If you’re a B2B marketer in the Greater Toronto Area, you’re the target audience for a new ongoing live event series that we recently kicked off in September with our first #torontoB2B Marketers Meetup at the sleek, modern, funky ING Direct Cafe in downtown Toronto. Each event is small and cozy with attendance limited to 50 people, so keep an eye on the upcoming schedule and register for free online to secure your ticket. The next #torontoB2B Marketers Meetup happens Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 4pm.

The mission of the event series is simply to unite the thousands of Toronto-area B2B marketers in a casual, face-to-face setting where we can share knowledge, expertise, and learning with one another. B2B Marketing is ripe with innovation, change, and growth these days. Even still, many marketing industry events and conferences pay little or no attention to what’s working in B2B marketing and what’s not.

This is the an ongoing series of peer networking and knowledge-sharing meetups exclusively for B2B marketers. The events begin with hand-picked guest speakers sharing their B2B-focused expertise and experience in focused 20-minute presentations, followed by an open and informal networking session fueled by light munchies and beverages.

Here’s a video of one of our presenters, Axle Davids from Distility, from his 20 minute presentation at the first #torontoB2B Marketers Meetup in September.

Exploration & Commitment: The Essence of Building and Living the Brand

If you have an idea for a guest speaker at an upcoming event, or would like to sponsor an event, please email Nolin LeChasseur.

Making it easy for recipients of your marketing emails to opt out (or unsubscribe) may seem counterintuitive if you are focused on building your list, but it will actually result in more high quality leads. Making opt-out difficult by hiding the link at the bottom of emails, or not having email preferences accessible on your site, has repercussions. Read more »

Thought leadership (some times called content marketing) is one of the most powerful but challenging tools in the B2B Marketing toolbox: here are 4 practical tips on how to get started.

As the very smart Chris Koch points out in this terrific blog post on idea marketing, many companies have given up trying to create valuable content and started dressing up product brochures as thought leadership.  But with the right approach B2B companies large and small can leverage their Subject Matter Expertise (SME) and create valuable content that will connect with their customers and drive business results.

4 Practical Tips from ITSMA’s Chris Koch

At the end of his post, Chris offers 4 practical tips on how to do a better job of thought leadership marketing. We thought they were worth highlighting for you:
Read more »

I’ll be honest, our objectives with clients very rarely include automating much of anything. So we’re not setting up marketing automation content, forms and campaigns to capture data that would feed into being able to automate. We’re usually seeking to capture data that gives more decision-making insight for the marketers and salespeople involved.

More specifically, clients usually want to be able to perform qualification at the Lead-to-MQL (marketing-qualified lead) stage and the MQL-to-SQL (sales-qualified lead) gates. So the qualification criteria the client wants to apply feed into data collection and capture execution.

MQL qualification is really about whether it’s worth investing in further marketing to the prospect…are they in a situation/company/role/industry that would realistically make them a potential customer?

SQL qualification is determining if a salesperson should contact them. Every sales organization has a different threshold for this, so the criteria can differ quite a bit, but often involve some version of BANT and/or likelihood of a sales opportunity, in addition to stage of the buying decision and role in the buying decision.

So…then it becomes an exercise of deciding how to use the tools you have to collect and organize the data you need.  Here are some ideas for applying Marketing Automation features to enable lead qualification, and what you can discern from each data point:

• Lead score is calculated based on activities, so it’s a good soft indicator for both MQL and SQL, but in itself tells you very little that’s definitive (my mom has a very high lead score in our database because she likes to read everything I publish).
• Lead grade is a good accompaniment to lead score because it’s a) manual, and b) based on yes/no qualification questions. Also useful for both MQL and SQL.
• In-depth activity data is where the real answers lie, and as you know, you really have to look at that one prospect at a time. So starting with prospects who have good score/grade combos, you then dig into what the other data tells you.
• We have been so bold as to set up custom fields that ask prospects, with drop-down list choices for data consistency, which stage and role in the buying decision best applies to them. It’s amazing how many people will answer this question since they don’t consider it as confidential as name or phone number. That’s really helpful insight to have, obviously.
• And if you’ve already figured out which content you offer aligns to which buying stage, then you should be able to eyeball someone’s content engagement (views & downloads) history to see where they’re most likely to be.

Add it all up, and you have information to help your sales team formulate an approach to contacting qualified leads in a highly relevant way.

Build some simple automation rules to manage lists of people against this field and activity data, and you can also compile some “segments” in your marketing automation tool and build more tailored campaigns (with appropriate content) for each.

Sadly there’s no one-size-fits-all out-of-the-box config for this, which I suppose is what keeps us in business. The best advice I can give you is to figure out your model first, and worry about automating it later. Automation is a useful tool, but as an objective in and of itself, can take you off track in your planning and execution.

We’ve set up some stage-based nurturing campaigns for clients, but actually use drip campaign logic very rarely. The sequential nature of a drip campaign can sometimes be tempting to over-engineer, and takes the natural choice away from the prospect.

Powerful marketing automation tools have led marketers to believe that they should be automating everything they do, but that’s quite misleading. (and a big “Thanks!” to Carrie in the Pardot Users LinkedIn Group for posting a question that inspired this answer.)

Rather than linear drip campaign structure, we set up “What next?” options and other “Choose your own adventure” style content that is presented to a prospect. The “What next?” content is primarily delivered via form thank-you content and auto-responder emails, and usually includes at least one content option for each of the three B2B decision stages we use (problem definition > solution evaluation > final decision).

The options are often also related in some way to the content the prospect just accessed–same vertical, same decision-making role, same need/pain, etc. Similarly, timed email campaigns (newsletters, etc.) include multiple content options that span different decision stages.

This does a few things:

1. It gives prospects obvious content pathway choices at the moment they’re already engaging with your content. When else will they be more likely to click on a link you offer up? Most visitors to your site likely already consume content in spurts…take a look at your prospect histories to verify.
2. It increases the likelihood that prospects, regardless of decision stage, will see something else that’s relevant to them.
3. It gives you greater prospect-level insight into where they likely are in their buying decision, what issues they’re primarily trying to deal with, and what they’re NOT interested in.

So it’s not as fancy as drip logic, but it also doesn’t require you guess right when trying to diagram out the buying process and timeline. You just make it really easy for prospects to choose their pathway, or adventure, through your content at whatever pace they set for themselves.