Chapter 1

Understanding B2B Online Marketing

Let’s face it: business-to-business (B2B) marketing is different. It is certainly different than those deal-of-the-day sites that popped up in 2010, multiplied like rabbits, and lurked around every corner in 2011. If you are tired of listening to case studies showing you how easy it is to increase sales on some ecommerce site or exhausted by going to webinars endlessly hawking some vendor’s wares while promising the moon, then this is the book for you.

We will cover what is crucial for today’s successful B2B marketer. We will show you how to market your business—a business with a complex and considered sales cycle—online. Say good-bye to irrelevant case studies and hello to practical information and real strategies you can apply to your business today, tomorrow, and one year from now.

Chapter Contents

• Why Online?
• B2B Is Different
• Developing Your Strategy
• How Online Reflects the Sales Funnel: Objectives and Measurement

Why Online?

You are a B2B marketer. Your sales happen over the course of months, not minutes, so you can just scrap this whole online marketing thing, right? Just segment your list, send off emails for lead nurturing, write killer collateral material for sales, attend some events, let your agency put together some dimensional mailer campaigns, and your job is done and your company makes money. Other books may tell you that, but if you follow their advice, then over time your competitors will be happy, but your bosses won’t be. The world of traditional lead generation (direct mail, email plus teleprospecting) is dead; it is time to embrace the changing, integrated marketing landscape, or you will be left behind.

Everyone—from the guy in the facilities management office to the CEO—uses the Internet to read, browse, surf, chat, and socialize, and online marketing is the tool to get in front of your audience. You want to get in front of them before they look for your product, while they are actively searching, and then when they need customer support.

We are here to tell you that not only is online marketing the most effective channel for B2B lead generation strategies at the top of your sales funnel: it applies to every stage of the prospect-to-customer life cycle, from establishing a brand to maintaining customer loyalty. Online marketing is also a great way to enhance and extend some of your more effective traditional marketing channels, such as events and PR.

Still not convinced you need online marketing? According to a recent study by AMR International, B2B online marketing spend is nearly double the percentage of budget from 2010 to 2012 (www.amrinternational.com/reports/b2b_online_marketing_in_the_united_states_assessment_and_forecast_to_2013). Although online marketing still may not take the lion’s share of most B2B organizations’ marketing budgets, it is quickly becoming a powerful force that complements traditional marketing and events and stands alone as an independent marketing vehicle for driving awareness, leading sales, and increasing the lifetime value of a customer. As marketing budgets tighten, executives are increasingly looking for better ways to measure returns on their spends and find ways to scale what works.

The value of online marketing isn’t just about the dollars in the market; it is about reaching business decision makers where they spend their time. First LinkedIn and now Facebook and Twitter have become prominent professional networking vehicles and places businesspeople look to their peers for best practices and advice. Social networks are no longer for your niece or your employees; your customers use social to research your product and to look for help. Imagine if you can use online marketing to connect with those customers at the moment they are researching or inquiring in social media. Now imagine that you can tie that tweet or Facebook status with a contact record in your CRM system. Not only is this possible, but it is increasingly the way your B2B peers are marketing their businesses.

Your Current Marketing Mix

So, now you’re convinced you need online marketing. You need to figure out where online marketing fits into your current marketing program. For optimal results, you must integrate and overlay online with the rest of your marketing. Far too many folks just add online marketing piecemeal into their mix like some sort of red-headed stepchild. Your online program shouldn’t be a separate channel. Online needs to be integrated into all facets of your marketing program, with everything you do to market your products: events, lead generation, advertising, PR, corporate communications, community, campaigns, and brand.

Does that sound goofy? Let’s think about events. A B2B company’s participation in large industry events is one of the most traditional forms of marketing and, if done right, can be very useful on its own. Large events can be the single biggest piece of many B2B companies’ marketing budgets. How do you inform people about your booth, interact with your salespeople, and turn the mediocre trade show experience into a home run? The answer (drum roll, please...) is to combine your events with an online strategy. Run a paid search campaign (we’ll get to the details in a few chapters) with keywords about the event, bid on the event’s brand name, and use online to generate awareness and interest in your show presence and drive people to stop by the actual booth.

During the event, run a mobile campaign geotargeting a five-mile radius around the event and further build awareness of your presence at the event and promote your cool giveaway. You want to encourage people to take action at an event, and online marketing can be that extra boost your event presence needs to hit your forecast numbers.

With the decline in attendance at many industry trade shows combined with the increase in competition, combining online with events is necessary; it is the first of many things you need to do to reach your prospects. Later in the book we’ll go more into detail about how online can increase the effectiveness of events, but for now we’ll give you a taste of what’s to come.

We all know the B2B sales cycle is long and complex, with many touches. We know marketing is often seen as a way to nurture people down that sales funnel. For larger deals, online marketing usually isn’t even a thought in the back of anyone’s head, let alone part of the overall mix. Field marketing is often the only group called in to help close those whales. They can go to a lead’s office, arrange peer dinners, and put a face on the company while augmenting sales.

Now, think of what can happen when you add online into the mix. Imagine a world where you can use retargeting to tag all of the key influencers of those top accounts and message those influencers as they browse third-party sites on the Web. Suddenly your company looks bigger; the influencers are now warmed up and introduced to your key features and benefits through a series of well-sequenced ads. Imagine you can offer them content, customer testimonials, and demo videos in these ads as well. Imagine when these key influencers ask questions about your products on social media; the sales team is alerted and immediately responds via the social web. All of this and much more is possible.

Online marketing can be a great complement to existing efforts within your marketing department. It’s time to bring the online team to the strategy sessions and the go-to marketing meetings.

Assessing the Value Proposition of Online

One less than charming characteristic of traditional B2B marketing is that historically many practitioners could be blissfully unaware of their own failures. The ROI of a brochure was never measurable, its impression count was delightfully never registered, and its engagement level was obscured. Low booth recruitment could be blamed on low overall event attendance, crappy exhibit organization, or even the skirt length of the booth staff.

However, every attribute of online marketing is becoming more measurable. You can calculate how much it cost to put something together, if it’s the bill of materials to construct a booth or the total print and translation costs of a brochure. Each of these costs can be measured against its goals, whether those goals are selling a product or getting more leads.

Yet attribution is a funny world. And tracking, though improving every quarter, is still a leaky bucket. A single event presence, brochure, or print ad could always be the very thing that stuck in someone’s memory and led to a paid search ad click, which led to a completed lead form and then the whole pipeline of measurable activity. Social media mentions and search engine terms prove that TV ads spur online activity.

That’s why the best form of attribution sets a value on each of these interactions, as opposed to valuing only the first or last click. When you set these values, you can also identify patterns—patterns against which you can refine your content and advertising. We’ll explore attribution modeling and metrics in more detail later in the book, but we want to get you thinking about assigning a monetary value to milestones through the buying cycle.

With all of this said, the effectiveness of online marketing is often discounted because it is so measurable and trackable. We give value to online only when we can directly quantify results, whereas we chalk up the impact of traditional marketing to so-called branding as if that is a way to justify countless spends. What if online marketing was more than just immediate clicks and short-term lead generation?...