In his latest blog, “Getting meta,” Seth Godin shares his usual instant insight into the world of sales and marketing. This little gem describes the state of the Internet and how services that appear to be the information are really just tools to find the information.
His conclusion: “Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity.”
That’s what I think about a lot of the B2B marketing content I see — “too much stuff and far too little information.”
It’s important that marketers make sure the content they are offering has real value to the prospect asking for it. To have value to the reader, content should include one or more of this type of useful information:
- A better understanding of the causes of a specific business problem.
- Some best practices for solving a specific business problem.
- What peers or experts are saying about the problem.
- Some kind of self-assessment of how the prospect’s company is handling a specific problem.
- Industry advances being made to make solving the problem easier.
Informational content should not sell the company’s product or service directly (there can be a sales story and secondary offer at the end of the content), but it should educate the reader and position the company offering it as a trusted resource.
So how does a marketer make sure the content they are offering has value? Here are four tips on how to do it:
- Provide content information that matches the specific needs of each pipeline lead.
Send a short survey to your pipeline asking them to identify their three biggest challenges. Then target the content you are offering them (white paper, checklist, guide, Webinar, self-assessment) to the issues they have identified.
- Create content that has how-to take-aways that can be implemented without buying your product or service.
For example, if your solution is collaboration software, include usable advice on how to improve collaboration without buying your product. That approach positions your company as a trusted “thought leader,” and shows that you truly care about helping them solve their problem — not just selling them software.
- Offer a mix of some content that is available without registration and some that is not.
By not requiring registration for content, your company instantly positions itself as a valuable resource. With no registration, B2B marketers can boost the number of downloads of their content to expose their brand to a larger audience of potentially qualified leads. However, a B2B marketer’s ultimate goal is generating qualified leads that can be nurtured and turned into sales. To do this, one must require registration for access to the more in-depth content or informational offers being made.
- Provide content that satisfies the focus of each decision-maker and influencer in prospect companies.
Need the approval of the CFO? Provide content that positions the financial benefits of the company’s product or service. Do the same for the CEO, user, department manager, HR manager or whatever titles have influence on — or decision-making power over — the purchase.
Content is not designed to directly sell products or services. It is designed to educate prospects on how their peers are handling similar challenges and subtly edge them along toward choosing the marketing company’s product or service.
Seth Godin got it right; we all have an opportunity. Let’s use it.
Sometimes I find the simplest things the most impressive. Maybe I’m just surprised that, because they are so simple, I hadn’t thought of them before.
I’ve come across two simple marketing ideas lately that I thought I would pass along as others may not have thought of them, either.
Simple Idea #1:
I discovered the first one when I was doing some online research and came across the Delivra site. Under “Getting Started” on the top navigation bar is a drop-down menu. One of the items on that menu says “Everything in one PDF.” When you choose that menu item, you are taken to a page with this headline:
Everything you want to know in one download.
Save it. Print it. Share it.
Then there’s a link entitled “Download the Delivra All-in-One Fact Sheet (PDF) >>.” This is so smart and so simple, it’s brilliant. I wrote a white paper about “Reaching Purchase Influencers” and suggest providing influencers with a one-sheet they can pass along to help influence decision-makers. But this 5-page PDF is significantly more powerful because it is not only well written, but it delivers a full sales story in one convenient package. Plus, Delivra tells just what to do with it — Save it. Print it. Share it. This device is not an afterthought deep in the Web site. It’s there up front, right on the first navigation tab.
I’m not personally familiar with Delivra, so this is not an endorsement of its services. But I think this one device shows excellent insight into how a marketer can make it easy for business people to get and share information, and I applaud them for it.
Simple Idea #2:
Many apologies to whoever wrote about this on a blog post or on LinkedIn, but I read this idea over a month ago and didn’t make note of where. The idea is to put an FAQ page on a BtoB Website to enhance SEO. FAQ’s are more typically used on consumer product Web sites to present product information in an easy-to-use, accessible format.
FAQs are not as frequently used in the B2B world, but offer two strong benefits to business:
- FAQ’s provide a long, copy-heavy format that allows for the insertion of keywords that might be awkward or too repetitive on other informational pages.
- The questions on an FAQ page can be answered in a friendlier, more casual tone that adds a personal touch to a B2B Website and makes the company seem more human.
My next Web site enhancements? The addition of FAQs and a “Save it. Print it. Share it.” doc. They’re both great, but simple, ideas. I wish I had thought of them.
It was the end of March this year that I started this blog to provide B2B marketers with what the Proteus B2B Marketing Blog so accurately described as “down to earth help for B2B marketing efforts.”
Many marketers have recently discovered B2BMarketingSmarts, so I thought it might be a good time to recap the most popular posts. These are the 6 top posts that have had the most readership:
How to boost B2B content downloads.
How the title of your content plays a critical role in getting it downloaded.
A B2B marketing message angle that could close sales.
Learn how risk can be a greater motivator than gain and how to use it to your advantage.
6 tips for B2B landing pages that land business.
Learn 6 tested and proven tips for building more productive landing pages.
Getting over our own marketing bias.
How marketers can get past their personal likes and dislikes when choosing marketing channels.
Will your B2B prospect take time to read your message?
How specific length guidelines can help ensure that, in this nonstop business environment, prospects will read marketing messages.
Boost B2B lead gen. performance by resurrecting the dead.
Why marketers who are abandoning direct mail marketing are missing a still-powerful channel for B2B lead generation.
If you have a topic you’d like to know more about in the realm of best practices in online or offline B2B direct response marketing, let me know and I’ll try to address it soon. Thank you.
It’s been a long time since I had to go on a date (thank heavens). But what I do remember is not the dates themselves. What I remember are the endless days after the date wondering if I would hear from the guy again. The guys could have 
prevented my pain by inviting me to go out again at the end of the first date. That would be something like “Now that you’ve discovered what a fun and charming guy I am, how about trying dinner and a movie?”
In marketing, we call this the secondary offer. Secondary offers are included in the thank-you communication sent after the acceptance of the first offer. If a prospect has downloaded a white paper, an auto email goes out saying thank-you and making the secondary offer at the same time.
In the email, prospects are thanked for their download and then invited to learn more with a secondary offer, which could be a Webinar, a checklist, a demo, a guide or any other appropriate content that would expand on the information provided in the first offer.
Some cursory research turned up a blog post from January 2007 by Anne Holland at MarketingSherpa. She talks about how MarketingSherpa measures the response to secondary offers and reports that response had been 40% but was updated to 39%. The number could be falling still. Yet if the response rate is only 10% these days, I wouldn’t want to miss those 10% who are ready to be further engaged with what my company offers.
It’s likely that the majority of respondents to a lead acquisition offer will be in the earliest stages of the buying cycle. They are just discovering that they have a problem and are just beginning to be interested in learning about the options available to solve that problem. Making secondary offers with the thank-you for acceptance of each previous offer is a solid nurturing process that slowly moves those prospects forward to the next stage of the buy-cycle and eventually to direct engagement with sales.
So when marketers acquire a lead, they should skip the good-night kiss and instead extend the invitation for the next date.
Direct marketing has never been considered fashionable or sexy. Those using advertising or focusing on branding turn their nose up at a discipline that is more tactical than creative. But then the economy slows and everyone wants to track the results of their marketing spend. So direct marketing is now back in favor.
The heart and soul of effective direct marketing, of course, is and has always been data. So I was happy, yet surprised, to read an article I discovered through a link on CMO.com a day or so ago.
The article was by Michael Mancini on Nielsenwire entitled “B2B Discovers Market Segmentation.” This article reported the availability of comprehensive databases that “give marketers access to accurate and current data within a consistent framework on 13 million business establishments –critical information such as a company’s total headcount and industry classification. By appending these data to its business customer file, a company can create a robust business segmentation approach to guide prospecting, sales territory mapping, advertising and target marketing.”
It’s great advice. My surprise was that this practice was presented as new. He could be right that some B2B marketers are just discovering it. But many have been appending data from files such as these for decades to build a profile of their best customers and then going back to the database and selecting “look-alikes” to target their marketing.
Multiple sources such as D&B, InfoUSA and many others offer data that can be appended to lists to build a productive marketing model. Some data suppliers, of course, are better than others. AccuData taps multiple sources to provide businesses with the ability to append data to their customer list to build a profile. In addition to finding “look-alikes” on the outside database, marketers can bump their profile against their existing pipeline to identify those leads that are the best match.
It’s excellent advice, so I thank Michael for the reminder. Regardless of whether this capability is new or not, it’s a powerful tactic for moving the success of B2B marketing up to the next level of success. When the results come in, marketers will see why good direct marketing is always fashionable.
Each night at bedtime, I work on a crossword puzzle. I’m not great at it, but crossword puzzles are a good way for me to take a mental break from the day before sleeping. One of my biggest problems when solving puzzles is not thinking 
about all the possible answers that a clue could be about. A clue like “Barker’s common phrase” for a 3-letter answer made me try to think of what a circus barker might say or what a manager would call out to his crew or what order an officer might yell to his soldiers. Yet I was stumped. The answer, of course, was “arf” from the one “barker” I hadn’t thought of.
The other day, when conversing with a new client, I realized that marketing can be a bit like crossword puzzles. Here’s what the client, a provider of business training materials, shared with me:
The company was successfully marketing to trainers and HR titles in corporations.
Then, recently, an independent trainer discovered them and not only made a purchase but also recommended the product to her colleagues who also made purchases.
Now this company is marketing to both corporations and independent trainers and has, in essence, significantly increased the size of its prospect universe.
SEO, social media, and other Internet exposure revealed a previously undiscovered group of prospects the company can now pursue with outbound marketing. Companies can just wait for other prospect groups to find them or take some action to find their own undiscovered markets. Here are a few ideas for marketers:
- Bring in a marketing consultant who can look at your product with fresh eyes and without any of the blinders of old habits.
- Scour your customer base for the one or two rare examples of a company that does not fit your typical profile.
- Look for ways your product or service could be renamed or repositioned to appeal to an entirely different group of customers.
- Gather your team together and hold brainstorming sessions without limits.
Imagine your product is a crossword puzzle clue and see if you can find any new trees for barking up new business.
Last July Tony Karrer at Browse My Stuff and Tom Pick at WebMarketCentral created and launched the B2B Marketing Zone, a community collecting and organizing the best information on the web about B2B marketing.
B2B Marketing Smarts is now please to be included in a long list of B2B marketing experts covering such focused topics as Content from Michele Linn and others at Savvy B2B Marketing, Sales from Mac McIntosh of Sales Lead Insights, Lead Generation from Brian Carroll of B2B Lead Generation, eMarketing Strategies from Ardath Albee at Marketing Interactions and many others.
Visitors can access specific info by keyword or by topic, so finding guidance on a specific B2B marketing subject is fast and easy.
Marketers who are looking for B2B marketing and sales insight can skip Google and go right to B2B Marketing Zone for all the guidance they’ll ever need.
In the short post last week “Some people are better than others,” Seth Godin talked about the value of certain prospective customers over others. He makes a great argument, for instance, that book buyers are more likely to be good prospects for buying a Kindle, not because they read more but because the have “bought” books. What makes these prospects better is the commitment of money to a particular interest.
His example is a consumer one. But his point applies in B2B marketing just as well. Prospects willing to “pay money” or “invest time” to learn something are better than those who just opt in or register to gain free information. Here are three examples of prospects who show the money.
 Subscribers: Prospects who fall into this category are far easier to find as there a number of rental lists available based on buying behavior. A list of subscribers paying to receive an industry publication, for example, is far more valuable than names rented from a controlled circulation publication that is free to readers offline or online.
 Trade Shows: In good times, companies freely pay to send employees to trade shows for learning. In this slowed economy, not as many businesses are participating in or attending industry trade shows because of the cost. Those who do send attendees are seriously in the market for solutions.
 Live Seminars: B2B marketers have long known that offering targeted content generates qualified leads of individuals who have an interest in a subject related to their product or service. Offering a live seminar, however, requires an investment of time on the part of the attendee. Time is money after all. This approach will significantly reduce response over an online Webinar, but those attending should be far more qualified.
 Prospects who are actively researching and evaluating something are closer to making a buying decision. Attracting this type of lead should not be a substitute for filling the pipeline, but businesses that want qualified leads who could close faster, should look for the money.
B2B Content | Susan Fantle | 
November 30, 2009 10:36 am | 
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