B2B Marketing Blog

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

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.

Marketing automation is now increasingly demanded by the manufacturers and services companies in the Oil and Gas sector.  Of particular note are the small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) with North American, or even global, aspirations.  These companies are uniquely suited to exploit online marketing and automation solutions as finding potential customers, and then nurturing them through the sales cycle, greatly enhances their ability to grow. This is done with online software tools that maximize their professional marketing and sales resources.  In particular, reducing wasted effort through better targeting/qualifying of potential customers.  With these solutions, these companies can cost effectively market to potential customers worldwide.

Download and read this whitepaper to help get answers for the following:

• How does online marketing help energy services providers?
• How to convert web visitors into sales leads using marketing automation?
• How to engage leads until they are ready to buy using lead nurturing and sales intelligence?

It is important to be memorable and to be able to leave an impact at the same time when we are faced with hundreds of advertisements within a day. This is not only for B2C marketing – it is for B2B marketing as well, where B2B marketers have to be more creative than they have ever been to catch that human attention span of less than 8 seconds. To be noticeable and inspiring at the same time it is important to be making a bold statement and be fascinating at the same time. Companies who get the most attention from their prospective customers are those who fascinate.

Sally Hedgehog, the author of “Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation”, says, “Fascination is the most powerful way to influence decision making”. Every day, intentionally or not, we are all using fascination triggers to persuade people at work and our prospective clients. Whether you’re pitching a new client, creating a new marketing message to sell a new or an existing product, you’re using triggers to elicit a certain response. Each trigger leads to a different style of communication, and a different type of relationship. The more accurately B2B marketers identify their audiences personality triggers, the more influential their message becomes. There are seven types of triggers that Sally defines in her book. I found few that can be used pretty effectively for B2B marketing. They are: power, alarm, trust and prestige. These triggers when understood and used correctly in the marketing campaigns can help marketers create compelling messages to persuade their audience to take that desired action. To know more about these triggers and to find out where you fit with your fascination score click here.

Here are a few questions that marketers can ask themselves when they are in the thought process and ready to create something that will generate them the leads they desire. Also are some supporting points that demonstrate how ActiveConversion uses some of the fascination triggers to create a compelling marketing message.

1. How would I fascinate my audience to influence them to take action? Pick the trigger that you think your audience will be influenced most with. Here at ActiveConversion, we recently used the message: “OUTSELL & OUTMARKET your larger competitors”. This call to action to outsell your competitor used “POWER” and the “ALARM” trigger by defining consequence where specific demands causes more specific actions.

1. How can I relate to my audience at a personal level? Pick a trigger that would take for YOU to take that specific action? Put yourself in their shoes and visualize the impact that you want to create. For instance, if you serve small businesses and are targeting other small businesses, talk to your audience in their language. Use the persuading power by triggering the sense of “TRUST”. For example, message that emphasizes how you know their business and how you have helped other similar businesses get value with a minimal budget. – “Do more with your budget. Let us show you how.” Using other companies as a reference and relevant case studies will leave the feeling of trust and motivate your audience to take the desired action.

The above few pointers will hopefully make you explore other triggers that will let you harness the power of your creativity in order to be fascinating when you are marketing. And as a final note – Be fascinating to be inspiring!

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.

I spoke with a prospect recently who was disappointed with the results they were receiving from the Google advertising they had set up and paying as much as $5 per click with little or no response.  Search advertisers make it very easy for business owners to set up a pay per click account but the costs of setting it incorrectly are not as apparent as they should be.

In today’s blog we look at the top 5 mistakes made when setting up pay per click advertising:

1. Not doing the right keyword research – Search advertisers provide research tools to find keywords to run your advertisements on, but often they suggest the highest searched keywords which have the highest competition.  Selecting these keywords also requires you to bid significantly higher for them in order to have your advertisement show up.  In most cases it is better to select keywords which have a reasonably high search volume, but lower competition, which will help to keep your bids down in the long run.
2. Not defining a daily budget – You can define a daily budget for your advertising where your advertisements stop showing after the budget is reached.  Not doing this may result in your monthly budget being reached within a week or two and your advertisements not showing for the remainder of the month.
3. Not targeting the right audience – You need to define the cities, states or countries that you want your advertising to be shown in. It doesn’t make sense for a local service provider to show advertising across the nation.  It is also important to set the time of day you want your advertisements to show (ex. Not in the middle of the night).
4. Not improving your website or landing page – If you do not get any business off your website currently, then driving more traffic using pay per click advertising does not always mean that will improve.  Your company website needs to be credible and look professional before someone will contact you from it.  Improve your landing page and add the right offers or calls to action to entice your visitor to make contact.
5. Not maintaining the advertisements regularly – There are a lot of moving parts in pay per click advertising that often get overlooked; It’s not easy enough to simply set something up and let it run.  You need to pay attention to things like: bids, keywords, ad copy, click through rate, bounce rate, quality score, etc.  It is worth the effort to run experiments and try different variations on ad copy and landing pages to see what produces the best result.

Search advertising is a very powerful medium to use when it is done right.  It can produce a good amount of business and easily pay for itself.  If you do not have the expertise or time to manage it, we recommend consulting with an expert who can help you to manage and achieve better results.

It is important to note that paid search advertisements are only clicked on by ~30% of search engine users; the large majority of search results are delivered through organic listings, so ensure you have a search engine optimization strategy as well.

There’s mounting evidence that the popularity of Twitter has hackers and phishers shifting focus to Twitter accounts.

According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, cybercriminals are trying to sell hacked Twitter user names and passwords on-line for hundreds of dollars.

While this is an outgrowth of existing security problems…

[data-stealing malware is] popular because criminals are starting to realize that they can do better than simply swiping credit card numbers. Bestuzhev has seen Gmail accounts for sale on Russian hacker forums, (asking price 2,500 rubles, or $82) RapidShare accounts going for $5 per month, as well as Skype, instant messaging and Facebook credentials being offered.

…Twitter is being singled out because of the premium hackers and phishers can charge for them:

…one Twitter account, with just over 320 followers, was offered at $1,000 in an underground hacker forum. The user’s name was a simple three letter combination that Bestuzhev thought might make it more valuable to criminals.

The answer is to use the same vigilance with Twitter as you currently use with email. Evaluate the link you are about to click on (URL expander plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox that will show you the extended URLs without you having to click on them), use a strong and unique password, always check that you are at twitter.com before logging in, and select third party apps with care.  Learn more here.

Many companies send regular email newsletters to their customers but not many of them measure the effectiveness of their newsletters and adjust them. I recently helped a non-profit organization improve its email newsletter campaign. They had been doing several newsletters each month in the past but they didn’t know if they were being read or even opened. Peter Drucker once said that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and this can apply to newsletters too!

When I looked at the newsletters. I found that it had too many articles. These articles covered many different topics and the staff  had to spend quite a bit of time collecting these articles each month. They created long newsletters and there wasn’t any focal point in them. I then looked at  the email opens and click thrus from previous newsletters and found that the numbers were very low.

As a result, I advised them to greatly reduce the number of the articles in each newsletter and focus on a theme for each month. For interested readers, we provided headlines and excerpts linking to longer articles on their blog and website.

I also noticed that they used the same email subject line for every month. The only difference in the subject line was the month. Many recipients will automatically set it aside in the hope that they would come back to it when they have time, but this may not happen unless the subject line has relevancy. I advised them to make the subject line more relevant and describe the theme of the newsletter with some curiosity and urgency for the recipients.

The results: It freed up time for the staff and the email open and click through rates increased significantly. Now the recipients see the value to them and some are even anxiously waiting for the next e-newsletter!

So the point is: You have to regularly monitor, measure and adjust your email newsletters to make it work. Don’t give up on it – it can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.

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)

Last week at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference, ActiveConversion was invited to be part of a panel on email marketing. The panel covered some basics on email marketing along with specific applications on campaigning within Salesforce, lead nurturing and the impact that social media has on email marketing.

An interesting observation I took away was that many B2B Marketers are not using email marketing on a regular basis.  I feel like this is something which we take for granted, because we have been using email marketing for so long.  I thought it would be valuable to cover the 5 tips for email marketing which were covered in the presentation:

1. Targeted Lists – Ensure you spend the time when building your lists to segment them.  This allows you to send out more targeted messages and offers, which will help give you a higher response rate and better return on your efforts.  Fields to segment on include: Country, City, Zip, Phone, Company size, Job title/level, past purchases, Age, Gender, etc
2. Targeted, Relevant & Fresh Content – Build messages which are relevant to those groups which you’ll be targeting in your offer. Use fresh content and offers to encourage the desired outcome of your email (ex. New whitepaper, limited time discount, new product announcement, etc)
3. Tracking and Reporting – To improve the quality of your email marketing be sure to use the built-in tools for tracking or reporting of your marketing campaigns.  Some of the metrics you may choose to measure success on include: Unique open rates, Unique click-through rates, Delivery success rate, Conversions and Unsubscribes, and Post click-through activity scoring.
4. Go Viral – Email is a great means to get your marketing messages out because they are easily forwarded and shared with others.  Make it easy for your emails to be forwarded or shared by your recipients
5. Permission is everything – Allow prospects to opt-in to receive your marketing messages and respect their privacy and requests if they choose to unsubscribe. When you are requesting information from your prospects, ensure you make it clear that their information will not be sold or rented to any third parties and it is being collected to be able to provide information on your company’s products and services

You can view the recording of this presentation and panel discussion here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eAkoptsBG0