B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Fast fixes for B2B marketing in a sour economy

August 21st, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

These are somewhat scary times at some B2Bs.  Despite expert advice about becoming more aggressive in a downturn (some of it summarized in our posting “B2B Marketing in a Recession”), their top management is more inclined to be cutting marketing expense than approving increased spending.  Leads are harder to come by and taking noticeably longer to close.

All these things make it a good time to do something fairly uncommon in the headlong rush of better times, which is to take a critical look at your marketing and fix some of those deficiencies that were ignored – with little or no penalty – back in the salad days.  Fortunately, along comes a nifty research-based webinar from MarketingSherpa titled, “Top 10 B-to-B Marketing FastFixes: How to Generate & Nurture More Qualified Leads” (that’s the slide set, with audio available here).  As usual, we’ll encourage you to check out the full presentation, and will discuss only selected points here.

Measurement.  When the phones are ringing and it’s impossible to chase all the leads, it’s easy for results measurement to slide off the to-do list.  But in times like these, it becomes critical… both to protect spending that you “know” is worthwhile, and to ensure that the highest-return vehicles are getting the proper priority.

Follow-up and nurturing.  Suddenly every lead is precious.  If you send an auto-response, be sure it’s engaging;  if you’re not sure, try running a mini-survey.  Be sure there are no leaks between lead capture and your nurturing program.  When new leads are harder to come by, those already in your database should receive increased focus and TLC.  You might also revisit with Sales the trigger points that indicate when to initiate phone contact;  there may be a good case for starting to call prospects just a bit sooner than you would in better times.

Rework optimization.  If you haven’t tweaked your website’s SEO for a year or so, it’s likely that good leads are drifting to competitors.  Why? …because search engines revise their algorithms, and the search terms your prospects use change, too.  You really need to go back through the whole recipe:  check your site analytics to discover the terms prospects are using to find your site; use a keyword analysis tool to find similar phrases; re-optimize your site for those relevant phrases; and make sure they get used in your ongoing content development.

Try a quiz.  More visitors than you might think – most especially engineers and IT types – enjoy showing off their knowledge, even just to an anonymous quizmaster.  You’ll capture their contact info as they register to win the high-score premium.  You can seed the quiz with some research questions that could inform part of a planned white paper.  In addition to just a homepage button, try promoting the quiz on your blog, via the company-standard email auto-sig, and/or via Adwords.

Try using snail-mail again.  What?! …a Web marketing company advocating other than online marketing vehicles?  Thing is, email has shifted so much volume away from direct mail that you’re now almost certain to get noticed by using the latter;  and it won’t be lost on your recipients that you chose to spend more to put this particular message in their hands.

For assistance with finding and fixing any holes in your marketing program, you may want to check in with your online marketing consultants.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Internet Marketing