Marketing Roadmaps

Marketing

What role the blogroll?

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What is the role of the blogroll? In the early days of blogs, they helped establish the community, kind of an “oh wow, there are other people out there publishing just like me.”  Everyone could share in the accomplishment as the group grew… and grew … and grew.

As a result, putting together a blogroll is something of a rite of passage for the new blogger – you know, or think, you need one, and you want it to be JUST right. Who should be on MY blogroll, what will my choices say about me…

I know this from my own recent, personal experience when I started my blog last November. I made the decision to consciously manage my blogroll, rather than just publish my Bloglines subscriptions. In other words, I read many more blogs than are on my blogroll.  The ones on my public blogroll are there for a reason, which I will get to in a moment.

So what is the role of the blogroll, NOW?  For some, being on MANY MANY blogrolls is a measure of popularity; measurements like the Technorati 100 tell us who are the most “linked to.” Now, that is one measure of worth, but in the days of the Long Tail, it is not necessarily the most important one.

Part of the long tail thesis (and apologies if I paraphrase incorrectly) is that the Internet has energized micro-markets, or niches, making it possible to target to specific interests in ways that the mass markets just could not. So, we need to think not in terms of mass popularity, a la the Technorati 100, but rather in terms of OUR AUDIENCE.

So, your blogroll should be for your audience. If you have an audience of one (or two if you count your Mum), then it can be whatever YOU want. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

But if you are writing your blog for a broader audience, you need to think about how they will use (or not) your blogroll.

I say OR NOT, because all this is complicated by the fact that RSS aggregators don’t show the blogroll. They just feed the actual content of your posts, unless you go to the complicated step of creating multiple feeds from your blog, with one of them being the blogroll. And who has time for that… I’m not sure I even know how to do this, although I am sure it can be done.

Now, it may be that only a small population is using RSS at this point, but it will grow. Put the blogroll in its proper place. It is FAR less important than the content of your blog.

So here is my advice:

  1. Focus on the content of your blog. Make it compelling, worth linking to and generally interesting to the people in your audience – the ones you want to read your blog. Don’t worry about the masses.
  2. Link to others. A lot. It will make a difference.
  3. Your blogroll should fit the nature of your blog. If it is a personal blog, put whatever you please on your blogroll. Don’t have one at all if you don’t want. It is YOUR blog. The window into your soul. Or not. Your choice, and you know what they can do if they can’t take a joke.
  4. If you have a business-oriented blog, you need to think about your blog as a resource for your customers. Your blog, and your blogroll, should help them as well as be a place for your personal expression.

My blog fits this last description, so I will share my “policies” should they be helpful to you.

First, for the most part, I stick to marketing and business topics. I rarely blog about my personal life. The one exception, as my readers know, has been to share with you the achievements of a Scottish Terrier that I co-bred and co-own.

Second, my blogroll is focused on my intended audience, not on me. The bulk of the resources listed are marketing and Internet business websites and blogs that would be helpful to my marketing colleagues and current/prospective clients.

Third, because people do want to know a bit about the person behind a blog, I have included a few hints as to my views in the blogroll (hint: check the politics and N.E.C. category). And my life isn’t hidden – if you only look a little hard, you can find a link from my business website (www.getgood.com) to all kinds of family stuff. I just don’t blog it, not my style.

Item four: I read a blog for at least a week before I add it to the blogroll. I have to say “YES” about something the writer has said more than once to add it to my blogroll. Likewise, if I have a blog listed and find that I am just not reading it much any more, I will take it off.

That is item five. Your blogroll should be actively managed. Don’t just put it up once and forget about it. If you are going to have a public blogroll, you need to make sure it reflects the views and opinions that you intended. If you don’t want to manage your blogroll, or make your news aggregator list public, then it is almost better that you don’t have one.

Finally: much of this is related to a business blog, versus a personal blog. I do believe that the rules are different if you are promoting a business, or presenting yourself as an expert in a field, versus emoting a personal view. When it is your business, and your livelihood is at stake, the stakes are higher, manage accordingly.

Peace out.

More on RSS aggregators and some other random stuff

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RSS aggregators

As regular readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of RSS aggregators. Some of my feelings about blogrolls (and utility thereof) are no doubt related to the fact that I read blogs (and any websites I can) in my RSS aggregator (Bloglines if you care) so I rarely see blogrolls.

A couple of good resource articles last week on RSS.

Random Stuff

Via Communication Revolutions , a link to Robin Good’s Best Blog Directory and Submission sites

Also from the Diva: 55 women bloggers. I am proud to be on the list, in no particular order J Thanks, Toby. Go to her main page for the post; I can’t get permalinks or trackbacks to the DIva to work for this link. I will fix it later if I can.

Always a great blog for good tactical sales/marketing strategy, Jim Logan has a nice post on testimonials.

Lead Rating System

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At reader request, here is more detail on lead rating systems. Fair warning: this is a long post.

Before I get into numbers, let’s start with some baseline assumptions:

A prospect is defined as someone who has demonstrated specific interest in your offering, usually by taking some action relative to a marketing program. In other words, they have raised their hand.

In any pool of prospects, roughly 15% are really ready to take action in the near term. We’ll call those sales leads.

Of the balance, about 20% are probably junk, and the other 80% are longer term. Let’s continue to call that longer term group, prospects.

The goal of an integrated sales and marketing program is to:

–         Classify the prospects. This is what the lead rating system does.

–         Assign the sales leads immediately to sales.

–         Develop nurturing programs for prospects to convert them to leads

I have a number of previous posts on this process, here and here and here. Today we’ll focus on the lead rating.

Okay, so how do we classify our prospects?

For just about every product, there are three common questions:

What is the timeframe of purchase?

Does the prospect have a budget?

Does the prospect have purchase authority? (decisionmaker)

These three questions form the basis of a lead rating questionnaire.

In addition to these basic questions, there are additional parameters that help us determine the lead rating. Two important ones are whether the prospect is a present/past customer, and the specific action they took when they indicated interest. Requesting a sales call is usually indicative of greater interest than downloading a brochure. Likewise a returning customer is generally more likely to purchase than a completely new prospect.

Finally, every company will have one or two things that the sales and marketing team believes is absolutely crucial to know for the lead rating.  Personally, I have yet to be convinced that to calculate a lead rating, you really need more than the five variables I listed here first, but it is easy enough to accommodate them in my model, so I do J

Step one is to develop the questionnaire that will surface the necessary answers to calculate the rating. For many of you, it will be a web questionnaire, but it could also be completed at a trade show or by a tele-marketing or tele-sales rep.

You will need to map the answers to the lead ranking model. The lead ranking model is a numerical system, with a maximum score of 100. Here is the basic framework. You MUST tailor it to your situation.

Total points: 100

Timeframe:    25

Action:          25

Budget:         20

Authority:      10

Customer:      10

Custom value: 5

Custom value: 5      

Timeframe scores: You may adjust your Timeframe ranges based on your sales cycle, but the total value must not exceed 25 points. Here is a place to start.

Immediate:    25

1-3 months:   25

3-6 months:   15

6-12 months: 5

> 12 months: 0

Action scores: You will use your actual “actions” here, but the model is:

The most indicative actions get 25 points.

Mid-range actions get 15 points.

Common actions (download a brochure, trade show booth) get 10 points.

Any time you need to calculate a rating with no action, assign 0 points.

Only one action is counted – there are huge implications to this for automated systems like CRM which go way beyond this post. My opinion: if you can get an initial lead ranking done, you will be light years ahead of most companies J

Budget:

Yes:             20

No:               0

“Don’t know”: 10

Don’t know gets points because a lower level person assigned to do research might not know the budget but other factors may push the opportunity up the scale.

Authority: This is the only additive score, with up to 10 points possible

Research alternatives: 0

Perform technical evaluation: 2

Recommend vendor/product: 2

Approve budget: 3

Approve purchase: 3

You can also make this a binary question, Yes/No With purchase authority equal to 10 points and No equal to 0. It really depends on your product and sales cycle.

Customer: 10 points for past/current customer

Custom values: The custom values are allowed a total of 10 points. You can have two at 5 points each or a single one at 10 points. No matter what you choose, I recommend you select binary yes/no questions. Yes equals all the points, No equals zero. You can also add these points back into one of the other variables.

In the end, what you want is a framework that will help you rate your prospects according to your business.

Step Two:

Use the rating framework to assign a ranking to your prospects. Your mileage may vary, and you should develop test cases to validate the ranges, but here is a starting point:

“A” lead: 76-100 points

“B” lead: 51-75 points

“C” prospect: 30-50 points

“D” prospect: 0-29 points

For example, a top A lead with 100 points: has immediate timeframe, budget, is a past/present customer, has purchase authority, scores high on the Action variable and the 2 custom values. Typically, B leads will score low on one of the high-valued variables, C prospects, low on two of the high-valued variables. This reflects the reality that your best leads are ready to buy right now,with immediate timeframe, budget and authority to buy, and the next best group typically is missing something like budget or has a longer timeframe.  And so on.

All the mathematical model does is quantify the reality.

To fine-tune the system to your needs, your sales and marketing team should profile their good leads and prospects against the system to validate the numerical values.

Please DO NOT take this framework as gospel. This is just one way to structure the lead rating framework, and I hope it gives you a good place to start.

Roadmaps Round-up

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Later this week I will have a post about calculating lead ratings, requested by a reader in Korea. I do love the Internet, and the way it lets you virtually meet people from all over the world.

It is a fairly involved topic though, so I probably won’t get to it until the end of the week.

In the meantime, I have a few links that I have been saving up to write about, and just won’t get the time before they are stale. So here they are in list form:

Courtesy Topaz Partners, a link to an article in CMO magazine about marketers embracing the blog form.

A post from Working Smart about Corporate Blogging Rules. Commentary by NevOn on same. I will come back to this topic I am sure 🙂

From AdRants (and others), Forbes article on the top corporate hate sites

From CorporatePR blog (Elizabeth Albrycht): 10 ideas for corporate RSS feeds

UPDATE: from Media Guerilla, a post about Feedster’s public blog policy.