B2B Marketing Priorities Checklist: Setting the Right Goals

When it comes to drafting plans, B2B marketers must know the right objectives to settle. Identifying specific goals is perhaps the right way towards an effective lead generation and appointment setting campaign. Besides, you can’t escape a tunnel without a light guiding each step. Without goals, there can never be any certainty that you will be able to compete against more experienced companies in your industry.

Survival is essential and, to quote from the famous and often neglected GI Joe series, knowing is half of it. Hence, here are a few things you should know and put in your checklist of priorities towards an effective B2B lead generation experience.

Brand awareness

The way you are perceived by your target market defines your brand’s popularity. If you have a highly popular brand, you are more likely to attract the right kind of people to engage. Hence, it would seem to be more important to focus on developing your brand’s image. This might involve enhancing your content campaign as well as tap various communication channels to spread your brand’s reach. There are many strategies to consider, however, but it all depends on your preferences regarding the platforms you will be using for your demand generation.

Conversions

Conversions entail the end of a B2B prospect’s journey through the sales pipeline. To use another definition, they also mean “sales” or “purchases.” However you define it, focusing on this specific metric can lead the way towards effective revenue-generating strategies.

Quality CRM

While generating B2B leads, it is equally important to pursue existing clientele, for the fact that they might want to engage you again for another purchase. In such a case, using effective lead nurturing software might just provide you with the ease and convenience needed to maintain quality customer relationships and revisit business opportunities. Thankfully, there are marketing automation software solutions out there that happen to have the right CRM features. With numerous software companies offering marketing and sales solutions, finding the appropriate software shouldn’t take much of your time and resources.

Influential reach

In most cases, marketers prioritize influence. They want their businesses to be in the forefront of thought leadership. Reputation is after all imperative, since B2B buyers are more responsive towards solutions providers that have far reaching industry knowledge.

What about you? Are you also focusing on these priorities? If not, then allow a competent multi-channel B2B marketing company to put your plans into action.

5 B2B Lead Generation Tactics You Probably Aren’t Thinking of Doing

The ability to capture, respond to, and manage incoming leads is the heart and soul of B2B lead generation. Marketers spend a huge amount of resources and money on carrying out the perfect campaign, so it’s only right to make sure they have the best practices in place to manage their leads during the sales lifecycle. 

However, a lot of them focus on generation and tend to forget the importance of lead management.

Properly managing leads develops more educated prospects and helps you better recognize their needs, which in the end means more business. Here’s how you do it:

1. Make your sales department your best friend

To set a working set of criteria in determining whether or not a lead is sales-ready, coordinate with your sales team. Let them lay down all the details in qualifying so you could decrease the chances of rejected leads.  Once you’ve determined what kind of leads your sales department wants, it would be easier to pre-qualify them before passing them on.

2. Reduce, reuse, recycle

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so they say. A prospect may not meet your criteria for now, but that doesn’t mean you can dump it into a black hole. If you implement a lead recycling system, such as profiling leads to determine its potential for recycling, you can make sure that opportunities are not wasted entirely.

3. Score leads using implicit behavioral data

Lead scoring determines where your prospect is in your sales funnel. The prospect’s interest level based on their actions should be the main consideration. To do this, you can track email clicks, free downloads, web page visits etc. With these data, you can score your leads and base your actions according to their interest.

4. Monitor anonymous visitors and study their data

One important information is to know how new prospects are able to reach your point of contact, whether it’s a blog, a landing page, a social media account or your official business website. To do this, you can integrate a simple code to determine previous website visits of anonymous visitors and monitor other pertinent behavior.

5. Consistently strive to understand your prospect’s needs

Don’t ask your prospects regarding things you probably already know. Instead, use progressive profiling and use the opportunity to find out something new, something that could help you position yourself better in terms of sales pitches and brand awareness strategies.

Why Does Networking Not Work With Lead Generation?

All right, when it comes to lead generation, part of the things that you have to do deals with creating business networks. The logic here is that, since you have connected with them, you can then go ahead and turn them into viable B2B leads. Unfortunately, that is not the way things usually go. In cases like these, it seems easy for you to look for ways to make it work. But really, while you may like to consider which of the myriad of networking solutions that are being offered, it is those that little problems in networking that you better know about. Avoid them, or address them, and you will be able to get better business results.

  

1.    These is not about the calling cards – a lot of marketers, whenever they go to networking events, or attend online forums, are there just to collect the calling cards of everyone who attended. That is a bad marketing move. The aim of such opportunities is to know more about people, not know more people. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time.

2.    Stop networking – more in the sense that you are there in that gathering because you want to answer a need of the other party, you want to connect with them, you are keen to learn more about their business, etc. This is not about your getting data for your telemarketing team to use later in their appointment setting campaign. This is about you wanting to learn more about them.

3.    Choose your events – here is the deal, not all business events are worth your time. If you want to create the right business network, make sure that you attend events that bring out your best. You want to meet fun and interesting people (not just to be customers, but real contacts), so you should save your efforts and attend occasions that fit well with you.

4.    Connect with a few – as the old saying goes, quality is better than quantity. Considering the amount of time, money, and effort that you have to spend in connecting to each contact you make, it does make sense that you connect with only those that can help you reach your goals. Besides, even if you have established a connection with only one person, you might get lucky and get connected with the rest of your new contact’s network.

5.    Follow up right – for a networking event to be truly effective in generating sales leads for your business, remember to follow-up with your new contacts a few days after the initial meeting. As a rule, if by two weeks, no discussion on business is made, then the window of opportunity closes.

Really, networking can be a really good tool for lead generation. The only problem here, so far, is how to make them work properly. As you can see, it is hard to do business with contacts that does not pan out, and the points raised above could be the real culprits. Try avoiding these pitfalls in networking. That will do your business good.

How To Make LinkedIn Help Your Lead Generation Efforts

One must say that LinkedIn, the social network that has connected so many professionals and business around the globe, can be powerful tool in helping your lead generation campaign become asuccess. Just imagine the millions of people that are registered. Tapping into that large base for B2B leads can be a really good way to improve your business. The question here is how you make that happen. You cannot just sign-up there, announce your business, and then arrange for your telemarketing team to give prospects a call. It is just not how it works. Which leads us to the following tips, it might help you.

  

1.    Be clear on purpose – LinkedIn is there to serve the particular needs of its user base. In your case, you need to understand why you are there in the first place, why you are interacting with the people there. Only then will you be able to come up with a good way to promote to them.

2.    Fix your profile – just like when you always go into a meeting with a shirt and tie, you should also make it a point that your LinkedIn profile is presentable. This will be a great factor on whether your business will get the respect of your prospects or not.

3.    Choose the right groups – for social media to work in your marketing campaign, you need to make sure that the connections you make are worth your time, and will contribute in improving your business profitability.

4.    Use your networks properly – this is especially true where referrals are concerned. As a marketer, you need to properly employ all the business assets that you have in order to maximize your profitability. The challenge here is how you use these assets so that you can continue building a relationship with your own networks.

5.    Deepen your connections – think of it as the sweetener that your appointment setting crew will need to produce results. Keep in mind that your business needs a lot of data to market properly. By talking and interacting with your connected prospects, you can have an easier time with them.

6.    Personalize, as always – really, personalization is everything, and business prospects usually get a kick out of receiving a gift, a letter, or even an invitation that is directly addressed to them. Do anything that stinks of being canned (no matter how faint) then your audience will walk away.

7.    Interact a lot – since you are creating a network for your lead generation and marketing efforts, make sure that you are interacting with them most of the time. In this way, you can put them at ease and make doing business with them easier.

There are other strategies that you can employ in making LinkedIn another effective marketing and networking tool for your business. Think of it as another investment for your lead generation campaign. If you have a social network of professionals like you, then would that not be a brilliant idea to invite them into your business. They might turn out to be excellent customers for you.

7 Unique Roles of B2B Telemarketing you won’t find anywhere else

Telemarketing now resides within the shadows cast by the enormous internet marketing evolution that’s eating up the business world today. About two decades ago it was at the pinnacle of all marketing heights, and now it only exists as a seasoned veteran – but very much alive.

There are things that traditional marketers value and these are things that only a traditional method like telemarketing can bring about.

Therefore it creates a distinctive impact in the industry, one that preserves the very reason why telemarketing is still being used by a majority of B2B companies.

Here are the roles that it plays in the B2B framework, and why you should value them as well:

1.    Telemarketing can tap a non-Internet-based demographic. Believe it or not, there is still a significant fragment of people that are not web-savvy, even in the B2B world. These are your conventional business people, living off simple needs and traditions. And just because they’re not online doesn’t mean they don't deserve your business.

2.    Telemarketing can strengthen brand awareness. What marketers really need nowadays is to reinforce a brand name without merely repeating. Telemarketing gives the opportunity to instill a brand within the target market’s awareness by being informative and personal at the same time.

3.    Telemarketing can extract immediate and timely feedback. Telemarketing promotes immediacy and interactivity, which other channels do not possess.

4.    Telemarketing calls can strengthen a relationship with existing customers while maintaining selling opportunities. Recurringcustomers make a company stable, and it’s important to keep the ties strong.Telemarketing can make them feel they are continually valued.

5.    Telemarketing is still perfect for business-to-business interactions. Business-to-business calls are part of the commercial landscape and do not carry the stigma that calling on households can. Aside from email, telemarketing calls are the main communication lines for businesses.

6.    Telemarketing can establish a good talent pool for future sales representatives. Telemarketing is a great way to try out people who have an aptitude in sales as a career track and see if they’ve got what it takes to succeed with the big guys.

7.    Telemarketingprovides sales evaluation data. The vertical volume of telemarketing calls provides a number of evaluation metrics, such as number of calls made, successful contacts per call, and lead closing rates. This is important in drafting future plans and making adjustments in a campaign’s approach.