by gabriel_sales | Aug 9, 2013
This blog article is a short overview of B2B small business marketing in the digital era.
As a small business, you don’t have anywhere near the amount of resources to develop a marketing strategy as your large business and Fortune 500 competitors.
That being said, the democratic nature of the internet means that even the smallest businesses have the chance to compete and grow. In other words, a viral marketing video is just as likely to come from a five-person start-up as it is an enterprise, if that startup has taken the time to understand their customers and produce content that speaks directly to their needs.
There are many ways you can go about small business marketing, and they pretty much all involve the internet. Here are several basic marketing tactics that any small business can leverage to find and connect with more customers:
Search Engine Optimization
You’ve probably heard talk about “how to improve your SEO,” which simply means getting higher on Google results pages. Google and other search engines have specific formulas for determining what pages rank the highest for each keyword. They take into consideration factors like keyword density, urls, meta descriptions and more when ranking pages for specific search terms. In order to show up higher on results pages, you need to “optimize” every page of your website to make it easy for Google to know what each page is about.
Understanding the rules of SEO is somewhat complex, but not impossible. Simply changing the urls for all of your blog posts might get you from page three to page one.
Social Media Marketing
For many small businesses, social media has been the best thing since sliced bread. That’s because pretty much all of your customers are already on social media, waiting for you to connect with them. Using social media networking sites sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, you can create profiles and push marketing messages within communities that are your ideal market. Social media marketing also helps to humanize your brand and allows your customers to get to know you better.
Blogging
Blogging can be considered both an SEO strategy and a social media strategy, depending on your goals. Starting and maintaining a company blog gives you much more space to optimize keywords for search engines. Each blog post you write can have a slightly different keyword variant, allowing you to reach a wider customer base. Blogs can also be considered social media, as your prospects and customers can “follow” or “subscribe” to your blog to receive updates every time you publish something new. You can also post links to your blog articles on your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. If your content is valuable enough to your readers, they may share your content with their friends or followers, which becomes free advertising for you.
For more on small business marketing for B2B, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 7, 2013
This blog article is an overview of sales pipeline management and its importance in the B2B world.
For some reason, a lot of B2B companies approach their sales process like a little kid approaches a magic trick; if you just believe enough, something amazing will happen.
While confidence is a critical part of success, belief in your own greatness is not going to convert MQLs to SALs. B2B companies need to think of sales as a process to be managed that is backed by logic and data.
Management of your sales process should be focused on your pipeline. A sales pipeline “is the amount of business you attempt to close in a given month, quarter or year” (inc.com). You can manage the data of your sales pipeline using spreadsheets or sales and marketing technologies and then use that data to give you insights as to how to forecast better, improve your conversion rate and refine your marketing messages.
B2B sales pipeline management consists mostly of working with different metrics. By looking at the percentage of your entire pipeline that closes every quarter, you can begin to predict future demand with greater accuracy. You can also look at more specific metrics as to how successful a certain piece of marketing content is for conversion. For example, if your data tells you that 75% of people who download your white paper end up closing, you probably want to make sure that every single MQL sees that white paper.
Managing your B2B sales pipeline also helps you keep track of leads who aren’t ready to buy right away. A lot of companies have discovered that some leads that enter their pipleline don’t close until a year later. Without a clear understanding of how long your typical buying cycle is and what activities signal buying readiness, you might give up on clients who are simply taking a little bit more time to analyze all of their options.
Overall, B2B sales pipeline management turns guesswork into a refined process with measurable results. When you have total visibility of your sales process and marketing efforts, you have certainty that each move you make has been well-thought out and is backed by data.
If you would like more information on B2B sales pipeline management, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 5, 2013
In the past, the buyer’s road to a B2B purchase was pretty clear. As there weren’t many options for gathering information on products and services, buyers had to go to trade shows or read through industry catalogues if they were looking for a solution. Information was so scarce that these buyers didn’t mind being “sold to”, either directly or through marketing messages.
Today, we are all on information overload. An article in Huffington Post estimates that Americans are exposed to 250 to 3,000 advertising messages daily. Buyers today are not hungry for sales information; they want to get as far away from it as they can.
This is the situation that has added tremendous value to B2B inbound marketing techniques, especially for lead generation. Because so many buyers are now turned off by traditional, self-promotional marketing, less intrusive inbound strategies instead let the buyer come to you when they are ready to be sold to.
In fact, all of your B2B inbound marketing tactics should not be focused on closing, but instead focused on education and giving prospects the information they need to move themselves through your sales cycle independently. This means that when coming up with an inbound marketing strategy, you need to map out your sales cycle and create educational marketing content to fit each stage.
Inbound marketing content can vary immensely, depending on your company’s needs and overall goals. Blogs, quick YouTube videos and infographics are great for early stage buyers while white papers, software demos or comparison-focused content are better later in the buying cycle. Social media can be used throughout the buying cycle and is great for lead nurturing and staying top of mind.
While all of these inbound marketing strategies can be effective for B2B lead generation, it is extremely difficult to measure that effectiveness without a marketing automation platform in place. With marketing automation, you have a “behind-the-scenes” view of which prospects are interacting with what content. You are therefore able to identify where your leads are coming from and how far along in their buying stage they are. You can also determine what tactics are most successful by measuring how many leads are coming from each source or piece of content.
If you would like more information on B2B inbound marketing tactics, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 2, 2013
Marketing Profs just released the results of a survey of B2B marketing professionals that discusses their biggest challenges. The survey found that the biggest challenge for B2B marketers is generating more leads.
While lead generation can be more difficult in the B2B space than in others, it does not have to be mystifying or impossible. As a sales and marketing outsourcing company with over 13 years of experience selling B2B products and services, here are three effective methods we have found for how to generate B2B sales leads:
- Outbound email marketing
Outbound email marketing may be one of the more traditional ways to generate B2B sales leads, but people wouldn’t keep doing the same thing if is didn’t work. Sending out introductory emails that emphasize the problem you can solve is always going to catch the eye of someone who desperately needs help. As long as you keep the emails educational in tone and keep out the sales-language, prospects have every reason to give you a chance and find out what you’re about. If you do a good enough job presenting your value with an intriguing call-to-action, you will have new leads.
2. 
Long-tail SEO
The success of long-tail search keywords is now well known in the worlds of digital buying and selling, and the value of this method is only going to increase as time goes on. By optimizing your website and all of your digital marketing content for long-tail, rather than short/thick-tail keywords, you have less competition and can find your niche market in a strategic way. The increased use of using voice commands like Apple’s “Siri” or “Google Voice”means that more and more people are going to be speaking their search queries, which will therefore will be longer, as they are unhindered by the effort of typing. For example, when you ask Siri for the weather, you are more likely to say ”What’s the weather going to be like in Denver today?” than “Denver weather.” Bottom line: long-tail is here to stay.
3. Telemarketing with educational content offers
While this may sound surprising, telemarketing is still one of the best ways to generate B2B sales leads. Yes, cold calls are declining in effectiveness, but that does not mean people don’t want to talk to you. In order to make telemarketing effective in 2013, you have to offer your prospects something of value. Whether it be an blog article, a white paper, a YouTube video doesn’t matter—it just needs to be educational and valuable to the type of customer you are targeting.
We think these three methods for how to generate B2B sales are each effective on their own. However, when you integrate all three of these methods and leverage a marketing automation system alongside it, the results are tenfold. To learn about the benefits of marketing automation, click here.
If you have any questions about how to generate B2B sales leads or would like to talk to a sales outsourcing representative about lead generation services, click here.
As a small business, you don’t have anywhere near the amount of resources to develop a marketing strategy as your large business and Fortune 500 competitors.
