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B2B Online Marketing Guide:
5 Critical Principles
best practice guide
. Increase the quantity and quality of your leads. Track, measure, & analyze for true ROI . Stretch your marketing dollarsTop B2B marketing Challenges
Where is Business-to-Business Marketing Headed? So, if you are a B2B marketer with a need for better lead genera-tion, relationship management, or tracking (or, more likely, all Over the past ten years, as online options have increased 100 fold, three), what are the critical factors you should consider?the world of B2B marketing has reinvented itself-several times. In order to be competitive, particularly in the Web 2.0 environment, First of all, remember that tried and true B2C tactics may not businesses have to be ahead of the trends. According to the Direct necessarily work. Taking a strategy that's worked well in the Marketing Association, by 2008 online marketing efforts will be the consumer world doesn't generally translate into business audience dominant media for business-to-business initiatives. Think about success. For example, consumers are often motivated by impulse that: traditional direct mail, industry print, and events and promo- or status-clearly emotional triggers. If they make the wrong deci-tions will take a back seat to more efficient and sophisticated online sion, at worst they've wasted their money. A business prospect, on efforts. A Forrester Research study in 2005 indicates that by 2008, the other hand, will spend far more time researching the product online marketing will be more ubiquitous than anything except in- or service, weighing the risks and implications, and looking for person events (including sales calls). possible alternatives. The easier you make it for them to get this information, the more likely they are to respond favorably. There B2B Trends-Marketing Tactics are generally several decision makers or influencers involved, so the initial "researcher" needs to have information readily available to "sell" everybody else in the decision making path. So give them the depth and breadth of information they are likely to need, and make it easy for them to close the sale on their end.
Steps to Successful Online B2B Efforts
1. Better Lead Generation
One of the most common mistakes businesses make is jumping in to a program without fully defining the relevant key performance indicatiors (KPIs). If you think that the most important KPI is the number of leads generated, your VP of Sales thinks it's the conver-sion rate of leads to sales, and your CFO thinks it's the overall CPL, how will your company define success? An age-old rule of direct A quick look at business buying behavior underscores the impor- marketing is even more important when talking about online lead tance of online marketing efforts. According to CMO Council/ generation-all leads are not created equal. If you treat them like KnowledgeStorm, more than 45% of all B2B decision makers spend they are, you are doomed from the beginning. That's why a suc-five or more hours every week researching product and service information. They're attracted by the ease of access and availabil- B2B Key Performance indictorsity, and breadth and depth of the information they can consume almost instantaneously. For most of them, their online research begins with a search engine. Perhaps most telling of all, 89% of business users and IT professionals state that online content has a moderate to major impact on their vendor preference and selection. Clearly, for B2B marketers, the ability to provide easily accessible, relevant, and in-depth information has never been greater.
But along with the opportunities come the challenges. For most marketers, those challenges are centered on lead generation, cus-tomer relationships, and measuring results more accurately.
1.888.722.7000 | www.omniture.com Page cessful lead generation model will rely on multiple KPIs to keep the website, or for each prospect. A successful program will slot these program focused and effective-and to keep you from wasting time events into your contact strategy with a defined, appropriate action and money on leads that just don't matter. Spend some time deter- at each one. mining what your most important-and most actionable- KPIs will be, understand the interaction between the KPIs, and then use that bb-complex buying cycleinformation to help you prioritize your leads.
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