An Open Letter on Marketing Tech Essentials for B2B | Business 2 ...

Online business and businesses that are online are two different things.

Many traditionally trained marketers are struggling to convert what has worked for years in the offline world into the new online environments.

They are not the same ? how can you know what will work and what won?t work on the internet?

As a marketer, the things lacking or needing enhancement for most businesses are creating and re-using content and proactively driving it out to the right audience. If you are in new business development, your job is to take leads and educate prospects, filtering them so that they move up the sales funnel closer to a sale.

B2B comms for existing customers, in a nutshell, is badly planned and poorly executed in most businesses. Don?t be like the herd.

Businesses have different user and customer groups who should be communicated to differently ? because they need different things from you. Let?s give an example: your manufacturers and suppliers need different information from your customers and prospects; if you are trading internationally, the way you work in China probably isn?t the same as with your clients in USA or Europe.

8 tech essentials for B2B marketing

1. How are you encouraging website visitors to join your mailing list? Building your own list and growing it is the second most important function of a business to business website. [Ask us what the first is.]
2. After joining the list and signing up, what are you doing to drive the customer deeper into using the higher features of your products and services?
3. Ongoing communications to prospects and clients are essential. What are the useful things you could be communicating with my business and are you delivering them in the channel that I prefer (clue ? this could include RSS, email, Linked In, Twitter direct message, a G+ community). Let the customer choose how she wants to hear from you.
4. How could you be leveraging existing customers to drive improved new business using member-get-member referrals and other incentives?
5. Autoresponders ? for new mailing list joiners you could have a ?guide? who is there for the reader, who acts as a signpost to helpful information inside your knowledge base, who helps check they?re getting what they need from your company. The guide would email the customer with helpful information that takes them deeper into the sales funnel and closer to a purchase.
6. STOP using FeedBurner to distribute your RSS feed from the blog. It?s unsupported and you could be leveraging the channel for marketing messages to your active users in order to drive deeper brand engagement and possibly sales.
7. Split out your blog into separate streams so that articles automatically send to different customer and prospect groups. Each would get articles designed for that audience. Create separate news feeds for different audiences, and further use them to drive marcoms to support your business growth goals
8. The more you blog, the bigger your archive. Readers rarely dive very deep and yet there?s probably heaps of helpful content which is being ignored. Could they be re-created into ?tip sheets?, e-books, training manuals and other support material?

As you can see we are expert content marketers and our mantra is ?write once; use three times?. The benefit you?d get from collaborating with us is that you can implement all these internally, while still dipping into our expert coaching for strategy.

Source: http://www.business2community.com/b2b-perspective/an-open-letter-on-marketing-tech-essentials-for-b2b-0363581

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