Content marketing attracts and engages prospects at each stage of the buying process.
With the rise of social media, many “traditional” online marketing tools have fallen out of the spotlight in the glamorous new world of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Marketers scramble to discuss the latest marketing campaigns that can be implemented with social media.
However, email marketing is one of the marketing tools that should be discussed in earnest. Email marketing is still useful and has its place in the modern B2B marketer’s repertoire.
Designing and launching a B2B sales campaign is a continuous activity for B2B sales and marketing teams. To illustrate this, we developed a Closed-Loop Marketing Architecture that describes the continuous campaign process. Data insights help determine the new customer messaging and personalized interactions resulting in better sales conversions. The process tightly aligns marketing and sales teams to orchestrate buyer engagement at each stage and maximize lead conversions and ultimately revenue impact. Data and insights from past campaigns drive new segmentation and new messaging, spawning new campaigns.
A campaign involves the design, launch and optimization of experiences across multiple channels. It will engage customers and prospects at each stage of the buying lifecycle. So what are the elements in an effective B2B campaign design? These 10 questions can help cover the bases for your next B2B sales campaign.
You have implemented marketing automation and you are generating some inbound leads. Great! You have uploaded a database of contacts and these represent even more potential ‘leads’ (in the system). Now you need to manage all these leads. How do you convert them into subscribers and real sales leads?
Of course, only a handful of leads are likely to become MQLs – Marketing Qualified Leads ready for sales engagement. Also, sales will likely want to send some MQLs back to marketing for more nurture. You need an approach to manage all the leads and contacts in your marketing database and start to nurture them into sales ready MQLs.
How do you set up a lead nurture program to generate more MQLs?
The answer is simple segmentation. Tackle this in three simple steps:
1. Define your buyer personas. Start with a few (3-4 perhaps) and build from there if needed. Personas could represent your typical economic buyer, technical buyer, business decision maker and influencer. Focus on personas that would likely value different types of content and messaging from you at a different cadence. Some marketing automation solutions will automatically generate lists based on the persona and corresponding drop down self-selection fields that new prospects can complete to self select one of these persona segments.
2. Define your custom fields. This is an important step to ensure the database has the parameters you need based on your specific business. Of course, the more data fields you track, the greater the segmentation options, but the harder it is to maintain and complete profiles for each contact. Data fields (custom and standard) may include things like business function, industry segment, personal contact status, interest areas, client status, partner, analyst, consultant, etc. You can also use existing analytics, like behaviors (interests) and lifecycle stage to help further create target segments and lists. All these existing and custom fields will allow you to build highly targeted lists for nurture campaigns and sales focus.
3. Build a matrix of segments to nurture campaigns. Now you can create a set of segments using the personas and appropriate custom fields. These segments can each receive different engagement campaigns. Campaigns can be set up along the customer journey; for example awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage campaigns. Another campaign archetype could be general company news and updates. Build your matrix to define which segments gets which campaigns and agree this with the sales team.
Now that you have the database set with personas and custom fields, you can run queries and build targeted lists for specific sales / marketing campaigns and follow-up. Of course, the process between marketing and sales must be highly collaborative. You can answer a range of queries that may trigger a targeted campaign or sales prospecting follow-up, e.g.:
Contact us know if you want to discuss nurture strategies in greater detail.
The promise of Account Based Marketing (ABM) is to increase sales success by coordinating marketing and sales efforts for target accounts. The ABM concept is a departure from mass marketing that casts wide nets with generic messages. Instead, with ABM, marketing tailors messages to each targeted prospect account, making marketing activities more efficient to help sales close more business. More tailored experiences mean relevant information for each account and a greater likelihood that potential buyers find the information they’re looking for, speed through the initial stages of the buying cycle, and become ready to be contacted,nurtured, and converted.
To ‘Feed the Content Beast’ seems to be a constant struggle for B2B marketers and businesses selling high consideration products/services and oftentimes a lengthy buying cycle.
Yet it’s essential to educate and enable prospects to self-sell at their own pace. Moreover firms, with content resources and associated campaigns enabled by an integrated technology stack, can capture, track and nurture those interested prospects to marketing qualified or sales accepted leads and hand off to sales for 1:1 selling. The rub: quality content assets and tools are required throughout the buyer journey as well as the customer journey and building a comprehensive content program can be daunting.
The focus on Account Based Marketing and it’s requirements has ignited a range of discussions and specialized B2B and ABM technologies and processes. For companies that are selling to accounts, the strategies associated with ABM are well understood, yet the technologies are still evolving. At first blush, you might think that a closed-loop marketing architecture doesn’t apply to B2B and account-based marketing. Closed Loop Marketing is data and insight-driven. It clearly works for B2C and high-volume campaigns. Yet, how does CLM apply to a highly relationship-centric account-based marketing focus?
Actually, closed-loop marketing is a core foundation for effective Account Based Marketing / ABM.
Imagine a marketing and sales team working in perfect harmony, seamlessly passing qualified leads from one department to the next. This ideal scenario is made possible through the Closed Loop Marketing Architecture (CLMA), a data-driven approach that aligns teams, optimizes processes and drives revenue growth.
Corporations with complex, high-consideration sales are often accused of 
focusing on the short-term, which is inevitably reflected in their demand generation or campaign strategy. This generally means that marketing and sales are not aligned and operating to some degree as silos. With short-term horizons, the campaign communications focus tends to be on sales driven, tactical programs designed to seek out “hot leads”.
In the highly competitive, complex B2B sales world with longer sales cycles, this is not fully sustainable. There is a typically a sales team or committees of savvy buyers. A short term focus may eke out some leads, but what about the other leads who may with some nurturing turn out to be qualified opportunities — but not yet “sales-ready.” The modern buyer knows your product or service from what is readily available on the web and related sources and will be considering any number of options before making a decision.
Studies show that 50% of leads are qualified but aren’t immediately ready to buy something from you [Source: Gleanster Research]. With lead nurturing however, you can bring those leads through your sales funnel and garner 4-10 times the response rate compared to a regular email blast while doing it [Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report].
So where do you start?
Many consider writing a blog post a daunting task. The structure needs to be clear and the writing needs to be persuasive.
It does not need to be a daunting task! A blog post can be drafted quickly using a structured persuasive communications approach.
So, how can you write a blog post effectively…..quickly?
The answer is to use Persuasive Communications and Top-Down Thinking!
How?
Begin with a single persuasive message and follow a proven ‘top-down’ structure: S-C-Q-A!
As we know, several factors fundamentally differentiate B2B from B2C. B2B (Business-to-Business) sales are transactions between business entities and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) sales is where businesses sell to consumers.
Typically B2B sales are complex and considered. Evaluation and decision making follows multiple stages of learning and evaluation. B2B sales cycles are longer and purchases typically have higher dollar volumes and higher risk. B2B is often characterized by team selling to committee buying. Decisions involve various stakeholders and influencers including economic buyers, solution users, procurement specialists, domain experts, etc. B2B buyers self sell. Sales teams are no longer the single source of product information and benefits. Education has shifted to the web where buyers search products and ‘self-sell’.
The buying and selling process is fundamentally different in B2B and marketing and sales must work well together around the customer buying process. Content needs to be multi-stage and mapped across the buy-sell cycle. It must include a spectrum of TOFU (top of the funnel), MOFU (middle of the funnel) and BOFU (bottom of the funnel) content. Content for B2B is typically less emotional and more educational. It includes value propositions and product facts. Qualification is more important in B2B as the cost and of sales is high so it is important that sales teams are focused on the qualified opportunities. Marketing and sales teams must collaborate on the qualification process and lead nurturing is more important. The cycle for B2B is elongated and complex and buyers decide when they engage with sales.
When you design your B2B revenue strategy, consider these 7 attributes.
1. Use the right set of performance metrics.
Measurement focus in not just about lead generation and vanity web metrics, it is about a tangible focus on pipeline and revenue impact.
2. Segment your markets and tailor the messages.
Segmentation and clean data is critical in B2B marketing. Campaigns for new acquisition and cross selling are driven by predictive analytics.
3. Design and launch integrated campaigns
B2B campaign design is complex and follows a variety of buy-sell paths. Campaigns can be automated and driven by business rules. Marketing Automation is a critical enabler.
4. Maintain a solid digital experience across web and social.
The website continues to be a marketing and sales hub for B2B and social media amplifies your impact and visibility.
5. Use the right revenue technology including Marketing Automation, CRM, Data Management and Business Intelligence.
The role of revenue technology, including Marketing Automation, CRM, Data Management and Business Intelligence is prominent in B2B. Closed the marketing and sales loop.
6. Take advantage of content marketing across the cycle.
The inbound marketing model relies on compelling, search visible and tailored content across the buyer process.
7. Build your selling excellence.
Of course the effectiveness and capability of the sales team is paramount in complex B2B sales.