Hearing a search marketer like myself talk about internet marketing for SMB’s has some benefit or else I wouldn’t do this. I do sincerely believe, however, that the most important voices for anyone to hear, whether you are a search marketing service provider or an SMB that is using or thinking about using internet marketing more effectively, are those who do this stuff and apply it to their business / work.
Heather Smith, Marketing Project Leader for ActiveStrategy near Philadelphia, PA was kind enough to answer some questions about how ActiveStrategy integrates the internet into its marketing efforts. In the interest of full disclosure ActiveStategy is a client that I have worked for with my company and had worked with them through another search marketing provider in the past. I feel that they are a “classic” SMB business that sees the value of internet marketing but has learned how to be realistic about it. Read on and learn more.
FR: Could you please tell us a little about ActiveStrategy’s offerings?
Heather: ActiveStrategy provides web-based Balanced Scorecard software, as well as strategic business
consulting, to help organizations execute strategic plans, turn them into actionable items, and measure their performance. Our software, ActiveStrategy Enterprise, allows organizations to align all employee activities to critical strategic objectives, drive accountability, discover the root causes of performance problems, and fix them before they become larger issues. We also offer a series of educational seminars that provide executives hands-on, practical instruction on various performance management methodologies.
FR: What forms of internet marketing are you currently doing for ActiveStrategy? (Pick from SEO, PPC, blogging, social media etc).
Heather: We leverage SEO, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, blogging, and free webinars in order to generate leads for our consulting services, to create demand for our software, and to drive people to our events (annual conference, seminars, and webinars).
On our website, we offer not only information about our products and services, but also free resources for people just starting to learn about performance management. We use SEO to optimize those pages for high search engine rankings because we believe that educating someone about performance management methodologies is one way to turn them into a potential client.
We offer webinars like Balanced Scorecards: Fundamental Concepts, Performance Excellence in Government, and Driving Aligned Improvement in Hospitals - some appeal to those just learning about Balanced Scorecards, and others appeal to specific industries. We follow up with webinar attendees to see if they’d like a web demo of our software, or if they’re interested in attending a seminar. We try to integrate our online marketing efforts in this way – they’re integrated with each other (we advertise webinars on our website, online event listings, and through email campaigns), and they’re integrated with our sales process (sales people are following up with the webinar attendees).
Last year, we started our own blog, “The Glue, a Guide to Executing Business Strategy,” as a vehicle for communicating our domain expertise. We also comment on blogs about Balanced Scorecards and other performance management methodologies.
Although we meet a lot of our leads at conferences and other live events, online marketing is an important part of our strategy.
FR: How do you define success for these campaigns? Lead generation? Actual sales? etc
Heather: Determining success for some of our campaigns is subjective right now. Because our blog is still relatively new, we don’t have a defined number of leads we hope to drive to our corporate website from the blog each month. I personally am happy when we get a handful of leads who visit our website after spending time on the blog. These visitors generally spend 1 to 5 minutes longer on our website than the average visitor.
Certainly some campaigns are concretely more successful than others. If we get 2% of an email list to register for a webinar, that’s a success. If we get a 0.1% click rate, we’ll go back, refine the message and look of an email, and try again.
In the past, we have concentrated more on driving high volumes of somewhat qualified traffic to our website, whereas now, we are more concerned with obtaining higher quality sales leads. As we continue to use lead scoring, we’ll be able to pass along highly qualified leads to sales, and we should see a direct correlation between our marketing efforts and revenue generation.
The point is, there is no magic bullet when it comes to our online marketing. We are in an industry that requires a lot of touch points before a prospect becomes a sale. But we recognize that in order for people to do business with us, they need to find us, which is why we’re big on SEO and SEM. I’m sure that the fact that we offer web-based products helps us get the money to spend on these initiatives, whereas other small-to-medium businesses (SMB’s) might have less understanding executives.
FR: What exposure do the internet marketing efforts get in the company? C-level? VP? Director?
Heather: We track the status and results of campaigns in our own software, and review this information with management at monthly business reviews. This ensures that our marketing efforts align with our corporate strategy. If one of the objectives set by management is “expand Healthcare business,” we ensure that our online marketing efforts target this objective. We’ll optimize our healthcare-related web pages, send e-blasts to our healthcare prospects, run a healthcare webinar, etc.
All of the employees in the company are aware of most of the online marketing we do. Our employees receive our email blasts so they know what event we’re promoting. We also ask that every employee include a link to our blog or to information about an upcoming seminar in his/her email signature. We try to use all touch points with clients or potential clients as opportunities to impart positive brand messages.
FR: What areas have been the most / least successful? Why?
Heather: The blog has been successful in driving leads back to our corporate website. Since we offer best practices, tips, and success stories, readers seem to be enticed to check out our product offerings.
Our SEO efforts have helped us maintain high search engine rankings for important keywords, and move up to the first page of results for keywords we are just realizing are important to our business. For example, we started optimizing for the term “strategic business consulting” back in December. We used to be on the 2nd or 3rd page of results on Google, and now we’re consistently in the top 5 organic results.
Webinars have also been a successful online marketing tool for us. Our email and website promotions of these once/month or twice/month events have consistently garnered high numbers of leads for our sales team, and have helped persuade people to go a step further and attend one of our seminars.
FR: How has outsourcing your search marketing worked for you?
Heather: We haven’t always had positive results from outsourcing our search marketing. We have gotten lost in the shuffle at more than one firm, and we’ve found that much of the work that’s been done for us is stuff we can do in-house. However, outsourcing this job has been a time-saver for us since SEO does require serious, on-going attention. In a very small marketing department, sometimes this just isn’t possible.
FR: What areas of internet marketing or social media are you currently examining (if any) for future involvement?
Heather: We have begun using software to “nurture” leads, and we are going to begin drip marketing in the coming months. Lead nurturing and drip marketing will help us move prospects along our very long sales cycle, and will allow us to qualify/score leads, passing only the most qualified on to our sales team. We are going to be using email for our drip marketing campaigns, sending deliberately timed informational materials, white papers, case studies, etc to prospects in the hope that we’ll stay top-of-mind with organizations that are considering a Strategy Execution or Balanced Scorecard project in the future. Drip marketing should be a powerful tool for us because our products/services require a “right time to buy” – we hope that our prospects will turn to us when they’re ready for software or consulting for their performance management project.
FR: What recommendations would you have for other small to medium businesses who are going up against larger players?
Heather: Be realistic about what defines a successful campaign, be smart about how you spend your money, and be flexible. I used to work for a (wealthy) entrepreneur who only cared about being 1st in paid search on Google. He didn’t care that, despite the marketing department’s protesting, we were spending $1,000/day to get and stay there. He read a book about the importance of being #1 of Google, and that became his only strategy. It’s simply not realistic or smart. We would have done better to hire an outside company to help us raise our organic search rankings, and we would have spent thousands less. But again, because we had a large marketing department, he wanted to do everything in-house. However, our time would have been better spent developing creative campaigns rather than monitoring PPC ads. At ActiveStrategy, everyone understands that spending money to achieve online marketing success is necessary, but we are smart about how we spend it. Email marketing is cheap and can provide immediate “success” – webinar sign-ups, seminar registrations. PPC is expensive, so we monitor the success of our PPC campaigns and adjust ads and budgets accordingly.
FR: Thanks, Heather!
Heather Smith Bio: As the Marketing Project Leader at ActiveStrategy, Inc., a Balanced Scorecard software and strategic management consulting company outside of Philadelphia, Heather is responsible for online marketing efforts, including SEO, SEM, and email marketing. In her previous position as a Product Marketing Manager at a multifaceted international organization, she developed and executed web marketing plans for three lines of business (managed care, manufacturing, and computer hardware).
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