I learned everything about b2b marketing from infomercials!

I learned everything I need to know about b2b marketing from watching Infomercial!

OK, so I'm spinning a bit of a lie.  I didn't learn lead scoring or progressive profiling or email design from infomercials, but in the spirit of catchy subjects, that seemed to work well.  The point is, however, that we can learn a lot of valuable and practical strategy for developing b2b marketing campaigns by paying close attention to the structure, language and flow of an infomercial, particularly the short ones (7-15 minutes).  Forget the late night 30-minute sessions.  I'm talking Sham-Wow, OxiClean and Ginsu Knives.  These 10-15 minute vignettes are constructed with a great deal of planning, purpose and the single minded goal of getting the sales.

Our b2b marketing campaigns can learn a lot from the late great Billy Mays. One of the consistencies you will find in any infomercial is that they are crafted  very much the same way as a typical b2b pitch is crafted.  Whether the pitchmen are selling cleaners, onion choppers or the next great cell phone holder, they are adhere to the a strict format in selling their products

• Situation
• Pain 
• Solution

This simplified version of the popular "Solution Selling" model found in ever b2b company, is carried out with rigorous process and attention to detail in the infomercial.  Each infomercial begins much the same way.  Let's take the fictional OnionChopper2000 as an example.  The infomercial opens with a frustrated cook attempting to cut raw onions with small knife (situation).  The cook is frustrated, the onion is making their eye's tear (pain) and the announce clearly states the problems with the current solution to onion chopping.

Enter the OnionChopper2000.  It is the solution to the pain and situation created by the lack of adequate onion chopping tools.  The infomercial dazzles the viewer with the numerous ways one may chop an onion (or pretty much anything in your fridge).  The features/benefits of the OC2000 are clearly stated and the problems each feature solves are directly related to the various pain points established in the situation portion of the infomercial.

Now, as a direct marketer for many years, I watch these shows with professional curiosity. I also respect the producers for creating a natural pain/solution chain in 20 minutes.  This is what every good b2b salesperson should aspire towards.  Beyond being a good lesson for a b2b salesperson, these vignettes also provide a blueprint for how b2b marketers should approach our campaigns.

Situation
Pain
Solution

In breaking down these 3 areas, we can relate how each can and should apply to creating good campaigns that illicit high response and lead conversion for our companies.

Situation:  What is the situation our clients face that causes business (financial) pain?  Let's take the healthcare space an example.  If you sell to hospitals, you must understand that the "Situation" (not to be confused with the endearing Jersey  Shore character) hospitals face is about money and the ever-changing regulations to reimbursement from both government and insurers.  This "Situation" causes pain for your prospective buyers.  This pain creates need.  The need is for solutions that maximize their reimbursement without sacrificing patient care.

In creating campaigns for this market, you have to build your campaign around this model.   Campaigns must paint the picture of the problem and quickly tie the solution to the pain you provide, caused by the situation.  Simple examples are a white paper outlining best practices for managing claim denials from Medicare.  The situation outlined in the campaign is "Reimbursement Changes Increase Denials".  The solution is providing a software application that manages claims more effectively by incorporating new regulations.

Too often, marketers fall into a trap that a lot of junior b2b sales persons fall into.  Show up and throw up is a phenomena wherein a salesperson comes to a meeting, throws up a powerpoint and blindly presents all of the great things that their solution can do for the prospect....without asking questions and identifying the situation/pain.

When designing an email campaign or a landing page, for example, how many times have you over-designed the email or the landing page to include a not-so-small subset of everything on your website?  I have seen this time and again in PPC landing pages in particular.  The marketer behaves like a dog chasing a car....when you catch it, you're so excited you don't know what to do with it!  The same holds true for a landing page or email....you design because you're excited someone has actually opened it or clicked on it...and you try to cram tons of extraneous information into it.  Your campaign will suffer because it is not focused on the task at hand. 

It is much more productive to create several micro-campaigns than one big all encompassing one.  Reason being is the conversion rates on the emails, landing pages, direct mail will be much higher when the message is focused on the 3 elements mentioned above.

So, before you hit send on that next campaign.....watch and infomercial first.....and take heed to just how focused the messaging is on those somewhat corny....yet extremely effective advertising vignettes!  And don't laugh...they're on TV because they MAKE MONEY.

Trash to treasure? How to use your existing marketing & sales collateral to drive cheap lead generation.

In the growing spirit of austerity, i thought I would re-start SalesFUSION's blog with a new post that is a follow up to a recent webinar created and presented by SalesFUSION and leading B2B Agency, Renaissance Direct. The theme of the webinar was "re-purposing your existing marketing collateral to generate new leads".  Without beating the hackneyed drum of "how to generate leads in down economy", this post will explore practical advice and usable tactics for making the most out of what you already have.

The realities of the current marketing environment dictate that we take a more rigorous approach to tracking and managing the opportunity value generated from the campaigns and corresponding spend.  We as professional b2b marketers are being asked to generate the same or more leads with less budget, personnel and resources.  We can however, leverage new tactics for old materials.   Chances are your company has a veritable treasure trove of collateral that has been collecting dust or sitting static on your website. Or worse yet, your marketing collateral and sales collateral sits idly on a C: drive somewhere and is only accessed by sales reps engaged in a sales cycle.

While marketers grasp with these challenges and attempt to achieve their goals with less, they often overlook the obvious.  Let's start with the website.  Many innovative companies now employ an online resource center as a standard page in the corporate website.  The resource center is meant to be a public facing document repository that is updated frequently with new content and promoted to the masses.  A typical online resource center will contain categorized links to White Papers, product data sheets, case studies, press, videos (testimonials is the hot one), screenshots (for software companies) and sales presentations. Whats important to note is that the majority of what would make for a good resource center for most companies is material that already exists.  Once you buy in to the notion of creating an online repository of materials, a few key elements must be put into place.  Firstly, you have to make the decision to put some or all of the materials behind lead capture pages.  The lead capture page should be treated like a landing page for pay per click. It should be user friendly and capture enough information to start a digital conversation with the lead.  Solutions like SalesFUSION's eDialogs provide a variety lead capture page types and configurations to accommodate all websites.

Once you have the content and mechanism for capturing those who access the content in place, it's now time to promote the materials on the resource center. There are several no-brainers when it comes to this.  If you have an existing house-file of leads/contacts, you can start with regular email blasts out to these lists.  It's important to provide regular updates to the resource center as it gives you a reason to send email updates out at some interval.  When sending out your emails for the resource center, don't get fancy.  Keep the emails simple and to the point.  Provide only one external link in the email; for the resource center.

Beyond email, we'll explore some other ways to promote this great new sales and lead generation tool on the cheap.  Social media outlets provide the next logical medium to promote our materials. Any social media outlet with categorized groups is prime real estate for publishing good content.  LinkedIn is a perfect example and lends itself well to these types of posts.  Proceed cautiously however because how you post is as important as what you post.  Many social media group-type sites frown on over sales messages.  When posting your web content in social media sites, be sure to post educational content first and inform the reader in the post that the materials require a form to fill out to access the materials.  This up front notice actually increases the form completion rates.  

Other ways to leverage social media are allowing sales team members and other members of the company to post content in their respective twitter and facebook accounts.  There are a couple of caveats to consider before proceeding.  Firstly, HR should establish a policy for posting corporate content in social sites.  Personal Facebook pages and twitter pages may contain material that is inappropriate for business use.  It must me made very clear that content cannot be posted alongside personal photos that may be too risque for the legal team.  Another consideration is how to track inbound clicks from social sites.  SalesFUSION just released a series of add-on social media posting tools for its dialog products.  These tools convert the landing page or dialog URL's so that they are track able to the person posting and fit within sites that have character restrictions such as Twitter.

An extension of social media, business social publishing sites have emerged as very good outlets for a variety of materials from a variety of industries.  Customer Think is a great example of these emerging user-driven publishing sites.  Members can join these sites for free, create an online profile and then post educational content and materials.  This is a wonderful outlet for your existing white papers, press releases and more.  Depending on the specific rules of any site, you can even post product-centric information.  Another social publishing site that has emerged is FOCUS.  Focus is tied to a popular LinkedIn group and like Customer Think, allows its members to drive the content.  What's interesting about Focus is that it rewards its regular posting members with different Status'. This encourages users to strive for the elevated status by posting good content on a regular basis, thus enhancing the information quality on the site.

Don't forget to dust off those power point presentations!  Other outlets, which are more product centric but can be linked into social media profiles are SlideShare and Box.net.  These are more file-sharing in nature but allow users to post content that eventually becomes indexed by Google.   Grab all of those old power points that have been created.  Turn them into presentation for Slideshare and box.net in your LinkedIn profile.  Encourage your reps and other employees to do the same. 

What's important about the social outlets is that you can direct social traffic back to your online resource center.  You can also spread your name through the web via social business publishing sites...both of which carry no cost.  In the end the more you post into the social and business sites, with PDF's that havce active links back you your site, the better your SEO will ultimately perform.


I summary, it's important that marketers look to their internal collateral as a valid means of increasing your exposure through  multiple channels.  You  don't expensive agencies or consultants to create campaigns around this content.  Just get it out there.  Make sure it has LOTS of links back in to your site and work towards creating a regularly-updated online resource center and you will dramatically improve your industry footprint.


In SalesFUSION we use a suite of tools known as eDialogs.  These are sort of like landing pages, sort of like social publishing tools, and many things in between.  Ultimately the goal of pushing content through eDialogs is to make the inbound traffic track-able.  All marketers need to strive towards tracking inbound leads right through to the CRM.  SalesFUSION, as a marketing automation platform, is built specifically with this process in mind.

Understanding nurture marketing

Nurture marketing is a term that has gained public visibility over the last several years.  As eMarketing applications have flooded the b2b marketing community, there have been great strides in technology-enabled marketing to help professionals increase their capabilities relative to demand and lead generation.

As with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding at how best to leverage new technology in day-to-day circumstances. Nurture marketing is a perfect example of this.  The term itself can be somewhat misleading so we'll first spend some time defining what nurture marketing is, what technology makes up "nurture marketing" and then we'll provide some real world examples of how b2b marketers can leverage this technology to improve their coverage and reach.

What is nurture marketing?   

Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer.  The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria.  This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral.  For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical.   Behavioral criteria are typically dependent upon a prospects interactions with the seller.  These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).  

How is nurture marketing implementing?

In the context of eMarketing, nurture marketing is typically comprised of  of 2 types of email communications; Drip Email and Trigger Email.  Drip emails are timed emails that go out to a pre-defined segment of contacts at a pre-defined time/date.  Trigger emails are only sent when a certain condition is met such as follow up email sent based on a campaign response.

Probably the best way to describe nurture marketing is to describe a sample campaign.

Basic nurture campaign:

Campaign Type - Webinar 

An initial invitation will go out or other promotional vehicles (banner ad, email sponsorship....etc are implemented.  Initiations direct individuals to a registration page for signing up for the webinar.

2-3 days after the initial webinar email invitation goes out, a subject line swap email is implemented.  In this case, the original email subject line is changed to a new subject and automatically re-sent to all those in the original list who did not open the email.

2-3 days later, a reminder email is triggered for all registered leads for the webinar.

The day of the webinar - a second reminder is sent about 1 hour before the start of the event.

Post-webinar - 2 primary branched followup campaigns are then executed following the webinar.

Branch 1 - Attendee email follow up campaign - For attendees a followup email is immediately triggered thanking the attendees for attending and the email may include a redirect to a companion white paper, a pdf copy of the presentation or to the website for additional information.

Potential follow up activities for branch 1

• Attendee responds to email - triggers call from sales
  
• Attendee does not respond to email  - put  into 7-day drip email
• Attendee responds to email - triggers invitation to next webinar

Branch 2 - Non-Attendees - those who registered but did not attend webinar - for this branch you may go in several directions.  The key is to stay engaged with this group as they were interested enough to register but likely had something come up that prevented them from coming.

Potential follow up activities for branch 2

• Send "sorry you couldn't attend" email immediately following the event - redirect to a re-broadcast registration (if applicable)
• Send email with link to copy (pdf) of the presentation
• Email inviting to a similar webinar
• Email inviting non-attendees to download a copy of a white paper

As you can see from this very simple example, companies can get very creative and detailed in trigger/drip followup.

The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.

Solutions like SalesFUSION (www.salesfusion.com) are specifically designed to help marketers implement these types of campaigns.

To learn more - visit us at www.salesfusion.com

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