Posts Tagged ‘B2B’

B2B Needs a Digital Touch

June 1 2009

The trick to marketing metrics today is a digital touch point. Adapted traditional media is an easy-to-measure marketing medium, as long as you go digital.

Send a coupon to drive in-store traffic, then count coupons and calculate your ROI. Easy. Send a coupon for your online store, then count visitors and buyers to calculate ROI.

Rent a billboard and post a huge, easy-to-remember URL, then count site visitors and calculate ROI. Rent a person and put them on a street corner with a big sign and easy-to-remember URL, then count site visitors and calculate ROI.

billboard

The digital touch point is the to ticket quick metrics and ROI calculations. You can spend thousands, even millions automating your marketing programs across digital touch points, but for most that is overkill.

Today’s B2B marketing programs are smaller, more agile and highly targeted. If not, you’re throwing money away. Whether you go to a trade show, send direct mail, host a seminar, or buy placement in industry pubs, the key to all of these is a unique URL and some basic math.

Make sure your marketing has a different URL for every program you’re running, every magazine, every billboard, trade show, mailer or radio spot. This will tell you half the story by revealing the impact of each marketing media. The next metric takes more time, a better database and some elbow grease.

To calculate ROI you’ll have to decide, “Do I include sunk resource costs?,” or “Can we track one person across all digital touch points?” Rough numbers are better than no numbers, so don’t be afraid to spit ball.

If you go to a trade show and no one noticed, it’s probably time to spend that money elsewhere. You might be afraid to find out just how much a trade show costs. We hear the same story all the time. “I have to go to the trade show, because my competition will be there.” Your customers can’t afford to travel, so you and your competitors end up eyeballing each other’s booths. “It’s networking,” how do you capture the return on that investment?

tradeshow

Save your gas money. Go virtual. Find new and unique ways to grab attention and hold it. We use personalized microsites to do just that and at the end of the day our customers able measure the impact of our program. The same may not be true of your other marketing spend.

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B2B: You Help, Help Me

April 22 2009

One carefully misspelled marketing concept coined here at VLG seeks to shed light on today’s marketing/advertising hysteria. Dialog Marketing is best described as sales enablement and best suited for B2B marketing.

Sales support remains the most important job for marketers. With all the distractions marketers face on the social media front, they can’t forget about sales. Sure sales would be quick to throw marketing under the bus, but sometimes it’s with good reason. (These two groups speak different languages, so look for excerpts from our Selling-Marketing Dictionary in the near future.)

In the meantime, let’s first take a look at marketing’s view of sales enablement. This usually involves marketing programs that disseminate information to the installed customer base or prospective customers, VARs, other channel partners, or maybe some vendors. It looks like this:
onetomany
And even though the majority of marketing spend today is one-to-many, ask marketers what they are trying to accomplish and you’ll get this reply:
oneotone1
Marketing’s heart is in the right place, but most tactical solutions fall short. Meanwhile, sales has gone rogue. They are crafting one-off sales sheets, quickly built slide decks and other reactionary marketing collateral to achieve true one-to-one marketing to get revenue in the door.

Sales doesn’t know or can’t articulate what they need from marketing, which is why marketing can’t take all the blame for missed revenue goals. Sales just wants something from marketing that will deliver buyers and shorten the sales cycle. Right? Because the sales force faces two major selling paradigms and is incentivized to sell, sell, sell.
relationshipselling
The CRM, a Rolodex by another name in most cases, drives the idea that building personal relationships helps close deals. Marketing can’t help but question this spend. It could be golfing, entertainment, whatever. Or, it could be far more complicated.
complexselling
Now selling to a committee of self-interested parties debating a strategic and tactical answer to their own business woes. Anyone that has worked on the agency side of the marketing business knows that if their at 10 people in a creative review, you have 10 creative directors. Sales juggles the same challenges, especially for deals that require a capital investment.

In the end, the idea that you should help me is shared by both sides of the equation. The important thing for marketers to remember is that they are a cost center. Sales is a revenue center. If you aren’t working on ways to define yourself as a revenue center, you marketers, you’ll always be first on the chopping block in a down economy. Why? Because rogue salesman don’t need you to sell, yet.

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