Complete B2B Online Marketing

William Leake, Lauren Vaccarello, Maura Ginty

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118239186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Learn to take full advantage of search and social media for B2B marketing

Business-to-business marketers have been slow to enter the online marketing arena, but now that the impact of search and social media marketing in the consumer marketplace is clearly documented, B2B marketers are ready for a complete guide to making the most of the medium. Written by experts with first-hand knowledge of the field, this book clearly explains how to leverage today's search engine marketing and social media technologies to get, nurture, and convert leads. Topics include strategy, branding, monitoring, resource allocation, and much more.

• B2B marketers need detailed, practical guidelines and strategies for how best to gain, nurture, and convert leads using today's Internet technologies and strategies
• This ultimate how-to guide examines strategic and branding considerations, search engine optimization techniques, and how to maximize the impact of banner ads and landing pages
• Explains how to use social media listening and monitoring tools, how to engage visitors, and how to allocate resources to ensure success
• Covers measuring results, improving web site usability, using metrics, and nurturing leads

Skilled B2B marketers who are ready to take advantage of all that online marketing has to offer will find this guide provides exactly the know-how they need.

Chapter 1

Understanding B2B Online Marketing

Let’s face it: business-to-business (B2B) marketing is different. It is certainly different than those deal-of-the-day sites that popped up in 2010, multiplied like rabbits, and lurked around every corner in 2011. If you are tired of listening to case studies showing you how easy it is to increase sales on some ecommerce site or exhausted by going to webinars endlessly hawking some vendor’s wares while promising the moon, then this is the book for you.

We will cover what is crucial for today’s successful B2B marketer. We will show you how to market your business—a business with a complex and considered sales cycle—online. Say good-bye to irrelevant case studies and hello to practical information and real strategies you can apply to your business today, tomorrow, and one year from now.

Chapter Contents

• Why Online?
• B2B Is Different
• Developing Your Strategy
• How Online Reflects the Sales Funnel: Objectives and Measurement

Why Online?

You are a B2B marketer. Your sales happen over the course of months, not minutes, so you can just scrap this whole online marketing thing, right? Just segment your list, send off emails for lead nurturing, write killer collateral material for sales, attend some events, let your agency put together some dimensional mailer campaigns, and your job is done and your company makes money. Other books may tell you that, but if you follow their advice, then over time your competitors will be happy, but your bosses won’t be. The world of traditional lead generation (direct mail, email plus teleprospecting) is dead; it is time to embrace the changing, integrated marketing landscape, or you will be left behind.

Everyone—from the guy in the facilities management office to the CEO—uses the Internet to read, browse, surf, chat, and socialize, and online marketing is the tool to get in front of your audience. You want to get in front of them before they look for your product, while they are actively searching, and then when they need customer support.

We are here to tell you that not only is online marketing the most effective channel for B2B lead generation strategies at the top of your sales funnel: it applies to every stage of the prospect-to-customer life cycle, from establishing a brand to maintaining customer loyalty. Online marketing is also a great way to enhance and extend some of your more effective traditional marketing channels, such as events and PR.

Still not convinced you need online marketing? According to a recent study by AMR International, B2B online marketing spend is nearly double the percentage of budget from 2010 to 2012 (www.amrinternational.com/reports/b2b_online_marketing_in_the_united_states_assessment_and_forecast_to_2013). Although online marketing still may not take the lion’s share of most B2B organizations’ marketing budgets, it is quickly becoming a powerful force that complements traditional marketing and events and stands alone as an independent marketing vehicle for driving awareness, leading sales, and increasing the lifetime value of a customer. As marketing budgets tighten, executives are increasingly looking for better ways to measure returns on their spends and find ways to scale what works.

The value of online marketing isn’t just about the dollars in the market; it is about reaching business decision makers where they spend their time. First LinkedIn and now Facebook and Twitter have become prominent professional networking vehicles and places businesspeople look to their peers for best practices and advice. Social networks are no longer for your niece or your employees; your customers use social to research your product and to look for help. Imagine if you can use online marketing to connect with those customers at the moment they are researching or inquiring in social media. Now imagine that you can tie that tweet or Facebook status with a contact record in your CRM system. Not only is this possible, but it is increasingly the way your B2B peers are marketing their businesses.

Your Current Marketing Mix

So, now you’re convinced you need online marketing. You need to figure out where online marketing fits into your current marketing program. For optimal results, you must integrate and overlay online with the rest of your marketing. Far too many folks just add online marketing piecemeal into their mix like some sort of red-headed stepchild. Your online program shouldn’t be a separate channel. Online needs to be integrated into all facets of your marketing program, with everything you do to market your products: events, lead generation, advertising, PR, corporate communications, community, campaigns, and brand.

Does that sound goofy? Let’s think about events. A B2B company’s participation in large industry events is one of the most traditional forms of marketing and, if done right, can be very useful on its own. Large events can be the single biggest piece of many B2B companies’ marketing budgets. How do you inform people about your booth, interact with your salespeople, and turn the mediocre trade show experience into a home run? The answer (drum roll, please...) is to combine your events with an online strategy. Run a paid search campaign (we’ll get to the details in a few chapters) with keywords about the event, bid on the event’s brand name, and use online to generate awareness and interest in your show presence and drive people to stop by the actual booth.

During the event, run a mobile campaign geotargeting a five-mile radius around the event and further build awareness of your presence at the event and promote your cool giveaway. You want to encourage people to take action at an event, and online marketing can be that extra boost your event presence needs to hit your forecast numbers.

With the decline in attendance at many industry trade shows combined with the increase in competition, combining online with events is necessary; it is the first of many things you need to do to reach your prospects. Later in the book we’ll go more into detail about how online can increase the effectiveness of events, but for now we’ll give you a taste of what’s to come.

We all know the B2B sales cycle is long and complex, with many touches. We know marketing is often seen as a way to nurture people down that sales funnel. For larger deals, online marketing usually isn’t even a thought in the back of anyone’s head, let alone part of the overall mix. Field marketing is often the only group called in to help close those whales. They can go to a lead’s office, arrange peer dinners, and put a face on the company while augmenting sales.

Now, think of what can happen when you add online into the mix. Imagine a world where you can use retargeting to tag all of the key influencers of those top accounts and message those influencers as they browse third-party sites on the Web. Suddenly your company looks bigger; the influencers are now warmed up and introduced to your key features and benefits through a series of well-sequenced ads. Imagine you can offer them content, customer testimonials, and demo videos in these ads as well. Imagine when these key influencers ask questions about your products on social media; the sales team is alerted and immediately responds via the social web. All of this and much more is possible.

Online marketing can be a great complement to existing efforts within your marketing department. It’s time to bring the online team to the strategy sessions and the go-to marketing meetings.

Assessing the Value Proposition of Online

One less than charming characteristic of traditional B2B marketing is that historically many practitioners could be blissfully unaware of their own failures. The ROI of a brochure was never measurable, its impression count was delightfully never registered, and its engagement level was obscured. Low booth recruitment could be blamed on low overall event attendance, crappy exhibit organization, or even the skirt length of the booth staff.

However, every attribute of online marketing is becoming more measurable. You can calculate how much it cost to put something together, if it’s the bill of materials to construct a booth or the total print and translation costs of a brochure. Each of these costs can be measured against its goals, whether those goals are selling a product or getting more leads.

Yet attribution is a funny world. And tracking, though improving every quarter, is still a leaky bucket. A single event presence, brochure, or print ad could always be the very thing that stuck in someone’s memory and led to a paid search ad click, which led to a completed lead form and then the whole pipeline of measurable activity. Social media mentions and search engine terms prove that TV ads spur online activity.

That’s why the best form of attribution sets a value on each of these interactions, as opposed to valuing only the first or last click. When you set these values, you can also identify patterns—patterns against which you can refine your content and advertising. We’ll explore attribution modeling and metrics in more detail later in the book, but we want to get you thinking about assigning a monetary value to milestones through the buying cycle.

With all of this said, the effectiveness of online marketing is often discounted because it is so measurable and trackable. We give value to online only when we can directly quantify results, whereas we chalk up the impact of traditional marketing to so-called branding as if that is a way to justify countless spends. What if online marketing was more than just immediate clicks and short-term lead generation? What if you could use it to build brands and change the very infrastructure of the world we live in? Ask yourself this: if social media can take down governments, why can’t it create value for a B2B brand?

B2B Is Different

In B2B, we frequently like to wear our complexities on our sleeves. We make complex stuff for complexity-trained workers in complicated industries. It takes more than a little training to use what we sell. And to add to the mix, we as marketers often have no idea what in the hell we’re actually shilling. Our core competency is, after all, in marketing and not in product development or sales. Our customers, at the core, are never really as obtuse and inscrutable as they seem, either. They want something that functions well to make their job easier. They don’t like the complications any more than we do. But their necks are on the line. Their career is riding on the purchase decisions that they make. So, like the human sheep that we are, our customers, the B2B decision makers, hide in the herd, often because of fear of being wrong.

Trying a new frozen food for dinner carries a small degree of risk. If you don’t like your choice, you just wasted $3.99. Filling out a lead form for a million-dollar business product could mean success, or it could mean countless calls from salespeople, endless emails from marketers, or—even worse—a failed product launch costing you your reputation or even your job. As B2B marketers, a large part of our jobs is to alleviate fear.

Building B2B Confidence

To minimize the my-neck-is-on-the-line factor, business decisions in the B2B universe are usually made by small-to-medium-sized groups, rather than by a solo decision maker, which is most common in B2C. These groups can be as few as four people or more than a baker’s dozen, with the average varying by up to six to seven people from country to country. This decision-making committee comprises people who know how to use the product at hand and those who will never interact with it. The users and the nonusers often have equal weight in the decision, and in some cases the nonusers actually are the decision makers.

You will need different messaging to persuade the different members of this decision-making committee that your product is the best choice for their needs. At the core of this persuasion is establishing a strong brand, which you can do through various tactics online; we detail online branding heavily in Chapter 2, “Building a B2B Brand Online.”

start feature

---

Note: Never underestimate the power of a strong brand.

---

end feature

This lumbering committee takes months if not years to come to a business decision. In the meantime, they will research. They will diagram. They will create flowcharts. A seemingly endless tome of PowerPoint and Excel documents must be created and circulated. Rounds of RFPs and evaluations may take place. Criteria, both sensible and irrelevant, will be constructed and reconstructed. Plus, you’ll be attempting to reach to the emotions and rationales of an inconsistent group as they slow-motion their way to a multimillion-dollar decision that will apply to their business for two to ten years.

How you address these groups also varies by the type of company. Cateri...