Auto DM and how to humanize the bots

It's something I've never really considered before, but recently I've been pondering on whether or not to automatically reply to my new followers on twitter (so called Auto DMs).

You know the thing - you follow a subject matter expert and within minutes you get a bot-driven response back such as "Thanks for following" or "Check out my fantastic site" or "Hey, follow me on Facebook too!"

The problem is, this is all very self serving and self indulgent. And as a follower myself I'm not sure it really adds much value. Working with leading consumer brands, this is similar to the Welcome/Onboarding challenge many businesses have in trying to build an emotional connection with their consumers. This is difficult to achieve at scale, and most businesses resort to automation as a way to manage the volumes. But whether you're a business or an individual, we're all trying to sell/market our services in a way that helps us stand out from the crowd and build a better connection with our audiences.​ 

Back to me (sorry for being selfish), I really enjoy connecting with fellow marketers around the world and sharing thoughts and ideas. Auto DMs in the way most people use them, however, go against this. They're impersonal (bad), self promoting (badder) and have little thought put in to them (baddest). And above all, they're counter to the fundamental principles of social media - to share interesting stuff and to enter into a conversation.

That's why recently I came upon a great idea. Why not think a bit differently about Auto DMs, step away from the "about me" and step nearer the "about my community".​

That's why I've started to Auto DM new followers with a simple message that encapsulates gratitude for following along with a desire to share. It is this:​

• "Thanks for following me! If you're into B2B marketing I can also recommend AAAA, BBBB, CCCC"

No promoting my blog (you can find that easily enough). No sales pitch on me or my company. Just a note of thanks and some suggestions on people I rate as a way for you to get a better understanding of who I am. 

In fact I've gone a stage further, using SocialOomph I rotate this message randomly to allow me to share even more great people. I have 4 messages now:​

• "Thanks for following me! If you're into B2B marketing I can also recommend AAAA, BBBB, CCCC"
• "Thanks for following me! If you're into B2B content marketing I can also recommend DDDD, EEEE, FFFF"
• "Thanks for following me! I can also recommend you follow these smart marketers GGGG, HHHH, IIIII"
• "Thanks for following me! I can also recommend you follow these Silverpop experts JJJJ, KKKK, LLLL"

Thats 12 people I rate and trust now shared with my new followers. Ultimately I think this is a smarter use of Auto DM as it leverages automation, is way more positive and delivers much more ​value to both sides of the equation (in the business world we'd call that "delivering a better customer experience").

And the great news? It's working. Here's  some of the feedback (keep it coming) I've got back in just the last week:

• "thanks for the follow recos - great thought leadership in the bunch"
• "thanks for the recommendation! Just added them and look forward to learning more on the subject!"
• "thanks for the recommendations on #thoughtleadership and #B2Bcontentmarketing. I will check them out."
• "That's a nice auto follow reply." ​
• "Great tips. Cheers."
• "Thanks for the follow suggestions!"
• "Thanks I have connected to all. Best"

​​​So why not give it a try yourself? After all, just like the real world, aren't we defined ourselves by the friends we have?

Stop Sending Email! Start sending messages that matter!

Email is, and should be, a pivotal part of revenue driving digital marketing strategy. But in an increasingly noisy world we all have to work harder to build an emotional connection with our customers. What really gains results is the delivery of the right message at the right time via the right channel.

​I was honoured to share some thoughts on the matter on a recent Silverpop webinar with over 100 UK marketers. You can see my slides below. In the session I talk about:

• how the consumer is in the driving seat
• what this means to marketers
• how email shouldn't be a standalone activity and should be part of a multi-channel strategy
• how a marketing approach based on consumer behaviours is far more effective than one based on broad segmentation

Hopefully you'll find it interesting. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss anything contained within.

Stop Sending Email! Start sending messages that matter! from John Watton

U.S. vs. UK B2B Marketing: United or Separated by a Common Language?

As a B2B marketer based in the United Kingdom, I’m always interested in the state of marketing in the region versus the United States. Typically the assumption is that the UK is behind, but I don’t believe it’s as clear-cut as that.

To consider the topic further, I took a look at three key areas of B2B marketing – sales cuIture, adoption of technology and communications approach – to see how both sides stacked up. And to help, I asked the following panel of B2B marketing experts to comment on each area:

• Bob Apollo, CEO, Inflexion-Point Partners (strategic sales consultancy)
• Gerry Brown, Analyst, Bloor Research (IT research consultancy)
• Joel Harrison, Editorial & Content Director, B2B Marketing Magazine
• Doug Kessler, Director, Velocity Partners (content marketing agency)
• Roger Warner, Director, Beyond (digital marketing agency)

Sales Culture
One of the keys to great B2B marketing is having a strong sales culture. All of our panelists agreed that selling is more ingrained in the United States, with greater pride there in the art of selling. As Joel Harrison put it, “Sales is more open and direct … which means buyers are more open to this approach.”

This culture of selling manifests itself in external marketing too — specifically, the desire of marketers to build their own personal brand, something seen as critical by many to building any company’s social media standing. “U.S. marketers seem more willing to step out from behind the brand and build relationships personally that benefit the brand,” noted Doug Kessler. “I know the names of marketers of U.S. companies, but very few in the UK.”

However, in terms of go-to-market models, I would argue the United Kingdom is a bit further ahead. As Bob Apollo pointed out, “The UK and Europe as a whole have certainly struck me in the past as being more intelligent in their use of channel partners than some of their U.S. colleagues.”

Adoption of Technology
When it comes to marketing technology, the agreement was that UK adoption is anywhere from 12 months to 24 months behind the United States. According to Gerry Brown, “The U.S. is embracing more advanced technologies, such as website personalization, more readily and with more enthusiasm.” This reflects the fact that British executives are more cautious about new technologies, wanting to see proof before purchase.

But that said, adoption doesn’t necessarily mean advanced implementations. Apollo agreed with me that there are wider differences between the early adopters and the laggards within each economy than there are between the United States and the United Kingdom on average.

Communications Approach
The shift away from mass marketing to behavioral marketing has seen an explosion in the channels, the type of content and the engagement models used by B2B marketers. Here, both sides of the Atlantic seem evenly matched.

Roger Warner highlighted how social media is driving a new breed of UK B2B marketer, particularly in hi-tech businesses. These companies have traditionally been execution muscle for U.S. corporate offices, but are now taking more control of their local brand communications.

“They are creating fit-for-purpose content and branding programs employing more consumer marketing-like tactics, because they have established freedom,” said Warner. “The results are great. Salesforce is a super example.”

There was also a definite consensus on the style of communications. The U.S. market is seen as more comfortable with a tone of voice that is “chummy,” “off-hand” and “informal,” as opposed to the United Kingdom, which tends to “business-focused,” “restrained” and “functional.”

Conclusions

In summary, the two regions seem to have more in common than different. Most of the experts agreed there wasn’t a huge gap between the two regions and that it’s not about the U.S. versus the UK. As Doug Kessler neatly put it, “There are good and bad B2B marketers on both sides of the Atlantic. The good have more in common with their good colleagues across the ocean than they do with the bad in their own country.”

[Originally posted on the Silverpop Blog]​

Fine food & great marketing automation

There's a lot going on right now in the evolution of B2B Marketing, especially in marketing automation. There's lots of discussion, debate and, dare I say it, hype.  

That's why I'm delighted to be hosting a pragmatic, no sales pitch seminar on B2B Marketing Automation in March.

I'll be joined by CleverTouch, probably one of the most experienced Marketing Automation consultancies in the UK and Ellen Valentine, experienced CMO and now marketing strategist at Silverpop. Together they represent the best of the best in B2B marketing automation excellence.​ 

To host such a fine line up we had to choose a suitable location known for its fine products. That's why we're at the world famous Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly in London.  Established in 1707 as a grocery store, it is now recognised internationally for its high quality goods and as an iconic British symbol. Perfect we thought!

The event is on Tuesday 12 March from 08:30 to 11:15.  You'll find out how a behavioral marketing approach can help you better integrate your email, web, mobile and social media marketing and deliver outstanding ROI. Heard enough? You can register here.

Join your B2B marketing peers, our marketing strategy experts, hear the latest trends and see actionable insights to help you win more business, plus of course the chance to enjoy breakfast at an icon of British retailing.

Join us for a winning agenda:

• 8.30am Breakfast and registration. 
• 9.00am Behavioral Marketing Automation: Trends, Opportunities & Insights - Ellen Valentine, Marketing Strategy Leader, Silverpop
• 9.45am UK best practices: a case study - Adam Sharp, Group MD, CleverTouch
• 10:30am Taking Action : Making Behavioral Marketing Automation a Reality - CleverTouch & Silverpop
• 11.15am Close

As I said, the event is an exclusive, no sales pitch, invite only event and is free of charge. However places are very limited, so please sign up as soon as you can. 

REGISTER HERE!​

I look forward to seeing you on the 12th.

Testing testing testing : the B2B marketer's mantra

I was having lunch with a B2B marketing peer recently (he'll remain nameless) who was struggling to get traction with his CEO in order to justify/demonstrate the full value of marketing.  

His problem was marketing just wasn't seen as strategic enough and he wasn't getting the funding to do the sort of thing he just knew would add bags of value. You know the situation - marketing's all about slide decks and collateral, and doesn't get to the table for revenue and market conversations. 

He was convinced that his company could benefit from customer-oriented messaging, solution selling and better targeting. And that marketing should be leading the charge. So, like any diligent marketer he had set about writing a strategy document to convince his board to invest more. It was based on industry best practice & other-company case examples.

Whilst I applauded him for being so rigorous, I do believe there is a better way. As B2B marketers we're surrounded by stunning insights about our business that are within our reach right now. There's such a wealth of data available to us through customer behaviours and digital interactions it's phenomenal. And all of this can be exploited not only in execution, but in strategy.

So rather than writing a strategy document, I suggested to my peer that he do some simple market tests. I gave him three ideas which were like light-bulbs to him, but I guess sometimes got lost in his desire to think big:

1. Run a webinar. Think a topic is hot? But struggling to get management buy-in to sponsor value proposition development/sales training/solution development? Set up a 30 minute webinar and invite a portion of your database. Use an event platform like eventbrite or amiando and the whole thing's free. See who signs up and use the names as proof of interest to your management, And if you get no response, then you have your answer too. You can even A/B test the email invitation's subject line to try out which message resonates the most along the way.  

2. Take out Linkedin ads. Arguing over product-oriented vs customer-oriented messaging? Use Linkedin ads to test out different messaging, e.g. "See how Watton Version 3 is fab" vs "Find out how retailers like you have reduced operating costs by 10%". Present the click thru rates to your management team.

3. Analyze wins. Want to illustrate which industry segments to go after? Dig into your CRM system and find out your company's last 10/50/100 wins. Build out your own analysis of each win (sub-vertical, av. deal size, company size, ERP system etc,) and then find out the addressable market size. All of the data is available at little or no cost. You can then present a market opportunity vs likelihood of winning boston matrix as a way of getting the conversation going.

What I love about all of the above is that they are:

• relatively cheap to do
• don't require executive sign off
• can give you results within 48 hours

But more importantly, they are real, tangible expressions of what your customers, not your company, think.

What's more you can tweak, scrap, improve and learn. Quickly. This continual running of small tests should be how we all do our marketing. Its an injection of data into our gut & rapidly transforms our marketing.

Hopefully I inspired my peer to try it out!

EMEA vs Global B2B Marketing – culture clash or culture club?

Working in the software technology industry and based in the UK means invariably you're working for the European subsidiary of a US-headquartered business.

This often throws up lots of challenges, many of which I've experienced over the years.  There are inherent differences between planning and executing campaigns in EMEA vs US (let alone differences between different European countries). Languages and cultures, budget centralisation (or over-localisation) and global team structures can all result in marketing friction.

Its a topic dear to my heart, which is why I'm pleased to be taking part in a panel discussion on how EMEA regional marketing teams work most successfully, with (often US) centralised resources.

In this event you’ll learn how me and other practitioners from Zuora and Brother address issues related to running EMEA marketing in a global business.

The event's on Feb 28th at BPP Business School in London

If you want to hear some interesting debate you can sign up on the event website.

Tracking content effectiveness using Squeeze

Producing all this great content in marketing is just fine. But do you really know which pieces have most impact or which channels are most effective?

I've struggled with those challenges for a while, so was excited to find a new tool called "Squeeze". It's currently on invitation-only Beta, but I think its easy enough to get an invite.

I've been using it a few months now & I've found it really useful in gaining insights into the content being produced on this blog. I'm going to explain how I use it, but please this is NOT a product review or a user manual. I'll leave that to the guys over at Squeeze.

How do I use it? Whenever I produce a post, I feed the URL into squeeze and it produces a custom, shortened URL for each of twitter, G+ and Linkedin (you can also extend this for email, blog & facebook). See Fig 1. You can then either copy these URLs into your favourite tools or share straight from the page.

Fig 1 : Creating custom URLs

I personally use hootsuite, and like to use the auto-scheduling feature rather than publish as i post. Which means I do have to make two separate updates in hootsuite for Linkedin & twitter (hootsuite doesn't do G+) but its not much hassle.

Fig 2 : YTD clicks by channel

How does that all help? The custom URLs then give you the ability to track traffic to the site by channel. So the first insight is which channel gets the most clicks.  FIg 2 shows all traffic to my blog, with twitter constituting 86% of all all traffic (vs 13% Linkedin and 2% G+). No surprise really as a) I have more engaged followers on twitter and b) I publish posts multiple times to twitter, but only post once on Linkedin/G+.

The other interesting insight is which day & time are best to publish. In terms of day, it turns out Friday is best for twitter (Fig 3). But it's not so clear cut for Linkedin with Thursday & Friday (Fig 4) pretty equal.

When it comes to time of day, Fig 5 shows 5AM EST (i.e. 10AM UK) is the best time for me to publish my posts. That's when I get the most engagement.

Fig 3 : twitter performance by day of week

Fig 4 : Linkedin performance by day of week

Fig 5: performance by time of day

Finally I can stack rank my posts to see what has been most popular. Fig 6 show that my "7 UK B2B Marketing Experts to Follow in 2013" is my most popular post yet. Leading me to interpret that you all LOVE a list!

Fig 6: Top content assets

So there you have it. Pretty cool stuff, and definitely one of the "6 marketing tools that save my life as a B2B marketer". If anyone's had experience of squeeze or can suggest another tool like it, I'd be delighted to hear from you!

You've got to build an emotional connection

A big thanks to Velocity Partners for immortalising the panel of today's G+ Hangout in stencil & spray paint. That's definitely a first for me! 

There's still time to register - over 100 B2B marketers have signed up already. Should be fun.

Apple and anti-behavioral marketing

I'm a big fan of Apple. I first used their products in 1989 (an Apple Macintosh SE) and never looked back. After a long hiatus in the world of the PC (and a short stint working for the Evil Empire), I returned to the World of Jobs with the iPod in 2003 ish and since then I've probably owned every Apple form factor.

I now own (wait for it) ten Apple devices: MacBook Air, MacPro, Apple TV x 2, iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Shuffle, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPad2 and iPad Mini. Its fair to say I'm a fan.

But Apple doesn't know that. In fact, it probably doesn't care. In another world I would be a Platinum customer, being loved, cherished and nurtured. But not in Apple's. Despite running the infamous "walled garden" iOS, demanding at every juncture that I let them get insight into what i'm doing and having me sign into iCloud for everything, they know nothing.

Never more is that obvious that in the communications I receive for them. The latest is "Buy an iPad for your loved one for Valentine's Day". No recognition of any loyalty. No offer and no discount. In fact its not even a new idea. I get the same email every holiday/season event saying much the same thing, the same as everyone else, with no personalization and no targeting.

It's the total opposite of what most marketers are trying to do. That's because using a one-size-fits-all approach may work for Apple, but its a road to disaster for the rest of us.

Tailoring communications based on behaviors has been proven to increase conversions and maximize retention rates. In Apple's case they know who I am (i've been registered on iTunes for nearly ten years) what products I've owned (I register them all), what music i like (i have all my 13,099 songs in iCloud), which emails I've opened, what I've clicked on and what web pages I have browsed.

And you likely have a similar wealth of information on your customers too. This demographic plus behaviors information is a goldmine for all of us that don't have the brand equity of Apple. How about using dynamic content in emails that reflects what the individual browsed on your site? Or an onsite experience that is tailored based on what emails they opened? Or scoring interactions to guess whether consumers are in active buying mode, sending offers at the right time, tailored to their profile.

This is the world of behavioral marketing and its the end of spray & pray marketing. Brands who ignore this do so at their peril. So for once, don't try and emulate Apple.

Checking out of foursquare

After just over 3 years of regular use, I'm checking out of foursquare.

Sorry guys, I just don't get it. This promised land of special offers, location based promotions and serendipitous bumping into friends never materialized. And to think for a while there I was checking in to gowalla (RIP) as well! What was I thinking?

I stuck with foursquare though, believing the glorious personal benefits will come. I think i've been tolerant. I've made over 2,500 check-ins and earned 46 badges. But there's just no value. It's just turned into something to do - another reason to fidget with my smartphone, an activity I'm trying to reduce thanks very much. 

As it turns out most of my friends agree. I have 1,700+ followers on twitter and only a handful every signed up to foursquare. Plus the community on foursquare ends up generating (with a few notable exceptions) a maddening set of social minutiae i can do without. Bus stop, supermarket and petrol station check-ins? Checking in to locations when you're clearly on a train? Don't get me started. Plus how can someone be consistently top of the league when all they do is check-in to Sainsbury's, their home office and their kid's primary school?

There's no doubt location based data is useful when supporting other online activities (photo sharing for example) but as a standalone community? No thanks. There's plenty of other ways to tell people what I'm up to. 

Enough. 

.....Unless someone can make the case otherwise?