Business-to-Business Forum 2008
When: June 9 & 10, 2008
Where: Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel - Boston, MA
Day 1 - June 9, 2008*
| Opening General Session | |
|---|---|
| 8:30 am–8:50 am | Setting the Stage Roy Young, President, MarketingProfs |
| Morning Sessions, Intensive and Lab | |
| 9:00 am–12:00 pm | Email Marketing Intensive
B2B Email That Moves the Needle Moderator: PANELISTS:
Plus, they’ll be plenty of time for you to ask your own questions. |
| 9:00 am–10:15 am | Concurrent Session 1
Intelligent B2B Web Design – Delivering on the Vision of Lead Generation Speakers: Successful online marketing efforts do not happen by chance. Instead, they are the result of planned, methodical, and unrelenting execution against an online marketing strategy built on a vision of success. We will look at the recent web redesign of Teradata.com and learn how mining detailed information on customers, prospects, competitors and even their own corporate products and services, helped Teradata obtain the necessary stakeholder buy-in, project budget and resources needed to create an online strategy and deliver on their vision of an effective B2B lead generation web site. Concurrent Session 2 The Real Story about Value-Added Relationships Speaker: Most companies believe they should be building long term relationships with all their customers. They call these Value-Added relationships, and they indeed can be valuable. However, in this presentation you’ll learn that not every customer wants a long-term relationship. The ideas that will be presented are most relevant to those who deal with other companies (agencies, suppliers, business buyers), but there are insights into consumers as well. In particular, you will learn:
You’ll come away with a clearer understanding of relationships and how to identify partners who want to have a relationship with you, and on what terms. |
| 9:00 am–9:30 am | Web Usability Lab Group Session |
| 9:45 am–3:15 pm | Web Usability 1 on 1 Labs Improving the Customer Experience of Your Website: Real Insights on How to Apply Usability to Your Site LAB LEADERS: Join Aaron Kahlow when he sets the stage for his hands on workshop that will explore The Top 10 Foundational Principals of Website Usability and how B2B marketers can apply these principals to improve their website, email campaigns, landing pages and the general Online Customer Experience. This workshop will educate you on the science behind Website Usability and how best to apply the known research to your website efforts. Learn tactics and strategies on how to build the optimal Customer Experience. Aaron will:
After Aaron sets the stage, attendees can take advantage of some 1 on 1 feedback about their own sites at the Website Usability 1 on 1 Labs. |
| 10:45 am–12:00 pm | Concurrent Session 1
Overcoming the Challenges of B2B Search to Land the Most Qualified Prospects Speaker: Influencers and Decision Makers across all B2B verticals utilize search engines along the entire buying process from researching needs, identifying solutions, short listing vendors, making product and service comparisons and determining credibility of potential providers. In order to build relationships with these searchers, businesses need to build a solid organic search capability first and then augment that, where necessary, with a paid search (PPC) strategy. Search Marketing has its challenges in B2B due to the complexity of the roles, motivations and approaches that buyers utilize to find what they are looking for, the competition to lure them to a variety of destinations based on a keyword phrase being the currency, and the amount of unqualified traffic that can click and land at your site or landing page. This session will review the challenges and approaches unique to B2B for both SEO (organic search optimization) and paid search in order to land the most qualified prospects while avoiding paying for unqualified ones. The connection between social media and achieving higher rankings ( SEO is one of the first web 2.0 environments as internet users are the voters as they link to content they believe to be interesting and credible) will be covered as more and more companies use these techniques to bolster their rankings. Also a discussion of various conversion measurement and optimization approaches utilizing both behavioral web analytics and as well as a predictive analytics to identify correlations between keywords and conversion outcomes. New tools available to aid in keyword research, link referral status, etc will also be reviewed. Concurrent Session 2 Gaining and Maintaining Real Competitive Advantage Today by Leveraging New Technologies and Tomorrow's Best Business Practices Speaker: Concurrent Session 3 Secrets and Lies: What's Really Working in B-to-B Creative Speaker: There are 10 commonly-quoted misconceptions about business-to-business creative that, when blindly adhered to, will limit your work from the start. Learn what they are and why they aren’t necessarily true today. Explore the three critical junctures of creative, and see dozens of formats, outer envelope lines and letter leads that drive opening rates and response. Learn traps to avoid, techniques to embrace, and tips that turn good creative into best in class. In this session you’ll discover:
|
| Luncheon Keynote | |
| 12:00 pm–1:30 pm |
Unlocking Customer Behavior…How to Understand and Profit from Predictably Irrational Customers Keynote: Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by? Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need? Or at prices that we would otherwise concede are beyond our budget? Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents? Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace? Dan Ariely provides answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world. For B2B businesses, these irrationalities help unlock our understanding of common behaviors and choices in buying, pricing, investing and saving, employee recruitment and selection, office politics and a myriad of other choices and interactions. As a bonus you will also learn how much fun social science can be, and how to see more clearly the causes for our everyday behaviors, including the many cases in which we are predictably irrational. |
| Afternoon Sessions, Intensive, and Lab | |
| 1:45 pm–4:45 pm | Demand Generation Intensive High Engagement Demand Generation and Sales Integration Strategies That Maximize Results, Revenue and ROI…REALLY! Speakers: In this two part program, learn from leading B-to-B practitioners the latest and proven approaches to fill your pipeline with highly-qualified sales leads and nurture them to closing. In part two, you will see how to convert prospects to buyers by deploying multi-channel lead nurturing programs aligned to the prospects buy cycle. You’ll also learn how to implement integrated closed loop sales management that motivates the sales organization, to effectively follow-up on leads and accurately report on sales results so you can timely and accurately report on marketing ROI. When You Leave This Session You Are Guaranteed To:
|
| 1:45 pm–3:00 pm | Concurrent Session 1
Successful Lead Generation in a Social Media World Speaker: With everyone telling you to get on Facebook, to blog, to start a podcast, you’ve got to be wondering how to derive value for your organization? One simple reward for building strong social networks and using social media properly is that it’s a great source of lead generation. How do you build content and use social networks to drive more potential clients and customers? What are some ways to make sure the value goes both ways? Some of these suggestions are old, some are new, and others are the kind that will make you smile and nod with instant realization as to your next big initiative. Concurrent Session 2 Branding Is A Road Trip – Know Where You’re Going or You Will End Up Somewhere Else! SpeakerS: Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder, Mavens & Moguls Building a strong brand will improve revenue, margins, and sales productivity – as marketers we know that. The challenges we face are first getting the buy-in of the executive suite to sign-off on the financial investment and embrace their role as brand advocates in chief. Once done, the second challenge becomes determining where to go and how to get there – determining the right brand promise for your business and ultimately having the market know and accept that promise as true. This session will identify the three steps of a successful branding road trip and give specific examples of leading B-to-B brands that took the journey to get there. We’ll also talk about what marketing had to do to get executive buy-in and how they delivered on the expectations they set. Concurrent Session 3 Make Your Website Sticky: 10 New Ideas for B2B Marketers Speaker: Learn how to make your website a sticky destination by engaging your customers online, especially while using many of the executions applied in social media. Find out how to write your content as a marketing conversation that will engage your customers. Specifically, we will take a look at:
|
| 3:30 pm–4:45 pm | Concurrent Session 1
Hewlett-Packard’s Exhibit and Event Measurement: Critical Success Factors by Design Speakers: HP’s event measurement program has won multiple awards and cited as a best practice by IDC. This session will focus on the critical success factors of the program and its use in managing HP’s global event marketing investments. We’ll discuss the following and more:
Concurrent Session 2
Is Green the New Black? Moderator: PANELISTs: Going green has tangible, bottom-line, business benefits that does not just benefit the environment. How can going green help you generate more leads, generate ROI, and make you more competitive? Hear what our expert panelists have to say about what has and has not worked in B2B marketing for companies of all sizes.
Social Media Lab Social Media Hot Seat Lab lab leader: You already know how important being engaged with social media is for visibility, expert status, thought leadership and reinforcing your brand promise. But like many companies, you probably started using social media with the best of intentions, only to be met with lackluster or confusing results. In this live, unscripted consulting-inspired lab we’ll put the social media efforts of three businesses (with their permission) under a public magnifying glass to determine what’s working and what they (and you) can do to increase customer loyalty and boost your bottom line. Just some of the things we’ll review are how to:
This session is suitable for anyone who has a vested interest in or responsibility for the social media and Web 2.0 initiatives inside both large and small organizations – and anyone who wants to have fun while learning the do’s and don’ts of social media. The top-level take aways will be actionable and contain specific information you need to make sure your social media efforts avoid common pitfalls, meet or exceed expectations and go the distance. (Only three companies will be selected to participate in the Social Media Hot Seat Lab. If you would like to be on stage with the lab facilitator and you can take the heat, email events@marketingprofs.com. We’ll inform you by May 23 if your company has been chosen to be reviewed in the session.) |
| Networking Sponsor Reception & Dinner | |
| 6:30 pm–9:00 pm | |
Day 2 - June 10, 2008*
| Opening General Session | |
|---|---|
| 8:30 am–9:00 am | B2B Sales Lead Generation: Integration of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Media Roy Young, President, MarketingProfs Chris Brogan, Vice President, Strategy & Technology, CrossTech Media Joel Granoff, President & CEO, BE GREETED Robert Lesser, Founder, Direct Impact Marketing |
| Morning Sessions, Intensive and Lab | |
| 9:15 am–12:15 pm | Creative Intensive
Bringing Cadence to Your Communications: Finding a Creative Rhythm in Multi-Channel Business Marketing to Engage Customers and Increase Leads Speaker: The B-to-B marketing process can be a tricky business. You need to create interest, build brand, and deliver a qualified lead, all without thwarting the sales process. In this two-session course, you’ll discover how a well thought-out creative plan can help create an effective path to increased sales. You’ll learn about treating every campaign in a rhythmic fashion, creating more opportunities for the “little yes” and a more engaged dialog with your prospects and customers. You also learn how best to evaluate each message to ensure you are always on brand, on strategy and on course to a profitable outcome. In the first part of this session, we’ll talk about the definition of “Cadence” and the value of multi-channel to business marketers. We’ll look at how to create the right mix of different mediums, how your creative plan should apply to each, talk about message strategies and discuss how best to engage your customers and prospects. In the second part of this session, you’ll learn about the tools you can use to evaluate your own creative including, how best to use a brand pyramid, what creatives look for in a brief and how to incorporate sales needs without sacrificing marketing integrity. We'll also look at methods for understand what customers are "really" saying in focus groups, how to gauge your competitors actions and the role of each creative element in a total communication stream. When you leave this session, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use creative consistently and effectively across your different marketing channels in order to engage your customers and prospects and ultimately increase leads and conversions. |
|
9:15 am–11:30 am and 2:00 pm–3:00 pm |
EMAIL LAB
Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Just Do It LAB LEADER: Sign-up to spend 20 minutes viewing your email program from the subscriber perspective and walk away with great ideas for stronger list growth, higher response and better inbox deliverability. Our strategist will work with you during a private session and give specific, actionable advice that you can take back to your office and use to make your email program more responsive immediately. We will have Internet connectivity, but please be ready to review:
Sign-up will be onsite on a first come first serve basis. |
| 9:15 am–10:30 am | Concurrent Session 1
Creating a B-to-B Social Media Strategy: A Guide to Defining it and How Your Company Should Take the Social Media Plunge speaker During this session, we’ll walk through a step-by-step process for defining what aspects of social media are appropriate for your company. Plus, you’ll hear a real-life example of how one B-to-B marketer determined what was right for their company and their specific goals. We’ll discuss the following and more: Gauging the readiness of your market:
Gauging the readiness of your company: Defining your plan: Concurrent Session 2 Proving Marketing’s Value: Tangible Tools and Metrics for the 21st Century Speaker: In this session we’ll focus on how marketing executives and professionals can create a performance-driven marketing organization that enables marketing to measure its contribution and value to the business. Using a framework any marketing organization can adopt, the session offers tangible steps and metrics every marketing organization can take and use to improve its accountability. You will learn how to shift from tracking activities to outcome-based customer centric metrics
|
| 11:00 am–12:15 pm | Concurrent Session 1
Achieving Closed Loop ROI Speakers: Closing the loop is the "Holy Grail", everyone talks about it but there are very few that actually achieve it. There are lots of systems and software for routing your leads and tracking the results, you will need them to get there but they cannot do it alone. The key is quality leads, establishing a lead policy with your sales channels, effective utilization of your SFA system and a consistent management process to monitor the results. In this session, you will learn about one of the industry's most effective lead programs established over the last several years by Denny Head at Avaya. He will be sharing best practices of practical ideas that have proven effective in helping to achieve closed loop ROMI performance. This integrated marketing process includes; creating quality leads, cultivating leads until they are field ready, lead routing based on your "best partners", lead management processes and setting lead policies with consequences with your sales channels that reward and penalize based closed loop performance. Concurrent Session 2 Attracting Quality Leads With White Papers Speaker: It's time to stop selling and start educating prospects. Numerous studies place white papers at the top of the marketing heap for sought after content. Why? Because good white papers contain valuable content that help people make decisions. This practical session will help you understand how to create white papers that attract leads in droves (and go viral, selling covertly along the way). |
| Luncheon Keynote Presentation | |
| 12:15 pm–1:45 pm | Luncheon Keynote
B-to-B Viral Marketing: How to Trigger Word-of-Mouse that Spreads Your Ideas for Free Keynote: What do fruitcake, boring gossip, last week's hockey scores, and most failed viral marketing campaigns have in common? They're not worth sharing. Thousands of B-to-B companies try to create something on the Web that will catch on and become a hit. The lure of telling stories and spreading ideas for free using YouTube, blogs, Facebook, and other Web based tools is intoxicating because there is that possibility of having a community of people that numbers in the millions exposed to your ideas… and it is free! However, the vast majority of people who create something that they expect will spread like a virus from person-to-person fail miserably. Why? Because they apply the old rules of marketing and PR to the new world of the Web. They follow the tried and true techniques of getting noticed offline: Buying your way in with advertising and begging your way in with the media. However, what works in the Web is utterly different: Publishing your way into people’s minds directly with great content and having a trigger to get it talked about. You can't generate buzz without something to buzz about. In this informative keynote address, David Meerman Scott explores the art and science of creating B-to-B viral marketing initiatives in a presentation that you’ll want to share. Told with dozens of case examples of successful Web phenomenons from B-to-B companies large and small, learn the tools and techniques of empowering others to tell your story and spread your ideas for free.
|
| Afternoon Sessions, Intensive, and Lab | |
| 2:00 pm–3:15 pm | Concurrent Session 1
How to Become a Marketing Champion Inside Your Organization Speaker: Luanne Tierney, Senior Director, US & Canada Channel Marketing, Cisco Marketing is misunderstood and undervalued in your company. Chances are both your CEO and CFO do not know how marketing adds value, Sales says your leads are no good, and your budget is the first on the chopping block when business is soft. In this challenging and inspiring presentation by the co- author of Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies to Improve Marketing's Power, Influence and Business Impact (Wiley 2006), you will learn how to:
From examples and easy-to-master techniques, you will be empowered to work to elevate your stature and convince others that Marketing is the engine of the enterprise, and make you a marketing champion in the process. Concurrent Session 2 Is Social Media Harder for B2B vs B2C? Moderator: Panelists: Sure, a B2B company can launch a blog, or maintain Twitter account, or a group on Facebook. But can it launch one that speaks to the company's audience so perfectly that it resonates with a vast majority of an audience, and grows its clientele? Or are B2B audiences more fragmented -- with internal employees, external partners, channel partners, third party vendors, and, oh yeah, customers and prospects. In other words, do B2C companies have all the fun? This lively panel discussion explores this issue.
|
| 3:30 pm–4:30 pm | Concurrent Session 1
10 Web Content Foul-Ups – and How to Fix Them! Speaker: On the web, content is king. B2B companies can rule their turf by offering meaningful information and know-how that turns curious visitors into qualified leads. But too many sites are fouled with confusion, self-absorbed boasting and an overall disregard for their prospects’ real needs. In this intense, one-hour session, copywriter Jonathan Kranz will help you identify ten of the most common web trouble spots. And find practical ways to transform website foul-ups into visitor-friendly copy that builds trust and draws prospects closer to your business. Concurrent Session 2 Lead Generation Web Seminars in a Web 2.0 World Moderator: PANELISTS: Web seminars are the “meat and potatoes” of online lead generation. According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) web seminars are recognized as one of the five the most popular B2B online demand generation techniques. Yet, at a time when nearly 80% of all B2B marketers claim to be increasing their online spending, how are marketers navigating the uncharted waters of Social Media and Web 2.0 Technologies to augment their web seminar strategy?
|
*Program and Schedule Subject to Change
Contact Us
Sponsor & Exhibitor Information
If you are interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at a MarketingProfs virtual
or live Conference, contact corey@marketingprofs.com or jim@marketingprofs.com for more information.
MarketingProfs Virtual and Live Conferences
For questions or additional information about MarketingProfs virtual and live
Conferences, please email events@marketingprofs.com
Advertising Brand Management Career Management Customer Behavior Customer Relationships Email Marketing General Management Graphic Design Market Research Metrics & ROI Non-Profit Pricing Public Relations Sales Search Engine Marketing Segmentation Social Media Strategy Web Sites Word-of-Mouth Writing
