B2B Marketing: Successful strategies and techniques from your peers
In today’s free webinar at 1:00 p.m. EDT – B2B Marketing Summit Wrap-up: Quick takeaways distilled from 478 marketers on lead nurturing, social media marketing, and more – we will share successful B2B strategies and techniques from the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit ’10 in Boston and San Francisco.
But first, we wanted to hear what worked well for you this year. Here are a few of our favorite answers…
Social media marketing plus search engine optimization
In the last year, my most successful B2B strategy involved incorporating a low involvement SMM program with two of our online products. This increased our SEO and client re-buys. We accomplished this goal by strategically including a few simple widgets within our own site, e-marketing newsletters, and on few conversion points where we were able to increase our conversion and click-throughs.
– Carlos Barbour, Marketing Technology Specialist at The Spokesman-Review
Finding a blogging nicheBlogging with heavy emphasis on quality content and SEO has been great for lead generation. Going after specific, long-tail or niche terms works better than trying to compete on broad competitive terms, because when B2B searchers are in research mode, their search terms become more specific. Searchers in research mode are attracted to blog posts, because they are assumed to have high informational value. To make this strategy work, you need a clear call to action on your blog post. Otherwise, there’s too much potential for the visitor to click off after making use of your valuable content.
– Brad Shorr, Director of Content Marketing at Straight North
Learn, improve…and growOur firm has found great success in having a structured data management plan in place. This ensures even distribution of effort across a prospect universe and allows for strategic data recycling. Traditionally, calling campaigns do not typically leverage business intelligence that is uncovered in initial prospect/customer dialogs to enhance future interactions. Instead, records are recycled in programs based on timing considerations. Often, this leads to the same process to capture the same information being repeated in the next campaign. The investment made to capture business intelligence is largely wasted if it is not leveraged in the future. Building prospect/customer intelligence in a structured manner and having visibility into relevant attributes of prospects enables sales and marketing to develop roadmaps for future communications.
– Mary Beth Russell, VP of Business Development at Cornerstone Marketing Services
A couple of my colleagues at MECLABS also had some advice that I thought you might find helpful…
A/B testing for teleprospecting
In my teleprospecting role, I use a lot of messaging testing to determine decision makers pain points when taking sales calls and creating a greater impression of expectations for their follow-up call from my clients’ sales team.
Most recently I’ve begun asking decision makers if they’d take a few minutes with me to determine if we can match their needs for data asset management and following this, if we are a fit, I’ll set up a data governance workshop that will uncover point-to-point value for business, legal, compliance, IT and executive users. This governance workshop will also get the ball rolling to help them determine a clear ROI roadmap on the purchase of a clients’ solution.
This approach has increased my lead generation from .04 leads per hour to .35 leads per hour for one particular client, achieve an unmeasureable success for another, and has allowed me to get in a few good conversations for a project I’ve just started.
I’ve found that some A/B testing of messaging in my teleprospecting efforts can create efficiency and effectiveness similar to how A/B testing of search terms/SEO can drive exponential results.
– Jason Croyle, Lead Generation Specialist at MECLABS Leads Group
If they’re hiring, they’re buying
Of course my main resource will always be the human touch possible through both the phone and e-mail, but there are a lot of things that can help make that more effective… none more important than relevance. One of the biggest untapped resources for relevance in my opinion is careerbuilder.com. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, there are search fields to find the relevance you seek.
In my case, I target companies by region that are looking to hire for the position of new business development, inside sales, field marketing, etc. Any company hiring for those positions will have lead generation on their list of relevance, as well as a need to be shown the value of outsourcing vs. inhouse.
You can change the fields to match a company seeking to fill any need your company can provide.
– Mark Smith, Business Development Rep at MECLABS Leads Group
Related resources
B2B Marketing Summit Wrap-up: Quick takeaways distilled from 478 marketers on lead nurturing, social media marketing, and more – Join us today at 1:00 p.m. EDT
Fostering Sales-Marketing Alignment: A 5-Step Lead Management Process
Social Media Marketing: How enterprise-level social media managers handle negative sentiment
