Tuesday, May 25, 2010

The Sales Process



Unlike business-to-consumer companies, B2B companies are regularly faced with long, complicated sales cycles. Ofen, it takes months after initial contact to close a sale. This cycle can initiate online, but it will go through several different stages and forms of contact, many of which occur offline. That's where print advertising shines.

It begins with developing a message that speaks clearly to your prospects. That message should be integrated into both print and online communications, enabling one to reinforce the other. A prospective customer is logically more inclined to initiate contact online with a brand they recognize, such as those they've encountered through print and vice-versa online.

The need for brand awareness.

Creating brand awareness is a key step in promoting a company or product. This is especially true in the B2B industry where products and services are typically more customized and complex. A high level of customization inevitably results in a multi-faceted and long-term relationship. If customers are going to enter into that kind of relationship with you, they need to feel comfortable with your company. They need credibility...and so do you.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

It's all about relevance.



Marketers looking to optimize their web efforts must follow a recipe to become more relevant to visiting prospects.

Listen to your prospects and customers. Effective use of intelligence gathered from existing behavioral actions and expressed interest can make or break a web site. Marketers who establish listening posts will ensure that they're arming themselves with the knowledge to become relevant.

Automate tactics. Online relevance does not rely on chance. It requires data-driven technologies embedded with foresight and automation to trigger actions at precise moments in the prospect life-cycle.

Be relevant in more ways than one. Profiles change, intentions fluctuate, prospects are fickle. Relevance tactics must span both historic behavior and real-time activity. Customer profiling builds relationships. Rely on unique user profiles to increase relevance. Encourage prospects and customers to identify their unique preferences. This minimizes the risk of alienating them with misaligned targeting and opens access to more meaningful interactions.

According to Jupiter Research, on average, prospects visit three-or-more web sites during their research and 2.5 sites as they narrow a search for a supplier. For most, research starts with a web site visit, search engine query or promotional email.

Relevance tactics will improve your chances of capturing prospects' attention and driving them toward sales conversions.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Getting Relevant




If your web site isn't delivering relevant content to visitors, you may want to make it a top priority.


Targeted content drives activity.

Research show that content and messaging delivered with contextual meaning for your web site visitors (derived from session activity and historic profiles) constantly outperforms one-size-fits-all content. You can accomplish this relevant content by mining customer intelligence data to calculate buying intentions and identify web site browsing behavior that indicates a visitor's readiness to act.

Meaningful experiences begin with relevant landing pages.

Deep-linking visitors to relevant or customized pages within your web site is not only a good practice...it's a key benefit. Relevant experiences should start immediately upon arrival. This strategy minimizes the risk of alienating visitors with a difficult to navigate web site while it opens access to more meaningful interactions. Advancing relevance requires marketers to maintain distinct data profiles about their known users and marry these identifiers to real-time session activity...to inject content at critical decisioning junctures.

Segmentation builds relationships.

Segmenation ranges from basic to highly complex but helps marketers target differences between visitor types by collecting explicit information with every visit. Perhaps you try for a job title and industry segment with the first visit; a job title and company name with the second visit; an email address with the third visit; and so on.

Simply identifying with web visitors through segmentation provides fuel for increasing relevance. By identifying with what your prospects are searching for, you can give them what they want, when they want it, to ultimately increase your conversions.

MY OBJECTIVE:

To share common sense lessons learned with 40-plus years experience in marketing, sales and as a B2B publisher.

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