Quantity, if there is no quality

Summer is in the air. And, more importantly, I am going to take two weeks off in September for Spain. So, if I wander off into Spanish, be forewarned.

Bueno. Vamos a ver la vida de un marketeer...

This is a relatively uneventful week. Last week's lead flow has been relatively low but good quality. So, I upped the Google budget and sure enough we are getting a flood of junk leads this week. I must say that this remains a conundrum for me in terms of how to get people NOT to leave junk info. One new strategy is to make the sign up process more onerous requiring full contact information and description of the buying process. This just got pushed out in the new Google landing page. I hope to see some positive impact that way.

Still on the junk lead thought. What is the story with internet users from China? What is the attraction of leaving junk information in a sign up page? I have no problem with the good people of China. But, to the extent that they are wasting my good marketing budget, I am peeved.

Yet another junk lead angle. Recall that we set up the webinar sign-up with a long list of questions and people have been leaving meaningful information. Well, yesterday, I got the first junk webinar lead. It is slightly different. The person's email indicates that he hails from UK. Still no excuse for leaving junk, and I do wonder why any sane person would bother with that list of questions?

One degree away from junk leads. I also have a $25 promotion ad running in Google. For the longest time, there was no taker. But, earlier today, somebody bit. That was the good news. The bad news was that the promotion specifically stipulated minimum company size and geographic location which this person did not meet. In fairness, I do not blame him for not reading the fine prints since I rarely bother to read it myself. I did tell Mr Proper that if this guy buys, I would be happy to give him an additional $25 discount from my marketing budget to compensate him. Will be interesting to track this lead's progress.

Webinar is still running. After the initial surge, there seems to be fewer takers. In fairness, they are still coming but it is not as numerous as before. On the other hand, this is probably the more "normal" state for a new program like this. somebody told me that there is an organization called CMP Research that is very good at driving traffic for webinars, I have not been able to find more information on it. Will try again tomorrow.

For a while, I have just assumed that our Google activities are fine and it would be just a matter of constantly tweaking it. Ha! I must have spent nearly half of my time on Google in the past week. First off, there were additional categories that I did not think of but customers suggested. So, that was kind of exciting adding a new category for search and content networks and all the associated decisions such as countries and ad-copy for the category. The other thing is that I am running an A/B test on all of my ad's. The A is the standard sign-up page and B is the webinar sign-up page. I am curious to see what would be the difference in sign-up rate.

A related question on Google is that I am wondering what is the impact of NOT letting Google automatically optimize the ad's served. My thinking is that the only "fair" A/B test is to make sure both ad's have approximately similar served rate. But, I guess this is another instance where I need to turn to my on-line marketing guru for some insight. Will ask. And, what the heck, I will play with it for a few weeks anyway with the auto-optimizations off.

Finally on Google. Recall that every time there is a conversion event at Google, I pass a text string to ID the ad and campaign. I have been keeping the stats on the ad/campaign combination. However, given the fact that there is a fair number of junk leads, I need to guard against having the junk leads skew the stats on the ad/campaign performance. Since I started to keep the warm/cold status of incoming leads (where junk leads are marked as "Cold") I can correlate the ad/campaign performance better with the true winners. I will run the numbers on my regular Thursday analysis. This should be an interesting eye opener.

Got a call from my favorite customer that the case study is all great but he cannot give me the official approval because there are some internal business needs that need to have a publicity blackout for about a month. This happens. Of course, this does not stop the CFO and I speculating about some kind of major SEC filing. We are nowhere needing to file with SEC, but we can always live vicariously...

Last item, more of a rant, for the day. I am pretty close on firing my current PR team. They are good people and, when given enough pressure, will deliver publicity. But, that is the thing. Why does it require pressure for getting performance? Isn't it what PR folks are supposed to do - get publicity? Every time I ask for something or suggest an idea, the response was pretty much the same. It is difficult, it is not interesting, etc. Now, I do not pretend to be a genius, but if my ideas suck, I would expect to hear some other ideas. Nada. Then, I see publicity for competitors that are based on ideas that even suck-er than mine. I also have to seek out analysts myself to brief them. Admittedly, these analysts ain't tier-one. But, they are certainly easier to talk with and I even get a few of them to write about us. (Oh, the article from the consultant/analyst lady came out this week and we got at least one confirmed phone call on the product as a result of reading that article.) The current PR team is shooting for the tier-one Gartner boys. I have no issue with roping in Gartner, but the truth is that I will never get the money to retain them and make them actually listen to what we/I have to say right now. So, when there is no quality, I would go for quantity.

Do you think that I am asking too much of PR? All I want is to get some publicity!

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