80% of B2B buying process is over before first sales touch

Inbound marketing is more important in this post GDPR world than it was ever before. The time where marketing meant letting the world know how great you/your product or your service is, is over. Just think of yourself as a customer and think how many cold calls/emails or flyers do you respond to?

Our buying habits are the best place to start analysing our customer’s buying behaviour (after all our customers are as human as us). Anything we want to buy we search via our phones, computers or ask Alexa. We convince ourselves that the proposition is right for us by reading reviews, asking our friends who would have commented or liked a product on social media and then as a last step, when we are really sure of what we want to buy we contact sales.

Sales is now the last step of the buying process.

What does this mean for marketing departments?

It means that the responsibility of sales and the goal of generating revenue has shifted quite heavily onto the marketing function. Only how we wish the fat bonuses and commissions shifted to us too! After all, we are bringing the customer to the point of sales.

I would love to hear about your customer’s buying journeys, please leave a comment or InMail me.

B2B Marketing strategies for the holidays

The Holiday season is near, how do I market my software product/ services?

The fact that the festive period is approaching is good news for any tech company because people use the quiet period to research, read and plan for next year. So, it is an excellent opportunity to increase your visibility and brand awareness. Also, it is the end of the year for most businesses which means they will be looking to spend any unspent budget.

What implications does that have on marketing?

This means marketing teams need to gear up marketing campaigns to increase awareness. Holiday related messaging is an excellent way to raise awareness. But be careful and stay relevant! Going overboard on holiday messaging can backfire. Keep it genuine, relevant and make use of social media platforms as they are perceived as more relaxed and informal.

Don’t forget the second set of audience who are looking to utilise their unspent budget for the year. They are further down in the buying cycle and hence would be interested in content that helps them make a decision quicker. If you are marketer, you must be already thinking business cases, client case studies, testimonials and product videos. Who says you can’t make any of the above marketing assets festive.

Coming up with an effective holiday marketing strategy can be a challenge, as competition is always high during this period. Not to worry, this guide contains the answers you seek. Let’s consider five winning strategies you can use to market your tech products as we approach the UK holidays.

Start planning early

You don’t expect to plant a seed this month and harvest its fruit the following month. The same principle is also applicable to marketing. If you wish you to make more sales in the forthcoming holidays, then you must start brainstorming what content strategy would be the most effective for your website,  emails, and ads. Try to be creative and flexible, welcome new ideas, and make sure you don’t leave it too late.

While preparing for your holiday marketing, you need to ensure :

• Improve the bandwidth of your site: You need to plan for future increase in traffic caused by seasonal spikes. Hence, your website requires some extra bandwidth to be able to cope with the pressure. You don’t want to lose customers and sales because your site is slow or crashes.
• Email Marketing: If you have a list of customers that haven’t bought from you in a while, this is the best time to get back in touch. Send them personalised, relevant emails and holiday-related content to nurture them for future sales.
• Pay-per-click advertising: The holiday period comes with a lot of competition. However, it’s still an excellent opportunity to win new clients, especially if you plan and launch your product/software early.
• Leverage on Social Media: Identify your customers and find out which social media platform (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) they use the most. Connect with them on these platforms and let them know why they need your products, especially as the festive period approaches.
• Create landing pages for unique products and promotions
• Track the results of each strategy you use to see which channel is giving you the best results.

Be ready for more competition than before

The increased rivalry during the festive period makes marketing more difficult. Hence, you need to plan early and ensure you don’t get overwhelmed by it. Examine what marketing strategies your competitors are using and brainstorm on how to stand out.

Create an influencer strategy

Your customers are expected to make use of social media more during the holiday periods; thus, influencer marketing can be a game-changer. Increase brand awareness on social media by creating an influencer strategy that would stay in your customers mind.

Don’t fake it. Give customers good reasons to buy

Your customers know what they want, better than you do. But can you make your value proposition attractive by offering year-end discounts or bundling up extra support and services? Can your solutions help your customer manage seasonal peaks more effectively? Then your marketing messaging should focus on that.

Don’t ignore your existing customers

The chances are that both new and returning customers will visit your website during the holidays. However, it is far easier to convince an existing customer to buy your products than the new one. While it is good to make new customers try not to forget the existing ones in the process.

Plan to cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers in advance. Start by analysing how their business will be effected in the holiday season and how you could help them. Creating marketing messaging that is relevant to their immediate needs could result in quick sales.

For example – if your existing customer is in the retail industry, could you provide a solution to manage seasonal peak in sales? Or help them manage their inventory better?

Conclusion

Coming up with a unique and effective marketing strategy during the holidays can be challenging. However, using the tips in this guide would help you make the most of the holiday season. Keep in mind that there would always be quiet times during this time of the year. However, starting early with a good plan makes it easy to overcome any challenge. If your customers have seen your messaging, they might not react immediately, but you are investing in your future pipeline!

The Christmas and New-Year holidays are approaching fast; hence, you need to start planning now.  Happy Holidays and Good luck!

Why do you attend a business event?

The purpose and format of business events has changed now. Most often I see organisations use events as a selling tool. With this changed attitude for events I would like to know your views, which events do you attend and why?

Business events were historically hosted purely for networking. It was an allocated time and space for people to come out of their hiding from behind their desks and meet their peers, talk about their challenges, share their successes, learn something from others experience and more often than not validate their ideas and go back to work next day feeling more confident about themselves. Often, people would uncover synergies/complementary strengths and that would lead to new relationships, new business and growth in general.

The format of events has changed now. Most often I see organisations use events as a selling tool. With this changed attitude for events I would like to know your views, which events do you attend and why?

can say for myself, jelly beans, free pens or mobile chargers don’t attract me. It needs more than that to get me out of office or miss family time. Although a good meal in the offering could change my mind. But that’s just the foodie in me talking! I attend for all the historic reasons listed above. I also find face to face interactions really valuable in world where most of us are like in the picture!

I have copied two invites for marketing events I have recently attended below. Please share which one would you attend and why. If you would rather attend none, I would like to hear your views as well (replace the X’s and Y’s with your individual challenges and industry) –

Event 1 invitation says – Come and join us to explore the practicalities of implementing X technology for your industry. This will transform your business or the way you do business. It will hosted in Top-Notch Hotel and you will have the opportunity to win an iPad mini.

Event 2 invitation says – We are hosting a lunch session for you to network with your peers and Y industry experts to discuss the X challenge that is bothering us all. You will have the opportunity to share experiences, learn from your peers and take back options of how you can resolve X challenge in your business. It’s local to you and hopefully you will find the couple of hours you take out of your day really useful.

Best B2B Lead Generation Techniques to Adopt In 2019

B2B or business to business marketing is competitive as units sold per year are few and the supplier market is saturated. One-off B2B marketing campaigns are not as effective as it is less likely that you will catch a prospect, ready to buy with just one campaign. A successful B2B lead generation strategy requires a continuous marketing effort.

Before you build a plan for lead generation , let’s define what a lead is. Well, while in simple terms you might call any potential audience of your business website as lead, in factual terms, the lead is a customer who is only steps away from buying from you. Unless you intrigue the customer with your services and make them aware of how you can solve their problems and help them achieve their objective B2B marketing fails miserably.

A regular influx of leads is the backbone of business growth. Various factors contribute towards creating a regular inflow of leads – your messaging, the user experience, presence and search ability, strength of your database and the channels you select to go-to-market – social, email, google, events, webinars, partners, affiliate marketing or any other channel. So let’s look at some building blocks which we recommend for a successful B2B marketing strategy.

Website Optimization

Website Optimization

• Make sure your website equally looks good on mobile. Mobile-friendliness can no longer be ignored. Most of our customers get 50% or more visitors from mobile phones. In this age, where websites are having mobile apps launched to reach out to wider audience base, your website should be mobile-friendly. In this context, optimize the font, page loading times, widgets and media to ensure that they run smoothly on mobile.
• Google Analytics can be your best guide in finding new keywords which are normally hidden in the website content. This will help you locate the long-tail keywords consisting of three or more words which generally have low search volumes but convert easily due to high relevance. For keyword optimization, you can also check competitor websites and identify keywords they are targeting or hidden gems that they are not targeting!
• With all the algorithm changes back-linking from relevant, authority sites is still quite important.. Once you get backlinks from other authority websites, your website too will get more organic traffic from Google or other search engines. Also keep a record of the visitor your site to analyse the effectiveness of the links created.

Content Marketing

Genuine and simple to understand the content is the king. Both google and your customers will appreciate authentic and simply written content. It’s hard to create authentic content and it takes long, but it’s worth it. As a part of your B2B Lead generation tactics, submit your content to Guest blogs that are relevant to your industry. That get’s you in front of new audiences and helps build credibility for your website.

Popularity of blogs can spiral quickly. Before you know you will be invited to blog on different discussion forums.

This is the time you should take the next leap.

• Create lead magnets on your website that your visitors would be interested in. Webinars, case studies, infographics and whitepapers are popular downloads. Think out-of-the-box to capture your audience’s attention.
• Make the contents unique and personalized so that your business can stand out among many others. The more dynamic your landing page is, more intrigued the lead will be in your business. Create Q&A page link to your website as often people search for answers to their questions Consider any prospective questions that your audience might have about your products and services.
• Also, add a chat box support with live chat option To make the website more interactive. Although, be careful about the timing and place of the chat box. It can be annoying.
• Start shooting webinars and post the videos on video sharing sites like Vimeo, YouTube etc. Launching a podcast is also a good way for long-term promotions. Infographics, news articles, pictures also make most of them end up in trash or spam folder. One of the effective B2B Lead Generation tactics is to send legal cold mails to prospective business mail ids or link old blogs so that the recipients understand that they are authentic. Using a good subject line is essential. Read more about email marketing tips.

Paid Social Media Advertising

While there are many advertising tools to promote your business to the prospective businesses, it is up to you to choose only the economically viable ones. Among the most popular social media sites, Facebook offers the paid Facebook Ads which are shown in between various Facebook videos, on the side panel and even in between the posts so that the user can click any ad, thereby, contributing on your revenue generation and check out the redirected link for his/her convenience. Google and LinkedIn advertisements are also excellent platforms for promoting your businesses, although the cost is bit higher.

Lead generation is quite overwhelming and often efforts die out if you don’t see results. We started this blog by suggesting continuous efforts are required to make any B2B campaign a success. Predictable Marketing acts as your outsourced marketing function or as an extra pair of hands for your marketing team to ensure marketing is consistent, continuous, cost-effective and in-line with your lead generation goals. Get in touch for a free marketing mapping workshop.