The Top 5 B2B Online Marketing Tips

Top B2B Online Marketing Tips:
Five Ways to Align and Improve
Your Online Marketing Efforts

©2012 ParkerWhite Brand Interactive, Reproduction Prohibited

TOP B2B ONLINE MARKETING TIPS
Five Tips to Align and Improve Your Marketing Efforts

Critical Components Drive Successful Campaigns

Our goal at ParkerWhite is to empower you with tools to intelligently engage your customers and
build brand value. The B2B industry has been slow in implementing digital technologies to
effectively reach their target markets. Studies show that an increasing number of companies are
turning to their computers to find possible vendors or partners to fit their needs. ParkerWhite
Brand Interactive develops solutions that maximize growth in a multi-channel world.

Today’s brands must:

• Match the product or service with the best response channel
• Select the right channels from the vast array of new media channels
• Incorporate technology to maximize efficiency and increase value
• Evaluate your efforts based on the right metrics
• Tap into the mindset of the evolved customer

Bottom line: Understanding the technology best suited for your company’s needs can create huge
returns down the road.

With the sophistication of marketing tools increasing tenfold during the past decade, the difficulty
of keeping customers engaged has also increased. Reaching qualified prospects at the right time,
and through the right channel, remains an obstacle, as the volume of marketing messages both
online and off-line continues to increase year over year.

A ParkerWhite Brand Interactive survey revealed the prevalence of these opinions. When
respondents were asked about top challenges during the coming 12 months, developing new
targeting tactics was second only to e-mail delivery issues. However, a key barrier companies face
is productively embracing critical marketing components for successful campaigns.

Begin building campaigns by using the following essential marketing tactics:
1. Gathering and building robust target customer profiles
2. Develop customer segmentation that will evolve as the sophistication of your customer
data increase
3. Coordinate campaigns for multichannel marketing media and add a Social Media plan
4. Tailor offers through personalization and media, Optimize and analyze
5. Find a strong marketing partner

This paper provides an overview of how to efficiently and effectively deploy these critical marketing
tactics, allowing your organization to focus on driving results. Additionally, this paper provides
insight into the benefits of employing these critical marketing tactics.

©2012 ParkerWhite Inc, Reproduction Prohibited

Let’s Start by Assessing your KPIs

Integrated Marketing Is Not Yet Mainstream

Despite investments in marketing
automation and CRM technology,
service, sales, and marketing
systems and organizations are still
extremely disjointed. For example,
only 15 percent of companies use
customer data as a customer
segmentation attribute in their
marketing segmentations, with the
majority continually marketing to
their customers while ignoring their
rich customer behavior and
attitudes. Only 12 percent of
companies leverage multichannel
customer data in their marketing
segmentations.

Marketing Technology Is Becoming More Accessible
E-mail will remain the primary interactive advertising/marketing medium to communicate with
customers. In 2009, 61 percent of b2b marketers embraced e-mail marketing to existing
customers as an outgoing model of marketing to offset cost of direct mail. Since 2009 overall
spending on e-mail marketing has increased, outpacing spending on other online advertising
tactics, such as paid search.

During the next 12 months, 32 percent of these companies plan to add interactive websites, video
and social media to their marketing mix. Ultimately, these additional deployments across business-
to-business sectors will increase marketing clutter vying for customers’ attention, further
underscoring the need to send highly relevant customer communications.

The volume of e-mail messages b2b professionals receive is up both at work and in the home.
Because your customers are wading through increasing e-mail, marketers must make every effort
to ensure messages are contextually relevant to their customers. Despite the clutter, online and
off-line marketing continue to be effective, with 50 percent of b2b professionals saying they have
taken action on ads.

The key to building successful and enduring customer relationships lies in understanding how your
customers interact with and react to different media, enabling you to anticipate and address those
needs at key points in their experience.

At ParkerWhite Brand Interactive, we call it the “Informed Customer Model.”
We have a proven track record of helping leading-edge, global marketers define the role of online,
data warehousing and digital direct marketing within their overall communications mix, and
successfully optimize their programs through a well-honed blend of strategic insight and analytic
substantiation.

Let ParkerWhite Brand Interactive ’s team answer your questions about our marketing programs
that maximize the effectiveness of your customer communications and brand growth.


Now Start Implementing the Critical 5 B2B Marketing Tips

Critical Marketing Tip One: Have A Strategy Before Implementing Tactics.

Many businesses and agencies are still hanging onto the
old “outbound” way of doing business. Place an ad — get a
sale. Build a new website — increase traffic. Launch an
email campaign — get a click-through.

With the addition of new technology and web-based
services, there are many new opportunities for marketers.
Social media, search and mobile marketing are just a few of
the new tools available. While we are all excited to put these
new tactics to work for our clients, we have to keep in mind
that buyer behavior has also changed significantly as a
result of new technology.

You need to create a marketing strategy that matches the new buyer behavior and uses the newly
available tools and tactics to take that strategy to market. By creating a strategy that focuses on
identifying target markets, uncovering prospect pains, creating aligned client solutions and
delivering remarkable client experiences.

Developing successful marketing campaigns requires decent customer data that not only depict
the value of your customers, but can also be used proactively to move prospects through a sales
pipeline, or send service alerts—instead of marketing campaigns—to customer segments most
sensitive to support.

Simply having more data is not necessarily an ingredient for success, however, having reliable and
ready access to multichannel customer data is. Use of a mechanism for marketers to easily access
a variety of customer data assets without the intervention of IT is a critical element in building
successful campaigns.

Creating an e-marketing strategy to reach, attract and engage buyers through digital content and
communication is critical to building trust with today’s buyer. 70% of B2B buyers use search
engines at the start of the B2B buying process. If you aren’t capturing the attention of your
prospects through digital content, chances are, they won’t find you. Once you have their attention,
you need to make sure it is relevant to their needs. Pushing out content just to grab someone’s
attention won’t work for gaining new business. Personalize your content by better understanding
your prospects.


Critical Marketing Tip Two: Create a Customer Segmentation Strategy and Initiate
Personalization Opportunities

One of the many benefits of customer profiles is easy access to various customer attributes to
develop customer segments. Such segments can be used to target customers with comparatively
meaningful and relevant content. However, many marketers fail to embrace even the most basic
segmentation tactics.

Challenged by disparate customer data
sources, less than one-third (31 percent) of
marketers use click-through information
from previous e-mail campaigns for
audience segmentation. Only 17 percent of
marketers sending promotional offers use
multichannel data, and just 16 percent use
customer service interaction data. A great
competitive advantage exists for marketers
that make the extra effort to improve their
targeting tactics with these infrequently
used data.

Marketers using segmentation are nearly
twice as likely to attain conversion rates of
more than seven percent, compared with
marketers not using segmentation. For
example, the greatest number of marketers
reporting average unique conversion rates
of more than three percent employ attitudinal segmentation (49 percent), compared with less than
one-quarter (23 percent) of marketers that do not use any segmentation and attain the same level
of results.

Although a lofty and perhaps ill-conceived goal, personalized one-to-one marketing is still largely a
myth, as it applies to digital marketing. Marketers are generally doing little to make e-mail
messages personally relevant to their subscribers. Salutation personalization can be easily
achieved through common mail-merge functionality, but less than one-half of marketers take their
personalization efforts beyond it.

Despite the prevalence of CRM deployments, the market generally clings to a broadcast mentality
that treats all customers the same. At the very least on a segment level, personalizing messages
with content that is relevant to these customers is a huge competitive advantage. Marketers that
employ personalization in their e-mail marketing efforts are 40 percent more likely to have average
unique conversion rates of more than seven percent, compared with those that do not. Forty-two
percent of marketers using personalization report average unique conversion rates of more than
three percent, compared with 30 percent of marketers that do not employ personalization. Clearly,
improving campaign relevancy through the use of personalization can have a dramatic impact on
campaign results.


Critical Marketing Tip Three: Incorporate Multichannel Marketing and add a Social
Media Plan.

Currently, 38 percent of b2b marketers implement coordinated online and off-line campaigns, such
as sending e-mail before or after an off-line mailing. This coordinated effort can be effective, with
nearly one-half (46 percent) reporting improved click-through rates for these types of campaigns.
Streamlining campaign elements into a multichannel marketing approach allows for increasingly
effective and efficient campaign management.

This approach ensures customers or prospects are getting
the right message at the right time and through the right
channel. Using triggering capabilities to coordinate
messages across channels is a good place to start. One
simple triggered message is sending postcards to
customers when their e-mail addresses go bad (i.e.,
bounce).

Across b2b industries, the use of social media tools and Web 2.0 collaborative technologies have
risen to play a prominent role in the marketing of products and services. For those companies
promoting themselves or products in the b2b space the urge to enter the social media/Web 2.0
marketing fray has been growing exponentially. Using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to expand a
brand and/or business is becoming commonplace in the B2B industry.

The more time our prospects or customers spend with your brand and products, the more likely
they are to buy. Engaging customers or prospects in social media channels increases brand/time.
Offering multiple engagement channels allows for self-selection of preferred channels. Being in the
right social media channels based on your market increases channel interaction. This is the new
multichannel marketing model for the 21st century. Social media creates brand advocates and
turns peers into your best salespeople.

Social media increases your search engine rankings and, when combined with your website, drives
additional traffic via organic search. Social media puts a human face on the faceless corporate
entity. Social media’s biggest opportunity is to allow people to connect with your employees as
peers.

Whether you like it or not, your customers and prospective customers are talking about your
brand. Social media is the great neutralizer. It allows you to seek out negatives and turn them into
positives via reputation management and communications.

In order to make their prospects feel safe, you need to position your clients’ businesses as the
most knowledgeable and trusted experts in their field or industry. To accomplish this, provide
resources relevant to your clients’ prospects in exchange for contact information. Whitepapers,
webinars and other educational content allow consumers to become familiar your clients’
companies without the pressure of a sales situation.


Critical Marketing Tip Four: Testing Is a
Critical Part of Improving Your Marketing
Performance.

Omniture 2010 Online Marketing report stated
these top key web analytics challenges include:
• Difficulty finding and training top talent
• Determining what actions to take based
on their data
• Maximizing marketing ROI through full
funnel measurement and automatic multi-
channel integration.

Marketers know which metrics are important to
measure, however they are not capturing all the metrics they need to achieve their goals. Eighty-
two percent of survey responders believe ROI is somewhat to very important to measure, but only
30 percent of marketers can effectively measure marketing ROI! Additionally, 86 percent of
respondents think conversion rate is somewhat or very important to measure, yet 27 percent of
marketers cannot effectively measure conversion rates.

Improving campaign performance requires a marketing application capable of performing not only
rigorous testing, but also effortless testing. About 20 percent of marketers employ e-mail testing
strategies on a regular basis (i.e., at least every other mailing). Without testing, segmentation or
targeting through personalization is a futile exercise that wastes resources. In fact, a ParkerWhite
Brand Interactive executive survey found marketers that test on a regular basis are more likely to
have e-mail conversion rates that exceed industry averages of ten percent to twelve percent,
compared with marketers that do not test.

Employing these critical marketing tactics, along with a commitment to continuously improve and
optimize your campaigns through testing, will surely have a positive impact on your marketing
organization. Developing customer segmentation schemes, applying personalization, and
performing regular testing have all proven to increase campaign performance. Although all
marketing tactics must be refined over time, developing successful campaigns begins with a
strong foundation built on the aforementioned important marketing tip.


Critical Marketing Tip Five: Select a Strong Digital Marketing Partner.

Theorizing about marketing strategies that may resonate with
customers and prospects is easy. However, turning these theories
into reality is much more difficult. As sophistication of the
marketing industry increases, successful companies will have one
element in common: a strong marketing partner. A competent
digital marketing technology partner that can extend into the
service and sales realm will have more success. They will be much
more familiar with the challenges and opportunities that an end-to-
end marketing campaign presents. The following are key attributes that marketers should look for
when selecting a marketing partner:

The Right Experience:
Some companies have a history of bad experiences with marketing. Unfortunately, they have
experienced a failed strategy or didn’t get the necessary return on investment to justify the
marketing expenditure. A good marketing partner will seek to understand what a company has
done in the past, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Longevity:
Consider how long your marketing partner has been in business. The industry is prone marketing
firms that come and go. Only those that serve clients well and deliver on promises will become
long-term players in the industry.

Breadth of services:
Ask what components of marketing a potential partner intends to employ to obtain strong
marketing results for your company. Make sure the firm you select has expertise in many online
marketing components and can pull out the right tool at the right time..

Understanding your business and your market:
Make sure the partner you choose takes the time to understand your business, your target market
and your objectives. Because results from a well-executed marketing strategy only get better over
time, it’s likely you’ll be working with the company you select for a long time. Make sure it’s a firm
with whom you can build a long-term relationship.

Their references:
While it may sound obvious, don’t overlook the importance of checking references. You won’t
likely be able to see specific ROIs they’ve obtained for their clients, as this would be protected
under a confidentiality agreement; however, you should be able to see ranking results and similar
benchmarks.

Belief in ROI:
Inspect reporting and analysis capabilities. Reporting and measurement are central elements of
any campaign management program. However, too few quantify the impact of your marketing
programs on other areas of the business. Viewing customer data through consolidated profiles
and tracking effectiveness of campaigns from marketing execution to sales are important. Although
this approach may require customized reporting, seek out partners that are built around this
philosophy and make these reports standard offerings.


About ParkerWhite

ParkerWhite Brand Interactive brings a depth of experience in building both business-to-
business and consumer brands for companies in the fitness, health, medical device and
consumer products industries. So whether it’s establishing brand positioning, creating an
integrated product launch campaign or developing a website with a targeted social media
and online communications strategy, we offer our clients new ideas and strategies
backed by solid insights to deliver brand experiences that engage customers. In short,
your brand becomes a thriving entity, hence our motto: we give brands life.

Click here to receive a website analysis for better lead generation!

Keith White
Brand Strategist
760.783.2020 ext 25
keith@parkerwhite.com


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