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B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 4: Connectors, Connectors, Connectors

Mani — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:44:15 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 4: Connectors, Connectors, Connectors

[Note: This is Part 4 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

Fitting In, and Connecting To Each Other
What is true in the real world is just as true in the marketer’s world. People need to talk to each other to get things done. And the platforms, systems and tools that enterprise marketers use every day, need to talk to each other too. Enterprise marketers are looking for new marketing platforms and tools that fit into their world, and will connect with their existing enterprise infrastructure.

The Less Things Change, The Better
As we talk to Enterprise Marketers, we have learned that new marketing platform providers need to have a clear strategy of connecting to the systems of today. They need to open up their own system with a large collection of APIs. They must allow other systems and tools to pull and push data, and integrate the “best-of-breed” new capabilities that they introduce into the user experience and work flow of the existing platform or tool. The goal here should be to make life easier for the marketer, not to add more to the marketer’s plate. Provide a way for marketer’s to stay with current systems and processes as much as possible,and if there is a change, make it minimal and for all the right reasons.

The Growth of Platform Ecosystems
Marketers, as well as their target users, touch many marketing, technology, social, enterprise application and enterprise communication platforms/tools every day. Many of these platforms are building out open APIs, and working to build an ecosystem of complementary applications and tools around their platform. The goal is to deliver a more complete solution for the end marketer (or customer).

A key consideration for enterprise marketers, as they add new platforms and tools to their mix, is the breadth and depth of connection capability of the new platform. How many platform ecosystems does that new system or tool support today? What “out-of-the-box” connectors are available? Does the new platform or tool provider have a clear strategy for adding more connectors on their product road map?

Enterprise Platform Ecosystems
Here are some of the leading platform ecosystems we see with strong adoption at mid-to-large enterprises. As we work with our enterprise clients, we see several of these platforms in use in their environment. We believe deeper connectivity and integration across these systems and new platforms and tools will be critical to marketers, as they execute their marketing campaigns in 2012.

CRM ecosystems: Salesforce, Oracle(Siebel), Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SAP CRM, Netsuite CRM, SugarCRM
Marketing Suite ecosystems: IBM/Unica, Aprimo, Adobe, Neolane
RPM / Marketing ecosystems: Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop
Ad Network/Platform ecosystems: Google Display Network, DoubleClick/DART, Google Admob, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bizo, AOL, ValueClick, Rubicon Project
Email ecosystems: Responsys, ExactTarget, Axciom, Epsilon, Yesmail, Cheetahmail
Analytics ecosystems: Adobe/Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics
Content Management ecosystems: SDL Tridion, Vignette, Day Software, Open Text, Limelight Networks
Community Management ecosystems: Jive, Lithium
Social Platform ecosystems: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+
Enterprise Communication ecosystems: Microsoft/Skype, Avaya, Siemens
Mobile Platform ecosystems: Apple iPhone, Google Android
Tablet ecosystems: Apple iPad, Google Android
Enterprise Content distribution hubs: Slideshare, Youtube, BrightTalk, Vimeo

Multichannel Engagement with Connectors
Here at Kwanzoo, we see the following connectors from interactive content and ad units, that integrate into multichannel marketing campaigns across the enterprise, as the ones of greatest interest to enterprise customers. Connectors significantly reduce campaign execution time and costs, and enhance the ability of marketers to engage their prospects everywhere, to drive more leads, conversions and sales.

Lead Connects to RPM, CRM, Marketing Suite, Email and Lead Management Systems
Email to Web Connects to identify individual users as they move from email to web and social interactions.
Live Connects to VoIP, Chat and SMS platforms
Social Connects to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to faciliate social sharing, and capture additional social data or insights on individual prospects
Ad Serving Connects to certify and deliver interactive marketing units across a range of ad networks and ad platforms
Mobile Connects to deliver interactive marketing units optimized for mobile platforms, and facilitate enhanced user experiences (e.g. Click-to-Call, Click-to-Chat, Click-to-Text).
Analytics Connects for consolidated dashboards/reports and attribution tracking
Dynamic Data Connects for IP Address to company, industry, and geolocation mapping of prospects. Enables relationship-based targeting with interactive marketing units. Data connects to demographic data on users.
Data Augmentation Connects for turning short form leads into long form leads for sales hand-off.
Content Hub Connects to enable serving content from Distribution Hubs (Slideshare, Youtube, others) directly inside marketing units.

Kwanzoo provides several of these Connectors today. We will be building out many more Connectors that our customers want from us. Are there connectors in your environment that you need? What are we missing? Please drop us a note if you’d like, or write to us with your comments and feedback below.

p.s. You can watch our webinar with Eloqua CTO Steve Woods where we explored many of the topics and themes in these posts. Also see these related posts: Maximize Your RPM Investment, Campaign and Funnel Automation, and Go Social, Go Cloud without IT

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 3: Go Social, Go Cloud without IT

Mani — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:36:09 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 3: Go Social, Go Cloud without IT

[Note: This is Part 3 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. We will have a new post up each week! Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

The Exploration So Far – A Quick Recap
As we work with marketers at mid-to-large enterprises, Kwanzoo sees five key themes for 2012. First, marketers are looking for ways to maximize the value of their Revenue Performance Management (RPM) investment. Second, marketing teams are seeking new approaches to boosting productivity of their staff and resources by re-thinking traditional campaign design, and re-using campaign components across channels. We noted new opportunities to enable rapid multichannel campaign execution and accelerate the sales funnel. We see significant interest in delivering interactive user experiences that are more targeted by tapping into intelligence inside RPM systems – applying Account-based Targeting (or Relationship Targeting) techniques.

It’s Time to Go Social, Go Cloud
The third key theme we see for 2012 centers around:

leveraging the power of social platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+) to drive more demand for a company’s products and services
tapping into SaaS and Cloud-based technology solutions to “just do it”, and execute marketing programs with no I.T. support needed

Social Sharing Gets More Seamless

We have all seen the recent proliferation of “social share” icons everywhere, from your email newsletters, to blog posts, e-books, webinar registration pages and more. But are they effective? As marketers and users understand the benefits of sharing, there is opportunity to make the social sharing process easier, more natural, more seamless. Marketers can enable sharing in much more flexible ways so that it is weaved into the interactive experiences they provide to their prospects and customers.

Keep It Natural, Keep It Real
Social sharing options are best presented to users in the natural flow of their consuming a content offer, or interacting in an online conversation with the brand. Whether it’s answering a poll or survey, watching a video, flipping through slides, reviewing customer testimonials, browsing an e-book, social sharing must be available when the prospect or customer is momentarily immersed, and “bought into” the brand’s value and is most willing to recommend the brand to her circle of friends and business colleagues.

With this in mind, we are thinking about ways to continuously expand our portfolio of rich media marketing units, that provide flexible social sharing flows integrated seamlessly into engaging, interactive, content experiences delivered everywhere.

The Power of Incentives
As we executed several social marketing campaigns this past year, a key learning for us has been the power of incentives to drive social sharing. In specific instances, we have seen social sharing jump from less than 1 percent to over 33 percent, resulting in 1 in 3 users who get to a social sharing screen, actually completing the sharing action, simply due to their desire to receive their sharing incentive.

B2B marketers have many different incentives they can work with. For prospects, an exclusive research report from a leading analyst firm, can drive social sharing, followed by a webinar registration, at which point the user receives the report. Of course the sharing message must be as simple as “I am planning to attend this webinar….” and not an explicit endorsement of the brand, which would be an overreach. Other incentives to try are raffles to exclusive executive retreats, a round of golf with the GM of the division or CEO, invitations to a wine-and-cheese reception at the annual conference, etc.

The Power of Real Identity
B2B businesses today are yet to tap into the power of real identity that’s now available via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. All of these platforms provide API access to a business user’s key data components, to external applications and websites. It is now possible to directly link information about a user on to a third party website (e.g. a thumbnail photo, Job Title or Role and Company affiliation). Public conversations between prospects, customers and a business or brand will now benefit from increased trust and authenticity. Customer testimonials are much easier to parse and calibrate, as prospects evaluate a new provider’s offerings.

Web Pages and Landing Pages Redone
We see interest in re-thinking traditional web pages and landing pages to introduce interactive, targeted, component content blocks on the page. Smart marketers are thinking about how each content block serves a clearly defined purpose to lead the prospect down a conversion path, to either share their engagement experience with peers, or opt-in for ongoing communication. Marketers now have ways to optimize each content block, so they are targeted to the incoming prospect, based on intelligence across more than one system, platform or tool.

Smart Testimonials
We will soon see Customer Testimonials on B2B websites that are more dynamic and remain current, as the testimonial provider changes roles at her company, or changes jobs and moves to a new company. Businesses can also present highly targeted and relevant customer testimonials to incoming web visitors, no matter where they interact with the brand or business. The specific testimonial presented to the prospect can now dynamically change based on the prospect’s Company or Industry affiliation, or stated or implicit preferences for specific products or services via prior interactions with the business, anywhere across the web. Combine that with the real identity of the testimonial provider, with links to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and we can deliver a much more enriching experience for users.

Granular Sharing – Still Hard To Do
It remains extremely difficult for end users to organize their circle of friends and business colleagues into lists and groups, on any of the social platforms. As that capability matures, marketers can start to think about enabling more granular social sharing by users, allowing prospects to share with specific colleagues in their social network, as opposed to the way it’s typically available today – a single post to one’s Twitter feed, Facebook feed or LinkedIn status.

From SaaS to the Cloud – Does It Matter?
The past few years have seen rapid adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms by enterprise marketers. With a SaaS approach, the entire marketing platform is developed and managed by the platform provider. With the arrival of Cloud-based infrastructure services such as Amazon AWS, it is now possible for platform providers to innovate faster, and deliver the end applications and capabilities that marketers want. There is more “off the shelf” technology capabilities available to leverage, and re-use.

The role of marketing platform providers has changed – they now need to think hard about their core competency and the value they best provide to their customers. Outsource or leverage everything else they need from Cloud-based infrastructure providers to provide a complete solution to customers. Have open APIs to integrate easily with other related platforms and tools.

We have taken this exact approach at Kwanzoo with our marketing platform development. Our commitment to customers is to constantly innovate, and deliver more (rich media) engagement marketing units, across more marketing channels, with more connectors to different enterprise systems and platforms.

Cloud – Pay for Use, Pay for Value
Cloud-based services also allow the new breed of marketing platform and service providers to disrupt more traditional enterprise software and custom solution providers, as they are easily tapped on a pay-for-use and pay-for-value model. As a consumer of Amazon AWS and related cloud-services ourselves, Kwanzoo is able to pass along the infrastructure savings we see directly to our customers. Our customers are assured of a robust, scalable, reliable, enterprise-class platform on a simple “pay-as-you-go” model. They can run trials until they have experimented with a range of engagement marketing campaign approaches, found the ones that deliver value on a consistent basis, and then sign onto a long-term arrangement for more savings.

A World Full of Mash-ups
Enterprise marketers are constantly looking for new ways to drive for higher ROI, while leveraging their existing marketing content, systems and tools. Another recent trend is cloud-enabled SaaS platforms, where each specific platform looks to be “best-in-class” in it’s core areas of competency. Marketers understand the best places as well as the value from hosting their marketing content outside their own enterprise walls. We have different sites emerging as category leaders depending on content format (videos, presentations, e-books, documents). These sites offer widespread distribution and visibility to the content, which is immensely valuable to the business or brand.

This opens up a key new opportunity for marketers today, viz: creating marketing “mash ups”. Think incorporating marketing content and formats (videos, presentations, documents, emails, social posts and feeds) inside branded, interactive experiences that marketers can create and place everywhere. Each experience serves up content from wherever it’s been natively hosted, while enabling easy social sharing, and lead capture. Think a video hosted on your company’s Slideshare channel, but presented to a prospect on a web placement, or triggered inside a partner newsletter. Users who watch the video can then easily opt-in or share with their colleagues to drive new viral visits to your branded video experience. It is now possible to completely re-think the older “banner ad click -> redirect to landing page -> capture a lead or prospect interaction” approach.

From Knot-Speed to Warp-Speed
With quick, easy to use multichannel campaign creation and execution tools that are directly available to marketers, it’s now possible to rapidly make changes, and test the changes in near real-time. Simple, easy-to-understand and yet comprehensive drill-down dashboards make it possible to drive optimal ROI from each marketing campaign, with more iterations as the campaign is underway, and prospects reactto the campaign concept and creative presented to them.

As marketing platforms bring together their insights and intelligence, this will be an area of increasing opportunity, as prospect behavior and history is captured and integrated across multiple systems.

So What Are We In For in 2012?
These are just some of the areas of innovation now possible, as platform providers introduce, and marketers leverage more social capabilities and the benefits of cloud-based SaaS technologies and apply them to their marketing initiatives in 2012. We look forward to your feedback, comments and key learnings. Please drop us a note or write a comment below.

p.s. You can register and catch our Insights webinar on January 12, 10 AM PST with Eloqua CTO Steve Woods which will explore many of the topics and themes in these posts. You can also catch it recorded here after the event.

See Part 2 – Campaign and Funnel Automation for Enterprise Marketers, who are currently forced to piece together a campaign from lots of moving parts, across many different systems and tools.

See Part 1 – Maximize your RPM invesment where we look at new ways to leverage and maximize investment in Revenue Performance Management (RPM) systems.

Kwanzoo News Update – December 2011

Mani — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:56:52 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

Kwanzoo News Update – December 2011

In this issue: 12/16/2011

Blog Post: Campaign & Funnel Automation
Webinar with Eloqua:Jan 12, 2012, 10 A.M PST
OMS 12: Enter to win a FREE pass

B2B 2012 Trends Part 2: Campaign & Funnel automation

The world today has changed. Your customers and prospects are everywhere. And no single marketing system can assume that your prospect will engage with your business, only through that specific system’s sphere of control. How can you gain more insights and deliver higher relevance with all of your marketing campaigns across channels?
Keep Reading

Webinar with Eloqua: Trends in B2B Engagement Marketing

Kwanzoo is pleased to bring you a series of webinars on cutting edge, multi-channel engagement marketing topics. Join us for the first Kwanzoo Insights Webinar, on Jan 12, 2012, co-presented with the industry leader in Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Solutions, Eloqua. Our speakers are Eloqua CTO, Steve Woods and Kwanzoo CEO Mani Iyer.

Register Now

OMS 2012 San Diego: Enter to win a FREE pass

The premier global online marketing education conference is back, this time in San Diego. As a proud partner, Kwanzoo is pleased to offer a FREE pass, valued at over $1500, for the conference between Feb 6-10, 2012. Share the news with your friends and enter to win our raffle! HURRY…the raffle ends on Jan 14, 2012.
Enter to win!

Lastly, we would like to wish you all a Happy Holiday Season. See you in 2012!

Regards,
The Kwanzoo Team

Kwanzoo News Update – November 2011

Mani — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:00:46 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

Kwanzoo News Update – November 2011

Welcome to our November Newsletter!

It’s that time again to reflect on the year gone by and plan for the year ahead. This month, we launch our 5 part series on B2B marketing trends for 2012 as we turn our attention to what will matter most to marketers in the new year. In other news, Kwanzoo added Salesforce.com support to our latest Platform release. Our Eloqua Partnership was covered by DemandGen Report and much more. Read on…

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 1: Maximizing Your RPM Investment

This past year saw the growing adoption of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) systems at mid-to-large enterprises. But how do we as marketers make the most of this investment? Follow our 5 part series as we explore this and other 2012 B2B trends. New installments will be added to our blog each week. Read Part 1->

Kwanzoo at Online Marketing Summit, Feb 6-10, 2012

Join us at the premier global online marketing education conference in San Diego and take part in over 100 high-impact sessions, workshops and case studies covering email marketing, search marketing, demand gen, mobile, and much more! Meet over 1,500 of your marketing and internet peers. Save 25% on registration->

Coming in January! Webinar: Kwanzoo + Eloqua – Trends in B2B Engagement Marketing

Eloqua CTO Steven Woods and Kwanzoo CEO Mani Iyer will be co-presenting a Thought Leadership webinar in January 2012. Date to be announced soon. Follow @Kwanzoo on Twitter for updates.

Kwanzoo in the News

DemandGen Report interviewed our CEO, Mani Iyer onKwanzoo’s impact on B2B Marketers.

Business2Community posed 6 thought-provoking questions to us on social media.

Ready to launch a Kwanzoo campaign?

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 2: Campaign and Funnel Automation

Mani — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:13:47 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 2: Campaign and Funnel Automation

[Note: This is Part 2 of a 5-part post. You can read Part 1 here. We will have a new post up each week. Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

The World Today for B2B Marketers
If you are a marketer at a mid-to-large B2B enterprise today, you and your colleagues probably work with a broad mix of marketing systems and tools. Here are just a few of them:

Website Tools:

Content Management System (CMS) to manage your corporate website
Blogging system (WordPress, Typepad or similar) to run your corporate blogs
Community Management platform (Open Text, Lithium, or similar) where your prospects and customers can interact with each other
Analytics tools (Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, or similar)
Landing page building tools (Adobe Test-and-Target, or similar)

Marketing Infrastructure:

Marketing Automation / RPM system (Eloqua, Marketo, or similar) to understand prospect and customer behavior on your website, and nurture with emails along your sales funnel
One or more email marketing systems for push campaigns, third party email lists to drive more inbound demand

Advertising & Media Buying:

Ad platform, that may be hosted and managed by your Agency partner to help drive brand awareness, and generate more top-of-funnel leads
Media yield optimization platforms & tools
A range of third party ad networks (PPC, Display, Remnant, Text Links, Media Exchanges)
Affiliate networks (Commission Junction, or similar) and partner marketing systems

Social & Mobile:

Social presence (Facebook pages, corporate Twitter accounts, LinkedIn Groups)
Mobile platform, for your mobile website, mobile apps, and more

And we’ve probably missed a few other tools, for data cleansing, sales outreach (Salesforce.com), customer service, data segmentation, customer feedback, and more.

The 2012 Imperative: Do More, Do It Better, Across More Channels
As you sit down with your colleagues, and go through your 2012 planning exercise, you are probably pondering these questions:

What can we do in marketing that could be a “Game Changer” in terms of driving revenue for our business?
How can we turn each $1 in technology investment into $3 or more in ROI?
How can we empower our existing staff to be 2X or more productive? How can we best leverage their time, so we optimally tap their knowledge of the business to drive results?
What should we do about social? Mobile? Increasing campaign relevance to the user regardless of the channel where they interact with our brand?
Can we deliver on everything we need to, while still having fun, and not have too much to do everyday?

The Core Issue: We have Single or Dual Channel Tools for a Multi-Channel World
As you go down the list of marketing systems and tools, you will notice something interesting. Most of these systems were designed before we started seeing the recent explosion of marketing channels. Traditional B2B marketing occurred primarily over 3 online channels – email, website, search/display and 1 offline channel – the sales rep on the telephone to the prospect. Many of these tools pre-date the more recent social and mobile channels, and richer data (geo, company, industry, and more) that is now available on the online visitor or user.

The world today has changed. Your customers and prospects are everywhere. And no system can assume that your prospect will make contact with your brand, or engage with your business, only through that specific system’s sphere of control. All marketing systems need to integrate better with each other, to greatly improve the end user experience.

A New Approach to Campaign Design
The traditional B2B campaign execution model assigned different owners for each of the marketing channels, who planned and executed their own campaigns. There is a limited level of campaign concept re-use across channels. While the concept of the B2B “Buyer’s Journey” as discussed by Christine Crandell, Babcock Jenkins, and the Content Marketing Institute among others makes a lot of sense, a key challenge for B2B marketers is translating conceptual marketing models into campaigns, that deliver both a superior experience to the user, and the desired ROI for the marketer.

Reusable Campaign Components
It is now possible to think in terms of small re-usable campaign components that reinforce the brand, engage the prospect, customer or web visitor, learn more about what they are interested in, and direct them to the most appropriate marketing offer or content asset. These re-usable, interactive, content units (or ad units) can be quickly deployed across all channels where the concept will resonate with the audience.

Interactive Experiences on Every Channel
It’s now possible to rapidly A/B test and multi-variate test multiple campaign concepts, make changes in real-time, and iterate to an optimized campaign execution. As users get more sophisticated in their demand for richer content format experiences (polls, mini surveys, social experiences, videos, slides – all enabled for social sharing and lead capture), we will see these content units deliver similar experiences everywhere. The typical campaign flow will change from banners prompting users to click through to landing pages and fill-out lead forms to rich, interactive branded experiences everywhere. Provide the user a rich experience, ask questions to learn more about them, adapt incentives and rewards to best fit their interests, then seek their opt-in, or word-of-mouth mention or support of the brand with their business colleagues and friends.

A New Way to Look At Existing Templates & Pages
By thinking in terms of re-usable campaign components, instead of an entire web page, landing page, email template or Facebook page, marketers can put themselves in the shoes of their prospects and customers, and think more carefully about how to make each interaction with the brand across channels more interesting, and rewarding for the user.

Here at Kwanzoo, we have thought hard about how we can make it easy for marketers to create and manage such campaign components, easily embed them everywhere, enable A/B and split testing, display the most relevant version based on all known information about the visitor, track the analytics, and help improve all of the ongoing campaigns across marketing channels.

Funnel Acceleration: Grow Insights from Campaigns you have Already Run
It is well known that the B2B prospect does not want to be over “touched”. Thus it’s important that each touch is carefully planned. Each touch is an opportunity to move the prospect further along in a long sales cycle. By leveraging known intelligence about a prospect, and combining that with highly relevant question-based engagement of the prospect, marketers can now gain specific insights, very quickly, directly from the prospect, to accelerate the sales funnel. Managing and executing this entire process inside lead nurturing emails, with the right questions presented to the right prospects, in the right sequence, can result in significant sales funnel acceleration.

Shared Intelligence Delivers Higher Relevance
Another key recent learning for us has been the power of sharing intelligence, insights, data and objects between an RPM system (such as Eloqua) and a platform for managing re-usable, interactive content units (such as Kwanzoo). Imagine being able to drag-and-drop interactive content units developed on Kwanzoo, onto the Landing Page builder or Email Template design tool inside your RPM system. What if you could instantly drop in an interactive poll, survey, tell-a-friend social promotion so they show up on any web page or email?

When these interactive units are served on a third party media site for a paid media placement, or on a display ad network, imagine being able to target your campaign concepts, creative, and delivered content offers and assets precisely to a web visitor based on her affiliation with a specific Company or Industry. Then collect a lead right inside the unit, and send the user onto a content asset (with no landing page involved). We are not alone in seeing this as the next opportunity for B2B marketers. The good folks at Babcock Jenkins are also recommending Target Account-based marketing as a key B2B initiative to consider in 2012

Wanted: Campaign Dashboards for Non-Geeks
As marketing channels proliferate, and enterprise marketers look to automate campaign execution, and accelerate their sales funnel it becomes even more critical for all marketing systems to support push and pull of campaign and funnel metrics from other systems into a centralized dashboard. It really should not matter if your campaign views are built around your RPM system, your CMS platform or your website analytics engine. As a marketer, you want to be able to review, analyze and optimize your ongoing campaigns, quickly and easily.

We may not get it all in 2012. But these sure are exciting times. We look forward to working with all of our B2B, B2C and Events customers, as you consider your campaign and funnel automation plans in the new year. Questions? Are there more discussion points that we’ve missed here? Please drop us a note or write a comment below.

p.s. Also see Part 1 of this 5-part Blog Post series here, B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 1: Maximizing Your RPM Investment

See Part 3 – Go Social, Go Cloud without ITwhere we look at new opportunities for marketers to incorporate social and cloud technologies, and enable social interactions, and tap social data and insights when engaging prospects.

You can also hear us discuss some of these ideas and approaches in our Insights Webinar with Eloqua. Catch it live or recorded here.

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 1: Maximize Your RPM Investment

Mani — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:56:35 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 1: Maximize Your RPM Investment

[Note: This is Part 1 of a 5-part post. We will have a new post up each week! Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

B2B marketers today face an interesting paradox. Online marketing channels have brought us closer to our audience than ever before. At the same time, marketers are being asked to reach prospects through more channels to gain their attention, with more targeted campaigns, without a lot of creative, agency or IT resources. Social and mobile are critical new additions to the more traditional B2B channel mix (email, websites, display).

This past year saw growing adoption of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) systems at mid-to-large enterprises. Eloqua recently filed to go IPO, as has ExactTarget. Marketo just raised a $50M round of financing to accelerate their growth. Small-to-medium (SMB) businesses are also stepping up their use of marketing automation, CRM, email and social media marketing platforms from companies such as Act-On Software, Salesforce, Constant Contact and others. These trends will continue. Kwanzoo is at the cutting edge of this transformation of enterprise marketing, for an increasingly social, real-time world.

As a young business, we have had to think hard about how we can add value, address our customer’s marketing challenges, while integrating seamlessly with their existing marketing systems and tools. We are grateful to our customers for their trust in us, and for sharing their insights and feedback. We see the following key trends and themes emerging for B2B marketing in 2012:

1. Maximize the RPM Investment
2. Campaign and Funnel Automation [See Part 2]
3. Go Social, Go Cloud without IT [See Part 3]
4. Connectors, Connectors, Connectors
5. Marketing on Mobile to Business

Maximizing the RPM Investment
RPM platforms such as Eloqua and Marketo are helping B2B marketers effectively identify and nurture prospective customers who visit their company website. As marketers continue to deploy RPM systems, they are considering these additional opportunities to maximize the return on their RPM investment:

Find More Prospects, Everywhere
A prospect touches the company blog, community site, social pages or a partner page, but does not visit any website pages monitored by your RPM system. Is there an easy way to engage the prospect, and capture a lead for ongoing nurturing on all those placements? How about leveraging partner channels (website, email lists) better? Is there a way to quickly and easily run co-branded campaigns via partner channels, on infrastructure (CMS, RPM, Blog) that is completely different from what a marketer uses in-house? Marketers are excited about ways to widen their lead funnel with easy-to-deploy solutions to these challenges.

Learn More with Every Interaction, Everywhere
You send out newsletters and nurturing emails to 1000s of prospects. Is there a way to learn more about specific prospects, and their needs? Find out a bit more about what they are thinking? Which of your 17 different product lines are of most interest to an individual prospect? What’s the prospect’s key pain point from your long list of pain points? You know that a long survey is not going to work. Is there a way to get answers to these questions, in a simple, non-intrusive way, so your sales person is armed with more insights upon lead hand-off? We can now easily address this, with newer approaches to driving interactivity, and triggering short surveys and question-based engagement everywhere.

Offer A Different User Experience
B2B marketers are now opening themselves to learning from their B2C colleagues. After all, B2B prospects are people too! And people love to engage, interact, hear their peer’s opinions. People want to share their knowledge, preference for solutions, and recommend what they love to their friends. B2B marketers who make it easy for their prospects to engage, interact, then receive more personalized offers that they can share with their friends will see greater success. Of course, marketers want easy ways to create these user experiences so as to drive the prospect to consume more content assets, or sign up for a webinar that meets their needs without breaking the budget.

Relationship Targeting Drives Campaign ROI
Marketing Automation Systems, along with Real-time IP data providers (such as DemandBase and Quova) deliver better targeting on landing pages. It’s quite common to pre-fill form fields with the Company Affiliation of a prospect (mapped from the prospect’s IP address).

What promises to drive significant new campaign ROI is leveraging the same Real-time IP data, combined with Target Account or Account Relationship information in an RPM system (such as Eloqua) to dynamically change and serve highly targeted, relevant, marketing offers everywhere. Marketers will be able to define rules in their RPM system to map or update Target Accounts into different sales pipeline stages. RPM systems will then interact with Engagement Marketing platforms such as Kwanzoo to make all of this possible.

We are excited about the opportunity to work with trailblazing partners and customers, to bring new ideas and approaches to a broad range of key demand generation and lead nurturing challenges that B2B marketers face today.

As some of you may already know, we recently announced Kwanzoo’s partnership with Eloqua. We delivered on the first phase, that enables better prospect profiling inside Eloqua lead nurturing emails, and widening the lead funnel to capture more “top of funnel” leads into Eloqua. For the next phase, we are working with Eloqua on leveraging and making business sense of the insights that are captured inside Eloqua, and using those insights to deliver better targeting of Kwanzoo campaigns.

Our core vision remains: offering a comprehensive platform to ideate, quickly build, and execute highly engaging, multi-channel campaigns. Bring interactivity and increased relevance, grow word-of-mouth mentions and sales, while delivering greater insights.

Kwanzoo News Update – October 2011

liznmcd — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:46:17 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

Kwanzoo News Update – October 2011

This month, we launched our new Platform release with strong testimonials from SAP and Real Networks. We announced a technology partnership with Eloqua. We had several media mentions, a brand new 90-Second Overview Video, and much more. Read on…

Thank You, SAP and Real Networks

We were pleased to receive strong testimonials from Salim Ali, Global VP, Routes to Market Marketing, SAP and Joe Weller, Director of Marketing, Real Networks. Thank you Salim and Joe.

We love it when our customers say “compelling conversion metrics” and “24% conversion increase, 300% ROI”.

Kwanzoo at Eloqua Experience, Oct 19-21

The Kwanzoo team went to Eloqua Experience. We met with Eloqua customers and partners to discuss the new Kwanzoo Cloud Connector for Eloqua, as well as an exciting new Eloqua – Kwanzoo capability we are introducing via an Early Adopter Program called Relationship Targeting. If you are an Eloqua customer interested in learning more, please contact us.

Kwanzoo Power Hour for Eloqua Customers – WATCH THE VIDEO

We presented the new Kwanzoo Cloud Connector for Eloqua to their customers, on Oct 25. We went through live examples and walk-through of three interesting B2B engagement marketing use cases:

Segment your audience & gather insights with smart polls & surveys
Grow word-of-mouth referrals with smart shares (tell-a-friend units)
Widen your lead funnel, capture leads everywhere with smart opt-in (lead forms)

Watch the Video>

Kwanzoo + Eloqua Joint Webinar – Trends in B2B Engagement Marketing

Eloqua CTO Steven Woods and Kwanzoo CEO Mani Iyer will be co-presenting a Thought Leadership webinar. Date to be announced soon. Please follow @Kwanzoo on Twitter. [Note: We have had to change the original Nov 9 date due to unavoidable circumstances. Our apologies.]

Media Mentions

DemandGen Report: Interviewed our CEO, Mani Iyer, and highlighted Kwanzoo’s Technology Partnership with Eloqua.

B2B Online: Did a quick summary of what Kwanzoo brings to Eloqua customers. They talked about our polls, surveys, social promotions, opt-in lead forms and data augmentation capabilities.

Website Magazine: Picked up and summarized our new Platform Release. We are glad they saw Kwanzoo as being useful to web managers and developers for driving engagement & conversions.

TMCnet: Wrote a Featured Article on Kwanzoo in their Email Marketing section.

Kwanzoo News Update – September 2011

liznmcd — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:29:28 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

Kwanzoo News Update – September 2011

Many of you have asked us for examples on how best to build out Kwanzoo’s smart polls, surveys and social promotions with opt-in lead forms for your specific use scenario.

Want to learn how you can enhance your lead nurturing, expand your lead funnel, maximize your media budget, grow word-of-mouth mentions or event sales with Kwanzoo? We have now setup use case samples for easy download on our site. Flip through any of our guides, and quickly build what you need. You will find the guides by filling out the form on our Products and Solutions pages.

Meet Kwanzoo at Eloqua Experience, Oct 19-21

The Kwanzoo team will be at Eloqua Experience. We will be there on all 3 days of the conference between Oct 19 and 21, for meetings with Eloqua customers to discuss the Kwanzoo Cloud Connector for Eloqua, as well as an exciting new Eloqua – Kwanzoo capability that’s currently under development. If you are an Eloqua customer interested in learning more, please contact us.

Kwanzoo Power Hour for Eloqua Customers – October 25th at 8am

Kwanzoo has been invited to present the Kwanzoo Cloud Connector for Eloqua to Eloqua customers, Tuesday, October 25th, at 8am PST/11am EST. This session, Widen Your Lead Funnel with Kwanzoo Connector for Eloqua, is open to everyone and you do not need to be an Eloqua customer to attend. Please follow @Kwanzoo on Twitter for more details.

Kwanzoo + Eloqua to Present Joint Webinar – MARK THE DATE

Eloqua CTO Steven Woods and Kwanzoo CEO Mani Iyer will be co-presenting a Thought Leadership webinar that you won’t want to miss, on November 9, 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST. Please mark the date / time and follow @Kwanzoo on Twitter for more details.

New Feature!

Kwanzoo Relationship Targeting: This innovative capability is now available to select enterprise customers as part of our Pilot Program. The initial capability enables you to setup multiple smart polls & display ads in a single Kwanzoo campaign and run them across all channels.

You can then map the most relevant creative to specific Companies, based on intelligence from your marketing automation platform, as to the Company’s stage in the buying cycle.

We expect this level of deep targeting to deliver strong ROI for our clients.

Kwanzoo News Update – August 2011

liznmcd — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:43:22 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

Kwanzoo News Update – August 2011

We are pleased to introduce Kwanzoo’s latest innovation. As an enterprise marketer, you can now target and serve prospects with highly relevant polls, surveys and social promotions based on their company or industry affiliation, geo-location, or sales pipeline stage in your marketing automation platform. Read on…

New Feature!

Company, Industry, Geo-Location & Sales Pipeline-Stage Targeting: This innovative capability is now available to select enterprise customers. Setup multiple smart polls and display ads in a single Kwanzoo campaign.You can then map each creative to specific Companies, based on their stage in the buying cycle:

Early stage
Getting educated stage
Buying process stage
Existing customer up-sell

Polls provide you a great way to engage and segment your prospects. And as always, you will be able to run these campaigns across several channels, from your corporate website, to blogs, community sites, partner/affiliate sites, Facebook pages, publisher and ad network placements and via re-targeting platforms! We expect this level of deep targeting to deliver strong ROI for our clients. Want to schedule a demo for your team? Contact Us.

Kwanzoo Tell-a-Friend Promotion Delivers for OMS!

Kwanzoo was a Silver Sponsor at the Social Media Marketing Summit earlier this month. If you signed up to attend, you probably used this Tell-a-Friend promotion (see the demo unit here). We just heard back from the OMS folks, and they were very happy with the results (engagement, social shares, conference sign-ups). Want to learn more? Contact Us.

Focus Round Table – B2B Engagement Marketing & Social Media Strategies

Our CEO, Mani Iyer moderated and spoke at this Focus Round table, with Mark Lange, CMO of Nimsoft Inc (an IT Management Solutions company) and Rajiv Parikh, CEO of Position2 (a Search and Social Media Marketing Agency). Here’s the audio recording of the session.

Meet Kwanzoo at Dreamforce

The Kwanzoo team will be at Dreamforce. We will be there at the Tuesday night SFMOMA party, all of Wednesday and Thursday in sessions and the Cloud Expo area, the Thursday Night bash and more. We are meeting our partners and customers. Would you like to meet us live? Just drop us a note via Twitter (@kwanzoo) or via email and we will find a way to get together.

What Can Google+ Do for Enterprise Marketers?

Mani — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 03:25:02 +0000

This post has been republished from: Social Inbound Marketing | Kwanzoo

What Can Google+ Do for Enterprise Marketers?

Just when marketers thought they had enough social platforms to deal with, along comes Google+, the newest social platform from Google. And it’s off to a fast start with 20M+ users within a few weeks. For more on Google+ check out Mashable’s Google+: The Complete Guide. We have been giving Google+ a closer look. If you are a B2B Marketer, Google+ could become a much more valuable channel to reach prospects and customers than LinkedIn and Twitter! While the latter are both successful social platforms for business users, they have been slow to innovate. If you are a B2C Marketer, Google+ as it ramps up on users vis-a-vis Facebook could again be a very attractive new channel. Google+ could outpace today’s social platform leaders very quickly, especially if they make specific moves to cater to the needs of businesses. Read on….

Social Presence for Businesses and Brands
Many businesses, both B2C and B2B, are already reaching out beyond their own corporate websites to develop a social presence. Two popular choices are Facebook Pages and Twitter Business Accounts. Some businesses are experimenting with LinkedIn Company Pages.

Facebook Pages

SAP Poll on Facebook

Facebook Pages, with their flexible brand controls, tab structure, and large ecosystem of third party tools and agencies are enabling businesses to create highly customized, branded experiences for their customers and prospects. It’s quite easy to add different engagement applications (polls, surveys, sign-ups, deals and promotions, presentations, videos, twitter streams, news and event announcements and more). And it’s not just B2C companies anymore. Many B2B companies such as SAP are connecting with their customers and prospects on Facebook today.

Even with all this, Facebook continues to stump marketers with their complex algorithms that determine what posts on a Company’s Facebook Page actually make it out to fans on their feeds. A marketer’s ability to drive interactivity and engagement via a specific Facebook post is still limited to text copy and content, an image and a link. Richer interactivity requires a link redirect to a Facebook page, or an external web page.

Twitter Business Accounts

Dell Outlet on Twitter

Twitter is able to serve a useful role as a conduit between a Business or Brand and its customers and prospects for customer service, promotions, deals, and general company information. However, given it’s inherent 140-character limit, the quality of the content consumption that’s possible on a Twitter stream remains limited. The native twitter web interface provides a limited experience for viewing photos and videos, and can only link out to long form content.

LinkedIn Company Pages and Groups

LinkedIn falls short of both Facebook and Twitter today. Developers and agencies have limited (if any) room to enhance the engagement model between a business and its customers. Businesses are also unable to provide highly relevant content in different interactive formats to their customers. LinkedIn Groups provides another avenue for businesses to connect with customers, but gets very noisy very quickly. A busy professional finds it almost impossible to identify valuable information from a promotional message inside a LinkedIn Group. LinkedIn Answers is yet another avenue for a business to showcase it’s expertise to prospects, to encourage them to engage with the brand. A key limitation here is answers getting locked down after a period of time, resulting in multiple redundant versions of the same question, and a disjointed collection of responses, which are also not easily whetted or sorted out by priority.

Google+ Business Profiles: A Wishlist

Google+ can take key learning from what works, and what does not in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and finally get a business-friendly social platform done right! Here are some key components:

Platform and Device Access: Open to all businesses, from the local corner store to a Fortune 10 company. Work well across all desktops, tablets and mobile devices.

Interfaces and APIs: Open interfaces with some structure. Quick and easy addition of a range of custom and third party applications into Business Profile pages. This will enable a business to offer their customers 100% of the same capabilities to interact and conduct transactions with the business as they do via their own website.

Upcoming Google+ Business Profiles

Circles for Business Profiles: Much has been written about Google+ circles, and whether individual users will use that capability effectively. Where circles will make even more sense is for businesses! Imagine being able to deliver targeted promotions, deals, content, information to prospects at different stages in their relationship with the business. Properly defined and managed Google+ business circles with deep analytics could provide the level of engagement with prospects inside a social platform that is hard to do today. Imagine lead nurturing inside Google+ (similar to what you would have to do today with a marketing automation platform such as Eloqua or Marketo).

The current interaction model for most lead nurturing platforms is email. Some are adding social capabilities. The model of tomorrow could be a combination of email and social streams (especially Google+ streams with its superior Circles-based user segmentation model) delivered via mobile or over the web. Imagine being able to do your lead nurturing with segmented prospect lists organized as Google+ Business Circles. For all this to work, Google+ needs to offer a level of transparency and openness well beyond what’s available today.

Easy Prospect Discovery: Google+ is powered by the world’s best search engine. They already rank and surface the most relevant content to a prospect who is expressing purchase intent via Google keyword searches. Google+ could become a top choice for businesses to create, post and share great content that is served out via Google+ streams. Google+ posts are linked to long form content on their own corporate blogs, and third party media sites. A great piece of content will get read, commented on, and voted up (+1s) by the network of customers and prospects. This in turn can be served up as a highly relevant piece of content to new prospects as they search inside Google+ and on the web. This would increase the pace at which businesses and prospects find each other, and confirm the fit and match between them. Google+ could take a very different approach from LinkedIn, with their (cold outreach) inMails and Group Member messages. A well-designed recommendation engine that shows related content to a post or content being consumed by a user would create a superior user experience.

Content Marketing Done Right

The Content Marketing Process

Content marketing today is all about writing a great post on a corporate blog, then getting the word out about the newly created content via any or all of these channels: – email newsletters – updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – engaging on community sites and third party blogs – answering questions on Quora, Focus, LinkedIn Answers, Salesforce Chatter, and other Q&A forums – guest posts and article placements on third party sites Prospects often discover content as a result of in-bound sharing and re-tweets on their social graphs through various channels. Another important channel for visibility is content hubs such as Youtube and Slideshare, where the hub promotes new content based on user views, likes, favorites. It’s a given that if you want an SEO friendly corporate blog, you need to write posts regularly to keep your blog fresh, and you also need to properly tag your posts with keywords that are relevant. Social sharing amongst peers remains the most effective means by which new content gets discovered by users, more so than “push marketing” by content creators. Effective content marketing will require optimizing for quick and easy publishing and sharing, on all of the major content consumption channels!

Sharing on Facebook – All Or Nothing?

Facebook Sharing

With every user’s time at a premium, a key issue with Facebook is the lack of relevance of many posts to a recipient who is shown the post via his or her feed. The Facebook sharing model does not require a user to better match the post with relevant receivers in his or her social graph. That is so unlike an email based sharing interaction where, especially in a business context, most of us try to be sensitive to the fact that we should only send someone an email if we have something that would be of interest to them.

Sharing on Twitter – Save That Extra Click

Twitter shares work well, if the person who posts does a good job of explaining what exactly is being shared. Driving people to the extra click, not providing enough context on the shared content, can all lead to a poor experience for content consumers. Many a time, it makes much more sense to stay on the same page to watch a video, view a photo, or engage in some other way – not so easy to do today via the native Twitter web interface.

Sharing on LinkedIn – Share What? With Who?

LinkedIn Updates

LinkedIn status updates have been a little late to the social sharing party! As a result, many users are simply linking their Twitter accounts to LinkedIn. Tweets flow to LinkedIn users as well, via a marketer’s LinkedIn profile, and the associated status. Again, given the limited features around adding rich media components and interactivity to a LinkedIn status update, and given the updates disappear quickly, they are not a very effective means to share content in terms of both the user experience and the ROI to the marketer.

Sharing on Google+ – More Targeted, More Relevant?

The vision of enabling more targeted, more relevant social sharing in Google+ is extremely powerful. The challenge as we all know, is making it intuitive and easy for users. Google+ is off to a great start as far as allowing users to share content in many ways:

- Share via steam

- links to blog posts, videos, presentations, images and more, reaching a large number of people very quickly

- Live share via Hangouts

- While it is limited to a small set of people at a time, its a great way for businesses to test out new ideas, concepts, and connect with their most loyal customers for feedback

- Q&A – not available on Google+ today, but providing a Q&A capability with Individual Profiles (a la FormSpring), Business Profiles (a la any Website’s FAQ) and across Google+ (a la Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers, Quora, Focus.com) with answers easily searchable across all possible Q&A placements, would create a very valuable new knowledge resource for customers and prospects, and a great way for businesses to engage their audience.

Other Related Topics That Will Interest Enterprise Marketers:

Q. How will display advertising evolve across Google+ ?
Q. What new forms of advertising might be part of the Google+ experience?

Q. How will Google+ Streams and Feeds impact Google Search and SEO tactics for both personal and business brands?

Q. How will email and social media campaign management evolve with the growth of Google+ Circles for Businesses?

When will all of this really happen? The fun is only just beginning. Let the Social Platform Wars Begin!

Have comments? Add a comment below, or find me on Google+ (where else?) at: https://plus.google.com/108070165960243194448/posts or Twitter @iyermani. I look forward to more learning and sharing.