Digital marketing and lead generation in B2B

"Welcome to my presentation on “Digital marketing and lead generation in B2B. The three most important stages for sustainable success”.

‍ My name is Robert Harnischmacher, and I am the managing director of the digital marketing agency Publicare in Frankfurt am Main. Perhaps you have registered for my presentation because you are curious to find out which three stages I will be presenting to you today. What's more, the most important ones. If so, I have already achieved my first goal. I was hoping to pique your curiosity – and you are here. Thank you very much. But I'm still a little nervous. Isn't it just as presumptuous to present the three most important stages to you as it would be to give you the ten ultimate tips for guaranteed wealth and a long life?

‍ I have been working in B2B marketing for almost 30 years and during that time I have come to the banal realisation that every company ultimately has to find its own marketing mix. That's why, strictly speaking, there can be no stages of development. So why am I talking about them anyway? As a marketing agency, I believe it is best to practise the measures you want to sell to your customers yourself. As an agency, we have been undertaking this reality and endurance test more intensively than before for several years now. That is why my presentation is, so to speak, a practical or laboratory report. I would like to present the three development stages that have proven to be the most important and best for us in our own marketing and sales. I believe and hope that our experiences can be generalised to a large extent. That is why we recommend tools to our clients that have proven to be useful and effective in our own field trials.

‍ Therefore, I would like to ask a general question: Which digital marketing tools and measures are not only good for us as an agency, but can we also recommend to all B2B companies with a clear conscience? Before we delve into the large toolbox of B2B digital marketing, I would like to present the criteria I recommend for selecting tools.

‍ We are not starting from scratch. How can we leverage what we have already built? The question of building on each other is the central theme. What do we do first because it is a sensible basis for something else? It makes no sense in digital marketing to think about extending the roof when the foundation walls are not yet in place.

‍ This principle of mutual reinforcement can be well described by a famous saying of Aristotle: ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ I would like to show you a few examples of how this is possible in B2B digital marketing.

‍ Ultimately, in my view, we should not think in terms of ideal end states. We will never achieve these in digital marketing. Instead, we should enjoy every small step and draw motivation from it, because we believe that it contributes directly to overall success. I am a fan of small-scale optimisation, as long as we don't lose sight of the big picture. Small measures are easier to optimise than large master plans. They must be measured and evaluated in terms of their impact and cost-benefit ratio.

‍ Another aspect to consider when selecting our tools is that they must also work within the basic constraints we all live with. Ideally, they should not make us painfully aware of these limitations.

‍ What limitations do our expansion plans have to work within? As already mentioned, we do not think in terms of master plans, but want to implement things on a weekly or monthly basis, or perhaps every three months for major issues. This is relatively easy in our 30-strong agency. We do not have a departmental mindset. This is certainly different for larger medium-sized companies. Here, silo thinking must be overcome bit by bit by focusing on real, common goals.

‍ For us, the most important goal – as you can see from the title of my presentation today – is lead generation. We want to acquire new customers and projects. We assume this goal in all the points I will make in my presentation.

‍ When we talk about means and resources, I am primarily concerned with two things. On the one hand, it is important to implement strategies in small, incremental steps so that we can achieve interesting results on an ongoing basis, even with limited resources.

‍ On the other hand, I am concerned – especially for larger B2B companies – with moving away from resource-intensive planning and consulting and towards implementation.

‍ Based on the insights gained with each step, one should then move on to consulting and plan the next steps. It is a truism that budgets are limited.

‍ We focus on instruments and measures whose success can be measured as accurately as possible, and we also recommend them. We like campaigns that work with both small and large budgets. Depending on the business situation, we sometimes have more and sometimes less budget. I think this is the case for many companies – and not just since Corona.

‍ This brings me to the first and probably most important criterion in my choice of instruments: the requirement to use what is already available. Let's consider what we probably all have, provided our B2B company has been on the market for a while.

‍ We all have a website, which has often been the subject of significant investment over many years. In addition, we hopefully have existing customers and prospects.

‍ Depending on how long it has been in existence, our existing customer base will include a large number of customers with whom we may not currently be in contact, but who have purchased items from us in the past and were very satisfied with them. I call this the refrigerator principle. I buy a refrigerator and only contact the seller again when the refrigerator breaks down after 15 years and I need a new one. So, under certain circumstances, there may be a silent majority of customers in my existing customer base who are by no means dissatisfied. The situation is very similar with prospective customers. Over the years, I will hopefully receive a large number of enquiries, but not all of them will result in projects and orders. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we won't see each other again.

‍ The question is: how can we use these existing resources – the website and the customer and prospect base – with minimal effort? So how can we bring these three things together? That brings me to our first expansion stage, which consists of email and content marketing. Let's start with email marketing. The easiest step is to get into classic email marketing and send out newsletters – many of you have probably already done this.

‍ This involves sending out multi-topic newsletters that cast a wide net to find out where the interests and potential lie in the existing customer and prospect base.

‍ Complementary to this is the medium of promotions, i.e. single-topic emails, where I work in a much more offer-oriented manner. Based on CRM information or the CRM profile, I try to activate individual potential in the customer and prospect base in order to win customers and projects through cross-selling and upselling.

‍ What is missing in this scenario? Every email should contain a link to further information or to a promotional landing page. This is where our website comes into play.

‍ In other words, our website pays off more if we don't just wait for customers and prospects to visit it on their own, but draw their attention to our offerings via newsletters and promotions. This makes the website more useful and generates more traffic.

‍ The only problem is that our website has a limited page programme. This is where we present our products and services. Anything that falls outside the scope of these topics, i.e. anything related to orientational knowledge, has no place there.

‍ That's why we rely on content marketing. Our recommendation is that every B2B company should run a blog that is part of its website. In this blog, I can publish useful content in every conceivable way, which does not have to be product or service-centric. In this way, I disseminate orientational knowledge and recognise at a very early stage which of my prospects and customers are interested in which topics and where there is potential.

‍ At this point, three editorial notes. Build your website and blog on a convenient content management system. Then you can publish new content in minutes in the future. Although this involves a one-time higher effort, you will be very flexible afterwards. And very important: run your blog under the same company domain as your website so that both work together in terms of SEO. So how do the principles mentioned at the beginning work?

‍ Our continuously produced content for the website and blog pays for itself by actively drawing the attention of customers and prospects to it. Conversely, we retain and monetise our existing contact base by actively providing them with news. The best thing about it is that we get significantly more valuable traffic to our website and blog because we have rich content there.

‍ In stage 2, we refine what we have created and continuously expanded on the website and blog by applying search engine optimisation and marketing. We are now in stage 2, sub-stage A. We only have limited reach via direct access because, as an agency, we are known to only a fraction of the market participants, even in our small industry. To really become better known, we would first have to be at least ten times bigger and invest heavily in brand marketing. That's why, in our view, it's not worthwhile for most B2B companies to invest in brand awareness in this generalist way.

‍ Our tool in this phase is rather search engine optimisation, because we want to bring as many of the relevant market participants as possible to our website and blog organically, i.e. free of charge. And we want to do this precisely when they are in a search and orientation phase. What do we do to achieve this? We review what we want to be found for and then check exactly which keywords, phrases and terms our target audience uses to search for what we offer. These terms are the benchmark, that is our own wording. We optimise the existing content for these search terms and develop informative, useful stories for our blog. These blog posts provide thorough, informative answers to the questions our target audience is searching for in the long tail. The blog is our place for content that is successful in long-tail search engine optimisation. I am only showing this screenshot as proof that you can achieve a good ranking with specific topics, regardless of the size of your company and its financial strength. We were surprised at how easy it was for us to achieve a high ranking on Google during the coronavirus pandemic by blogging about the topic of ‘sales during the coronavirus crisis’.

‍ But you can't be at the top of the organic rankings everywhere. That's why we now move on to stage 2b. In this phase, we examine where we have gaps compared to the competition and close them with Google Ads. Here, too, investments already made in offer pages pay off. For example, for our most important search terms, we refer to the landing pages where our services are described in detail.

‍ When we invest in search engine advertising, we need to ensure that our landing pages convert well. That's why it's important to invest in additional activating offers, such as white papers as gated content, live webinars or promotional offers. We generally recommend integrating dialogue options such as feedback forms, live chat or a callback service directly on each product or service page. But what do you do with website visitors who leave your website without making an enquiry?

‍ This brings us to step 2c: remarketing. In our view, remarketing, which is mostly based on Google Display Ads, is a largely underestimated tool in B2B marketing. It ensures that you remain in the minds of those who have visited your website and that these people come back when needed. Here, too, you can reuse what you already have.

‍ For example, all visitors who have been to your normal offer pages but have not made an enquiry can be directed to a special promotional offer or a white paper landing page via remarketing. You have already set up these pages as landing pages for Google Ads anyway. Let's move on to the third stage, which I consider very important: visitor recognition or visitor identification. What is this about? We have a website and a blog, we do search engine optimisation and marketing, and we generate traffic. Now we want to recognise B2B visitors to our website in order to get the maximum benefit from our investment.

‍ Let's take a look at the situation on your website. If we imagine that we have 100 visitors to our website, how many of them would subsequently identify themselves to you by means of a phone call, an email or an enquiry?

‍ We estimate – quite optimistically – that around one per cent would come out of anonymity. Depending on your business, this percentage may be higher or lower. However, we can probably agree that it is a negligible amount. There are good reasons for this: B2B decision-makers remain anonymous for longer and longer as they go through their purchasing decision process.

‍ They often only submit an enquiry at the very end, even though they have already made their decision. By then, it may be too late for us, because you may have already enquired with the competition. Conversely, this means that we never see 99 per cent of our website visitors. They leave as anonymously as they came, remaining out of reach for our sales team. However, that doesn't mean they aren't interested!

‍ B2B website tracking tools change that. They use reverse DNS IP lookup to determine the name of the company from the static IP address used by companies of a certain size to access the internet, and then enrich this with address data that they research themselves or extract from commercial company databases. Incidentally, the recognition rate of 15 to 25 percent of all B2B website visitors tends to be slightly lower in times of Corona, as many website visitors access the internet from their home office rather than their normal company office. In their home office, they are of course connected to the network with their private, dynamic IP address. Nevertheless, we still achieve significant recognition rates, making the use of such tools definitely worthwhile.

‍ Compared to conventional website tracking tools, however, such B2B tools provide a second, crucial service. Tools such as Google Analytics use page-based tracking. This means that almost all data relates to what happens on a specific page or in a specific page programme: how many visitors there are, how long they stay, what the average dwell time is, what the bounce rate is, etc. Although this information is useful for optimising the website, it is not useful for lead generation.

‍ B2B tracking tools such as those from SalesViewer or WiredMinds, on the other hand, provide a visitor-based view. This means that they show which pages were visited per visitor and per session, how often this happened and how long the pages were visited. This is exactly the information we need to be able to assess whether this visit has lead potential or not.

‍ Let's take a look at an example using a screenshot. You can see an excerpt from the B2B website visitor recognition tool we use for our website. The excerpt is from 2 June, a few days ago. Let's pick one of the many companies, namely Alva Edelstahl. I can quickly see whether this company is relevant to us in terms of its origin, industry and location. I can also see that this company came to our website via a Google ad and was apparently looking for information comparing newsletter tools. Three quarters of an hour later, the company was back on our website and visited a special landing page where we present our CleverReach services. They spent 52 seconds there.

‍ Here, too, the tools reinforce each other. If we take another closer look at Google Ads, I would like to present the following small calculation: Let's assume that we have a factor of 1 to 100, i.e. that only one out of 100 visitors makes an enquiry. This would also apply to 100 visitors via Google Ads. If I pay three euros for a click on a Google Ad – which is a realistic figure – I spend 300 euros for 100 visitors. I receive one opportunity, i.e. one enquiry, which has already cost me 300 euros to acquire. If I assume that half of these enquiries actually become customers – an optimistic figure – I have already spent 600 euros before I have received my first order.

‍ If I now recognise an additional 20 of these 100 visitors through visitor recognition, the cost per lead is 15 euros. Assuming a conversion rate of only five per cent, I gain one new customer from these 20 leads. This would cost me 300 euros, or only half of the enquirer I initially described.

‍ If I combine the two, my new customer acquisition costs drop to a third of the original value. And that's exactly what I mean. We need to think about the tools together and bring them together in order to generate leads cost-effectively and efficiently. Of course, there are also challenges in this area of visitor recognition. One problem, for example, is that we recognise companies and not contacts. This is very important in terms of data protection, but for sales work it means that I have to go to the trouble of researching contacts via Xing or LinkedIn. If I can't find any, I may have to do a Google search. That's tedious. Of course, we mustn't forget that this also allows us to recognise existing customers and prospects. That's much easier. Another problem is that many people are unsure how to approach potential customers. Can I call a company and say, ‘I saw that someone from your company visited my website. Please place an order.’ Or should I use this knowledge implicitly without addressing it directly? This also requires a lot of experience. We advise companies on how to get through the door successfully.

‍ Perhaps the most critical point is that I typically do not have advertising consent for contacts that I have researched on LinkedIn or elsewhere. This raises the question of how I am legally allowed to approach them. The momentum of relevance plays a very important role here. In other words, I know that a person has shown interest and need for certain things through their behaviour on my website. I can then respond in a very targeted and relevant manner. However, this does not replace a clear legal assessment of how the approach can be structured. But of course, this can be brought into play.

‍ Perhaps you saw at the beginning of my presentation that there was an asterisk next to email marketing. Of course, we like to sell marketing automation solutions, i.e. automated lead nurturing processes. I deliberately left this out here because it is costly and only worthwhile if there are many participants. For example, running an automated, multi-stage lead nurturing process when you only have twelve participants in that process per year is not cost-effective.

‍ You may also have noticed that the topic of social media marketing did not appear at all in my three expansion stages. We use social media, as you probably do too. For us, the standard programme is sufficient: we also distribute our content via LinkedIn and Facebook, of course. However, we have found that the reach of our email address database is incredibly greater than the reach of social media. Therefore, for us, it is not a tool that we would include in the first three expansion stages.

‍ One small detail that ties in with the existing tools we use is LinkedIn Matched Audiences, which we are currently experimenting with. What does that mean? For example, we can put the domains of the companies that have visited our website into a large list, upload them to LinkedIn as a ‘LinkedIn Matched Audience’ and then target ads to people who work at these companies and are registered on LinkedIn. This is excellent targeting. However, there is one small problem: LinkedIn charges a lot for this targeting. So we'll have to see what the return on investment is.

‍ In general, we recommend viewing your website and blog not as a digital business card, but as a lead generation machine, and doing everything you can to make it the central point of sale for your business.

‍ Finally, allow me to add two or three points that did not fit into my three-phase scheme. In the 1990s, as a direct marketing agency, we did a lot of print work, but since the 2000s, we have actually only done digital work.

‍ We are thinking more multichannel again, including in the B2B sector, and are using print mailings and print flyers. The GDPR naturally sets tighter limits for us, which is why print mailings, for which we do not need advertising consent, can make perfect sense. However, we then have to ensure that these mailings are as highly individualised as we have been practising in the digital sector for many years without any problems. A general tip: take lead generation into your own hands. Don't rely too heavily on external service providers to generate leads for you. Only use them if they offer you real traffic, for example by placing specialist articles in external media, which will give you link juice and boost your ranking accordingly.

‍ That concludes my presentation for today. Thank you very much.