B2B Marketing Blog

Relationship building is a critical process in certain types of sales cycle involving personal interactions and rapport before the prospect is near the buying phase. The high cost and infrequency of purchases requires a level of trust and friendship to be established between seller and buyer. Note I did not say “between sales and the buyer”.

Traditionally, the sales department was responsible for developing relationships with prospects as they moved through the stages of the buying process. Marketing was traditionally only responsible for identifying which prospects sales should build relationships with. However, the time and dollar cost for sales to build and strengthen relationships was often too much to be able to see every lead to the end. The solution for this involves marketing accepting the responsibility for developing relationships.

Using marketing automation tools, such as ActiveConversion, marketing not only identifies prospects and leads, but also nurtures those prospects until they are sales ready. Automated drip campaigns, periodic offers, and resources such as videos or case studies build a stronger buy in. As the company begins to build their credibility as experts in their field, prospects authenticate them more, and finally move closer towards a sales ready state. Using marketing automation, marketing passes only leads that are close to sales ready state and are open to a purchase negotiation.

If marketing assumes the task of building relationships, there can be many benefits. Immediately, sales would have more time and resources to close sales with prospects that are sales-ready. The reduction in energy used to nurture leads who are not sales ready saves the parent company a large amount of overhead. As well, marketing has the resources and expertise to execute cohesive long term campaigns to deliver a message over multiple communications.

Establishing a relationship between marketing and the buyer is more effective and cost efficient than a sales representative chasing after a lead too early in the sales cycle when in fact the lead is still RESEARCHING!

Author: Mike Hwang

Does your company want to get its feet wet in the social media world, or is trying to and spinning its wheels?  If so, what can be done to improve the situation?

First, re-analyze why you have a company blog in the first place:

1. We have a blog because competitors do and we don’t want to seem out of the loop.
2. We have a blog due to the fact we wanted a way to promote our brands and services.
3. We have a blog for the simple reason our owner likes to talk a lot and this was one way for him/her to spout off.

So, what would you say is the correct answer to the three options above? If you said the last one, maybe your company needs more assistance than some realize.

While choice number one may be part of the reasoning for your blog, number two should be the obvious choice. Quite simply, company blogs are great tools to not only promote your goods and services, but stay in the social media loop.

With that being said, don’t just write to write.

• Your company’s blog needs to have worthwhile content on it so people will read it in the first place.

• Secondly, it requires regular updating so that readers will come back to it and search engines are more likely to pick it up. If you update it once in a blue moon, not only will readers be gone but the search engines will pick up more worthwhile entries.

• Another reason that readers will come and go from a company blog is if they are leaving valid, appropriate comments and you are not responding. Would you follow someone if you left them several comments and they ignored you? Companies need to take the bad feedback from consumers with the good, so respond accordingly, but do respond.

Companies need to determine if the blog materials they’re covering are appropriate for their readers in the first place. Relevant information draws people to blogs, so know what you want to write about ahead of time and be concise.

Are you placing relevant internal and external links and keywords in your company’s blog?

While SEO writing may not be for everyone, it is not rocket science either. If your company covers the auto insurance industry, your blog better be insurance related in order to drive more worthwhile traffic to it.

The most important item brings us full circle to the first point….why are we blogging in the first place?

Some companies decide its best to hire full-time staff to write, edit and oversee blogs. It allows for the boss/bosses to delegate one more item to professionals who can get the company’s message across.

Others, meantime, decide to do it on their own and give it more of a personal feel from the man or woman at the top.

Both ways can have their advantages and disadvantages, so decide what is best for your company. If you try one approach and it is not working for a period of time try another until you find the right solution.

A company blog can be a very useful tool to drive business your way; determine how blogging can best serve your business and get writing.

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like a document management systems and is based in San Diego, California.  He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

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.

There is a little used tactic in the world of marketing – it’s called education. So why do I need to educate my customers? If you help to educate them, you are building a relationship.

A relationship based on knowledge gained, is very strong. If you want a repeat customer, teach them about your area of expertise. Give them the knowledge that makes them confident about the market you are an expert in. This far increases the likelihood that they will use your product or service.

Reciprocity is a strong force. Foster a more informed customer, and they will recommend you to others!

So how does one to this? That is where blogging, social media, webinars and whitepapers all provide you the opportunities to not only reach your target audience, but to teach them. After all it’s better than a banner ad (push/outbound marketing), and a whole lot more fun!

Related articles

• Why marketing and teachers share a love/hate relationship (bilingualmontessori.wordpress.com)
• SEO, Social Media and Content: The Three Musketeers of Inbound Marketing! (B2B Marketing Blog)
• There is More to Marketing than Marketing (B2B Marketing Blog)

ActiveConversion recently conducted a “lunch and learn” seminar, and I must say, the topic was pertinent.  The event was very timely. Here are some of my thought and learning’s from this seminar.

The most important question asked is, “How can I improve my tradeshow ROI?” There are many ways to market for a tradeshow and many ways to spend your money, but often little if any ROI is realized. The most compelling factor to attend a tradeshow and set up a booth is the prospect of meeting face-to-face with the decision maker. But is your tradeshow marketing investment totally justified when you are just a needle in the haystack?

There are many other techniques to market a tradeshow: you can sponsor an event, you can write editorials in the event magazine, you can advertise on the tradeshow website etc.  Tradeshows are already an expensive endeavor, and they can cost more if you choose to advertise using these other popular channels.  If you are not a large company, costs for tradeshows can be significant considering the already limited marketing budget.  On top of the advertising costs, there are other associated costs such as designing the booth, time that your sales reps spend to exhibit, flying costs, as well as food and lodging.

So, how much do you get back on the investment you just made on the tradeshow? Not as much as you were expecting, but the use of online marketing techniques can boost your tradeshow investment. In my last post, I wrote how you can combine the use of traditional and online marketing techniques and benefit from them, but here I’m describing how you can use online marketing to better market your tradeshows.

Following some concerns and solution suggestions based on online marketing and online tools – thus making it the most for your tradeshow investment.

BEFORE the show: How do we get more people to visit our booth?

Invite people from your list to meet you at the booth. Give them a compelling reason for meeting: a big prize give away, or a free product, or a free software copy, or free consulting time or free passes to the tradeshow in your email. Give prospects a good reason to meet you to make the best use of their time and money.

DURING the show: How do I maximize marketing during the show?

When the prospective client meets you at the tradeshow, you can scan his badge and register him in your system. These are already partially qualified leads and can be entered into your CRM or Marketing Automation system. Using a marketing automation system will let you know exactly who clicked on your offer, and then scanning their badges at the show and assigning those leads to your system can qualify your leads further.

AFTER the show: Who are my best prospects? Whom should I follow up? What do I do with the big list of names?

After the show, send the prospective client a thank you email note with the prize giveaway announcement, and have the prospects click on the results. If the prospect does more than just look at the prize landing page (for example visit other web pages) browse your product page or the pricing page, you can see how the accumulated scoring of your leads will give you a better picture of the lead quality. Now that you know who is really interested, you can nurture them further using marketing automation tools.

Therefore, during various stages of your tradeshow you engage the prospect, and help qualify the leads that actually will be worth spending your time on.  With online marketing, make before the show, start of the sales cycle.

So the next time you are a part of tradeshow, think about the before, during and after of the tradeshow, and how online marketing can help generate stronger leads. Download this PowerPoint slide deck and read this whitepaper that talks more about the challenges which companies face today, and learn more about increasing tradeshow ROI using the online marketing techniques. Go on and start perfecting your tradeshows!

Related articles

• Webinar Recording- Learn How to Substantially Increase Your Trade Show ROI (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• Global Petroleum Show 2010 Exhibitors; Find the needles in the haystack! (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• Tradeshows: What’s your ROI? (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• B2B: Tradeshows (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• How to Engage a Tradeshow Audience Year-Round (marketingprofs.com)
• Make Your Next Tradeshow a ‘Qualified’ Success (marketingprofs.com)
• Let Your Brand Shine at Tradeshows (marketingprofs.com)

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.

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?