B2B

Lead generation in B2B – 4

B2B, budget, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, niche, segmentation, single target market

While we are on using social media for testing the campaigns, for the last 2 posts,  one more thing you need to keep in mind is geography.

Different social media platforms and other PPC search engine platforms like Google have different pricing mechanisms for local, national and international markets. If you will start your testing from a broad geography, then you could end up paying a much larger amount for doing your testing.

One major challenge with social media is that costs can go out of control very fast. This is where starting with a Single Target Market helps. You can choose a very small segment of the market and then niche it further to ensure that you can do changes quickly and then roll out on a national or international scale.

With PPC advertising on social media the second challenge for B2B marketers is to get official emails. As I have mentioned in my posts in this series, earlier, until you have the emails, of people, you don’t own the information. But when people, raise their hand or subscribe to whatever lead magnet you have chosen, they generally end up giving you their personal emails.

So while you have got the information about the person and you can start sending information to her, you won’t know her company details and her designation.

That’s where you will need to figure out a way for her to give you information. This will make it a multi step process. While there are a lot of coaches who talk about social media advertising, very few talk about B2B related successes because of this challenge.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

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

B2B, lead generation, Marketing

Over the years the whole process of lead generation in the B2B segment has become tougher and tougher.

About 20 years back one of the best ways to identify opportunities in B2B were things like lunch and learn or an event of an hour followed by cocktail and dinner.

The value proposition for the seller was that they got to meet people from their prospective clients first hand and understand their challenges. For the buyers, there were two key benefits.

First was that they got information, second was that they would meet their peers from the industry and share notes. Once the visiting cards were available, then the calling out teams, sales teams would target these prospects. However all vendors followed a similar process and people started getting tired of responding to calls.

Go back

Your message has been sent

With the large scale availability of information via the internet that aspect was lost. In addition with travel times increasing in most countries and complexities in their environment growing, they found less and less interest in socializing.

From an economics standpoint the cost per lead was pretty high, but if you had experienced sales people in the room with the prospects, you could get firm requirements also from an event.

On the other hand email is free. You can send as many emails you want at virtually zero cost. The challenge is that nobody wants to share their email with you because they realize that you will start inundation them with emails.

However if you can offer something of value, in return for an email address, people may still be willing. But that VALUE is the question we were looking at yesterday. Its becoming tougher and tougher to get people to part with their email addresses.

So one other mechanism which I wrote about in a post about a week back is to utilize snail mail once again to be in front of customers regularly. Since most companies are either lazy or don’t have the manpower to send out post cards or envelopes, its a good opportunity to stand out and get mindspace. And the economics of sending one post card to a thousand prospects over 52 weeks will not be too much.

The key is to figure out how you can cross the barrier to get the prospect to raise their hand and show interest.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The concept of Value – in Services – 2

B2B, Product Management, services, Value, value proposition

In the post yesterday we had seen how services can have different values for different people and its our responsibility as sellers and product managers to create the value differentiation. 

If we look at the B2B segment, there’s a very clear difference between how the value is seen if it is helpful in getting revenue or is it about cost.

Anything which can help increase revenue is always more valuable, versus anything that is about cost is always going to be seen as less valuable.

Therefore any proposal on the cost side will take longer to close, until and unless there’s an emergency of some kind, versus a proposal which talks about increasing revenue.

Even when you’re going from the “gate” which brings in the revenue, you have to be able to showcase how your service forms a solution to their overall problem of increasing revenue. As an example,you can’t go in saying I am a content writer and therefore I can increase revenue….you won’t be able to move ahead.

On the other hand if you understand the problem that they have and how content writing can be the solution to their problems then you have a bright road ahead.

Its happened with me many times, where , we created an amazing offering for the cost side and were not able to get it to move with customers because they were already solving the problem in a different way. But we started getting traction the moment we moved towards re-orienting the solution from the revenue side.

This is a key thing to learn for all of us who are in the services business of any kind.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!