We all know, not every customer is alike.  Customers buy for many different reasons.  Some buy to solve an immediate need, some buy a cure a specific pain point, and others know they need it but not sure how to get the most value out of your solutions.  As a marketer tasked with staying engaged with current customers, where do you start?

Start by segmenting your customers into groups that share common characteristics.  Talk to you sales team, spend some time with your customer implementation team, stay in touch your customer support team.   All of these people will help provide you more insight on how to reach out and target your communications with your customer base.   Try and figure out who has the best relationship with each customer and make sure you get regular updates when possible.

Here’s a few ideas on how your might segment your customer base for more effective, targeted marketing.

• Who are your end users?  What is their role in the organization?

• What pain points are your customers trying to address?

• Do you have multiple products?  Do your customers use one or a combination of several?

• Do you have different editions of your software or platform?  Each level will have different needs with your enterprise users having more complex problems and a higher level of sophistication.

• Do you have some customers that need more education to achieve success?

• Do you have some that are stretching the capabilities of your solution?  You might need a more sophisticated message for these people.

• Are their multiple people in the customer organization using your solution?  These people probably care about different things, you might consider doing more customized outreach here.

• Geographies/Firmographics – are their verticals or industries that are clustered together that use your product in a similar way?

• You probably have some customers who have gone dark on you too, your message and offers to these people are definitely going to be different.

Don’t forget your cross sell and upsell opportunities.  You’ll want to be sure you are considering these things when crafting your messages.

Once you have segmented your customers, stay top of mind through monthly or bi-monthly communication.  Here at ReachForce, we send a monthly newsletter and one targeted email or direct mail to each of our customers every month.

Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

It seems like everyday I hear about a new social networking tool and read another article about how to increase my Twitter following or maximize my Facebook presence.  You can’t be everywhere but how in the world do you go about choosing the right networks to participate in? I have found there are 3 questions to ask myself when choosing where to spend my efforts online:

• What are these networks already talking about? - Most every social network has some sort of search tool. Plug in your keywords to see if your industry is already being talked about.  Sign up immediately and join the conversation if they are.  Don’t forget to include your Company name in the search.  Someone else may have already started the conversation about you.
• Where are your competitors? – If your competitors have a presence there, you should too. To find out where they are, go to their website or blog and look for links like “follow us on Twitter” or “join our LinkedIn Group”. You should also head to some of the post popular social networking sites and see if your competitors have created profiles/accounts/pages.  Be sure to check for activity in groups and discussion boards like in Facebook groups and in LinkedIn Answers.
• Where are your customers? – I think the best place to start is with your customers. Their activities should most closely mimic those of your prospects.  You can find out where they are by a quick survey to your customers.  Do you have a customer advisory board?  Use them to help you get started.  And there is always the hard way (not really all that hard but rather time consuming) which is to go out to different networks and search to see if your customers are already there.

Keep in mind that social networking is not right for every industry.  You definitely want to do your homework up front so you can be stategic in your social networking lead gneration.  If you feel like you are a little ahead of your time for your industry, I would start with something like LinkedIn.  It is the most professional of the networks out there and is kind of the gateway drug to other social networks.

We launched our new search optimized website yesterday.  Thank you Leigh Anne for all your hard work!  After many months of research and lots of copywriting, we are all set and ready for the inbound leads to start pouring in.

As part of the new website launch we are also doing a PR blast.  Anyone that knows me well knows I’m not a PR person.  I get that it has its place but PR has always been very difficult to measure.  So instead of perfecting my PR skills, I’ve almost always outsourced this function.

But now, with social media and some pretty simple analytics we can see where we our visitors are coming from so we’ve built a PR program around the new launch.  To get over my dislike of writing news releases I’ve convinced myself that we’re doing these to support our SEO efforts as well as our overall awareness goals.

Here’s a few tips we used when drafting these announcements:

• Writing for our audience – we want to be sure that our audience understands our news and sees the value in what we are announcing, this is key to supporting out SEO efforts.  Important thing to remember here is the news comes first, SEO 2nd.  You have to make sure you don’t confuse or dilute your news by trying to overuse keywords or keyword phrases.

• Decide on your keywords before your start writing – this will help you make sure you are writing with these in mind.  Here, Leigh Anne keeps an updated list of our top keywords and keyword phrases on our white board, this way we’re looking at them every time we go to write something.  Trying to plug in your keywords afterwards will cause problems like I mentioned above.

• Links, links, links – be sure to link keywords in your press release back to pages on your website.  Best strategy includes already having optimized these pages with the same keywords.

• Optimize the important stuff – Be sure you are including your keywords in the most important places – your headline, your subhead, your boilerplate and your first paragraph.

• Press Release Grader – once again, a cool free tool from the folks at HubSpot.  Just copy and paste your press release in and it will grade the release based on language, content and SEO.  Don’t worry if you score a little low at first, it will give you tips for improvement.

• PRWeb – it’s what we use here – it’s worth it to upgrade (we use SEO visibility package).  You will be able to:
  • add links
  • add images
  • include in your own RSS feed
  • add Technorati tags
  • use SEO tools and statistics

We have seen some really great results since we started optimizing our releases.  From one release alone, we got over 100 new leads in a day.  It definitely makes the extra effort worth it.

It’s a new year and here at ReachForce we are in the process of analyzing all of our programs to determine which ones drive the most sales conversions.  Very quickly we realized that people that respond to our programs seem to over and over again.  But what about those that never respond?  They are killing our response rates and conversions.

With every program we as Marketers run we are able to bucket people into “responders” and “non-responders”.  We typically do different things with these two groups.  Responders can either move into other programs that try and further qualify the lead for sales or they go directly to sales/inside sales for more follow up and further qualification.

Now – what do you do with the non-responders and inactive contacts in your database?  By leaving them in the current mix, you’re only hurting your program ROI and possible sales conversions.  Continuing to do the same thing over and over again with these non-responders is insanity, right?

So instead of writing these people off, change up the mix and try something new with them.

In our 2.0 world, there are so many new possibilities for reaching your prospects in a way they respond to.  Here’s a few ideas to consider:

• Webcasts – some people are visual learners and want to feel like they are interacting with live people.  Email them an on-demand webcast or invite them your next live webinar.

• Podcasts – some people like to listen vs. read [a whitepaper or eBook]

• Survey – we use explicit surveys here at ReachForce to gather lead qualifying information.  Now, yes we do incentivize people to take the survey but the results we get back are fabulous.  It helps our lead gen and sales team to prioritize their follow up and it helps us weed out no fits (also helping increase our next program ROI).

• Social networks – where else are your prospects hanging out?  Get out there with them and try and make contact.  Remember you can’t enter the social world with your used car salesman pitch, people will roll their eyes at you and never interact.

• Channels – are your prospects also customers of some of your partners, see if they can help with introductions or more insight into the prospect account.

• Offers and Incentives – be sure to change them up and test what works best.

And if all else fails, it might be time to clean up your data.  Make sure you have the right buying contacts in the right companies or it doesn’t even matter what you are sending or offering.

With every program we put together here at ReachForce, our #1 goal is to drive more hand raisers.  That means we have to create programs using multiple vehicles.  Is vehicles the right word here?  Maybe not, but you know what I mean.

So how are you reaching those stubborn prospects that give you no signal of interest?  Hopefully you’re not just giving up on them …

For those of you conversing out in the Twittersphere on your company’s behalf, here’s a little tip to leverage your web site visitors to get the word out about you on Twitter.  Create a simple link on your home page that links to the following url:

http://twitter.com/home?status=[whatever+status+you+want]

Be sure to replace the [whatever+status+you+want] with, well, exactly that.  For example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Checking+out+ReachForce

To be safe, you’ll want to use the “+” character in place of any spaces in your status text.  When someone clicks on your new Tweet This link, it will take them to their Twitter login page and then automatically populate the “What are you doing?” box with the text that you put after the “status=” part of the link.  Below is an example of what happens when clicking on the link above:

We’ve been talking a lot about Twitter around here lately.  It seems it’s become our newest shiny object.  People are loving it, they’re dedicated to it so there’s got to be a way to leverage this very active audience, right?  Right.

As we were out and about reading about the new world that is Twitter, I came across this blog post from Joint Venture Marketing Strategist, Christian Fea – 6 Effective Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool.

Here’s the list of his 6 tips and a few of my thoughts.  Be sure to read his full post, it’s worth your time.

1. Target your market to follow the right people.
   We’re all about targeting here at ReachForce so I couldn’t agree more on this one being #1.  If you are going to use Twitter as a lead gen tool, it only makes sense to find the right audience.
2. Offer actionable advice
   Again, couldn’t agree more.  Please save us the details of your Chinese food lunch or that you are on the bus ride home.  Give us something useful, and please don’t waste  my time.  Just my 2 cents…
3. Use your 140 character wisely
   And don’t forget about tinyurls.  You can customize these too.
4. Your offer and call to action
   Christian recommends that you push people back to your own blog whenever you can.  This gives you an opportunity to interact with more than 140 characters.
5. Frequency of your tweets
   We REALLY struggle with this one.  It’s tough staying relevant and being as frequent as we should be.  We’re trying to share the responsibility here, we have a team of 3 that are each responsible for tweeting once a day.  This way our audience gets different personalities and not just one person is carrying the entire load.
6. Tracking your results
   Google Analytics will tell you if people are jumping from Twitter to you.  It’s free, why wouldn’t you use it?

All great and easy to implement tips, Thanks again Christian!

Are you using Twitter as a lead gen tool?  We’re giving it a shot, in fact, follow us @reachforce.  We’ll be sure to let you know when we land our first customer who found us on Twitter.

Try saying that five times really fast!  If you’re like us and are running a blog, you’re always trying to find new ways to get the word out to drive more traffic your way.  One interesting method that we are partaking in is to create widgets for your blog.  These widgets are little web-based trinkets that make your blog content available for people to access through popular “start pages”, such as Google IG, Pageflakes, and my personal favorite, Netvibes.

It’s really easy to create one and there are a number of services out there that will walk you through the process, but probably the easiest one I’ve found is the Widgetbox Blidget service.  There is no coding required and all you have to do is provide it with the URL to your blog and then optionally configure some standard theme elements and off you go with your very own blidget within 5 minutes.

Widgetbox also hosts a gallery where you can publish your blidgets and it automatically draws in any meta keywords you have setup in your blog and will use them as the default keywords for people searching through the Widgetbox gallery to find your blidget with.

Check out our blidget to see what the finished product looks like.  There are also over 60 other B2B-related widgets and blidgets already published out on the Widgetbox gallery, so no guinea pigs here!

With any luck, your blog could end up on The 25 Most Valuable Blogs list next year!

For our 200th Tip here on The B2B Lead we decided to do a survey to see what you want to talk about these days.  Our goal was to see what our readers are challenged with in these trying times and get an idea of what’s working right now in the B2B marketing world.  Thanks to everyone who has participated in the survey.  If you haven’t taken the survey, you should, we’re sending the results to everyone who takes it and you want to know what your peers are doing, right?

The last question on the survey asks what you [the survey taker] what you would like to ask our audience.  With over 100 responses, we’re already noticing some really interesting trends.  The 2 most asked about subjects from the last question aren’t big surprises though – social media and marketing program metrics.

Since we’re stacking up a good number of questions people are searching for answers to, I thought we’d go ahead and start talking about these.  Below are a few of the questions from our survey, please jump in and share your thoughts.

Social Media –

• Are social networking sites really that helpful for B2B?

• What are the metrics and things corporate marketing can do with social media?

• If your company doesn’t support the use of social media (to promote the business) how have you overcome those objections?

• Do you get returns on podcasting? What is the breakdown for your marketing plan among the social media tools for Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Podcasting, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg & Plaxo?

Marketing Metrics –

• How are they calculating revenue attribution back to campaigns?

• What trends are you seeing in email response rates? I’m seeing a big problem with increasingly aggressive spam filters and policies trapping marketing emails.

• What metrics do you track to measure overall success of your program?

• How are your google ppc campaigns going?

And the question I’m most interested in…
What has been working for you in the first few weeks of this year?

P.S.  Here’s the tiny URL, http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey, please forward to any other B2B Marketers out there.  After all, the more responses we get, the better the results.