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Turn Your B2B Lead Generation Programs into a Customer Advantage

February 28, 2012 by

The goal of B2B lead generation is to collect high quality, sales ready leads for your business. When it works correctly, your sales people are eager to follow-up on leads, have the necessary information to quickly understand the sales potential and the customer’s readiness to buy, as well as identify the main selling points they will use to close the deal. Notice that all of this is focused internally and fails to consider the potential advantages to the customer.

A mature, well-defined B2B lead generation program does more than capture leads for the business. It’s also the front lines of the organization and often the very first point of contact between you, your business and your future customers. It is during this stage that your potential customers will form lasting opinions of your company and solution.

They will also learn more about your organization during this stage than at any other time during the buying process. Thus, how you represent your organization and share information is critical. Creating a B2B Lead Generation program that focuses on the needs of the customer as much as it does managing your sales process is the first step.

When sharing information, be proactive in consistently delivering new, valuable information to your target prospects. Share with them new features of your solution, but also expose them to trends and issues facing their industry as a whole. The more you can educate your prospects on a broad range of ideas, the more they will trust in your ability to deliver the right solution for them. Most importantly, they will open up to you about their buying decisions, which will in turn, increase your ability to win business and generate new sales.

Filed under General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy

Read Between the Lines to Improve Your Media Relations

February 24, 2012 by

If you’re like me, you get a stack of magazines each month that you skim through to find relevant articles. They sit in a pile on the edge of the desk until they hit the recycling bin.

As a marketing professional, you’re probably using these magazines as a resource for staying current on industry events and what your competitors are doing. You should also be identifying who is speaking through the magazine stories you read each month, as a way to build awareness for your own business.

Developing a media strategy is more than saying “let’s write a press release.” It’s about understanding the players who watch trends, shape stories and talk to your target prospects through the media.

As you read an article, check out the author’s name, title and organization. Making a concerted effort to understand what’s happening behind the scenes can help gain you valuable free coverage, that is more credible than traditional advertising space.

The first thing to watch for is the same name popping up on numerous articles. When you observe this, make a point to meet that individual. Drop them an e-mail or consider sending their article back with a note about the points you liked, disliked or thought were missing. Authors love constructive feedback and knowing they are reaching people in a way that causes a reaction.

When you do respond, suggest an idea for another article and, if you have it, offer source material. At the very least, make sure you include your contact information with some details on topics you could discuss with them. This person is most likely very overworked and will be happy to accept a good idea and ecstatic if your source material makes researching future story topics easy.

Second, watch for contributed articles from industry experts. If you regularly see articles from outside companies, take the next step and outline an article that you think would be interesting and share the idea with the editor. If they like the idea and ask for a draft, then you can put the time into writing and/or work with an outside copywriter to put together the materials.

The important thing is to follow through on the idea. This means both making a phone call to the editor to ensure they have seen your proposal, and, most importantly, delivering the article if you agree to write it. Deadlines drive the publishing business. If you miss yours, you may never get another chance to publish that article idea and gain the associated awareness for your company.

Filed under General Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Media Relations

B2B Lead Generation Strategies for a More Effective Trade Show

February 21, 2012 by

Trade shows continue to be the top lead generation activity according to a survey ResponsePoint recently conducted of more than 100 companies. Nearly 80% of respondents listed trade shows as one of their top 5 lead generation activities. In fact, nearly 60% of the marketing professionals we spoke with listed trade shows as their top lead generation activity over all other tactics. Why it ranks so high is open to interpretation, but the one thing this survey does tell us is that trade shows continue to heavily influence where B2B organizations spend their time and resources.

With that in mind, we developed a list of best practices for improving your trade show lead generation activities. This list includes strategies for driving traffic before and during the show; as well as capitalizing on new leads and the investment you’ve made in the show once it is over. Most of these tips are taken from programs developed in collaboration with our existing clients and are now part of our Quick Start program offering.

5 Tips for Improving Your Trade Show Performance

1) Enhance the value of your time and offer before the show
If your trade show plans include building a booth schedule to ensure employees availability, but not to coordinate the times when customer demonstrations are going to be given, then you’re missing a golden opportunity to increase the real or perceived value of your offer. People want to think they are special. Scheduling appointments to give demos to booth visitors will not only help you better prepare for those customers, but it will reinforce the value of your time and solutions. Promoting in advance the availability of a limited number of demo times will help you gain advanced knowledge of who is attending, and hopefully make your booth a must-see destination rather than another drive by evaluation.

Top B2B Marketing Activities2) Develop a multistep lead follow-up process for after the show
Trade shows produce a lot of data, but very little understanding of a person’s readiness to buy. To do that, you need to reconnect with attendees after the show on multiple occasions. The first attempt is to catch those people with an immediate need. Subsequent communications then need to be done to evaluate everyone’s state of readiness and nurture them into a buying decision. The one-and-done mentality of trade show follow-up is perhaps the greatest mistake companies make when managing their leads.

3) Plan communications to happen during the event
What you do during the show hours is almost as important as what you do after. Developing a process of regular communications and visitor follow-up during the show can greatly enhance your corporate recognition and even drive repeat traffic to your booth. One simple way to do this is to schedule follow-up emails to go out at regular intervals during the show. Download your lead retrieval system, load the leads into your contact management system and send out a simple thank you message with an invitation to come back to the booth. If you’re hosting an event in the evening, include an invitation to that or even connect these emails with a give-a-way in your booth that will bring attendees back later in the show.

4) Repeat and reuse content before, during, and after the event
Regardless of your message, the content of you show needs to be reinforced multiple times to make it truly memorable. Offering webinars or promotions in advance and after the show can help you do this. Pre-show webinars can be truly beneficial as it can allow attendees to get a sneak peak at solutions that they can get a better look at live at the show.

5) Reconnect with past attendees prior to the show
Most companies attend the same trade shows every year. If this is you, building a program to educate and nurture attendees about the benefits of your product or solution needs to be a year-long process. If you don’t, you’ll continually be starting from scratch each year to rebuild those relationships. To avoid this, pull out lists from past shows and build a program to promote your attendance at the next event. Encourage prospects to schedule time to stop by your booth and meet with you. Like you, they probably will attend the same shows many times, which gives you the opportunity to truly build a long-term meaningful relationship with them throughout the year.

Filed under Direct Mail, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing

Writing Copy that Sells

February 17, 2012 by

I’ve long professed that copywriting is an art form similar to playing the piano or painting a picture. Some people are able to do it, while others cannot. Certainly anyone who commits themselves to the mechanics can improve their craft and be proficient, but mastery of the technical skills does not mean you are able to excite others through your work.

One of the greatest compliments I have ever been given as a writer was that I could make counting buttons sound interesting. As nice as that was, for copy to be successful, it needs to do more than sound good. It also needs to relate to its audience and clearly communicate the unique characteristics that will motivate the reader to take action and, if you’re lucky, make a purchase.

Doing this requires a clear understanding of how to present your product’s features and benefits throughout your copy. That requires understanding the difference between the two. To be clear, benefits are the value that you deliver. Features support your benefits and explain the how and why those results are achieved.

As an example; the benefit of working with ResponsePoint is that we deliver high quality, sales ready leads. We accomplish this by understanding our clients’ specific values and how they fit within their industries. Then, we develop measureable programs that communicate these values to their target audiences using experienced sales and marketing professionals.

Writing copy that sells requires mastering the ability to identify your true value and then validating how you deliver it. Neither can exist alone or your message becomes meaningless.

Once accomplished, how you choose, organize and arrange the words on the page becomes a matter a preference. In most organizations, the facts are written by experts; while copywriting professionals perfect the language and make the ideas flow together smoothly.

The magic happens when you can combine natural ability and the technical expertise to create something that will capture the attention of your audience and inspire them to want more. Without it, Vincent Van Gogh spends his entire career painting potato eaters, The Beatles sing only Gregorian chants, and your corporate and product literature will read like a technical manual.

Filed under Direct Mail, Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Media Relations

Building a Successful B2B Social Marketing Strategy

February 14, 2012 by

I recently had a conversation with one of our Industrial Manufacturing clients about social marketing strategies. The client was in the early stages of rebuilding their website and wanted advice on how to leverage and start using the many different social opportunities such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. In particular, they wanted help in understanding how they should build an audience for their own blog community. There are many nuances to this question, based on your objectives. However, for many companies the answer is simple; you don’t until you have a solid foundation for managing a community and turning these types of communication streams into solid lead opportunities.

As someone who spends a great deal of time investigating, participating in and managing different blog networks, my advice may have seemed a bit harsh, if not shortsighted. The reality is many companies succumb to the hype before they truly understand how to capitalize on the benefits of social marketing. Knowing when a B2B organization is ready to launch a social marketing initiative boils down to a single question; “Have you invested in the marketing infrastructure to identify and manage lead opportunities, and are you willing to invest the human capital to manage it?”

Okay, so maybe that’s two questions, but the message is clear. Building a successful B2B social marketing strategy requires careful planning and consideration. At the top of this list is a method of identifying the people involved in your community and being able to profile and nurture them until they become sales opportunities. Failure to address this issue won’t result in a stagnant community, but it will cause executives to question the effectiveness of the entire effort if you continue to devote a substantial amount of manpower and money to managing your network without clearly defining metrics for how the investment will result in an increase in business. Often the answer to how they will identify sales opportunities from among the many different conversations that happen is shortsighted. Most companies simply answer that someone will be responsible for reviewing discussions and talking with clients. To that, I point out the potential magnitude of work and the required long-term commitment.

A more effective strategy is to focus on building the marketing platform, audience and specific conversations within your social forum. There are tools and resources available to help you build a community and make your social marketing strategies run more smoothly. In the early stages, you’ll need to do more to support its development, but as I mentioned in a prior blog post, when a community takes off it can go in many unintended directions. Your job is to nurture and guide it forward, not control its growth. This doesn’t mean you should simply let your blog or community wander. Incorporating a planned editorial schedule with regular content updates and follow-up messaging is critical. This doesn’t mean planning the entire year, but rather thinking far enough ahead to ensure content is regularly available. The next step is to broadcast this content to your existing database of customers and prospects using e-mail and e-Newsletters. Encourage discussion by linking all of these vehicles back to your social platform as a way to grow your content and track individual participation. If you don’t have a database or you haven’t developed a working outbound communication strategy that incorporates e-mail and e-Newsletters, then that is the place to start.

Finally, be conscious of who you are communicating with and mindful of how public member profiles are. Business-to-Business social marketing sites are as valuable to your competition as they are to you. This includes Twitter and LinkedIn networks, where discussions are relatively open. Often members are easily identified. If your client base participates in these discussions, be cautious of how easily it will be for your competitors to target them as lead sources. As always, if you are interested in discussing any of your marketing activities, drop me a line. At ResponsePoint, we are here to help. We offer honest, straight-forward opinions and real-world experience gained from working with a broad range of clients.

Filed under Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing

Defining Standard E-mail Open, Click-Thru and Unsubscribe Metrics

February 7, 2012 by

The most common question I get from clients when discussing e-mail marketing is “What are the standard open and click rates they need to get to be successful?” My standard answer is of course 100%. I quickly explain this number only applies if you’ve successfully built a campaign that clearly identifies prospects that have the need, budget and are ready to buy when the e-mail hits their inbox. In this case, anything less than 100% response rate should be viewed as failure.

For most organizations, having such a clearly defined target audience is not practical. As a result, determining a satisfactory response rate requires a better understanding of your program objectives, what you are attempting to measure and the quality of your list. All three elements will play an important role in determining your target e-mail response rate and measurement criteria.

For example, if your program objectives are to increase awareness of your company, product or solution, then measuring the combination of open rates will give you a good indication of the quality of your program and if your messages are being received. You may also want to include a metric focused on audience growth such as the number of e-mails sent as compared to the bounce rate.

If on the other hand your objective is lead generation or even list segmentation, click-thru rates are going to be much more important. In these types of programs, the number of e-mails sent could actually decrease as you learn more about your target audience and emails become more focused on the specific needs of the individual recipient. In these instances, maintaining your delivery rates will require more, unique e-mails sent in smaller batches. Your goal should be to appeal to the individual and, as a result, achieve a higher click-thru rate.

Regardless of your objective, two numbers need to be consistently measured and acted upon to determine the success of your email program. The first is your unsubscribe rate, or the number of people who request to be removed from your email communications. Clearly, you want this number to be a low as possible from email to email. The second is your click-thru rate, or the number of people that click on a link within your email. This number represents active interest in your email message. Each click should results some activity to further profile or qualify the individual’s buying state to determine if there is an immediate sales opportunity.

Filed under Email Marketing, General Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing

Launching and Testing Your B2B Social Marketing Strategy

February 3, 2012 by

There are more than a few theories on how to build and manage your social marketing programs. What’s right for you requires understanding your business objectives and the level of influence you have with customers, prospects, media and other stakeholders within your industry. The one constant is that launching your own social media program is similar to a message-in-a-bottle. You can choose the type of bottle, where you’ll place it and even who has access, but the current will take it where it wants to go.

To test the waters, working with and through existing social channels offers a less risky alternative to launching your own program. This starts by identifying groups that are focused on your target markets and becoming a source of content and conversation. Linked In and Yahoo Groups, for example, offer a good way to build an audience and your credibility, while maintaining your ability to back away if necessary.

This measured approached to social networking allows you to get your feet wet and discover the level of investment your willing to make. What few people and companies realize when first getting started is the amount of time and energy that goes into managing a social marketing strategy. To succeed, you need to be diligent and consistent in your participation. This includes responding to inquiries when they arise, leading conversations in the direction they want to go and knowing when to just sit back and say nothing. To extend my earlier analogy, you need to become the current to move the conversation in the direction you want it to go.

Once you have successfully built your credibility and gained a firm understanding of the commitment, how you choose to build your own social network and platform will once again depend on your unique business requirements. The advantage you’ll have now, is the ability to significantly reduce your risk of failure and the potential social media backlash that could result from a false start.

Filed under General Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Media Relations, Online Marketing

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