Sitecore in 2009- Website Marketing and Partners worked the best

A lesson learned from this year is that authenticity really matters, and companies are starved for the real story on what works and what doesn't regarding marketing inititiatives. Here's the background on our delivering the straight story to a number of our colleagues.

Our CIO, Kim Elsass, had an opportunity to present this fall to a group of Marketing and IT executives in Copenhagen, where he works at our Corporate Headquarters. They had asked him to look back over the past 2-3 years at Sitecore Marketing, and described what has worked and what hasn't, lessons learned, and what we are now doing differently.

Since I'm responsible for our global Marketing budget/ demand gen initiatives it made sense for me to put this together for him. But as I'm in our North American headquarters here in the San Francisco area, and Kim is a terrific presenter, we worked as a team- I wrote and he talked.

It was the perfect opportunity to pull together our ROI info for this extended period, and was illuminating and a bit gratifying to see the positive results that have occurred in the past 2 1/2 years. But in no way was I prepared for Kim's email the morning after he spoke. Here is what he said:

"Hi Paul,

I am so pleased to say that the presentation I made yesterday (Your PRESENTATION) was a fantastic success. I’ve never encountered so many people (C-level from sales, management, and marketing) so excited from my appearance. :-) I actually never managed to finish the presentation, as there were so many questions and comments underway. After the show, I was “attacked” by 8-10 managers with additional questions and some asked me if I could do the presentation for their managers in their own environment. Awesome – I’ll share the profits from the lecturing tour with you. :-) Already, I owe a bottle of Amarone from last night.

It’s a Sitecore presentation that I really can align myself with, it being light years from a traditional product presentation, but was about how to intelligently create measurable RESULTS.... "

You just love getting those emails, don't you? When I followed up with Kim he was even more effusive than his email, and was tickled that he continued to get requests for his presentation.

Kim walked the attendees through various challenges we had, solutions we tried and the results. Like the graphic at the top, he identified the initiatives and their varying ROIs, as best as we can measure it.

The summary is that the biggest winners in terms of Lead Gen ROI were our Website and our Partners. We got more revenue per cost expended through leads delivered from http://www.sitecore.net/ and our global Partners than any of the other means we tried. And believe me, we tried a lot.

Given the Economic Hurricane in 2009, in retrospect it isn't all that surprising that a candid presentation about our real world experiences and marketing ROI comparisons made for an attentive audience. Even more importantly, using your website to reach your audience is clearly a winner, and supporting your channel partners through thick and thin pays off. Frankly a lot of our competition has cannibalized their channel by taking business away to prop themselves up in these tougher times, but our ROI metrics tell us that our Partners provide great value.

Our approach is to invest even more in the initiatives that are providing the best returns, so here is to taking on more business possibilities through our websites and to many returns with our global Partners in 2010.

Sitecore is watching Google- turning the tables.

Google is everywhere , right? With so many free convenient services, and all they want to do is watch ....over your shoulder and maybe offer ads...Your searches, Gmail, Google Docs, Wave, your mobile, Chrome browser and more.

Well, who is watching Google? Well in our case at Sitecore, our Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is- and it just saved us some money and time!

We use Google ads, Bing and Yahoo Ads, and a lot of display ads as well. We have these campaigns feed into our OMS, because beyond the click performance we have visibility into visitor goals success on our website and context of the visitors' experience. We also integrate our email campaigns, PR campaigns, really anything online that ends up on our website.

A few days ago Ted, our Online marketing Ad specialist, noticed that suddenly our conversions were way down on our Google Ads. The OMS showed that it wasn't consistent across all our many campaigns, specifically the traffic from our Google Adwords wasn't engaged with our website at all, they were bouncing right away without accomplishing any goals.

Google was showing lotsa clicks, the meter was running but the wheels weren't turning on our website!

Ted then went into our AdWords campaigns and noticed some strange things about our ads and account.

Suddenly we were selling iPhone accessories! Instead of offering only our software, we had iPhone Ads popping up everywhere and linking back to our site. No wonder our OMS pointed out our conversions were lousy- other than the fact that our Web CMS allows your website to look great from an iPhone, we have no interesting iPhone accessory info on our site! So these visitors bounced.


Turns out we were hacked, or else Google accidentally merged our account with another company's AdWords account, with a name that is very close to our Sitecore name- literally the same with two letters transposed. Suddenly our ad total budget tripled, we had a new group of ads appear, and campaigns got scrambled.

Ted quickly got in touch with Google via their chat system and escalated the problem. We had to suspend our campaign, change our credit card info, and update our passwords. Of course all the crazy charges were refunded, although we lost the productivity from 3 days of online Google Ads.

The good news is by having our OMS system watching Google's system we caught this quickly, and kept the expense from being even higher. That was not our original intent, frankly. We use the OMS to integrate our multi-channel campaign results, since we do so much more than just AdWords. But, as it turned out, the OMS helped protect us as well as see the fuller online picture than presented by Google!

Sitecore wins Web Idol competition at J Boye Conference

The annual J Boye Conference held in Denmark focused on web content management, web strategy and user experience. One highlight was an interactive, crowd pleasing "Web Idol" bake off demo fest with multiple web CMS vendors showing their best 7 minute interactive demo.

For the second year in a row Sitecore won it all, with an engaging and light-hearted demo of user interaction on a Sitecore website. Lars Petersen of Sitecore, with his two alternate 'personas' rocked the house with a true life personalization-driven web form and landing page for a fun-filled beer party.

Check it out here on YouTube.

If Sitecore can do this is 7 minutes , imagine what a few weeks of work will result in!

The opening keynote was deliver by psychologist BJ Fogg, of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology lab. Fogg is an expert in online persuation and in understanding how technology is used to influence peoples behavior. It is significant that a well known researcher and innovator like Fogg was featured at this conference. Clearly it speaks to how important it is for web CMS systems to have persuasive abilities, adapt to their visitor's needs, and encourage and influence behavior.

Context is King, or at least a Prince

We've heard content is King.
OK, I buy that, but can we have 2 Kings? While Content is a critical focus for making visitors' experiences rewarding, is there an equivalent for us as marketers or business people trying to understand visitor behavior and ultimately influence it? You know, when we have to dig deeper into understanding who came, what they did, and why...basically resorting to using the "A" word, that "Analytics" thing for websites. For me that 'King' is 'context'.

What is context?
What would you think if you heard "Jackie is really fired up!" Is she angry, with smoke coming out of her ears, storming down the hallway? Or is she super motivated, excited about a new idea and eager to tell people? You need more information to make the call, right?



Segway to your website (don't we always somehow end up there?) Avinash Kaushik, the very well-known Analytics blogger and writer, describes web analytics as thought of as having three parts:

1. Clickstream data analysis to infer intent. The classical approach from log files. The "where" analysis


2. Outcomes Analysis. Conversion rates. Revenue. Specific goals. The "so what" aspect.


3. Experience Analytics. This is the "why". Did they leave a page satisfied? Or did they abandon a form and bounce? If so, what was missing that would have made the difference?
   This is the hardest part, and new focus of attention in analytics.

The "Why" question and associated analysis, once you have the other two in order, is ultimately the most important for ongoing improvement. Because if you can answer the "Why", then you have the power to improve improve 1. and 2. Without it, we're just guessing.

Context is really having all three working for you. Context is knowing the referring site they came from, the forms they filled out on your site, the items they searched for and if they found them, the videos or white papers they chose, and even the other visits they made over time. That covers the "where" and the outcomes or "so what".

The toughest is the 'why', which helps you dig really deep. There are several ways to get this.
Feedback in a poll or an 'open' field in a form is a great way to get context in a visitor's own words. A comment to a blog post is another way to see what sparks interest, and how they respond. That voice gives you what the clickpaths miss.

Perhaps the most meaningful way to quantitatively understand a preference is to test, either A/B split testing or multivariate. This used to be characterized by 'easy to say, hard to do'. This certainly was my team's experience in using Google Analytics and Google optimizer to run multivariate tests as a third party to our website CMS. Now with Sitecore's OMS, which combines A/B or Multivariate testing built into the CMS, it is so much more approachable for our team. Our content editors can also set up tests, without programming and hassles.

So now the full context is possible with the same people in Marketing who are helping deliver our content. So while content is King, in order to keep making it useful I think Context at the least deserves to be a Prince or Princess!

The Pitch that curved around the earth

Don't you appreciate things done well? I got a pitch a while back that was perfect, and it happened to also pull in the sales leaders at Sitecore from around the world at the same time. We all thought it looked like an ideal answer, and like a magnetic star pulling our little metal vessels in multiple countries, we got sucked into a consistent orbit.

The product being pitched was actually a GeoIP lookup service that lets you know who is on your website. The sales guy from the GeoIP service did a great job of simulating who our desired prospects would be, and made a nice report of them enbedded in the emails he sent out. And he wrote about the value of knowing what organizations were on your website, what they were interested in, and learning about it -presto! instantly!- directly to you and all the sales team regardless of location on the globe.

I had over 6 emails from our sales leaders - let's see, North America, Denmark , Australia, the U.K, Netherlands and more- all demanding that we get something like this! ...Why aren't my own ideas met with this enthusiam? :-)

Anyway, our product development guys and gals had actually already been thinking about this, and our enthusiasm fastracked this aspect into the first part of our Online Marketing Suite (OMS). But beyond identifying who is on the website and what pages they went to, our full Suite tells where they came from, what they searched for, what they need, and whether they had a successful experience on our website.

The OMS is great for all our web stakeholders. And now we are addicted. And our sales team? You should see the Hall of Fame pitches they are throwing with this- all around the world!

Improving Google Ad campaign effectiveness with Context

As the marketer responsible for lead generation in our B to B organization, I work closely with our Sales VPs to keep the dynamic sales team happy with enough quality leads (easy right?). This past year we launched numerous initiatives that generated an impressive growth in the number of leads for our team , more than doubling. But, I really struggled with understanding the effectiveness of our Google Online Ads in North America.

Now, Google does a great job of making you feel good about your spend, no matter how poorly you are doing! It seemed like all I really needed to do was to increase my budget for better results.

Well, in all fairness, sure it is true there are some simple things that really help your Google Quality score. For example, make sure your keyword phrases match your Ad text, and that they both match your landing page text. If you make sure you keep that relevance and matching very high between all three, your Quality score will go up with Google. You can see that displayed in the Ad Dashboard, and the higher the quality and closer to 10, the better. And, the higher the Quality the less Google charges you for the same Ad click.

But, what about the challenge of understanding more about your campaign effectiveness? Which campaigns are resulting in more leads, subscribers, people contacting your sales team, visiting your stores or ending up with something in their check-out cart?

You are spending dollars every day, and in today's online world, we should know what is working and what isn't. It's easy to get lost in 'reletive effectiveness' of Ads, but what really matters is Ads that deliver ROI, in however you measure that for your organization.

Google does supply their Analytics package where you can set up Goals and align them (somewhat clumsily) with your Ads. So it is possible, with enough time, to align your Goals in Google Analytics with your Ad properties.

But what I couldn't learn from the Google Analytics was more context on who was visiting, where else on the site they went, and what organization they came from.

I also wanted to be able to tie together repeat visits from the same vistor, becasue often the conversions where later on in sebsequent visits. I didn't want to miss understanding which valuable first campaign they came in on.

We installed Sitecore's own Online Marketing Suite (OMS) this Spring, and we gained a number of valuable insights into our campaigns previoously missing.

For example, we found that certain online properties where we are advertising were really more valuable than we thought, and others a disaster in real ROI. One publication had a lower click through rate, yet we could see their visitors spent much more time on the site, were from organizations of great interest to our sales teams, downloaded more content and eventually would register to get our premium content. I couldn't get this intel before.

With the OMS, global cookies are retained so visits weeks or months apart are automatically tied together. That let us understand campaigns that were really working, and delivering visitors who returned later on to learn more and join.
We eliminated the costly campaigns that just had a lot of clicks but not the right target audience and actions.

What the OMS delivers me is context. Visitor context. And that makes a huge difference. We realigned our Ad dollars and felt the pleasure of seeing our campaign ROI rise appreciably.

Found- the Missing Middle Class of leads

I recently penned a piece about discovering visitors that quite frankly I had been missing on our own website. Yes, sad as it is to admit, visitors who were interesting in learning and doing more with my company were being (unwittingly) ignored. But isn't that a typical marketers life? Learning what an idiot you've been yesterday and getting better every day? Seems to me that if you can try to find your mistakes before the competition and everyone else does, you are OK! Of course throwing in a few good new ideas now and again sure helps.

Anyway, I was trying to decide how to describe these 'missed leads' and decided to call them the Missing Middle Class. Of course the reference here is to what we often see, that there is a concern that we're getting more super rich people and more poor people and fewer inbetween. Now this isn't an economics blog, nor a political blog, just a business marketing blog emphasing all things online. So why choose the Missing Middle Class? Well, because they are really important. They form the backbone of every successful economic system in history (nor an historical blog...), and in fact every emerging and exciting economy (including China and India) all are trying to build this very group, viewing it as critical to success.

And they are critical for your website. So to learn more about how I view these leads and how we then successfully identified and reached out to them, you may want to check out my article in Online Strategies Magazine.