Every sale counts

You can't open a newspaper or turn on the TV at the moment without hearing more implications of the global recession and 'credit crunch'.

One of the key strategies for surviving an economic downturn is ensuring that every customer touchpoint is working as efficiently as possible. For a great many B2B marketeers often fail to maximise the impact of their web presence. But there are a number of techniques that businesses can employ in order to evolve their online presence away from simply brochureware to make their site support the sales process and demand generation.

Jakob Nielsen, one of the pioneers of website usability, outlines the three major goals relevant for almost all B2B sites:

1. Survive the screening process
In the consumer market around 67% of consumers use the internet to research products before buying (source: InternetRetailing Feb 2008). Again this habit has translated into the workplace with more and more employees using the internet to shortlist vendors in an initial research phase. This is where search engine visibility, homepage usability, website accessibility and content usability are essential. Additionally, ensuring that site content explains exactly what a company does (rather than the often impenetrable language of marketing-speak missions, visions and propositions) and signposting users to key elements of content is critical. Remember, first impressions count - and the website is the most influential first impression that B2B marketers can control. Even if potential clients are visiting simply to find contact information, make it easy for them to make contact in the way that suits them – email, instant messaging, telephone etc. (How many websites make it difficult to find the company’s telephone number!)


2. Build a reputation
This is where the internet excels and where companies can provide excellent post-sales support online at a fraction of the cost of other methods. However, this is the area in which many companies fail. A recent report by Transversal (March 2008) showed the dire performance of many UK firms when responding to customers’ emails. Less than half (46%) answered those questions “adequately” and the average time they took to respond was almost two days (46 hours).

3. Support your advocates
Nielsen recommends the creation of Advocacy Kits to make it easy for potential clients to access materials and information that helps them support the argument for a particular vendor. This may include links to external PR coverage, webinars, downloadable video and product tables together with PowerPoint slides (that clients can use in their own presentations) and downloadable White papers (using this as a potential value exchange to obtain some data about potential customers).


As with the B2C world, content is king. Building content distribution deals and gaining associations with the right industry bodies/brands takes the marketing message to a wider audience – hitting those business buyers who may be actively trawling the internet within their own buying cycle - and in an tougher economic client every sale counts.

Missing a trick

In the consumer space, company websites have evolved from the brochureware of the 90s into sophisticated, personalised e-commerce and CRM tools with the corporate website seen as a primary consumer channel. And this is reflected in consumer use: the ease and convenience of online shopping meant that online sales for Christmas 2007 were 30-40% higher than the previous year. Our experiences as consumers with sites such as Amazon are now setting expectations as to how easy to use B2B sites need to be, and how well product information is presented.

However in the B2B space there is still an overwhelming view that a company website is simply a source of information. Remarkably only 5% of companies look to their corporate website as an integrated part of the CRM and support process and 1.5% of businesses don’t even have a website.













Of course, the B2B sales process is more complex than consumer e-tail. It involves multiple stakeholders and departments, an (often) lengthy sales cycle and a focus on personal contact and relationships.

So part of the issue is that B2B sites are not often viewed as e-commerce channels where the final purchase can be made online. As a result they frequently do not have clear metrics set against them, other than the traditional measures of unique visits & page impressions. And because the true value of the site is not measured, the necessary budgets are not allocated to its development and evolution.

The changing face of networking

One of the biggest developments over the past 18 months in the consumer space has been the rise of the social networks. This rapid consumer adoption of sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook has been quickly picked up by the business community with B2B social networking sites such as LinkedIn which, after seeing a slow start to member numbers 3-4 years ago, has doubled in size over the last 2 years on the back of the social networking boom.

The prediction is that consumer focused social networking sites will evolve away from their current generalist nature towards more specialist communities; whether that’s related to shopping (Yub.com), pets (fuzzster.com) or student travel (statravellers.com). This will become increasingly relevant for the B2B world where communities can be easily built on industry sectors. It’s always been true within the interactive and software world, where developer forums have been a key means of product development and solutioning, but these more specialist social networks are popping against wider industry sectors:

• MedicalMingle.com for Healthcare professionals
• Sermo, where doctors can seek advice and get access to relevant content
• INmobile.org - a network for senior mobile telecoms executives
• Adgabber - for the advertising community
• E-Factor – a European-based network for entrepreneurs to share knowledge and advice
• Damsels in Success – a women-only professional networking site, focusing on career and business issues.

B2B brands will need to understand how to ensure that they can leverage these new networks to drive awareness, seed content (as with the B2C world) and build customer advocacy.

Online PR is important here – the ability to get news out quickly, targeted to your specialist audience and often through trade bodies, can enhance influence in the marketplace and so improve the ability to get new customers considering you as an authority in your space.

And outside of the social networks themselves, the personal Blog has also been adopted by the B2B community. One of the most famous examples of B2B blogs is Darren Strange’s “Officerocker” that he created in the run up to the launch of Office 2007. Darren is the UK product manager for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and is credited with changing Microsoft Office into a personality rather than a faceless product through blogging. Since setting up the blog two years ago, “Officerocker” has allowed him to build a dialogue with customers, partners and press attracting around 250,000 hits each month.

Potentially one of the biggest (but currently most under-utilised) communication areas is RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows users to subscribe to an information feed from a website and view it within their own browser. What’s important about RSS feeds is that (a) the user has actively subscribed to that information, and (b) unlike email, there are no ISP issues to be navigated, so RSS means 100% deliverability of information to the user.

Some 80% of internet professionals are already using industry or sector-specific RSS feeds, and more than half of them (54%) have personalised homepages. [Source: E-consultancy / Convera, Nov 2007]

Can businesses actually make money with virals?

• Indirectly, yes. Viral marketing is simply about creating word of mouth, developing communications that raise awareness and drive engagement with a brand in the hope that it will be passed on. The same ATL success metrics of ‘awareness’ and ‘engagement’ still apply.
• Word of mouth marketing is THE most effective marketing tool

What should marketers bear in mind when considering a viral for their company - Dos and Don'ts?

• The biggest mistake that marketers make when creating viral campaigns is to think that a brief to ‘create a viral campaign’ will create one campaign or idea that will ‘go viral’ – the essence of what creates a great viral can be hard to pin down and therefore a number of different routes should be created and perhaps, one out of every 20 ideas will get traction and hit that all-important ‘tipping-point’
• Ensure that viral is considered throughout development of all marketing elements to maximise impact and cost effectiveness – not just created as an ‘add-on’
• Viral is NOT simply:
  • uploading the latest TV ad to YouTube (unless it’s a gorilla playing the drums…..)
  • simply creating a member-get-member mechanic or ‘send to a friend’ functionality – and does not even have to be about creating a ‘piece’ (ie a video, application etc). The US TV show has hit #1 in the DVD charts simply from the amount of online buzz and word of mouth content seeded throughout online communities and the press.
• Therefore, how to seed the viral should be considered as much as the viral concept
• Lastly measurement is key – and again this is something that should be planned at the outset – there are many ‘buzz marketing’ tools that can help in the tracking of campaigns and their impact

What makes a good viral?

• Viral ‘pieces’ need to be easy to send on – it sounds like a basic requirement, but it’s often missed
• Content and engagement is key: virals must be: engaging, funny, sexy or a weird for users to send on
• Remember virals don’t necessarily have to be complex pieces: consider the recent Gap virals (and the successful if a little costly Thresher email from previous years) that simply offered customers a good deal (eg 30% off) on a given day / product