SMB Marketing Blog

This is the sixth in the series of ActiveConversion’s very popular “eHow To” guides. This one deals with applying online marketing best practices to trade show marketing.  From the guide:

Business to business (B2B) trade shows can be a cost-effective means of gaining valuable face-to-face interaction with many qualified prospects. Most B2B companies have a reasonable expectation that sales revenue will result from participation at trade shows. Yet too often, experience has shown that for many leads from trade shows the timing is too early in the sales cycle. This experience may explain why business executives are constantly dismayed that so few leads are actually followed up by their sales departments. Trade show industry research indicates that 80-90 percent of all trade show leads are not followed up.

What the guide advocates is that in addition to using marketing automation in the promoting of attendance pre trade show, a trade show booth is analogous to a website for the large number of “inquiries” that exhibitors come home with:

• Most of these inquires are not ready to buy (95% according to the research)
• They have opted-in to receive more information (so they are ideal for email nurture campaigns)
• They need to be nurtured through a sales cycle so that in 3 or 6 or 9 months when/if they reach sales ready, the exhibitor is still top of mind
• They need sorting (scoring of their behavior) to weed out the ones who are, and who are not, worth inside/outside sales resources.

But also key is the takeaway that companies need to know who is visiting their website (marketing automation platforms like ActiveConversion identify anonymous company visits, as well as labelled individuals).  The traffic that visits a company’s website directly after a trade show is often a key indicator of whom at the trade show they got some level of engagement with, especially if there are multiple visits from different individuals from the same company.

To download this eHow To Guide on why marketing automation can increase your trade show ROI, click here or on the image!

This is the fifth in the series of ActiveConversion’s very popular “eHow To” guides. This one deals with aligning a company’s marketing and sales departments so that they can work together seamlessly. From the guide:

B2B marketing is about driving sales, yet a common complaint from the sales department is that “Marketing throws leads over the fence!” Too often experience has shown sales that few leads from marketing are qualified and even if they are; the timing is too early in the cycle. Meanwhile the marketing department is constantly dismayed that so few leads are actually followed up by the sales department.

According to the 2008 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, only 37% of respondents agreed that their sales and marketing organizations are aligned in what their customers want and need [source]. Since sales teams want to prioritize on the buyers that have a better chance of closing, it makes sense to use to:

• give marketing more of a role in the targeting and qualifying of prospects
• use marketing automation to nurture prospects that are not yet qualified for hand-off to sales
• give marketing the ability to auto-communicate to sales a lead’s activities and engagement level
• prioritize for sales a large volume of leads based on qualifiers like company size and engagement

To download this eHow To Guide on why marketing automation can get your Sales and Marketing teams aligned, click here or on the image!

This is the fourth of ActiveConversion’s very popular “eHow To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to score the behavior of website visitors, and those who click through on emails, so that they can be automatically sorted for prioritization.  From the summary:

Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

In establishing your system you should;

• Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness
• Assign point values to each of those behaviors
• Establish a score that defines “Sales-Ready”

With a contemporary marketing automation solution like ActiveConversion, today’s B2B marketers can reduce costs and increase revenue through prioritization with lead scoring.

To download this eHow To Guide on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead scoring plan for your business, click on the image!

In the third of their very popular “eHow To” guides, this guide explores how to effectively use Social Media for marketing.  While a lot of ink has been spilled on this topic, this guide approaches it from a layman’s perspective, and focuses on the business case and a pragmatic way to implement in a way that will succeed.

“The spectacular growth of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have taken B2B marketing by storm. B2B marketers recognized that they have access to hundreds of millions of people who have registered for and are using social networking sites.

More importantly, within those substantial groups B2B marketers can target their messages and advertising directly to the audience that will be the most receptive to their product or service, using the underlying technology inherent in social networking sites …

Social media differs from traditional media in that social media is where many individuals share information with each other rather than one source broadcasting to the masses. In Web 2.0 marketing language, it is many-to-many instead of one-to-many.”

Specifically it speaks to integrating Social Media efforts into wider eMarketing such as SEO/SEM and email marketing, all the while managing the flow of new referrals with proven marketing automation tools such as ActiveConversion.

Link to download page

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of “eHow To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, click on the image!

ActiveConversion recently published an “eHow To” guide to Lead Nurturing that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)