B2B Sales and Marketing Tip # 13 - Tune in to MarketingSherpa ASAP
Friday, August 31st, 2007The experts at MarketingSherpa recently presented the findings of their annual survey of B2B Technology Marketers and B2B Technology Buyers. The B2B Lead Blog shares a few of the findings here for those of you didn’t have time to attend.
- Survey Result: Enterprise Buying Committees are Getting Bigger – there are more and more people involved in the buying process and as your target company gets larger, so does the size of the buying committee.
Lesson: Set your white paper PDFs free, if the lead comes back, it is really a lead. Let your PDFs go viral by removing the barriers to your content. That way it is more likely that your materials will be forwarded to all of the members of a buying committee. But, make sure you’ve included a call to action at the end of the white paper. - Survey Result: B2B Decision-makers attend more webinars than Contributors aka End-users.
Lesson: Managers, Directors and VPs are more likely to attend your webinars, than end-users who tend to prefer white papers. Target your offers accordingly. - Survey Result: 80% of your prospects think they found you.
Lesson: Make yourself more visible. Make sure you are there when B2B buyers are shopping. Capture or append their contact information when you can and then launch a systematic multi-modal Marketing Communications campaign.
For the complete B2B Marketing survey results, purchase the full report at http://www.sherpastore.com/b2bbenchmark08.html and stay tuned to The B2B Lead Blog for more insights.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #12 - Six Principles of Subject Line Writing
Friday, August 31st, 2007Subject Lines are like first impressions. When an email comes in, most email providers are set up to show you who the message is coming from and the brief subject of the message. As you are writing subject lines for your demand generation programs, make sure your message includes the following 6 principles –
- Be Informative – Be sure to convey something important, valuable or timely
- Create Intrigue – Prompt your reader to open and act on the email immediately
- Build Trust – Be sure not to over promise or mislead your prospects
- Call to Action – Make it easy for your prospects to act on the call to action
- Understand who you are targeting – Speak to each prospect as an individual and address their pain points
- From who? – Subject lines can work with From Lines
I just recently heard a new best practice – subject lines should be no longer than 6 words. Do you think this is because so many people are getting email on mobile devices?
Are we missing anything here? Post a comment to add to the list.
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #11– Transform Your Marketing from Lead Generation to Demand Generation
Thursday, August 30th, 2007ReachForce customer, Linda Roach of PlanView, writes to The B2B Lead Blog with a few tips for transforming your B2B Marketing Organization from “the group that generates the leads” to a performance-driven demand generation organization.
- Organize your staff around integrated Marketing programs. Each member should have responsibilities for managing integrated Marketing Programs. That means each team member works together to stretch beyond their tactical focus to orchestrate multi-touch, multi-media programs designed to deliver messages to the customer in the right way at the right time.
- Shelve low-yield marketing techniques. As you reorganize your team around integrated marketing programs, all of a sudden your Marketing Program managers are no longer willing to accept 2 to 3 percent response rates. The more you target your audience, the better your response rates will be and the greater yield you can expect from Marketing programs. Funnel the budget that you’ve allocated for list rentals or email blasts toward a more cost-effective and targeted contact discovery campaign instead.
- Integrate your communications with the Customer Buy Cycle. Are you communicating with customers and prospects at the right time with the right approach? Or, are you generating leads through a barrage of emails and handing them off to Sales? Marketers today must realize that some prospects that respond to programs are not always ready to talk to Sales. They may be in the Education phase and simply looking for resources. So, why waste the time of your valuable Sales resources and risk turning off your prospects with a premature Sales call? Make sure you are nurturing buyers with multi touch programs designed to programmatically usher them through the funnel.
Share your tips with readers of The B2B Lead Blog.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #10 - Integrate Social Media into Your B2B Marketing Mix
Thursday, August 30th, 2007Are you a Marketing Communications professional or a Marketing Conversations professional? Find out by reading this manifesto just published by Brian Solis a Principal of the FutureWorks PR agency. In my opinion, this is an excellent primer on Social Media to help B2B Marketers expand beyond the traditional one-way communications monologue. It provides a nice overview of the tools and techniques B2B Marketers can use to initiate conversations with their target audiences including this tidbit:
“What does the future of communications look like?
First it’s an understanding that social media is about sociology and less about technology. It’s a mashup of new and traditional media that spans across advertising, PR, customer service, marcom, sales, and community relations. In order to succeed now and in the future, is to bridge the gap between early adopters and everyone else.Now, however, it’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners.Participation is marketing.”
Check it out at http://www.thinkfreedocs.com/docs/view.php?dsn=819339
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #9 - Tips for Writing Good Email Copy
Thursday, August 30th, 2007- Consider what your prospect or customer wants to hear, not what you want to tell them.
- Don’t beat around the bush – get to the point in 100 words or less
- Make sure call to action is above the fold (and in the preview pane)
- Be sure your offer or call to action are related to the content
- Get to the point – use 1 idea per sentence and make sentences punchy and easy to scan
- Do not use catch phrases, clichés – use real data to make key points
- Ask yourself – So what? – this will help you get to the real message
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #8 - B2B Marketing Copy - Write it Right Part II
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007Here on The B2B Lead Blog, we are obsessed with great B2B Marketing copy. Here are a few new tips for crafting high impact copy:
- Get to the point quickly. Start with pain points, goals, or the most important reason that the reader should care. Put yourself in the buyers’ shoes. Why would you spend money or spend valuable time to read the document? To get to the real pain, ask “why” three times.
- Remember your audience - what do they care about? Lead with the most important value proposition, what’s most likely to sell first.
- Provide a full explanation of the concept, but remember: less is more. Do not use too many words to say something. Do not say the same thing several different ways before getting to the point.
- The reader should be able to scan the headline and subheads throughout the piece and get the basic story. Each subhead should tell a significant piece of the story. Make ample use of bulleted lists for readability.
- Effectively use call out boxes or highlighted quotes.
- Ensure there is clear linkage from one concept to the next, and one paragraph to the next.
- Use short punchy sentences and bulleted lists that are easy to read quickly.
- Repeat brand names and key messages to reinforce branding.
- Don’t use buzzwords or hype.
- Tie the theme of the headline to the copy. Weave the headline into the copy to reinforce.
- Use action words. Speak to customer needs with benefit-oriented statements. Avoid overly cute or cliché language.
- Always include a compelling call to action and a fast, easy way to contact you.
Share your ideas about what makes great B2B Marketing copy with readers of The B2B Lead Blog.
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #7 - Know Thy Customer aka The Principles of Deliberate Marketing
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007Today’s The B2B Lead blog tip is “know thy customer.” Sounds painfully obvious, right? Certainly you should understand your customer’s role in the organization, their needs and pain points, their preferred communication style, how they buy, and then target your messages and delivery mechanisms to meet those needs.
Yet, today, 50% of B2B Marketers rely on Sales to drive the customer interaction. Could this be why B2B Marketers continue to rely on the old spray and pray approach to lead generation?
If you’d like to improve your Marketing Campaign metrics, try taking a Deliberate Marketing approach: build and leverage in-depth customer insight to convert leads into qualified buyers and drive greater revenue. This is the single most effective way to optimize your Funnelnomics. Here are six deliberate marketing tactics to consider. You can read about these in detail in Funnelnomics - Accelerate Your Marketing & Sales Funnel to Drive Growth & Profitability (http://www.reachforce.com/funnelnomics/)
- Are you creating attention or buyer intention?
- Are you targeting prospect based on their title or their role in the decision making unit?
- Are you creating leads or sales ready qualified buyers?
- Are you executing typical spray and pray initiatives or predictable marketing programs?
- Are you capturing leads or nurturing buyers through the sales pipeline?
- Are you measuring responses or ROI?
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #6 – Get Your Free eBook on Improving Funnelnomics with Deliberate Marketing
Monday, August 27th, 2007This tip for The B2B Lead blog focuses on getting your Marketing and Sales pipeline in order with a couple of powerful concepts called Funnelnomics and Deliberate Marketing. You can download a free copy of the ebook titled Funnelnomics - Accelerate Your Marketing & Sales Funnel to Drive Growth & Profitability (http://www.reachforce.com/funnelnomics/) and get a step-by-step guide for improving the velocity of your funnel by using Deliberate Marketing techniques.
What exactly is Funnelnomics? It’s essentially the revenue generated by Marketing and Sales activities divided by the Marketing and Sales expenditures required to generate and develop leads into customers. It’s a strange word but a very powerful concept for B2B Marketers, because using this model will enable you to squeeze the most value out of the leads in your funnel thereby boosting Marketing ROI. It is about moving all leads through the funnel from awareness to purchase in the fastest, most cost-effective way possible. By understanding and carefully managing your Funnelnomics, you can:
- speed the process of turning leads into customers
- execute more high ROI programs
- eliminate lost revenue due to leaks in the funnel
- extract the maximum value from each contact in the funnel
In our next The B2B Lead blog Sales and Marketing tip, we’ll cover the principles of Deliberate Marketing. But if you’d like to get a jump on those ideas, download your ebook now (http://www.reachforce.com/funnelnomics/)
The B2B Lead Blog Marketing WTF? - Wild and Wacky B2B Marketing Ideas
Friday, August 24th, 2007In today’s Marketing WTF?, we highlight a campaign that raised the hackles of the folks at PETA. Mike Rosenfelt, Executive Vice President of MessageOne, is never one to shy away from the outrageous in an effort to generate buzz. In an odd ploy to illustrate how unexpected factors—such as a goat chewing through your fiber conduit– can take down your email system, he brought a live goat onto the trade show floor at the International Legal Technology Association show. The next year he one-upped himself by bringing alligators and pythons. The connection? The alligators had eaten the goat, or so they said. Live animals have now been banned, so we are all on pins and needles to see what Rosenfelt will think of next. As he said, they only banned live animals…
Share your News of the Weird with The B2B Lead blog.
B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #5 - Take Your Next Product Launch to An Alternate Universe
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007You’ve probably heard your peers talking about Second Life and how it offers a new avenue for B2B Marketing. But like most of us, you probably don’t have time for one life, much less a second one.
It is probably worth your time, however, to watch this 3 minute video produced by Text100 to learn how Second Life can relate to your business.
During last week’s Networkers conference, Cisco used Second Life to host a B2B Press Conference, and more B2B companies are finding it to be a valuable tool for promoting their products in a virtual, consumer-led environment.Share your thoughts on Second Life with readers of The B2B Lead Blog. Did you find it useful? What were the pitfalls and advantages?
