We’ve just returned from the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) held in sunny San Diego, CA, and for this first podcast of our B2B Marketing Podcast, we offer our thoughts about it. Key takeaways from the event, some of the interesting presentations we saw and what it all means for the B2B Marketer.

Demandbase Podcasters: Greg Ott (CMO), Amit Varshneya (VP Professional Services) and Jason Stewart (Director of Marketing)

Show Notes:

00:01 Podcast Show Introduction

00:55 Online Marketing Summit 2012 – Event Overview

03:05 Audience mix at the event

Top 3 concepts trending at the event

03:49  - Content

04:37  - Social

04:59  - Data and Analytics; BigData and Predictive Analytics

07:30 – The resurgence of the Tradeshow. How are Web and Data reviving it.

10:58 – Show wrap-up.

Demandbase B2B Marketing Podcast 1 – OMS Roundup. Play by clicking here

Some of the notable sessions at the event around these concepts – Joe Chernov’s keynote “From Content to Customer”, Joe Pulizzi’s “The Difference between Good and Great Content Marketing”, Jon Miller’s “The Definitve Guide to Metrics and Analytics” and Adam Needles’s “Balancing the Demand Equation”.

Happy New Year from Demandbase!

As I am sure many of you can relate, I love data.   We want to see our numbers rise, web traffic, social media activity, webinar attendees….but you have to wonder, am I bringing in the right people? Are they in my target industry? My web traffic is up 20% but who are these new visitors?

I have recently been setting up our Google Analytics instance with my team here at Demandbase.  The added bonus working here, is being able to use our own Demandbase RTID data as additional custom variables to the mix,  which adds a new layer of fun.  The ability to add in this additional firmographic data puts a face to the data so to speak, converting even non data geeks to believers.  Instead of getting yawns at my marketing metrics meeting for reporting out the average page views for Browser386, eyes are all a flutter to know that Cisco Systems checked out 10 pages including 2 case studies.

For our install, we chose to add in the custom variable data:

• Industry
• Revenue Range
• Company Name
• Account Status…….and last but not least our newly released
• Audience Classifications

AUDIENCE CLASSIFICATIONS

Now when my CMO raves about the 20% spike in traffic from our site and wants insight into the who? I have it… I can answer the who by slicing and dicing between any of my custom variables.

Taking it one step further….at Demandbase we have a target profile for our prospects as most of us marketers do. These are the people who are important to us, in our case a company size and subset of industries that are our target market.  We created a custom segment that bands together the key attributes of our target company and allows us to report out data on just the companies we WANT visiting our website.

Results?   Now instead of focusing on when we have a 20% spike in web traffic we want to know when we have a 20% lift from our target segment. This in turn curbs our behavior as marketers to focus our marketing activities on the right audience, not just volume alone.

The topic is the Zero Moment of Truth in buying, that online decision-making moment when an individual decides to make a purchase.

In the Google context, this seems to be mainly focused on that moment when a consumer decides to spend money, but as BtoB buyers are beginning to make buying decisions and research products while utilizing the same methods they have become accustomed to while shopping for themselves, there is a tremendous amount of applicability of this “ZMOT” when considering Buyer 2.0.

In BotB, the Zero Moment of Truth is when an individual has done enough research about a product or service on their own and decides to make the commitment to a company by filling out an online form and making the transition from a web visitor to a lead. No money changes hands, but it is often a harder transaction to complete than a simple purchase.

At Demandbase we are focused on ways to help BtoB marketers accelerate that Zero Moment of Truth by helping to ensure that web visitors see content that is relevant to them before the identify themselves. That when they are faced with the decision about filling out a form, the number of fields on that form are reasonable enough to eliminate any friction without making sacrifices to the data quality that your company requires. We want to ensure that your top prospects are welcomed with strategically offered chat invitations, and that your web analytics include information about the offers and content that performs the best when it is shown to the companies and industries and prospects that matter the most.

Please join us on Friday 12/9/11 for the Zero Moment of Truth webinar, or click here to learn more about how Demandbase can accelerate the Zero Moment of Truth for Buyer 2.0.

You can register here, but the session on Website Conversion Optimization starts at 2PM pacific time. This is an interesting session to me because it takes a slightly different approach to content strategy and targeting than much of what is discussed in BtoB marketing today. Instead of strictly building buyer personas and mapping content to where “identified” individuals are the the funnel, it looks at how to convert more of the “unidentified” traffic hitting your website by focusing on account-level descriptions and offers.

Here is a description:
Learn how Adobe Systems uses real-time visitor identification to enhance the performance of their marketing automation, web analytics, and A/B and Multivariate testing tools in order to deliver relevant, personalized, account-based content to the most valuable prospects hitting their website.

Full Event Details

Register Here

There will also be a virtual trade show floor, online chat and networking, and all of the benefits of a trade show directly from the comfort of your desk. If you have never been to a virtual show before, this is a great introduction to the space. And remember, as host Brian Wilson says … fear the beard, not the technology!

Demandbases' David and Tamara

Congratulations to our 11 customers who are Markie Finalists. And a special call out to the following Markie winners:

• Rally Software- Best Lead Nurturing Program
• NetApp – Marketing Center of Excellence
• McAfee- Clean House
• ArcSight- Marketing Visionary: Meagen Eisenberg,
• Isilon Systems - Event Nirvana
• Progress Software – Connecting in the AppCloud

Rally Software and McAfee both were selected as speakers this year, if you missed their presentations, they are posted on Eloqua’s Topliners.

Customers and Friends Celebrate After the Markie's

And finally we celebrated the success this year at the Markie’s at our after party at 111 Minna. Check out the pictures of the evening on our Demandbase Facebook page.

We look forward to more fun in 2012!

Shari Johnston

• Only show this messaging to accounts where it is relevant
• Highlight our offer to do a free forms audit for Eloqua customers
• Emphasize our presence at the show, through both our booth and with added events we are involved with during the show
• Showcase our “Wake Up Your Forms” theme for the event

Clearly not everyone going to demandbase.com is an Eloqua customer — so we used Demandbase Real-Time ID for Content, as well as some Named Account Marketing to create a version of the home page that would only be visible to companies we have identified internally as users of Eloqua.

Slide one, offering an Eloqua Forms Audit to all attendees of the show

Slide 2, inviting attendees to an "after-party" Demandbase is sponsoring with implementation partner DemandGen after the awards

Slide 3, offering a download describing how Demandbase works with Eloqua and emphasizing our theme ... "Wake Up Your Forms"

We did a similar home page update for Dreamforce, only we also tagged the IP Addresses we could find around Moscone Center to try and make sure anyone visiting the Demandbase website from the show would see Dreamforce messaging on our home page:

Custom Conference-Specific messaging made possible with Demandbase RTID

Hope to see you at Eloqua Experience! And don’t forget to ask us about the number 31…

• Executives cite the website as the top online source of sales leads, but 80% of B2B marketers don’t believe their site is generating leads to it’s full potential
• While 90% of non-technical respondents felt the website has not been performing to its potential, only 52% of IT respondents felt that way
• 87 percent of respondents report that the website needs to improve on the tracking and reporting of unregistered site users
• The major challenge in website analytics is not the data itself, but the ability to act on the data

B2B corporate websites are the leading demand generation engine for new sales leads, but B2B companies are struggling to optimize site performance and analyze insights around customer behavior once they arrive. And while companies have invested heavily in the corporate website, they are doing little to optimize the Web experience for those very audiences they have worked so hard to attract.

That being said, as we have been working with the media and sharing these results we noticed an interesting trend about what our survey says about social media as a lead generation tool. The single statistic the media challenged the most was the fact that social media, as a B2B lead generation source, was outperformed by personal connections and referrals, the corporate website, email marketing, and advertising.

Heck, even “other” performed better than social media.

There have been some interesting studies about social media as a lead generation tool. For example, Eloqua released this “Chart of the Week” a few weeks back about Klout and Conversions. In it they examine the performance of content that is shared via Twitter by individuals with high Klout scores … a metric for measuring social media influence.

“Content that is tweeted by highly influential people had an 6X lift in total visitors, AND those visitors were more then twice as likely to submit a form on our site in the future.”

Generally speaking, though, most B2B content never gets tweeted by @GuyKawasaki or @MarketingProfs. And Joel Rothman from Eloqua admits that “…the content was really great, and might have performed equally well without the high profile tweets. It’s hard to say that the tweets are what caused the response, or if the response triggered the tweets.”

In the opinion of our respondents, when it comes to consistently driving conversions, social media simply isn’t as reliable and scalable as other demand generation sources for B2B. And that one statistic was the number one thing that the press and bloggers pushed back on. None of my B2B marketing friends and colleagues were surprised or found it hard to believe, but articles about the findings were full of quotes like this one from Marketing Vox:

“More than likely they also don’t integrate their social media campaigns across all channels, online and offline. This is an important step, a survey by Gallup recently found – but one that few companies take.”

And this one from ZDNet:

“…this isn’t to say at all that businesses should abandon social media. It’s really only the beginning for this realm of marketing, and other studies and analysts have shown that this medium really resonates with younger generations. Thus, these results could be vastly different within a few years.”

It’s clear that there is some resistance to downplaying the role of social media marketing. It’s also interesting (and telling) that the study ZDNet links to is that it is not from a B2B company … it is a B2C study from Ford Motors and Twitter.

Full disclosure, we here at Demandbase are social media junkies just like many of you. I know my Klout score, and regularly access Facebook and use Tweetdeck to monitor Twitter for both my corporate and my personal interests. One of the leading drivers for “net new” names for events like webinars often come from PPC advertising on social media networks. But what is the right answer here? If you are a B2B marketer, where are your leads coming from? How reliable is social media as a lead generation source? And are things like PPC advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn muddying the waters? Is it social media or is is PPC?

And why do people find it so hard to admit that social media isn’t the best source of new leads?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Look at your slides in “sorter” mode where you see them all next to each other. Does every slide look exactly the same?

If every slide looks the same from the mile high view, it’s not going to be all that better when you get close up. Make sure there is some variety in there, offering your audience a little shock to the system every now and then.

Now about that haiku….did you know I was an award-winning poet? I won a copy of Carmen Taran’s book, Better Beginnings, for my poem on powerpoint…

So many words here
Is he really reading this?
I could have done that

Demandbase will be revealing the results of the survey on Thursday, September 29th when CMO Greg Ott and Scott Albro, CEO of Focus.com analyze and interpret the results in a live webinar. You can register to hear the results here.

They will be discussing the following questions:

- What is the #1 source of new leads for businesses?
- How is the website performing as a lead generation engine?
- Which is the top area for improving and generating new sales leads from existing traffic?
- What is the single most important performance indicator for website effectiveness?
- What is the single biggest challenge around usage of web analytics?

Please join us on the 29th by registering here.