If you have a limited budget but you need to boost awareness and conversions quickly, commit to these two tactics and you’ll never look back.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asked multiple times which one or two marketing tactics I’ve used that delivered a big result quickly. Of course, the answer should always be “well it really depends on your situation”… but that doesn’t quite satisfy, so I’ve decided to pull out just two tactics and two strategic approaches I believe work in most B2B tech environments, especially where the goal is to build awareness and conversions at the same time very quickly.
Of course, it goes without saying that you should be testing and optimising all of your executions over time, and it certainly pays to have multiple initiatives on the go at any one time. However, in today’s crowded content environment, it often pays to take an approach that combines traditional and contemporary strategies.
Tactic 1 – Old School Fundamentals
Break out from the crowd and do things that used to be the norm but are now quite unusual…like sending printed brochures and letters in the mail. Yes, I’m talking about the actual physical, real-world mail with a stamp on an envelope. It works incredibly well in B2B marketing, especially if you build a super-targeted list of accessible decision-makers. Plus, it gets around any online SPAM laws, and it surprises the heck out of the recipient because nobody bothers to do this anymore.
The caveat here is that you must produce extremely high-quality brochureware and keep your message simple, powerful and to the point. Make sure you deploy a phone call follow-up process that kicks in within a week of the mail-out and be sure to ‘project manage’ the exercise, so you get maximum return on your investment. It takes a bit more work than an online campaign, but it gets you traction very quickly, and you’ll be more memorable than your competition.
Tactic 2 – Remarketing and Retargeting
Something else that works well is remarketing and retargeting. Yes, they are two different things. From a sales perspective, one of the powerful things about remarketing is that it enables multiple online touch points with leads and prospects that can be personalised and timed appropriately, which would otherwise have been part of your costly human sales process.
From a marketing perspective, it lets you fill your funnel with leads that are demonstrating increasing awareness through frequency and recency and gives you the chance to lead score individuals as they move through their buying process.
Take this strategy to another level and combine your retargeting list with your direct mail list, and your results will seriously shock you. I’ve used this approach with many of my tech clients, and we’ve seen response rates x30 in general and x70 in one case where they already had a deep content archive.
Forecast the Implications of Each Decision
Basically, this means thinking strategically and being smart. Take time to look in detail at how your marketing initiatives will impact the rest of the business, what exactly will you be measuring, and how will you disrupt the status quo inside your organisation by taking certain actions?
For example, if you’re going to produce lots of content every month, what will your workflow look like, and how might this affect peoples’ jobs day to day and therefore their job descriptions and remuneration? Can you promote a junior marketing person into a strategic content management role? Can you leverage existing freelancers, or will you need to spend time briefing and educating new contributors which will end up costing you more? Will your sales funnel remain the responsibility of your sales manager, and how should you create a clear split between the marketing funnel and the sales pipeline?
Become Skilled at Process Mapping
Be clear on what actions you’ll take, what this looks like in a workflow diagram, and whether or not you can automate tasks. I recommend that you be skeptical about the promises of the marketing automation industry – it always requires a LOT of up-front work and automation almost always costs more than you realise at the start, but in general, automation is something you should be paying attention to across the board.
Map out the steps of your frontline sales process, create a visually clear matrix ranking all of your lead generation channels, and then sketch out your customer journey map and an online conversion process that’s practical and manageable. Only when you do that will you clearly see how it will all work, what kind of resources you’ll need, and how much each initiative will cost you.
