B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #56 - Turn Role-based Data Into Interested Prospects With a Relevant and Enticing Call to Action
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a list of offers that B2B Marketers can use to improve campaign results.
OK, it’s a new year and you’ve got your freshly scrubbed ReachForce-built database full of highly-targeted prospects. Now what? If you found yourself busy reacting to end of year crises and didn’t greet the New Year with a properly planned, integrated lead generation campaign, you can still juice your Sales pipeline with a well written email and a strong call to action.
Unfortunately, for most B2B marketers, therein lies the challenge. What to offer? Where can I find a fresh and compelling white paper to serve up, because, well, every B2B marketer knows that a white paper is the number one offer in our arsenal. But if your product marketing group is as busy as mine, it’s not always easy to get your hands on new content to support your latest campaign.
Don’t be tempted to resort to a Sweepstakes offer like “enter to win an iPod.” Most will respond for the wrong reasons or avoid responding entirely because the offer is “too good to be true.” Aim for something that is relevant to the prospects’ daily job. Here are a few quick ideas:
- Free Books: Identify a new business or technology book that is related to your prospects’ responsibilities and your product or service and give away 10 to the first respondents.
- Webinar: Recruit a spokesperson and schedule an educational Web cast.
- Newsletter: Offer a subscription to your newsletter with tips and case studies.
- Video Tutorial: Grab your Flipcam, an expert, and a white board and shoot a mini-tutorial.
- Podcast: Think video tutorial with a voice recorder instead.
- Expert Guide: Ask an all-star group of experts to send you their best advice or anecdotes, package it up into a “guide” and publish.
- Quick Assessment: Provide a list of questions that can be used to assess a problem.
- Free Resources: Pull together a few free online tools, previously published white papers and articles, then offer access to the compendium.
Got any other creative ideas? Share them with us.
Best of The B2B Lead 2007
Monday, December 17th, 2007If you are new to The B2B Lead or just want a refresher on what we have said in 2007, here is a list of our favorite posts this year. If you like what you see here, be sure to check out the archives for much more. Enjoy!
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #1 - B2B Marketing Copy – Write it Right
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #7 - Know Thy Customer aka The Principles of Deliberate Marketing
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #8 - B2B Marketing Copy - Write it Right Part II
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #12 - Six Principles of Subject Line Writing
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #15 - Everything I Know About B2B Blogging I Learned from Perez
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #18 - Avoid being called a SPAMer
Marketing WTF? - I See Dead People – In My Database
Marketing and Sales Tip #22 - Forget Everything You Know About B2B Web Site Design
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #23 - Implement Lead Scoring for Better Marketing ROI
The B2B Lead Podcast #3 – Making a Viral Campaign Successful - Seeding
The B2B Lead Podcast #4 – Adapt or Die – Marketing and PR in the Blogosphere and New Media
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklist: Step 1 - Start with SEM (ala Google Adwords)?
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #48 - Understand Your Google AdWords Spend and How to Boost ROI
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #50 - Don’t Forget About Happy Customers
Blog Master…NOT – So You Want to Start a Corporate Blog
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #51 - Put the Long Tail Work in B2B Marketing
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #53 - Practice Metrics-Based Copywriting
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #57 - Beat the Holiday Rush, Send Thanksgiving Cards
Marketing WTF? - Who Listens to Voicemails from Sales Guys?
The “Oh #%@$!” Day in Marketing
The B2B Lead Vidcast – A Case Study in Viral Video Marketing
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #62 - Put These 20 Ideas into Action for B2B Viral Marketing Success
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #63 - Lessons from Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #64 - Take a Hard Look at Funnelnomics as You Move Into 2008
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #45 - Persona Marketing in a B-to-B Environment
Friday, November 30th, 2007I have been reading Mac McIntosh’s blog on B2B Marketing and agree with his view on Persona marketing. Some interesting nuggets on his views follow:
Persona marketing in a business-to-business environment can offer different challenges than in a business-to-consumer environment.
McIntosh offers this advice on getting started with personae in a b-to-b world:
- Convene a group of employees who interact with your customers and prospects. Bring in lunch and a white board and ask them to help you build personae for your target customers.
- Describe the target customer’s role in the company: Is he the CEO or a purchasing agent? An influencer or an end user?
- Describe the kind of company each type of customer works for. What industry is it in? How big is it? How up-to-date is it? Does it have a lot of competition?
- Give each persona a name, a title, and an age, and describe how he (or she) looks. How does he dress? What kind of car does she drive? What does he do in his free time? What kind of educational background does she have? Flesh out as many attributes as you need to give a full picture of who this person is.
- Think about each persona’s problems and goals. What does this person’s daily calendar look like? What are his most pressing concerns? What product or service attributes would be most helpful in solving this person’s problems?
- When formulating your marketing messages, think about what path this prospect or customer might pursue to solve this problem. Will he turn to white papers? Articles in trade publications? Websites? Would this persona seek input from a speaker at a networking group of their peers?
- Let the personae steer the route; you can then pave the route with information to help your prospects and customers move forward in their consideration and buying process.
The “Oh #%@$!” Day in Marketing
Thursday, November 29th, 2007Here at ReachForce we are declaring January 15th the “Oh #%@$!” Day in Marketing.
Let me ask you this: Are you prepared as a B2B Marketer to deliver sales-ready leads in January? December is typically a slower month for B2B Marketing and Sales teams, since most organizations slow down current marketing programs and instead spend their time preparing for the next year. They leave for the holidays happy to have completed the painful process of planning and budgeting for the next year’s activities. Once the holiday haze clears, it’s January and everyone is ready to kick off the New Year with new customer wins. Sales teams are asking, “Where are my leads? I’ve got a number to hit.”
This is the “Oh #%@$!” moment.
Instead of listing off the activities to come in the New Year, start the year off with a bang by getting things rolling earlier. B2B Marketers should be armed and ready with role-based leads to fuel the New Year’s marketing programs. Get started now to avoid the “Oh #%@$!” moment.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #42 - Beat the Holiday Rush, Send Thanksgiving Cards
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007This year at ReachForce, we sent out Thanksgiving cards to our current customers rather than the usual generic holiday cards. Sending a card at Thanksgiving has a few advantages. First, you won’t get lost in the clutter of all the other holiday cards sent in December. Also, you don’t have to worry about offending anyone. Not everyone celebrates a holiday in December and even if you are as generic as possible, you will almost always still offend someone.
On the other hand, Thanksgiving makes perfect sense as the time to send cards to your customers. After all, you want to thank them for the good business they have given you over the past year. This is also the perfect time to put your name in their hands as they are probably doing next year’s budget planning. This could even help the usual slow sales month of December be a great month for up-selling and cross-selling to your current customers.
Of course if your client base is mostly international this strategy probably will not go over well. However, Canadians actually do celebrate Thanksgiving as well, but it is earlier (the second Monday in October).
Not to take all the glory, I got the idea as a tip from Marketing Profs. See what others had to say about the topic here.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #40 - Monitor Your Company or Product in the Blogosphere
Thursday, November 15th, 2007In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Manage You Company’s Reputation with Google Alerts), we wrote about how to use Google Alerts to manage your brand reputation. Now, MarketingProfs is listing a round up of paid services and a few free tools such as Blog Pulse (www.BlogPulse.com) which features conversation tracking, and visual trends. Marketing Profs advises readers to:
“Set up a Google Alert so that every day, or as it happens, you get an email that shows you who is talking about that keyword (which can be your product or brand name). The challenge with simply using a tool like Google or Technorati Watchlist is the sheer volume of information. You need to either task people with manual assessment or use better tools (many of which are paid services) or contract with an outside provider.
An alternative to Alerts, which hit your email inbox, is to setup an RSS Reader (Google, Bloglines, etc). Then you can check it as needed, versus filling your email inbox to the brim. The risk with an RSS Reader, though, is that you don’t look often enough. “
Marketing WTF? - Pondering the Future of Marketing
Monday, November 12th, 2007Heard about a very interesting Vendor Relationship Management project (the counterpart to Customer Relationship Management or CRM) today. Apparently, ProjectVRM, headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was chartered to “improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter.”
What really captured my interest was this intriguing presentation on possible scenarios with some fun and interesting implications for micro-segmentation marketing (Minority Report) vs. social media (The Global Village).
Details on the Project VRM wiki - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Scenarios
Marketing WTF? - Playing Dress-Up is Not Just for Halloween
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
Can you believe this is at a trade show and not Halloween? That’s right, at this year’s DreamForce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference, ReachForce found a fun way to stand out from all the other booths. The theme was Let’s Make a Deal. You can see Monty Hall in the center with his wacky contestants around. The theme definitely worked and gained a lot of attention for ReachForce and their debut software product, Insight. One lesson learned though was that some people had a hard time having an intelligent conversation with Fred Flintstone. If you try to get noticed at your next event with costumes, choose wisely who will wear them.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip # 30 - You’re Measuring What?!
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007You know you have to have metrics to show value in marketing programs but are you tracking the right metrics? Can you track value added to top line revenue? Check out this article from Customer Think about aligning sales and marketing metrics.
The B2B Lead Podcast #4 – Adapt or Die – Marketing and PR in the Blogosphere and New Media
Monday, October 15th, 2007As new media has pushed its way into B2B marketing, many marketing departments reacted by hiring a specialist to tackle these new forms of marketing and PR, especially blogs. But as these new media have come to replace many traditional media and really become now media, all marketers need to accept blogging and twitter and YouTube and become educated, so that not just one member of your marketing organization understands these communities. In this podcast, I interview Josh Dilworth to discuss the changing landscape of marketing and PR in new media.
