What's On Our Minds

In this episode of Coffee Talk, the Minds On team will discuss the editorial process and how it can enhance your business. Don't miss Dan Harris and Randy Murray, share helpful tips and provide viewers with insightful ideas as they guide you through the practice of content marketing. The key points discussed in this week's episode include:

• Be aware, content is an extension of your brand.
• What role does a content editor play in a digital strategy?
• Tips for managing the editorial process within your organization.

If you missed the first two episodes, click here to listen and learn. Episode One: Content Marketing: The Importance of Content in Marketing Episode Two: How to Capture The Right Subject Matter for Your Business Marketing Strategy

If you're a marketing professional within an enterprise and you have a topic you would like to share or have more questions, contact us at coffeetalk@mindson.com to learn more.

When an organization comes to us and says, “We need a new website,” we stop and ask, “What’s in it for you?”

Yes, you may need a new website, but we can only design one if we understand what you want and need to happen.

A lot of marketing use to be based on the broadcast model. Some call it “shotgun marketing.” Blast your message out there and you’ll hit a few of the people you need. Today you don’t need a shotgun—you need magnets. You need gravity. You need the right things to draw prospects to you and a laser focus on those who might need you in the future (but might not know yet).

We’ve found that really great marketing can come from this perspective. You need strategies and tactics that use a wide array of marketing methods to increase revenue, grow the sales pipeline, optimize operations, simplify on-boarding, raise brand awareness, and in some cases, protect your competitive advantage and move into a thought leadership position in the markets you serve. 

It’s not just about creativity. It’s about that all-important question: What’s in it for you?

The reason we know this is because we wanted those same outcomes while we held marketing department management positions within the companies we worked for in our past. Today, success comes from focused marketing approaches, programs that are targeted at speaking directly to customers and finds them where they are. Less successful is just blasting away and hoping to hit one by chance.

Here are five things for you to think about if you're in a sales, marketing, product manager, or business development role at your company:

Is your content:

• Created and distributed with the end-customer in mind?
• As specific to the industry or segment as possible?
• Focused on solving customer challenges and delivering results?
• Created in mediums that your customers will consume?
• Designed to illustrate how your customers’ success is a reflection of your commitment to their success?

We would love to hear your point-of-view. Schedule some time to meet us for coffee. What's in it for you? We'll ask questions to learn more, share our ideas, and do what ever we can to help you and your company be successful. 

In this episode, Randy Murray and Dan Harris of Minds On discuss how businesses can capture rich and highly relevant content from internal subject matter experts. This valuable information can help businesses expand on their current content marketing strategy.

Key points discussed in this episode include:

• Finding the right person(s) who understand the current issues your customers/clients are experiencing
• Partner with a writer that is a skilled interviewer
• Capture the natural conversation on paper or digital recorder

You’ll find that this natural conversation can build out content for your business, include: blog posts, articles, short videos, website copy, and possible information graphics.

If you are interested in more of Dan and Randy's conversations over coffee, click here to listen and learn. Episode One: Content Marketing: The Importance of Content in Marketing Episode Three: Content Marketing: Defining Your Editorial Process

If you're a marketing professional within an enterprise and you have a topic you would like to share or have more questions, contact us at coffeetalk@mindson.com to learn more.

The most interesting, most innovative, and most creative marketing concepts can fail. In fact, they often do. Why? They fail because capturing a potential customer’s attention is only part of effective marketing. Just like the proverbial iceberg, the biggest part of successful marketing programs is behind the scenes. It’s the measuring and managing of marketing results that drives really successful programs.

And knowing what’s in it for you, first.

A lot of marketing agencies come from a strictly creative background. We’ve found that great creative is absolutely required, but that’s only part of the battle. The executive team at Minds On, including Tom, Randy, and myself, have all held senior marketing and executive positions in B2B, high tech, telecom, and software companies. That matters. We clearly understand the “program” part of marketing. If you can’t measure something, if you can’t use what you generate, it’s a waste of money.

Our experience, while steeped in creative, comes from running corporate marketing departments. That picture of a chair? We’ve sat on your side of the table. We've worked with creative, digital, and marketing agencies of all sizes, and we’ve seen what does and doesn’t work. And the three of us clearly agree on a workable approach to sales and client relationships. It starts with a focus on results. It’s starts with “What’s in it for me?

Here’s something else we’ve learned: The best creative solutions come from an understanding of what you need to achieve and what your potential customers want. Great creative on one side, clear systems and strategies on the other.

While clients may tell us that they need websites, emails, banners, tradeshow booths, logos, and sales tools, we’ve learned to stop and ask, “What do you need to achieve? Who are you trying to reach?” Maybe you do need all of those things. Maybe not. Most importantly, you need more is to drive sales, to understand what’s working. That understanding shapes how we work with every customer at Minds On.

In my next post I’ll tell you more about how the “What’s in it for you?” approach can work for you.

Are you using Facebook to stay connected with customers and prospects, or is it just another forgotten piece of marketing?

Here’s the key to leveraging your Facebook brand pages in order to get new business: Do your timeline right.

First, grab your audience’s attention with an effective cover photo. The new timeline feature of Facebook lets you use a large, page-spanning photo or image. While it may be tempting to simply splash your logo across there, this is an opportunity for you to broaden your branding approach. Yes, your logo should be part of what people see, but Facebook has already taken care of that.

This image can’t be an advertisement, so no pricing or promotions there; it’s strictly for branding.

Use the cover image to set a tone for your brand page. What do you want people to think and feel about your organization?  Your cover image should portray and further this message.

My simple advice: Give this key element the attention that it deserves. Get some professional help. This single item, the cover image, can set visitors expectations. There’s lots more you’ll need to do with your business Facebook presence, but get this right as a start.

Here’s a quick topic: Are you using Facebook as a part of your press relations?

If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

PR use to be a very well managed and regulated activity. In most circumstances, your PR team would coordinate quietly and behind the scenes with the press. Today, PR needs to be an active interface with your customers and prospects without the traditional or industry press as an intermediary.

This is important when you’re launching a new product, and it’s absolutely critical in times of a crisis. Facebook and Twitter are absolutely essential mediums of communication when things are blowing up.

And when things start to blow up, it’s far too late to start using Facebook and Twitter. You need to have them active long before an emergency.

When things go wrong, people first learn of things through social media--not the newspapers or industry magazines. You don’t have days to figure things out. You’ll be expected to respond within minutes or hours.

Facebook and Twitter are the only ways you can do that. That’s where people will be talking about your problems. You need to be there to respond, calm things down, and supply solid, accurate information.

It’s not just about emergencies. It’s also where you’ll respond to customer service issues, product launches, and celebrate good news.

Facebook marketing and PR are inevitable and unavoidable. Why not embrace it?

A lot of organizations have started Facebook pages only to soon abandon them.. You can almost see the tumbleweeds blow across the pages. The new Facebook Timeline for businesses is an opportunity for you to restart your efforts and refocus on what Facebook marketing can do for you.

The other day I heard someone say, “People go to Google more often, but Facebook knows more about you.” It’s true. People are spending more time and connecting more parts of their lives on Facebook. It’s a big opportunity for your organization to be a part of those connected lives.

Here are four things you can do to kick your business Facebook marketing into gear:

1. Cull your timeline. Facebook will allow you to edit past entries. Clear out all of the boring and expired stuff and get rid of any no longer pertinent information. Keep your timeline fresh and on point.


2. Remember that Facebook is an integrated part of your complete marketing program. If you’re doing a marketing activity somewhere, no matter where, it also needs to happen on Facebook. Tradeshows? Post that ahead of time and then during the show add details, maybe photos of the booth and visitors. Email campaign? Where’s the Facebook component? Everything you do needs to have a Facebook component.


3. Make it someone’s responsibility. The reason that most business Facebook approaches fail is that it isn’t someone’s primary responsibility. For too many it’s an “if you have time,” chore. If you want Facebook marketing to work for you, someone in your organization has to work it every day. It must become a priority.


4. Engage your marketing agency. Since you’ve followed point two and made Facebook marketing an integrated part of your full marketing approach, you’ll also need to engage your marketing agency. Your agency can help you coordinate your imagery, activities, and campaigns on Facebook. Your agency will also have experience marketing on Facebook and will be able to keep you up-to-date on the latest changes and approaches. Make them a partner!

It doesn’t have to be difficult to integrate Facebook marketing. It’s too big of an opportunity for you to pass up. Use the new Timeline as an opportunity to start over and really make Facebook marketing work for you.

What exactly are sales and marketing systems? What does that mean?

A fully coordinated system tracks every activity from the first contact through the eventual sale and ongoing customer relationship. It's not just a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), but it's a way of developing relationships and turning suspects into customers. It's not the old style hand off from marketing to sales. It's a continuous marketing role from introduction through mature, long-term customer relationships.

It's about efficiency. Systems that have a single view of the prospect-customer relationship provide a more realistic picture of what it takes to sell your product or service and what it will take to sell more. B2B systems that actively court prospects, determine who is and isn't a prospect, and supporting the sales process is becoming increasingly critical to the success of the organization. Look at it this way: B2B sales organizations are spending up to $20,000 a year to train and support sales reps. Better systems and better supported sales efforts, can, and do have a dramatic impact on bottom line sales. IDC ranks the improvements in sales productivity to exceed $250,000 per year.

What do you need to coordinate?

The key areas are:

• • Customer Segmentation
• • Strategic Planning
• • Sales Tools
• • Lead Management

When you coordinate these four areas, you open up significant opportunities to both understand the market, your potential customers, and to drive the sales tactics and activities.

What does a coordinated system look like? Imagine someone new comes to your website and requests an interesting white paper. A well-designed system will check to see if this person/organization exists, collect detailed profile information, assign the lead to the right sales rep, and send a personalized message to the lead. It will track any and all responses by email and allow the rep to track responses from phone calls and in-person meetings. The system will track the lead through the sales cycle and help the rep keep in touch, providing the right information at the right stage and supporting the lead's decision-making process.

The system will know every time the lead visits your site and keep the sales rep informed. The system will know what messages they respond to, including those from Twitter, email campaigns, mailers, Facebook, and more. When the rep sends a proposal, the system supports the creation of the proposal and tracks the win/loss rates.

Does this sound complex and expensive? It doesn't need to be. Organizations that are coordinating their sales and marketing in this way have significant advantages over those that don't.

Are you ready to talk about coordinated, integrated sales and marketing?

For more information on how Minds On can help your company with B2B sales and marketing needs, feel free to contact us at (740)548-1645 or email us at info@mindson.com

There's a lot of talk about sales and marketing working together, but it never seems to end. In today’s fast-paced marketing, there’s simply no time for it. Let's face it, the bickering has got to end. Our customers and prospects have access to unlimited information about competitive options. B2B buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated.  Time and money constraints make it very difficult for these same buyers to focus on fundamental solutions.

The only way to be successful in today's market is for sales and marketing departments to bury the hatchet. Salespeople can't be lone wolves anymore and marketing can't work in a vacuum.

Successful B2B sales and marketing teams are deepening relationships with prospects, nurturing them, and collecting detailed prospect profiles. The days of handing your sales team a stack of brochures and folders and waiting to see the sales numbers are over. Marketing needs to be able to continually tune the message and meet the need for the right information at the right time. Sales teams need to know that they're talking with qualified prospects and what messages work, when.

This means one thing: Sales and marketing need to be fully integrated and coordinated.

It's not easy when today you have voices within the organization calling for following the latest trend of pushing to dump the whole marketing budget in a single bucket. Twitter isn't the answer to your problems and neither is Facebook, or Google Adwords, or any other single method. You still need printed brochures and materials. You still need to pound the pavement and meet people in person. But you'll also need systems that work to attract suspects, nurture prospects, and deliver sales.

Are your sales and marketing teams and systems fully coordinated? Do you even have sales and marketing systems in place?

It's time to talk peace and to set new sales and marketing goals.

For more information on how Minds On can help your company with B2B sales and marketing needs, feel free to contact us at (740)548-1645 or email us at info@mindson.com

The complexity of the B2B sale and the increasing sophistication of B2B buyers is demanding that organizations that sell to businesses build and grow sales and marketing systems that are equally sophisticated. A B2B sale has always been about the relationship. Now those relationships are developing and blooming online. Do your systems help make that happen? Or are they preventing it from happening? Is your marketing and sales teams firing on all cylinders?

Take this for an example in just one industry: According to this IDC Report, IT buyers are spending up to 4.8 hours of every week evaluating future IT purchases. They need information to support their decisions. Do your systems let you supply them with what they need to know, when they need to know it?

Direct marketing is a numbers game. Mail out one hundred thousand flyers, get a one to five percent response rate, close about ten percent of those. Test, refine, do it again. But B2B marketing and sales isn't a numbers game at all. It's about understanding needs on one side and measuring value on another. That takes time and effort. If your systems aren't helping you do this, then you're at a competitive disadvantage.

A good B2B website is only one side of a system. It helps to initially establish a relationship, to deliver information and value, but also to collect information. Behind the scenes, that information is collected, analyzed, and acted upon. A coordinated sales and marketing effort recognizes the "touch points" for buyers and has the right information to deliver at the right time. A well-designed system knows when to send the right mailer, email a white paper, or to connect a fully qualified prospect with a live salesperson.

As these systems mature, they'll help marketing and sales, working together, to better understand the sales cycle, react to changes and competitive pressures, and adapt over time. Marketing owns the broad branding and market relationship while sales owns the individual customer. Together, they form an integrated, realistic picture of the market and what future prospects will need and react to.

Ideally, everything is fed from a single system, but even when not ideal, a single system can coordinate all sales and marketing efforts. Your website, search, social media, physical media, events, absolutely everything fully integrated.

If that doesn’t sound like what you have today, it’s time to talk about how to make that happen inside your organization.

For more information on how Minds On can help your company with B2B sales and marketing needs, feel free to call us at (740)548-1645 or email us at info@mindson.com