A Few Gold Nuggets from BtoB's NetMarketing Breakfast(5/14) – Interactive Marketing

How do you get busy marketers in a room for 2 hours to discuss some of their interactive marketing practices? One way is to offer them breakfast, exposure to several leading marketing organizations and industry experts, and introduction to a couple of digital marketing vendors. BtoB did just that this morning in Waltham, MA. Panelists included John Smits, Global Dir. Dbse. Mktg. and Segmentation, EMC; Leigh Day, Sr. Dir. Corp. Comm, Red Hat; and Paul Gillin of Paul Gillin Communications. Vendors included Brightcove and ZoomInfo.

Here are a couple of key takeaways from the meeting:

How do you avoid "campaign collisions" [EMC insight]

• Problem: multiple BUs and regions were sending communications to the same individuals (e.g., CIOs) about different EMC events on the same day
• Solution: "Deliver the most appropriate information, to the most relevant audience via the user's medium of choice" [sounds easy, no?]
  - "Centralized Demand Center" created a couple of years ago --> a single global database
  - Segmentation strategy used to profile individuals and their needs, leveraging intrinsic and extrinsic information from disparate sources to best understand who should be targeted for which go-to-market(GTM) activities
  - "Plan, calendar and govern". . . only give folks access to prospects/customers that meet specific criteria, thereby improving the quality of interaction of EMC with specific individuals as part of GTM activities
• Results: For a specific launch activity (email) for one of their platforms, they achieved a >20% open rate and <0.05%>
• Ongoing challenges. . ."How do you "control" prospect interactions across all BUs and regions?": Less about control, more about leveraging common interests; Involve users in decision-marketing processes; Offer value for use of corporate database (e.g., access to valuable infrastructure, higher quality contact information) [leverage Mktg. Shared Services as another part of this execution strategy]

Some key success factors for your digital marketing strategy

• Red Hat
  - news blog with an RSS feed, headlines on Twitter
  - offer high quality content and value for customers: Red Hat KnowledgeBase to provide relevant and valuable info. to customers; "Carve Out Costs with Red Hat" campaign- an online resource site to help customers deal with the downturn
  - Leverage multiple types of technology to reach different audiences (e.g., video, podcast, whitepapers); yet content must be written differently for each medium ("don't just webify a white paper") [earlier Blog on video]
• Paul Gillen
  - "must lead with your business objective, not the latest social media tool"
  - To optimize participation in a community you need to identify and leverage peoples' interests and passion for participation and collaboration
  - The real action now is branded and special interest communities. For example, "Opinion Panelists" by Hilton (private panel): direct feedback from their best (~300) customers. . . virtually replaced focus groups for Hilton. . .save $, immediate feedback, etc. . . get loyalty points for participation
• EMC: Leverage social media to broaden the impact and value of other marketing activities: EMC World. . "we've started marketing this in-person event months before its start date– e.g., getting people online to engage and discuss key topics and then gather these folks together when in-person at the event