Join the club. A recent Marketingprofs survey among B2B Marketeers reveals that ‘producing engaging content’ today is their biggest challenge. ‘Contagious content’ is indeed another Marketing buzzword. But a crucial one if you want your company to stand out in a 2.0 information era! Have you managed to convert from a push to a pull lead generation strategy?
How does the quality of content impact your business
Traditional patterns have changed, sales no longer being the primary source of information to your prospects. Information today is everywhere and buyers go looking for it out there. It is precisely Marketing’s role to make sure that suitable and catchy content is available for potential customers in every phase of their buying cycle, right at the places where they expect to find it. Educate the market through contagious content and make sure your company will be top of mind as soon as potential clients get ready to buy. How will engaging content impact your business?
- Become a thought leader
- Drive web traffic
But most important:
- Lower your lead generation cost and boost the amount of qualified sales leads
- Improve the activity rate of sales
- Increase the hit-rate
Creating value content: where to start
A few guidelines to get started creating demand through content:
- Contagious content is in no way commercial
Don’t write about products and features, nor about yourself. Educate your market and start a conversation
- Write on topics that the greater part of your prospects will embrace
Focus on challenges that your target audience will find interesting, skipping niche topics
- Write as an advisor
Make sure all content will provide actual solutions to your prospects’ business challenges
Put yourself in their shoes and feel your buyers’ pain!
- Prove the case
Make sure to prove your point through customer references and statistics
- Keep in mind that buyers go through different phases when buying
No shop owner will be interested in the looks or features of your pay terminal before he even considered he needs one! Make sure potential buyers find content to suit their needs in any of their buying stages
One of our customers saw a 28% increase in qualified leads over a period of 6 months after changing the way they comunicate. Looking forward to reading about your challenges and results with content driven demand creation!
The way people buy has changed dramatically through Internet and globalization. Prospects are spending more time on the Web doing independent research, obtaining information from their peers and other third parties. Companies are therefore meeting prospective buyers earlier than ever. What are the implications for marketing and sales?
Sales & Marketing can no longer afford to operate as departments that happen to work for the same company. Whereas many organisations have been trying to create alignment for the past 15 years, I have seen very little improvement. Here are some continuing statements, despite all efforts:
- Marketing is not delivering sales-ready leads, says sales. Sales is not following up on leads, says marketing
- Marketing is spending a lot of money but does not measure ROI
- Sales has very little impact on marketing spend and vice versa
- We are unable to sell value over price. We are unable to differentiate ourselves in the market
Let it be clear that sales-marketing alignment has failed. So it’s more than time to start looking at a new approach of Buyer aligned collaboration. What does it take to implement Buyer aligned collaboration?
- Convert your marketing campaigns into continuous conversational marketing
- Take control by marketing a vision (in role and pain-based messages) for each of your segments
- Adapt your language to readiness to buy and use lead-scoring based on the same foundation
- Involve sales to double check on readiness to buy & let them decide when time is right to take over from marketing
- Measure and benchmark all activities along the buying cycle and implement incremental improvements
In practice that means: increase revenue performance by making the buying cycle the centre of your corporate universe. Apart form synchronising Sales & Marketing targets, here are a few tips to make a start maximising Lead Development in your company:
- The buying cycle is key for every action taken by Sales & Marketing!
- Marketing develops sales ready deliverables synchronised with the readiness to buy
- Implement a tool to help track your prospects’ readiness to buy (assuring company wide acceptance)
- Product input is problem based, not feature based
- Use CRM to track the above, as a pragmatic cross-departmental tool. Correct information is more vital than lots of it.
Just remember: you can no longer neglect the buyer if you want to make a difference in today’s market!
Looking forward to reading your comments.
Part II of my blogpost on how to be a topnotch B2B marketer.
It’s amazing how time flies when I see how long it took to find the time to finalize the second part.
Yet it was worth waiting since I’ve been involved in 2 change projects at the same time where I could practice my previous blog and can deliver this post with 2 recent cases incorporated.
10 must do’s: (Part II, 6 -10): post with must do’s 1-5
- Build an experience sharing platform: It’s amazing to see how much information and experience stays underutilized and leaves the company with former employees. An experience sharing platform, ideally, managed my marketing is pivotal to leverage, study and optimize the best practices. Sales-marketing alignment is the immediate result. The platform consists of a small set of sales-ready deliverables which are kept up to date per segment and key-contact in the buying process of prospects and customers. Regular sales meetings with best practice sharing and assisted by marketing are the starting point. Ask your sales to send a blackberry style email with the summary of meetings (especially on pains, challenges and capabilities) and make sure marketing has access to that information in order to keep the best practice up to date.
- Facilitate market ready innovation: The information gathered during the visits by marketing (see post with must do’s 1-5) and aforementioned internal meetings will deliver a wealth of information to help inform and educate R&D and product management on market needs and what they should be capable of doing. I’m still surprised to see how R&D, product- marketing and management are limited in their view and understanding of the market because sales is translating customer needs in features themselves leading to the battle of prioritizing development on the product roadmap. On the contrary of what they think at a first glance, R&D and product marketing/management will be able to be creative and innovative to an unprecedented level because they will understand the native customer environment.
- Educate your internal customers: Increase the value of the marketing department by playing a pivotal role in all communication from and to the market. Keep the following up to date:
- win/loss reasons by calling key decision makers per deal yourself a couple of weeks after a decision has been taken. Assemble those winning and losing buying criteria per supplier;
- best practice per segment and key-contact and use it as a base platform to streamline interdepartmental communication;
- prioritised market pain/capability area’s for which the product should be upgraded.
- This will enable you to monitor proposed product upgrades and new versions in terms of competitiveness and hit-rate thanks to a better coverage of market needs.
- It will also enable you to focus your external market education to a group of prospects who are seeking your leadership.
- Implement a lead nurturing program: You main mission next to the management of the experience sharing platform deliverables and educating internal customers is to deliver ‘real’ sales ready leads. The only ROI based approach is to start communicating with your targeted market on a continuous basis with ‘role-based’ messaging. Meaning language adapted to the specific role in the company of each of the different contacts involved in the decision making process. also see: necessity of lead nurturing
- Measure and communicate: Make sure you can measure most if not all of the marketing activities. It will help you to communicate progress on all these area’s. Some of the mentioned points might be quit heavy change projects and thus will take time, patience and continuous improvement. This is the best way to ensure a large enough budget to accomplish all of the 10 must do’s.
Have fun implemeting the 10 rules to be a topnotch B2B marketer and keep me posted on experience and/or challenges.
In today’s world people are using the Internet to research and get smart even before they are willing to see a sales rep.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that a B2B marketer is using all tools at his/her disposal to educate the market in the early stages of the buying cycle. Doing so, should enable you to influence your target market based on your strengths. The prospect should seek your leadership by the time they’re willing to see a sales rep.
Being top of mind and perceived as being ‘different’ requires lead nurturing in which the Internet plays an important role.
Your website needs to combine the following:
- of course the traditional features and benefits but also deliver pain-based an educational content
- explain the impact of your solution and the capabilities it will enable for the customer
- explain the problem and capabilities looked from the different impacted roles in a organization. Have a look at the Protime (HR solution) website to see an example of role-based information
- the ‘about us’ should include the value proposition to your specific targeted market
- use compelling personalized landing pages in combination with email marketing in order to attract traffic to your website.
People will stay longer on your website, visit more pages and support your queeste to be perceived as a thought leader.
2 final notes:
- Use search engine optimization in order for prospects to find your content via search engines
- Make sure you balance the goal of capturing contact information and the risk of capturing up to 75% less registrations. So ask only the ‘really’ necessary information. You should also give the basic information without registration in order to allow search engines to find your content.
More than ever, this generation experiences the world as a rafting trip rather than a rowing-contest. This makes it impossible to tackle problems one at a time. A holistic approach, adapted to the specific environment, is the best way to a lasting solution. The marketing field is no different.
I see more and more companies seeking salvation in isolated short term plan of actions. Unfortunately these will only keep them out of the danger zone for a short while. Typical examples are: searching new target markets, one-off lead generation efforts hoping to find prospects that are ready to buy. This last one is a typical returning strategy in an attempt to find the famous needle in the hay-stack (lead generation).
Furthermore, today, more than ever, we have a multitude of tools and -techniques at hand. Numerous studies, amongst others the study delivered by the Aberdeen Group , have shown that optimal ROI can only be reached by using the correct mix of tools at all times.
Let me drill down on this new method of influencing your target market based on your own strengths (LEAD-NURTURING) rather than using lead-generation as a means of attracting new business. Lead nurturing means entering into a 1:1 conversation, on a continuous basis, with decision makers in your target market. This means communicating about the pains and the possible solutions your products and services can offer to solve these pains looked at it from the viewpoint of each decision-maker. The most common channels to market for lead nurturing are: email, website, blogs, whitepapers, documentation, speeches, 3rd party articles, follow-up by phone, webinars, podcasts.
Let me emphasize the most important advantages:
- The number of qualified leads will be at least doubled
- Cost of sales will be lower because your prospects will specifically seek your strengths
- Average revenue per order will be 57% higher (see Aberdeen study)
- Salespeople will succeed in winning more deals
- Next to your product-differentiation, your sales approach will also differentiate you
- A higher ROI of your marketing investments.
- Furthermore, these methods are cheaper than traditional promotional and advertizing campaigns.
Important to note is that the ROI is directly linked to the level in which you succeed to be perceived different. In order words: be different from your competitors instead of trying to be better.
Find more info on the Perpetos website:
To close off, some practical tips:
- Adapt the content of your message to the buying mindset of your prospect (meaning: Being interested, probably needing your solution or in the process of evaluating different suppliers)
- Define your product/market combinations directly linked to your your product-differentiation
- Make sure your website is optimized with the correct web key words (Search Engine Optimization – SEO). The website content must use language for all three mental stages
- Make use of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) to attract more traffic to your website
- Initiate a company blog. This is the ideal way to communicate with your customers and prospects. Don’t communicate about your products and services
- Use personalized landing pages to your website in emails. These will allow you to get more information about the click-behavior and the interests of each individual person
A step by step implementation of the above combined with follow-up by phone and email will guarantee your ROI.
Good Luck!
