Bateman Group has started off 2012 with a bang!  Today we kicked off our new partnership with a company called Adchemy based in Foster City, Calif. and led by CEO and Founder Murthy Nukala, a veteran leader of innovative, technology-driven businesses.

Adchemy’s mission is to help advertisers leverage consumer intent to create more effective digital advertising experiences. The company is backed by Accenture, August Capital, Mayfield Fund and Microsoft and in 2010 was listed by The Wall Street Journal as one of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S.

Adchemy is a wonderful new addition to our digital advertising and marketing technologies practice. The account will be run by a spectacular team consisting of practice lead and Senior Vice President Bill Bourdon, Vice President Lisa Melsted, Account Manager Shannon Hutto and Senior Associate Kathleen Stuart. I feel confident this will be a long and fruitful partnership for both our organizations. Please join me in welcoming them to the Bateman Group family.

This is the first in an ongoing series of Q&As with marketing executives and senior management at Bateman Group client companies. The series aims to spotlight the critical issues senior marketers are grappling with and offer practical advice about PR’s role within the broader marketing mix.

The following interview was conducted with Carlos Carvajal when he was vice president of Marketing at Baynote, a leading provider of software solutions for personalizing the online customer experience. Currently, Carlos is vice president of Product Management at Baynote.

Q: What do you view as the most important element of a successful B2B marketing program?

Having the right team in place is first and foremost critical to the success of any marketing organization. Beyond this, there are really three core pillars to running a successful B2B marketing program.

First, marketing needs to be in alignment with the overall corporate strategy which should guide all tactics and campaigns. This sounds simple but all too often is overlooked. Staying true to your strategy often means a slow and steady approach. But in my experience, this approach always wins the race.

Second, a marketing program cannot be successful in this day and age without a strong customer reference program. It’s become increasingly difficult for marketers to differentiate their messages from the competition. This means the real differentiation is best coming through a third party that’s viewed as credible to your target audience. Customers are the most credible source in the eyes of their peers, with industry analysts and media also playing an important role.

Finally, the third requirement is compelling content. There are too many cases where marketing content simply regurgitates a company’s positioning and product messages. Content needs to be useful. It needs to make people feel like you are trying to help them, instead of selling them because people are so desensitized to traditional marketing messages.

Q: In what ways has social media changed the way you approach marketing?

Social media has changed the dynamics of marketing in many different ways but from my vantage point at Baynote the most profound changes are around how we communicate thought leadership and interact with customers. For example, a successful corporate blog allows companies to show thought leadership in a way that conditions people to look for them on a regular basis. This phenomenon didn’t exist with traditional websites because the content wasn’t dynamic and marketers couldn’t truly engage their audience in a two-way conversation.

The important rule with social media is that slow and steady wins the race. You really have to invest and stick with it. It takes time to build a loyal following, but once you have established one it will truly pay dividends.

Q: PR is under a lot of pressure to improve the way it measures business outcomes yet it often lacks access to the KPIs used by marketing, such as data on lead flow, revenue growth and company valuation. What KPIs are you currently held accountable for at Baynote and which of these would you like to see better integrated into PR measurement?

Marketing lives to service sales. Our overarching performance metric for marketing is marketing sourced revenue. We also look at different marketing functions and those that mattered most. From an awareness standpoint, we look at traffic and bounce rates. Is there a steady uptake in traffic? This is far more important than the number of impressions.

With lead generation we look at two things: marketing sourced pipeline and marketing qualified leads. Finally, with product marketing, who’s main job is to enable sales to close leads, we track the opportunity to close ratio.

In terms of the measurement opportunity for PR, I’d like to see a system that tracks the effectiveness of the PR assets the sales team uses, like media coverage and blogs. Through better understanding what specific articles or blog posts played an active role in the different phases of the sales nurturing process, PR could play a more focused role in tangibly driving revenues.

Q: What technology company do you admire most for their marketing effectiveness and why?

It’s hard to pick just one. I really admire Apple for their brand which they’ve built around their relentless focus on staying true to their vision and core competency. Google has done the same thing. Everything with the Google brand and service offering is about simplicity and speed.

I also think Marketo and Hubspot have done an exceptional job establishing thought leadership around the problems they are solving for their customers. They both excel at content marketing.

Q: What piece of advice do you have for PR teams on how they can work more effectively with senior-level marketers?

First, I think it’s important that we look for better ways to share ideas beyond email. This is not limited to PR/Marketing. Businesses simply need more effective collaboration systems that foster better ideas and encourage ways to track progress. At Baynote, we have been experimenting with Box.net to improve collaboration and communication around critical marketing projects and campaigns.

Because marketing is so busy, PR can also help by creating “cookie cutter” emails around company news or competitive moves that can be easily shared with the entire company. This concept of helping senior marketers communicate big wins internally is really simple, and equally as important.

As the year comes to a close and we reflect back, there’s no denying 2011 has been an incredible year for Bateman Group. The surge we experienced in the fourth quarter; however, has truly been unprecedented. Today, we publicly announced our selection as agency of record by three exceptional companies. These recent additions to our client roster include:

Qualys — Based in Redwood Shores, Calif., Qualys is the leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT security risk and compliance management solutions. Qualys solutions are deployed in a matter of hours anywhere in the world, providing customers an immediate and continuous view of their security and compliance postures.

Antenna Software — Based in Jersey City, N.J., Antenna provides mobile business solutions that enable enterprises to build, deploy and manage applications, websites and content across myriad devices for employees, customers and partners.

Sociable Labs — Based in San Mateo, Calif., Sociable Labs provides on-site social commerce solutions for online retailers to maximize social sharing, referral traffic and conversions.

We’ve worked hard over the years to maintain a client roster notable for its diversity — particularly in terms of geography and market position. These recent wins only enhance this by adding an early-stage startup and two fast-growing market leaders that hail from Redwood City all the way to Jersey City. At the same time, Qualys, Antenna and Sociable Labs will strengthen our sector knowledge in IT security, mobility and social commerce markets, respectively. Today we took another big step in our journey to national prominence.

A warm welcome to all three!

Earlier this month, Bateman Group, along with fellow boutique PR agencies Mindshare PR, LewisPulse, Borders + Gratehouse, Kulesa Faul and Eastwick Communications co-hosted a panel discussion on the evolving forces impacting the marketing leader and how PR can improve the way it works with the broader marketing organization. Moderated by Bateman Group’s Bill Bourdon, the panel included Anurag Wadehra, CMO at Baynote; Darby Williams, VP of Marketing at Sociable Labs; and Michelle Cox, VP of Marketing at Metacafe. All of the panelists offered a unique point of view that made for a very lively discussion. Here are the highlights:

Biggest disruptors to marketers in the past decade: All of the panelists agreed that social media has been the biggest disruptor to the marketer over the last decade. Anurag explained that social media has forced marketers to take on a new role of establishing credibility, and Michelle added that the direct brand-consumer conversation has led marketers to shift their goals from pure customer acquisition to creating brand ambassadors in their customers. This new socially-driven climate has empowered consumers to speak directly with each other continuously, so rather than just push messaging to their customers, marketers need to inform their audience so they can make the right decision.

The relationship between sales and marketing: There was a resounding agreement that marketing is all about driving sales. Anurag provided a great analogy for this relationship: marketing lays down the tracks and sales runs on them. In the end, sales is the most important customer of marketing, he said. On the consumer side, Michelle said sales depends on marketing to recruit new customers, but more challenging is the expectation that marketers will maintain customers through engaging digital experiences so they will return again and again,  ultimately acting as brand ambassadors.

Web content: It used to be that the website was one channel for marketers to deliver their marketing message to customers. Now it’s not just a channel, but a necessary component of an organization that serves as the digital hub for all forms of communication, from sales, to internal communications to outbound marketing. From an outbound marketing perspective, marketers today are acutely focused on influencing the influencers, which means they are talking directly to a highly sophisticated audience that demands direct access, brand transparency and content that speaks directly to them. Content needs to speak to pain points of the customer, and provide tools that the customer can put to use immediately.

Where PR fits into the marketing mix: This portion of the panel was particularly insightful for the agency representatives in the audience, and each panelist offered unique points of view that served as an excellent reminder of what in-house marketers expect of their agencies, and how we can improve our client service.

The key takeaway was that all companies need to tell a story, and PR agencies serve as the amplifier. The best PR agencies fight for a good story and prevent a company from fading into the background. A PR agency does its best work when it has deep knowledge of its client, but can also step back and offer a valuable outside perspective.

It’s was also interesting to hear the panelists say that it’s common for companies to use their agencies inappropriately – while it’s up to the agency to be proactive and driven to deliver results, in-house marketers need to be savvy consumers and recognize the strengths of their PR agencies and give them what they need to be successful – that could be a clear product roadmap, corporate vision, or data like customer references or industry surveys.

I’d like to thank Anurg, Darby and Michelle for being straightforward and honest in their responses – it’s not often that you get an opportunity to hear in-house marketing executives explain their pain points and issues that keep them up at night, and I learned a lot!

I’m excited to share with you a really cool and thoughtful content marketing campaign we’re involved with on behalf of our client Motista. The campaign involves a series of cartoons that Motista commissioned award-winning cartoonist Tom Fishburne to develop, entitled “Moments of Truth”.

With a wink to marketers, the cartoons will parody the current state of market research and the ways in which marketing teams are struggling right now with data — whether to better understand their customer’s motivations or simply justify budget decisions. The series will be promoted on Motista’s blog with a new cartoon featured every other week. Tom will also be featuring the cartoons on his website, which happens to be followed by some of the best marketing minds in the business. First up in the series is a cartoon called “Justify”:

In this day and age when successful businesses are oftentimes successful digital publishers too, content is, as they say, king. The Motista/Fishburne campaign embraces this simple, yet still often underestimated concept and does it with flair. Or as Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid might say, the campaign really gets the value of “social objects”.

A cartoonist himself, MacLeod defines a social object as follows:

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if you think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

Within this context, Motista is using the cartoons as social objects to connect with other marketers around their frustration with data. More precisely, data focused on helping them understand what’s motivating their customers into action.

We’ve got some great promotional plans in place beyond the blog distribution, which I’ll save for a later date. In the meantime, the “Moments of Truth” cartoons will be covering some salient topics over the next few months. Check back and leave comments about any topics you would like to see lampooned in the future!

P.S. Props to Motista’s marketing director, Paula Cavagnaro, for spearheading the campaign and introducing us to Tom.

Today we publicly announced our selection as agency of record by NatureBridge, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco and the largest residential environmental education partner of the National Park Service. NatureBridge currently operates four campuses in Yosemite National Park, Olympic National Park in Washington State, Golden Gate National Park and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area and each year serves more than 40,000 participants through field science, youth leadership and teacher training programs.

Environmental education is a pre-requisite for a sustainable planet, yet it continues to be misunderstood, underfunded and even ignored. This is especially true in our public schools where, much like the music programs our client Little Kids Rock aims to protect, hands-on nature and science courses taught out in the field are among the first to be cut. In response, NatureBridge has set ambitious goals to expand the program nationwide and inspire even more students in more places to become advocates for the planet.

This win is a key addition to our Green/Sustainability practice formed on Oct. 25, 2010 made up of companies, both for profit and nonprofit, offering products and services designed to protect natural resources and embrace the concepts of environmental integrity and social responsibility. The bi-coastal account team, consisting of myself, Tyler Perry, Shannon Hutto and Kathleen Stuart, will work closely with our fantastic internal contacts Susan Larson and Brea Jones along with a soon to be hired new PR director.

We feel very fortunate to be able to compete for and win accounts where the organization’s mission so closely aligns with causes and issues we as an agency (and individuals) feel so strongly about, namely managing climate change, living a more sustainable lifestyle and protecting the planet for future generations. Welcome aboard NatureBridge!