Savvy B2B Marketing

Hi John,

Thank you so much for asking such a provocative and insightful question. I anticipate "running long" in my answer here, but only because your question deserves a thorough reply.

I agree that Eloqua had some assets that a new company might lack. Yes, David Meerman Scott tweeted about our infographic and Playbook, and that helped. Also we do have a pretty big footprint (about 60,000 marketers use our software), so we had that going for us. We are also tracked by a number of independent analysts that monitor the lead gen industry.

But please don't feel that those advantages should deter you from trying this type of marketing. Because, frankly, in some ways, we BLEW IT when it came to our built-in strengths, and in other ways, the strengths didn't make as big a difference as you might imagine (or as I had imagined going into this). Here's what I mean.

Yes, David Meerman Scott tweeted about our content. His tweets triggered about 30 RT's (I have the exact number in my office, actually, but I am traveling internationally at the moment). So that's about 1% of all Twitter activity. Further, we dropped the ball when it came to promoting our Social Media Playbook and The Content Grid to our installed base. We NEVER emailed either resource to our database (oops!). Imagine how many MORE downloads we would have received if we had pushed to our database? (There were reasons why we didn't push it out, but we've rethought those reasons, and will be using much more of this type of content in our lead nurturing moving forward.)

With regard to your question about paying an army of social media drones (great term!), we didn't do that. In fact, we pushed the Grid and Playbook out while we were in a transition between PR firms. In that regard, it was the WORST possible time to release these assets because our new agency hadn't become fully engaged yet, and our previous agency was in the process of separating. This is precisely why I made the decision to let our design / strategy partner, JESS3, brand the heck out of the content -- we needed a partner to help us promote the content! And that they did.

When it came to triggering awareness, the strategy was to "start at the top". I truly believe that "influencers" trigger disproportionate spread on the social Web. I also knew I didn't have the resources to pitch this stuff to everyone. So I picked like 50 people to share it with first, and crossed my fingers that they'd become rainmakers. They were. And I wiped my brow and slept a night without grinding my teeth.

You. Can. Do. This.

Yours,
Joe Chernov / Eloqua / @jchernov