresh will look different for one company than it does for another. But before you completely abandon an old Web site, first evaluate the costs and benefits of a Web site refresh vs. an entirely new Web site.

On Web sites, “Content is King.” Fresh, relevant and up-to-date content will help your site perform better in search engine rankings and will keep customers and prospects engaged and coming back to your Web site.

The challenge is coming up with all this fresh content. Busy marketers don’t always have time to write or update copy, which is an important task but not always the most urgent. Sometimes it gets pushed down the to-do list and before you know it, your Web site hasn’t had a fresh posting in weeks or even months.

My recommendation: Don’t go it alone.

Whether you are a small or big company, put together a “Content Task Force” of colleagues who will take responsibility for developing content for one area of your Web site. Product managers for new product information; public relations people for press releases; graphic designers for photography and illustration; technical support reps for frequently asked questions or tech tips.

You can recruit anyone who has knowledge of a specific area that is of interest to your audience and is willing to compose the first draft of an article (marketing can be responsible for editing and publishing).You can even recruit professional writers to develop articles and white papers for your Web site.

The point is, if you can summon a team to help generate content, it will be much easier to keep your Web site fresh and relevant—both to search engines as well as customers and prospects.

Today I saw two articles about that mentioned negotiating and made me think how important it is for marketers to be good negotiators.

In an interview with Larry King reported on CNN.com, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said about North Korea:

“They are some of the best, toughest negotiators I’ve ever dealt with,” Powell said. “And you can read the whole history of our negotiations with North Korea, going back to the Korean armistice discussion, and you’ll find they know what their negotiating positions are, and they will drive you crazy, and they will use your impatience against you.”

No wonder we can’t get anywhere with them.

Then I came across “Four Rules for Effective Negotiations” by Anthony Tjan in Harvard Business Publishing. All marketers should pay attention to these four rules because all marketers must negotiate.

For example, you negotiate with your IT department for the new Web site functionality you need built, with media companies for advertising space, with colleagues about how to divide up a group project, with your boss on salary and bonuses, and with your agencies (and yes, consultants) over scope of work and price. That’s just a few examples.

The other thing I like about Tjan’s article is the nifty headline that starts with “Four Rules . . .” If you want to get your audience’s attention, the “Five Tips”, “Top Ten”, “Six Reasons”, etc. approach is a classic. It works because it promises practical advice in short, usable format. That’s marketing content.

Dear Dave:

How can we keep prospects from filling in junk on our landing page forms, which prevents us from generating a lead and contacting that person again?

Signed,

Can’t sell to zzzyyyggyg

Dear ZZZYY …

Every company that drives prospects to the Web and offers valuable content such as white papers in exchange for contact information has met up with Ima Smarterthanyou, Heywood Youleavemealone, Mickey Mouse and zzz@xxx.com. Very clever.

One solution is to ask for a valid e-mail address and tell prospects you will e-mail them a link to the white paper or other offer they want to access. The approach I prefer is to just let it go and purge these invalid forms as soon as you get them.

I figure if the person is really a prospect and you are providing valuable content, they will contact you again when motivated to buy. If they’re not really a prospect, then lucky  them, they got away with your white paper.

For David Klein Marketing, I’m Dave

Dear Dave:

Our company has had the same look and feel to our marketing materials for years. Is that reason enough to make a change?

Signed,

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Dear FBC:

I’ve seen otherwise intelligent and accomplished marketing professionals overhaul—at significant expense—a company’s entire marketing collateral set, even the logo, simply because they became tired with the way it looks. The reasoning is always that the market is sick of the same old look and feel and it’s time to “freshen things up.”

But I can guarantee that marketers exposed to the branding and design on a daily basis get bored with the look and feel long before customers and prospects do. There’s only one reason to change the visual look of your marketing: if it doesn’t work in the marketplace.

How do you know if it’s working or not? You can conduct research with customers and prospects to get their feedback. You can compare yourself to what competitors are doing or other leading companies in your industry. If your company is changing significantly, either through a strategy shift or merger/acquisition, then your marketing look may need to change to accommodate a new market positioning. But even in this case, the only reason to change is if your current graphic identity doesn’t reflect your company’s position in the market.

Rather than spending unnecessarily to change your marketing look and feel, focus resources and energy on getting your brand exposed to more potential customers and generating new and qualified leads for your sales team. Nothing looks as fresh and exciting as positive results on your marketing investments.

For Klein Marketing, I’m Dave