Small Business B2B Marketing Blog

How to Create A Small Business Marketing Audience

Robert Hennessey — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 11:31:00 GMT

One of the biggest problems small business B2B firms have when it comes to marketing their business is not identifying their target audience. But, how to create the marketing audience they need to reach. There has been a lot written about marketing personas, and these can be helpful, but most B2B companies know the make-up of their target market from a demographic and psychographic standpoint.

Should You Use Marketing Personas

Marketing personas are great if everyone were the same. I think the need for marketing personas is better applied in B2C selling where the task involves culling through and identifying your best prospects from tens and hundreds of millions of people. Here there is an opportunity to fashion and ideal customer because the numbers are so large that many people will resemble the persona.

However, in B2B marketing the audience numbers are much smaller around 10,000 to 50,000 people, and the target audience is readily apparent and the only key is to identify, who makes the buying decision not who might buy they all can and do buy. What is lacking is how to create a core audience to market to.

Sales Prospecting List Realities

For most small businesses not engaged in content marketing, or are not actively blogging being able to build a quality email prospecting list of any appreciable quantity is unlikely. Sure you can buy a bad list of email prospects that will cost you significant dollars multiplied by 3 or 4 because that is how many times you will likely need to resend to the same list to get any response. The bad part isn’t the wasting of $5 to 10$k, but the fact that you will not likely get any sales from this effort. Why because you are using a mass push marketing technique that doesn’t work well when marketing to other B2B companies.

The best way to create a small business marketing audience is to implement various marketing efforts to build your own marketing list. Building trust with your sales prospects is as important as building your list. The trust you build is how you obtain a quality list, and the number of different marketing activities is how you build quantity in your list.

Building Quality into Your Sales Prospecting List

The foundation of building trust with your target audience is to offer them your expertise and knowledge in helping them solve the business problems that you have the solutions to resolve. And, you need to offer your help for free for the most part.

Using the following content marketing tools you can build the trust, all B2B buyers seek before you meet with them.

Application Stories
Articles
Blog Articles
Case Studies
Market Research
White Paper

Using these tools you can address what your B2B buyer wants to know:

Are you interested in my problems or only your problem (getting a sale)
Do you have a real solution or the same thing as everyone else
Are you saying what you think the buyer wants to hear or being forthright
How will you help me make others involved understand your solution
Demonstrate how you have helped others like me
Don’t push me into buying let me ask you to sell me

These content marketing tools used properly will build the quality of your marketing list at the same time you are addressing the need to grow your prospect list.

Building Quantity into Your Sales Prospecting List

To build the quantity you need in your prospecting list we recommend the following:

Create effective landing pages for your content to boost sign-ups
Add additional links to your forms on thank you pages and other places on your website
Collaborate with others to obtain increased content distribution
Use LinkedIn groups or start your own group to contribute to others in your target industry
Create a video and distribute it on social media sites like YouTube
Write guest blogs for placement on other websites
Place a relevant call-to-action or sign-up form on Facebook
Offer relevant quality incentives to encourage sign-ups
Use send-to-a-friend share with a friend links when appropriate
Employ offline direct mail

These marketing tactics will help you increase the size of your prospecting list 24/7 daily as you go about your business.

Takeaway
Achieve success in creating your small business marketing audience by remembering to be honest, transparent and respect your prospects privacy at all times. Do not abuse the people with spam, or scams these are your potential future customers. Shower them with relevant quality content that puts their needs first and you will reap the biggest reward a continuous supply of high-quality sales prospects.

If you would like assistance we can help plan, execute and manage your marketing efforts to create a small business marketing audience contact us.

What to Look for in a Content Marketing Specialist

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 09:06:00 GMT

Many B2B companies are looking to increase their spending on content marketing now and for the foreseeable future. A recent study conducted by marketing software review company Software Advice, analyzed 300-job listings to understand the attributes hiring managers are seeking in content marketing specialists.

Most companies are unsure about the specific characteristics required of an effective content marketing specialist. Given the newness of this job position or the need to find competent outsource content marketing consultants, there is predictably a lot of conflicting thoughts on just how to identify the best candidates.

Most business owners and hiring managers are wrestling with how much weight should be given to the diverse backgrounds they consider when evaluating content marketing specialists. Among various characteristics and skills the study assessed which are likely more important:

• marketing
• writing
• editorial
• public relations
• journalism
• search engine optimization

The study summarized its analysis with these key findings:

1. Forty-eight percent of employers sought candidates with marketing degrees, but many also requested degrees such as communications, journalism and English.

2. Nearly half of employers wanted candidates to have at least three to five years of professional work experience, with the majority preferring marketing experience.

3. Employers want a content marketing manager to have a wide range of skills, but most listings (68 percent) placed a premium on writing and editing skills.

Source: Analysis of 300 Job Listings Reveals What Employers Are Looking For in a Content Marketing Manager - May 9, 2014 by Jay Ivey

We would agree that these findings are supportive of the findings in another recent study by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). They reported that while B2B companies’ adopting content marketing usage has reached new highs now 93%, one of the biggest challenges facing these companies is producing the “Kind of Content that Engages.”

Therefore, companies wanting content specialists with marketing experience (50%) and writing skills (68%) as confirmed in the Software Advice study are indicative of these employers recognizing that not just content, but engaging content is crucial to content marketing success.

Another essential item that this study pointed out and should not be overlooked is the need for researching skills. One of the most important aspects of effective content marketing begins with researching topics that interest your potential clients. This coupled with solid writing skills are the prerequisites for achieving the “kind of content that engages.”

In achieving your customer engagement goals, it is critical for B2B businesses to understand the power of original research that is necessary to form the foundation of all your content marketing. Besides company blogs, articles are the second most common content marketing vehicles that require the same intense research effort. Without a dedicated research capability, your ability to stand out among the avalanche of content on the Internet is highly unlikely or worse you are relegated to being perceived as mediocre.

Besides hiring a content marketing specialist, you may want to consider outsourcing your B2B content marketing. Outsource marketing can expand small business marketing expertise, capabilities and flexibility to engage more potential customers without adding overhead. Outsourcing marketing lets you focus on what you do best without draining in-house resources of productivity and time.

Hiring the right content marketing specialist or choosing to outsource for your company will depend on a number of factors specific to your business and personnel. Factors like:

• What are your content marketing requirements?

o Content Planning & Strategy
o Buyer Persona Creation
o Writing engaging content
o Editing
o Content Distribution/Syndication
o Measurement/Analytics
o Management Capabilities (internal and external with
agencies)

• Do you have an in-house marketing expertise for content marketing that is capable of client engagement?

• Is outsourcing better suited for your small business to engage clients and reduce cost?

• How much background and experience in various content marketing skills are necessary?

o Writing engaging content
o Research for blogs and articles
o SEO & social media distribution

These are just a few questions to get answers to in evaluating, planning and executing a successful b2b content marketing effort.

Takeaway:
The advent of content marketing is still quite new to most companies and as such there are many roads being explored to find the right path to content marketing success. Many are just beginning to develop a blueprint that works for them. However, fundamental to all content marketing is quality research and the ability to engage your client and motivate them to want to learn more about how you can help them be successful.

If you would like some help in establishing or evaluating your content marketing effort feel free to contact MyMarketingDept Inc., a solutions-based marketing firm that offers small business B2B marketing consulting services and outsource content marketing services.

Content Marketing - What to Look For

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 09:31:00 GMT

Are you contemplating hiring a B2B content marketing specialist anytime soon? A majority of companies say they are looking to expand their b2b content marketing activities; if this is something you will be doing then here are some helpful insights.

B2B companies’ adopting content marketing usage has reached new highs now 93% as reported in a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). While this is an impressive percentage, less than half only 42% of the companies surveyed consider themselves being effective with content marketing. Why the gap?

The study concludes that those B2B companies that have dedicated resources specifically; content marketing specialist and a documented strategy in place face fewer challenges in implementing content marketing and are more effective.

Hardly surprising given the number of companies pushing content marketing automation to help B2B companies do more content marketing. However, the big challenge is not just the doing, the quantity of the effort, but the quality too. The issue of quality surfaces as the biggest B2B marketing challenge among companies that have the time and money to produce significant quantities of B2B marketing content. Among small companies, the biggest challenges they face is the time to do it themselves or the budget to outsource content marketing.

I think it is interesting to note that market automation does not address the biggest challenges faced by either big or small companies. That is why you should be cautious in understanding that marketing automation is a tool not a panacea for content marketing. It saves time in integrating your content marketing across various distribution platforms. It can be helpful, but not a complete solution. High quality, customer-centric content is not produced by software.

Another interesting aspect of this study is a significant discrepancy between the uses of blogging in content marketing. The CMI study states, “Best-in-class B2B marketers, however, rate blogs as the most effective tactic (79%), which surpasses how they rate in-person events (76%); only 29% of their least effective peers rate blogs as effective.”

Source: 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends—North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs

The use of blogging as the foundational element in content marketing is well documented however it appears many B2B firms still shy away from blogging. Why because despite marketing automation blogging requires someone to do the research and write a blog. This is time and labor intensive for those companies without a dedicated marketing content specialist and costly for those that look to outsource blogging to a marketing professional.

With the lack of time and the ability to produce the content that engages potential prospects being the top two out of three challenges faced by B2B content marketers. Among small B2B companies, it would stand to reason they might look to outsource their content marketing more than big companies with larger marketing staffs. The CMI study reports that two-thirds of small businesses continue to use in-house resources only for B2B content creation in spite of the time constraints and a dearth of content that successfully engages prospective clients.

I think what this says is that small businesses are content to spend in-house resources with limited time for content marketing and continue to produce content that is ineffective in engaging their potential clients. While outsourced content marketing may appear to a small business as being “more expensive” because they are already paying in-house personnel. The reality, in fact, may be that the limited time available to in-house employees to produce enough content consistently and at a quality, level to be effective in engaging sales prospects is likely inefficient and more costly than outsourcing.

Outsourcing could increase existing employee productivity with work they are more suited for as opposed to adding content marketing to their task list or something they want to do but just don’t have the skill set to be effective. Outsourcing B2B content marketing to a marketing specialist then becomes less expensive and more effective in generating results because of their expertise to engage your potential clients.

Splitting the content marketing tasks between in-house and outsourced may be a good compromise too. A marketing professional may be best suited for doing the following:

Content Planning & Strategy
Buyer Persona Creation
Writing engaging content

While assigning in-house personnel these tasks:

Editing
Content Distribution/Syndication
Measurement/Analytics

Takeaway
B2B marketing content to be effective requires a plan, relevant topics to your target audience and writing that engages your potential clients. Anything short of this and you may be fooling yourself that you can produce content without all these requirements as being beneficial to your marketing, it’s not. You are simply wasting labor resources and will not obtain the results from the time and salary being spent.

What Is a Sales Lead for Business?

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 20 May 2014 09:10:00 GMT

What is the type of sales lead for business you really want? A lot of people will tell you there are a lot of different definitions of the business sales lead. Why is that?

Is it because defining what a sales lead is difficult? Not really. Is it because the people who want to sell B2B businesses sales leads know that delivering a real B2B sales lead is hard? Yes. But they know we want sales leads desperately, so they create their own definitions of a sales lead in order to get us to buy their services.

If you are in B2B marketing or sales, this is a topic near and dear to your heart. Just in case you didn’t know, there are no instant answers to B2B sales lead generation. Like you, I have wasted a lot of money on the latest sure fire can’t miss sales lead “solution”.

In spite of all the sales claims made by all types of partial and complete marketing automation firms, what they claim they do and what they actual deliver are two different things. They all claim to generate “sales leads” in one way, or another. Here are some of their sales claims.

Typical Marketing Automation Sales Claims

Sales Claim #1:

A “software platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.”

I believe they have software that will help attract visitors and aid in converting “leads” (they don’t tell you what kind of leads, but I am thinking they mean contact info). Do you believe “Software closes customers”?

Trust me software does not close customers. If it did, we would all be using this platform and they would be charging a lot more money than they do.

Sales Claim #2

It’s “the easiest way to grow sales and save time.”

Benefit Claim:

We “combine everything your business needs—contact management, CRM, marketing automation and e-commerce—into a single online system.

Again their sales claim, “the easiest way to grow sales,” really? They tell us how they save time, but we must trust them on how they “grow” sales. They want to convince us that simply by having contact management, CRM, marketing automation and e-commerce (which usually doesn’t apply to B2B) software we will grow sales. Buy the software and sales will follow. Sounds to me like more sales claim hyperbole.

Sales Claim # 3:

Generate More Leads with _______ Landing Pages

Benefit Claim:

Our “platform has been designed with one thing in mind: Conversion. Our goal is to facilitate a simpler and more streamlined marketing workflow so your marketing team can focus on creating, publishing and measuring your campaigns without the IT or software guys.”

I believe the benefit claim and the sales claim may be true if, by leads, they mean name captures and email addresses. If they mean or are inferring real sales leads then I think not.

Yes, they have software because that is what they deliver to you. Many also have either an expensive price tag or tedious learning curve or both. I have used one or more marketing automation solutions, but they haven’t generated real sales leads or more importantly the ROI they claim.

Why because at their core and what they don’t tell you is you using the web to market your business is a mass marketing proposition. So you will likely need tens to hundreds of thousands of page view for your website, blog, landing page and social media posts to obtain any results.

You also need to define what a sales lead is for your company. The so called, “sales lead” by most Internet marketing companies are a name and email address. Then through extensive email nurturing you might be able over time to fill in the rest of the data that you need to acquire in obtaining a real business lead. However, this still doesn’t guarantee that this “sales lead” is interested in contacting you.

I think I we have all seen these same sales claim charades before without the technology mumbo-jumbo. You may or may not remember companies that sell prospect mailing lists. They said and still say they sell “sales leads”. Providing the name, title, address and phone number is not a sales lead by any stretch of the imagination. It is contact information. I think today’s technology brethren are spouting the same old sales claims as the mailing list companies have done for years. It is the same sales claim in a shiny new wrapper. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

Warm leads, pre-qualified sales leads, contact information with phone or email address are not real sales leads.

I don’t know how you define a sales lead but here is how I define one. I know the only “real” sales lead is someone who actually contacts me first and then provides complete and accurate contact information for me to follow up with them. Anything short of this is not a real sales lead.

Generating real sales leads is hard and won’t likely be accomplished by simply buying software. Marketing automation is not likely a good investment for businesses with a total customer universe of less than 20,000 potential customers because it relies on tens and hundreds of thousands of page views.

Takeaway
Therefore, when someone promises you sales leads it may be prudent to challenge them to define, exactly what they mean by a “sales lead”. Paying several to tens of thousands of dollars for software to create content, publish content and track responses to that content that result in contact information, not a real sales lead may not be the smartest use of your marketing dollars you can make.

Marketing Automation Are You In?

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 14:01:00 GMT

We all are bombarded by emails about B2B marketing automation every day. So we thought you might be interested in learning more about the trends driving the frenzy in business marketing automation.

Our source for information on this topic comes from Software Advice^TM. Software Advice helps buyers choose the right software. As a trusted resource, and offers detailed reviews, comparisons and research to assist organizations in finding products that best fit their current and future needs.

Software Advice conducted a study of nearly 900 SMB software buyers from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2013 that reveals some very interesting insights into the marketing automation phenomenon.

Here are some of the questions that this study answers.

How “hot” is the marketing automation market
Who’s adopting marketing automation?

What Industries?
What size businesses?

What benefits are buyers looking for?

The Software Automation Market Opportunity

The marketing automation business opportunity is pretty wide open with less than 10% of participants in the study reporting having a marketing automation system in place. However, about 79% reported using some type of software to manage marketing operations. The types of software being utilized to manage marketing are:

48% using CRM software
7% an email marketing program
6% using their own “home grown” software

And, the biggest surprise was that 21% of firms were not employing any software at all still relying on pen, paper, spreadsheets and company email.

Current Methods of Managing Marketing Activities

Source: Software Advice^TMMarketing Automation Software BuyerView | 2014

In 2013 over 90% of firms were evaluating marketing automation for the first time. Marketing automation has been around for about 8 years, so it has taken awhile for most businesses to begin to accept marketing automation as a tool that they are ready to embrace. In our experience, we have found that the biggest concerns for SMBs to overcome in embracing marketing automation into their everyday operations are:

How much automation do I need?
Which one is right for my business?
How easy is the marketing automation software to learn & use?
Cost vs. benefit

The numbers of sales automation software firms has exploded in the last several years is likely giving rise the growing interest by potential buyers for many reasons:

More companies promoting marketing automation (check your inbox)
More choices from single function automation (email only) to multiple function (email, landing pages) to fully integrated marketing options (including managing content, social media lead scoring, and more)
The simultaneous increase in popularity for inbound & content marketing
Costs are coming down and early adopters now showing positive investment returns

There is a broad spectrum of businesses that were found to be among those reporting active interest in evaluating marketing automation. No surprise here that High-tech leads the way by a significant margin.

Top Industries Among Prospective Buyers

Source: Software Advice^TMMarketing Automation Software BuyerView | 2014

When it comes to the size of companies that were active in evaluating marketing automation in 2013 there was a surprise, maybe. According to the Software Advicestudy:

50% of buyers had fewer than 50 employees in their company (15% had 500 or more)

While this result may be surprising to many, the fact that consulting industry was the number two most active evaluator of marketing automation, and they generally have fewer employees than most other companies and, therefore, may account for the large percentage of buyers in firms with less than 50 employees. Or it may be that smaller firms are less risk adverse when it comes to exploring new ways of doing business.

The last area I wanted to discuss concerns the reasons study participants cited for the most requested marketing automation features.

Most Requested Marketing Automation Features

Source: Software Advice^TMMarketing Automation Software BuyerView | 2014

Here 81% of respondents choose lead nurturing as their number one feature that marketing automation software should offer. I think this is not only significant but crucial to having a successful marketing effort period.

Lead nurturing is the reason why you want all the other features listed by the participants in the study. If someone wants to buy your product now, it’s easy, and you don’t need all the other features of marketing automation. The reality is that most B2B buyers are not ready to buy the first time they complete the form at your website.

It makes sense because lead nurturing is the cause for marketing automation. You will get a lot more leads that require nurturing than those that don’t. Having an automated process to report, analyze, score leads, segment leads, send follow up and follow on emails, and integrate social media activities, and content all support the lead nurturing goal.

Bottom line if you don’t need or want to nurture leads than you can probably get along with something less than a fully automated and integrated marketing system.

Takeaway
The Internet has given us great power to reach out to our potential customer base in broader and deep ways than ever before. No matter the size of your business or the type of business you have marketing automation is a powerful tool when sized properly for your business and easily executed into your small business at a favorable cost-benefit ratio.

Tell us your experience with evaluating or implementing marketing automation into your small business.

What Makes Small Business B2B Marketing So Difficult?

Robert Hennessey — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 09:19:00 GMT

The reason that many small business owners find business-to-business marketing difficult is because, it is difficult.

Almost everybody we speak with regarding small business marketing tell us that if we can get them qualified sales leads, they can close the sale 80 to 90% of the time. The reality, we have found is somewhat different.

Most small business owners usually give us very high closing percentages because most of their sales were coming from referrals. So when we ask them to tell us about their ability to close sales they are eager to tell us this high closing percentage.

What they fail to mention is the fact that their closing percentage is based on referrals, not sales prospects generated from marketing. A more realistic closing percentage from sales generated from marketing is around 33%, and if you are a really good sales person perhaps as high as 50%.

We have had many clients who were getting meetings with potential customers that were generated by our marketing efforts, but just not being able to close the deal. When this happens, they usually tell us our marketing isn’t working.

Here is a typical example. Just because we were able to obtain four face-to-face meetings for a client in six weeks, they felt it was our fault that they didn’t make any sales. After biting our tongue, we try to explain that our job was to get them qualified sales prospects, not make sales for them. But because their selling experiences were generated from referrals, their ability to sell a customer was not previously an issue. Their sales experience consisted mainly of showing up being polite and talking about the person they had in common and being ready to take an order.

Given this reality among B2B small businesses, we now offer a crash course in SPIN selling. SPIN selling is a sales strategy that was developed over a 12 year, million dollar research project by the Huthwaite Corporation to determine, if there were repeatable principles and techniques that could be found in establishing an effective sales performance model.

Huthwaite’s president and founder, Mr. Neil Rackham and his team were able to identify and substantiate their findings with hard research data. Mr. Rackham has dispelled many long held sales myths that still exist today regarding how to sell B2B complex product/service sales. His company researches, consults and holds seminars for the leading 200 sales organizations worldwide.

We highly recommend the SPIN selling model for all our clients selling business-to-business products or services to any size company.

SPIN stands for the type of questions to ask your sales prospects.

S-P-I-N QUESTIONS

Situation: Data Gathering Don’t Use Too Many
Problem: Explorer Problems. Difficulties, Dis-satisfactions
Implication: Take problems & Explore Effects, Consequences, Urgencies
Need-Payoff: Get Customers to Tell You the Benefits They Seek

The SPIN Sales Process

75% Preparation 25% Presentation

Plan the 6 step Sales Process
Know something about your client to avoid too many situation questions
Be prepared to demonstrate your capabilities
Don’t forget to obtain to some particular commitment no matter what… sale, test, demo, next meeting with more or different people

Six Step process

Build Rapport
Investigate the Situation
Identify Problems
Bring Out Implications
Discuss Needs
Gain Commitment

Follow-Up

Immediately after every meeting
Within Every 10 days

The DON’TS

Do not Send literature
Do not make commitments you can’t keep
Do not except maybe, ask S-P-I-N questions to get a new commitment or a definitive yes or no.

Successful small business marketing includes marketing and sales. Obtaining qualified customers is half the battle, but unless you are prepared to close sales with a proven selling plan you will not achieve the results you want.

While everyone wants easy, simple marketing solutions they just don’t exist. Yes, we know there are lots of companies promising instant success and easy solutions. Of course they are because by telling small business owners what they want to hear, they figure they can sell their products and services easily. After all isn’t that the way to sell people. Tell them what they want, and they will buy from you.

Takeaway:
We have learned that small business marketing is not easy and often ineffective because it takes:

a well thought out plan, not an app
significant investments in time, either yours or someone you hire
trial and yes sometimes errors to get it right
a consistent marketing messages
a daily marketing effort
a dedicated marketing budget
a proven sales method like SPIN selling

Tell us what you think makes small business marketing so difficult.

What Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Mean to Me

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 09:27:00 GMT

In the age of social media, I can tell you what Social Media Marketing doesn’t mean to me as a B2B marketer.

It doesn’t mean that every “Like” of a company or their product is the same as a thoughtful recommendation from a business colleague or even stranger that has had first-hand business experience with a firm that I am considering to help solve my business problems.

They tell us that a “Like” or social media proof is today’s word of mouth endorsement. I am not so convinced there is a direct relationship between the new digital word-of mouth and the original offline word-of-mouth.
The original word of mouth that we all know was great marketing because it was an, “honest endorsement from a trusted source.”

However, the digital version may be missing some key elements required in the making the original word-of-mouth marketing so powerful and useful. If you examine the important words in the definition of word-of-mouth, they are honest and trusted. But “Likes” and many other social media endorsements have been bastardized by media gurus and corporate giants that are paying for digital word of mouth recommendations on social media.

See how the media and the mega corporations are manipulating social media, exploiting young people and stealing our privacy in the recently aired PBS television show FRONTLINE PRESENTS “GENERATION LIKE”.

Having someone promote your brand or product true or untrue and then rewarding them to create the social buzz you want and then trick people through games and “shiny objects” to give up their privacy and presto you have created the new digital pied piper of the 21st century. This is can result in many millions of unsuspecting people to be happily led over the edge of the mountain every day.

They say I have a million “Likes” or thousands of blog followers that listen and do what I say. And the numbers are true but how did they obtain their followers and just because I am a “friend” of a “friend” times 100 can you really trust what I say or write?

In the business-to-business world relationships are all about trust and confidence. Using today’s marketing mediums to build fake or false trust and confidence will not work for long just as untruthful, half truthful advertising claims of the past didn’t work either. Testimonials have always been a way to persuade and convince potential customers to consider your company. Digital word of mouth to reach more people you don’t know and can’t really be sure of their honesty and trust, or who may have bought that trust is sure to diminish this once reliable way of verifying the truth into just another marketing tool to dupe unsuspecting customers.

In a world where everyone wants easy and instant answers I guess it is no surprise that social media marketing would both, be popular and be susceptible to being corrupted. The easy way out often isn’t easy and usually causes more problems than doing the hard work of confirming testimonials in the first place.

Digital social media platforms make and solicit social proof at every turn. Not always with high integrity. Why because getting real business referrals is really difficult. Many people say; they will refer you company, but few will actually follow through.

In the Harvard Business Review article “How Valuable Is Word of Mouth?” By V. Kumar, J. Andrew Petersen, and Robert P. Leone stated that: “The number of both companies’ customers who said they intended to recommend the firms to other people was high, but the percentage who actually did so was far, far lower.”

I give and get referrals all the time. While I have always valued an honest and trusted referral I always felt that I need to evaluate the value of that opinion to me and my business.

Not all my business friends are in the same business, have the same issues or have the same resources. Just because someone tells me that XYZ Company is good or was a good solution for their business that doesn’t mean they will be good for mine. Will I consider XYZ Company maybe, if I know my friends’ needs are very similar to mine? If not the referral doesn’t help me. Just as buyers always need to beware you should employ the same healthy skepticism in “Likes” and other digital social proof.

Takeaway
Like the original word-of-mouth digital social proof could be a powerful persuader and motivator to drive B2B sales with two big caveats, if the veracity of that social proof is from an honest and trusted source and the comments are relevant to your business and needs.

What are your thoughts on the traditional offline word-of-mouth and digital social proof on the Internet today?

Outsourced Marketing What's Important?

Robert Hennessey — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 09:25:00 GMT

The key element you need to look for in hiring an outsourced marketing consultant is probably not what you think.

One of the lessons I learned in my early career that I share with my clients is about the most important part of hiring personnel or consultants. I relate a true short story that I encountered in hiring personnel in a former business life. The key principle is the same for both hiring in-house as well as outsourced employees.

Sure, the first time I was in a position to hire staff I was predisposed to rely on the traditional process of hiring personnel based on their meeting a set of educational and job experience criteria.

You know check off the boxes of who did and didn’t meet the criteria. Look to eliminate people instead of finding reasons to include them. This is really easy to do when you are faced with having to manage a large number of potential candidates.

This company process resulted in hiring a consistently high number of people that failed to be productive or left the company after a short period of time. This cost the company a substantial amount of time and money and because it occurred with our sales force and it was affecting our customer relationships and sales negatively.

Then we decided to question why this was happening. We decided to examine all the specific characteristics of the current and previous sales hires we had made. We then compared the specific characteristics of successful long term sales hires with our current sales force. By doing this, we found that there were additional characteristics of a more personal nature that statistically stood out as a key indicator that could predict future performance as being more important to success.

As an example, we had a tenured inside customer service manager that tried really hard to improve his department, but everything this person did and we suggested just wasn’t working. Finally we made a change of personnel and at a trade show I was introducing our new customer service manager to our customers.

Our customers were concerned about the change simply because they had become accustomed to the previous manager and were feeling a bit forlorn over his departure in spite of their complaints about the department.

In introducing the new manager, I did not talk about their education or business experience. What I did convey to our customers were all the problems they were experiencing with our customer service department.

Then importantly, I told them they could have complete confidence that positive change was on the way because of one especially quality the new manager was bringing to the job. I told them this person was a volunteer fireman. And his willingness to enter burning buildings with his life on the line to save strangers with no enumeration made him the perfect person to solve our customer service problems. They welcome the new manager with open arms.

Takeaway
The key aspect needed to instill confidence and trust with the department and our customers was passion, a personal character trait the transcended job competence or knowledge. Today there are many qualified people to do a job, but those people that live their job and will place their own concerns to the side to accomplish their job is always the best

What has been your experience in hiring employees or consultants? Love to hear your feedback.

Related Information

5-Prerequisites for Small Business Outsource Marketing

Outsource Small Business Marketing

Small Business Marketing, - Should I Outsource?

How to Generate B2B Small Business Sales Leads

Robert Hennessey — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 10:01:00 GMT

How to generate B2B small business sales leads is often a challenge and confusing proposition. This is especially true now, when every day it seems we are bombarded by this new marketing or that new marketing instant solution to b2b sales lead generation. The truth is there is no instant solution. Generating B2B sales leads takes work and persistence.

To achieve sales lead generation success we recommend these guidelines to assist you in building a consistent flow of new customers for your small business.

1. Develop a Marketing Plan:

A b2b marketing plan will help you identify the vertical markets, services and customer demographics to map out the goals and objectives in defining your target markets. Your marketing plan should define clearly the business problems of your potential customers, and your solution(s). Finally, your plan will help you analyze your current situation to establish realistic performance criteria that will guide the development and implementation of a targeted marketing strategy and tactics to generate new clients.

2. Establish a Marketing Budget:

Commit to a marketing budget that you can live with in order to market your business every day. This is the most critical aspect of small business marketing. Avoiding the small business marketing roller coaster mistake is critical to your success. Remember it is not how much you spend. But, rather how you spend it and your dedication to market consistently your business every day that will ultimately determine your marketing success.

3. Create a Unique Selling Proposition:

The heart of your marketing communications message is your Unique Selling Proposition or (USP) for your business. Along with your USP then create a 10 second commercial that allows you to communicate how you help your clients solve their business problems. Do not use self-serving tag lines about what you do or how great your business is.

4. Don't be confused by Marketing Distribution Methods as Being Marketing:

Craig's List, Google AdWords, and LinkedIn Ads and other advertising mediums are just ways to get your marketing message out to the market. The first step is to develop the right marketing message, otherwise how you disseminate your marketing message doesn't really matter. A wrong message delivered to the right target audience = no clients.

5. Our Preferred B2B Communication Distribution Methods:

We like these relatively low cost and high value marketing tactics for b2b small business sales lead generation. You can always add more marketing tactics as required, if necessary, but mastering these should be your first priority.

An offline direct contact we call, “Perfect-Alignment-Marketing^SM”
Website B2B Lead Generation
Blogging
Public Relations
Email Lead Nurturing
LinkedIn Networking & Participation

6. Use Layering:

To use layering in your marketing simply means; don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Layering is the employment of multiple communication channels by which you can reach, and your target audience can find you. Using all or some combination of our preferred B2B Communication Distribution Methods from above will insure you are using layering in your small business marketing.

7. Embrace Customer-Centric Marketing Communications:

Customer-centric B2B marketing is as its name says; centers on the needs and wants of the customer, and not about what the person doing the selling wants their customers to buy.

It is built upon the assumption that the sale is the natural result of creating a solid relationship built on listening and problem solving, not forcing or intimidating someone to buy. It begins with building customer rapport and ends with a lasting business relationship that generates continuing lifelong sales.

Ideal B2B marketing message alignment is achieved when initial rapport is built with your prospect based on the realization by your prospect that you understand their business problems and you have indicated a willingness and ability to help them solve their problems.

You must put your customer first and not yourself in the communications messages you are delivering to your sales prospects. It is not about you it is about them. You will know when you have achieved the perfect message alignment you seek. When a prospect calls you and says, "I feel as if I already know you and want to meet you as soon as possible", you have achieved perfect alignment.

Takeaway
Following these seven steps can put your small business on a methodology to overcome the chronic small business sales lead generation problem of obtaining new B2B sales leads on a consistent basis. If you could benefit from our marketing expertise to assist you please contact us.

Related Information

B2B Sales Lead Follow Up

Market Alignment - What is it? & Why you need it.

The Secret to B2B Sales Lead Generation-No Selling Required!

Small Business Trade Show Marketing 5 Tips

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 11:02:00 GMT

Trade shows have been a staple of small business marketing because they project your brand and facilitate customer contact in a captive environment.

The goals of most small businesses at a trade show are usually one or more of the following:

Introduce our company brand to the market
Obtain sales leads to follow up with customer appointments
Sell a specific amount of products or services

Traditional Trade Show Approach

However a trade show can be a significant expense especially, if you use a traditional approach to exhibiting at a trade show. The traditional approach involves:

renting booth space
acquiring an exhibit structure
spending on signage
a promotion campaign
possible in-booth entertainment
possible giveaways

Even a thrifty budget of $2,000.00 for direct trade show expenses, (not including set-up, working hours & booth take down time expenses), can be a very costly exercise, if you are not focused on your specific marketing goal and the best way to achieve that goal.

A True Trade Show Story

The best way for me to explain how to work a trade show is to relate this real world experience I had with one of my clients. The client approached me to help them evaluate their approach to working a trade show. I was not asked to be involved in the planning stage, just to observe on the actual day of the show to make future recommendations.

I did suggest to my client and counselled them to focus on one simple principal. I asked the client to tell me the biggest problem they help their client solve. I suggested that they make this the focal point of their effort at the trade show.

They were a software company that made a niche software solution for government reporting for auto dealerships. They told me their software eliminates the manual and tedious job of recording and reporting information on accounting pads to the state government.

The software firm thought that the best way to sell their product was to demonstrate it live during the show. From their perspective they thought this would make it obvious to their potential customers they would need the company’s software. So their main concern for preparing for the trade show was setting up computers to conduct demonstrations of their software. The other important aspect of preparing for the show from their perspective was a new sign they had made for their booth. I told them I thought the old sign was sufficient but they wanted to “spice up the booth” (the sign cost was $500.00). However, sometimes trade show booths are for the owner and not only their customers.

When I arrived at their booth, about an hour before the show opened, the client was busy setting up their computers just finishing hanging the new sign and placing brochures around the booth.

Important Fact
You should know that a trade show is like a carnival. Your ability to control the sights, sounds and smells around your booth is impossible.

This was a shock to my clients. Across from our booth was a really tricked out race car that my client’s team thought would help attract a large crowd right across from their booth. Then 5 minutes before the doors open a well-endowed young lady appeared in a yellow bikini and positioned herself on the hood of the car. What my client’s team thought would be helpful to drawing a crowd had become, “who is going to pay attention to us with that across the aisle.”

Then to add insult to injury right around the corner from our booth began a very loud banging sound that repeated every 20-30 seconds like a pounding headache. The crowd was coming in and the noise level in the hall rose to a constant din. Then it dawned on my client that it was going to be very challenging to hold computer demos of their software with all the noise and distractions going on around them.

I turned to the owner who was now very demoralized for all the work they had done and I said did you bring the accounting pad that your customers use to do their reporting to the state? He said yes. He gave it to me and I started walking down the aisle from the main approach to the booth.

I spotted a man and woman who appeared to resemble our target audience of independent auto dealers. I approached the woman and said, “Have you ever seen one of these pads?” She said, oh yes! So I said to her, “how would you like to throw these in the garbage?” “She responded, “if you can help me do that I am all ears!” She then grabbed her husband’s arm and I escorted them to our booth. I introduced them to my client’s co-owner who was the sales manager and he began to talk with the couple. The other co-owner who was a key person for the software code began demonstrating the software. Within minutes unprompted to buy, the client’s husband said we have seen enough and he took out his credit card. The co-owner responsible for the computer code and demonstrations wanted to continue with the demo. I was able to pull him aside and told him they just took their credit card out we don’t need to continue with the demo.

Takeaway
So here are tips we recommend to small business owners about trade shows and selling at trade shows.

Set your goal for your trade show
Remember a trade show environment is a carnival & prepare accordingly and understand what you can accomplish
Identify your customer’s biggest problem and demonstrate their problem to them
Spend just the right amount of time to accomplish your goal; sales lead, establish your brand identity or if possible sell quickly
Do not spend more than 5 to 10 minutes per sales prospect

Image credit: penin / 123RF Stock Photo

B2B Collaborative Marketing the New B2B Social Media

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 10:44:00 GMT

What is collaborative marketing and why could it be the preferred marketing approach for small businesses selling B2B products and services?

Many small business owners find it hard to set aside the time and effort required to become fluent in all of the new Internet marketing platforms. Even if the time is available, many simply did not get into their business to spend four to eight hours a day posting on the social media platforms and writing blogs, articles, press releases and white papers. And, most do not have the budgets to hire people full time to perform these marketing activities.

However, collaborative marketing is a method to share marketing resources that could assist small business to benefit from today’s new social media marketing platforms.

If you have ever attended a trade show, you have experience in understanding the power of collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing is defined by the BusinessDictionary.Com as:

General: Cooperative arrangement in which two or more parties (which may or may not have any previous relationship) work jointly towards a common goal.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/collaboration.html#ixzz2uG8iJtYl

You may also have experienced or engaged in a form of collaborative marketing, if you have ever set-up a mutual referral or alliance arrangement with other business, where you both share common customers and promote to your target audience in a cooperative or collaborative manner. Some typical examples of this form of marketing collaboration are:

Networking firm and a web designer
Accountant and a financial advisor and business broker
Event planner, local hotels, and a ad specialities company
Web designer and a copywriter

The some benefits to be gained from collaborative marketing are:

Gaining some new customers from your collaborative partner(s)
Sharing marketing costs to reach your target audience
Developing unique or collaborative products or services for your clients that cannot be found from competitors
Collaborating with other businesses whose customer service or marketing expertise compliments your strengths and their weaknesses and vice versa

The ultimate goal of marketing collaboration is to create a mutually beneficial business arrangement that makes all the collaborating partners more successful.

Marketing automation has been touted, as the method to achieve marketing independence. So far it has mainly succeeded in increasing the marketing labor hours required to benefit from the automation, and the hours needed to learn the software.

Additionally, buyers continue to yearn for personal one to one relationships that used to exist pre-automation. The marketing automation promise was a one-to-one to feel based on a one-to-many delivery, and it may not be exactly working out that way. Many buyers are learning to detect automated lead nurturing emails that fail to speak directly to their specific needs.

Buyers also really want less content not more. Wow, is that an explosive statement! We are all bombarded daily in our email with what we need is more content marketing. There are two problems with this mantra:

First-buyers want less content, not more, and they want smart content with solutions, not just insights and thought leadership.
Second, think about it, how hesitant are you complete a contact form. Even if you think the information might be relevant to you because you know you are going to be inundated with many more emails to come.

The Internet and now social media continues to expand interaction and collaborative marketing opportunities. And, buyer behaviors and needs will continue to change that is for certain. Buyer and seller collaboration will also likely begin to increase. Collaborative marketing is one small step you can explore to find better ways to serve customer needs and your own.

So where might you find potential collaboration partners? Well talking to your existing clients is a good place to start. After all, they like your company, and they will be able to recommend who else they do business with that might be a good fit for your business to team-up with as potential collaborators.

Takeaway
Collaborative marketing is just one more strategy option for small business that could help expand and grow your business. There are many variations of collaboration marketing, so it pays to explore all your options. The new social media in B2B marketing for you could be a new twist on collaborative marketing.

Are B2B Social Media Platforms Failing Small Business?

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 10:15:00 GMT

Just as the B2B social media platform, LinkedIn is growing successfully, are we beginning to detect a fall from grace among small business B2B professionals?

In fairness to LinkedIn it is important to recognize it began and remains primarily a business-to-business job site that has expanded into marketing solutions and networking subscriptions, its smallest revenue center.

Many small business professionals don’t think the popular social media platforms understand the needs of business-to-business professionals. At least not in terms of how these platforms actually help B2B businesses accomplish their business goals. So, what’s the problem?

All of the current social media platforms purport to be havens for real open and honest communication of community that foster business relationships. The reality is a continual move to curtail many of these principles.

Why, because most business people either, can’t resist the temptation to blatantly market their companies, or are told to do so. This is in contrast to attempting to engage with a business platform of peers and potential clients in the word of ethical behavior and ideas.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King, “someday people will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin”. I for one want the opportunity to be judged by the quality of my content and ideas not to be the victim of the many ways that people look to game the LinkedIn platform. However we are all held captive as a result of those that want to:

scrape emails
message constantly to everyone buy their products or services
post spam content by the deluge of wall-to-wall news feed like posts, press releases and promotional content
only want to make valuable content available behind gated content

I have also found that the people I would really like to engage with my prospective clients have walled themselves off from vendors because of these abuses of the LinkedIn system.

LinkedIn is pretty much resigned itself to the fact that people cannot help themselves when presented with the opportunity to reach a large potential audience of customers to promote shamelessly their products and services. Their response to this promotion minded spam reality has been to:

Increase the effort to promote Ads – more self-serving than serving the community
Eliminate LinkedIn Answers section – response to spam
Allows Users to Opt –Out of Messages to be received as a response to spam
Allows Users to Select who can send you invitations to connect

So the reality of LinkedIn is all the serious buyers of products and services are left to commiserate within their closed groups and generally among themselves. This walls people off without the potential benefits of ethical supplier input, because the spam reality is too prevalent to invite ethical suppliers inside the group.

Even when suppliers participate in closed groups, there are few discussions that involve people that hold positions of marketing and sales in companies other than those that want to sell marketing services. Here is a common plea from a moderator that is more prevalent than not.

“Seems like many, (most?), of us, participating in this discussion are suppliers of B2B marketing services. It would be great to hear more perspectives from those who hold marketing and sales positions in B2B technology companies.”

This even in a closed group, it seems worst once a group becomes open.

Early adopters to LinkedIn generally are more likely to report a better experience prior to many of the changes made to mitigate spam. More recent Users usually have more negative comments.

The increasingly difficult it becomes to reach your target audience ethically because of spam practices the less viable LinkedIn becomes in helping ethical suppliers. LinkedIn then becomes a closed forum for sellers eliminating one of the most important goals of most business people. This doesn’t seem to help anybody.

LinkedIn and other social media platforms for B2B professionals need to construct a system that delineates their purpose clearly in helping business people. While it may have started without a clear mission (B2B jobs) as it evolves to wanting to be all things to all people, it is showing signs of a confused plan that is frustrating many of the audience it hoped to serve.

Takeaway
There definitely is a place where the primary purpose is to bring sellers and buyers together for a sales engagement. Likewise there is need for a place to help business people build initial rapport with each other through sellers and prospects seeking to be educated, reviewing differing opinions, and become socially engaged. Is it possible to do both, I think so. But it will require distinct separations to serve the same audience with these very different services and keep everyone satisfied. What are your thoughts?

New Small Business B2B Marketing Dilemmas

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 21:00:00 GMT

How do you as a small business deal with the new marketing dilemmas? That’s right, dilemmas plural. So what are the new marketing dilemmas?

The new marketing dilemmas for small business are major in both scope and importance to your business. First, there are more marketing choices today than ten years ago, and the marketing budget for small business have not expanded proportionately. So many small businesses are agonizing over what marketing choices are best for them.

Expanded Marketing Options & Cost
We are all well aware of the fact that there are no shortages of people promoting the latest marketing “silver bullet.” We all are bombarded by emails, webinars, and social media testimonials, that if we will only invest $29, $49 or $99 a month that our marketing problems are solved. The problem is we are also told that we need all or most of the following marketing automation and services to conduct small business marketing today.

Analytics	Social media tools
Blogging services	Video Services
CRM	Web advertising
Content writing	Web conferencing
Email/lead nurturing	Web design
SEO services	Web hosting
Stock photography services	Webinar software

If you were to add up a monthly fee to utilize all these services at just $29/month you would be spending in excess of $4,500 annually that doesn’t include the time to learn and manage these services that many costs thousands more.

The second marketing dilemma is to understand what marketing tactics will achieve your short term and which will accomplish longer term business objectives.

Marketing Tactics Short Term vs. Long Term
The goal of small business B2B marketing is often focused on acquiring new customers. This is also akin to the classic battle of what works best push vs. pull marketing. What is now called outbound marketing or traditional marketing tactics, (like direct mail, advertising and telemarketing), are generally accepted to return a short term result. These are classic push marketing tactics.

In contrast, the new social media marketing takes six to twelve months to begin helping you acquire new customers. This is classic pull marketing which is at the heart of social media marketing. Understanding this is important in making good decisions regarding your budget allocations.

The third important marketing dilemma is turning your marketing communications from an inward focus about telling how you can provide a product or service to another company, to developing customer-centric marketing communication messages that speak to your potential customer at every stage of the buying cycle.

New Marketing Message
The new marketing in the age of the Internet and social media is in one way a radical departure from how you have always marketed your business and in another way it embraces some compatible B2B marketing principles.

Social media marketing approaches require that you not begin the selling process too soon. Potential sales prospects today want to become informed and educated before they engage potential suppliers. They are choosy about receiving quality, relevant content from sellers and want to know that you understand their biggest business challenges. This requires relationship building on your part through customer-centric content that exhibits and builds your company leadership and expertise.

Think of this as akin to a traditional face-to-face B2B selling situation where your job is to build credibility and trust before you can progress to discuss the details of their needs.

Hidden Cost of Content
The final marketing dilemma we want to address is the realization either initially or upon adoption to the new social media marketing approach that social media marketing requires significant amounts of labor to create content. Previously out bound marketing content creation required just a small amount of marketing content.

Takeaway
We always caution clients from just assuming that following the herd is a good idea. Why, because the heard is an aggregate of all businesses and does not reflect your particular, goals, industry or target audience that will likely benefit you. What we do recommend is to develop the proper small business marketing plan that marries the right marketing mix to achieve your specific marketing goals.

How to Write Effective Business-to-Business Website Content

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 10:39:00 GMT

Writing effective business-to-business website content is critical to converting website visitors to leads and then customers. I think we can all agree that most business people go to the Web to find solutions to their business problems. Business people are not waiting around for someone to contact them and say, “Hey, I have a solution to your problem.”

The Mission – Problem/Solution Content
Therefore, our job is to provide customer-centric, problem/solution marketing content on our websites. Not sales copy telling our visitors how great we are as a company. If you are doing that you are wasting your time and money to obtain B2B sales leads from your website.

Begin by understanding the critical problems of your target audience. If you don’t know these problem issues, ask a lot of probing questions to understand your customers’ real problems. Assume nothing and seek to gain insight into all the concerns of your potential customer, explicit and implied.

Business-to-business sales prospects are also evaluating you and your competitors because now the Web makes it easy for them to perform business comparisons than ever before. Therefore, to have business-to-business content that will be effective in convincing your website visitors that they should contact your company, your marketing communications content must address the following

The First Principle – Overcoming Buyer Anxiety
The first element to understand in writing effective business-to-business website content is that the focus of your marketing communications message must be to minimize the mental stress of that most people, including business people deal with in order to make a decision. We all experience the same stress to a lesser or greater degree in our everyday lives. Making decisions is not easy and in fact creates a lot some or of stress for almost everyone and stress levels are even higher when the decision you make affects your business or livelihood. Buyer anxiety not managed and ignored can even lead to outright buyer fear.

The process of overcoming buyer anxiety requires a serious examination and introspective look at your primary marketing message, your value proposition. A value proposition that is lacking in any of the following attributes can drive your inability to convert website visitors into interested sales prospects that want to talk or meet with you.

Second Principle – Put Value in Your Value Proposition
A properly constructed value proposition goes a long way to address the need of alleviating buyer anxiety. Here are four important ingredients in an effective value proposition that can reduce or eliminate buyer anxiety.

Your value proposition must convey credibility to a potential buyer
The value you purport must have meaningful appeal and be relevant to your sales prospects
The more exclusive the claims made in your value proposition the better
The easier it is to understand your value proposition the more effective it is in reinforcing all the preceding elements

Understanding how important your value proposition is to your prospective customers is crucial to mitigating buyer anxiety and therefore increasing your sales opportunities to connect with buyers.

Buyer anxiety and fear are readily apparent when your marketing communications put your potential customers on the defensive or increase their stress or anxiety. By not taking every precaution to anticipate and minimize or eliminate buyer anxiety;

from the elements in your value proposition
to the type of communication messages you impart on your website
to the content on the Web forms you present to them
to the actions you ask them to take at your website

…all are critically important to breaking down the barriers to turning your potential sales prospects into buyers.

So how do you construct business-to-business website content that will reduce buyer stress? Well it is always smart to put yourself in the shoes of buying your own business-to-business product/service. What would you like to experience that would reduce your own buyer anxiety?

Third Principal – Content Really Counts
There are a few ways to improve your problem/solution content with ways to enhance visitor conversions that are easy to implement.

Being specific about quantifying your value proposition claims is one such way. If you claim quality add specific content that conveys reassurance of this claim to your visitors like a “no-hassle” guarantee. If you claim reliability insert comments from your satisfied customers etc.
Reassuring your visitors with visuals and text right at the point of action on your web pages you want them to take will certainly help.
Content used in a more self-confident manner can also aid in reducing buyer anxiety. Things like comparison charts, not requiring a credit card, if requiring a credit card explain why, things like instant download and no set-up fees are also good ways of reducing the potential stress of visitor participation.

Takeaway
Effective business-to-business website content begins with understanding that business people want to find solutions to their business problems. You don’t want to use sales copy on your website if you want to convert sales prospects to customers. Lastly, overcoming buyer anxiety and using your value proposition and content that reinforces reducing buyer stress is paramount to converting website visitors to leads and then customers.

Orginal Source Material: 263% Higher Conversion

Related Information

5 Things Lead Generating Websites Have In Common

B2B Website Content That Sells

B2B Marketing Website Content Tips

B2B Marketing Website Content Tips

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:36:00 GMT

How important is the length of your B2B marketing website content on your small business B2B web pages? This is a question that doesn’t get asked enough by small businesses. Why?

We have found that small B2B companies are often hard pressed to find sufficient meaningful content to fill their web pages. This is really important when you are selling consultative products or services to other businesses.

The key to producing effective web pages that convert your traffic to sales leads begins and ends with providing quality and relevant content that reduces the resistance of your visitors to accept the validity of your value proposition and marketing messages. Building the confidence of your sales prospects to trust your marketing message and company value proposition is what will break down this predisposed skepticism of virtually all potential clients that visit your website.

How Much Content Is Needed

So what’s the right amount of copy to have on your web pages? Well it is not so much about the absolute number as it is about the best copy that will minimize or eliminate potential client resistance in their mind.

B2B Marketing Website Copy Tips

Here are some valuable tips regarding website copy length for small business B2B marketing.

Every B2B sales web page that that is fundamental to helping your sales prospects to understand…

who you are
what you do
how your product/service can help them
what makes you different

…should all have a minimum of 600 words per page, or more.

All your B2B website content must articulate or advance you company’s value proposition.
Your website copy needs to reduce the anticipated resistant mind set by sales prospects by producing:

Quality and relevant content of interest to your target audience not you.
Customer-centric content that focuses on how you help your prospective clients solve their business problems.
Sufficient copy length a minimum of 600 words or greater per page to guide your sales prospects thought the process from problem recognition through discovery to a positive sales action that results in a lead conversion, meeting request, or purchase decision.
Increased amounts of copy length for high cost or complex products/services, as opposed to low cost, impulsive products/services you might sell. See example below.

Various levels of content complexity to attract and retain the different sophistication levels of sales prospects that visit your website. Having content at the beginner, intermediate and advanced level of complexity is ideal too.

Takeaway
Having proper content (relevant and meaningful customer-centric content), for your website B2B sales prospects and having the right amount of content in relation to the complexity and cost of your products/services is vital to transforming your website into a B2B sales lead generating website.

Original Source Content: Long vs. Short Copy May 16, 2013

Related Information

5 Things Lead Generating Websites Have In Common

B2B Website Content That Sells

B2B Sales Lead Follow Up

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 11:15:00 GMT

You’ve worked hard to get your B2B sales leads, but when they arrive how fast are you responding? How fast should you respond?

Understanding buyer behavior online or off line is always critical to converting B2B sales leads. As B2B buyers continue to rely using the Web to research purchases, it becomes paramount for companies to understand the online behavior of their potential customers.

The findings in a recent study of B2B Buyer Behavior on the Web and Phone by Software Advice, Inc. reveals some key insights into their buyers that can help us all analyze our own buyer behaviors on the Web.

Software Advice, Inc. analyzed data collected from 6,000,000 unique visitors to their website to shed light on when B2B buyers perform research on the Web, when they convert on the website and the best time to contact them. The Key findings in the study revealed:

Key Study Findings

Call leads fast—really fast.
Tuesday through Thursday is the best time to reach buyers.
Don’t underestimate the opportunity around the holidays.

Defining some key terms used in this study will help clarify its findings:

First, a qualification is the result of a telephone conversation by a sales person via a telephone needs analysis and BANT qualification.
Second is a conversion. In the study, the conversion is defined as a website visitor who completes a contact form from a landing page.

This study focuses on B2B sales lead qualification and its importance in setting the stage for achieving ultimately higher sales lead conversions. It demonstrates the benefit to increase the number of qualified sales leads by reacting quickly to visitors converting on your landing pages, so you can increase the numbers of qualified sales leads.

Surprised? May be we shouldn’t be. While researching business solutions on the Web, when we find something that interests us most people are more likely to engage improving your ability to qualify leads generated online.

The study also suggests some additional insights into particular times of the year, week and day that are most fertile in a company’s ability to turn website conversions into qualified leads. Please note that the findings in this study of qualification rates are specific to their business. This means that your qualification rates will vary based on your business and any seasonality of your business.

One caution do not assume that the study’s result on times of the year, week and day and your company’s ability to turn website conversions into qualified leads will be identical to those in this study. However these general guidelines in responding to your online B2B sales leads should help us all.

Key B2B Sales Lead Takeaways for Everyone:

Analyze your sales qualification rates and adjust your sales follow up resources to respond to your particular buyer activity patterns.
Invest in technology that enables you to contact sales leads that convert on your landing pages quickly, if your website generates lots of sales leads.
Not all buyers deserve an immediate call. If the nature of the buyer’s contact is—requesting an immediate interaction, price quote, or product demo—then you should call them.
With buyers that are responding by completing a form to download a whitepaper, access video content, or view other informational content—then these sales prospects you should nurture with email, not call.

The findings in this study show calling conversions right away can significantly improve the ability to qualify leads generated on the Web. Moreover, there are certain times of the year, week and day when you need to plan your sales team’s capacity to maximize your ability to turn website conversions into leads. To get these insights that would benefit your firm, you will need to conduct your own research.

More Information

Infographic of this Study

Software Advice, Inc

LinkedIn Small Business B2B Marketing Tips

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 11:03:00 GMT

LinkedIn enables you to find and connect with 25 or more qualified leads in one hour while sitting at your desk. This makes it one of the best social media marketing platforms for B2B small business.

It is unique for many reasons not the least of which is its focus solely on a business audience and worldwide reach, LinkedIn currently reports 259,000,000 members plus. Besides being a hub for jobs which represents 57% of its revenue as of Q3 2013, it represents access to the following business audience.

LinkedIn counts executives from all 2013 Fortune 500 companies as members; its corporate talent solutions are used by 91 of the Fortune 100 companies.
LinkedIn members did over 5.7 billion professionally-oriented searches on the platform in 2012.
More than 3 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.
There are more than 1.5 million unique publishers actively using the LinkedIn Share button on their sites to send content into the LinkedIn platform. †

So, if you are not actively using LinkedIn you should be as soon as possible. Why, well in the first place it is free and when used properly, it can be very effective and efficient in growing your business. There are paid services available for job listings, advertising and premium search, email and contact services. Initially, these services are not required for most small businesses to make effective use of LinkedIn as a marketing platform to build your business.

Get Started with LinkedIn

Complete Your Profile - This is the first critical step in positioning your small business to benefit from LinkedIn. Do not complete your profile like a job resume. Your profile needs to speak to the needs of your potential customers. We call it customer-centric marketing. This profile is not about you as you natural would think. It needs to be about how you help your customers solve their business problems.

Add Your Company Page – This is another opportunity to help your prospective clients learn about how you can help them meet their business objectives. By helping your potential clients know that you understand their business problems they will be able to quickly evaluate why they should be getting to know you and your firm.

Add Your Services – Again, another occasion to impart the value of your services in solving the business problems of your sales prospects. If you haven’t created service products for your business do so. If you need help contact a small business marketing consultant that can assist you in creating service products for your business.

Add a Follow Me Button – Add a LinkedIn Follow Me button to your website. This will encourage visitors to your website to have the opportunity to learn more about you personally and your company. This is another customer-centric approach to small business marketing. Today sales prospects that don’t know you will have the opportunity to learn more about you and your firm through your participation at LinkedIn a respected peer-to-peer business community.

Share Updates on Your Company Page – You can add an update to your company pages to expand your thought leadership, provide relevant, quality content to your sales prospects and gaining valuable back links to your web site. These updates can be added by directly entering them at your LinkedIn company page or through social media management platforms like, Seesmic, HootSuite, or TwitterFeed.

Join Groups – Joining groups, (LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups at one time), is a key activity to meeting the types of people that you will share interests and business collaboration with that can benefit your business. Start out slow selecting your groups so you can get an idea of the types of people in the group and what they are talking about and trying to achieve for tits members. Be sure to read the Group Profile by clicking on the i in the top right hand side of a group’s header next to their number of members.

Select groups that contain the type of sales prospects you would like to connect with over industry groups are in your same industry. After all you are trying to connect with people that you can potentially have a mutually beneficial business relationship. Steer clear of the big groups as a rule it will be harder for you to gain a voice in large groups. For small businesses less than 10,000 members is best.

Start out by reading some of the discussions in a group first. If you come across a discussion you can contribute to then post a comment. You objectives in posting in the group are to be supportive, helpful and not to start selling your products or services. Plan to spend at least 10 to 15 minutes a day to begin with your groups reading discussions and finding opportunities to contribute to the discussion. Over time you will begin to be recognized as a valuable member of the group and you will have people wanting to contact you and visit your Profile, Company Page and begin reading and linking to your posts.

Takeaway
LinkedIn with time, perseverance and patience will begin to provide you with a growing network of people that will be very beneficial in helping you grow your business. These contacts will begin to rely on you and refer you to other people that will generate sales leads and customers for your business.

† http://press.linkedin.com/about

Small Business Marketing Success Are You Ready?

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:31:00 GMT

It’s a New Year and business owners are planning for success. This is the year for increasing my business is the hope of every small business. But we all know that hope is not a plan. So what is your plan? And, what marketing steps are you taking to ensure business growth this year?

At the top of all small business priorities is obtaining new clients. First take stock of those marketing tactics that have worked for you in generating new business. Second what new marketing approaches or ideas are you considering in growing your business? The marketing goal is to be continually improving upon previous client acquisition success and reaching out for new ways to improve.

The key is to be honest with yourself and see where you need to improve your consistency or get realistic and understand if you have the time to handle all that is required.

To assist you in planning your success here is a simple checklist of the marketing basics that every small business should review in assessing their marketing that helps you evaluate where you are and what you might need to work on to ensure you can achieve success.

Do you have a current marketing plan?
Do you have a marketing budget that you are committed to spending?
Do you have a unique selling proposition that you communicate consistently?
Do you have detailed descriptions of your target markets and the decision makers?
Do you have a target list of potential sales prospects by market segment?
Do you know where and how to reach your target audience efficiently and affordably?
Do you understand the need for marketing constancy and consistency?
Do you have a lead generating website?
Do you have the ability or are you employing help with the know how to implement the following B2B marketing tactics:

Ongoing lead generation using landing pages
Ongoing lead nurturing with email communications
Ongoing content generation
Application stories
Blogging on a minimum once a week basis
EBooks
Articles
Press Releases
Videos

Do you use LinkedIn for networking

Successful marketing has many component parts one of which is called layering. Layering simply means that you are employing a variety of marketing communication tactics to reach your target audience. These are the small business marketing basics you should be engaged in implementing every day.

People often confuse the method used to deliver a marketing message with a type of marketing. Many people equate telemarketing, direct mail, magazines, newsletters, email, and social media as a marketing approach. These are not marketing approaches they are delivery methods used to distribute marketing messages.

The key to successful B2B marketing is not about how you deliver the marketing message; it is all about the marketing message you deliver, to the right audience, at the right time.

Marketing your small business is a full time job in and of itself. If you lack the skills and knowledge to do your own marketing or it is a job you don’t want to do yourself then look to partner with a professional marketing person who emphasizes:

Placing your best interest first above theirs

Assessing what will work best for you and your business not them

Developing a marketing plan you can afford

Personal collaboration after all, it is your business

Realizing there is no silver bullet solution

For those that have plenty of time to become educated on these marketing principles and tactics there are lots of seminars, training, and vendors of specific marketing tools like email, social media, and marketing automation who can help you. If you hire help with your marketing, be sure you know what kind of help you need. Do you need tactical marketing help someone to write blogs, post in LinkedIn or compose email etc? Or, do you need someone to help you with your marketing strategy or both?

Takeaway:
The best way to ensure growth in your business this year is to plan to succeed and not just hope it happens. Focus on what you do best and get educated or outsource specific marketing responsibilities. One caution understand the motivation from the people you receive help from. Always ask yourself are they telling you that their solution is best for them or you?

Related Information

Marketing Plan Check List

Free Marketing Campaign Analysis

Outsource Marketing 5 Tips

Small Business B2B Marketing Best Blog Posts 2013

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 11:01:00 GMT

The New Year is almost upon us. As we say goodbye 2103 and welcome in 2014, what important small business B2B marketing insights and lessons have you learned in 2013, and most importantly, which will you employ in the New Year? We thought it might be beneficial to share with you our most popular 2013 small business B2B marketing blog posts that offer you some valuable information to help grow your business in 2014.

We wish you success in 2014 and hope you will continue to follow us as a reliable source of small business B2B marketing. Thank you for your support!

5 Problems and Solutions In Small Business Marketing

The top 5 problems and solutions small business wants answers to
in marketing their business.

Small business owners have many problems they face in marketing their business. In working with many B2B small businesses, we have found that there are five problems that constantly surface that need attention to achieve small business marketing success.

Pros and Cons of Inbound Marketing for Small Business

Pros and Cons of Inbound Marketing for Small Business
Given no marketing strategy is perfect, what are the pros and cons of employing inbound marketing for your small business. The Internet has changed everything related to the way business-to-business sales prospects begin their buying process. Prospective business buyers go to the Internet first to get ideas, get educated and gather information about how to solve business problems.

Small Business B2B Marketing Automation

Is marketing automation worth the investment for B2B small businesses?

Many companies are springing up telling small business that we all need marketing automation. What is marketing automation? Well to me it automates all the aspects of an old fashion direct mail campaign using technology to manage prospecting for leads. Including lead:

5 Prerequisites for Small Business Outsource Marketing

Are you prepared to outsource your small business marketing?

Outsourcing your marketing may or may not be a good idea for your business. While there are certainly significant benefits to outsourcing like…

Inbound Marketing - How Much Does It Cost?

The real costs to utilize inbound B2B marketing for small businesses.

Potential clients often ask, what is the cost of inbound marketing? Providing an answer is to this question is always difficult without actually understanding the scope of marketing services the potential client really needs. Nevertheless, we will attempt to offer insight into what some average costs might be incurred. Ultimately it is necessary to understand your specific set of circumstances you are starting from and what goals you want to obtain.

Join our LinkedIn Group on small business B2B marketing to get answers and stay informed on sales lead generation best practices for your small business. If you are interested in partnering with an affordable, small business B2B marketing specialist who can fast track your sales lead generation then we’d love to discuss your 2014 marketing plans and how we could help you call us at 1-866-875-2534.

Happy New Year!

B2B Website Content That Sells

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 12:02:00 GMT

Most B2B small businesses struggle with placing effective copy on their web pages. By effective, we mean website content that convinces your B2B sales prospects to contact your company.

We have all heard that most websites are simply pages created from a company brochure. The result is you see a lot of small business B2B website pages that contain only a couple of hundred words on a page or less.

Typical B2B Website Content Fails to:

Become indexed by search engines & show up when your sales prospects are searching the web for solutions to their problems
Engage and motivate a dialogue with your sales prospects
Trigger visitor engagement to transform needs into wants
Identify a client needs sufficient to stimulate a contact action

Writing for a sales brochure is much different from a B2B webpage, where you must involve your visitor’s quickly and intensify their need to seek a solution to their business problem that you can solve and be mindful of search engine requirements.

Satisfying search engine requirements is easy by including at least 400 words and preferably 600 words but no more than 1,000 words. Satisfying the needs of your prospective clients is a little more difficult and requires a customer-centric messaging focus.

The Ancient Art of Storytelling the New B2B Marketing

No longer is just listing features and benefits acceptable to persuade your sales prospects. Today, you must explain your understanding of your potential customers’ problems and how enlisting your company to help them will result in a positive outcome for them. So how is this achieved? By using the oldest form of human communication the story. Telling a compelling story motivates people to action.

We all like a good story because it has a:

Beginning, (once upon a time there was a company that… insert your clients’ problem here)
Middle (intensifying the trials and tribulations faced by the client in solving the problem)
And an end (the solution and outcomes achieved by the client).

And, when you think about it if someone asks you, how was your day? You will tell them the story of your day with a beginning, middle and an end. There is no secret to the power of storytelling as a powerful way to engage, persuade and motivate people to action. Best part you were taught this technique in ninth grade English composition. Now you can start using it on your B2B web page copy.

Keys to Turning Client Needs into Wants

Employing the story telling process is not sufficient to create great web pages that will meet your sales objectives. The actual content in your story must be:

Relevant - to your target audience
Important – to your clients’ success
Urgent – instill action on the part of your clients

To transform your story from just satisfying needs into client wants will require increasing the three aspects above of your website copy.

First relevance defines to what degree your business solutions are perceived to be connected to a sales prospect’s problem. In telling your story, relevance can either be internal or external depending upon the type of problems your clients’ have and you can solve.

Types of Relevance

Internal	External
Personal Client Interests	Competitive Offers
Purchasing Habits	Seasonality
Demographics	World News Events
Communication Styles	Industry News
Level of Engagement	Competitive Threats
Client Personas	Technology Disruption

In order to intensify the relevance of your website copy to your target audience your copy needs to be as specific as possible. First, talk about the problem(s) facing your potential clients then connect your solution(s) to the relevant problem or set of problems. Avoid generic solutions and do not focus on the solution first because your prospect my not understand its relevance to them. Using relevant internal and external copy you can connect problems that they might have just experienced to your solution.

Next importance is used to explain the degree to which your solution is critical to your clients’ success. Here you can use importance in your marketing communications by pointing out fundamental needs that your client seeks to fulfill. Needs such as:

Security
Meeting expectations related to their job performance
Feelings of belonging to a group
Self-worth when their professional image or integrity might be perceived as threatened

Besides just addressing a need to know how to solve a problem adding specific copy points about the intensifying consequences of not solving the problem add to and heighten the importance of needing to engage a solution now. Also, the most significant copy points should be placed first to emphasize the link between their problem and your solution.

Lastly instilling urgency is the final tripwire needed to illicit active engagement by your potential B2B prospects. Without the urgency in your copy, there is no engagement deliverable. Urgency can be made present by either the prospects situation like a crashed computer or an artificial urgency you create like limiting time or availability of a product or service.

Takeaway:
Your B2B website content needs to work hard to convert your traffic into sales prospects. To engage dialogue with B2B sales prospects to increase your business, you need to rely on the oldest form of marketing communications, storytelling. Be sure you follow the keys to turning needs into wants, and you will be able to recoup a return on your website investment.

Related Articles

Small Business B2B Content Marketing How To

1 Simple Way to Build Initial Rapport with Your Customers

7 Small Business Content Marketing Tips

Small Business B2B Content Marketing How To

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 12:01:00 GMT

Why would you want to deploy inbound content marketing into your small business B2B marketing? Well that’s a great question. Here are two really good reasons. A recent study by the Custom Content Council† found that:

• 73% of consumers prefer to get information from a company in the form of a collection of articles over an advertisement

• 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content AND are in turn more likely to buy from that company.

Here are some of the benefits you can obtain from content marketing done right.

Benefits of Content Marketing

We think that employing inbound content marketing for small business B2B marketing is critical in generating a consistent flow of B2B sales leads. Why because content marketing allows you to accomplish the following:

Increase your brand awareness
Establish yourself as an expert in your field
Increase your website page rankings in search results
Build a continuous email database of sales prospects to nurture
Increase the number of sales prospects to convert into customers

Now that we know the benefits to be derived from B2B content marketing, so, what do we mean by content marketing?

B2B Content Marketing Definition

There are many definitions of content marketing, but we like to define it as;

the process of using high quality, relevant business solution content that is directed at a specific target audience that helps, teaches, or aides the target audience in solving their business problems in order to drive direct engagement of the audience with your company.

Simply put: Communicate about what your B2B customer is interested in and they will want to communicate with you. And, what they are interested in is help in solving their business problems. What they are not interested in is how great your company is and what you have to sell them.

How to Use Content Marketing in Your B2B Business

1. Define your target audience beyond basic demographics to include:

What are their business concerns, needs & trends
Personal motivations and interests
Where they go to find business solutions, Web, blogs, social media, LinkedIn

2. Create relevant content select topics for your content that are important to your target audience i.e. help them solve problems

First, take a look at your existing business content as a source of relevant topics for your audience

Reports, sales brochures, case studies, press releases, product or service brochures, etc.

Second you can repurpose or reword this content into new or multiple content types instead of starting from scratch

Develop new content like…

White papers
Blog posts
Press releases
eBooks
Newsletters
Videos
Social media posts

Here’s a helpful link from HubSpot to their: 20 Ways to Brainstorm New Blog Content

Third create content that is germane to each step of a typical purchase process for your business as follows.

Discovery
Research
Comparison
Purchase

Fourth create a content creation schedule and stick too it
Fifth assign content creation internally and/or outsource to a third-party be aware good content costs time and money

3. Post your content where your target audience is most likely to be looking for it. This could be:

Your website (blog, article, white paper, eBook)
Guest Post on another Blog
Press Release Distribution
Social Media sites like Facebook & Twitter
Send as an email or newsletter

Content Marketing Cautions

One caveat content marketing, it is not easy or everyone would be doing it. It takes commitment to the process and patience in execution to start reaping the benefits you are seeking.
One suggestion make a plan start small and then build on it.

Takeaway:

B2B inbound content marketing is the best way to cultivate a consistent flow B2B sales leads. Why, because it mirrors all the same attributes about solution selling that is the bedrock of B2B sales success. Putting your customer’s needs above your own is the secret in not only generating B2B sales leads but most importantly closing them.

If you are considering content marketing for yourB2B business we suggest you check out 9 Tips for Customer-Centric Marketing.

† http://blog.customcontentcouncil.com/?p=297

Should You Display Prices on Your B2B Website?

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:01:00 GMT

The Debate Over Displaying Price

Don't Display Prices	Display Prices
We don’t want our competitors to know our pricing?	Establishes you as a market leader causing competitors to react to your pricing and value propositions. Differentiates you from your competitors that don’t post their prices making it more likely for prospects to contact you.
It makes it too easy for prospects to shop our products or services.	Giving prospects more information allows them to make an informed purchasing decision that builds trust because you're being transparent.
We don’t have any standard prices; we customize our services.	Display a range of prices based on your services and value proposition to increase buyer trust.
If we display our prices, potential clients may think our prices are too high.	Many buyers assume that if you don’t display a price it’s because you’re expensive and won’t even contact you. Weeds out buyers that aren’t going to buy from you because of their budget or unwillingness to pay for value.

This is a question that almost all B2B firms debate, but often decide not to display their prices. But, is this the best decision?

These are all valid concerns to think through in determining whether you should display your pricing on your website. But, to make an informed decision about these concerns you need to understand a little more about price and pricing.

If you were selling consumers, there would be no question about displaying prices on your website. In the business to the consumer world, customers not only expect to see prices they demand them or they will depart instantly. Why, because consumers need trust and transparency in what they will be paying for a product or service.

Do you think that the B2B customer demands less? Aren’t trust and transparency in purchasing your B2B products and services just as important to B2B clients? If you think not, you are just fooling yourself. Perhaps, we just think we can ignore these required attributes in the B2B selling process, and unfortunately most B2B firms think they can.

Many business-to-business firms confuse price and cost. Whether you display your price on your web page or not, remember the cost always exists in the mind of the buyer. B2B buyers, like all buyers have an idea either about what they should pay for your product or services or what they can afford or are willing to pay.

Key Point: So buyers are already concerned about cost before you decided to display pricing on your website or not.

Now let’s look at the some other elements other than price that contribute to cost and the buyer perception of price and cost.

First you need to know that price does not = cost because of other factors on the mind of your buyer. Other factors that can:

confuse your customer

confusing headline, competing information on the page makes it difficult to know what is important, and layout not focused directing customer to what to do
confusing marketing message, too much information and marketing information is not customer-centric,

cause them to be fearful

is your solution difficult to understand
do you have all the features I need and want
lack of trust, transparency

just make it too difficult an effort for them to make a decision

too difficult to read your message, hard to read fonts, white on black type, layout presents multiple calls-to-actions, and too many calls-to-action
ask your potential client to do too much, or make too many changes to implement your solution

Therefore, your price no matter whether it is the lowest, highest or somewhere in between doesn’t really matter, if there is a negative price perception by the buyer. These perception factors are psychological pricing factors and are often overlooked by most business people.

Key Point: Psychological pricing factors are as important or more than your price.

By minimizing these psychological pricing factors, you can actually make your price a positive factor or a negative factor influencing your prospective customer’s decision making. Controlling your customer’s price perception as positive or negative is within your control.

Whether it is on the landing page, on a call or in a meeting be sure your potential client understands the value of your offer. The key to answering the question when to present your price depends on how well you have intensified your value proposition to the prospect. With high value justification that positions your price positively, you can reveal your pricing right up front.

Presenting your price in the form of the highest perceived value possible is what makes price positive instead of price negative in contrast to just saying or displaying the price for your services or product is X dollars. This can be done in a number of ways such as:

“our price enables you to save $1,500 off of the ________.
”Things like “lifetime support, free updates, 100% quality guarantee etc.”

Be sure to call out the features with the benefits that distinguish you from your competitors. Every price requires a value justification; if you can’t justify your price, neither can your buyers.

Key Point: Be sure to link what matters to your buyers most, so they recognize the true value in your price.

Key Takeaway:
Understanding these key points about price, we can make a rational decision regarding the question should you display a price on your website selling B2B products and services and say, yes. But with one important caveat, that you must position your price as positive and intensify your value proposition with the buyer.

Customer-Centric Email Marketing - 3 Success Keys

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 12:15:00 GMT

Looking for an edge in increasing the number of B2B sales prospects, you can actually talk to?

Email is a marketing distribution method of choice for most business-to business firms today. But, what’s the best way to increase potential customer conversions using email? And, is searching for the perfect email marketing template to grow your business the best solution?

Many will tell you that the design of your email message is critical to generating success. They point out that there is a particular design layout that will lead to email marketing messages that will result in high conversion rates.

Employ accepted design principles to create balance & hierarchy on the page
Lots of images & graphics to capture the reader’s attention
Multiple call to action buttons to for increased points of access

Or, perhaps you are fixated on the subject line. You must have the best subject line. Sure you need an appropriate subject line, here we recommend honesty first and, oh yeah, don’t try to sell your audience in the subject line, simply tell your audience what’s in your email message for them.

Maybe everyone is just caught up in this era of marketing automation. We automate this and automate that, but in the end; it’s not about the logistics of creating or sending marketing communications, it’s all about the message. No one buys your products or services because of how your email looks. Use automation to free up your time. Then invest that time into creating effective marketing communications.

Create Effective Marketing Communications

An effective email message needs to build at least in
itial rapport with a prospective customer that leads to a dialogue not a monologue of, “hey, look at what I want to sell you.” Especially in the business-to-business space People do not buy from emails they buy from people.

We have discussed two of the three keys to email marketing success. Now, let’s take a look at what we mean and how you build an initial rapport on your way to creating a dialogue with your prospects.

Understanding your potential customer is crucial to creating customer-centric marketing messages. So how do you do that? You start by developing empathy for your customer, and you will then end with the ability to create empathetic messaging needed to spark conversions.

How to Create Empathetic, Customer-Centric Messages

By immersing yourself in the mindset of your target customer, you can begin to outline the insights you need to translate into marketing messages that will motivate prospect conversions.

What are the top level outcomes your prospect is responsible for? Do they need to maximize sales, profits, or increase market share?
What is your prospect’s key focus? What area of their business responsibilities do they care most about and what do they need in terms of information for evaluating solutions and what’s their decision time frame?
What are the major problems your prospects are faced with every day?
What are the specific solutions you have that can drive your prospects outcome and alleviate their anxiety over their most pressing problems.

By answering these questions, you will be armed with the insights to write a customer-centric message that will resonate with your potential customers.

So what can you do to build an initial rapport, begin that dialogue and increase your email conversion rate? Here are our three email marketing keys to increased email marketing conversions.

Three Keys to Email Marketing Success

An honest straight forward email subject line that tells your prospects WIFM
Simplifying your email marketing template to increase conversions. We recommend adopting a more personalized approach like you would in drafting a personal letter; limit your use of graphics and images and only one call to action button or link.
Employ empathy in your messaging to participate with the prospect’s conversation and create the dialogue that is paramount to obtaining a sale.

Effective Email Marketing Summary

Promotional style emails do not create initial rapport or dialogue with potential customer
Promotional style emails make customers feel they are being marketed to, not communicated with
Promotional emails rely on a design approach versus engaging in a conversation
Customer-centric emails connect to your prospects in a personal way
Customer-centric emails engage your prospects in an actual conversatioCustomer-centric emails increase conversion rates over promotional emails.

B2B solution selling tells us that understanding the needs of your customer are critical to closing a sale so why would using email to engage B2B prospects be any different. The answer is simple, it wouldn’t be any different.

What email marketing techniques have you found successful in generating high conversion rates? Share your info in the comments!

Stop Targeting B2B Buyers

Robert Hennessey — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 12:30:00 GMT

Maybe businesses should stop targeting b2b buyers and encourage buyers to target advertisers.

We all talk about how smart the buyer has become, but we seem to use the same old targeting approaches of yesteryear. The one exception is social media but while social media is customer-centric it often is fraught with incomplete or bad information. It is more like hearsay than any empirical facts.

In the rush to monetize social networks, what are they all turning to? Good old attention advertising. They are all scrambling to find ways to advertise not serve the needs of their audience.

Up until now all advertising on the web has been about getting people’s attention. How many opens, impressions, eyeballs, and clicks are we generating. This has been a natural way of thinking about advertising since its inception and has been carried over to the Web. After all advertising is conducted by sellers that want to “attract” buyers.

The problem is the desire to attract buyers is so strong; it leads us to accept the myth that advertising can actually persuade a buyer is true; all you need to do is advertise. A contrived reality and assumption sold to business by the media to sell “attraction” advertising in B2B markets in the same way as consumer advertising is sold.

If the key to B2B is solution selling then why is everyone still using targeting of customers? B2B customers don’t need to be targeted. When a business has a problem they pro-actively seek appropriate solutions. They are not waiting for some company to contact them and tell them about a solution for a problem they don’t have. You can’t sell businesses like consumers.

Then why do so many B2B companies waste money on attention advertising, it is the antithesis of problem/solution selling? Attention advertising says look at me I am great and can solve your problem. I don’t know what your problem is, but I can solve it. Really don’t be fooled by this approach by anybody I don’t care how many “likes” they have or “followers”.

David “Doc” Searls, wrote an article in 2006 in the LINUX™Journal about what he called the “Intention Economy”. Searls said, “The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or "capturing") buyers.” He goes on to say, The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Though advertisers are not effectively targeting buyers on the Web, buyers can and do indirectly and in some respects directly through quality content marketing that provides information and solutions that will satisfy their needs.

We believe there is a fundamentally better, more productive and efficient B2B advertising approach for the Web. It is not another adaptation of what has been proven ineffective in countless iterations of eyeball attraction, attention or target marketing on the Web.

The ability to turn mind dulling content into information rich environments with ease is just part of a revolution in how the Web can and should be used to deliver the union of potential business partners. A marriage of self-directed discovery where two parties find each other based on an intelligent exchange of customer-centric communication not self-serving boasting, meaningless slogans and exaggerated capabilities.

We will be sharing more about how you can stop the insanity of targeting your potential customers and invite your sales prospects to discover your company’s ability to solve business-to-business in a professional solution selling approach that generates high quality sales leads where your sales prospects ask you to contact them. Stay engaged with us.

Where Are Your Business-to-Business Sales Prospects?

Robert Hennessey — Tue, 28 May 2013 09:01:00 GMT

A successful business-to-business marketing effort begins with identifying who your sales prospects are and how you can reach them.

Most small business owners know the target audience of their clients. Sometimes they think everyone is their potential client and while that may be true in the broadest sense it is unlikely to be realistic from a practical standpoint. Often there are actual or perceived limitations imposed on who small businesses can sell based on the perceptions of their clients real or imagined.

However the most prevalent issue that small business wrestles with is not who their best sales prospects are, but how to reach those prospects. This where many marketing experts are promoting this solution or that to reach small business sales prospects. Given we all can be lured by instant success this is just “fools gold.” There is no instant success in marketing.

In most cases it is actually easy to identify business-to-business sales prospects. The easiest way is to obtain a highly targeted mailing list. Another way is to organically grow your own email business prospect list online with very specific targeting attributes.

Combining content and inbound marketing techniques will allow you to target your business-to-business sales prospects in an efficient and affordable manner. This is achieved by sharing high quality content via landing pages that will allow you to capture the specific attributes and contact information about your target audience. We do not recommend purchasing email lists because it is fraught with pitfalls and is costly to do it effectively.

Once you have defined your target audience the next step isn’t to start marketing to them. A common mistake by those in a hurry to obtain instant sales.

Finding your business-to-business target audience is going to take longer and be more difficult using social media platforms. While the platforms are free to use the time and effort is substantial to identify and begin cultivating potential sales leads.

The next step is to develop customer-centric marketing messages that speak to how you solve the common business problems faced by your potential customer base. Once you have created specific customer-centric marketing messages you need to evaluate the most efficient and affordable way to market to your target audience on an everyday business.

The options to reach your target audience are many and sometimes confusing and many waste their money by chasing the latest marketing fad. You know you hear things like…

“Everyone is doing it aren’t you?”
“I heard that so and so used this and they got a lot of sales.”
“This is an easy way to get customers and it’s free.”

While we are all intrigued by these comments from those we meet and often make a knee-jerk marketing decision because of their comments, the results are usually unsuccessful. Why, because we do not know the specifics of who, what, when , where and all the other important details necessary to make a rational business decision. When you hear about someone else’s success these are the types of questions you need to inquire about.

What business are they in?
Who are their customers?
What types of products or services are being sold?
What is the price of what they sell?
Through what channels of distribution do they sell their products/services?
What type of market do they sell to business-to-business or business-to-consumer

The answers to these basic questions and some additional ones will allow you to gather enough information to make an informed business decision on how to invest your marketing dollars.

Takeaway
Identifying and finding your business-to-business sales prospects are fundamental to achieving sales lead generation success. Content and inbound marketing make finding your sales prospects easy because the right content and inbound marketing will make it easy for your sales prospects to find you.

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