A blog entry on the Marketo website provides seven guide tips for B2B marketing during tough economic times, with emphasis on how to allocate marketing budget and time. It is argued that a downturn creates opportunities to accelerate growth faster than your competitors. This means it may be the best time to step up your marketing - at least in quality if not quantity. The marketers that focus on getting the most out of the money spent and on demonstrating marketing's impact on revenue and pipeline will be well positioned to come out of the slump successfully.
The seven tips are:
1. Use lead management to maximize the value of each lead. In a recession, risk-adverse buyers take even longer than normal to research potential purchases. When you first identify a new prospect (regardless of whether they downloaded a whitepaper, stopped by your booth at a tradeshow, or signed up for a free trial) they are more likely than not still in the awareness or research stage and are not yet ready to engage with one of your sales reps. What this means is you need lead scoring (as provided by Prospectvision) to identify which leads are highly engaged, and lead nurturing to develop relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet ready to engage with sales. Implementing even a simple automated lead nurturing program can yield a major improvement in the conversion of qualified prospects into sales opportunities over time. The companies that can do a better job of managing leads and developing early-stage prospects into sales ready leads will be in the best position to thrive in a downturn.
2. Focus on your house list. In a recession, you may have less money to spend on acquiring new customers. The solution is simple: spend more time marketing to (and building relationships with) the people you already know. Some activities that can help you get the most out of your existing relationships include lead nurturing campaigns and creating new content to offer to existing prospects.
3. Build and optimize landing pages. When times are tough, it's more important than ever to maximize the return on your advertising. Whether you are using Google AdWords, banners, sponsorships, or email campaigns, a dedicated landing page is the single most effective way to turn a click into a prospect. A relevant landing page can easily double conversions versus sending clicks to the home page, and testing your pages can increase conversions by even more. Together, these tactics alone can result in more than doubling leads for every dollar you spend, something that's sure to look good in tough times. A recession is perhaps the best time to focus on some of these basics.
4. Content for later in the buying cycle. When buying slows down, you need to focus more than ever on making sure you are finding the prospects who are actually ready to buy - or even better, make sure they are finding you. One great way to do this is to focus your offers on content that will appeal to someone who's actually looking for a solution. Examples of this kind of content can include "Top 5 Questions to Ask a Potential Vendor" whitepapers; buyers guides and checklists; analyst evaluations; and so on.
5. Appeal to the nervous buyer. A recession can mean more risk-adverse buyers, which may lead to a tendency to go with "safe" solutions. This is fine for large established companies, but it means younger companies need to do more than ever to reassure and build trust. Tactically, this means including customer references, reviews, expert opinions, awards, and other validation as part of your marketing.
6. Align sales and marketing. Today's prospects start their buying process by interacting with marketing and online channels long before they ever speak with a sales representative. This means companies must integrate marketing and sales efforts to create a single revenue pipeline - a tougher selling environment, driven by a recession, means this is more relevant than ever.
7. Don't be a cost center. There is a perception that Sales delivers revenue and Marketing is a cost center. In a recession, marketing needs more than ever to change this view. This means that marketing investments must be justified with a rigorous business case and should be amortized over the entire "useful life" of the investment. And it means marketing must increase marketing accountability by demonstrating the impact of each marketing activity on pipeline and revenue. Of course, this is easier said than done, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Even small steps, like reports that show the total opportunity value for each lead source or campaign, can make a big impact.
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