B1BLOG

It’s speak­ing sea­son at the Ban­ner search team, and over the next couple of months we’ll be speak­ing at con­fer­ences in Lon­don, Stock­holm and Oslo.

First out is SEM Kon­fer­ansen in Oslo (14−16 Septem­ber). Here we’ll run a couple of ses­sions with a main one-hour event ded­ic­ated to share our insights on B2B search marketing.

Fol­low­ing this we’ll con­tinue our Nor­dic jour­ney and ven­ture across the bor­der to Stock­holm and the world-renowned SMX (28−29 Septem­ber). With no-less than three speak­ing ses­sions penned in it’ll be a busy couple of days.  We’ll be dig­ging into the Google qual­ity score and how to integ­rate search and dis­play advertising.

Back in Lon­don we’re run­ning a retar­get­ing ses­sion at the always-excellent A4UExpo (12−13 Octo­ber). This is the premier UK event for affil­i­ate and per­form­ance mar­ket­ing, and a bril­liant oppor­tun­ity to under­stand more about this excit­ing mar­ket­ing model.

If you’re plan­ning to attend any of the above events, please write a line in the com­ments as we’re always happy to catch-up over cof­fee in-between ses­sions. Oth­er­wise you’ll surely find us net­work­ing in the bar.

Google has announced that it is chan­ging its ad policies to allow advert­isers to use third party trade­marks in their ad cop­ies, even without approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­pon­ent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­nic­ate the brands they sell or support.

The policy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ire­land and Canada.

Fur­ther­more, as a con­sequence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuit­ton in the European Court of Justice and also French High Court that allowed com­pet­it­ive trade­mark keyword bid­ding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other mar­kets such as the UK.

Both policy changes are planned to come into effect on 14 September.

Read the full press release.

Even if search has matured incred­ibly over the last few years, both from a tech­nical point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coördin­a­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all levels of the organisation.

Earlier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Huddle. This was an intim­ate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

While the event was roun­ded off by Cedric Cham­baz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Microsoft and myself, by look­ing at the latest devel­op­ments of search and what lies ahead, what gen­er­ated the most debate was how to get the fun­da­ment­als right; what can you do today, to make a tan­gible dif­fer­ence to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web mar­ket­ing man­ager at Autodesk shared his exper­i­ence of man­aging inter­na­tional paid search cam­paigns, and high­lighted recent cor­por­ate struc­tural changes that had helped facil­it­ate increased own­er­ship and sub­sequent coördin­a­tion of their search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Avaya, rep­res­en­ted by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a dif­fer­ent innov­at­ive fash­ion. With the object­ive of gen­er­at­ing sales through their chan­nel part­ners, together we had cre­ated a paid search reseller pro­gram that was rolled-out with selec­ted part­ners across Europe. The chal­lenges faced where not so much about tech­no­logy as it was about com­mu­nic­a­tion and education.

The event clearly high­lighted that although search can many times be per­ceived as a highly tech­no­logy focused mar­ket­ing chan­nel; the biggest factor to suc­cess is still the people driv­ing it.

With search engines char­ging for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­ic­ally being con­sidered a dir­ect response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s little need to optim­ise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity factor to determ­ine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if object­ives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an import­ant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­ev­ant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge advert­isers per click, their rev­enue increases.

The fol­low­ing chart out­lines the main factors that determ­ine the qual­ity score for a keyword on Google Adwords. This qual­ity score is then used in an algorithm that determ­ines click-cost and pos­i­tion.

Due to this, it’s very pos­sible that an advert appear­ing in top pos­i­tion is pay­ing less per click than the one below. The search engines are of course max­im­ising their rev­en­ues by the higher num­ber of aggreg­ate clicks that the top CTR advert is producing.

To make things more com­plex for advert­isers, con­sider the fol­low­ing scen­ario: an advert with lower CTR is con­vert­ing very strongly on the web­site, as it effect­ively pre-qualifies the traffic. In com­par­ison a high CTR advert for the same cam­paign con­verts poorer, as it doesn’t seek to fil­ter out unwanted traffic at the ad level, but instead on the land­ing page. Which should you run?

At this stage you would need to cal­cu­late the actual cost-per-action and volumes that can be achieved, depend­ing on objective.

In prac­tise, it’s dif­fi­cult to make this type of dir­ect com­par­ison on a live cam­paign, due to the ever-changing nature of com­pet­i­tion, qual­ity score, pos­i­tions and costs. How­ever, from exper­i­ence, typ­ic­ally for b2c the bene­fit of a higher qual­ity score from optim­ising ad cop­ies towards CTR (with res­ult­ing lowered CPC and higher pos­i­tion) out­weighs the altern­at­ive, whereas for B2B it might not be the case.

There are many, many cus­tomer seg­ment­a­tions in the world of mar­ket­ing. Typ­ic­ally, these involve a chunk of research to determ­ine a set of buyer arche­types. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on cam­pus’, ‘har­assed MD’ and ‘digital refusenik’.

As an approach, they can be pretty help­ful. They provide a short­hand way of look­ing at an audi­ence – one which enables us to form more tar­geted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The prob­lem, how­ever, is that typ­ic­ally they are simply made up.

That’s unfair of course. These seg­ments rep­res­ent por­traits of group­ings of char­ac­ter­ist­ics as seen by the research­ers. We get a group of people that kinda, sorta look like X. But the point I’m mak­ing is that exactly what these group­ings are is fun­da­ment­ally down to the sub­ject­ive view of the researcher.

Myers-Briggs – the ulti­mate segmentation?

A few years back, I decided to try to do bet­ter. I’d been on some lead­er­ship train­ing course and taken a test to determ­ine my Myers-Briggs per­son­al­ity. I found what it told me to be both accur­ate and intriguing.

Many of you will know of Myers-Briggs – it’s been around some 50+ years and is based on the work of Carl Jung. Essen­tially it breaks the world down into 16 per­son­al­ity types (which can be clustered into 4 groups). The indi­vidual types are given 4-letter codes. Mine is INTP which means I’m Intro­ver­ted, iNtu­it­ive, Think­ing and Per­ceiv­ing. I won’t go into more detail here as you can find out all that on the hundred’s of sites already devoted to the topic.

The key thing for me is that over the years mil­lions of people have taken Myers-Briggs tests (the most widely used is called the MBTI). This means that we have a huge body of evid­ence about what makes an indi­vidual per­son­al­ity type tick. I began won­der­ing whether we could use these types as a kind of über–segmentation system.

Typ­ing IT buyers

We decided that the only way to find out was to try an exper­i­ment. At Ban­ner, we cre­ated a kind of Myers-Briggs-lite test that could be com­pleted in a few minutes online. We then tested it to see that it broadly delivered the same res­ults as other tests. And then we invited IT pro­fes­sion­als in the US, UK, France and Ger­many to have a go. Every­one who com­pleted the sur­vey got a copy of their res­ults and a little bit of ana­lysis for their effort.

We got just under 1,000 responses. And the res­ults were rather remarkable:

Focus­ing just on Europe for a moment, out of the 16 types, two alone accoun­ted for 40% of the IT pro­fes­sion­als we sur­veyed. One was my own type, INTP (which we termed Archi­tects) with 22% and the other was ISTP (which we called Craftsmen).

We then com­pared Europe to the US – aston­ish­ingly the top per­son­al­ity type in Europe accoun­ted for just 5% of US IT professionals.

And France and Ger­many were almost polar opposites.

A present­a­tion of the top-line res­ults is embed­ded below. You can down­load it from Slideshare.

The good and the bad

So is this really the pan­acea for seg­ment­a­tion? Well, not quite.

Where it appears to work well is in spe­cial­ised job roles. As soon as it is exten­ded to more gen­eral busi­ness roles (eg gen­eral man­age­ment) the indi­vidual per­son­al­ity spikes van­ish and the dis­tri­bu­tion returns to that of the gen­eral population.

There are those who are not con­vinced by Myers-Briggs as an approach to per­son­al­ity – Google ‘Cri­ti­cisms of Myers-Briggs’ for a pretty com­pre­hens­ive list. There are a whole bunch of other com­pet­ing systems.

But, as a pos­sible approach it at least removes some of the sub­jectiv­ity from seg­ment­a­tion. The pro­files we built up (by review­ing every piece of lit­er­at­ure on the sub­ject) gave us over 60 dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity attrib­utes – from how people make decisions and how they like to be com­mu­nic­ated with through to what kind of par­ents they make and how they react under stress.

See what you think.

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.

Per­haps pre­dict­ably, it was the day’s agenda and cal­ibre of the speaker line-up that attrac­ted most people to the first event. Not to men­tion it was free to our invit­ees. Of course our speak­ers scored very highly, but com­ing away from the day almost all com­men­ted on how much they’d val­ued the oppor­tun­ity to net­work. I’m sure they found it cath­artic to share some pain and under­stand that oth­ers out there were try­ing to over­come the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feed­back came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in put­ting together the agenda for the forth­com­ing summit:

1. People want more prac­tical con­tent and less of the the­or­et­ical. There’s an appet­ite for stor­ies of blood­ied knuckles, as well as a hun­ger for real learn­ings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very con­scious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side mar­keters telling their stor­ies. This time round we’re try­ing to encour­age our speak­ers to tell their suc­cess stor­ies, and what mis­takes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is com­ing along to tell the story of how he and other mar­keters trans­formed sap.com from a largely bro­chure­ware site to a ‘demand gen­er­a­tion machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more oppor­tun­ity to net­work and learn from their peers. We had some great table con­ver­sa­tions at lunch­time last time round, and we tried to allow gen­er­ous breaks. For the most part people res­isted the lure of their Black­Ber­ries, made con­ver­sa­tion and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit fur­ther and we’ve made the after­noon ses­sions entirely inter­act­ive. Attendees will have the oppor­tun­ity to attend three out of four work­shops on social media, accel­er­at­ing sales, using web­cast­ing and online video, and meas­ur­ing and optim­ising cam­paigns. We’re going to have people cap­tur­ing learn­ings from one group to another so that through the course of the after­noon we gen­er­ate a body of know­ledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the con­tent, there was a lot of call for tips on mak­ing the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and prov­ing a return on mar­ket­ing activ­ity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cas­sidy, is an ex IBM mar­keter now at European com­pany Step­Stone. In his pre­vi­ous life with a budget of mil­lions, his greatest chal­lenge used to be how to spend mar­ket­ing budget fast enough. He’s now in a pos­i­tion where every penny (cent) has to be accoun­ted for. Jim will talk about what he’s pri­or­it­ising, how he’s mak­ing a case for spend with the board, and how he’s mak­ing his mar­ket­ing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Job­bins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hope­fully that gives you some­thing of a taster for what’s to come on the 30^th April. If you need any more encour­age­ment, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stun­ning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remem­ber, we’re only accept­ing regis­tra­tions from client-side mar­keters from the B2B ser­vices, tech­no­logy and tele­coms sec­tors. No offence inten­ded to oth­ers, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hope­fully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twit­ter­ing kind, you can get reg­u­lar updates by fol­low­ing us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or sub­scrib­ing to the RSS feed

One of the big themes of our upcom­ing Sum­mit is going to be the import­ance of con­tent when it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads. My favour­ite quote on the topic comes from the people over at the advert­ising giant JWT, who pro­claimed when relaunch­ing the agency that we needed to “stop inter­rupt­ing what people are inter­ested in, and be what people are inter­ested in.” Two years on and it still rings true as a clarion call to our industry. But the fact remains that the bulk of demand gen­er­a­tion spend­ing still gets piled in to intrus­ive, inter­rupt­ive marketing.

I believe that’s because so many of the prin­ciples and think­ing driv­ing mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions are still derived from the old advert­ising world. The more atten­tion spans have shortened, the more time we’ve spent agon­ising over the single ‘killer’ concept that’s going to stick in people’s heads, the arrest­ing visual that’s going to grab their atten­tion, the call to action that’s going to make them click or pick up the phone.

By com­par­ison, most agen­cies tend to spend very little time think­ing about what they’re actu­ally driv­ing people to. Typ­ic­ally, a land­ing page with a visual and head­line that per­haps match the DM piece. A col­lec­tion of all our ana­lyst white papers and product data­sheets. And forms ask­ing cus­tom­ers to tell us everything from their budget to their waist size.

What if we were to chan­nel more of our energy and cre­ativ­ity into devel­op­ing the con­tent that actu­ally helps people decide whether our product or ser­vice is right for them? Bet­ter still, help them to get stuff that mat­ters to them done. We are look­ing at re-writing our cre­at­ive briefs so that we force ourselves to think about the con­tent before we dive into the com­mu­nic­a­tion. The simple logic says if we first make the des­tin­a­tion more attract­ive, then design­ing the sign­posts that get people there becomes so much easier.

We’re really excited about an upcom­ing event we’re co-hosting with a bunch of like-minded part­ners. On Novem­ber 4^th we’re launch­ing the European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit in part­ner­ship with Google, Elo­qua, Bright­TALK and Mar­ketOne. It’s going to be held in Lon­don at Alti­tude, which is on the very top floor of Mill­bank tower with views across Lon­don. Speak­ers include Amanda Job­bins, Omniture’s Neil Mor­gan, Jeremy Bevan from Nov­ell and Justin Gale, a senior online mar­keter from HP.

So why are we doing this? Well we’re really see­ing a major change in the way demand gen­er­a­tion is mov­ing. More import­antly, the way in which pro­spects and cus­tom­ers are respond­ing to cam­paigns. The frag­ment­a­tion of media chan­nels, increas­ing cyn­icism and res­ist­ance to push ‘mar­ket­ing’, coupled with empowered cus­tom­ers who search for whatever they need and would sooner be talk­ing to each other than vendors. OK, so this doesn’t neces­sar­ily make us mar­ket­ing vis­ion­ar­ies, but at a time when everyone’s begin­ning to feel the pinch (or wait­ing to feel it) — it makes it more of a press­ing issue than it has been for the last year. Best start plan­ning sooner rather than later.

We figured it would be a good start to gather together some experts from across the industry. Not just our fel­low hosts, but some of our cus­tom­ers and their peers who are actu­ally tack­ling some of the chal­lenges we’re all facing… How to develop con­tent that people want to engage with and map it to the buy­ing cycle; how to tar­get timely, rel­ev­ant com­mu­nic­a­tions to someone whose name you don’t neces­sar­ily know; how to har­ness emer­ging and social media; and how to turn cus­tom­ers into advoc­ates, either online or face-to-face. Then of course there’s the small mat­ter of meas­ur­ing return on all these mar­ket­ing investments.

Over the next couple of weeks in the run-up to the event I’ll be pick­ing up some of these themes and expand­ing on them. In the mean­time you can visit the event site here. It’s open to mar­keters from tech­no­logy and tele­coms com­pan­ies, B2B and B2C. A bunch of invit­a­tions should be going out in the next day or two so keep an eye on your in-tray and in-box.

So I spent yes­ter­day at this year’s Insti­tute of Dir­ect Mar­ket­ing Business-to-Business Con­fer­ence. I rarely get to con­fer­ences. Even the ones I book on always seem to fall on days where ‘stuff hap­pens’ and I become another no-show. But yes­ter­day, I actu­ally made it.

And wished I hadn’t.

The only reason I will go to events like these is to learn stuff. I’m not inter­ested in the net­work­ing (prob­ably because I’m rub­bish at it) and catered food only holds so much appeal. It’s all about new think­ing that chal­lenges the mind and expands my understanding.

Apart from the odd men­tion of blogs and a good over­view of search mar­ket­ing (presen­ted really well by Chris War­wick of Hoover’s) this could have been a con­fer­ence in 1997 rather than 2007. We were told of the need to under­stand busi­ness cus­tom­ers as people. How mar­ket­ing and sales really should get on bet­ter. And given an insight into how a cam­paign can pro­gress from “frankly we don’t know what we’re doing” to “for the most part, we do know what we’re doing.”

I then joined the “mar­ket­ing to cor­por­ates” stream that con­scien­tiously avoided any men­tion what­so­ever of how to mar­ket to cor­por­ates. Soon after, I lost the will to live.

Business-to-business has always been FMCG’s ugly sis­ter. But the chal­lenges and oppor­tun­it­ies within B2B/considered pur­chase are (IMHO) far more inter­est­ing than FMCG. The com­plex­ity of the sales. The need to really engage with the mar­ket over a long period. The chance to part­ner with cus­tom­ers. All offer massive scope for innov­at­ive think­ing and fresh approaches.

If what I saw yes­ter­day is rep­res­ent­at­ive of where most of the industry is at, we should all be very afraid.

When Chev­ro­let jumped into con­sumer gen­er­ated media with its ‘build your own Tahoe ad’ there was a col­lect­ive gasp of ‘you don’t wanna do that’ from the inter­net. And yes, pretty soon people put their satir­ical skills to work with a series of ads high­light­ing the Tahoe’s woe­ful green cre­den­tials and the gen­eral per­ceived stu­pid­ity of any­one con­sid­er­ing buy­ing one. As of right now, you can see over 70 of these on You­Tube (click here for a look). And, as is the norm, once the ini­tial furore died down, it all went quiet.

Well, Wired has fol­lowed up on the story to see how well (or not) the cam­paign actu­ally worked.

As it turns out, not badly at all.

BY ANY OBJECTIVE MEASURE, the Tahoe Appren­tice cam­paign has to be judged a suc­cess. The micros­ite attrac­ted 629,000 vis­it­ors by the time the con­test win­ner, Michael Thrams from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On aver­age, those vis­it­ors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks run­ning, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many reques­ted info or left a cookie trail to deal­ers’ sites.

I guess the kind of people who are con­sid­er­ing buy­ing a Tahoe really won’t be that wor­ried about its eco-credentials. They are not mak­ing a decision between a Tahoe and a Prius after all but prob­ably between Chevy’s option and an even worse gas guzz­ler from another man­u­fac­turer. In that con­text, the dif­fer­ence between a brand that helps them cel­eb­rate their decision and oth­ers who remain detached is pretty clear. It’s just a shame that it’s work­ing to put yet more CO2 into the air.