Ruth P. Stevens Articles and Columns

Ruth P. Stevens Articles and Columns: DIRECT Magazine

January, 2007

Hot New Ideas in B-to-B Marketing
By Ruth P. Stevens

B-to-B marketing-previously known as industrial marketing-may not be as glamorous as its consumer cousin, but I am glad to say that there are plenty of hot new ideas coming along to help business marketers better acquire and retain their customers. Here's a round-up of new developments to help you meet your business objectives.

Domain-name targeted ad serving

As the Internet evolved as a marketing tool, consumer marketers have been constrained from marrying an anonymous web visit with offline data that would permit better targeting. Today, banner ads targeting relies online-behavioral indicators like the keyword the visitor was searching on, or the pages the person has visited in the past, as recorded by cookies. Unless you persuade the visitor to disclose their personal information, there's not much else a marketer can do to focus the message.

In the B-to-B world, however, the rules are evolving differently. A website visitor who is using an office computer, for example, can be identified by company based on the corporate domain name. Sophisticated B-to-B website publishers have been quick to offer targeted ad serving based on company name.

The consulting giant Accenture is already taking advantage of this capability, which is now offered by a variety of leading B-to-B publishers, like the online editions of Forbes, Business Week and The Wall Street Journal.

Since Accenture tends to serve companies no smaller than the Fortune 1000, they constantly seek highly targeted vehicles for their outbound marketing communications in order to avoid waste. Domain-name ad serving fits the bill perfectly.

To promote outsourcing deals worth $5 to $10 million among the top 100 electronics and technology corporations, Accenture's communications and high tech practice had a target list of a mere 30 to 50 potential clients. Marten G. van Pelt, marketing director for the practice, provided his prospect list to several business sites, who then served up the Accenture outsourcing ad only when visitors from those top companies appeared.

"We got great results from this campaign," says van Pelt. "We negotiated a CPM, or a flat fee, and of course the cost was higher than normal ad serving, but we had 100% control of the targeting and zero waste. I'd say this kind of targeting is worth it, no matter what the price."

Forbes.com's chief advertising officer, Bill Flatley, advises, "The best use of domain-name targeting is 'surgical' targeting in concert with a broader campaign." Flatley relates the example of a consulting company involved in a multi-million-dollar systems-integration RFP ran ads specific to their systems integration expertise when visitors showed up at the Forbes site from that prospective client company. Forbes.com has offered domain-name targeting for the last two years, and charges about a 100% premium for the service. Flatley says the biggest users of the option, other than consulting firms, are technology firms and auto leasing companies.

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is hot, but I wish someone would sort out the confusion about exactly what it means. Unfortunately, the term is being used concurrently for two entirely different marketing tactics. In this discussion, it is not the technique of delivering text ad messages onto people's cell phones. It's the other kind: decking out an 18-wheeler as a mobile display and driving it around to educate and entertain clients and prospects.

Already popular in the consumer marketing world - think condom distribution at rock concerts-mobile marketing is now entering the industrial market. Craftsmen Industries, of St. Louis, created a touring display for HP, which needed a convenient way to show a 10,000-pound Indigo digital printing press to prospective customers. The 53-foot double expandable trailer functioned as both a sales showroom and a training classroom on wheels. Over 16 months, the truck visited 2,000 locations and demonstrated the product to over 6,000 buyers, resulting in over $20 million in direct sales.

Scrubs & Beyond, which sells equipment to hospitals, used a Craftsmen truck to deliver a retail store directly to the parking lots of busy customers. The 48-foot trailer contained clothing racks, shelves and a cash register, and the outer shell of the vehicle acted as a mobile billboard for the brand when it was on the road or parked.

SeaChange, a maker of digital video servers, used a mobile display to enhance its presence at the 15 trade shows where it exhibits annually. With a 53-foot double-drop trailer, they were able to reduce their trade show expense by $700,000 but simultaneously improve their market share by 30%. Best of all, between shows, the truck could tour around to specific clients, in effect extending the value of the trade show concept to an annual marketing strategy.

Says John Salozzo, director of marketing at Craftsmen, business buyers flock to mobile displays because they are convenient, but also a break in the daily routine. "The big advantage to marketers is that the customer touchpoints are controlled, so you can capture data on visitors to the display and track sales. Our clients tell us that their ROI is fantastic."

Mass-customized voice mail messaging

Any seasoned direct marketer knows how effective it can be to combine a mail campaign with a phone call. With Do Not Call legislation, phone-mail-phone campaigns are generally out of bounds for many marketers.

B-to-B is stil-for the time being at least-exempt from DNC. But the problem for business marketers is that business buyers are never at their desks to take the call. Voice mail campaigns delivered by auto-dialers give sketchy results when trying to navigate through receptionists and corporate voice mail systems. But, there is a new solution: a "guided" voice mail campaign.

Here's how it works: The marketer records a message, or multiple messages, and a team of call center reps make sure it gets delivered to the right voice mail box. The extra push by a human rep means respectful use of the voice mail system, and connect rates and response rates that are far higher - as much as 700%--with the "guided" support.

The guided voice mail concept was pioneered by a Canadian firm called Boxpilot. According to Mika Kaitila, Boxpilot's founder,"There's nothing more powerful in business-to-business than the human voice. You need to convey your enthusiasm about your offer, to get people truly interested in responding to you." An extra bonus: the live agents will feed back to your database updated information on phone numbers, titles and other changes elicited from the call.

Boxpilot's program is being used for communications of all sorts, from event invitations, to lead nurturing, to channel support and new product announcements. Dan Ziman, senior manager of worldwide direct marketing for the service-oriented architecture software firm TIBCO Software Inc., used Boxpilot in combination with cold email using a list rented from the Business Email Network, to generate new subscribers for an online journal targeted to IT architects and developers. Through testing and analysis, Ziman found that guided voice mail followed up by email was twice as effective as email alone.

Turbo-charging inside sales

Most business marketers deploy multiple sales channels, often combining field sales assigned to large accounts with phone-based sales reps covering lower-value customers. These so-called inside sales reps can manage many more accounts than their field counterparts, and they may be responsible for the same, or even more, revenue.

But it's tough when an inside sales force is asked to get in touch with inquirers, or to keep in touch with cold or dormant customers. Outbound dialing is generally ineffective, as noted above. And email by itself is not working these days-what with corporate filters, and that handy "delete" key.

The ideal situation, however, just may be inside reps enabled with customized outbound email, whereby they can combine an email alert with a real-time conversation. A new Web-based platform called WarpSales, from Acrelic Interactive, is making this happen.

Here's an example related by WarpSales's president and CEO David A. Rosen. Say the inside sales rep sends a personalized email out to a list of 3,500 inactive contacts from the company's Goldmine database. These contacts have been dormant for over a year.

The emails are sent out in batches. As they arrive, and are opened, the WarpSales system pings the rep, indicating the ideal time to make an outbound call. Not only does the rep know the target prospect is online, but he can also keep track of whether the target clicked through from the email, and what Web pages he viewed. The phone call thus has a much higher chance of being answered, and the conversation can be tailored to be more relevant than usual.

In this example, according to Rosen, two inside sales reps were able to connect and qualify 489 of the 3,500 contacts, in six days, over two weeks, with a 40% live connect rate. Compare this with typical B-to-B connect rates of around 10%. Of those contacted, 171 (35%) converted to a qualified lead and were passed to outside sales for follow-up.

CA (Computer Associates) found that WarpSales tripled their connect rates, to 35%, in the first 60 days of use. Matt Kalmenson, vice president of sales for the 500-person CA inside sales center, said "WarpSales is like a sales assistant working the background, lining up the next opportunity. We are starting to see not only a higher quality lead, but a fuller pipeline and higher conversions rates."

Ruth P. Stevens consults on customer acquisition & retention, and teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She is the author of The DMA Lead Generation Handbook, and her new book is Trade Show and Event Marketing, now available at Amazon. Reach her at ruth@ruthstevens.com.

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