'Net Features : business-to-business

Calling All Content Marketers: Curb the Sales Pitch

Michael Garrity — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

At the end of the day, no marketing effort in the world can make up for the need to provide good content that is meaningful and relevant to the users you are trying to attract to your brand. This sentiment is just as true for business-to-business marketers as it is for B2C promoters.

Recently, DemandGen Report conducted a survey with business executives tasked with finding and purchasing content solutions to determine their specific needs and preferences in an effort to give B2B organizations more detailed information to improve their content marketing strategies.

The survey, titled The Content Preferences Survey, found that 75 percent of respondents would like solution providers to create content that will curb sales messaging, meaning that these marketers should re-imagine their content strategies so that prospective buyers have a better understanding of their solution’s value. Over half of them agreed that these messages should focus on the actual objective-based value of a solution and less on product specs.

Although email is the most popular way to share content, 53 percent of executives also use LinkedIn for sharing purposes. The vast majority (88 percent) also said that they prefer white papers as the top choice for content-based research, with visual formats such as video (44 percent), infographics (38 percent) and webinars (72 percent) emerging as accepted alternatives.

And, of course, there’s the mobile trend. Forty percent of respondents said they now access content on mobile phones, with 23 percent using a tablet more frequently. This should signify to B2B marketers the importance of also providing mobile-optimized content whenever they can.

“Solution providers, now more than ever, need to demonstrate a clear understanding of their prospects’ challenges, market trends and objectives,” says DemandGen Report managing editor Amanda Batista.

B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:30:00 GMT

A survey by marketing automation solution provider Pardot reveals that a significant number of business-to-business (B2B) marketers aren’t actively or accurately tracking the revenue that their campaigns generate, a non-practice that can lead to missed opportunities in establishing B2B marketing’s “essential role” in the growth of a business.

For the survey, Pardot talked with dozens of anonymous B2B marketers about their strategies and how they implement their programs, including what they choose to measure, how they do it and the standards they use for qualifying leads.

According to Pardot, as many as 37 percent of all marketers simply aren’t tracking the revenue they generate. By not measuring the results of their lead management programs, many B2B marketers are not accurately reporting their value to their organizations.

Of those marketers who aren’t tracking and reporting their results, approximately 40 percent said that it was because they lacked the time and/or resources necessary to create and analyze these sometimes complex reports.

The survey also found that 20 percent of marketers don’t measure marketing-sourced leads at all, 30 percent don’t track “advanced” metrics, like marketing-sourced opportunities, 35 percent don’t use lead nurturing for less qualified leads and almost 30 percent lack the tools needed to track leads through the sales cycle.

These are pretty dire numbers for the B2B marketing industry, which does, at least, understand that it needs to adapt its analytics approach to a more data-driven model; as many as 80 percent of the survey’s respondents said that they want to spend more time in the upcoming year focusing on marketing metrics, and 85 percent will be initiating plans that require leads to meet a given set of criteria before they're passed on to sales teams.

In addition, the survey found that one-third of respondents felt that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the most important metric for them to measure, while marketing-contributed opportunities came in second. Metrics that were less revenue-driven, like site traffic or page views, were considered the least important.

Digital River Offers B2B Ecommerce Solution

Linc Wonham — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Selling directly to business buyers has increased margin efficiency and produced renewal rates of 30 percent for many ecommerce companies. The new cloud-based, business-to-business solution from Digital River enables merchants to sell directly to business buyers by tailoring their services and using authenticated portals, segmented pricing, preferred payment methods, private reseller networks and more.

“Today’s business buyers are demanding more from their online purchases,” says Joel Ronning, Digital River’s CEO. “They are demanding unprecedented levels of self-service, content, flexibility, and integration across channels and locales. Our enhanced B2B solution helps online merchants answer this call in a way that no other solution can.”

Digital River’s B2B solution offers online merchants the ability to do the following:

•    Streamline system integrations – expand and enhance current online capabilities by integrating Digital River’s commerce solutions with traditional business platforms and systems, including ERP, CRM or partner management systems.
•    Reach new global markets – secure access to markets across the globe and reach underserved channels with flexible solutions and an international resource network of local tax professionals, payment specialists and regional marketing experts.
•    Launch channel-specific sites – customize the B2B shopping experience by offering authenticated portals, and segmented and tiered pricing for specific channel partners or key accounts.
•    Streamline the transaction process – tailor the purchasing process to meet company requirements with multiple seller- and merchant-of-record model options.
•    Secure ownership of the customer lifecycle – drive reccurring revenue by maintaining access to valuable channel customer data and establishing direct customer relationships.

“According to forecasts, the global ecommerce market is poised for tremendous growth – and we expect that B2B will be an important driving force behind it,” says Ronning. “Companies can not only take advantage of this increasing revenue opportunity, but also deliver a world-class user experience that drives operational efficiencies and reduces conflict across their sales channels.”