Using Digital To Revolutionize B2B Marketing

	Jeff Maling President & Chief Experience Officer Roundarch
	Hendrik Kleinsmiede SVP, User Experience Roundarch

B2B has long been an afterthought when it comes to digital marketing. Yet while consumer digital marketing still gains the lion’s share of attention, a quiet revolution is occurring in the business-to-business space. B2B marketers, who historically have relied on offline processes and large sales forces, are increasingly fueling growth while reducing the cost of sales with digital.

Until recently, the typical B2B company viewed a Web site as a necessary evil, believing that the real action happened when the customer (or sales person) picked up the phone and initiated contact. Although facilitating contact remains central to digital marketing, B2B companies are recognizing the Web channel as a strategic asset that can support the process from awareness through post-sales servicing. To achieve this goal, B2B organizations must undertake the mammoth task of translating the entire traditional sales process for the digital realm, both from the organization’s and customer’s perspective.

Define The Sales Funnel
To build a Web experience that will resonate with customers, it’s important to understand the customer’s purchasing process. A B2B sales funnel can provide an underlying structure for an effective and efficient Web experience that anticipates customer needs and facilitates sales. Our B2B sales funnel has seven stages, each of which can be discrete or bleed into one another and accomplished by an individual or a team. Nearly each stage offers an opportunity to inform.

Start With Analytics And An Integrated Lead Capture Process
From an organization’s perspective, it’s feasible to spend $1 million to $10 million or more on redesigning a Web experience. Many B2B companies that do so, however, need to incorporate a critical element—measurement—in the final or even future phases. An old adage holds true: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. B2B companies must think about measurement from the outset to focus design on elements that “move the needle.”

Likewise, most lead integration on B2B sites is very poor. Leads rarely include pertinent information, like whether it is an existing client or what was  looked for on the Web. This not only requires the sales person to start over with the potential customer, which can be frustrating, but it also misses the chance to tune into that customer’s needs from the beginning.

One company that is gaining valuable insight and context to the user’s mindset is Crowley, a maritime service, transportation, and logistics company. Crowley’s staff uses a marketing automation solution from CoreMotives that integrates with its CRM system and provides key information about the Web visit so that the sales person does not need to start over with the customer. This information further integrates into a full measurement strategy for the entire B2B sales process.

Beyond The PDF
Raising awareness typically involves the entire spectrumof marketing elements that get the word out, from real-world advertising to banner advertising to positioning within expert forums. However, B2B generally falls outside the traditional advertising realm, and awareness often comes from trade shows, sales forces, and word of mouth. Today, digital can play an integral role, such as through virtual trade shows, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO).

>> Virtual Trade Shows: A staggering amount of money is spent on trade shows and sales conferences each year, with some organizations spending up to $1 million on a single show. Companies like Varian and Cisco, however, have changed this mindset and gone virtual. For example, Varian created a virtual trade show experience complete with real-time video presentations, product launches, and networking.  Companies such as INXPO have created specialized trade show platforms with integrated videos, large-scale communities, and, in some cases, innovative games. These platforms reduce conference costs and travel costs, while providing features, such as networking, that are difficult to execute in a nonvirtual environment.

>> Social Media: Many B2B companies have created communities to support their products. Classic concepts such as “crowdsourcing” (whereby customers “road-test” new ideas or troubleshoot product issues) are well-established in the B2B field, and some companies monitor Internet forums and blogs for mention of their brands. Still fewer B2B companies have mechanisms in place to transform monitoring activity into strategic benefit. However, a growing number of innovative companies are tapping into deep communities to create awareness and launch products.

B2B companies have a specialist audience, and it is not surprising to see specialist communities in the vanguard of utilizing social media. A cursory scan of LinkedIn reveals a myriad of professional communities. These communities are a largely untapped source of information for crowdsourcing, direct marketing, focus groups, customer surveys, or usability feedback, to name few areas of potential. In a recent project focused on mass spectrometry, for instance, one day on LinkedIn produced 50 recruited users of these high-tech devices, a result that would have taken weeks using traditional methods.

>> SEO: It is easy to assume that search does not apply to B2B, that your product is too specialized, and that the universe of customers is too limited to make SEO effective. Not so. In fact, SEO might be the most effective way to reach global B2B customers.

Today, nearly every inquiry process begins with the Web, and many start with Google. Even somewhat esoteric search terms, where the universe of competitors is known, generate compelling numbers. For example, there are only 10 real family office providers in the U.S., yet family offices generate 200,000 Web searches per month. Another strong B2B category in financial services—asset management—generates 1.2 million monthly searches.

If you don’t think being good at SEO can improve your bottom line, consider the success of Huffington Post and AVIS. You might assume that AOL purchased Huffington for its unique content, but the reality is that Huffington produces only a fraction of its own content. Huffington’s SEO process for the Associated Press and other articles that everyone else can access helped make the brand valuable to AOL. For AVIS, an auto rental company, small business customers grew significantly when SEO and landing page optimization was put in place.

One reason SEO is undervalued in B2B is that it is hard. It takes effort to ensure your global product content shows up on in local search results, and dealing with a corporate site (.com) that might not be your U.S. site complicates matters further.

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