CMO = Is Your 2014 Marketing Plan Obsolete?

As CMO, you’re constantly trying to answer these 2 burning questions:

1. Are customers responding to our marketing campaigns?
2. What are we doing to adjust to the market demands?

Perhaps in the past you laid out a multi-year marketing plan, or simply went year-to-year. World class CMO’s are perfecting the agile approach to marketing campaigns. The agile approach is paying off. The average tenure of CMO’s has doubled since 2006. It’s now up to 45 months.

There are a number of reasons for the increase in tenure. But one combination always sticks out. It’s a solid marketing plan with an agile process approach. There are many components to a solid marketing plan. In this post we’ll focus on the B2B Demand Generation (DG) plan. Download the 2014 B2B Demand Generation Planning template here to get started.

B2B Demand Generation – Building a Base Plan

Like a football coach going into a game, you start with the baseline plan. Developing the game plan involves multiple groups and huge amounts of research about your customers. This research includes accurate buyer personas and buyer process maps. The plan going in must start with a clear set of goals and objectives. Then continue with a set of strategies to support those goals.
As an example, you may run 3 different types of campaigns for the year:

1. Growth campaigns focused on increasing the wallet share from your existing book of business.
2. Retention campaigns focused on reducing churn in the existing customer base.
3. Acquire campaigns focused on new logo acquisition within a specific vertical, channel or region.

In many cases the overall campaign framework or approach remains the same. You may have a proven methodology for reaching your audience. What changes or is customized is the content. What may work in one vertical or region doesn’t necessary work in another. An example may be in the small to mid-size market; a customer in Oklahoma may buy differently than someone in Los Angeles.
The game plan continues to evolve with the associated tactics, target audience (both internal & external), execution responsibilities (RACI) and schedule. When you’re watching football you notice the coaches constantly looking at picture or results of prior plays. This is agile coaching; agile demand generation is no different. You’re constantly analyzing feedback from campaigns and making the necessary adjustments to campaigns.  This may mean completely scraping a campaign. Your goal is the greatest return on the marketing’s investment as possible.
When you apply this approach to affiliates, partners or your sales channel the same concepts apply. More collaboration is involved with a clear communication plan and quality data being the cornerstones. A closed loop communication process both internal and external supports better decision making.

Agile Demand Generation Execution Process

Agile execution by nature is what marketing is supposed to be doing. What often happens is you’ve not adopted an agile culture across your team. The team starts executing the plan but doesn’t feel empowered to make quick decisions. The result is the team executes the initial plan and ignores critical data. The team misses the opportunity to adjust a campaign or stop it all together. The result is typically a reduced return on marketing spend.

Key Components of Agile Execution:

1. Pilot Plan – A small segment of the market is selected by working with sales leadership.  Launching with the purpose of validating and fine-tuning the campaign prior to a broad launch. This reduces risk and increases speed to market.
2. Test & Learn Plan – A/B Testing leveraging a planned run-off between two versions (a control version & alternative).
3. Lead Management Score Card – Captures existing performance and provides historical and external context to evaluate performance. Conversion rates between stages are tracked and compared against B2B averages, B2B world-class conversion rates, and where possible industry metrics. 

How to Get the Benefits of Agile Demand Generation

The benefits are worth the extra effort to change the way you work. You may meet resistance, but you will realize tremendous gains, including:

• Results generated in half the time
• Success probability increases by 2X
• Greater measured return on marketing investments
• Supports the constantly changing buyer
• Collaboration among affiliates, and channel partners improves
• Greater speed in the marketing team
• Improved buyer personas, and buyer process maps
• Increased number & quality of SQLs handed off to sales
• Improved relationship with sales
• Greater campaign execution
• In some cases less reliance on 3^rd party support

Trade info industry grows 4.4% in first half of 2013

Dec. 5, 2013 - For the first six months of the year, business-to-business media and information company revenue totaled $13.108 billion, up 4.4 percent from the $12.560 totaled over the same period in 2012. ABM's Business Information Network (BIN) Report, an ongoing research project that calculates the size of the industry, considers revenue from trade events, print advertising, digital (online) advertising, and business information products and database services (collectively, "data").

Event revenue, as reported to ABM by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, rose 2.7 percent. CEIR is projecting that "there will be minimal growth through 2013" -- although the CEIR report emphasizes that the trade event industry has experienced twelve consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth.
Print advertising revenue is slowly declining, showing a 4.3 percent dip compared with the first half of 2012, although it remains a substantial contributor to total revenue (see pie chart). Some segments, such as health, tech and agriculture, are doing very well. ABM's print advertising data is reported by publishing service bureau Inquiry Management Systems.
Digital advertising surged 24.8 percent in the first half of 2013, driven by two factors. Search engine revenue, which is not included in the BIN Report, is growing at a slower pace. That may be because marketers are pushing ad dollars into mobile platforms, which are included in the BIN Report; mobile ad revenues rose a startling 145 percent over the first half. That growth rate is accelerating -- considering the second quarter only, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, mobile advertising rose 149 percent compared with the second quarter of 2012.
The data component of the BIN Report, which includes business information, online directories and database services, grew 7.1 percent in the first half of 2013, driven by growth among several major players. McGraw Hill Financial's Commodities & Commercial Markets division saw revenue grow 7 percent in the half. Hearst Business Media, which reported its 12th year of record revenue in 2012, has recently launched data services focusing on credit reports and electronic medical records. The data component of the BIN Report is provided by information and research firm Outsell, supplemented by publicly available data and ABM estimates.

By Michael Moran Alterio

The Freight Brokerage Business – Basic Information And Licensing Requirements

Freight brokers are basically middle-man between the shipper, buyer or owner of the product and the trucking company that moves the freight. Freight brokers will accept an order for a load to be moved from the customer and arrange for the transportation of the goods by locating a carrier to move the load. Freight broker’s revenues are generated by the freight broker simple paying the carrier less than what they are being paid by their customer, which then becomes the freight brokers “Margin” or profit.

This freight broker business model, for all intents and purposes, sounds simple but in actual fact, it is not. There are freight broker licensing factors that need to be considered to become a freight broker that is not always apparent when first looking at it.

Freight Broker Licensing

Before you can start your freight broker business and actually brokering freight, you need to become established with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association which licenses freight brokers. Although there are very little regulations that are specific to freight brokers, there are some basic requirements. These would include a Freight Broker Motor Carrier (MC) number. This freight broker MC number is fairly easy to acquire by providing your incorporation papers and paying the application fee of approximately $500.00. This will almost immediately get you a freight broker MC # that is in pending status. In order to remove the pending status from your freight broker MC, you will need to file a freight broker Surety Bond of $10,000.00. A surety bond is basically security for carriers that in the event they are not paid for a load from the freight broker, they have the right to file a nonpayment complaint against the freight broker bond and will receive all or a portion of their payment from the bonding company. The bonding companies will then go after the freight broker to top the bond back up to the required $10,000. There are a number of bonding companies that will look after this for you and their services vary. Some require freight brokers to front the $10,000 up front while others will finance you until the total is reached. Along with the freight broker surety bond, these companies will also set you up with a “Process Agents” in each state. These process agents are where the carrier with the nonpayment complaint, will file their issue against the freight broker.

If you are a looking at being a freight broker out of the Canadian market then the above licensing is not required. Canadian based carriers will not ask for MC information from freight brokers nor will they be looking for a surety bond. Each province will have its own specific licensing requirements for being a freight broker but these are normally limited to business registrations and nothing more. As a Canadian based freight broker, if you chose to broker freight that originates in the US and is destined for the US and the final stop, it would be strongly suggested that you go after the US based MC authorities. US based carriers will never take a load from a freight broker that does not have a MC number and surety bond.