Lead generation in B2B – 3

B2B, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

One advantage of using social media is that you have the ability to quickly test your campaigns, irrespective of your budget. If you have a large budget you can do parallel testing, if you have a smaller budget then you can test serially. On the other hand, with print media and events the adaptability is non existent. So if you make a mistake in the copy and a thousand mailers have been printed, you lose all the money.

I keep talking about testing everything. With social media it is easier to do tests. Most Social Media platforms also give a lot of Analytics to study your response and take better decisions.

Tests are after all, experiments. Like all experiments, you start with a hypothesis, and then verify the variables one by one.

I always prefer to start with the market, then the message and the medium. This is because I feel that the other two items are dependent on the market that we choose.

In case of B2B, one market could be defined by industry, it could be further refined by revenue size or specific location. Now with B2B the key challenge is getting to the actual person who would be responsible to take a decision on what you are selling .

So while you might be able to easily target, based on demographic data, using social media, getting to the right decision makers is considerable work. So you have to think in terms of, who else within that organization, could be impacted because of the problem.

As an example if you are selling packaging paper or wrapping paper. Now the first people who come to mind , because this ia a commodity item, are the people in procurement or factory. But if you were to also look at marketing, because the final packaged item goes to the customers and marketing may be hearing things about their present packaging from customers and could be the key driver for decisions to change the packaging.

B2B in those respects is a little tougher to crack.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead generation in B2B – 2

B2B, campaign, education, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, media, segmentation, single target market

While events were very expensive, and emails are free, companies would still be willing to spend the money on events, if getting the right audience was assured. Reason being, you get to interact with the prospects on a one-to-one basis. Due to which you can qualify better and you maybe able to close deals faster.

One medium which comes closest to doing a more targeted prospecting, I have found these days, is LinkedIn. Since you can choose the industry, the demographics etc. It can help you reach your ideal customer profile faster. In addition because it allows you to create different segments you can do testing quite fast to identify the best single target market to address.

I haven’t worked on Facebook for doing B2B prospecting, though I am told of a lot of B2B vendors are targeting their clients via Facebook.

With any social media platform, there’s one challenge that I warn my team or customers. You don’t own the information of the prospect. Which means anytime the social media changes its policies or algorithms, you can suffer.

When you have a visiting card of a person or an email id, until the person leaves that organization, you can communicate with her whenever you need to. You are not at the mercy of a third party. This is not completely true with social media, until the prospect share the information with you.

Therefore whenever you’re using a social media to generate leads, always find a way for the prospects to share their email via opt-ins. Once they raise their hand and allow you to share information with them, you get a chance to build a relationship.

Once you have the emails and physical addresses, you can continuously keep sharing valuable information with them and educate them about various things that you can help them with.

Marketing based on education helps build trust as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 6

budget, campaign, Marketing, media

In this last part I would like to take a very short comparison between different types of media and what needs to be kept in mind. I am not an expert on the different media and their costing methodologies. You would be well advised to look at some experts , especially if you intend to go the online and social media way.

So I will start with the physical media like print ads or physical letters or events. The positive about these is that once defined, the prices more or less are constant. So from a predictability perspective this is good. On the other hand, you only come to know the response to your ads or events after the whole thing has taken place.

So if you have targeted to do an event for 100 people and on 10 come on the day when it’s planned, the event has failed and you have spent all your money which was budgeted. So testing with physical media is a lot tougher , time consuming and expensive.

On the other hand with online and social media, you can do simultaneous testing of various ads and also put a limit on your spend while doing the tests or while running the campaigns. You can also stop an advertisement after running it for just one day on most social media platforms.

The downside with social media is that you don’t understand the algorithms that are running behind the selection of the people to whom the ads are being shown and when the site will change the rules / algorithms. So you are at their mercy. However if you have a diversified mix of social media sites giving you results then the whims of one particular site will not impact the business too much.

I hope you gain from these quick tips for doing a budget. Will look forward to hearing your comments.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 5

Assumptions, B2B, budget, campaign, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, media, single target market

In the last 4 posts we started with nothing but a napkin and created a rough budget that you can spend every month so that you can hit your target of 10 leads.

While most people you talk to will say Maths is tough, here it’s the reverse. Making 5he budget using math is the easy part. But even if you spend $1600/- on Google or Facebook every month (to understandwhere this has come from, read the 4th part of the post on this topic) , you won’t get leads and you may end the year with no orders but $25000/- gone.

The reason for that , whether you’re using LinkedIn or Google or print ads, these are all only media at the end of the day. Someone has to respond to your ads. If no one responds to the ads then you don’t get the leads.

So you have to test for two things here – if the media is right and if the message is right. My assumption is that you have defined your single target market earlier. If not, then that will be the first step.

Not everyone is comfortable, or using the same media. Some people maybe more comfortable with LinkedIn and not okay with Facebook. In some cases the media you are wanting to use, may not have the ability to target the people who are in your Single Target Market.

Next you have to test your ads to see what gets people to click or respond to an advertisement. You have to change them until you start seeing a response. Then you need to make changes keeping the one that’s getting you a response as the benchmark, or what is called as the “control ” in copyrighting circles.

In marketing there’s no such thing as failure, its all about experiments. So you keep testing various hypothesis till you are able to figure out the best combination of media and message for your market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!