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

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.

Download this guide to thought leadership and learn how incorporating thought leadership marketing into your B2B marketing efforts can get you astounding results. In this dynamic social media driven world, it is more important than ever to utilize these strategies and techniques to successfully be a thought leader in your industry.

There is a sea change in the way buyers and vendors engage each other and that is being driven by three key developments in buyer behavior:

First, research is being conducted by chief executives themselves. According to a 2009 Report by Forbes Insights in association with Google, more than half of C-suite executives prefer to locate information themselves instead of delegating to subordinates.

Second, the internet has become the preferred means of business research. In the same Forbes report, executives declared the internet more valuable than any other source for gathering business information, surpassing even colleagues and personal networks.

Third, when executives go online, they first turn to mainstream search engines. This development levels the playing field for B2B companies. A firm’s appearance in search engine results does not require the substantial budget required for conventional advertising/branding campaigns.

Please comment and share your thoughts on our comment sections.

Business to business (B2B) trade shows can be a cost-effective means of gaining valuable face-to-face interaction with many qualified prospects. Most B2B companies have a reasonable expectation that sales revenue will result from participation at trade shows. Yet too often, experience has shown that for many leads from trade shows the timing is too early in the sales cycle. This experience may explain why business executives are constantly dismayed that so few leads are actually followed up by their sales departments. Trade show industry research indicates that 80-90 percent of all trade show leads are not followed up.

What the guide advocates is that in addition to using marketing automation in the promoting of attendance pre trade show, a trade show booth is analogous to a website for the large number of “inquiries” that exhibitors come home with:

• Most of these inquires are not ready to buy (95% according to the research)
• They have opted-in to receive more information (so they are ideal for email nurture campaigns)
• They need to be nurtured through a sales cycle so that in 3 or 6 or 9 months when/if they reach sales ready, the exhibitor is still top of mind
• They need sorting (scoring of their behavior) to weed out the ones who are, and who are not, worth inside/outside sales resources.

But also key is the takeaway that companies need to know who is visiting their website (marketing automation platforms like ActiveConversion identify anonymous company visits, as well as labelled individuals).  The traffic that visits a company’s website directly after a trade show is often a key indicator of whom at the trade show they got some level of engagement with, especially if there are multiple visits from different individuals from the same company.

To download this eHow To Guide on why marketing automation can increase your trade show ROI, click here or on the image!

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!

Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

In establishing your system you should;

• Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness
• Assign point values to each of those behaviors
• Establish a score that defines “Sales-Ready”

With a contemporary marketing automation solution like ActiveConversion, today’s B2B marketers can reduce costs and increase revenue through prioritization with lead scoring.

To download this eHow To Guide on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead scoring plan for your business, click on the image!

“The spectacular growth of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have taken B2B marketing by storm. B2B marketers recognized that they have access to hundreds of millions of people who have registered for and are using social networking sites.

More importantly, within those substantial groups B2B marketers can target their messages and advertising directly to the audience that will be the most receptive to their product or service, using the underlying technology inherent in social networking sites …

Social media differs from traditional media in that social media is where many individuals share information with each other rather than one source broadcasting to the masses. In Web 2.0 marketing language, it is many-to-many instead of one-to-many.”

Specifically it speaks to integrating Social Media efforts into wider eMarketing such as SEO/SEM and email marketing, all the while managing the flow of new referrals with proven marketing automation tools such as ActiveConversion.

Link to download page

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

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 B2B Blogging 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 implementing a blog for your business, click on the image!

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)