President of Clarity Quest Marketing Christine Slocumb recently appeared on Enterprise Radio to share her experiences in healthcare and technology marketing and the ways to achieve success. Slocumb also shared some great resources and tools for companies to utilize in their own marketing campaigns. Listen to the full podcast here.
The following is a transcript of the podcast:
1. What are some common mistakes you see technology and healthcare companies making when it comes to marketing?
The first mistake companies make is trying to do too many campaigns without specific measurable objectives.
The C-level these days expects marketing to report on how it’s contributing to the bottom line. If you don’t have measurable objectives and the processes in place to track where you leads are coming from, there’s no way to show marketing ROI.
Secondly, some companies are really confused to what’s a reasonable marketing budget to support the revenue and sales goals they want to achieve. That’s why a big core competency of our agency is helping companies figure out what they should be spending on marketing.
2. Which marketing campaigns have the lowest cost per lead for B2B companies?
We’ve been tracking lowest cost per lead for various B2B clients over the last 18 months and without a doubt organic search rankings and email marketing are the lowest CPL.
Organic search wasn’t that big a surprise – everyone understands ranking well on Google for your target keywords gives you great, qualified leads.
But the email marketing results surprised us a bit. There are marketing gurus out there, especially social media gurus, saying email is dead, it’s too spammy, etc.
But if you offer great content, have a clean, targeted list, and offer educational content before asking for the sale, it can be very effective.
Email marketing is even more effective when you nurture leads throughout the sales cycle using a marketing automation system.
3. Which tools do you like for email marketing and marketing automation?
If your company is just getting started with email marketing, we really like MailChimp. It’s relatively easy to setup and use. Our creative director really likes its simple design interface. If you have 10K leads, the system is only going to cost you a few hundred dollars per month.
However if you really want to jump into the marketing automation world, we like Act-On or Pardot. However, those systems start at around $1,500 per month and there’s a learning curve. To implement them effectively companies either hire an agency like ours that has experience using a system, or they train in-house staff.
4. Does social marketing work as a lead generation tool?
Social media or social marketing using channels like Twitter and LinkedIn are not as effective at generating B2B leads quickly as they are fostering discussions and building relationships. However, there are a bunch of tools popping up like Socedo and Salesloft that let you mine the data within these tools. For example, if your clients tend to belong to similar groups or have similar titles, you can find groups of these folks and start to engage them via discussions, Twitter follows, etc.
Business to consumer is a whole different story than B2B especially if you are targeting people under the age of 30. We know an injury attorney whose finding leads off Instagram!
5. What are some marketing tools you can’t live without?
Good question. This in an old school answer, but I’d have to say Google Analytics. Google has taken away some really useful functionality such as keyword data, but they are adding new features all the time. Conversion tracking in Analytics is super insightful.
And probably because I’m still really partial to SEO, all the tools on Moz.com that let us check keyword ranking difficulty and where competitors are getting backlinks.
6. As we wrap this up, what is one key tip you would like to give B2B companies looking to improve their marketing?
Create a measurable marketing plan tied to your business goals and have the patience and foresight to stick with it. Don’t grab for the shiny new campaign just because you haven’t met your lead quota in the first 2 months.
Eric, our agency is always posting new findings and marketing tips on our blog and Twitter feed which is @CQMarketing.