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Why B2B Marketers Need More than Email to Reach Buyers 2.0

Bill Nussey, CEO, Silverpop | Articles > From the section: Lead Nurturing

November, 2014 |

There's a new business buyer in today's interactive marketplace – Buyer 2.0. She evaluates purchase decisions not from the information in your sales collateral or on your Web site but from the countless conversations taking place— primarily online— between your current and potential customers. Her access to data is fueled by the Web 2.0 phenomenon and its wealth of user-generated content.

With better-informed business buyers and tighter budgets, today's B2B sales cycle requires more than just point-in-time, linear email communication blasts. Instead, you need multitouch, multichannel dynamic campaigns that reach customers when and how it's appropriate for them.

While strategic email programs are a key element to any strong B2B marketing program, it takes a whole lot more to get the job done. If your goal is to drive leads down the sales pipeline, you must reach decision makers through a diverse network of touch points. Here are some areas to focus on to better engage prospects and make your B2B marketing efforts more holistic.

Lead Nurturing Planning and Strategy
Now more than ever, leads must not be allowed to slip through the cracks. To keep them within reach, let prospects' preferences be your guide on how to best connect and engage with them across multiple channels. With the longer B2B sales cycle, it's likely you'll need multiple interactions to move leads along, and communicating with prospects across a variety of channels increases your likelihood of success.

Don't settle for generic email blasting. Build dynamic, buyer-centric campaigns that have numerous branches to account for many different scenarios. For instance, if Prospect A came to you through an industry-specific trade show and indicated specific needs, while Prospect B only visited your Web site, you'll want to interact with each differently.

For example, trade show prospects who visited your booth likely visited your competitors' as well. A series of case studies showing how customers benefited from your product or service would be appropriate. In comparison, Web analytics can track site visitors' behaviors to indicate their degree of interest. Are they viewing a product demo or not going any deeper than the home page? If they are looking at specific product pages, providing customer-generated reviews can be helpful. The key is to create interactive marketing campaigns based on prospect actions and responses.

Furthermore, map your communications to the buying cycle. These general guidelines will serve as a good starting point:

In the early stages, educational materials and best practices are a smart choice.
As prospects get further into the evaluation process, case studies and special event invites will engage them.
When a prospect begins to narrow the choices, pricing comparisons, testimonials and demos can be sent.

Still, it's important to recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all B2B marketing program. To create a program most likely to expand your customer base, start with the customers you already have and backtrack. What led them to your door? What advertising vehicles did customers originally respond to, and what kinds of offers best resonated? What messages moved them through the pipeline?

A strong lead-management program will score leads based on business rule sets that lead to segmentation of prospects based on varying degrees of sales-readiness. So if you score leads as cold, warm and hot, what specific actions did you take to convert a customer that came into your lead-nurturing program with a"cold" score? What communications vehicles successfully reached warm leads? Analyze the dialogue paths for different buyer segments, looking for discernible patterns. Once you understand these dialogue paths, you'll better understand the roles different communication channels play in the buying process and can use this knowledge as the basis for building future nurturing campaigns

Using Marketing Automation
For B2B marketers serious about employing a multichannel approach to connecting with prospects, having a supporting technology in place that automatically performs many of the time-consuming aspects of lead management—including segmentation and nurturing leads—is a must. Marketing automation enables you to efficiently create sophisticated and engaging campaigns that automatically respond to customer/prospect behaviors, lifecycle segments and other criteria.

According to a Silverpop survey of B2B marketers, companies that use marketing automation are more than twice as likely to nurture leads. Nurture programs that provide prospects with value-packed information such as white papers, customer testimonials or data sheets can keep a company top-of-mind during a buyer's information-gathering process.

As an added bonus, marketing automation solutions that integrate data with a CRM system give salespeople visibility into prospects' historical and real-time Web activity. This enables them to speak specifically with prospects about what communications have connected most strongly with them, making for a more productive interaction.

In the modern B2B buying process, marketers' tactics and channels mirror the various ways buyers are researching, educating and selecting brands and products. With B2B buyers increasingly self-propelled as they go through the decision cycle, marketers have an opportunity to step in and manage the upstream dialogue. By moving beyond rudimentary email blasting and using a diverse network of touch points such as landing pages, RSS, surveys, white papers, byline articles, newsletters, direct mail and telesales to communicate, you can engage today's savvy buyers, help move them through the sales cycle and ultimately increase revenue.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[Bill Nussey] Bill Nussey has 20 years of experience as a chief executive for technology companies. Previously, Nussey was president and CEO of iXL Inc., a publicly traded e-business consulting firm. During his tenure, iXL executed its initial public offering, grew revenues from $10 million to $120 million per quarter and served multiple Fortune 500 customers including General Electric, JP Morgan and Delta.

Prior to iXL, Nussey was an investment professional with Greylock, where he worked on investments including DoubleClick, MediaMetrix and iXL. Before Greylock, Nussey was the co-founder and CEO of Da Vinci Systems. When he sold the company to ON Technologies in 1994, Da Vinci was the third most widely used email product in the world with more than 3 million customers in 45 countries.

Silverpop's Engagement Marketing suite of Web-based solutions enables companies worldwide to build relationships with customers and prospects through the creation, automation and delivery of relevant online messaging.

Companies rely on the Silverpop Engage platform to create and manage multichannel marketing campaigns that reach millions of individuals—one at a time—enhancing lifetime customer value and brand loyalty. Silverpop's Engage B2B marketing automation platform seamlessly scores sales leads, nurtures them through the pipeline and measures campaign return on investment.