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I came across this quote from George Lois and it got me think­ing…”Cre­ativ­ity can solve almost any prob­lem. The cre­ative act, the defeat of habit by orig­i­nal­ity, over­comes every­thing.”

I’ve got a nag­ging feel­ing that mar­ket­ing automa­tion is giv­ing today’s mar­keters a num­ber of bad habits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly bought into the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits of auto­mated plat­forms — com­mu­ni­cat­ing at the right time based on expressed and behav­ioural data, iden­ti­fy­ing qual­ity leads and rout­ing them appro­pri­ately to sales. And once the mar­keters have got to grips with the plat­form, they deliver greater effi­cien­cies, speed­ier exe­cu­tion, more con­trol and in-depth mea­sure­ment.

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Money is tight. Bud­gets are squeezed. You sim­ply don’t have the resources to do every­thing. It’s deci­sion time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the atten­dees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have cho­sen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

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Land­ing pages would seem to be a fairly tedious topic of con­ver­sa­tion; how­ever they can often make or break cam­paigns. And all too often, it’s the lat­ter. Many clients have sep­a­rated mar­ket­ing and web teams, leav­ing the IT-driven web team to pro­duce the land­ing page. This can cause issues with the link­age between the cre­ative and land­ing page con­tent, less than ideal land­ing page struc­tures with call-to-actions hid­den below the fold and nav­i­ga­tion bars divert­ing the users from the key action com­pa­nies want them to take. Alter­na­tively, it could be that the client has out­sourced their land­ing page con­struc­tion to an exter­nal agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a night­mare from an SEO per­spec­tive and addi­tion­ally, exter­nal host­ing exposes the site to poten­tial secu­rity attacks. It seems that due to the rel­a­tively short shelf-life of cam­paigns and thus cam­paign land­ing pages, the think­ing and atten­tion needed is not being given to the pri­mary way of con­vert­ing poten­tial cus­tomers.

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With the next Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit just a cou­ple of days away, one ques­tion to ask is once you’ve got the leads, then what?

For clas­sic B2B sales this often ends up in a con­ver­sa­tion around the hand-off process to sales and closed loop mar­ket­ing. But just as impor­tant a ques­tion is: is your web­site play­ing its part?

Over on Con­ver­sion Rate Experts they have an excel­lent arti­cle of the worst offend­ers when it comes to killing a lead stone dead. These include:

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• The ‘empty cart’ but­ton posi­tioned where you’d expect the ‘sub­mit’ button

Ever since we held the last (and first) Euro­pean Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back process on the last event, we asked what peo­ple thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the for­mat of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see cov­ered.

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In the head­long rush towards the Christ­mas break, it’s easy to for­get that peo­ple have been mark­ing this time of year for pretty much as long as there have been peo­ple. It’s the short­est day today – marked across mil­len­nia as the turn­ing point when we begin look­ing for­ward to the future. Tra­di­tion­ally, this has been a time of opti­mism – longer days, shorter nights, the promise of bet­ter times to come.

Of course, just now, opti­mism is in pretty short sup­ply around the world.

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So our eDMs and mail invites for the Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit have gone out today. All nicely per­son­alised you’ll be glad to know. I was delighted to learn that I was going to be noti­fied by email of the reg­is­tra­tions as they came in. What a time-saver — no need to keep ask­ing for reports from the web team. And now I’ve found myself sat here for the last hour obses­sively press­ing ‘send-and-receive’ on my email account, occa­sion­ally check­ing the Black­Berry just in case it’s synch­ing with the server faster than my mac. Truly sad.

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