B2B New Year Resolutions

The "Good" - taking time to think about how to improve in the new year -- some simple resolutions that will benefit all B2B marketers (in no particular order)

Review the events plan for 2008 and cut all the shows/conferences that you have to go to because "we have to be there".  Then review the rest and cut the ones that aren't highly targeted since events take a big chunk of the budget and you'd rather spend the money on higher ROI tactics.

Get competing bids from web agencies to do a total health-check on your web sites including benchmarking them against leading tech sites and top competitive sites for usability, content and use of the latest tools.  Simultaneously ask the product management team to review all the product content for freshness and relevance. Then use the results to develop the 2008 web action plan and budget.

Review the marketing/customer database for completeness ... do you have the right contacts (with email addresses) in the right verticals in the right countries.  Then challenge the database team to purge the junk and find new data sources that reach your target audience.

Do a deep dive on your SEO and pay-per-click results for 2007 and set stretch goals for 2008 traffic and conversions.  Challenge the team to evaluate your list of key words to make sure they are still relevant to your marketing goals and then cut/add where necessary.  Challenge your SEO agency to deliver higher page-ranks.  If they have been in place for longer than a year get some bids from other agencies since your current one may have already exhausted their toolbox.   

Carve some budget out to post your most valuable white-papers, webinars and technology guides on industry sites (for example Ziff Davis and TechTarget/BitPipe) so you generate awareness and leads when buyers are searching for products in your space.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Meet with the Sales VPs to review their needs by region.  Then review your lead-generation machine to see where it needs tuning (or in my current case where the engine needs to be rebuilt).  Encourage the regional teams to give you their territory plans with lists of top verticals/prospect accounts and then tailor your 2008 lead-gen programs accordingly.

Work more closely with your inside sales team...create a joint plan for executing a regular series of highly focused installed base up-sell programs. This is low hanging fruit that often gets overlooked in the push to find new customers. Also, make sure you jointly create a plan for lead nurturing with at least one useful (non-salesy) email per month to each contact plus a phone call. 

Go through your collateral cabinet and see which boxes are empty and which are full.  The empty boxes represent useful pieces to sales and the full ones are clearly not valued.  Empower your staff to rationalize the collateral to only the useful pieces and toss the rest since collateral can be a time and money drain.

Challenge your PR team to layout a proactive plan for getting you coverage in the new year since it is too easy to get sucked into a reactive/damage control mode.  The plan should include a list of industry issues that you want to be thought leaders on, the key pubs/reporters/bloggers covering the issue, the messages you want to get across and the assigned execs who will be the spokespeople. And, most importantly the plan should be in calendar format with the tactics to be completed in each time period (e.g. media tour in February on new product launch, exec speaking slot at trade show in March, CTO comments on industry expert blogs every week, etc.)

Comments

[Darin Dixon]

One this about lead nurturing. With the right technology, I've seen companies that get a 2-5% response rate on their drip campaigns. Of course it wasn't just one email and one phone call every month, but all of it was completely automated so they didn't take time from sales/marketing.

Also, what exactly did you mean by checking the collateral cabinet for empty boxes?

[Nancy Arter]

Hey Todd, Great counsel on all fronts. The idea about database clean-up particularly resonate with me. If our customers do this one thing this year, it will definitely set them up for a much more successful 2008. I think that much of what you discuss would also be of benefit to the B-C space, too.

Great insight!

[Bob Sullivan]

All valuable marketing advice, Todd. If readers follow only 2 or 3 of these resolutions, I’m sure they will have one of their best years ever. And, I can’t agree more with Nancy Arter’s comment about database cleanup. Without accurate customer data how does a marketer know who their customers are and who to target? Are they wasting thousands of dollars repeatedly mailing to accounts that no longer exist? How many cross-sell or up-sell opportunities are they missing? And those are only a few problems a company faces when not having an accurate database. Chances are that marketers who don’t perform consistent quality updates to their database are slowly losing customers and prospects.

[Cece Salomon-Lee]

These are great tips Todd. Regarding your 6th point, we've also created a channel on YouTube with some webinars, videos, podcasts. This has created some awareness and traffic for our B2B service, Insight24.

For folks without a lot of content to create a channel, consider posting teasers on YouTube with the full content on the company site. Interested folks will then go to site to view the entire webinar for lead gen purposes.