Marketing Calls-to-Action Along the B2B Buyer Journey

PLACEHOLDERS Category | Email this content [icon]

Your offerings were developed because your solution meets a specific need in a new, innovative way and/or in a way superior to similar offerings in the market. Human behavior tells us that today’s B2B buyer—especially today’s B2B tech buyer—wants to go as far as they can in evaluating your solution virtually before having to engage and/or respond to a sales consultant by email or phone. It’s your job as the solution provider to serve up content in a way that clearly demonstrates value AND lends itself to this virtual vetting process. And from your perspective, you have invested in a sales team and need that team to be extremely efficient with their time, avoiding chasing tire kickers in order to focus on serious buyers.

What will persuade prospects to move from a competitor’s offering or to justify the adoption of a new concept to start a relevant sales conversation?

Product companies may consider providing an educational asset (solution guide, white paper, third party assessment/analyst report, pre-recorded webinar, etc.) to download as gated resources—which establishes brand recognition and initiates the sales process. These assets demonstrate thought-leadership and feed other marketing channels. After 2-3 days, have automatically deploy an email from your CRM or marketing automaton tool that links to a video landing page—giving a peek into the product. Upon viewing the video, you can direct your prospects to schedule a demo with one of your sales consultants or go directly into a trial program, if available. However, we have seen greater success allowing sales consultants to control the trial and pricing requests upon the live demo.

Service companies may also consider providing an educational asset to get things started but should first make sure there is a unique way to package or productize their solutions (or methodology) so that prospects can see clear, tangible deliverables and outputs upfront—not just a list or services. You can then expand upon deliverables via a “brief” turnkey GoToMeeting session with interested prospects. Be sure to promote this offer on your website as well. It’s mutually beneficial and also you gauge your prospects’ level of interest and intent before committing your sales resources to do any heavy lifting.

Both product and service companies should also consider the of development customer case studies to validate your claims along the buyer journey.

All of this said, we recommend that your marketing programs ultimately focus on only one or two strong calls-to-action rather than many. Using too many calls-to-action ultimately dilutes the strength of each and can throw off your click rate statistics. Make it clear to the recipient what you think their next action should be by determining what you feel would be most valuable to their virtual evaluation.

Key takeaway: The easier you make it for your prospects to visualize their potential with your offerings, the shorter your sales cycle will be.

“PR” Does Not Mean Press Release: New Strategies

PLACEHOLDERS Category | Email this content [icon]

Not too long ago, emerging technology companies selling business-to-business could send a compelling press release over a newswire service and get response from journalists with a light pitch or sometimes no pitch at all. Journalists covering Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and other giant brands were also drawn to smaller tech companies, even startups, if their innovations were unique, improved the flow of business or made other technologies better. These same journalists established themselves with the same publications and helped influence decision-making. Some journalists have stayed in one place, but the vast majority come and go nowadays.

Fast forward: the changes in PR

The Internet has considerably widened the field of media outlets covering business and technology. It includes news aggregator websites and pay-for-play editorial to reach your audience, making it tougher to get your news covered by publications the traditional way—mentions, pickups, and interviews for articles.

Getting your news (or company) covered by publications is still valuable for raising awareness, just tougher to do and takes a lot of work, and a lot of money if you use a dedicated PR firm.

The role of press releases and newswire services has changed also—but it hasn’t died. The links in your releases no longer impact search rankings thanks to Google’s algorithm changes in 2013 and the majority of newswire “reads” are from audiences with no interest. Despite this, we have found that:

Frequent news with keyword-minded headlines can help to rise above your competition and web clutter.
One or two press releases a month can demonstrate that you are stable and advancing. Have you ever gone to website and the last news announcement was over 6 months ago? It starts to raise all kind of questions for prospects and journalists.
Journalists still have newswire accounts to help organize their interests, but they can’t have them all, so they also rely on Google Alerts and web searches to identify news opportunities—often driven by pre-defined editorial calendars that their publications want to focus.

“Closed loop PR” supports SEO, directly reaches prospects

Don’t stop writing press releases and don’t stop building press relationships. We suggest that you take your press release content farther than just your website and newswire distributions to directly reach prospects. Here is a “Closed loop PR” approach to consider that supports Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and raises the buzz:

Write a 300 to 400-word Blog article that is educational, include a link to your website for more detail and/or link to another of your Blog posts. Don’t link people away from your content. An image or graphic also helps to illustrate your points. It’s important to host your Blog on the same domain as your website (not a sub-domain) in order to fully reap SEO benefits, like domain reputation and page ranking. Hosting your Blog elsewhere—even a subdomain—waters down your search presence.
Post to your Company LinkedIn for key staff to share with their connections. It takes all of 5 minutes for them. Buyer-related contacts and influencers are likely there. Be sure that your staff is connected with your Company LinkedIn account.
Feed other “active” company social media platforms. Don’t start and stop with Twitter, Google+ and other platforms if you’re not actively managing them, lack followers, or they simply are not right for your audience. If the news is technical in nature, ask your R&D team to talk it up with their peers on platforms they are actively sharing information.
Send an Email to your customer and prospect databases. Based on the news, the call-to-action may vary for customers and prospects, so sending separate emails may be required and easier to track.
Outreach to your press list for compelling news only, such as new offerings, customer successes, mergers and acquisitions, or executive and board appointments. Don’t waste a pitch on corporate achievements (awards, office openings, etc.), events (speaking, trade shows, webinars, etc.), and resources (white papers, etc.). If an Industry Analyst covers your company in an objective manner, I would consider it compelling because it can help journalists better understand the offerings and give them a source to leverage and speak to.

Final note: PR is part process and part instinct. Leave room for some creativity and some time to develop content. I suggest developing an initial PR Topics Schedule that you can reprioritize each month to stay proactive.

Achieving Case Studies for Marketing Content

PLACEHOLDERS Category | Email this content [icon]

Content is king and frequent, valuable content rules the castle. But it remains true that serious buyers value case studies over anything else because they validate your offerings and show them the full potential of using them. Companies gain extra credibility because rather than touting their value in a salesy way, case studies demonstrate value in the customer’s own words. And yet, case studies are the hardest materials for most companies to generate due to red tape barriers when securing consent. More often than not, this barrier can be easily overcome with the right process, persistence, and clear expectations set along the way. Here are some new thoughts to consider:

Get organized, start “initial” outreach

Huddle with your account owners to make an initial List of Candidate Customers of who have reported positive results—quantitative or qualitative—regardless of contract language which stipulates the customer will not participate in any endorsement of a vendor. (More about this soon.)

Set goals: If four case studies a year is a realistic goal (I think it is), you should target 12 candidate customers when kick-starting your case study program, as consent comes at various times. You may get lucky and get more than four but sales and marketing can do a lot with even just four. (More about this soon.)

Equip your account owners with a Consent Request Letter that briefly explains how the case study will be mutually-beneficial and outlines the steps your marketing will take from interview to approval, even assisting in their corporate approval process. Know that the larger the customer, the more involved their processes will be.

Outreach to Customers by email first, and if you do not get a reply within a few days, contact them by phone as an excuse to catchup. When they consent, a representative from your in-house or external marketing team should contact them to set expectations and schedule an interview.

Prior to your interview, be sure to have TWO things pre-determined:

List of Questions to pace the discussion. Give to customers in advance.
Content Structure to drive copywriting and design (web page/handout)

(Repeat: After your initial list, continue this process with new customers upon 1-3 months that your product or service was implemented.)

Don’t stop when consent is not granted

You may have willing participants—your end users or business point of contacts who will benefit from documenting the story—but their corporate policy prevents them from using the company name. If this happens, follow the same process (above) but develop “blind” case studies. The content is still valuable to prospects who should appreciate that “named” case studies cannot always be achieved due to corporate policies. In the end, a true case study engine—named or blind—will validate your offerings and can demonstrate value across one or multiple industries.

Feed sales process and marketing channels

Case studies should equip your sales team and feed marketing across various channels to extend their value, generate demand, and build awareness.

Creating a case study library on your website should be your first step. We like dedicated web pages (best for SEO) with a PDF option. Your sales team can use both based on their style of selling.

With consented companies, we have found success converting case studies into a Webinar Series or Speaker Panels at industry conferences where the customer’s end user or business point of contact shares their experiences and best practices using your product or service. Attendance is typically increased when promoting peer-to-peer education. And, your customer speaker(s) will gain market visibility.

Promoting your case studies across other demand generation programs is key. Here are some starting ideas to consider:

Proactive PR (editors like customer success)
LinkedIn and Blog posts (that key staff can share)
Nurturing email campaigns to prospects (shows their potential and may motivate)
Awareness to customers (shows that you are advancing and it may help upsell them)
Nominate customers for industry awards as the attribution will come back to your offerings (you already have the content and it will strengthen your relationship)