SIIA is delighted to announce a new video series, filmed at DreamForce 2010! With about 30,000 attendees, DreamForce has seen spectacular growth. This was SIIA’s first time exhibiting at DreamForce and we look forward to seeing everyone next year and in May at SIIA’s own executive cloud computing conference, All About the Cloud.
Why bad news is good
February 12, 2010 By
Written by Frank Catalano, Principal, Intrinsic Strategy
Submitted by Intrinsic Strategy
It’s inevitable that, during the slow crawl up through economic recovery, companies will have good patches and bad patches. What they shouldn’t do is succumb to the natural corporate temptation to share only good news.
This might seem counter intuitive to traditionalists: Share bad news with customers? But that will hurt our image, our customers’ trust in us and maybe our business. But what these traditionalists forget is we live in a century with customers who both distrust typical marketing messages … and aren’t afraid to use Twitter.
I think of this as my fifth and final myth of marketing coming out of a downturn: Communicate only good news. And it’s one I discussed with The Bellevue CollectionMerchants last month.
Let’s be realistic, for two reasons. First: As firms get back on their feet there will be missteps. Customers know this, and expect more transparency. People expect to hear bad news when coming out of bad times, especially if they know an individual industry sector has been troubled. If all they hear instead is happy-fluffy-bunny marketing speak, they will either be suspicious and wonder what you’re hiding, or they may wonder if you’re clueless about the true state of affairs. That’s not a good either-or to be in the middle of.
Second: Twitter, blogs and online discussion boards make it impossible to control or “manage” bad news in the old mass media sense when it comes to developments that affect large numbers of customers directly. Once it’s out there, it’s out there — and it spreads fast. It’s better to be slightly ahead of it than sweeping up from behind.
Read the rest at: Intrinsic Strategy
Introducing Seed Nurturing
January 28, 2010 By
Written by Jon Miller, VP Marketing, Marketo
Submitted by Marketo
One thing you’ll notice about most lead nurturing campaigns is the fact that they usually take place after prospects land on your site and enter your database. However, what happens when qualified prospects visit your site or social media sites anonymously where you don’t necessarily have their names or e-mails?
This is where seed nurturing comes into play. Seed nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information.
It comes down to is this: prospects are educating themselves long before you actually identify them by landing on your corporate Web site as anonymous visitors, and researching your products and services through third-party resources, word-of-mouth recommendations, and social media sites. Just because you can’t identify these individuals doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified prospects — and because of this, you must nurture them just as you would the known contacts in your database.
If you succeed at this, you will stay top of mind with your prospects as they educate themselves and move through the early stages of their buying process. As a result, they will come to you when they are ready to engage with a sales rep, and you will create a steady flow of highly qualified inbound leads. If you ignore the requirement to build relationships with these very early stage prospects, you’re yielding this opportunity to more agile competitors who will scoop these savvy prospects out from under you.
Read the rest at: Modern B2B Marketing