B2B Marketing Blog

How often have you overheard the following exchange in a retail setting?

“May I help you?”

“No thanks, I’m just browsing.”

The customer has made the effort to present herself in the store yet declines to engage with the sales clerk.

In the online B2B world, “Just Browsing” is an apt description of the activity of researching potential purchases before engaging the vendor. Any online marketing effort must take into account the situation where a prospect is genuinely interested in a particular product or service but are in the early stages of their investigation. Some studies show that up to 85 percent of all B2B purchases follow this pattern. So we know leads must be nurtured because the timing is not right for involvement from the sales team.

Ideally the lead nurturing system is interactive. We’ve all seen systems that divert these shoppers into unobtrusive auto-drip email campaigns meant to cultivate interest. While useful, they are effectively a one-way conversation unless the email is acted on. To complete the progression a versatile lead nurturing system “listens” for feedback from the prospect. It must then process this feedback to determine if attention from the sales team is warranted.

Moreover, leads may exhibit “ready to buy” behavior that are unrelated to an auto-drip email nurturing campaign. A typical example is a return visit to your website. Your lead nurturing system must pay attention to these and similar behaviors as well.

An interactive lead nurturing system adds the human touch at just the right time.

Our 'burning' Lighter

I caught up with an old colleague this week that I hadn’t seen in years. We traded stories and did the ‘where are they now’ thing and talked about how we had taken the career paths we had. As diverse as those paths were and the different businesses that we’re in, we ended up on the topic of social media. Amazed at the power, yet still respectfully wrestling on how to fully capitalize. As an aficionado of great consumer electronic products, he quickly brought out his iPhone and showed me an app from Smule, the Sonic Lighter . He fired it up and I saw a very real looking natural flame flicker on the screen, that waved back and forth with movement of the iPhone and the flame even flickered when you blew on it … kind of cool, but I quickly dismissed it as a novelty at best. The big ‘so what’? Then he connected the iPhone to the network, and with a view of google earth, he said, “check it out, these are all the Sonic flames ‘burning’ in the world right now”. The world? Right now?. It was amazing to see at that global level. He navigated to north America, zoomed down to a street level view of the city, and there was ‘our’ flame flickering on the map. A couple of blocks over, another flame. I’ve been in the GPS industry and around technology for many years, so that part I got. And we all remember the hype around LBS apps and the press on ‘find the nearest Starbucks’, but the concept struggled on a number of fronts. Yet now,  there it was. A global, ubiquitous platform of iPhones which provided a medium for these colored flames – A community, so simple, yet so powerful. Most of what we’ve seen with the iPhone to-date is at the personal or consumer level and centered around entertainment, but there are B2B marketers all over the world salivating and looking to take advantage of this reach.  As a B2B Marketer, are you going to be one of the pioneers …… i-Marketing.

Boxers or Briefs?

BTW – Smule is now running global polls based on flame color. So for $0.99 download the iPhone app and take part in that long standing debate … briefs or boxers. To track the world’s preference, view the Smule Under-pants Map at http://app.smule.com/soniclighter/boxerbrief/.

BTW -As real as the flame appeared, it’ll never replace the waving back and forth of the good old bic flame at a great concert ….. now i’m just dating myself

The Super Bowl has come and gone and along with it the annual GoDaddy Super Bowl spot.  This year’s ad features three dudes watching racer Danica Patrick shower with another woman.  The notorious tradition started with GoDaddy’s first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2005 that parodied the infamous “wardrobe malfunction.”

GoDaddy is supposedly a Domain Name Registrar, a B2B play since the vast majority of Domain Names are registered by businesses.  So why chose a B2C medium like Super Bowl ads?  A closer look reveals that most registrants are SMBs who rely on in-house or independent web designers.  These web designers are in fact intermediaries that register the bulk of Domain names and they generally have free rein selecting a Domain Name Registrar.  As it happens these intermediaries are overwhelmingly aged 18-34 and male – the same demographic that beer ads target.

If you are beginning to suspect some method behind the madness, consider this:  Internet analysis firm Netcraft says GoDaddy’s 2005 campaign played a key role in driving GoDaddy to become the world’s largest web hosting firm.  In the 12 months after the first Super Bowl commercial, GoDaddy grew 136 percent, surpassing 1&1 Internet as the world’s largest web host.  All this despite the fact that most of their customers think of GoDaddy as a Domain Name Registrar, not a Web Hosting company.

In 2006 Go Daddy filed an S-1 registration statement prior to an initial public offering.  The IPO was withdrawn a few months later but the S-1 filing revealed that GoDaddy made $30 for every Domain Name registered.  Pretty good when GoDaddy registers most Domain Names for just $10.  Their site is designed to bombard a Registrant with multiple offers for services, including web hosting.

Is GoDaddy just a bunch of dudes singing to their own vulgar tune or are they clever marketers with a deep understanding of their customer’s psychographic?  You decide.

The owner of a higher-end laser hair removal clinic called me the other day looking to increase the visibility of her website.  Put bluntly, her site is invisible, and she acknowledged that it gets very little traffic; certainly none of her new clients come from finding it during a search.  I described ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO) and what it could do for her.  I described a Pay Per Click campaign, email campaigns, best practices for getting visitors to her site to convert, and how to set up an automatic drip-nurturing campaign for the resulting prospects list.  She said it sounds fantastic, what does it cost?  I said three or four thousand to start and that again to keep it all running for a year.  She said “Three thousand?  Wow that’s a lot of money”, and indicated that was simply too much money to spend on her website.  I asked her what she does right now for marketing and she launched into a proud description of how she had, in the not-too-distant past, spent $10,000 on a TV ad which ran for a few weeks, and which she reported a lot of her existing customers had seen and had congratulated her on.

The point of my little tale is to demonstrate that the perceived status the TV ad brought her was added to the meager ROI of 1-4%. Presented with a less expensive marketing option that would outperform the TV ad for months and maybe years, it was none-the-less devoid of status.  Her mindset (and the mindset of the majority) couldn’t conceive that as an SMB her website could become the primary driver of her business.  Regardless of what SEO did for her business her mindset wasn’t going to bring her to proudly boast to anyone of her post SEO massive increase in unique visitors,  let alone an Alexa ranking or Google page rank.

Secondly what this means is that, as an SMB, most of your competitors are still stuck in an old mindset (you’re not, my evidence is that you are reading this blog), spending 64.6% of their budget on expensive TV ads, often because for them, psychologically, TV ads are the gold standard bringing them a feeling of “my company has reached the big time”.  This feeling persists regardless of how expensive TV ads are, or how many DVRs are being bought to skip them.  Since the days of the Apple 1984 ad things have changed; the effectiveness of TV ads is sliding, today 85% of B2B buyers go online during the purchasing process, and 83% found the vendor from which they eventually purchased online [source].  This is handing you a golden opportunity to outperform your competitors by simply focusing on what delivers the best ROI: Automatic Web Marketing.