We Would be Fired if We Were in any Other Profession - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #63
Thursday, January 31st, 2008As B2B Marketers, we are constantly looking for new tactics and methods to reach new prospects. You may think that we have come a long way in recent years. After all, you can cheaply send thousands of emails. Anyone can come to your website to find out more about you. And more and more targeted trade shows are available. But are our current methods really working?
- Email – Industry Response rates vary from 1 to 3%
- Direct mail – Industry Response rates vary from 1 to 3%
- Events – Only 10% of trade show leads are followed up on by sales (SiriusDecisions)
- Online Marketing – Only 3% of web visitors fill out forms
Based on these numbers, B2B marketers are wrong 90% of the time and still get to keep their jobs! Wow, imagine if Accounting was wrong 90% of the time or if sales only hit 10% of their number, where would we be as B2B marketers? We, at ReachForce, get up and come to work every day to figure out ways to help marketers turn more suspects into prospects and more prospects into customers. In an effort to find new ways to get better marketing results, we are experimenting on ourselves using targeted lead generation, focusing on the right person at the right company. I am proud to say 70% of ReachForce customers have come through marketing.
When it Comes to Social Media: Play By the Rules - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #62
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an overview of the Social Media landscape and important tips for making it work for both brand awareness and lead generation.
The marketing analysts at Sirius Decisions just came out with a decent high level view of the Social Media Landscape in today’s SiriusPerspective newsletter. Some of the categories and descriptions seemed a little “old school”, so I’m adding my own edits to their categories here:
- Blogs/Blogging including the creation of a blog and participation in other writers’ blogs.
- Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook where people can network with other parties who are interested in a particular topic.
- Forums such as Yahoo or Google Groups that are moderated and focused on a particular topic or function.
- Podcasting or Vidcasting which simply means syndicating your digital or video messages via sites such as Odeo or YouTube.
- Media sharing on sites that let users upload and rate content such as contributed articles, videos and images.
- RSS/Web feeds that distribute blog articles or other content summaries which readers view via an RSS reader. Users then click through to read content.
- Wikis. Collaborative documents that are created using a Web browser. Contributors can add, delete or edit content, and notify other authors of their changes.
- Social bookmarks: Sites such as del.icio.us (owned by Yahoo!) and Digg that enable users to store, rate and recommend bookmarks. Many bookmark sites provide Web feeds to notify subscribers of updates.
The newsletter states that, according to their research, roughly 50 percent of B2B organizations are utilizing some type of social media. They also warn that social media may not be a good tactic for demand generation unless marketers play by the rules.
Let me first say that while I am typically not one to “follow the rules,” I do agree with that statement. It is vital that marketers have a solid conversion strategy for social media that is not “in your face” or overly aggressive. The important point in the social media arena is to network, build awareness, establish your expertise, provide high value content that buyers can easily find and make it easy for them to contact you when they need your product or service. The results of the NetQoS viral video campaign show that it works.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #61 - Jumpstart Expansion Into New Territories with Deliberate Marketing
Monday, January 28th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a strategy for leveraging market research and a role-based database build to reduce costs and jumpstart expansion into new territories.
Expanding into new territories is always a challenge because it involves a slow and painful ramp up investment. First, you have to understand the unique needs of buyers in foreign territory and then you also need to build a presence. You won’t know what works and what doesn’t until you’ve jumped in and tested a few techniques and this takes time. Will Google Adwords pull in buyers or do you need to rely more heavily on face-to-face events?
Another issue, in recent months, has been the economy. With the decline of the US dollar, lead generation and promotional campaigns cost more than ever before. I was recently quoted a staggering $145 per lead from a white paper syndication service in the UK. Who knows how much those same leads are today, just a few months later.
So, what’s a B2B Marketer on a budget to do? With both time and money at stake, we chose to invest in a little upfront research and role-based database building. By investigating the pain points and decision drivers of the UK market and building out a complete role-based database of all of our target companies in that country, we were able to quickly provide a list of prospects for our in-country inside sales professionals.
With this database in hand, we were able to experiment with Google Adwords and other promotional activities to find the right mix. What worked? Well, calling on the new database, and exhibiting at live events worked best in 2007. Google AdWords helped us secure a few introductions. And, direct mail and email marketing did not yield much.
What has worked best for you in Europe or Asia-Pac?
Marketing WTF? - Inaccurate Business Cards For Sale, Minimum Quantity 5,000
Friday, January 25th, 2008Just read that a study by John Coe and the Sales & Marketing Institute showed that “70.8% of business people changed one or more elements on their business cards each year.” According to a new study conducted by research firm NFO WorldGroup, “31% of email addresses change annually.”
If you are buying a list from a trade publication and basing your direct marketing on that list, you are in effect paying good money for old business cards and then basing your expensive campaigns on those cards. Ouch. What a waste of money and time. And, imagine what your campaign results will be!
Perhaps it’s time to take a different approach to database marketing?
Marketing WTF? - Sell to Me not sales@blank.com
Thursday, January 24th, 2008I recently received an invite to a conference via email, quite common these days. The problem was, wait no, I should say the problems were:
- It was addressed to someone who has not worked for my company for over a year
- It was sent to sales@reachforce.com
- It was addressed to the former CTO
This is an announcement to all sales people: if you want me to spend money with you, know that the person you are selling to still works there. A quick trip to our website would solve that. And do you really think that the CTO receives anything from sales@blank.com? Never send a marketing message to sales@blank.com or jobs@blank.com or contactus@blank.com, it will be deleted immediately.
Find the right decision maker to sell/market to and deliver you message directly to them. Sending your message to sales@blank.com just shows me you are lazy, and I will never buy from someone who is lazy.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #60 - Go Viral With an E-Book
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008The author of my favorite book of 2007 — The New Rules of Marketing and PR– David Meerman Scott has just posted a free ebook on viral marketing. Or, as Meerman Scott puts it “word of mouse”.
Download the book at http://www.webinknow.com/2008/01/the-new-rules-o.html. Bonus: no registration is required. It’s a quick read and there are some excellent examples including this tip about using the power of ebooks like the ReachForce Funnelnomics book to go viral. According to Meerman Scott:
“One of the most powerful forms of word-of-mouse content is the e-book. Steve Chazin found incredible success with this medium. And hey, if you’ve read this far in The New Rules of Viral Marketing, you’d have to agree, because, after all, this is an e-book! E-books have a great deal of importance to readers. People can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, e-books should be material people want to read, compared to the dense and usually boring white paper, which our buyers feel they should read but often don’t.”
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #59 - Changing Your Company Logo
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008As you may have noticed, The B2B Lead got its own extreme makeover today. Here at ReachForce, we changed our logo and look and feel last week. To maintain a consistent brand image we gave our blog, The B2B Lead, an updated look to match our changes.
Being number 2 on a 2 man team meant I was charged with changing out everything from the old logo to the new one. Here is a list of places you want to remember if you decide to take on this task:
- letterhead
- envelopes
- note cards
- business cards
- website
- blog
- press releases
- anyone that may have your logo on their website (ex. partners, funders, vendors, etc.)
- accounting
- intranet or internal software
- all products
- white papers
- case studies
- eBooks
Have I missed anything?
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #58 - Get to Know Your B2B Technical Buyer
Monday, January 21st, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post highlights research on B2B Technical Buyers and provides a quick overview of how to develop a persona for this role.
Building an effective B2B target database takes a lot more than just identifying the right market segment, company size, and target title. Before you get started building your database, it’s important to get to know the different roles, responsibilities and characteristics of each person involved in the buying process.
Today, we take a look at the B2B Technical Buyer – the person within a company or organization who is responsible for ensuring a solution meets the technical requirements of the company. For technology purchases this could be an IT professional. For CRM software it might be a Sales or Marketing professional. Depending upon the size of the organization, these individuals may or may not have final financial approval but they do hold significant influence over the purchase.
Here’s what a recent MarketingSherpa Benchmark Study says about this role:
a. white papers, product literature and industry articles as their top sources for product information.
b. their top search engine is Google. Depending upon the source of data, you’ll hear that anywhere from 80 to 98% of them start their purchase process on Google.
c. 64% of them shortlisted a product based on a timely sales call.
What does your technical buyer look like? For my network management software company, we built a persona profile that described his or her job, life and daily concerns. We did this by describing our best customers. We even gave him a name—Ajay—and a face by adding a photo. Now, whenever I write literature or design a campaign, I always think of Ajay and I’m better able to target the campaign using the right messages and media. Here are a few items to think of when you are building your own:
Name:
Photo:
Geographic:
Gender:
Age:
Annual Income:
Marital Status:
Number of Children:
Education:
Work/Life Experience
Psychographics:
Current Work Environment:
Mobile Devices:
Presence in the Buying Cycle:
For more on this topic, download the free B2B Marketing ebook called Funnelnomics from ReachForce.
Blog Master…NOT – Say More with Less
Thursday, January 17th, 2008I was catching up on my blog reading today and found a great post on Seth Godin’s Blog. It read:
The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people
Who vs. how many.
I think this is brilliant on several levels. First, from a bloggers perspective, he uses as few words as possible to get his point across but still provokes thought and leaves you wanting more.
Secondly, I am a firm believer in what he is preaching. At ReachForce, we call the concept Godin refers to as spray and pray. That is, traditionally marketers have sprayed their message to as many people as possible and prayed that it will reach the right people and stick. With industry response rates at 1-3%, this methodology obviously isn’t working.
Targeted lead generation, however, can yield response rates of 20-30% or higher. If you focus your efforts on a smaller, more targeted group, you can send a more relevant message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience.
You can read more about this concept in our eBook, Funnelnomics.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #57 - Dive in and Jumpstart SEO With a Quick Start Plan
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides quick tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and six-step plan for getting started.
You might call me a fast-follower when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I resisted for some time because the prospect of researching and sorting through hundreds of keywords and applying techniques to outwit Google’s ever-changing algorithms seemed so daunting. I can barely spell algorithm, after all. Then a slew of industry surveys showed that anywhere from 80 to 90 percent or more of B2B tech buyers start their research and buying process on Google.
Well, that was a wake-up call. So, last year I made SEO a higher priority. I shifted the funds from online advertising into SEM and a ReachForce role-based database build. (That way, I could cover both my Inbound and Outbound bases.) I also maintained my investments in PR and some key sponsorships to cover the brand awareness and drive Inbound traffic. Then, I pulled resources and funds that had been spent trying to keep up with endless campaign design and development, and re-focused them on social media and SEO.
It’s truly amazing how quickly you can get results like Page 1 Google rankings when you focus resources on boosting a particular page ranking. Here are a few tips to help you do the same:
- Invest in the right tools: There are literally dozens of free and low-cost SEO tools that you can use to get a lay of the land and assess your best SEO prospects. Of course, Google provides several like Google Suggest and Google Trends. Another one of my favorites is WordTracker. And, a new tool I am using right now is HubSpot. HubSpot’s CEO Mike Volpe makes a great case for SEO in the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog. More about that another time.
- Don’t just go for the highly competitive popular terms. Consider niche or long tail keywords terms. There are dozens of keywords with significant search traffic that have little competition. Optimize for all of them and the numbers add up.
- Integrate your PR and SEO efforts to ensure inbound links from press releases support your strategy.
- Make sure your “anchor text” on in-bound links is optimized to provide the greatest SEO value.
- Optimize with a conversion strategy in mind.
- Leverage your “educational” assets for landing pages and social media sites like hubpages.com, scribd.com, flickr.com and others.
Here’s a quick plan for getting started:
- Information Gathering Session: Just like data cleansing, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to SEO. Pull together a team to discuss and prioritize objectives and scope your initial project.
- Research: Review your marketing objectives, competition, and your web site and blog to get a lay of the land and identify low-hanging fruit.
- Produce a plan and guidelines for optimizing your top five web or blog pages. This should include recommendations for URLs, internal link building, meta tags, page content updates, blog cross-linking and a conversion strategy for each of those pages.
- Then begin to build your inbound links to those pages by leveraging other sites, partners, blogs, social media sites, portals, and other high-value (not spam) paid link directories like Yahoo.
- Review and Revamp: After the pages have had sufficient time for Google Indexing review the project and results, and adjust the components of the program if necessary.
I realize this post presents a fairly simplistic view of SEO. It is, in reality, a very complex and overwhelming discipline. But this is a quick plan for hopping on the moving train. You will, of course, learn more through trial and error and there are numerous online tutorials that will help you hone your skills.
