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!!!

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!!!