Forrester analyst Kim Celestre just published a new research report titled “Social Media Amplifies Your B2B Buyer’s Experience“.  The $499 report is filled with new data on how business to business marketers (primarily those who sell technology products) view social media, as well as how business buyers view it.  One timely bit of information from the report is a chart showing how B2B marketers are budgeting and spending on social media.  The report also contains excellent data on developing a B2B social media strategy that’s based on an understanding of how your customers view social media and how it affects their buying decisions. 

Celestre’s report says that 52% of B2B marketers plan to increase their investment in social media, and 40% plan to spend the same this year as last.  That’s an interesting detail in light of another report out this week in which General Motors pulled its entire Facebook advertising budget because of a lack of results — while Ford stepped up its spending.  Obviously, there’s no direct comparison — GM’s campaign was B2C, not B2B — but the media has been buzzing all week with opinions about whether or not social media advertising actually drives revenue and sales for corporate marketers.

Venture capitalist and marketing expert Amanda Maksymiw of OpenView Venture Partners wrote this week that B2B companies without a clear plan for social media spending are likely to wind up spending way too little, or way too much. ”With over 800 million active users on Facebook, more than 300 million tweets sent daily, and one hour of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s easy to get carried away and let everything just pass you by,” Maksymiw says.  “ The truth is, B2B companies can’t afford to overlook a solid social media strategy.”

Maksymiw’s article goes on to link to a series of tutorials and best practices tips prepared for the portfolio company that her firm has invested in, as well as data that she gathered from a panel discussion she moderated at a recent conference.   Links for all of Maksymiw’s resource materials on developing a solid B2B social media strategy are available here. 

Graphic credit:  Forrester Research published this graphic in its new report “Social Media Amplifies Your B2B Buyer’s Experience“, and  holds the copyright to the image.  Do not reuse or republish without the consent of Forrester Research. 

1. In a study that showed that 76% of marketers use 3 or more technology solutions, top performers were twice as likely as everyone else to use a central marketing platform that manages email marketing best practices for corporate and local/partner campaigns.
2. “Internal” communication — between corporate marketing and the “external” distributed marketing and sales channel (dealers, resellers, partners, wholesalers, local and branch offices, captive or independent sales teams or producers) — is the #1 value driver for increasing revenue, with top performers 12 times as likely as everyone else in the Gleanster survey to have staff members charged specifically with communicating, training, and motivating the sales channel to use corporate marketing materials.
3. Email is still the primary outbound communications tool for nine out of 10 marketing organizations surveyed, followed by web and print.  Social media and other channels trailed in adoption among the companies surveyed.
4. Developing marketing systems that support the distribution channel was a key factor in improved results for top performers.  62% of them, in fact, said that their centralized brand marketing system was a key factor in their success — nearly five times as many as those in the lower-performing groups.
5. 76% of the top performers practice email marketing “glocalization” — that is allowing local sales and marketing teams, including channel partners and dealers — to personalize and customize corporate marketing resources for their own campaigns.

To get your copy of the complete report, click here.  For more information on glocalization and how distributed marketers can adopt some of these strategies to drive revenue in their own organizations, download the presentation deck from last week’s webinar on Distributed Marketing Best Practices.  The webinar includes email marketing glocalization tips, best practices, and research on how B2B and B2C companies are marketing best practices to achieve measurable results.

One of the reasons that they work is that providing high-quality content helps build trust and rapport with prospects and customers, making it easier for them to make an eventual purchasing or renewal decision.  It’s not a new idea.  Early in my career, I worked at Shell Oil Company in Houston, where the “Come to Shell for Answers” booklets were a primary part of our marketing communications budget.  Back then, we called it thought leadership marketing, and it was an expensive, time-consuming process.

Luckily, the days are long gone when you needed to be a multi-billion dollar corporation to be able to afford to produce, print and distribute helpful content that builds brand awareness and loyalty.  Now, all you need is a knowledgeable subject matter expert, an Internet connection, and the ability to produce some form of digital content.

What kind of content marketing works?  Be creative — there’s no single definition of what constitutes “content marketing”.  Great content comes in many forms — not all of them involving text or words.  Here’s a partial list; you’ll find more in a  great post from guest blogger Joan Stewart, who provided 17 samples of fabulous content that from great thought leadership marketing campaigns.

• Articles
• Books/eBooks
• Case studies
• Podcasts/video casts
• Presentations
• Webinars/Webcasts
• White papers
• Widgets or apps
• Calculators
• Reference guides
• Buyer’s guides
• Comparison tables / charts
• Videos
• Photographs, infographics, or cartoons

The best content answers a business question, or offers a way to solve a business problem. How do you know what kinds of questions or problems your prospects and customers have?  Start by asking your customer service staff and your sales staff.  If you can answer the questions that are reaching them, you’re probably tapping into an area where your target market wants more information.

Know the Rules

As with anything else, it’s important to understand content marketing rules — and when to break them.   For content to be effective in generating thought leadership, building a brand or corporate image, and turning readers into followers and content consumers, who can be converted into customers, your content should be:

1. Non-promotional
2. Relevant to the reader
3. Relevant to your company
4. Well-written and SEO optimized
5. Proves a point that supports your value proposition

Pretty basic rules, right?  Yes, but there are times when most of us will struggle with the need to balance “the rules” with corporate mandates, deadlines, or directives.  The one I hear marketers talk about most often is, of course, the first one.  “My boss wants me to put product screen shots on every page of every white paper,” lamented one friend recently.

Another said, “I’m supposed to fill a twice a week blog with nothing but sales copy – and they wonder why people don’t read it.”  A third said, “I am having trouble getting my boss to see the value in writing ‘best practices’ or ‘how to’ content.  He says that we should be selling that advice through our professional services team instead of giving it away.”

So how do you persuade management to follow the content marketing rules?  By building a business case for content marketing the way your customers build a case to purchase your more expensive products or services.  Start with the pain point you’re trying to solve.

For instance, when I started my job as director of marketing at Distribion, a SaaS software company, about a year and a half ago, this blog was our first major content marketing initiative.  Didn’t realize that this blog was published by a software company?  That’s the point.

The purpose of this blog is to provide best-practices content that will help our customers, prospects, and anyone else who’s interested understand the environment in which our products are sold and used.  Secondarily, it’s a great source of traffic for our website, thought leadership positioning for our executives, and ideas for content we might publish on our website in other forms.

We started our content marketing strategy for three reasons.  First, I had a background where I knew how to do it, and the writing skill to do it quickly and at low cost.   Second, we had a small marketing staff – two full-time, one part-time people – and a lot of work to do to meet our key performance indicators (KPIs).  Third, we’re a relatively small company in an arena dominated by larger, older companies.  We can’t possibly outspend our competition – so we have to out think them in order to gain share of mind in our target market.

I try to focus on providing something practical, useful, and immediate.  I’ve heard this called “closing the information gap”.  To me, closing an information gap doesn’t mean that the information has to be brand new, original research.  It just means that it has to be presented in a way that it’s useful, thoughtful, error-free, and answers a specific question or problem that my audience has right now.

When to Break the Rules

Normally, when I am working on my content marketing plan, I follow the rules pretty closely.  And I have one more rule I follow:  if it doesn’t relate to something I can sell, I don’t write about it.  That’s the rule I break most often, however.

Why?  Because there are times when a topic is so compelling to my audience that I need to write about it in order to demonstrate thought leadership, or position our company in a space we are planning to enter.   One of my earlier jobs was working for a genius named Philippe Kahn who pioneered many technological breakthroughs – not the least of which was the camera phone, and the TrueSync  technology that makes wireless multi-media transmission possible.  Often in that job, I was “writing ahead”, positioning a category that didn’t exist yet, or shaping the dialog about a product that we hadn’t announced yet.  Most marketers find themselves in that position, and it’s still a valid part of content marketing.

The other breakable rule is the very first one.  Sometimes, it simply isn’t possible to get budget approval for content that doesn’t include a direct product pitch.  And sometimes, there’s the opportunity for a direct product pitch as a “wrapper” or embedded part of the non-promotional copy.  For example, a customer case study can be very non-promotional, but if yours is the only product on the market that solves the customer’s problem, be sure to say so.  Adding a product pitch or company pitch to the end of a white paper or eBook is common, and doesn’t break the rule about not being promotional, because the reader is free to ignore it, and can still get the information they wanted without reading it if they choose.

Don’t break the other rules, however.  Because if it isn’t relevant, well written and SEO optimized, or doesn’t support your value proposition, it isn’t worth publishing because it won’t help your thought leadership and positioning efforts – and might hurt much more than it helps.

Photo credit: Image licensed from iStock Photo; all rights not licensed by Distribion, Inc., rest with the copyright holder.  Do not reuse this image without permission from iStock.

In fact, if you work in some industries — like insurance, financial services, health care, the legal profession, or high technology — the costs for the most popular keywords used in search marketing are increasing so rapidly that even big brands are feeling the squeeze.  Take a look at this infographic on the most expensive keywords for more details.

But top performing marketers have found four strategies that are helping them meet the challenge, and a distributed marketing best practices webinar earlier today offered insights into how they’re doing it.

The four strategies covered at length in Distribion’s Distributed Marketing’s Best Practices webinar today included:

• Empowering local producers via “glocalization”
• Closed-loop measurement and reporting
• Harnessing technology to save time and money
• Marketing on behalf of channel partners or sales agents

You can view the entire webinar online by clicking here, but here are a few of the highlights that we thought would be of special interest to marketers.

Consumer Experience Emerges as a Key Revenue Driver

Ellen Carney presented quite a lot of new Forrester Research data during the webinar, much of it in support of her basic premise that a consumer’s experience with your brand – online, in person, at the point of sale, during a customer service encounter, and through feedback from friends and family – is the deciding factor in additional purchases, churn reduction and word-of-mouth (positive or negative).

Carney showed one slide that how customer experience affected over $4 billion in revenue for key industries like insurance, hotels, banks, and others. Another visually striking slide showed how smartphones have become the “remote controls” for consumers lives. 

She said that the role that technology plays in business has shifted from being just a way to reduce costs to being integrated into how business gets done, and the online experience you deliver is now key to customer  loyalty, as well as recruiting and retaining top sales people and channel partners.

Odds of Hitting Your Target Go Up When You Aim At It

Lindsey Resnick presented an overview of the role that customer data plays in today’s marketing and sales environment, noting that new and maturing communications channels are fueling an explosion of data.

“By knowing digital attitudes and behaviors across a range of technologies and devices marketers can deliver customized messages to customers via their most preferred digital device and digital destination,” Resnick said, adding that the key to doing that is data segmentation.

Resnick presented a wide range of important data, but one slide she presented stood out:  it showed the percentage of consumers in various demographic groups who are “hyperconnected cybersumers”.  That is, buyers who research nearly every purchase online, and rely heavily on feedback from user-generated reviews and comments in making their purchase decisions.

The 54 slides presented during the one-hour session were filled with useful data that most marketers will find both new and somewhat surprising.  Details and a recording of the webinar are available online by clicking here.

Graphic credit:  This image is from the KBM Group’s webinar “Marketing Life Insurance in a Customer-Driven Environment: Optimize Customer Engagement via Data & Technology,” and copyright to the image rests with the KBM Group.  Do not reuse or republish without permission.

Months before Sergei Brinn and Larry Page announced their new search engine, I attended a hush-hush meeting (after signing “binding mutual non-disclosure agreements and information embargoes” explained with great seriousness by two teams of lawyers), and saw one of the very first demos of the product that became Google.

I was standing backstage when the public (or at least the tech industry press, pundits, and opinion leaders who were standing in for the public) got its first look at Google at the Demo conference.  To be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed.

While the demo was going on, I turned to the show’s host David Coursey (my writing partner and one of my best friends), and asked, “Does the world really need another search engine? Especially one that’s ad supported?”

David said that he thought that Google had a lot of potential, but he agreed with me that advertising-supported products would struggle. Boy, were we wrong.

What we were watching that day was a revolution that changed marketing forever.  Google created a way to find, report, and organize the almost unlimited amounts of data available online. So, for the first time, buyers have the power to find products globally, whenever they want them.

A whole new industry — search engine optimization — has grown up in the past 12 years and it’s changing and evolving quickly.  But some of the SEO fairy tales about  search marketing and Google Analytics still remain.  Here are five SEO fairy tales without happy endings that I keep hearing from people who are otherwise very good marketers.

1. Using Google Analytics will reduce your SEO, because you’re giving Google data they’ll use against you.  Yes, there are people out there who believe this one — a LOT of people, judging by a recent discussion in a marketing group on LinkedIn.  Let’s start with the basic fact that Google already has your data, whether you are signed up for Google Analytics or not.  And let’s add the fact that no one knows what goes into the algorithms that Google uses to calculate page rank.  Last, but not least, let’s add in the fact that most of us just aren’t important enough to get onto Google’s radar screen.  Why should they care enough about my blog or even the software company where I work to skew their results in order to hurt me?  Even assuming that I managed to tick off one of their programmers enough that there is a personal vendetta against me, why bother using my Google Analytics data?  Why not just drop me from search results altogether?
2. Page rank doesn’t really matter, because search results are personalized for individual users — so everyone sees different results anyway.  I actually heard this one at a conference recently, from a well-respected social media and SEO expert with a couple of best-sellers.  Yes, Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (whether you’re logged in to Google or not), but in most cases the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are so small that they’re hard to notice.  Click here for a post specifically on this topic.
3. Trading links helps boost page rankings. At least that’s what all the totally irrelevant sites that want to “trade links” with me claim in their mass-mailed spam.  It isn’t true.  Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount.
4. There are affordable services out there that will “register your site with hundreds of search engines” and this is essential to your site’s rankings.  If you believe that, then why are you reading this instead of helping that Nigerian prince who desperately needs your help to get a large sum of money smuggled out of his country, for which you will be richly rewarded? You don’t register with the search engines.  They find you.  (This blog was indexed by Google within 24 hours of its launch — and another blog I started the same week was on page one of search engine rankings for its topic within 72 hours of its launch, and has stayed there ever since. And I didn’t have to register either one.)
5. Great Content = Great Page Rank. Great Page Rank = High Traffic.  This isn’t a baseball movie.  Just because you build it (write it) doesn’t mean they will come — and it doesn’t mean that you will be found.  People have to be searching for it before they’ll find it.  And page rank is based on many factors — but the quality (or even the accuracy) of the content isn’t one of them.  (If it was, the outsourced link-builders who spam sites with broken-English comments in order to build links, wouldn’t remain in business.)

Like I said, I’m not a Google geek — and I’m not a search engine expert.  But I do know that believing in fairy tales is fun when you’re four — and dangerous when you’re a marketer.

Cartoon credit:  The cartoon is available thanks to the amazing Geek and Poke blog which made it available for non-commercial re-use under a Creative Commons license.

Like it or not, there are some features in the new layout that can make a big difference in how user-friendly business pages are for both the page manager and customers or prospects who “Like” the page.

Here are some basic steps every marketer needs to take now to catch up with the new Facebook Timeline.  I’ll admit that when Timeline first came out, I was among the many skeptics.  And I still find it harder to find things on individual Facebook profile pages than it was before Timeline.  But once I took these four steps for the business pages I manage, I realized just how many benefits there are in the new system.  Try it for yourself – I’ll bet you like it, too!

Add a Cover Photo

Pro Tip:  When you add a cover photo, take the opportunity to update your profile picture, too.  Most marketers use a company logo as a profile photo, because the profile picture is the thumbnail that shows up on news feeds and new posts.  On April 26, 2012, Facebook changed the sizes for some other photos, too.  Here are the new sizes, in pixels:

• Profile picture: 180 x 180
• Thumbnail image for apps: 111 x 74
• Highlighted & milestone images: 843 x 403
• Images within wall posts display as 404 x 404

One of the things about Timeline that marketers like best is the ability to pin something to the top of the page for up to 7 days.  This really helps when you have an event to promote (webinars, trade shows, contest deadlines, new product launches, etc.).

Here’s how to pin a post to the top of your Facebook Timeline: Hover over the upper right-hand corner of the post until two icons appear.  Hover over the pencil icon that reads, “Edit or Remove.”  Click on the icon to get a drop-down menu, and select the top link “Pin to Top.”

How do you know whether to pin something to the top of your page or not?  Let your fans and friends help – if there is a photo or post that is popular, and you’re getting good conversion or click-through rates on it on the first day or so, pin it to the top to make sure that new visitors don’t miss it.

After seven days, the post will fall back to its appropriate date on the Timeline unless you remove the pin sooner.

Pro Tip:  When you’re exploring the “Pin to Top” feature, take a look at the ability to highlight a photo album, video, or status update.  Highlighting allows you to select a post or image and expand it to the entire width of your timeline.

Add Milestones to Your Timeline

Don’t Forget the “About” Section

You can’t use your cover photo for a current promotion – but there’s no prohibition against using the “About” section for a current promotion.  So this 160-character bit of “prime real estate” is a valuable place you can (and should) update regularly.

Turning Tabs into Apps

Until Timeline, business pages could create tabs, and set one as the default landing page for new visitors.  To put it bluntly, you can’t do that anymore.

Here’s what you can do now that you couldn’t do before.

1. Create (or download, or buy) apps that have their own unique URLs, to draw traffic from pages outside of Facebook as well as posts and status updated within Facebook.
2. Maximize the use and space of the cover image, because apps are shown directly underneath your cover photo.
3. Use the apps as calls to action and fan engagement tools.
4. Create innovative and inspiring ways to connect with your audience.

Apps are the new tabs – and even if you’re like me, and couldn’t program an app if your life depended on it – there are dozens of sites where you can get tested, proven apps for your Facebook page.  Many are free, and nearly all are low-cost.  Here are the four things every marketer needs to know about Facebook Timeline for Business apps:

1. Up to four apps will always be on display directly underneath your Facebook cover image.  You can change the cover image to highlight the apps.
2. There is a limit of 14 custom apps on your timeline.  You can’t add #15 until you disable one of the older apps.
3. You can create a custom thumbnail image for each app. Thumbnail images are limited to 111 X 74 pixels.
4. Use the custom URL for apps to track traffic, increase traffic to your Facebook page through other communications channels (banner ads, social media, email marketing, other websites, QR codes, business cards, etc.).

Photo Credit: Jim Merithew’s photo of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, comes from Wired.com and is published under a Creative Commons License from Wired’s Flickr PhotoStream.  

The webinar will take place at noon, on Tuesday, May 8.  Attendance is free, but pre-registration is required.  Registration is now available by clicking this link.

Distributed marketing best practices deliver measurable results for organizations where strategy and creative resides in corporate marketing but local or field sales and marketing organizations or channel partners execute local campaigns — insurance, health care, financial services, casino gaming, franchise, and retail —  face a unique set of challenges in multi-channel marketing communications.

This webinar presents distributed marketing best practices based on data drawn from an analysis of over 120 global brands that effectively use multi-channel marketing communications (email, web, social, print, interactive digital, landing pages) to reach B2B and B2C prospects in regulated, distributed organizations.

Topics in the free one-hour session include:

• Empowering local producers within brand & regulatory standards (glocalization)
• Setting common goals & measuring campaign results
• Harnessing the power of technology to save time and money
• Leveraging the power of OBO (on behalf of) campaigns

The session will present real examples of the techniques and processes that help Distribion’s clients achieve outstanding results, with a summary of the results each of three clients achieved using these tips and techniques.   Presenters include

• Edgar Rodriguez, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Distribion
• David Potter, Vice President of Professional Services at Distribion
• Deb McAlister-Holland, editor of The Distributed Marketing Blog

All three have decades of experience in multi-channel marketing communications, and worked together to analyze and review over 120 “best practice” audits and case studies to gather the data for the webinar.

Edgar Rodriguez, Deb McAlister-Holland, and David Potter will present the May 8 webinar on Best Practices in Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing.

People either love it or hate it. Forbes blogger David Coursey called it “Facebook with training wheels” in a recent article in which he said that Facebook’s purchase of Instagram would kill Pinterest.

The same day, CNBC aired a story titled “Why Pine for the Pinterest Customer?  They’re Worth More.”  Here are three of the comments that business owners or marketers made during the CNBC segment:

• “Customers who come to (our) website from Pinterest have a 70 percent larger ticket overall than those that come from other social media sites.”
• “[CEO] suspects that shoppers referred from Pinterest buy more because they may have already formed an emotional connection to the product.”
• Pinterest is “exploding,” with traffic coming from Pinterest growing substantially in the first two months of the year.

Referral traffic – that is the percentage of Pinterest visitors who click on links to go to other sites, is far higher on Pinterest than other social media sites, according to Mashable.com, which ranks Pinterest as the #3 social media site, with 104 million visitors.  Here’s the ranking:

1. Facebook: 7 billion
2. Twitter: 182 million
3. Pinterest: 104 million
4. LinkedIn: 86 million
5. Tagged: 72 million
6. Google+: 61 million

Despite those numbers, Pinterest may not be right for every marketer. How do you know if it’s right for you?  Start with these questions.

1. Are your customers predominately female?  87% of Pinterest users for women between 25 and 54.
2. Is your brand highly visual in nature?  Pinterest is all about the pictures!
3. Is there a planning element to your brand?  Weddings, birthday parties, vacations, building or redecorating a home, gardening, pets and hobbies, fashion – those are the kinds of businesses that lend themselves to Pinterest.

Email + Pinterest = Faster ROI

Once you’ve determined that Pinterest is for you and your brand, follow the social media best practices you’ve learned in other media.  Be relevant, be active, be social.

The first step in tapping Pinterest’s potential to add to your social media ROI is to create Boards that mirror the interests and activities of your customers or followers.  You’ll want to have customized boards for different segments of your email database, and of course you’ll want to know who is pinning from your site and engage them on other social platforms as well.

Then start pinning email to Pinterest for faster ROI, by linking your email marketing campaigns to your Pinterest usage.  Here are the five most productive ways to increase social media ROI by linking the two.

1. Include “Pin This” icons on content inside your email or newsletter.
2. Deploy special emails designed to educate your database about Pinterest, especially if your brand (or parts of your audience) haven’t joined yet.
3. Include visuals of Pinterest activity in your email campaigns, including the Pinterest activity of your most social community members.
4. Tie specific boards to your email marketing calendar (holidays, big events, social media trends, special sales, or any popular Pinterest category that’s relevant to your brand).
5. Add the Pinterest icon to your standard social media sharing icons – including in email campaigns and newsletters.

Another social media best practice is to pin (update your Pinterest boards) around email deployment schedules to complement the email message with social media. (If you’re not already doing this with your other social media channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn, why?)

• Prepare your boards before an email, so that they’re ready to help you sell when traffic spikes
• Keep your boards looking fresh by rearranging them frequently so featured pins are “above the fold” (at the top of the page).
• Stay social – repin other people’s pins, monitor the community, and start a conversation with users.
• Highlight Pins about events or products in email

What’s piquing your Pinterest?  What do you want to share with prospects and customers?  How can you communicate those things through email and social media?  Those are the key questions that will determine whether or not pinning email to Pinterest for faster ROI should be a key part of your marketing plan.  My guess is that if you’re using both email and social media, then you’ll find that linking them together in a planned, coordinated effort will make a significant positive change in your social media ROI.

There are those who make pretty convincing arguments that B2B email marketing is a dying art.  I’m not one of them, although from a personal angle, I’ve seen more than my share of email campaigns that seem to be intent on killing it.

The problem is that marketers have over-killed email marketing by getting it wrong, by thinking that because it was cheap, it was the best way “in” to a new prospect. And while a broad, scatter-shot approach may have worked 10 or more years ago, it doesn’t work now.

As B2B marketers, we need to understand our channels better, and I sincerely believe e-mail marketing should be a part of the marketing mix – but not as it is now. Falling open click-through rates show us clearly that we can’t just stand by, shaking our heads as the prostrate carcass of a valuable marketing tool lies gasping for air on the floor.

Engage Before You E-Mail

An unsolicited e-mail – however catchy the title – will often go ignored, and persistent unsolicited e-mails can result in a negative feeling towards your brand. I personally remember one e-mail from a 78-year-old man in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada, who was not on our mailing list. He was, however, on that of a sub-affiliate with dirty data. It was typed in capitals, screaming NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN. EVER. I HATE YOU.

E-mail rage never sounded so eloquent. E-mail is personal – it’s a 1-to-1 discussion to which no one else is party. It differs from what we now call social media, because that’s an open community for open discussion. We should stop trying to engage with people by e-mail unless we’ve already engaged with them through another channel.  Increasing email ROI is the new mantra among top management, and if B2B email marketing is to survive, we need to take a fresh look at the process of engaging customers before we send that first email. This involves bringing in engagement metrics and enforcing them throughout your demand generation pipeline.

What could they look like? Well, you could be looking at active engagement measures, from having made contact through Twitter or LinkedIn, or you could be looking at passive engagement measures, such as known web visits (e.g. logged in, IP address tracking, etc.) You could start measuring engagement in terms of sentiment or awareness: do they feel positively towards you or not? Have they engaged several times with you, or was it just a fleeting glance at your website?

You need to understand these engagement metrics before you start using e-mail. Just where do you stand with that contact?

Develop Your Contact Strategies

Multi-channel marketing communications these days means a lot more than just print, email, web, and video communications.   So make sure that your contact strategy includes all manner of additional methods of contact, including Twitter handles, LinkedIn addresses, and so on.  So use your CRM system to manage contact history, and you’ll start to build up a picture of which contact strategies work, and which ones come to a dead end.  Linking social media and email isn’t a new idea, but it’s an important one.

Linking social media and email is the way you’ll be able to nurture a prospect through social media channels before you reach for the e-mail – and your e-mail marketing will be all the more powerful as a result. You’ll be able to see how soft conversions through your website, such as white paper downloads, develop into harder conversions.

Top Tips

1. Have your data thoroughly cleaned.    A data append service, telemarketing campaign, or survey can help you scrub a list before your campaign starts.  Many of these services are very low cost, and offer invaluable insights.
2. Invest in data enrichment, and link your email marketing campaign to a social media campaign.  Take your scrubbed list, and use it to find LinkedIn profiles, Twitter handles – even personal blogs.  There are services like FlipTop that offer a social media profile for as little as 0.10 per email address – and charge only when there is a match between the email address you provide and the social media profile they can match it with.
3. Invest in content creation, so that you have something interesting to say. You can carry out surveys online, and have results back within a few days.  Use the survey data to craft a message that’s unique and of value to people in your target audience.
4. Promote your content through LinkedIn and Twitter discussions – and use an e-mail capture form for downloads.  Don’t forget LinkedIn Groups and responding directly to Twitter users or Twitter lists to connect directly with people in your industry or target market.
5. Monitor and record engagement with your brand, and develop an e-mail list on the basis of engagement.  Budget for regular contact list management and updates, so that the list remains fresh and is constantly updated and scrubbed.

Taking these five steps means that the email campaign you run next is more likely to turn into a one-to-one conversation, and you’re taking the first steps toward increasing email ROI.  You will notice better open rates, better click-through rates, and fewer unsubscribes.  And those are the metrics that will ensure that B2B email marketing is a viable part of your marketing mix for years to come.

About the author: Gareth Cartman is an IDM-qualified marketer at the global B2B market research company BIG Research, a network of B2B market research agencies around Europe.