• Inbound marketing
• Social media
• Lead nurturing and scoring
• Marketing scorecards
• Budgeting for results

During the coming year, we believe resourceful B2B marketers will embrace these trends in greater numbers as the recovering economy places a new emphasis on growth.

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Tiziani Whitmyre’s B2B clients also have had success using LinkedIn profiles and groups to build brand awareness and peer-to-peer validation. These companies are creating social media teams comprised of thought leaders that post high-value content to their LinkedIn networks as well as to followers on Twitter. It’s clear that social media is here to stay as a brand building resource, and B2B companies should develop plans that integrate these channels with their marketing programs.

For your reference, Website Magazine’s top 10 list of most-visited social media resources for the fourth quarter of 2009 were as follows:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. MySpace
4. Twitter
5. Flickr
6. Photobucket
7. LinkedIn
8. Digg
9. Ning
10. Yelp

• Lead acquisition
• Lead nurturing
• Measurement
• Optimization

B2B companies are demanding easy-to-implement marketing strategies that employ today’s powerful Internet-driven technologies to boost lead generation and accelerate sales conversion in highly measurable ways. The paper explains how best-practice companies have used the process to achieve dramatic results in capturing new prospects and building sales across a wide range of B2B markets. We’ve included two case studies to illustrate the process.

To download the paper, click here.

Inbound marketing is an exciting set of tactics that attracts prospects to your brand and company. This strategy includes Web site search engine optimization, Google Adwords, blogging, social media and networking (LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook) word of mouth (buzz), referrals, and interactive public relations. We call them inbound tactics because they do not target specific audiences with outbound stimuli or offers to generate responses. Prospects tend to find our messages as they search the Web, chat with colleagues, or network online. Brand recognition and acceptance are essential to successful inbound marketing, since the prospect is not directly incented to respond. With inbound marketing, we are joining a conversation, hoping our messaging will be discovered by the broad audience we want to influence. Inserting high-quality content into this discussion can prove highly effective in gaining attention and nurturing those that shape opinions.

Outbound marketing represents the power drill in the B2B tool kit. It includes the advertising (print and online), trade show, e-mail, direct response and traditional PR tactics that typically absorb most of the marketing budget. These vehicles incorporate brand/product messages and offers to heighten awareness and stimulate response. Outbound marketing campaigns are more easily focused on specific audiences and ensure exposure to large numbers of prospects. But this efficiency comes at much higher cost. With an outbound strategy, marketers are buying their way into the dialog, crashing the party with attention-getting messages to generate leads and build brand.

The Benefits
Inbound or outbound marketing? Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The leads generated from inbound marketing tend to be more highly qualified and convert to sales opportunities at dramatically greater rates (10% to 30%) than those from outbound tactics. They also come at lower cost. But outbound campaigns produce larger lead quantities, more consistent response rates, and far more brand impressions — albeit at higher cost.

Both strategies are essential elements of a winning marketing program. The engaging nature of inbound tactics is highly complementary to outbound marketing’s throw weight and firepower. We recommend clients spend from 20% to 30% of their budgets on inbound tactics to leverage the B2B buyers’ new proclivity for search, networking, and dialog.

Forrester’s Global CMO Recession Online Survey echoed this sentiment, revealing that marketing executives are enduring overall budget cuts of over 20% in 2009. The Forrester survey reports that marketing leaders are cutting back on traditional tactics and investing in digital channels such as Web sites, social media, and outbound e-mail campaigns.

But B2B publishers are beginning to take notice. “Penton will never again be overwhelmingly dependent on print advertising as it is unlikely to return to its historical highs,” said Sharon Rowlands, CEO of Penton Media. “Advertisers have so many more choices for their marketing campaigns today, ranging from live to online events, a variety of electronic products, sophisticated direct marketing, etc. Offering the full array of such media will be what will distinguish the B2B winners from the losers in the future.”

One bright spot is in the performance marketing category, where marketers only pay when a desired action is delivered. The Vertical Search Report 2009, published by Econsultancy and Convera, predicts that 78% of advertisers are planning to increase their spending on cost-per-action/acquisition programs this year. Two-thirds said they would increase budgets for cost-per-lead campaigns. Interest in these Internet-based programs is growing rapidly, since they offer little waste and deliver greater efficiency than traditional marketing campaigns.

• The wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions that has swept through the industry has created extreme branding challenges. (My observation is this is true in other B2B markets as well.)
• The deep global recession has forced marketers to search for new cost-effective and measurable forms of lead generation and demand creation
• The rapid introduction of new interactive technologies has overwhelmed many practitioners who are struggling with integrating these new tools into a strategic marketing process

The audience showed particular interest in several elements of our presentation that addressed these issues. Semaphore used an online performance-based advertising strategy to acquire leads in real time at highly cost-effective rates. In addition, they incorporated high-value content to stimulate prospect response. Our experience has shown that combining these two strategies has resulted in the acquisition of qualified leads in greater numbers and at cost-per-lead rates significantly lower than traditional marketing tactics.

Semaphore also embraced a disciplined brand development process that created a new global name and corporate identity. The brand was economically applied and implemented on a global basis and across all marketing initiatives. By coupling today’s highly efficient digital technologies and some unorthodox strategic thinking, launching a B2B brand on $250 per day now becomes a reality.

To request a copy of the Semaphore presentation, click here.

• 78% of the companies’ sales and marketing groups collaboratively define a qualified lead, the buying cycle, and the sales cycle (versus 37% of the laggards)
• 49% score and rank sales opportunities in their CRM systems by their intent to purchase (versus 14% of the laggards)

Lead lifecycle management is a strategic view of demand generation that creates a seamless process between marketing, sales, and service to maximize the quantity and quality of sales-ready opportunities.

The report identified three key areas where best-practice companies excel: prospect segmentation and targeting, lead nurturing, and lead scoring.

We’ve begun to see significant interest among our clients in the fundamental elements of lead lifecycle management — particularly at mid-market companies where sales and marketing tend to be more tightly integrated. Lead nurturing programs that include content development and outbound email marketing are relatively inexpensive and generate healthy returns on investment. When combined with lead scoring, these programs enable marketing to generate highly qualified prospects that have a demonstrated intent to buy. Lead lifecycle management helps close the gap between marketing and sales and implants a process that leads to greater demand generation and sales performance.

Download a copy of the Aberdeen report.

Recent statistics cited in Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing show that companies excelling at lead nurturing:

• Generate 50% more sales-ready leads at one-third lower cost per lead
• Reduce the number of marketing-generated leads that are ignored by sales (from as high as 80% to as low as 25%)
• Raise win rates on marketing-generated leads (7% points higher) and reduce “no decisions” (6% points lower)
• Have more sales representatives make quota (9% higher) and a shorter ramp up time for new reps (10% decrease)

In addition, a DemandGen Report says on average, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus nonnurtured leads.

As interactive marketing tools and analytics increase in capability, lead nurturing has become a highly cost-effective way to provide a strong tailwind for your selling efforts. A start-up program typically consists of several pieces of high-value content (white papers, case studies applications briefs etc.) and an inexpensive CRM database (such as TW Solutions’ LeadManager) integrated with an outbound email campaign manager. Today’s Web-centric buyers may not engage with your sales force until the last third of the purchasing process. Lead nurturing helps maintain your relationship with these buyers throughout the buying cycle.

Client 1 – New Technology Introduction
Faced with a limited budget, the company introduced new industrial technology through a 60-day targeted campaign of online ads. The ads offered a white paper that introduced how the technology could be applied in the market. The campaign was carried by two Web publishers. At a cost of $60 per lead, it generated the following results:

• Impressions 62,871
• Click-throughs 2,084
• Qualified leads 289
• Lead conversion rate 14%
• Total cost $17,340

The client reports that strong brand recognition was generated, lead quality and qualification were excellent, and numerous quotations resulted upon sales follow-up.

Client 2 – Life Sciences
A life sciences company tested the performance marketing approach to support its lead generation program. A 30-day campaign was launched that offered a scientific paper on FDA compliance for a specific type of laboratory testing. The test was run with one Web publisher. The company accepted only North American leads at a cost of $60 per lead.

• Impressions 12,029
• Click-throughs 409
• Qualified leads 68
• Lead conversion rate 17%
• Total cost $4,080

The cost per lead of the performance-based campaign was significantly lower than the client’s traditional adverting program and a decision was made to adopt this strategy for future lead generation.

Many publishers are now engaging with advertisers around a performance-based model. We believe it is an ideal strategy for B2B companies desiring real-time lead generation and demand creation.

• Your Web site’s age: If you have a new site, it will take longer to improve your rankings than an existing site. You can submit your site to Google, but it will only index your site if there are other sites linking to it. Also, you have to earn Google’s trust and prove you are not spammy. Google uses filters to weed out spam sites. So your new site won’t achieve higher rankings until you earn Google’s trust.
• Inbound links: If you have an older Web site with few inbound links, it will take longer to get your pages ranked by Google. Conversely, if you have many high-quality inbound links, higher rankings will come much quicker.
• Targeted keywords: The keyword phrases you select to optimize will play a major role in timing. If they are highly competitive, frequently trafficked keywords, higher rankings will require more optimization and inbound links and will take longer to attain. Start with specific keyword phrases that are highly descriptive of your business, experience some success, and then tackle the more competitive ones as your site achieves greater optimization.
• Competitors: Honestly evaluate your competitors for the keywords you select. If they have thousands of inbound links and hundreds of pages, it will be difficult to crack the top 10 if you have only few pages and a dozen links. Your choice is to wait until you have more links and optimized content to see results, or identify and optimize for other keyword phrases that are relevant to your products and services.

So how long does it really take? Our experience has shown that a new Web site that is well optimized and has a modest number of inbound links can see significant improvement in the rankings within 90 to 120 days for specific industry keyword phrases. Existing sites with a solid base of inbound links will show improvement faster – typically within 60 to 90 days. Cracking the top 10 will take longer, sometimes up to one year as you build the inbound links that are critical to search engine optimization success. And remember that higher rankings always drive increased Web site traffic from people who are searching specifically for your products and services.