Sensible Marketing for Small Business

Now that the calendar has rolled over, many people are reviewing their approved budgets, evaluating their project lists and setting their B2B marketing and communications priorities based on last year’s results. Management has handed down its business goals and objectives for the year and it is now the job of marketing to support those objectives. If social media is part of supporting those objectives, remember that all online engagement drives customers and prospects back to your website. This is the perfect time to review your website and make sure that it is in line with those business objectives as well.

As many websites have been around a while, they may not reflect your marketing initiatives and business strategies for this year. We offer the following suggestions to help guide your review of your site. Some of these may be small fixes to your site that can be easily accomplished. Others, however, may require you to shift your priorities and make a site redesign part of this year’s tasks.

1. Home Page Clarity and Functionality

When prospects arrive at your home page, it is clear what products or services your company offers? Objectively review your home page and view it as a first time visitor, whether your primary offerings have changed or not this year. You may have optimized your search results to drive great traffic, but if people can’t tell what you do at a glance, they are not sticking around. And by the way, if you have an animated flash landing page or auto playing music or video, remove it today. These outdated and slow-loading bits of media only slow down your site visitors and make it more likely that they will leave your site without taking action. Check your analytics to see what sites people came from or what keywords they searched to understand who stays on your site and who leaves.

2. Clear Path to Information

Prospects and customers arrive at your home page and they know they are in the right place, but can they find what they are looking for? As web sites have gotten fancier and technology more advanced, gadgets, widgets and sliding navigation have made it harder to find what your site visitors are looking for. Make sure your site has a clear path to get people to the information they need, whether it is product specs, customer service or finding a distributor. Again, your analytics tell you what pages people go to after your home page.

3. Call to Action

Is your site generating leads for your sales force? Are you trying to get new subscribers to content via RSS or to an email newsletter? Are you selling products directly from the web or passing all these prospects to a distributor? Whatever your call to action on your site is, make sure it is on every relevant page and customers and prospects know what to do. And make sure this is all trackable so you can match this up to your objectives. Review these numbers on a regular basis so you are not surprised by either success or failure. Your website is a living entity that should be easy to change to make it more effective. If you are constantly fighting with your IT department or a web vendor to make changes, you need to reevaluate that relationship. Your company’s success cannot be held back by technical limitations or the whims of your internal or external partners.

4. Social Media Profiles

Last year you started a blog, joined Twitter and created a Facebook fan page. Now is the time to get those social presences to the home page of your site. You want to grow these social communities and burying their existence on your about page, contact page or some random page that no one can find is not the way to do it.

Your marketing content library can be an incredible resource in lean economic times. You have opportunities to repurpose, reformat and reuse that content for new lead generation campaigns.

We’ve collected five examples of clever content repurposing strategies that B2B marketers shared with us over the years. Includes tips on generating audio and video from text and finding new content for nurturing emails.

Tight budgets require marketers to stretch every dollar they spend. Fortunately, few investments are as elastic as the content you create for lead-gen campaigns.

Every white paper, webinar, client case study, video, podcast or other piece of content you create can work for multiple campaigns. The process can be as easy as recording your webinars, then using links to archived versions in lead-nurturing campaigns. Or, it might require a bit more work, such as by developing a Q&A podcast with the author of a white paper.

The key is to examine your marketing content and find the best opportunities to repurpose and reuse what’s already available. Here are five examples from past Sherpa case studies to inspire you:

Strategy #1. Use past media coverage as content in nurturing emails

Staying in touch with prospects in your nurturing funnel doesn’t necessarily mean developing a new white paper, case study or other piece of content every time you want to send an email.

You can build friendly, low-pressure, lead-nurturing emails simply by sharing a link to media coverage you’ve generated from public relations efforts:

- Executive interviews or bylined articles in trade publications typically cover relevant industry topics that demonstrate your industry leadership.

- Sharing an article you believe prospects would find interesting gives them a break from repeated calls to register for content or provide contact information.

For example, Matt Barker, Director, Marketing, TeleHealth Services, made the most of his team’s PR strategy by recycling bylined articles they had previously written for trade publications.

Barker and his team used nurturing emails to follow up on a direct mail campaign touting one of the company’s health information products. The first nurturing message offered a recap of the product line the DM campaign had been promoting, but also included a link to a bylined article citing the value of those products in a healthcare setting.

The result: A 12.5% open rate on the email — a key step in a campaign that generated more than 20 warm leads for the sales team. One deal from those leads would be enough to cover the entire cost of the program.

Strategy #2. Create podcasts from in-person speaking engagements

Here’s a quick, low-hassle approach to creating podcasts: Record and edit any public speaking engagements by company executives, or by clients describing your products or services.

Michael Williams, Marketing Director, Global Management Technologies Corp. made the most of his speaking gig at a major industry event. He obtained permission to record the presentation (using an inexpensive digital recorder) and turned the raw audio into a podcast using free digital editing software.

Through promotion via email and PPC ads, the podcast was heard by more than nine times as many people as there were in attendance at the event. Additionally:
o 16.7% of the podcast listeners were deemed sales-ready leads
o Those additional leads reduced the average cost-per-lead from the trade show by 71%

Strategy #3. Supplement white papers with audio highlights

White papers can also be a source for new audio content. Interviewing an expert author on the paper’s top findings, providing an audio summary of key takeaways, or simply excerpting a portion of the paper are all ways to turn text content into a podcast.

When Paul Dunay was a marketer at the management consulting firm BearingPoint, his team developed podcasts to use as related offers for their financial services white papers:

- The team wrote and recorded six- to eight-minute audio summaries of the white papers.

- They used active titles, such as “How to Avoid the Seven Pitfalls of…”

- They added podcast offers on the white paper download page to serve as content previews.

- They promoted the podcasts by emailing their house list and posting them to audio sites like iTunes.

The results:
o Conversion rates tripled when podcasts were added to the white paper landing page
o Podcast listeners were just as qualified as other leads
o 18% of listeners downloaded more than one podcast

Strategy #4. Recycle testimonials and case studies for advertising campaigns

It takes a lot of time and effort to find clients willing to share their testimonials. It then takes your team just as much effort to shape those stories into suitable case studies for your marketing campaigns.

Why not use as many channels as possible to drive prospects to that collateral?

Here’s one approach: Angela Sanders, Director, U.S. Marketing Operations, Aon, recruited several clients to share their success stories for use in the company’s booth at an annual trade show.

To prepare for the event, the team developed:
o Video testimonials from the clients
o Case studies that provided in-depth descriptions of the client/company relationship

The event was a huge success for Sanders and her team. But afterwards, they realized the marketing collateral could form the basis of a new print advertising campaign:

- They created a series of client-focused advertisements for one of their regular trade magazine ad placements.

- The ads provided a brief description of how the company helped a particular client, and included a URL for a dedicated website where prospects could view the video testimonials and case studies.

Strategy #5. Turn boring-but-necessary documents into video

Technical specifications and other product details play an important role in the later stages of the buying cycle — but they can make for pretty dry reading. Breathe new life into old docs by converting them into videos.

Brian Ellefritz, Sr. Manager, Customer Relationship Marketing, Cisco Systems, created five-minute videos of product managers guiding prospects through the company’s two- to three-page product data sheets.

Within six months, video files accounted for 21% of all product data downloads.

Useful links related to this article:

How to Turn a Trade Show Speech Into a Podcast That Becomes a Lead Machine
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article_print.html?id=30093