Keep your customers (happy) during recession

Recession has come as a strong incentive for companies to  understand more than ever the importance of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth, and to create strategies to ensure they come out of this downturn with good results, profit even.

Especially in B2B, there are three main tools that you can use to make sure tyour companu survuves the crises, and maybe even thrive afterwards:

• Retention. Attracting a new client costs much more than keeping the ones you already have happy. Furthermore, an old customer can bring new clients using word of mouth. Financially speaking, retention can lead to big returns. FedEx, for example, gained $100 million in revenues after a 1 percent improvement in customer retention.
• Repurchase. This is a strategic and profitable tool to keep your revenue base, and even increase it. The best way you can encourage repurchase is by providing your clients with a positive customer experience. Purchase habits will increase, thus leading to an increase in sales.
• Referral. Today, you can even measure the correlation between word-of-mouth referrals and financial outcomes through special programs or surveys. The financial benefits associated with word-of-mouth referrals can be impressive. The only “dark” side to this is that negative word of mouth can lead to significant losses in popularity and, implicitly, in sales.

More specifically, here are a few tips to help you set up a good retention program:

• Have one-on-one meetings with clients, just to discover their needs and worries
• Make the executive team’s contact information available to all clients
• Include thoughtful gestures into all client-oriented activities, especially in face-to-face interaction

From a recession point of view, opportunities now arise to do all those small tasnks that you’ve been postponing because of lack of time. And customer loyalization is probably the most important task you have to complete these days, to make sure you overcome the downturn successfully.

Filed under: b2b marketing, b2b sales, Best Practices, Business-to-Business, Marketing Results, Marketing Tactics, Relationship Marketing, Strategy

How can B2B companies approach viral marketing?

Can B2B marketing be fun and creative? The idea came to me to write about it because at newAD we are now talking to one of our clients, an IT company, to use viral campaigns as part of their marketing plan. With viral marketing, online campaigns get a life of their own, because, if the spot is both funny and witty,  everyone wants to see it and share it. The rules for success in B2B viral campaigns could be summarized in:

• Make sure the specialized agency delivers good content, which is both interesting and funny, and conveyes the benefits of your products or services. Research several social media sites, such as YouTube and StumbleUpon, to discover what the big success stories were for industries related to yours and try to replicate that success.
• Build a fan base. Put the video on your company website and integrate other social media tools to build a user base and communicate with them.
• Use Search Engine Optimization, as your video has to be easily discovered through YouTube search. That’s why videos should have clear titles, an accurate description and appropriate keyword tags so that they can appears correctly in a YouTube search.

How can viral marketing benefit B2B marketers? The way that people find answers to their problems and research problems is to turn first to Google. In this respect, viral marketing spreads your ideas so that people find you. Any company with irelevant  ideas to share—and intelligent methods to gain interest in them—can, after a while, get fame and success on the Web. A successful viral marketing campaign can increase exposure for your company and product while increasing the number of links to your website.

An interesting thing that our client wanted to know was how can the effectiveness of their viral campaign be measured. The truth is you cannot measure it in the number of sales leads if gets you. It’s all about spreading your ideas, without spamming people.

There are, though, things you can measure:

• How many potential clients are exposed to your ideas?
• How often bloggers talk about you and your ideas? And what are those bloggers saying?
• Where are you appearing in search results for important phrases?

If your viral campaign is successful you need to follow it up with something that holds the audience’s attention. This can be a sequel, or some behind the scenes videos, but the idea is to exploit the buzz you’ve originally created for as long as you can.

Filed under: b2b marketing, Best Practices, General, Guerilla Marketing, how to, Marketing Tactics, b2b viral campaign, viral campaignes, viral marketing, viral videos

The importance of being proactive in marketing

Numerous clients and colleagues ask me what they should do about marketing these days, because they find it a very hard job to market and sell even the best imaginable product or service, in this bad economy. As far as sales are concerned, cycles are much longer and actually closing a contract lasts twice as longer than one year ago, let’s say. And even if you do close a contract, the profit will be smaller.

In terms of marketing, there is a tremendous pressure to achieve better results by investing less money. Many marketers may think that quickness is the fastest way to success, but this can actually harm the business, instead of helping it. Maybe the best thing to ask yourselves is not: “What brilliant marketing techniques should I use next?”, but rather “What is the perfect balance between reactivity and pro-activity?”

This is the difference between the two opposed attitudes:

• Proactive marketers plan very carefully, spend the marketing budget wisely and control their message veery step of the way. That understand what works and what doesn’t work in their industry, and they are not afraid to come up with a bold strategy. They proactively spend valuable the marketing budget in areas most likely to create positive results. Proactive marketers participate actively in social media, and take control over what is being said about their companies, products and services, thus being able to limit potential damage. They always monitor and measure results along the way, knowing that these efforts will return value for the company in the end.
• Reactive marketers rush in and respond to trends, without taking their time to analize the market situation. These marketers do whatever they’re told or just follow therules they’ve read in books. In most cases, this approach ends up being more wasteful than successful, requiring multiple cycles to determine that something doesn’t work. With a “damage control” attitude toward their online reputation, these folks are vulnerable from a PR standpoint. Most often, they wait until the annual budgeting process to assess what happened to their money and efforts.

The point is: we all feel the pressure to deliver much better and convincing results than ever. Even though you need to act as quickly as possible, you should take a second and consider your attitude. Establish some measurable and sustainable goals and then execute your plan.

Filed under: b2b marketing, Best Practices, General, Marketing Planning, Marketing Tactics, objectives, Strategy, proactive marketing