I had the opportunity to sit down with Webmaster Radio last week at SES to discuss the rising importance of content marketing to SEO as well as how the role of “marketer” needs to change.  The shift in search and seo is indicative of the larger shift within the digital marketing community.  I also got a chance to discuss how our educational system is not designed to produce the type of marketers and engineers that are needed for the future and what can be done to change that.

It was really interesting to see how many content marketing companies are starting to pop up within the search community, specifically trying to put numbers to words.  After all, creativity without conversion = 0!  Listen to the interview over at webmaster world.

Call it the ‘Death of Marketing Tour,” a bit of a morbid title, but the theme is rapidly gaining traction. That’s because it’s not actually about the “death” of marketing, but about its total re-birth in the social era.

Pelin and I made two local speaking stops in the last two weeks to deliver STG’s though-provoking new presentation: “The Death of Marketing as We Know It: Adapting Marketing to Changing Customer Behaviors and Demands.” The presentation describes the sea change in marketing, from outbound to inbound programs; the rise of the “content engineer” to effectively engage the changing customer; and the importance of establishing a culture of measurement to optimize the marketing mix. The genesis for the presentation came from an essay STG wrote for Cornell Enterprise called “The Birth of Customer 2.0 & The Death of Marketing As We Know It.”

Our first stop last month: the San Diego Software Industries Council (SDSIC) on April 22. The feedback was great. Wrote one marketing executive: “This was the best presentation that I’ve attended through SDSIC to date (and I’ve attended quite a few). Congratulations on a successful event today!”

Our second stop: San Diego State University (SDSU), where we spoke to Karen Marchetti‘s Internet marketing class. The response was great there too, with many students engaging with us on emerging marketing careers in new media.

Earlier this spring, Pelin gave a similar presentation to the Cornell University Entrepreneurship and Innovative Institute. Last month, Pelin and Rand gave a university wide presentation at the University of the Pacific (UoP), which may be considering a future curriculum in  content engineering.

As the web becomes cluttered with more data and spam generated by black hat games and content farms, relevant Content becomes more critical. The key is findability. Can your content be found? There are many ways to insure good results but there’s a lack of formal education around the new media and just how to do that. Though Web Analytics has been around for a decade, few really use it to optimize their work and we know why and it needs to be addressed by higer education and creating relevant graduates. But things are changing so quickly, so how do you that in this environment and what is the role of higher education in setting the foundation, and giving tools to future content creators?

I’ve been talking about a new disciple that I’ve called Content Engineering for about five years, and now I’m happy to say that higher education is addressing the issue head-on. Pelin and I are speaking to the students and facility, hosted by the Deans of the Business, Engineering and Liberal Arts schools at the University of the Pacific to share our vision of how Social Media is changing marketing and those of us who create content. What’s key is that UOP recognizes that students and future Content Engineers will need critical skills across disciplines – English & Communications; Business and Engineering. We expect to see more schools and universities create programs that address these requirements in the near future.

This is a good start.

I am here at beautiful but frigid Cornell, at the invitation of Steven Gal of the Johnson Graduate School of Business, to guest lecture at his entrepreneurial marketing class.  The reason for the invite:  MBA students are starved for practical knowledge on how to leverage social media and online marketing for their entrepreneurial efforts.   When Dr. Gal announced my impending visit to his colleagues, other entrepreneurship professors jumped at the opportunity to engage me as well.  My jam-packed schedule for the three days on campus include several classroom lectures, a lecture at the Cornell Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute, meeting with the aspiring entrepreneurs of Cornell eLab, dinners with the entrepreneurship professors and few of their hand-picked students, as well as meeting with the Cornell Enterprise team.  Add to this the numerous ad-hoc meetings with individual student-entrepreneurs who want to pick my brain on their go-to-market models. You get the picture…Whew!

But there is good reason for this insane demand…and Dr. David BenDaniel said it best during dinner last night: Universities are falling behind in incorporating the latest social media and online marketing developments – and their massive implications to business strategy – into their curriculums.  (Incidentally Dr. BenDaniel was my entrepreneurship professor during my Johnson years…and helped me get connected with UCSD Connect which lead to my very first start-up experience – the man is an icon! ).   Cornell is actually doing much better than most in this area since it has such a well-organized curriculum around entrepreneurship at Johnson as well as a massive University-wide initiative.   But traditional marketing courses in most business schools still focus too much on “old-style” marketing strategies and are creating future Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)-marketing leaders.   This needs to change.   Clearly not all MBA students are entrepreneurial, and many will take on more traditional marketing roles within CPG companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever or P&G.  But the reality is that the use of social media and online marketing is no longer limited to start-ups or tech companies in Silicon Valley.  One of the social media success examples I gave during my lectures is about Whole Foods.  Whole Foods has impressively embraced social media more than most, gathering over nearly 2 million followers on Twitter and half million fans on Facebook in the process. While it is easy to understand why a relatively young company or one started by a tech-savvy founder would so completely embrace social media communication tools, it is quite a bit more remarkable for an almost 30 year old established brick and mortar company with roughly 50,000 employees and over 270 stores worldwide to have done so.  And they are not alone.  More and more companies are following this model and embracing inbound marketing strategies to engage the new customer (Customer 2.0) in the emerging media channels.

Seems to me we have a great opportunity to add our new truths to the well-established curriculum.   If we don’t teach tomorrow’s business leaders about the opportunities and challenges presented by social media and online marketing, how can we expect them to lead their employees who are likely to be more social-media savvy then their managers? How can we expect them to steer their companies successfully without at least understanding the new go-to-market models powered by the social Web?  While there is undoubtedly a lot of hands-on learning the students will do when they step out into the “real world”, business schools must do their part in educating our future business leaders to not just survive but thrive in this brave new world.  My trip here indicates that the Johnson entrepreneurship professors certainly get this…and the conversation with Dr.  Vithala Rao this afternoon – who asked me to come back in the fall for more! - tells me Johnson marketing is on board as well…

I am delighted that my Alma Mater is once again taking the lead.  I’d say definitely worth the 18 hour round-trip 

It’s sure great to talk to real people for perspective. We don’t do it nearly enough. Those of us in Silicon Valley spend too much time talking to each other and obsess endlessly about the buzz du jour – Twitter’s analytics;  Facebook’s privacy; the newest browser; Google’s new search algorithm and the games SEOs play. We talk about Social CRM, Social Selling, Customer 2.0. viral, Freemium, brand  and conversions.  But it’s not the real world.

My partner Pelin and I were invited to present a keynote recently for a Strategic Marketing Conference hosted by Cornell University at the beautiful and historic FDR Presidential Library, a few hours from NYC, in the Hudson Valley where the autumn colors where in their full glory. We presented our topic, and a recurring them about how marketing is dramatically changing to attendees from around the country – professors; business leaders, students and entrepreneurs.

We were honored to present our observations about the rise of Inbound Marketing, and some of our experience working with “cutting edge firms”, like Eightfold Logic, ViralHeat, and InsideView each pioneering these new concepts. We regularly speak at technical conferences, but we thought this might be a bit different as it had a general and mostly non technical audience. A few minutes into our presentation we asked a series of questions to find out more about the attendees, “How many of you use web analytics” – most hands went up.  That’s good we thought. “How many of you use links on your web site, and know how to link”?  This time almost no hands were raised and few knew how to link, and NO ONE knew the value search engines place on the right links!

How could that be? Surely they MUST understand the value of linking? Well, no, they didn’t. I’ve been creating marketing applications for 15 years and have to constantly  be reminded about the adoption myth. The one where I think everyone uses our products, and they don’t. While the rate of adoption will certainly be more rapid than it’s been in the past, the rest of the world is not living in our tech bubble. The real world is doing just fine and it’s good for me to get out and be reminded not drink too much of my own bath water. While a link is ubiquitous, its value is not understood by most. And that’s the lesson I relearned during my visit to Cornell. In future posts I’ll talk about how we can accelerate adoption. What role colleges and universities need to play, and what marketing skills will look like in the not too distant future.

Rand and I just gave a very well-attended webinar to the Cornell Entrepreneur Network titled, “The Birth of Customer 2.0 and the Death of Marketing as we know it”. One of the primary trends we discussed is the emergence of Inbound Marketing – and given the tremendous interest, I wanted to talk a bit more about it here on our blog.

It is clear to all of us that online marketing and social media have dramatically changed the marketing practice over the past decade. They have certainly made it a lot more measurable and accountable – much more of a science. They have also made it a lot more interactive and collaborative with the target customer.

Yet it is important to note that some of the marketing fundamentals haven’t changed. Marketing has always been and continues to be about knowing our audience so we can target them with relevant messages that will resonate. Of course the best way to resonate with our audience – really in any situation – is by listening to them before talking. So the fundamental approach to marketing hasn’t changed but how we do it, the tools we employ and how we define and measure success certainly has…

Traditional – or as it is coming to be known as “Outbound Marketing” – focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness and demand through PR, online and offline advertising as well as direct mail and email promotions. It is the company reaching out to the customer – presumably with a compelling message or offer – to entice them to buy their products and services.

Inbound Marketing is a new approach to marketing that optimizes getting found by customers. It is about attracting customers to the business…Whether through search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, social media, or relevant cross-linking, Inbound Marketing is focused on helping businesses improve website “findability” for qualified buyers. The bonus is Inbound Marketing also benefits the visitor with improved content relevancy and linked resources.

What’s important to note about outbound marketing is that it is “interrupt-driven”. What I mean by that is, just like that a TV or pop-up web ad, we interrupt whatever the customer (both B2B and B2C) may be doing with a “message from the sponsor”. Even email is interrupt driven.

So to put it simply, with Inbound Marketing, marketers “earn their way in” vs. “buy, beg or bug their way in”!
One of the biggest problems with outbound marketing – besides the interruption factor – is that it has to rise above the noise to be effective…and the amount of noise is growing exponentially. There are too many ads, too many email offers, too many websites, simply too much content out there – and of course that’s further complicated by less and less time and attention on the part of the buyer.

In an earlier post, I described Customer 2.0 as NOT wanting to be “sold to”…as being informed about products and services not from the vendor’s messaging but from peer to peer conversations. Hence interrupt driven marketing is NOT effective with Customer 2.0. They want to find the right products and services themselves. But given the increasing noise level I just described, rising above it and being “findable” isn’t easy.

The KEY to findability is relevance. It is back to those marketing fundamentals I described earlier, since relevance comes from a deeper understanding of customer behavior and sentiment…it comes from listening before shouting out our outbound marketing messages.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Inbound Marketing comes with another bonus: unlike its program $$ heavy counterpart, it is people (that is time and effort) heavy. It is about generating the right content in the right places, building and fostering user communities for productive engagement to enable the right people – qualified prospects – to FIND us. Sounds interesting? Stay tuned for more discussion on innovative approaches and emerging best practices in a future post…

It sounds like one of those chicken or the egg questions…and given all the buzz about Sales 2.0 technologies and methodologies, you might be tempted to answer “Sales 2.0”.  But I think Sales 2.0 is really the sales organizations response to the “evolve or die” mandate they face, given the smarter and more informed buyer they have to sell to: Customer 2.0.   I do believe the customer has evolved faster than the sales guy…and I believe this is – at least in part – due to how B2B trends typically follow B2C.  Prospects who are looking to make B2B purchase decisions are also consumers, and have been making B2C decisions for a long time.  Access to online reviews, comparison shopping engines, Facebook or Twitter “conversations” on products and services they are evaluating has turned them into much wiser B2C buyers…So, why not transfer that same process, powered by “social intelligence”, to the B2B buying cycle? 

I started an earlier blog post with the observation “We market and sell in a brave new world where prospects are equipped with near x-ray vision into companies, products and people they are considering doing business with.”  This statement implies Customer 2.0 holds all the cards!  Hence, evening out the playing field requires sales to be just as knowledgeable about the buyer and bring real value to the sales process by demonstrating why their products and services can solve the customer’s unique business challenges.  Relevance emerges as the key to synchronizing the selling cycle with the buying cycle.  Armed with a 360° view of their prospect’s business that can only come from “listening to” them and engaging them through social media, sales people now have the opportunity to gain the deep insights necessary to get Customer 2.0’s attention – insights that will drive Customer 2.0 into deeper engagement with your company and delivering on the ultimate promise of Sales 2.0!

The ZiegenBock beer is going down smooth. Austin airport is a great place to wait for a flight. And, Ray’s Chuck Wagon at Asleep at the Wheel surely serves the finest briquette of beef in any airport. Dry and spicy. Country rock, courtesy of a SXSW (the locals say “South – By”) band helps me collect my thoughts about the day here.

This is the first time for me attending the show. And it will no doubt be the first of many. Austin is Portland meets Texas – hip, clean, smart and technology enabled with a little barbeque sauce. SXSW takes over town attracting (perhaps) hundreds of thousands to the festival.

 I spoke at session titled “Is too Much Math Killing Marketing” and debated the point with UK Ad Agency chief Mike Teasdale who took the position that it has. Mike’s a brilliant ad guy, fast, and with biting humor so I had to be careful not to get cut up in the knife fight on stage. In Bush country, I made my points – with rhetorical shock and awe (I had to work in a Bush-ism). Actually, we’re mostly in agreement but for the sake of a good show each of us labored (or laboured as Mike would say) to support a pure position – me arguing for left brain and Mike right.

 We didn’t really have any expectations – would this group come hear our thoughts at 9:30 in the morning on the last day of the show after four long nights of SXSW parties – the other reason people seem to go, or would we speak to a big empty room?  The answer came in loud in clear, that despite the time there was a morning thirst for an answer to the question, and we gave it our all in front of a full ballroom at the Hilton.

 So here’s my summary. One of Mike’s main points is that data becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. He made fun of some of Eric Petersons‘ work around measuring visitor engagement. Now, I know and love Eric (we worked together in several firms – Web Trends and WebSideStory),  however  the audience made up mostly of interactive agency types, seemed to agree with Mike that it’s too complex.  He quoted Ogilvy and Dave Trott, “it’s better to be interesting and wrong than dull and right”.

 And the battle lines were drawn –  Math, Reason, Data, Left brain; English, Instinct, Imagination, Right brain. Too much math stops us from taking giant leaps, “it takes imagination to take a leap into the future”, he said. There where hoots from the crowd supporting the position.

 I started the counter point with the question “What is the Sound of Creativity When No One Can Hear It”? And quickly counter punched that the world today has changed as the internet provides us the tools and the empirical data to optimize. I followed up with the observation that, “we’re all becoming Content Engineers”. I’ve seen this movement for some years – one part creative director and what part data analyst.  Here’s what I said back in 2005 to ZDnet about the topic. This new breed needs to monitor, measure then maximize. Check out our SXSW presentation here.

 But the bottom line to my math is this, creativity without conversion = zero. And hopefully on that point I had a KO! Regardless, the debate stirred the pot and seems to have triggered interesting tweets – #toomuchmath, and blog posts. I would be curious to hear your thoughts?

This past week I moderated the Forecasting, Analytics and Compensation Management Panel at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (good event by the way – probably the best one yet!).  My diverse panel included sales execs from ArcSight, LaCrosse Footwear, and GuardianEdge who deployed Sales 2.0-powered sales management solutions from Xactly, Right 90 and Cloud 9 Analytics, respectively. 

Given my marketing analytics background (or DNA as some might say ), I’ve always been focused on making marketing more accountable to and aligned with sales. My personal edict is “You Cannot Improve What You Cannot Measure”, and I practice it religiously to ensure my clients drive the most revenue possible with their marketing dollars, great or small.  What was thrilling about my pre-conference conversations with the panelists was how the Sales 2.0 movement is enabling sales organizations to adopt a similar culture of measurement, bringing in much needed accountability.  Actually according to my panel, it is moving beyond accountability – and shifting sales into a culture of predictability.  Here is how: Sales management solutions, such as forecasting, business analytics and compensation management tools, improve visibility into sales performance with objective, dynamic data.  Better visibility in turn exposes volatility at the aggregate level as well as gives us the ability to drill down to pinpoint and act on the problem areas – whether product line, geo, sales rep, lead source – resulting in overall sales performance predictability.

Think about it:

• Business Analytics improve visibility into the pipeline. With just a couple of clicks, we can see what deals are won, lost, closed, or added to your pipeline, even deals that slipped.  Better pipeline analytics help drive a better forecast and also help alignment with marketing re: driving the appropriate lead gen efforts to mitigate potential shortfalls. 
• Accurate sales forecasting, based on dynamic sales data, can build trust in the forecast for run-rate business as well as new demand, ensuring alignment with production – getting us a step closer to achieving the dual goals of improved profitability and customer sat.
• Smart compensation management can help us incent sales people to drive sales of the “right” products (and you got it, we get to define what “right” means!).  We can now adapt compensation plans to match changing market conditions to better align sales comp to business objectives.

Uncovering volatility and bringing about predictability into sales performance have far reaching benefits. It of course helps with the all important revenue numbers – but also drives organizational alignment between sales and finance, sales and marketing, sales and product management, sales and production… (yep, you get the picture) and improves trust between these often mistrusting departments.   Most importantly, it translates into customer value in the form of a more efficient and customer-centric organization. And, to quote a popular MasterCard ad, “that’s priceless!”

We market and sell in a brave new world where prospects are equipped with near x-ray vision into companies, products and people they are considering doing business with. Attention span crunch has become pandemic, and we now have the mandate of ensuring every customer engagement is targeted and relevant to synchronize buying and selling cycles – or risk being left behind to join the multitude of businesses that simply didn’t make the necessary transformations in time.

It wasn’t too long ago where the norm was for marketing and sales teams to shout insults and pass blame on for not reaching revenue goals: “The leads are worthless!”…”No, it’s the sales reps who just cannot close!!” Fast forward a decade and the rules have changed. Marketing is now measured and compensated more like sales reps on attainment of goals; and our friends in sales are having to think more marketing-like and segment and target prospects with the right messages at the right time to increase conversions. Welcome to the world of sales and marketing 2.0 or “Smarketing”!

The 2.0 approach requires the art of selling and marketing (a.k.a. creativity) to be augmented with a healthy dose of science (a.k.a. repeatability) to achieve the massive productivity gains required. While there are several factors that contribute to realizing these efficiencies, I believe there a few that are paramount to increasing accountability, reducing customer acquisition costs, and ultimately driving revenue.

Here are the four essential steps to grabbing the Sales and Marketing 2.0 brass ring:

• Align sales and marketing organizations around jointly-defined processes, definitions and success metrics. Establish a “system of record” – whether it is your CRM or your marketing automation system or both if they are synched – to ensure you are capturing all customer engagements in one place. And make sure to agree on the definition of sales stages to ensure your lead scoring process is consistent and gives you the necessary data to measure the effectiveness of each of your programs.
• Target the right audience with the right message at the right time. The days of one-to-many mass emails are gone. Launch targeted one-to-few campaigns by segmenting your prospect database. Watch for trigger events in the industries or geographies you are targeting to reach out to prospects with information that’s relevant to their current initiatives and urgent business challenges. Use behavioral targeting based on how your prospect is engaging with your website or your “free trial”.
• If lead scores indicate prospects are not quite sales-ready, nurture them! Educating prospects with whitepapers, tips and tricks emails or educational webinars are great ways to nudge them along the sales cycle (and effectively reduce your cost per lead!).
• And… don’t underestimate the power of continually testing and measuring the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. Is your website attracting and converting the right prospects? Which programs have the highest percentage of converting into sales-ready leads? How do changes in message or design translate into improvements in conversion rates? Remember, you cannot improve what you cannot measure!

Want to find out what we think on next gen demand generation strategies or dig deeper into how you can implement some of these recommendations? Then follow us on our new blog Smarketer. We hope you will join the conversation – and share your own experiences as well!