If you’re intrigued by the idea of saving by marketing outsourcing, contact us, and we’ll share our Marketing Outsourcing ROI calculator with you.

Step 1: Decide what you want to outsource

We have clients that work with us in one area (say, web content writing) and others that work across multiple areas.

Your selection(s) depend on your business need, your company’s strategic goals, and the existing skills and team within your organization.

When you work with MarketPlane, we become an extension of your internal marketing, product management and sales staff.

Step 2: Specify the size of the project(s) to outsource

Projects can range from ‘small’ to ‘large’ in size. Typically, a ‘small’ project is one for a single-product company or startup while a ‘large’ project typically involves 3 or more products at an established company.

Alternatively, a mid-size company that completely outsources their marketing activities would also qualify as a ‘large’ project.

Of course, these terms are relative and actual figures will depend on the exact scope of work. However, we have found these levels to roughly hold true – because they assume a basic assessment of marketing workload per skill and role in hours based on the project nature and size.

Step 3: Specify your regional costs

This is a key function to set the underlying compensation expense levels for internal staff. Please let us know your regional cost level.

Calculating Your Results

With over 3 years of marketing project execution metrics, we have a good idea of the skills and time it takes to execute marketing projects with quality, creativity and timeliness. Each project is therefore broken down into specific hours of execution from a combined team with multiple roles and skills.

Why is outsourcing frequently less expensive than in-house?

Marketing workload at nearly all companies vary over time – while internal team sizes and costs are fixed. Marketing outsourcing with MarketPlane provides the flexibility to align workload and resources to optimize costs throughout the year.

Please note that our calculator makes the provision that your current marketing staff can absorb 15% of extra workload over and above their regular working hours.

Typical marketing projects include a diversity of skills that may not be fully loaded to justify staffing with an internal team. Marketing outsourcing removes any such inefficiencies by bringing in resources as required only for the time needed – and providing the right skills as well.

How MarketPlane can reduce your costs

MarketPlane standardizes cost of execution by offering a team of trained individuals who can hit the ground running and make an immediate difference to your project. There is no time lost in hiring, training and long ramp-up for in-house resources. By shortening time to execution and executing faster – we optimize overall costs.

Our customized results show both the cost savings and the workload estimates by typical roles for any combination of project areas and sizes. And when you consider that most marketing teams have downtime between big product launches and vacations – marketing outsourcing looks even more attractive.

What does the MarketPlane team gain?

The satisfaction of working on diverse business areas, using cutting-edge tools and concepts and helping multiple clients reach their business objectives – which in turn helps all of us personally develop our marketing acumen.

If you need a more detailed discussion on the underlying data to our calculator and how outsourcing may help your organization – please contact us.

B2B marketing outsourcing is a great way to build a strong marketing presence at optimal cost. Yet for many companies, the very phrase “marketing outsourcing” is counterintuitive.

While companies regularly work with agencies on one-off projects, like building a website, collateral development, or managing SEO/PPC campaigns, management is often skeptical of long-term marketing outsourcing.

After all, how could external teams who are not connected to the business have the level of knowledge, strategic insight or day to day impact of an internal marketing team?

Our experience over the last 3 years has been quite the opposite. We’ve been fortunate to work with clients who’ve hired us to perform their strategic marketing leadership and operate as a seamless extension of their internal teams. And in several cases, we’ve been our client’s entire marketing team, responsible for every facet of planning to execution.

Why would they do that? Consider the results:

• Our analytics based approach has helped one of our client’s grow its revenue and profitability by 30-40% each year over the past two years. They will soon reach the $100M mark.
• Another client is a recognized industry leader, growing at over 50% with many influential international and brand name customers.
• We’ve helped a number of our clients reposition, restart and even get acquired.
• And at a minimum, we’ve helped our clients exceed their business objectives while providing a professional, high quality, and demand inducing market presence.

Consider the other benefits

• Our clients have reduced their marketing staff costs dramatically, in some cases by over 100%.
• By working with us, our clients have brought in new skills, insights, and best practices to their teams across every marketing function. After all, we develop and execute strategies across multiple industry and technology sectors and while we guard all client data securely, many of the successful strategies help us get better with every diverse project exposure.
• When our clients need a marketing project completed in a short time-frame, hiring and training the right team members involves huge time, effort and recruitment cost. Working with us eliminates all that hassle.
• We give our client’s senior marketing leadership or executive team peace of mind. Our clients will speak to our commitment, loyalty and quality of work and ultimately our results.

Maybe you should consider marketing outsourcing

Contact us and find how we can energize your marketing organization and improve your business results.

Achieving believability in marketing.

Continuing with our recent theme of writing credible marketing copy, I’m excited to share with you Mashable’s HOW TO: Make Your PR & Marketing Believable.

This article covers Rohit Bhargava’s Mashable Connect 2011 presentation on ’Likeonomics’, a term he has coined to describe our current ‘affinity’ economy where “the most likable people, ideas and organizations are the ones we believe in, buy from, and get inspired by”.

Likeonomics stems from the belief that consumers align with companies they find believable– a believability that is achieved when marketing strategies make room for simplicity, humanity, honesty, and emotionality.

How can we apply Likeonomics to B2B technology marketing?

Bhargava corroborates his theory by highlighting four B2C companies who’ve made believability a priority in their marketing initiatives. But B2B technology marketers can certainly appropriate from his theory as well. Here’s how we can apply being simple, human, brutally honest and emotional to up our likability quotient.

1. Be simple.

Just because your technology is complex, doesn’t mean you have to be. You can help reach your audience with copy that commutates with them on their level.

There’s no need to overwhelm your prospect with unnecessary facts and jargon. Instead, be open and direct in how you communicate. To learn how, check out our post on how to simplify your marketing content.

2. Be human.

Bhargava gives the example of wrapping a campaign around a humanitarian cause. You can do this too if your can relate your technology or service to a particular issue, be it social, environmental, or what have you.

However, you can also demonstrate your humanity by allowing your personality to shine through in your social media communications and marketing copy. Leveling with your audience on a personal level establishes sincerity and trust.

3. Be brutally honest.

As Bhargava demonstrates with Dominos Pizza, owning up to your mistakes can really help you turn lemons into lemonade. No one has time to read between the lines, and certainly no one likes being misled.

For instance, everyone knows that there’s no such thing as bug free software. Instead of covertly tightening loose screws behind the scenes, air your faults and fixes to your community. Making your bugs transparent will help you demonstrate an active commitment to improve quality and usability, while also displaying a degree of humility that most people will respond to.

Always being on the up and up with your customers will give them the assurance that they can trust you.

4. Be emotional.

Bhargava’s Mini Bottle Gallery example speaks to picking something you’re passionate about. Same goes for technology marketing. No one will care about what you have to offer if your enthusiasm doesn’t shine through in your marketing efforts.

Here is where creative storytelling comes in handy. Wrapping a narrative around your company story helps to establish an emotional and relatable touchpoint for your customers and prospects.

In the end, there’s no space for spin.

As marketers we have to constantly remind ourselves that overexposure to marketing speak and spin causes our audience to question the sincerity behind the sentiment.

By looking beyond the ‘tech’ in our technology, and finding ways to relate honestly and personally will help us build a reliable  reputation in this affinity economy.

Earlier this week I came across this TEDTalk on The Beauty of Data Visualization by David McCandless and thought it too inspiring not to share.

We are avid enthusiasts of data visualization here at MarketPlane (see our post on infographics) and McCandless does an excellent job of wrapping science around the way we process information. Calling it ‘the language of the eye’, he explains that our eyes are receptive to patterns, shapes and colors. Combining this visual language with what he refers to as ‘the language of the mind’–i.e. words, numbers, concepts–creates powerful visuals for conveying important data.

I invite you take a take a break this afternoon to enjoy McCandless’ engaging and interesting presentation on the art of beautifying data.

Why is data visualization important for technology marketers ?

As technology marketers we’re often tasked with conveying dry and complicated information. Finding new and interesting ways to illustrate your data can spruce up your marketing collateral and better connect with your audience.

The overall goal is to keep your audience visually engaged with your content and to do so by making it easy for them to process your message. You can achieve this by combining visual elements with text and figures to create  a context around your data that your audience can relate to.

So, give it a try. Start thinking of ways you can transform your facts and figures into visual narratives.

In a previous post we gave you 5 tips on how to simplify your marketing copy. Today, we’re going to pick up where we left off by offering suggestions on how to write with confidence and credibility.

As technology marketers, winning over prospects takes more than selling a product or service. It requires displaying knowledge and expertise on industry topics and issues. The way to do with is to back up what you’re saying with credible facts, figures and language. Doing so will help you build a reputation as a thought leader with a solution worthy of consideration.

Once again inspired by Write to Reach Your Readers by BPA Corporate Communications Group, here are 5 ways that you can write marketing copy that your prospects will trust.

1. Be accurate and specific.

Simplifying your writing forces you to choose your words carefully and thoughtfully. This attention to context enables you to craft accurate and specific descriptions your prospect will easily understand.

For example, when we write website copy for our clients, we always make sure to answer the Who, What, Why, and How as clearly and succinctly as possible.  No one has time to plow through page after page of marketing speak to learn what you’re about and what you have to offer.

Staying focused and on point assures your prospects you know what you’re talking about, and you don’t have to relay on circuitous writing to help you sound knowledgeable.  If your prospect wants to know more, they’ll ask you (and that is called a ‘lead’).

2. Build substance with facts.

Unfortunately, claiming to know something does not make you an expert. You need to support your writing with facts and figures to make you credible to your audience. Also, incorporating supportive data in your writing helps to educate your reader on what’s going on in your industry.

Let’s say I want to write a blog post on leveraging email campaigns to nurture leads and build relationships. Instead of simply stating what I know to be true, I can corroborate my position with mention of a recent poll or a report.   A possible example could be:

“Email marketing remains a critical component of marketing strategies. According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, 89 percent of email marketers find email to be an effective tactic for driving sales revenue, improving customer retention and driving website traffic.”

Not only am I substantiating my claim, I’m also building a case with supportive material that readers can trust. Note that when you choose to include data in your writing, make sure you select from credible sources.

3. Give enough information to be understood.

Part of being credible is making sure your audience understands you. Don’t over explain, and don’t over justify your points with unneeded facts.

Say you’re lucky enough to come across some polls, percentages, or  facts supporting your case. As tempting as it is to want to work them all in, there is such a thing as data overload. Your message can get lost in a sea of facts and figures.

Be sure to balance your position with just enough detail to make your point and supportive information back it up.

4. Use terms and figures that are consistent and that relate.

Establishing credibility means walking the walk and talking the talk. Take this very post for instance. I am making it a point to use industry terms and sources related to B2B marketing.

Mixing examples and metaphors in your writing can confuse your prospect. Just as it is important to use common terminology, you should also reference standard data metrics and sources. Doing so will help your audience to contextualize your message with familiar points of reference.

5. State opinion as opinion, not as fact.

It’s perfectly fine to speak your mind in your marketing copy, but make sure your audience isn’t confusing fact with opinion. This also holds true when you reference an opinion from other publications and industry experts.

Let’s take tip #2 from last week’s post–Prefer the simple to the complex. I found a pertinent quote from Seth Godin, a renowned marketing expert, to bolster my argument: “Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free and is a permanent shift, desensitization to ALL the information, not just the last bit. More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.”

Seth makes a very salient point here that few could argue with. But it’s still his opinion. In order to use this quote accurately, I will need to distinguish between fact and opinion by noting the source for the statement.

What’s the overall key to being credible?

Saying what you mean, and meaning what you say. You’re not going to instill trust in your audience with unfounded claims and fancy jargon. The bottom line here is to appeal to your audience with content that is readable, clear, and believable. Maintaining a confident voice and  doing your homework will help you become an expert in minds of your prospects.

Instead of winning over their prospects with plain speak, they lose them in a sea of unnecessary vocabulary. Why complicate matters more by using complicated language?

Write to Reach Your Readers by BPA Corporate Communications Group offers some helpful advice on writing with clear and simple language.

If you think your marketing copy could use a little improvement, here are 5 easy writing tips you can use to express yourself more clearly and thoughtfully.

1. Keep sentences short.

No one likes to read a convoluted, longwinded sentence. Your message gets lost in the roundabout turns of one idea connected to the next. The more words you use to convey your point, the more likely you are to lose your point entirely.

Instead, try using shorter sentences to make your content more accessible. Your prospects should be able to scan it and get the message. The rule of thumb is to keep sentences between 12-17 words, or shorter. Anything beyond that is just too long.

You can shorten sentences by finding ways to use fewer words. For example, use “best use” in place of “to optimize the utilization”, or  “consider” in place of “take into consideration”.

Where is a good place to edit your language? Your website. Short sentences and one topic paragraphs make your web copy more scannable.

2. Prefer the simple to the complex.

Using simple words to convey complex ideas makes it easy for your prospects to understand your message. Using what BPA calls ‘foggy words’ (words that make writing seem phony or insincere) can complicate your copy, and can also carry negative associations. For instance, some foggy words can bring along a mental history from your prospect’s past experience.

Let’s take the word ‘implemented’, for example. Say your prospect recently purchased from a software company that used the term ‘implemented’ throughout their marketing material. And say the implementation of this software did not go well. Now, every time the prospect sees ‘implemented’ in your writing, they may associate it with this previous experience.

How do you stay away from negative associations? Choose clear, straightforward words. Instead of using ‘implemented’, choose ‘began’. It’s simple, clear and has no ‘mental baggage.’

3. Avoid unnecessary words.

The key to good marketing writing is to communicate your value to your audience. This can easily be muddled with unnecessary words. For example, technology marketers can easily get caught up in using lots of adjectives to describe their product’s functionality. Rather than influence the prospect, these adjectives distract from your message and they can negatively impact on it’s credibility too. Write to your prospects like you’re talking to them. Don’t tell them why you’re great. Show them.

One way to scale down your word count is to use nouns and verbs in place of adjectives and adverbs. Your product datasheet, for example, should outline your product’s value in clear and simple terms. Relaying on nouns and verbs to describe your offering provides clear associations that your reader can relate to.

4. Use terms your reader can picture.

A great way to connect with your prospect is by using familiar terminology.  Make sure your marketing copy connects with your prospects’s experience. Talk the way they talk.

How do you get on the same page? Incorporate standard industry terms only where appropriate. Also, try not to distract your reader with uncommon jargon. Doing so will take away from your intended meaning and will make your content sound like a sales pitch. The best place to use familiar language is right on your homepage. Greeting your visitor with popular industry terms will quickly get them up to speed on what you’re about.

5. Write with confidence.

It’s important for us technology marketers to position ourselves as thought leaders.  Before your prospect becomes your customer, you must first earn their confidence and trust.

You can establish a ‘thought-leader’ approach with your writing by maintaining an active and authoritative tone. Writing in an active voice and using declarative sentences allows you to speak directly to your audience. As a result, you prove to your readers that you know what you’re talking about and have the confidence to back it up. Also, by keeping your writing clean and direct, you avoid run-on sentences and complicated verbiage.

There is no better format to boast your knowledge than in a white paper. As the name connotes, white papers are not meant to be colorful. They are meant to educate your audience on your technology and related business topics. Sticking to a ‘professorial’ tone will position you as an authority on the matter at hand.

Always side with simplicity.

The common thread of these 5 tips is ‘simplicity’. Anytime you can find a simpler way of getting your point across, the greater chance you have of reaching your prospect. Remember, what you say is important, but it’s also how you say it that will make the biggest impact.

I spent some time on this Friday afternoon thumbing through one of my favorite books on creating presentations - Slide:ology The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentation, by Nancy Duarte. Doing so inspired me to check out her website for recent updates on her latest activities.

Fortunately I did because I happened upon her recent talk from TEDxEast titled “You Can Change the World”, in which she discusses how to give powerful presentations using elements of traditional storytelling. I thought this would be a nice resource to share with our B2B marketers looking for ways to create meaningful and powerful presentations.

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

Looking for helpful tips on how to prepare for a presentation?

I also encourage you to check Duarte’s accompanying article 10 Ways to Prepare for a TED-format Talk where she traces her steps for scaling down her material for the 18-minute talk, and addresses the importance of cultivating an idea…and not selling one.

We hope you find Duarte’s insights as valuable as we have. Have a great weekend from MarketPlane!

How far is your social reach?

At MarketPlane, we devote a lot of time to managing social media strategies, and we’re always on the look out for tools to measure our social reach. During my research I came across Klout, a free web-based application for measuring social influence, and decided to check it out for myself.

How does Klout determine your clout?

Klout assesses an array of metrics including followers, tweets, retweets, likes, etc., and applies a unique scoring system to determine your accumulative influence.

Your overall Klout score is based on a scale of 1 to 100 and is broken out into three categories:

• True Reach measures the breadth of your engaged community based on total followers, mutual follows, friends, retweets, etc.
• Amplification Score refers to the likely appeal of your content based on how frequently your friends and followers retweet, like, and  comment on your posts.
• Network score gauges the level of influence of your followers based on their overall level of social engagement.

Based on my test-drive, I find Klout to be a very useful tool for businesses who actively, or even casually, use Twitter and Facebook profiles as part of their social media marketing strategy.

Simple score reporting.

With the help of a simple two-page interface, you can view a summary and analysis of your Klout score. The summary page tells you what kind of user you are (observer, celebrity, thought leader, conversationalist) based on an influence matrix of 16 possible classifications.

Your score analysis page breaks your totals for your overall True Reach, Amplification, and Network scores, along with accompanying charts, to help you understand how you rank in these areas.

The higher your score, the stronger your influence; the lower your score, the more socializing you need to do. Visit What is the Klout Score? for a deeper dive into their detailed scoring system.

How can Klout help your business become more socially influential?

In addition to giving you and idea of how far you reach in the Twitter sphere and part of the Facebook realm, Klout also makes it easy for you to connect with influential leaders and customers in your industry.

Right off the bat, Klout calls out highest scoring followers in your community that you’re not currently following. This list is displayed right on your dashboard and serves as a gentle reminder that you should be following them, too. You can also search for influencers based on topic or hashtag, and also run a search on your brand to see who’s talking about you and what

Connecting with influential thought-leaders and customers can help you increase  brand awareness while also cultivating meaningful conversations and relationships. The more influencers you engage, the greater the influence you will have.

Does Klout have any clout?

Since your social scope is limited to Twitter and your Facebook profile, Klout isn’t fully armed to determine your overall online influence as it claims since. But I definitely see a lot of potential here.

Today, in a matter of minutes Klout let’s you see how your social activity measures up and gives you suggestions on how to improve your score, be it by finding relevant influencers to follow, tweeting/retweeting more, or posting better content. This is insight is very useful for leveraging Twitter for promoting your business and enhancing meaningful interactions.

And fortunately with the incorporation of Facebook business and fan pages and a LinkedIn Beta program on the horizon, businesses will soon gain a more inclusive understanding of their social reach on these key networking sites.

For more information on Klout, check out this review on GigaOM.

A quick and easy marketing platform?

We were recently on the lookout for a marketing automation tool. As a B2B marketing agency, our emailing needs aren’t as complex or frequent as perhaps a more sales-focused organization. What we needed was a simple application that would allow us to create and send email campaigns on the fly, and track their reach with ease.

Inspired by praise heard through the proverbial grapevine, and coming across this IT PRO review, we decided to give MailChimp a shot to see what it could offer.

What’s so great about MailChimp?

MailChimp is a great tool for businesses both large and small, with or without design resources, who need to get email campaigns out the door quickly and painlessly.

Our email marketing efforts focus on monthly and bi-monthly newsletters to moderately-sized, yet growing databases. MailChimp allows us to easily create multiple, customized templates that we quickly use over and over again. Creating a template is easy. Using the feature-rich campaign manager, you select from a library of templates and customize it with your company’s brand elements.

Blasting the actual email is made possible by following an easy 5-step process that starts with choosing your recipients and ends with clicking ‘send’.

The platform features for handling your contacts are simple and straightforward. We’re able to add to our database in a matter of seconds, and can move contacts about from list to list with ease–something we greatly appreciate.

We also gain clear insight into how our campaigns are performing with MailChimp’s reporting functionality. Along with the usual staple stats of clicks, opens and bounces, MailChimp offers a ‘click map’ feature that shows you the distribution of clicks on your email. You can also drill down to social stats to see who tweeted, ‘liked’, or commented on your campaign.

Is MailChimp the right tool for you?

There’s no doubt that MailChimp offers a dynamic platform for creating attractive and easy to manage campaigns. But it might not scale to fit the demands of every marketing strategy.

For instance, if your marketing strategy requires capturing white paper registrations from your website, automating lead action items for your inside sales team, or establishing lead scoring rules, then marketing automation platforms like Loopfuse, Marketbright, Marketo, or Pardot might be a better fit for you.

The right marketing automation tool is different for each company and it all depends on what your goals and internal operational needs. I will say, however, that given my previous experience with the aforementioned tools (and many others), MailChimp tips the scales with its ease of use, and intuitive functionality.

MailChimp’s pricing model is as sensible and flexible as it’s platform providing four options to accommodate your email marketing needs.

Starting with the Forever Free Plan is, well, FREE, and allows you 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. From there, MailChimp gives you the option of selecting between monthly, pay as you go, and high-volume plans. Check out the full list of pricing options for yourself.

Will I keep this monkey on my back?

Absolutely. Mailchimp does exactly what we need it to do and then some.

And as a marketer, I appreciate a clever gimmick when done well. MailChimp’s witty “ape-isms” and colorful interface take the mundane tasks associated with email campaign management and kind of make them, dare I say, fun.

A recent McKinsey Quarterly featured an interesting case study and interview with Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, the authors of The Dragonfly Effect. Using the example of how non-profits leverage social media with effective storytelling, they offer some helpful ways that companies can do the same.

The concept of storytelling aligns with what we do here at MarketPlane. For B2B companies, your story may not be immediately obvious or tangible. This doesn’t mean you don’t have one to tell. It merely indicates that you need to get creative in order to illustrate the value you can bring to your customers and prospects.

What’s your story?

The key to social media is making a connection with your audience that goes beyond the product or service you’re selling. One of the principal take aways from the article is investing yourself in your company’s story.

Here are few tips I gleaned to help you create a relatable company narrative:

1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Making an effort to understand your customer’s goals, fears, issues, etc., will help you create a story that resonates with them on a deeper level.
2. Incorporate personal anecdotes. Stepping outside of your technology/ business and applying your personal experience will help you come across as accessible and authentic.
3. Don’t be afraid to get provocative and creative. As Aaker mentions, switch around the elements of your story to create tension, interest and appeal.
4. Use visual media whenever possible. Images really do speak louder than words. The more you can help your audience visualize your story, the greater impact it will have on them.  (I touched on this in a previous post about turning your corporate presenation into a visual narrative. )

How do you measure the impact of your story?

As Andy Smith notes, gone are the days of relaying on website hits to measure your marketing efforts. Our engagement with customers goes beyond analytics and statistics. He suggests defining goals and target metrics for your social media channels to measure their impact.

The volume of trackable activity is important. But how can you tell if your story is really resonating? Here is where quality trumps quantity. In my view, it is the quality of the conversations and interactions with your customers that weigh as much, if not more,  than the sum of you website analytics, Facebook ‘likes’, and ‘retweets’. Powerful stories result in meaningful exchanges.

The moral of this ‘story’?

Empathy.  Marketing today is not about convincing people that they need what we’re selling. It’s about understanding wants and desires, and creating solutions to fill them. Companies who strive to see the world from their customer’s eyes stand a great chance of  leaving a lasting and meaningful impression.