According to a recent Aberdeen Group research report, “Demand Generation: Kick-start your business," the four most profitable marketing channels for B2B companies are (in order):
1. Website
2. Email
3. Telemarketing
4. Trade Shows
As I wrote in my September 25th post, – the top challenges faced by marketing are: measuring marketing results and lead generation, followed closely by lead nurturing and lead qualification.
Combine these lists and you can see that you need a website you can manage and change easily, that can be optimized for search engines, and that provides value to your target audience. Your website builds your reputation with them and captures or qualifies lead information where possible.
Email is the preferred method of interaction within the B2B space today. It is trackable, and it is interactive. Many B2B marketing executives I know tell me they don’t even consider direct mail any longer. They focus primarily on the email channel to get messages out to their prospects and leads.
Telemarketing is a secondary channel that validates and verifies lead interest and is part of and combined with email campaigns, and can be very effective when used intelligently to provide further value for each lead contacted.
Trade shows can be a good way to get into a specific industry and start to get recognized, or to drive marketing and sales conversations from the leads that can be gathered in those venues. While there might be a few sales that occur directly from a trade show, mostly trade shows are about demand generation – building awareness in your target market and getting more leads started in the nurturing process.
Simple enough, but when you start tying it all together it gets complex. What are you doing to power each of those capabilities, and can that technology deliver the intelligence needed to drive a continuously improving and effective lead nurturing process that will improve the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)?
The Aberdeen report also points out that “Best-In-Class [companies] demonstrate heavy adoption of email marketing applications 87%, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 77%, customer survey tools 64%, and content/knowledge management tools 63%.” It’s not enough to implement these tools. Effective companies are seeking to integrate them in ways that yield actionable intelligence.
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