Marketing in Motion

Archive for December, 2011

A nice little feature that I’ve been using is, “Web Forms”. Coremotives includes the ability to create a web form that can be used to collect user information, create a lead or contact record in CRM, and initiate one or more actions.

There are two reason I use this functionality:

• Help build my e-mailing list
• Provide positive identification for some of the “Anonymous Web visitors”

The second reason is the most important to me. The additional information provided by the web form starts to add real value to the web tracking activities captured by Coremotives. It allows me to analyze who and what type of people are using my sites. This will allow me to further engage with these people and broaden our relationship.

Here are the main components of web forms:

This shows the fields that are going to be visible on my web form. I try to keep it to a minimum. All I want is a name and an e-mail address. The rest will come later as I broaden the relationship. These fields are going to map directly to CRM

This shows that I’m going to have a lead record created in CRM when the user completes the form. It will also check for duplicates. I’m also associating these web form interactions with a specific marketing campaign.

This shows what actions are going to be taken when the form is completed. In this case I am sending an e-mail with a link to download an e-booklet. You can see from the drop-down list, that you could select from several action types to take, and you can select more than one.

The web form will also generate its own HTML code to make it easy to include in your web site, e-mail, etc.

What’s really nice about this is that you’re engaging your prospects and customers in an automated fashion. You’re making an offer that they can act on right away.

If you spend even a little time on Twitter, and follow more than a couple dozen people, you’re going to run into TrueTwit Validation. According to their website their service will allow you to, “Avoid Twitter spam.” It is so annoying.

I don’t know why I find this so annoying. I think it’s just the perversity of the whole thing. These are my three main issues with it:

Twitter is a social tool. If you post updates, answering the question, “What’s happening?”, you are presumably thinking that others might be at least somewhat interested in what you report. Making it more difficult for others to follow your messages seems perverse. You’re using a social medium to be anti-social.

When someone initiates to follow you back, TrueTwit sends a Direct Message (DM) to the person initiating the follow. This is spam. This Direct Message is certainly of no interest to the recipient, and the recipient did not request it. Therefore it is spam. TrueTwit initiates the very activity it says it’s meant to stop. That’s perverse.

Of course you can avoid getting the spam DM’s from other TrueTwit users by signing up for the service. This then makes you a “carrier”. You won’t be infected yourself, but you’ll be helping to spread it throughout the community. That’s perverse.

Hollis Tibbitts writes a wonderful article here (I wish I would have written it): http://socialmediatoday.com/softwarehollis/385357/truetwit-satan-savior-or-simply-misunderstood

Do you use TrueTwit? Come on, admit it if you’re a TrueTwit.

Do you find it annoying? Do you think it’s idiotic?

CoreMotives is one online service, among several, that allows you to better monitor and execute your marketing activities on the Internet. I started using CoreMotives four months ago.

What initially drew me to the service was their ability to track and identify visitors to our several web assets. We receive thousands of visitors each month to our websites and blogs. I assume that people who visit our sites several times are either doing business with us already, or could be persuaded to do so in a shorter period of time than a typical prospect. My problem was how to measure the level of engagement for each visitor, how to identify them, and how to gauge when they might  most be inclined to enter into a sales process.

CoreMotives provides that functionality right out of the box, with very little configuration. A big bonus for me is that they integrate directly and significantly with Microsoft CRM. In fact, access to most all of the functionality is within Microsoft CRM.

It took me a couple of days to coordinate with various developers to install the required tracking codes on all the pages that I wanted to track. But it’s easy to do. I installed the codes on our blogs myself. Simple. As soon as the tracking codes are installed, CoreMotives starts tracking your web traffic. This is a sample of what the traffic records look like:

CoreMotives Web Traffic

If you look at the file you’ll notice that the visitor is identified as, “Anonymous Web visitor”, and you’ll wonder what possible use that is. I’ll cover that in a later article.

Now you’re interested, right?

Wow, this would be neat: I’d like to be able to track traffic to our YouTube Channel. That would be neat.

I posted my first blog article on our Dynamics GP blog on this date, four years ago: http://gp.rosebizincblogs.com/2007/12/fear-not-it%E2%80%99s-only-great-plains-10-0-2.html

So what?

I along with others at our firm have gotten into the habit of blogging and sharing our expertise and thoughts with our communities. Beyond just the personal expression benefits, blogging has helped us develop a strong Internet presence that supports our marketing objectives.

What we’ve found is that blogging is pretty easy to do, and it’s cheap. We feel that it definitely differentiates us from our competitors, and draws in prospects.

This is the quick summary. If you’re not already blogging, get started. You cannot have an immediate impact on your market, so you need to start as soon as possible and build momentum.