Does your B2B technology or consulting firm find attracting new clients a major challenge? If so, you’re not alone. The chances are you’ve been reliant on traditional tactics such as networking, tradeshows, sponsorship and cold calling, but today they just don’t work like they used to.
Even referrals, whilst still important, rely on you providing a more remarkable customer experience, as well as a more formalised referral system.
So, when it comes to marketing, many business leaders have been searching for something new. Quite rightly they believe the way forward will be found online. But despite an increased focus from their marketing teams, they have yet to yield any significant results.
If this sounds familiar, you’re probably caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand you’re seeing diminishing returns from traditional marketing. On the other, you aren’t sure if your unstructured attempts at digital are having any impact. As the traditional outbound tap trickles slower and slower, you’re finding that you can’t turn on the modern, inbound one fastest enough.
The thing is it takes a bit more than a few tweets and a better looking website to make digital work. This doesn’t necessarily mean an increased marketing budget, but it does mean you need to let go of some outdated beliefs about marketing. To reap the true benefits of digital there are three fundamental principles that you must first embrace.
1. Marketing’s sole focus is to generate revenue
Marketing can no longer be seen as a peripheral, airy-fairy supporting function. Today it should play a core role in driving the top and middle of your revenue funnel. Being able to show the impact of your marketing programme on the funnel is critical. Any activity that you can’t link to this should be regarded as a random act of marketing (RAOM) and seriously questioned.
The two core measures of how marketing is impacting your funnel are a). the volume of traffic, contacts and leads flowing through and b). the associated conversion ratios. Being able to analyse what’s working and what isn’t is critical to improving your results, as well as reducing the cost of customer acquisition.
Of course, the bottom of the funnel is more complex and needs close alignment with sales. Opportunities will move forward, go on hold and be abandoned – so you need to have an integrated process in place to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
2. You have to CONVERT, not just attract
Maybe you’re developing content and pushing it out through various online channels – email, social media and search? Perhaps you’re attracting more traffic to your website as a result? But if nothing really happens thereafter, it’s because you don’t have a conversion process in place.
Most companies focus on the ‘attract’ phase because their stretched resources have no time for anything else or because they don’t understand the ‘convert’ phase. But it’s vital you do both.
Leaving conversion to chance means you will definitely be missing opportunities. To address this you’ll need a website that is built to convert and a process designed to move and track buyers through the middle of the funnel. Research by Hinge Marketing on B2B tech and professional services supports this claim. Their study revealed the single main difference between high growth firms and their average growth peers is that they focus more energy on their websites.
The convert phase includes forms, landing pages, calls-to-action, lead scoring, email workflow and smart content that helps you react to learned behavior by providing the right information depending where buyers are in their decision-making process. This can be very powerful when combined with inside sales as they can focus on warmer, rather than cold leads and are armed with more intelligence to help them nurture buyers until they become sales-ready.
3. It's not about you
In the past, when buyers needed help their only option was to tap into your expertise by talking to you directly. The likelihood of that happening today has been vastly reduced.
Your buyers are more time-pressured, have shorter attention spans and now very well equipped (thanks to Google and social media) to get answers to their questions online and from other independent sources.
So if you want to be the place your buyers still come to get educated, you have to do three things. Firstly, take the time to really understand what matters to them. Secondly, don’t hold anything back when sharing your valuable content (and commit as many experts to this as possible). And thirdly, don’t bang on about your company and your services until people are ready to hear it.
When buyers have a new challenge that they can’t resolve themselves, they first seek to get some kind of perspective. That means they just skip past promotional messages. When they find helpful information, the source immediately becomes more trustworthy. If that source also provides the right service, the buyer is likely to be more drawn to them when they decide they need to hire someone.
.jpeg?width=2000&name=Point%20image%20(1).jpeg)
Keep going but work smarter
If you’ve jumped into digital marketing but have yet to see it result in leads or revenue, don’t give up. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. All the hype and inflated promises from the so-called experts may have created false expectations that success comes easy. It does come, but it probably means you need to work a little smarter.
Fully embracing the principles outlined above must be done in parallel to getting the right technology, people and processes in place. Marketing automation integrated with CRM are fundamental technology components needed to manage all stages of your funnel more efficiently and effectively. People and process will largely depend on your available skills and resources and whether you decide to build an in-house capability or outsource your programme to a specialist inbound agency.
Some companies that have already invested in automation have also found it tough. They’ve not been able to use the tools to their full potential and experienced much less success than expected. In many cases, it’s because they have also failed to embrace these principles.
B2B technology and professional services companies have been slower to make the digital transition than their more product-orientated counterparts. Instead many have opted to dip a toe in the water. But as the saying goes, ‘you get out of life what you put into it’. And this is definitely the case with digital marketing.
If you don’t make it abundantly clear how you do that, they'll find someone else that will.
