B2B Marketing Blog

When the money is tight, the general rule of thumb is that small businesses need to tighten their purse strings and draw back from efforts like marketing and advertising.

But what if companies actually spent more on their marketing when things were tough? Could marketing department managers just this to their bosses?

It is not a big secret that many small businesses falter not long out of the gates; with some reports stating more than three-fourths of businesses go under in their first year.

While the reasons can vary, one of the main reasons companies bite the dust early on is they do not understand what their special niche or true market really are. Without understanding these areas, many companies are doomed for failure.

Before you blow up the marketing budget in this troubled economy, consider the following:

• How will you attract new business if you decimate the marketing budget?
• What is the competition doing? Assuming a number of them are not applying major blows to their marketing budgets, will they reap the rewards when you slit your budget?
• What will your current customers think? Another danger here is that you will stop marketing to the very people who helped establish you in the first place;
• Once the economy does improve, is it already too late? You run the risk of having to recover from a point where there is no recovery.

Marketing your business when times are tough doesn’t require a Master’s degree in finances, just some good old common sense. Most importantly, have a well thought out plan in place so that your business can handle just about any situation.

Among the things to include would be:

• Objectives – What are our company’s objectives during this rough financial time? If we’re not slashing the marketing budget, do we in fact add to it? If so, what areas do we target?

• Audience – Given that money is not only tighter for us but also consumers, who exactly should we be marketing to? Are our customers only going to be interested in deals and rewards programs or will they buy like they did in the past?
• Competition – What is my competition doing? Since it is safe to assume that they are also feeling the pinch of this economy, have they increased or scaled back their marketing efforts?
• Timetables – What are the financial experts saying regarding how long this bad economy will be in place? I can’t just start up a marketing campaign today for tomorrow, so what do the experts believe will happen financially in the next 3 to 6 months?

Even though you may think it is a done deal that your boss or bosses will want to slash the marketing budget in this struggling economy, do not assume that.

Take the time at office meetings to point out that the marketing approach needs to be consistent and cannot be severely reduced or even dismissed in a bad financial climate.

Your competition is having the same meetings your business is in terms of how much and when to market when the economy is bad. Be sure not to pass along customers to them because you were too afraid to market yourself when the economy went south.

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like appointment setters and is based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on answering service purchasing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

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

When you have an online presence, there are a few things which you need to pay attention to in order to be a success. One of the major things to pay attention to is lead generation. After all, this is one of the premier reasons for having a landing page and an online presence to begin with. The more optimized you make your pages, the more leads you can enjoy. Below are five elements you simply must have on your landing page to make sure you will get the leads you are looking for:

1. Use a Good URL –
The URL is not only the way that your prospective clients will find you. It is also the way search engines find your website. To make sure your page is search engine friendly; it is a good idea to make sure that your URL uses keywords as much as possible. You should also make sure to opt for dashes rather than underscores.

2. Prove You Are Trustworthy –
One of the biggest problems most people have with giving up information is they feel they will be scammed in some way. Make sure to include everything from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) logo, to customer testimonials to Privacy Statements. These will reassure people you won’t use their information in a fraudulent manner.

3. Call to Action –
Always remember those who are on your landing page are looking for something. Give them a reason to click through to the free downloads, demos, reports or other freebies. Make sure you direct people to the content they are looking for through short copy with a distinct call to action.

4. Consistently Test Your Landing Page –
Make sure you are checking the effectiveness of your landing page on a regular basis. The more often you are checking in, the more likely you are to catch anything which is falling short of your goals so you can make necessary changes.

5. Thank Your Visitors –
Whenever you score a lead, make sure you thank those who gave up their information. Do not make them regret giving you their information. Make sure the thank you confirmation screen also includes another offer they can take advantage of. Above all else, make sure the thank you email is short, to the point and concisely written. You do, after all, want to make sure that you leave a good impression on would be clients.

These are just a few of the ways you can optimize your Landing page for lead generation. These can help you to get better results than the average telemarketing company, and for a fraction of the cost. You can also hire a professional company to help you with this kind of project.

Author: Matt Kraustrunk (Resource Nation)

Resource Nation provides free tools, tips, and purchasing advice for business owners and entrepreneurs in over 100 business categories ranging from telemarketing to credit card processing. Whether it’s connecting businesses with local and national pre-screened vendors, or offering easy service comparisons on a VoIP service, Resource Nation empowers business decision makers by providing the information they need to make smart choices.

Related articles

• How Landing Pages Can Make or Break Lead Generation Campaigns (customerthink.com)
• Tips to Create Effective Landing Pages (marketersdaily.com)

SEO, Content, Social Media

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media and content are collectively the three most important components of inbound marketing. For this webinar, we’re calling them “The Three Musketeers of Inbound Marketing”. Between them, they are capable of winning you the best qualified leads in this modern marketing battle of quality lead generation from various online medium.

View this live Webinar which took place on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 12:00PM MDT.

Inbound marketing “pulls” potential buyers towards your business and your products. In today’s shifting marketing paradigm, where your potential buyers research and dissect all the available options before they contact you, there is also a need for a strong inbound marketing capability. After all, you should be among the few that your potential buyers read and investigate about. Inbound marketing is executed with strategies such as: search engine optimization (SEO), relevant and compelling content, and social media.

In this webinar, Jim, our inbound marketing specialist will walk you through some tested and proven inbound marketing strategies that will enable you to know:

• How SEO can help you get found on the internet?
• How social media, marketing content and blogging can contribute towards a more informed inbound lead generation strategy?
• How marketing automation generates leads from various sources, and how it can help you make intelligent decisions?

Now that online marketing has become firmly entrenched in marketing, and it’s been predicted that in 5 years, up to 70% of your leads will be coming from your website, it is clear that websites are no longer just an ‘electronic brochure’ for marketing, but a vital part of the sales and marketing process.

Conversion is what everybody is starting to talk about. Whether it’s conversion ratios, conversion rates, conversion funnels or ActiveConversion, leading sales and marketing organizations understand that beyond having a professional looking website and large volumes of traffic, that they need websites that convert visitors into leads.

This is easier said than done, as your visitors don’t always want to be converted, at least not yet. Your website visitors want to make sure you fit the bill before they get called every week by your company for the next 7 weeks. In addition, today’s buyer wants to be well informed, before they contact you. This has increased the need to understand conversion so that you know what you are really getting from all this traffic.

Fortunately, conversion has been studied extensively, and it has resulted in tools and practices, that help increase conversion rates. One common, but neglected practice is the idea of a conversion path. With a conversion path, each step in a conversion is mapped out, so that the website elements lead to the conversion objective. For example, a home builders conversion path for a potential home buyer would typically be:

1. Community or area (needs to be where they want or is willing to live)
2. Amenities (does it have schools, recreation, or other amenities that the buyer needs, nearby?)
3. Floor plans (600 sq ft, 1 bedroom condos won’t fit a growing family)
4. Pricing (no sense looking at this until the above is checked out)
5. Form fill for an appointment at showhome (conversion objective).

Those companies thinking they can get to step 5 before addressing 1-4, will likely get poor conversion.

Knowing the usual order that a buyer will want to look at your product/services, and making it easier to find it in that order, will work much better than a website that just expects the visitor to spend time looking for it. Because your competition is always only 1-2 clicks away.

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)

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.

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?

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.

The folks at Forrester Research have updated their Interactive Marketing Forecast out to 2014. 

The table of contents has some predictable headlines:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters – Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS – Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

It’s a very good read, and a few points jumped out for me.

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

What was also interesting was the the potential for more growth; interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spend online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of  DemandGen Report. Check it out. Your marketing future may depend on it!