Ally PLM Marketing Status and Plans
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The document provides a status report on Ally PLM Marketing. It describes the general marketing responsibilities and evaluates tactics from February to September 2013. It identifies strengths like webinar attendance but also opportunities like becoming the top NX support provider. The report outlines plans for FY2014 including increasing social media engagement, improving the website, and enhancing evaluation tactics.
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Ally PLM Marketing Status and Plans
- 2. Explanation of general Ally PLM Marketing responsibilities Evaluation of marketing activities February 2013 – September 2013 Moving forward: Ally PLM Marketing in FY 2014
- 3. Lead generation Support sales staff Company branding and positioning Marketing Transition ◦ Tim Larsen, Director of Marketing ◦ Bridget Hatfield, Marketing Specialist
- 4. Evaluation tactics Support Knowledge Base articles, how-to tutorials Solid Edge business outweighs NX business significantly Website Facebook page Availability of AEs Social media entities are updated very frequently ◦ Major drivers of website traffic Strengths ◦ ROI tracking Points of Improvement
- 5. New business Lead generation through webinars Increased social media visits and interaction Become the #1 provider of NX customer support Opportunities Territory competitors Weak evaluation system Threats
- 6. Direct communication Direct Communication ◦ Mass email campaigns ◦ Telemarketing campaigns Internal and DCI ◦ Direct mailers ◦ Newsletters Website ◦ Trial downloads ◦ Knowledge Base articles Email Lead Generation Platforms Telemarketing Evaluation Direct Mailers Newsletters
- 7. Live events ◦ Webinars Lunch Bytes Product specific Prospect ◦ Solid Edge University ◦ Solid Edge. Get the Edge Webinar Attendance 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 March April May NX Lead Generation Platforms Evaluation Solid Edge June Prospect July Total August September
- 8. Evaluation Tactics ◦ Understanding ROI on all Marketing and Supporting Entities ◦ Monitoring of Social Media Trends and Analytics
- 11. Social Media ◦ Facebook Special offers and newsletters ◦ Twitter Special offers, newsletters, upcoming events, some KB articles, some blog posts ◦ LinkedIn Group posts – special offers and some KB articles ◦ Blog Special offers and PLM related special interest stories ◦ YouTube Lunch Bytes, other replay webinars Lead Generation Platforms Evaluation
- 13. Engineering Support Sales Support Online Presence Other New Initiatives Evaluation Tactics
- 14. Engineering Support ◦ Communication to Potential Leads ◦ Social Media Engagement ◦ Support Hour for Maintenance Customers ◦ Management of LinkedIn Groups ◦ Authoring of Blog Posts
- 15. Sales Support ◦ Standardized Process for Leads/Opportunities in CRM ◦ Reporting of Specific Activities ◦ Including Marketing in Significant Sales Transactions
- 16. Online Presence ◦ Live Chat Feature ◦ Creation and Management of New LinkedIn Group ◦ Producing More Special Interest Blog Posts ◦ Adding More Value to the Ally PLM Facebook Page ◦ Cleaning up Website
- 17. Other Marketing Initiatives ◦ Presence of Stronger Brand Image ◦ New Features for the Ally PLM App ◦ SolidWorks User Prospecting Conversation ◦ Training ROI Calculator ◦ Heat Map Software ◦ Online Radio Show
- 18. Evaluation Tactics ◦ Understanding ROI on all Marketing and Supporting Entities ◦ Monitoring of Social Media Trends and Analytics
- 19. LiveChat feature Knowledgebase forum Improve SEO for long tail keyword searches Increase social media engagement Increase website traffic Customer testimonials ◦ Case studies Increased training attendance Increased relevant prospecting leads Enhance customer referral program ◦ + 550 Visits/month ◦ + 400 Unique Visitors/month + 2000 PageViews/month Web Initiatives Other Initiatives
- 20. Explanation of general Ally PLM Marketing responsibilities Evaluation of marketing activities February 2013 – September 2013 Moving forward: Ally PLM Marketing in FY 2014
Editor's Notes
- Support: Ally is able to offer its customers a 2:1 support to sales staff. Siemens has recognized Ally as being the #1 provider of customer support for Solid Edge. This needs to be heavily tied to the brand of Ally PLM, and all marketing efforts going forward will reflect this. A great place to start is on our website; the homepage should be dedicated to the main theme of outstanding support.Knowledge Base articles and other how-to tutorials: Knowledge Base articles are by far the biggest driver of traffic to our site. They have even been recommended by LinkedIn users on group discussions. More frequently “how-to” searches are being utilized by users of NX and Solid Edge software. If we can continue to post Knowledge Base articles and other “how-to” collateral (we’ve already begun producing short How-to CAD videos), this will remain a major strength for Ally with a goal of driving new business and also upholding our brand image of superior support.Frequent Social Media Updates: Social media marketing is essential way to engage with existing and potential customers, and it provides the added benefit of a free platform. Our social media entities are updated far more frequently than other channel partners. These sites are also large drivers of traffic to our main website. Evaluation Tactics: Ally PLM needs to implement an evaluation process for all lead generation activities. This will help us be more efficient in both time and costs. A major necessity is understanding the ROI on marketing activities. This may involve a greater presence of marketing in sales activities. If Ally can implement a stronger evaluation process, a greater understanding of new business development will likely follow. Solid Edge Business Heavily Outweighs NX Business: Solid Edge to NX sales as well as marketing activities by Ally PLM is heavily skewed towards Solid Edge. While this is a strong and profitable segment, the ability to do the same business with NX would be huge. More marketing activities and events should be targeted towards NX. Website: The Ally PLM website contains a lot of information, an overwhelming amount. Specifically on the homepage, there is no clear call to action. There is a small description of what Ally does, but branding on the website does not align with the goal for Ally PLM to be recognized as a superior solution partner. The homepage should be the start of many minor website updates with the goal of making the site more user-friendly to visitors.Facebook page: Currently, the Ally PLM Facebook page only posts special offers and newsletters, as well as some Knowledge Base articles and blog posts. This forum should become more engaging with followers and provide more topics of interest to help make Ally PLM more known. A place to start would be to look at other channel partners as well as engineering users and model what their successful posting provides. When more Knowledge Base articles are available for posting, they should continue to be promoted on Facebook as they are very interesting with engineering users of the products Ally PLM provides. Availability of Application Engineers: Ally PLM’s marketing initiatives rely heavily on the industry knowledge and ability to produce posts on social media websites.
- New Business: Aligning with the main goal of marketing, lead generation is at the forefront of marketing efforts. There are many ways in which this can be done that are outlined in the “Moving Forward: Marketing in FY 2014” section. Lead Generation through Webinars: Ally PLM webinars often have strong potential leads in attendance. A new process should be created to reach these leads in a more impactful way, even something as simple as a follow-up phone call would be helpful. Survey creation and feedback should be more prominent to attendees of webinars in order to capture more information.Increased social media visits and interaction: If Ally can engage more people in discussions and other interaction on social media entities, and increased brand awareness and new business segment will follow. Recommendations follow in the “Website Analytics Explained - All Time Referrals” section, but the main theme is to use social media websites as more of a forum, where Ally AE’s can post discussions as well as other engineering users to create a dialogue rather than a one-way form of communication. Increase NX Customer Sales and Support: As mentioned previously as a weakness, Ally’s Solid Edge business greatly outweighs NX business. Efforts to more effectively target these groups through all marketing assets should be made. Siemens recognizes Ally as the #1 provider of Solid Edge support; being able to say the same for NX support would be huge towards the brand image and reputation of Ally PLM. https://sales.industrysoftware.automation.siemens.com/sell/nx/release/nx9/ - Essentials for Excellence, CAD Productivity, NX9 Release (emulate Siemens videos)Territory Competitors: Currently, Ally PLM positions itself well against other territory competitors. However, this is a dynamic process that should always be considered in all marketing efforts. Weak Evaluation System: Mentioned earlier as a weakness, Ally’s weak evaluation processes can also serve as a major threat to all business aspects, especially new business development. Evaluation practices need to be employed for all marketing activities to allow for the efficient allocation of resources, as well as create the ability to attract new business more quickly.
- All Direct Communication activities are tracked in CRM. MailChimp provides analytics on Newsletter Open and Click Rates which we use to craft our newsletters. We use direct communication for prospecting as well as informing our current customer base of various promotions with the overall goal of company recognition and brand exposure along with establishing and nurture current and potential customer relationships.
- Our live events provide support to current customers on a range of product specific topics. In FY 2014 we plan on targeting webinars and other events more towards prospect and new business development.
- $13,711 FY2013 MDF Spent- Prospect Spend = $10,039- Customer Spend = $3,672Problem/need arises: we know how much money we spent, but we don’t have a solid idea of what the return on these spending ideas are.
- We use the website to keep visitors aware of upcoming events, current promotions, and as resource for product information as well as helpful tutorials. It also is platform for free trial downloads and Lunch Bytes, which are large drivers of traffic to the website. This slide shows the increase of all categories, Visits/Unique Visitors/PageViews/Pages per Visit/%New Visits along with a decrease in Bounce Rate from when I started 5 months ago.
- This is an overall outlook of our website traffic visits, as you can see it has gradually increased each month, Pages per Visit sit right around 4, the % of New Visits is almost 67%, and people are spending over 2 minutes on the website per visit.
- We use social media sites to promote our website, interact with current and potential customers, promote events, and to keep prospects and customers informed with helpful resources. Our top referring sites to the website are social media entities.
- Going forward, we are surrounding our new efforts for the next fiscal year around five separate platforms. In order to gauge accordingly, we will assess each one of these different platforms within the first quarter of 2014 to make sure our efforts are being utilized properly and our resources are not being put to waste. These five platforms are Engineering Support, Sales Support, Online Presence, Other New Initiatives and Evaluation Tactics.
- Communication: Rather than only 8% of sales being new logos, we would like to increase that number through effective and direct communication to customers and prospects by engineers. We’ve previously mentioned following up trial downloads and major prospecting events with our AE’s, but the process still isn’t standardized and so we would like to draft and manage a schedule in order to efficiently schedule AE’s time around these activities. Social Media Engagement: The more quality touches we can provide to our social media followers, the greater our brand value and SEO levels will increase, and this will be very impactful in upholding the brand image for superior support, along with facilitating prospecting efforts by increasing our brand awareness. With the latest addition of encrypted keyword searches, websites can no longer track keywords that power their searches. This is a huge piece of our traffic, with 8 of the Top 10 Landing Pages from users signed into Google are Knowledge Base articles. In order to remedy this, our SEO strategy needs to be increasing production of relevant content to serve both customer audiences and prospects, along with leveraging content through SEO via social media channels. Page quality and unique and relevant content has grown increasingly more important, with long tail keyword searches becoming the norm. We’d like to see 3 FB/TW/G+/Li interactions every week from an AE, and we can measure the increase in engagement and tie it into the SEO value. I am a part of 18 relevant LinkedIn groups and 14 Google + Communities (wait for laughter), but with the increase in security, and Google being a monopoly, Google + continues to gain importance in SEO related purposes, as the GoogleBots continue to put more emphasis on relevant interactions on this social media channel. We would like every AE to get a Google+ account and start to build Ally’s and their online presence immediately. Support Hour for Maintenance Customers: This idea will benefit our maintenance customers, to provide them with an opportunity to be a part of a monthly Support Hour webcast/roundtable hosted by one of our AE’s. Offering up an open forum for our current maintenance customers (pre-qualified to ensure their contract is up-to-date), to send questions to an AE on Solid Edge and NX. We schedule to do these once every other month per product, and measure the value after two sessions each, in four months from the implementation, beginning in January. Management of Ally PLM LinkedIn Group: This is important to our brand recognition and continued promise to be Siemens’ #1 support VAR, along with easily reaching potential prospects with any general questions regarding their software issues. This group will be created by the end of the month and will require an AE to be an Admin, making sure we are always engaged with our group members. Management will be minimal at the beginning, but as the group grows it will require more resources. John Gaioni’s CAM Logic page has grown in 4 years to 500+ members. Implementation will start at the beginning of November. Authoring of Blog Posts: An authored blog post is incredibly powerful for Google too as it can verify the author of the web page. When Google fetches an authored link, they now have data about the writer, creating more trust in the link, creating a more likely scenario where a link authored manually is of higher quality, and the writer is more unlikely to claim responsibility for a link if it is spammy. It also allows Google to change the weighting of links according to AuthorRank, which is a mechanism by which Google’s search engine rankings are influenced. Google Authorship is Google’s way of identifying the author of a piece of content to factor it as a signal of content quality. The new type of SEO is extremely tough to game, and claiming authorship of your site and establishing yourself as an authority in this field is for SEO success, along with having a strong presence on Google +. It will only take a couple of minutes to implement authoring, and I would like a post from an AE every two weeks.
- Standardized Process for Leads/Opportunities in CRM: In order to fully comprehend the value of a successful and an unsuccessful marketing activity, we will need to fully integrate a closed sales opportunity in CRM with the originating lead. To do this, we will need a standardized process of sales going back into the opportunity and setting the originating lead, along with aligning a concrete name for each Topic, i.e. Solid Edge Trial not SE Trial to better gather proper information tying back everything that led to the sale. BOGO was an extreme success with a Plain-Text emailer to our customer base, along with great follow-up from sales, so we will strive to continue to build on programs such as this. Most of our on-site GTE and online webinars that DCI has called on have been unsuccessful, whether it be the quality of the prospects they are calling, or the lack of follow-up. It takes an average of 7 to 13 touches to generate a quality B2B sales lead, and creating a more organized approach to this will allow for more prospecting success. Starting with cleaning up lists in CRM, Bridget and I will also take training courses in CRM specifically targeted to this process before 2014. Reporting of Specific Activities: With integrating a more standardized process for open/closed leads/opportunities, we will report monthly on current progress and closed business progress, and how they came to fruition via marketing, beginning in November. Including Marketing in Significant Sales Transactions: Marketing should now be alerted to all new logo transactions, along with significant sales transactions, in order to better diagnose and organize what marketing activities led to the eventual sale. Marketing will attend Monday morning sales meetings to gain a better understanding and grasp the activities of the sales staff in the sales funnel.
- Main goal: increased interaction with visitors and followers of our online entities Live Chat Feature: Depending on the landing page, we can have a pop-up with a sales email alert and a support email alert, along with a prompt after-hours to alert either avenue. The Live Chat feature will allow us to capture more prospective leads, and help lessen our exits, losing potential revenue. Receive, record and redirect chats, along with receiving detailed customer information http://p3chat.com/tour , history of previous interactions with in-page activity and one-click actions. Google Talk is also fully integrated so no need to install software or create a new account. Options like Automatic Rules, Departments, TimeZone configuration, Operator Work Hours, Priority, HTTPS Security to prevent browser warnings. Creation and Management of New LinkedIn Group: Previously discussed, we will be in charge of creating the group, and managing the group alongside an AE Admin. The group will be in full swing by the beginning of November, and we will measure our success after the first four months. Producing More Special Interest Blog Posts: We will be writing at least once a week on special interests, i.e. Richie Parker-type.. The more unique and relevant content that we can provide for search engines and current and prospective customers, the higher our SEO values will rise and the more leads will be created. This task will begin immediately. Adding More Value to the Ally PLM Facebook Page: FY14 FB Campaigns--Sweepstakes,Photo Competitions, Group Offer,Video Contest, Vote Contest,Photo Caption Contest,Referral Promos,Showdowns,Funny Videos,Customer Shout-Outs,Practical Tips, Fill In The Blank,Like/Share,If_, I’d,When_, I,Like If_,Remember When_Cleaning Up Website: In an effort to lessen our exits and increase potential leads and guide prospects to clearer calls-to-action, the website will gradually be edited and the home page will have a cleaner outlook. This process is extremely gradual, and will be completed by the end of April 2014.
- Presence of Stronger Brand Image: Our brand image should reflect that we provide superior support to our customers. Marketing activities will align with this in our home page, the resources we share, and interaction with users of our social media entitiesNew Features for the Ally PLM App: The way that a user is now interacting more and more with tablets and smart phones, we need to be on the front lines when they continue to move towards this area of search. We already have a well-developed app on Android, so we should look to expand into the Apple market development, along with further integration of our current app i.e. Games that can apply engineering knowledge in the form of matching and apply an avenue towards our training landing pages after playing along with integration of contests to add app downloads. Ben can go into more detail on this. SolidWorks User Prospecting Conversation: In order to have an online conversation with discontent SolidWorks users, Navjot has brought up a way to start a conversation, and create a solution based on their error prompts. We can attack these avenues via social media i.e. LinkedIn groups and blogs in an attempt to grab up some relevant back-and-forth conversations with perturbed SolidWorks users maybe looking for a possible switch. Training ROI Calculator: Creating a landing page and relevant email attachments that will provide our customers with a clear cut return on providing training. Here’s where I found the idea to emulate: http://www.advancedsolutions.com/training/trainingCalculator.aspxHeat Map Software: In order to better diagnose exactly what each website visitor is doing, Smart Egg has created heat mapping software in which you can see exactly what visitors are looking at, and convert more visitors in revenue. Heatmap tools visually identify the most popular areas of each given page. Scrollmap tools help to see which parts of the pages work and which ones don’t by showing how far down the page people are scrolling and helps to determine where visitors are abandoning the page. This will help to know exactly where to add elements to hold a visitor’s interest longer. Overlay tools show the number of clicks on each element of the page. Confetti distinguishes each click by referral sources, search terms, etc. In knowing the most valuable click traffic source, this is where we can concentrate more efforts. Online Radio Show: Third-party streaming hosts will allow you to turn a radio station into another avenue of getting the word out about our products in order to gain new customers. With little upfront costs and a little time invested, testing an online radio show is simple and easy to start. http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/10/01/ultimate-guide-online-radio-work/ Record MP3, so you can re-broadcast over-and-over, or podcast. Third-Party Streaming Hosts: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ Server:http://www.shoutcheap.com/ Free promos: Blog Talk RadioLive365StreemaTuner 24Tune InStreaming The Net
- $13,711 FY2013 MDF Spent- Prospect Spend = $10,039- Customer Spend = $3,672Problem/need arises: we know how much money we spent, but we don’t have a solid idea of what the return on these spending ideas are.
- In this presentation we discussed the role of marketing at Ally PLM, marketing activities from the point of transition until now, and our plans for marketing in FY2014 which will align with the 5 platforms previously mentioned to create a stronger brand image of Ally being a superior support provider and to increase new logo sales beyond the 8% we’re currently doing.