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08.13.10 Increasing Your Site Ranking With Image Alt Tags  By David Raab The always-insightful Adam Needles is running a series of blog posts this week that summarize the "real state" of B2B demand generation. So far, his main points have been that the role of B2B marketing has expanded to cover the entire buying cycle from initial lead generation through closed deals and that new technology must be accompanied by changes in people, process and content to have an impact. Tomorrow's post will apparently discuss the need to tie marketing efforts to revenue. This is good stuff and well articulated, but industry gurus have been making similar points for a long time. The real question is what to do about it. HOW can marketers adjust their staffing and processes, given the practical constraints of time and budget? And can systems provide specific capabilities that will make the adjustment easier? The conventional wisdom is that marketers need to become more efficient, more attuned to individual buyers' movement through the purchase cycle, and better coordinated with sales departments. But although these are certainly valid goals, I think they understate the problem. Specifically, they make an implicit assumption that marketers are facing a stable situation. This is what allows them to design a new set of processes and techniques optimized for that situation. I'd argue that the situation is highly unstable. Marketers face continued rapid change in the methods and media they have available. In this situation, any optimized process will rapidly become obsolete. So, the key requirement is flexibility itself. The most successful organizations will be those whose people, processes and technology can most effectively exploit new opportunities as they appear. (The classic example of the conflict between stability and flexibility is the competition between Ford and General Motors in the 1920's. Henry Ford relentlessly, even obsessively, optimized his company to make Model T's more efficiently. But even though Ford kept driving down his costs, he ultimately lost to a General Motors that was able to change its products more quickly. Just thought I'd throw that in there.) What does an organization optimized for flexibility look like? I think it keeps its processes simple, so they can be easily adjusted. This may mean they're broken down into many small, connected processes that can be changed individually without affecting the other processes around them. ("Modular" and "loosely coupled" are better terms for this but sound too geeky.) It certainly means that results are measured closely and frequently, so successes and failures are identified quickly and exploited or discarded as appropriate. It also means the organization makes experimentation easy, in terms of funding, staff time and tolerance for mistakes. It probably suggests that staff members should be more generalists than specialists, which implies greater willingness to pay for training and perhaps wider use of outside resources to provide particular skills on demand. Continue reading this article. About the Author: David M. Raab is a Principal at Raab Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in marketing technology and analysis. He advises major consumer and business marketers on marketing processes, technology and service vendors. Mr. Raab is author of the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems and Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit. He has written hundreds of articles on marketing technology for industry publications including DM Review, DM News, Relationship Marketing Report, Bank Marketing, Target Marketing, The Journal of Database Marketing, and elsewhere. Mr. Raab established the technology consulting practice at Raab Associates in 1987. He holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and MBA from the Harvard Business School. Check out his blog at http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/. |
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