It’s amazing how many B2B companies I come across that still see Marketing as being the department that produces brochures. Thankfully it’s less frequent than it was a few years ago as most have recognised the value of the brand, the impact that lead generation and prospect management campaigns can have on sales effectiveness and the contribution of customer communications to retention rates. They’re beginning to see the value of marketing.
Why then do these same enlightened people restrict their use of the internet to a website and what’s more, a website that is no more than an online brochure (that’s actually out of date)?
A recent survey* highlighted to me why things need to change. It identified that corporate buyers felt that the first port of call when looking for potential suppliers was Search Engines – way ahead of exhibitions and trade magazines. So we should all do more Search Engine Optimisation? Well yes, but it means a lot more than that.
It means that B2B buyers have changed their behaviours and their buying processes and that we need to change our approaches accordingly. It’s great news as it means that we can make use of the attributes that make online marketing so compelling – low cost, high degrees of personalisation, immediacy, ease and speed of response, self fulfilment etc.
It does how ever require a new communications strategy. It’s only by reviewing the entire sales and marketing process that you can identify all the opportunities for increased effectiveness and efficiencies. Web response has been proved to improve both the quality and quantity of leads generated by advertising and direct mail and eBrochures can be built “on-the-fly” to provide exactly the information they need, whilst also saving on the print and fulfilment costs. Online datacapture is less prone to errors and facilitates self qualification and results in a higher submission rate of permission email addresses. Automatic email follow-up keeps them warm and encourages further action and can lead to a prospect management campaign that nurtures them until them enter the buying cycle. Similarly keeping customers informed to generate cross-selling opportunities as well as measuring customer satisfaction levels can all be moved online.
But, it’s not only the changes in buying behaviour that makes this the right time, it is also recent developments in technology and significant reductions in the cost of content management systems and the availability of Rich Internet Applications. We can now build an entire content managed website for as little as £5,000. And it’s viable to develop online applications to tell complex stories in a simple and easy to use format, to provide product selection tools that would enable an industrial buyer to find exactly the widget they need in no time at all and to give an online experience that really motivates people to buy from you.
There really is no excuse for us not to improve our results or to reduce our budgets – the buyers are ready, the technology is available and is affordable, we just need to open our minds and look afresh at how we use the internet.