B2B Marketing Blog

Many companies are starting to question whether or not their traditional means of marketing are as effective as they once were. For example, at one time, taking out an advertisement in an industry journal was a great way to get your company noticed. However, if your competition was also doing this, were you really getting noticed, or just getting lost among the clutter?

Many of those same companies who have been questioning their current marketing strategies have moved towards an online marketing strategy simply because they are able to regain their competitive advantage. Remember, the most successful businesses are the ones who have embraced innovation.

It’s also understandable that many businesses do not know a lot about online marketing or even where to start when implementing a new strategy. The following are three steps that will help you on your way to marketing your business online in order to see your business flourish and prosper into the future.

1. Search Engine Optimization and Marketing:

Search engine optimization is a garden that must be tended to and cared for. The first step is planting the seeds, or in this case the keywords. For example, you can research targeted keywords that you feel people will be searching for to find your products and services and build them into your website so that Google can index them. Along with that and other “seeds” you should plant, you must maintain and water your SEO garden. It is very important to remember than you cannot simply set and forget your SEO. You must keep up on whether or not you are getting your desired results. SEO is an effort that, with the right amount of time and care, can produce a positive outcome.

The second element is search engine marketing, which are ads that are set up and only paid for if they are clicked. This is called pay per click advertising.

2. A website that looks and acts professionally:

Would you hire someone who didn’t look or act professionally? If you did, would you expect professional results? Probably not, right? The same goes for your website. Many businesses view their website as an online brochure and those same people do not get much return on their website investment. The key is to have a website that converts visitors into prospects for your business developers to follow up on. This in effect is a website that makes you money.

3. A Marketing Automation System:

Wouldn’t it be handy if you knew which companies were interested in your goods and services before they even told you? Well this is actually possible. By implementing a marketing automation system, you will not only know who is coming to your site, they will be lead scored, and inform you of their current engagement level. Further to this, for those who are not yet ready to buy, you can also set up email nurture campaigns to continuously remind them of your offers so that they will think of you when they are ready to buy.

Author: Jon Edgar is an Account Specialist at ActiveConversion

Email marketing is a very popular and powerful tool for lead generation.  This form of database marketing allows businesses to reach markets and customers in the global village quickly, efficiently, and cheaply.

Database marketing has the ability to generate a wealth of information about your customer.  However, properly harnessing this information and using to increase revenue can be tricky.

Barriers to Email Marketing

The most common barriers for email marketing are 1) time and 2) ensuring that your message is not immediately buried in a recipient’s trash folder.

Building lists for email campaigns can be very time consuming: building a list with thousands of contacts is not easy.  Constructing the body of the email requires a significant amount of time as well.  The email needs to be short enough so readers are not bored, but still long enough that you are able to properly convey your message.

The first step to avoid having your message deleted is to personalize the email.  Use the recipient’s name, company, and industry in the email.  Moreover, make sure that the subject matter of the email is relevant to the recipient: sending information about animal care to a beverage company is unlikely to have the desired results.

Having the Right Content

The second step is to ensure the content of the email has value to the reader and can trigger an appropriate action.  The subject of the email is the first line of content the viewer reads.  This line is the difference between the reader opening the email or deleting it.  It must be relevant to the reader, create a desire for more information, and encourage the recipient to read the body.

The body of the email builds a relationship with the reader by providing information about how your products and services will benefit them.  Successful communication in the email body is crucial for conversions.  Encouraging readers to visit your website or reply to your email is how you measure the effectiveness of an email campaign.  Thus, the content in the body of your email must provide information valuable to the reader and generate an action such as calling your sales team.

Tracking Results

The most important stage of any marketing campaign is learning from the results.  Without properly tracking who opened which email or who clicked what, email marketing is as effective as leaving a voicemail and hoping the message got through.  Tools such as Vertical Response can track which recipients opened your email and which of those recipients went further and clicked on conversion links in the body of the email.  This information is critical to understand what sort of message your audience is looking for and what types of offers encourage them to engage with your business.

Tracking recipients after their initial conversion is just as important.  Most tracking tools only indicate that a reader has clicked on a link inside the email body.  Learning details about a prospect’s visit to your website is important in driving the sales cycle.  Tracking tools, such as ActiveConversion, can identify which pages visitors viewed and how they were originally directed to your website.  Combined with the information from the initial email campaign, you are better able to identify which leads are the most interested in your products and services.  Your sales team can then focus on these highly qualified leads saving them from chasing down every recipient that opened the email and generating more revenue for you.

While a well designed and well promoted website can create leads for a company, it goes without saying that most companies will not rely on it entirely.  They will also supplement inbound marketing with outbound targeted calling; they will take a look at who their customer base is and why, develop a list of other companies that are similar, and start calling.

Success at this point will usually sound like “…interesting, send me an email with your info in it and I’ll get back to you”.  The big question is did they say it to be nice,  to get you off the phone?  Or are they genuinely interested? If they are not interested, you may have just set yourself up for a waste of time following up with them.  What you really want is insight into who on the “send me an email” list really is interested, who is actually engaged with your message.

One path to this insight is through a combination of a content-rich website, and marketing automation like ActiveConversion.  When they ask for the “more information email”, the email itself contains links that lead to the information/content.  With the ActiveConversion Outlook plugin installed, if they click on any of those links, you’ll see if they clicked through and what they looked at.

If they said they were interested, but didn’t click through on any of the informational links, well, not as qualified.  However if they clicked through and looked at multiple pages, and even more significantly, if they returned later for a second look at your website, notch them up as having passed qualifying test #1.

Keep in mind this same approach is useful when re-engaging with customers and old prospects.  Even deep into a relationship sell, being able to gauge how interested and engaged a prospect is with the new message you’re delivering is invaluable.

We all know that happy customers are advocates for your product or service. But how do you get fanatical customers? These are customers that really move the marketing and sales yardsticks. They promote you, they review every feature, and can’t imagine their work life without your product being part of it. One of the ways is to engage your customers in a way that makes them part of the team. The best way to do that is to make sure they have a voice, and that their voice is heard. This can best be accomplished by building an online community.

There are many, (many!) online community tools in the marketplace. They range from message forums to social media networks to chat oriented products.  In order to enhance service and make users heard, business to business companies can make use of these tools which are basically feedback channels where customers can provide any and all thoughts they have about your product. This helps companies listen, really listen, to what their customers want. An online community not only allows the customer to see how their feedback has been handled, but it also allows them to see the interest on those ideas from other professionals using the service. They may even stumble upon ideas that would enhance their own use of the product.  This creates engagement, and engagement generates fanatical customers.

How are you building your fanatical customers?

Both before and after the Global Petroleum Show, companies seriously interested in you will likely visit your website. Knowing who is interested in your product and services (and especially when), is something that you can use to increase your trade show return of investment substantially.

Finding The Needles in the Haystack
Research on trade shows have shown that serious buyers will gravitate to doing their research online and arrive at your website both before and after the trade show. But trade shows like the Global Petroleum Show can have two huge wins for exhibitors; Opt ins, and after show website visits.

Opt Ins
By virtue of the fact they are going to the GPS show, anyone visiting your booth is qualified in so far as they are in the energy industry. When one of them asks to be scanned for more information they are doing what is the holy grail of  marketing; they are “opting in”.

When someone asks for their badge to be scanned for more info, you can email nurture them  while always leading off with “you are receiving this because you visited our booth”. Then use a new breed of software to notify you as to who keeps coming back to your website, or visited the right pages on your website; it will tell you who to call, who you stand the best chance of building a relationship with.

The Bigger They Are, The Less They Call
Every exhibitor at the GPS hopes for booth visits from big, sought after accounts. But ironically the bigger the account, the less likely they are to call you after a trade show for fear of salespeople chasing them months on end. Regardless though, if these big accounts are interested in your company they will likely visit your website after the show to investigate your company further. Again, knowing who is visiting, who is interested in your company, who you should target over the weeks and months following the GPS show can be a significant competitive advantage.

eHow To Guide
Here’s a quick eHow To Guide from ActiveConversion that further explains what I’ve mentioned above. Good luck at the Global Petroleum Show 2010!

Marketers are shifting to digital for a variety of reasons, chief among them are the results.  While social media gets all the hype, it’s two tried and true workhorses, email and search marketing, that come out on top of effectiveness.  From a post over at Marketing Profs:

Most marketing executives cite email or search marketing as their company’s top-performing advertising channel in 2009—39.4% and 23.6%, respectively—and over nine in ten (93.6%) say they plan to increase their budget allocation to digital marketing in the next five years, according to the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Just 9.4% of marketers cited offline channels as their most effective response channel last year. Another 4.7% cited social media, while mobile marketing, still in its early stages, was cited by 0.8% of marketers.

Crucially I’d argue that all these pieces need to work together.  Search so they find you, content to convert them, email to nurture them.

This is the fifth in the series of ActiveConversion’s very popular “eHow To” guides. This one deals with aligning a company’s marketing and sales departments so that they can work together seamlessly. From the guide:

B2B marketing is about driving sales, yet a common complaint from the sales department is that “Marketing throws leads over the fence!” Too often experience has shown sales that few leads from marketing are qualified and even if they are; the timing is too early in the cycle. Meanwhile the marketing department is constantly dismayed that so few leads are actually followed up by the sales department.

According to the 2008 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, only 37% of respondents agreed that their sales and marketing organizations are aligned in what their customers want and need [source]. Since sales teams want to prioritize on the buyers that have a better chance of closing, it makes sense to use to:

• give marketing more of a role in the targeting and qualifying of prospects
• use marketing automation to nurture prospects that are not yet qualified for hand-off to sales
• give marketing the ability to auto-communicate to sales a lead’s activities and engagement level
• prioritize for sales a large volume of leads based on qualifiers like company size and engagement

To download this eHow To Guide on why marketing automation can get your Sales and Marketing teams aligned, click here or on the image!

The principal sponsors of this blog, Active Conversion, are offering an limited time 60 day free trial if you sign up as a result of reading this post, so here’s a quick look at what to expect:

After you’ve taken a few minutes to activate your trial account and install the Active Conversion code, you’ll begin seeing results immediately and within days patterns will begin to emerge.  To start with, visitors to your site will be identified by company name.  Some of these visitors may surprise you and as a B2B marketer or sales professional you’ll gain valuable information about which companies are interested in you.

After a while some visitors will start to jump out at you, repeatedly returning to your website to visit more and more pages.  Intuitively you may have pegged them as higher value and more qualified but now you have quantified data to back that hunch up.

For the trial, most marketers or sales professionals simply used the default lead scoring.  By looking at the online behavior of your visitors you’ll begin to correlate that to the lead score that each visitor accumulates.  Eventually you’ll be able to develop your own lead scoring criteria based on the behavior of visitors to your own site but for now you can see that higher lead scores mean higher quality leads.

If your site has pages with form fills using the same default conventions as Active Conversion, your visitors that have previously been identified by company now become people with names, email addresses and/or phone numbers.  In other words, leads.

You’ll also want to take an email nurture campaign for a spin during your trial.  Load up some content into a nurture campaign, pick say 3 emails over six weeks, and anytime any of the respondents clicks through on a link, they are identified as though they had form filled on your website.

Eventually when these leads are presented to your sales team the lead information will include a summary of their activity.  This will give your reps some background for that all-important first call.

This has been a quick look but you can see that even on the trial, things happens automatically, like it’s on cruise control.  We haven’t even talked about, lead nurturing, lead management, email marketing campaigns to your existing in-house lists, or social media ROI tracking.

Feel free to pass this offer along to your network, as long as you or they use this sign up page they’ll have access to a 60 day trial.

ActiveConversion recently published an “eHow To” guide to Lead Nurturing that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

For most small businesses, and a surprising number of medium sized businesses, marketing is a family secret kept in the attic.  Ask them about what they do marketing wise and eyes go downcast, a foot reaches out to kick a pebble, they look up a little ashamed and say; “we really don’t do any.”

Often I dig a little deeper and find out they are doing marketing, they’re paying $500 a month to the old search engine, the king that has recently died, the Yellow Pages (calling your company AAA-Plumbing was the old way to get Search Engine Optimized).

Here’s a piece of advice that I make no money on (so hopefully you can trust it more).  Take that $500 worth of spray and pray (you pay your $500 and you take what you gets, pray there’s ROI), and spend it with Google, the new king, for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) adwords campaign.  With PPC you pay only if someone reads your ad and clicks on it to visit your site.  This is a first in the history of marketing and I’ll be so bold as to say that never in the history of capitalism has the bar been so low, so easy, and so cheap to do real and effective marketing.

And the best part? You can tell Google where you want the ads to run geographically, you can even tell Google when to run the ads, and you can tell Google where to direct visitors who have clicked on it (so you can have an extra special message or offer on hand to greet them).  Wait, there’s an even better part, research has shown that you’ll get about as many free click throughs from adwords as the ones you pay for; seems people like to cut and paste the web page address they find in ads into a new window.

Of course the ton of leads a properly set up adwords campaign produces can be a problem in itself for small companies with sales infrastructures developed for only a few new leads a week.   That being said, there are Marketing tools out there that can handle this wonderful problem and work with your existing process to manage the influx of new leads.