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.
by gabriel_sales | Jul 26, 2013
The fast-paced nature of today’s B2B sales world has some marketer’s heads spinning trying to figure out the best ways to find and qualify b2b sales leads. Tips, trends and industry reports all say the same thing in regards to inbound B2B lead gen: B2B content marketing is king and you need to post content constantly.
Most successful marketers are already doing this. But, we all want more leads.
Here are 3 seemingly insignificant things you might be doing that are costing you leads:
- You content isn’t mobile-friendly.
53% of Americans now own smartphones and time spent on mobile devices is growing. A lot of B2B clients scroll through their social media feeds on their phone while their kids are at soccer practice or read blogs on their iPad in bed. If your content isn’t compatible on mobile devices, you are essentially giving these customers to your competition.
2. Your CEO/Executives are silent on social media.
82% of companies say they trust a company more when the CEO and/or executive team communicate via social media. This means that if you’ve hired a copywriter or social media manager to create all of your social media content, you might be losing credibility. People looking to make a B2B purchase want to know about the people they will be buying from or working with. By having your CEO tweet or write a blog article every now and then, you can make your company seem more human and trustworthy. You can even copy the way Obama does it. He has someone else posting the majority of his tweets, but when one comes from him directly, he signs it “-bo.”
3. You aren’t using hashtags on Facebook.
A year ago, using hashtags on Facebook would likely make you the brunt of some social-media-savvy jokes. However in June 2013, Facebook incorporated hashtags into their system, and you can now use hashtags to help you classify information with short keywords. Your B2B prospects can also find you by searching particular hashtags, just like on Twitter. This means that if you aren’t hashtagging on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, you aren’t doing everything you can to find new leads using social media.
For more information on B2B sales lead gen or how to improve sales, download our white paper on “The New Rules of Seilling & Buying in 2013” here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jul 18, 2013
A landing page is where your prospect ends up after they have clicked on a link from a search engine or search engine ad. If you get someone to click on your website, that’s great. But, the goal at the end of the day is to convert and close deals, so if your landing page can’t do that, it isn’t worth much.
Your landing page has to be engaging enough that prospects want to stay long enough to get your full message. Graphics and a nice design will help, but the content is what keeps people interested.
Here are three tips for how to create a successful landing page for B2B Demand Generation:
- Have something to offer everyone.
If someone clicked on one of your links, it is likely they have interest in what you do. However, someone clicking on your link may not know much about your line of work, as they are very early in the buying cycle. Having broad and general educational content readily available will not only appease your prospects’ curiosity, it will increase the chances of those prospects coverting to sales qualified. For example, if you answer the question “What is Business Management Planning” for someone, they are likely to remember you when they realize they need that service themselves.
2. Be specific, too.
No, we aren’t contradicting ourselves; your landing pages need to be both broad and specific. Using the “above the fold/below the fold” format works well for us. Here is an example. While your early stage prospects need light educational content, some prospects are much closer to buying. You need to offer them something too.
As can be seen in our example, above the fold of the landing page is content that is more general. Below the fold are several tabs, each with a more specific subject. You can segment the tabs in many ways to further engage prospects and move them down the sales pipe. For example, you can have tabs that read, “How We’re Different,” “Success Stories,” and “Pricing”. Each of these tabs will help your prospects with their buying decision and simultaneously help you understand where they are in their buying cycle.
3. Tell people what to do.
The best way to get prospects to do what you want them to on your landing page is to just tell them. Do you want them to call you? Then say, “Call Today!” in big letters with your phone number. Do you want them to download something? Say, “Download this white paper to learn XYZ.” If you want them to educate themselves, say “For more educational content, click here.”
The simpler you make it for your prospects, the longer they will stay on your landing pages and the more they will like you. So, avoid the complex and flashy sales pitches and just say what you mean.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jul 15, 2013
“You need to post on Facebook at least twice a day.”
“If you aren’t blogging weekly, your SEO will slip.”
“You should be holding webinars once or twice a month.”
“You need to offer a new white paper every quarter.”
If you do a Google search for B2B marketing content development, you’ll likely find tips like the ones above. As a startup company or a company with a small staff, keeping up with all of the different types of marketing content you need to create can be overwhelming and exhausting.
It may seem like you need a whole staff of copywriters and marketers to keep up with the constant demands of marketing content production. However, we believe if you know how to repurpose B2B marketing content to share across platforms, your workload decreases dramatically.
While none of the above tips are hard and fast rules for marketing today (although they are all good ideas), what they illustrate is the need to consistently reach your prospects in the way they want to be reached. Some people are Facebook addicts while others still love well-written white papers. So you need to offer both, and then some.
The good news is you don’t have to come up with completely new b2b marketing content for each marketing medium. By quickly and easily converting one form of digital marketing into another, you can push the same messaging and content through all of your marketing channels.
Here is an example:
To start, write a white paper. Let’s say the white paper is called “The 10 Things You Need to Succeed in 2013”.
Then, take that white paper and turn it into 10 short blog posts, each one about one of the “things” you need to succeed.
If you are able to produce live video, have one of your senior executives stand in front of a white board and go over each of the 10 points. Then, chop that video into 10 separate videos to post on your YouTube channel.
You can also take your white paper and turn it into a Powerpoint presentation. You can then share the Powerpoint presentation online on places like Slideshare and the ‘presentations’ section of LinkedIn. Using software like Camtasia, you can also turn your slide show presentation into a video to share on YouTube or Wistia.
If you were to do all this, you would have a white paper, 10 blog posts, 10 ‘live-action’ videos, a slideshow presentation and a slideshow video. That amounts to 22 digital content marketing assets to share with your prospects—all coming from a single white paper.
You can then push those 22 assets out over your social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google ) on whatever type of schedule you chose. By varying your messaging in social media posts to highlight different features of each asset, you can tweet or post the same piece of content multiple times.
Hopefully this example has shown you that repurposing b2b marketing content and the mediums to reach prospects does not have to be overwhelming. By leveraging the same messaging or theme throughout multiple digital platforms, you will be able to ensure you can reach your customers in their preferred content-consumption format.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
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.
