August 07, 2000
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*** MarketingSherpa.com’s B-to-B MarketingBiz.com ***
Practical News & Tips for B-to-B Marketing on the Internet
August 7, 2000 - Vol. I, Issue 11
1) News: Email Warning, B-to-B Analyst, Esecurity Online
2) More Headlines
3) Case Study: Multicity Got 100,000+ Webmaster Customers by
Maximizing Free Site Reviews
4) Interview: Michael Hinshaw, CEO, Verida on Using Offline
Marketing to Grow an Online ecommerce Hub
5) Jobs Sought: PR Freelancers to Help Your German Launch
* Yes, forward this email to your friends!!!
Plus, get your own FREE subscription today at:
http://www.B2BMarketingBiz.com Thanks!
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NEWS
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Developing & Integrating Strategic Plans for eBusiness:
October 23 & 24, 2000; Chicago, IL
Attend this conference to gain understanding and knowledge
from those who have been there: John Hancock, Toyota and
Lycos … just to name a few.
For more information call IQPC 800.882. 8684 or go to:
http://www.iqpc.com/M221A/plansforebiz. Be sure to give
priority code: M221A when registering.
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* VerticalNet’s Lesson: Email Can Get You in Trouble
You’ve probably heard that new B-to-B ecommerce magazine, Line
56, just published a not-so-nice review of VerticalNet’s
business strategy. Every biz gets a little negative press
now and then, and the story probably would have gone away.
Until VerticalNet’s CEO Mark Walsh fanned the media flames
by sending Line 56’s editor a nasty email about it. Other
business media leapt on this now-juicy story -- especially
for the IPO-slow days of Summer. (Best article so far is at
Inside.com.)
Moral of the story -- B-to-B marketers need to warn everyone
in their company including Mr/Ms Big, that emails to
editors are verboten unless cleared by whoever normally
clears all other PR communications. Even casual emails to
press may be taken as quotes for publication!
http://www.line56.com
http://www.inside.com
* Steal Ideas from U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffrey’s B-to-B Analyst
If you are tracking the b2b ecommerce arena from serious
economic/biz model overview standpoint, you may want to
sign up for a free subscription to US BanCorp’s email
newsletter, “The B-to-B Analyst.” Weekly issues, averaging
five concise pages, are jam-packed with hard-core biz info.
We also recommend B-to-B marketers take a look at a sample
issue for ideas on how you too can create a free site
newsletter that impresses investors, clients and the press.
Good job U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffrey!
http://www.gotoanalysts.com/b2bsubscribe
* Campaign Review: eSecurityOnline.com’s Banner Campaign
We’re absolutely torn between loving and hating
eSecurityOnline.com’s “Click here for peace of mind” banner
campaign and we think you will be too. Trouble is, it’s
beautifully copywritten. Who wouldn’t be sucked in by
Panel one: “Your CTO told you not to worry.” Panel two:
“Why are you still worrying?” However, at five panels
long, there’s just waaay too much to wade through before we
get to a company name and a call to action. (Note: most
usability experts recommend no more than three panels.)
Check it out for yourself at eSecurity’s homepage.
http://www.esecurityonline.com
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MORE HEADLINES
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Here are more exclusive news headlines you might be
interested in from other MarketingSherpa.com channels:
* SmallBusinessDepot.com’s Grows Opt-In Email Database by
Giving Airline Travelers Print Newsletters
http://www.marketingtosmallbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=624
* SHOPA ecommerce Study Finds Nearly All Small Businesses
in the US are Online Today
http://www.marketingtosmallbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=627
* How the “Stars and Stripes” Newspaper Transformed Itself
into Stripes.com
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=616
Note: if you'd like to run MarketingSherpa.com headlines
on your site or Intranet for free, go to iSyndicate.com
http://www.isyndicate.com/directory/partners/all/marketingsherpa.html
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CASE STUDY: Multicity
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* Multicity Maximizes Results from Free Site Listings &
Online Reviews
CHALLENGE
Back when Start-up Multicity launched their
first products for Webmasters, they were a fairly small
company trying to make a big noise without a lot of budget
or even a full-time marketing staff. New VP Marketing Todd
Tweeny says, “It was the founders and a few employees who
were working to get awareness.” Luckily, as Tweeny puts
it, “in this marketplace grassroots marketing is critical.
If you’re not doing it, you’re not marketing.”
CAMPAIGN
The team did extensive research online to find
every important site that carried reviews and listings of
products for Webmasters. “We have a gigantic spreadsheet
that’s updated on a daily basis with at least 40 sites.”
Before submitting their products to the sites, the team
carefully created official wording to be used in
submissions. “They spent a lot of time coming up with very
benefits driven statements that support value for each of
our five products. Each is a very concise message that’s
very action driven. It’s not just ‘we have this, we have
that, we have something else.’ It’s ‘they’re free, they’re
multilingual, and they help you in this way.’” Tweeny also
notes, “It’s just as important as a paid media
announcement. Your wording should be consistent across all
placements.” In fact now that the company’s started banner
advertising they’ve been careful to keep the same wording!
The team continued to keep in touch with sites that listed
their products, “We try to expand our placements within the
site, and we want to optimize text-based placements within
the property.” The team also tested whether site listings
should link to their informational home page or directly to
their registration page. They’ve found, “performance is
generally higher for links directly to the registration
page, except for links from news sites where it’s
reversed.”
RESULTS
After seven months of this grassroots campaigning,
Multicity attracted 100,000 Webmasters to use its software
products.
NOTES: Since hiring VP Marketing Todd Tweeny this May, the
Multicity has begun testing a wide range of online
marketing tactics. Here’s what they’ve learned so far:
1. Banners: With the help of InterAdNet, a Raleigh-based
media planning and placement firm, Multicity tested 24
different banners on a variety of sites. They learned
“images of groups of people outperform single individuals
and females outperform males if it’s just a one-person
image. Text works better than graphics-rich creative. The
word “Free,” larger capitalized text, and banners that had
less copy worked better.”
2. Ads in text email newsletters: Tweeny recommends against
“just doing one drop” saying you need to “do a series of
drops in a sequence.” He also recommends you challenge the
newsletter publisher to see if you can have your ad placed
in an unusual spot or use unusual format breaks to identify
that it’s an ad vs. editorial, “one of the biggest problems
is all ads look alike in newsletters and it’s easy for
readers to scroll right past and not read them.”
NEXT: Multicity’s pulled in outside expert Jill Whalen of
NetRankings to work on optimizing their site for search
engines. This six week process includes “defining key
words, creating copy for specific pages, changing meta
tags, optimizing site architecture for placements and then
going through the submission process.” No easy task!
The Company is also about to launch an affiliate program to
maximize friend-get-a-friend referrals with the help of
Commission Junction.
http://www.multicity.com
http://www.interadnet.com
http://www.commissionjunction.com
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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Verida’s Michael Hinshaw
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share with your peers, please contact Susan Hilbish,
Conference Director at 312-977-4308 or shilbish@psinet.com.
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* How Verida Uses Farming Industry Experts to Hand-Hold
Farmers into the Internet Age
In the B-to-B Net markets universe there have been a lot of
hyped launches over the past year, but very few have shown
the solid, steady growth of Verida’s Agriplace and its two
sibling sites GrainPlace and InputPlace. This may be
partially due to the fact that Verida’s CEO Michael Hinshaw
comes from a marketing background, rather than one in
technology or investment banking.
Q: How did you launch your sites? You didn’t seem to do
much online marketing at all.
Hinshaw: We really had no customer acquisition plans that
were online. We’re an agricultural company that happens to
be on the Internet to help farmers and other suppliers do
their jobs better. We’re not an Internet company.
Q: Even through you are what people call an Internet “pure
play?” How did you figure out how to reach people then?
Hinshaw: That’s right. We figured out how to speak to them
in a way that they would be willing to listen to us. With
farmers that’s direct marketing and outbound telemarketing.
With end users, who are primarily very large companies,
these are direct sales so we go and sit down with them.
For brokers and dealers it’s a combination of targeted
direct mail followed up by a sales call and typically
meetings.
Q: How did you figure all this out in the first place?
What sort of prelaunch market research did you do?
Hinshaw: We spent a lot of time figuring out what their
pain points were, what’s causing them difficulty in their
jobs. We did surveys and focus groups and then took those
results to the field to reality check them.
We’ve found in our research that the farm community has a
very hard time believing that one lone entity can be an
expert on everything, hence we launched two separate
services -- our GrainPlace which is run by experts in grain
and our InputPlace which is also run by names the farmer
knows and recognizes. It’s all about focus and hiring
long-standing experts the marketplace already respects.
Q: What have been your most successful offline marketing
tactics to let farmers and others know you exist?
Hinshaw: To raise general awareness in the farm community
we were very active in trade shows and we’ve done a fair
number of our own seminars. Our senior agronomist and
chief agronomy officer go out and meet with farmers in one-
on-twenty seminars. It’s fairly low budget. It’s the cost
of the plane, the room and getting the farmer there through
our telemarketing call centers.
Q: A lot of sites are outsourcing call centers because it’s
such a demanding specialty. How are you handling it?
Hinshaw: We built our own call center and only hired people
who absolutely understood the farmers’ business already.
If someone’s calling to say, ‘We have a special on nitrogen
this month,’ and the farmer says, ‘Actually I think I need
potassium,’ they can actually converse about their needs.
We have other experts on staff so if the farmer has a
question about a particular product, the telemarketer can
say, ‘Well I have an expert here who used to work at
Monsanto, let me put him on the line.’
It’s all about winning the trust and then the business of
our customers and that’s the order it has to go in. With
farmers, they are particularly difficult!
We also use telemarketing to do a lot of cross-selling of
products. InputPlace will know when a farmer plants a
crop, when he needs to buy fertilizer, when he has to apply
crop protection and preemptively call him at each stage to
present him with alternatives and opportunities.
Q: So how do you transition farmers into using your Web
site for all of this?
Hinshaw: We recognize you can’t get people to change
overnight the way they’ve been doing business for 20 years.
We call it ‘transitioning’, evolution not revolution. When
we get a farmer signed up, we don’t let that farmer
transact without having him walked through the process with
a person the first time.
We show the farmer that the Internet is nothing but a tool
and there’s real people behind it. The farmer will call up
and say, “now I’m pushing this button, you got that?” and
our call center rep will say, “Yep I see it Mr. Johnson”
and read the order off to him. You hand-hold them for
first couple of times. By hand-holding we’re increasing
the volume of the system by increasing their comfort level
with technology.
Q: There must be two dozen or more agricultural portals on
the Web, how are you dealing with the competition?
Hinshaw: It’s a highly competitive environment. We looked
at the space and made a decision to focus on what was the
greatest opportunity that had been addressed the least --
and that’s Canada. Competitors there totaled zero. So
we’ll initially roll out in regions with high promise that
are underserved.
A lot of B-to-B and net-based companies have done a very
effective job of marketing themselves to the business
community and are less effective in marketing themselves to
actual customers. We’re focused entirely on delivering
service to our customers.
Your biggest competition in every channel is the entrenched
brick and mortar channel. We’re working with existing
brokers. Some of the smarter brokers are coming over to us
in partnership as part of their online stategy. The
forward-thinking players in every business realize that
like it or not, the Internet is a significant part of the
future of business. We don’t have a strategy for dis-
intermediation, we’re inclusionary. Our long-term success
will be very tightly tied to how we can integrate with the
brick and mortar channel.
Q: What’s next?
Hinshaw: We launched Agriplace on March 31st. Our goal now is
to develop as many markets as we can balanced with our
growth and our ability to create real solutions and
generate REAL revenue.
Editor’s Note: As you can see from Verida’s corporate site,
PetroPlace for the petroleum industry is their next
planned launch.
http://www.verida.com
http://www.agriplace.com
http://www.grainplace.com
http://www.inputplace.com
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