March 2011 Archives

A useful analysis on online display advertising in b2b marketing from Forrester indicates that marketers have an opportunity to use display more effectively as part of the mix. Download the full 'Making Online Display Marketing Work For B2B' report.

Forrester's conclusions are:

'Use display to drive and nurture leads. B2B marketers shouldn't expect their display
campaigns to immediately create qualified leads. In addition to pure branding efforts, B2B marketers should be certain to use their display campaigns to drive clicks to lead-securing and nurturing opportunities like webinars, white papers, and virtual events. Site-retargeting -- through publisher partners or vendors like Dotomi -- can be a valuable tool for reaching out to prospects with an expressed interest in your company.

Buy audiences, not just content. B2C marketers have long reaped the benefits of online
audience targeting, and B2B marketers are only beginning to recognize opportunities to use targeting to find elusive business decision-makers.B2B data provider Bizo and popular B2B social networking site LinkedIn both offer extensive targeting opportunities that allow B2B marketers to look beyond their standard site lists of major newspapers and trade publications. B2B marketers like American Express and Verizon use targeting through ad networks and exchanges like Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange to find business decisionmakers and tailor messages throughout the lead nurturing process.

Build consensus about your customers' early stage purchase path. We find that B2B
marketers have strong ideas as to how to best market to sales-ready leads and existing
clients but struggle to apply interactive marketing to early stage prospects. Success requires working with traditional marketing counterparts and the sales organization to build consensus about how top-of-funnel investments contribute to the customer purchase path. For instance, marketing services provider eMedia used display banners to drive prospects to white papers hosted on the eMedia website. A lead scoring system allowed the marketers to attribute credit back to the sources that drove the highest volume of quality leads.

The 4th B2B Barometer survey reveals that:

• 57% of B2B marketers have seen increased revenues over the last 12 months
• 67% reported a greater number of new business enquiries over the last six months
• 51% are seeing improvement in quality of enquiries
• 73% of agencies report a confident outlook for the next 12 months
• 70% of client-side marketers highlighted the customer as one of their highest priorities
• 64% of marketing companies are now developing and implementing social media    strategies

The full report is available for download.  If you're a B2B marketer, how well do the results reflect your own experiences?

Hubspot recently drew some useful parallels between online dating (ie  marketing yourself to find a partner) and inbound marketing: 

1. Be selective with wording
2. Optimise presence for Search Engines and people
3. Emphasise aspects you are good at
4. Create authentic messages
5. Let your personality shine
6. Keep your messages short
7. Study best practice
8. Invest the time  

Read the full article for yourself

Here's a useful post from MathMarketing on how B2B Marketing can better align itself to the buyer's journey, rather than try to re-educate sales teams or function purely as a service to them.  Read 'How to Align Marketing to your buyer's journey'.