B2B Marketing Blog

If your company’s marketing strategy appears to be taking on some water, perhaps it is time to set sail on a new course?

Since marketing plays such a key role in the direction of many companies, take the time to review your company’s efforts and if they are being directed squarely where they should be.

Reviewing Your Marketing Needs

As you review your company’s marketing needs, analyze where your return on investment (ROI) could be improved, where money may be disappearing to and where you see your company’s finances down the road.

Among the specific areas to zero in on are:

• Numbers review – It is important to review the company financials to determine if change is necessary.
• Marketing efforts – Where are your marketing dollars going? Have you changed anything significantly in the last six months or years? If so, what were the end results?
• Get an outsider’s opinion – While it is easy to judge things from your end, have an outsider look at your marketing efforts. They can give an unbiased viewpoint as to what may be working, what isn’t likely to work and where the dollars should be going;
• Do an industry review – See what others are doing with their marketing efforts. Are they putting the pedal to the metal or are they pulling back? While you don’t necessarily want to emulate what the competition is doing, it doesn’t hurt to review their efforts.
• Customer feedback – Most importantly, get feedback from the clients you are marketing to. Find out what they like and don’t like. If they feel something isn’t working but you aren’t aware of that, how will you fix it?

While you don’t want to be changing your marketing efforts every month, tweaking here and there is by all means a good thing to consider.

If you decide that a change to your marketing game plan is in order, be sure you can answer the question as to why this is in the first place.  At the end of the day, companies need to determine and understand the ongoing cost of promoting and advertising their brand to their customer base and the potential prospects.

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like copier machines and is based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource, providing expert advice on digital copiers for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

Service businesses, especially companies in the Energy Sector, Are looking outside their usual stomping grounds for new customers…

Perhaps the volatility of the energy markets is driving them to seek new lands offering better stability and security. Perhaps the possibility of positioning their businesses in markets with little, or no, competition has many companies looking at around for bigger and better opportunities. Whatever the reason, there is a growing trend among energy service providers to seek opportunities globally.

But, How Do You Grow Globally…

Bringing your business to market is all about putting the right message in front of the right audience at the right time. The trouble with marketing somewhere other than where you live is precisely that: You do not live there. How do you gain exposure? How do you know what messages will be well received? How do you know when those you want to deal with are ready to buy—if you even know who your real prospects are in the first place?

There are 2 options: get a consultant, or get a marketing automation system. Having been a consultant I have no desire to heap too large a pile of coals on my head. However, there is one truth I will confess: as a consultant, I was NOT cheap. I knew what the best options were, how to engage and how to get results. I also knew that my knowledge was well outside the scope of my clients—that is, they NEEDED me. And I charged for it.

A marketing automation system, like that of ActiveConversion, does much of the work of a consultant. The system literally educates those marketing into new territories by providing answers to key questions, such as:

• Which marketing campaigns are driving visitors to my website?
• Of those visiting my website, how often do they come and which products or services are they most interested in?
• Which of my competitors are checking me out, and what are they looking at?
• Who are the most relevant contacts at my prospects’ business?
• Whether prospects are at the right point in their buying cycle or not, how can my business stay top-of-mind (professionally and ethically) with my prospects from afar?
• When is the best time to commit sales resources to maximize my chances of converting my best prospects?

And one of the most interesting aspects of this information: it is gathered anonymously. No one has to fill out a form for you to know who they are, what they’re looking at, or how interested they might be.

Whether you plan to take your business to places where angels fear to tread, or if you’re staying close to home, a marketing automation system will keep you on top of your prospects, competitors ,and your advertising effectiveness—all for a lot less than I ever charged.

Being top of mind in the energy sector takes time and effort, but it’s eminently doable, even for firms with a limited marketing budget.  We all know about the basics like branding and advertising, or tactical events such as trade shows, so let’s talk about a few of the lesser known ways to market.

First off, how about networking?  Most people view this as an individual career move but in fact it’s fantastic marketing for your business.  Get creative about ways to network.  Volunteer at events with industry participation such as the Calgary Corporate Challenge, or even sponsor/start one.  Networking at business and industry events is a guaranteed way to get recognition.  If you aggressively network, people will see your company’s name over and over again and it will instantly come to mind when looking to buy into your sector or when recommending a service/product to a colleague.

Secondly, industry sponsored speaking engagements for yourself or a thought leader on your team can generate excellent exposure with many side benefits.  Usually such presentations are not about being an infomercial for your business, but about educating the audience about a specific aspect of your business.  Presentations, such as ones hosted by APEGGA, are the perfect opportunity to generate great brand awareness by sharing knowledge in your company’s field of expertise.

Demonstrating the passion for your business and what you do creates foundations for future business relationships.  Make sure you are able to stay around and network afterwards so that you build on your new found credibility.  You’ll also find future network events that much easier as you will have gained substantial experience and confidence by getting up in front of an audience.

Bottom line, there are many ways to market, and these are a few more tools for your toolkit. Get out there and don’t be afraid to fail! Aim to be that company that everyone has heard of!

Author: Jeff Rouse

VP of Technology

FP iMarketing

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.

I’m sure avid readers of this blog are well and truly aware of what marketing is all about.  I’m sure a lot of you live it and breathe it on a daily basis.  However, what I want to delve into today are business activities that many people don’t consider to be marketing, but are in fact crucial to your companies marketing success.

Marketing is something that happens in every transaction, communication, and action.  That customer support call, that’s marketing.  That invoice you just sent out, that’s marketing.  That email to a supplier, also marketing.  And yes, the way employees talk about your company to their family and friends is marketing.  Marketing is your company’s actions in their entirety, its the sum of everything that you do.

So the next time you’re dreaming about what to sponsor, how to get your message out, or feature your service, perhaps the best thing to do is to look inward and make sure you’re doing all the little things right.  A great product or service is itself the best marketing of all.

ActiveConversion will be hosting an information packed live seminar on March 3^rd, 2011 in Calgary for all those looking to get first hand experience in learning how to sell more globally without significantly increasing corresponding marketing costs.  As an audience member, you’ll learn how you can combine and leverage traditional and online marketing techniques to sell globally in the most efficient way possible.

Register for seminar here

Often B2B companies end up spending substantially on marketing in addition to their own time – be it at the trade shows, conferences or events. This face to face interaction is intended to meet directly with potential new customers and create relationships. But often, these expensive endeavors remain fruitless due to the disconnect between marketing events and actual sales activities.

This seminar is presented by Yves Matson, Marketing Director from United Safety Solutions, who will walk through his own experiences. Yves is familiar with traditional marketing techniques, and he will demonstrate how the effective use of online methods and existing marketing such as trade shows to gain more customers. The highlight of this seminar will be how to make the best use of online marketing and marketing automation tools to accelerate your sales.

Register today for this informational and value packed seminar, and learn strategies on how to build stronger relationships with your prospects and get better sales results when you combine traditional & online marketing techniques. Also learn about how to effectively use marketing automation tools to your advantage to take your marketing efforts to the next level.

In many B2B companies, management hears its fill of “the internet will change your industry this way” or “the internet is changing your industry that way”, and as often as not (especially in engineering oriented companies, or those that sell to a finite list of possible customers) these pieces of advice are roundly dismissed with a “that’s not how we do it in our industry, we relationship sell in this industry”.  And I’ll agree with that emphatically; in B2B, people buy from people, not a website.

What those companies are missing are some key emerging points;

1. Google is making most of the new introductions; you can’t relationship sell if you’ve never met them, ‘who meets who’ is decided by Google many times.

2. Companies do due diligence with Google because it’s just so easy; “I always buy from Joe at XYZ co, but I need to have two more quotes”.  Even if the intent was to gather some quotes, I’d rather start there than with a cold list.  At least I know they have budget, and are customers for my product/service. Even I don’t win this time, I may in the future.

3. Most of the time, nobody wants to build that relationship with your sales rep’s phone calls.  Executive days are so busy that a sales rep with a “you buying any time soon?” question is just annoying.  What they will make time for is a very pertinent case study or webinar that speaks to their business problem because it helps them answer a question, it doesn’t take much time, and they can read/watch it when they have time.

4. New technology, like marketing automation, helps tell your reps who really does want to talk now; instead of talking to everyone as often as possible, get sales developing relationships with prospects or customers who are showing real interest.

So instead of dismissing the internet, B2B companies that rely on relationship selling should see it as a tool for relationship selling:

1. Get more relationships started via Google, get Google introducing you to more companies that need your services.

2. Leverage digital intellectual property (ie a case study or whitepaper) to do some relationship building with many more of your contacts.

3. Use tools such as ActiveConversion to show you who is actually interested in talking to you.

Online marketing coupled with tools like marketing automation software will make marketers and salespeople more effective and efficient at relationship selling.

Experience-based marketing is not a new concept, as it has been around for a while and many B2C companies have had a lot of success implementing it. The challenge is for B2B companies to use such techniques to advertise and market. Experience marketing gives the target audience a first hand experience by giving the audience the ability to touch, feel, see and know your offering or product.

Max Lenderman, the author of “Experience the Message“,  says engaging potential customers is more important than shoving advertisements into peoples’ faces. With an attention span of 8 seconds which is equal to that of a goldfish, it is really hard to reach the target audience minds with one or two or even 10 instances of our marketing campaigns. I like two examples that Max Lenderman gave at the Art of Marketing event.

Example 1: In India having a cell phone has become the fifth necessity after food, housing, clothes and electricity. Most of the people in rural places are not educated and their main preoccupation is with farming. Reaching such an audience to promote products is a difficult task. Billboards, TV, newspaper ads or online ads are all off limits. How do companies reach such audiences? The way marketing agencies do that is by implementing experience based marketing. They use pop ups in stores where they engage the audience via a street play, drama or musicals.

Example 2: Charmin, the maker of bathroom tissue, opened up a few free to use washrooms in one of the busy New York areas. People in New York’s Time Square area had resorted to washroom use in Starbucks or nearby restaurants. Now people are happy to see these public washrooms conveniently situated  that also provide an experience nothing like they have ever experienced before. In addition to providing a washroom facility, Charmin has richly decorated that place with fancy chairs, and a stage to dance and sing while waiting. Many people have left with pictures and most importantly praise and promise to use only Charmin from there on. View the video.

Takeaways for B2B marketers:
1.      It is more important to engage with the audience while marketing or showing off your product.

2.      Instead of spending thousands of dollars in billboards, banner ads and other expensive ads, make use of experience based marketing by giving away  free to use products and giving prospects a first hand experience.

3.      B2B marketers can learn from these examples by letting their potential customers experience the product before making a decision like the 30 day free trial by ActiveConversion.

4.      Make it easier for them to use/try the product. It is easier to make people switch if you change the environment to making ease of use your priority.

To all you B2B marketers, can you bring the flavor of experience into your marketing?

We at ActiveConversion make use of various social media channels – with our presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn groups, Slideshare, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr and many more. Keeping track of all these social media channels and updating them on a regular basis is difficult and time demanding, but if we use them smartly they work very well to our advantage. With the advent of Internet and as the web 2.0 matures, the online community is an ever growing powerhouse, and it is quintessential to engage with our audience.

Broadcasting

Traditionally websites were developed as a brochure, with static content, one way communication. But as Web 2.0 matured, websites became more than just a brochure. It was necessary for companies to adapt to this ever changing World Wide Web where two- way communications was more than a necessity for any B2B type company. This communication can be in any form; blogs, forums, and online community etc. Similarly, social media channels started as a means of personal use. Twitter & Facebook mainly started as people to connect with their family and friends to let them know where they were or what they were doing or simply share activities and photos. Now B2B companies can also use Facebook and Twitter, but it is important to know the difference between using these channels to broadcast your message versus using them to engage with your targeted audience.

I recently attended “The Art of Marketing” event and found a very close connection in all the speeches that had a common theme of “Engaging”. It is important to understand that our users or customers, and our audiences are the most powerful and the biggest advocate for our products. For B2B companies, the new way of creating customer relationship is by engaging and knowing who their audience is and what are they talking about. Here are some of the speakers who talked about engaging with the audience:

Mitch Joel, the author of “Six degrees of separation” said the Internet is almost going to be as important and pervasive as the electricity”. In the social media world where B2B marketers are trying to connect with as many people as they can and create a solid followers base, it is important to understand that it is the basis of who is following you more important than how many followers you have.

Engaging

Gary Vaynerchuck, author of “Crush It!” cleverly stated that “Internet is just a baby and it still has to grow up and unleash its power”. Whether you are in B2C or B2B, Twitter, Facebook’s and similar social media accounts are a must have. If you don’t have either of these, it is not too late to jump on the bandwagon. Facebook credits are soon going to be precious currency and if we don’t use Facebook, and there is a big chance that companies might miss out on large opportunities in the future.  Social Media should be used intelligently in a way that we not only broadcast our messages and offers but to engage and be involved with our audience. Having a conversation with our audience, providing opinion, resolving issues on the go and engaging with our audience is a key.

Sally Hogshead, the author of “Fascinate” said, “Create messages for our network’s network”. Don’t ignore the larger network which is linked to our immediate network. Social media lets you connect to this web of networks that you simply can’t ignore.

So go ahead and start engaging in conversations!

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!