Help Buyers Research Early In The Sales Cycle

April 27, 2010

businessyellowpages B2b Blogs, B2b Marketing , , Leave a comment

The charting times have brought about several changes in the business processes. Earlier, before buying a product a customer enquired about it from the sales representative. The customer care center was the most sought after enquiry center for the consumers. But now in this Internet dominated world, the customers seek the help of Internet to get the product details.

Using Internet to attain product or service information is a smart move on the part of the consumers. Talking to a representative has now become only a formality as the customers have more knowledge about the products than the company’s representative. Representatives are only meant to convey prices of the products and services.

Role a B2B marketer has to play:

So, what becomes necessary for a B2B marketer is to provide complete information of the products to the potential buyers in the early stages of the buying cycle. This will enable your company to emerge as a brand that understands the customer requirements and problems.

How this can be achieved?

You can engage the Buyers in the buying cycle by following the below given points:

  • Acquiring an influencing position on the search engines so that the customers can easily find the information they are searching for and locate you without any hassles.
  • Creating attractive as well as informative landing pages for each and every topic that you think the potential customer will search for.
  • Providing the customers the details early in the cycle before the registration or filling the forms, etc. This is important as the customers tend to leave the site because of so many formalities asked to fill up. This may result in lesser conversion rate. Also, more the registrations more are the chances of less indexing by the search engine spiders.

Benefits of assisting the buyers early in the sales cycle:

√  Drive more traffic to your site
√  Increase conversion rates
√  Boost your sales

Thus now you understand how important is to educate the buyers while they research for the products. So, follow the points provided by us and enjoy better and increased sales.

Top 5 Tips For Learning More About Your Customers

April 24, 2010

businessyellowpages Customer Management, E Commerce , Leave a comment

Concern and attention are the two major key factors that help in building a strong customer relationship. But the basis of effective customer relationship is laid out just after learning about the customers and what it is that they actually want.

By following just 5 simple steps, you can learn more about your customers:

♦ Be clear of what exactly you want to know about your customer base.

  • Do you want to know about their needs and requirements?
  • Do you want to know about their taste?
  • Do you want to know about what are their demands and expectations?

Try and figure out exactly, what it is that you want to know about your customer. Identifying your main objective would help you to figure out your customer’s needs in a better manner.

♦ Once you have identified your main objective of what you want to know about your customer, prepare a set of questions to ask them. Observational and conversational approach will definitely help you delve into the mind of customers more deeply.

Various techniques through which the questions can be asked are:

  • Direct mail
  • Telephone marketing
  • Focus groups

♦ If you don’t have a marketing experience, hire a marketing firm to develop questions and analyze findings. A marketing firm will effectively represent you and your firm by creating questionnaires and conducting surveys to analyze the psyche of the customer. They are the experts in this field and will greatly affect the whole process of knowing more about your customers.

♦  Once all the questionnaires and surveys have been conducted, hold a meeting and discuss the results with the staff. Discuss the feedback of the customers and take criticism in a positive way because it will help in the growth of your company. Also, instruct employees to keep the record of all the feedback they receive.

♦  So, now that you have the feedback of your customers try and improvise on the areas where you lack according to your customers. This would surely help you in getting closer to your customers.

We hope that the above mentioned points would have helped you in determining the basic steps to be undertaken for learning more about your customers.

Marketing Automation Maintenance Checklist

April 21, 2010

businessyellowpages B2b Marketing , , Leave a comment

Marketing Automation allows your business lead nurturing campaigns to reach to the right person at the right time. The hot leads passing to the sales at the very moment they search for the product or service offered by you doesn’t mean that your marketing program ends here and you do not require maintenance. The quick review and constant up-gradation of marketing automation maintenance checklist assists in ensuring that your marketing campaigns are going in the right direction. It also helps in keeping a tab that whether your leads are moving through the pipeline and making your sales team happy.

Here, we are mentioning some of the steps for maintaining the marketing automation checklist on regular basis, which in turn will yield high financial outcomes for your business.

On Weekly Basis

  • Search for new changes in SEO, PPC and email campaign results that give the indication of form or broken link
  • Give time for reviewing leads and assure that sales have followed up appropriately and swiftly.
  • Make sure that all the good leads are passed to the sales and not overlooked

On Monthly Basis

  • Improve your landing pages and e-mails by trying something new or innovative every month.
  • Improve the performance of your campaign and implement the strategies you have learned from testing done on previous campaigns.
  • Schedule reports that are useful for sales or management, which should be delivered to the leads automatically.

On Quarterly Basis

  • Upgrade your promotional campaigns with informative, relevant and fresh content
  • Interact with your sales team and discuss about the lead optimization score
  • Upgrading of campaign calendar ensures that you have new marketing strategies for the next quarter
  • Find out the ways of including segmentation and personalization in your campaigns so as to improve the results
  • Review the features you have introduced in your marketing automation system during the previous quarter

By maintaining this simple checklist you can assure that your marketing automation system is yielding beneficial outcomes. With these steps, you can easily get the most out of your marketing tool while keeping your both sales team and management happy at the same time.

Is Your B2B Company REALLY Ready For Social Media?

April 17, 2010

businessyellowpages Marketing Strategies , , Leave a comment

Social Media has come up with tremendous growth opportunities for B2B Yellow Pages. In the current scenario, if you are looking to drive a new business or increase revenue then you should have a solid foundation of social media. Brief understanding about the benefits of social media can make a lot of difference even to those who have already made it a part of their business. You should also make sure that the steps taken by you are receiving desired attention from the targeted audience.

Here is a small checklist that will help you in determining, is your organization ready to start a venture in social media. There are also some tips to make your efforts successful and beneficial.

Make clear goals about social media

Being specific about certain aspects of social media like increasing lead conversion rates, building awareness with the help of online traffic, decreasing the time required for handling customer grievances etc. will help you in executing your social media initiative more precisely.

Appoint committed human resource for social media

Before starting an account on any of the social networking site make sure that you have enough resources to allocate for that particular account. Social media is all about responses and continuous updating of information and it requires both dedication as well as commitment.

Provide optimum quality content for sustaining social media conversations

Content is the key ingredient of social media. The more educational or informative content you put online, the more visitors you attract. Good content is proved to be much beneficial in social media rather than in conventional sales collateral.

Understand, which social media website is popular among your customers

Targeting your focus and investments towards the interest of your audience is a key factor for gaining success at a social media platform. Do your research and understand the preferences of your customers before taking any further step.

Prepare website for social media attention

Ensure that your website is in good shape before starting multiple social media pages or profiles. The look and work of your website plays a key role in handling the attention. A fool proof plan will be an added advantage for marketing the leads generated at your social media pages.

If you are aware of the points mentioned in the checklist, then your business is ready to be a part of social media group. It is also important to monitor your prospects in this field as well as the interest of the customers for marking a strong social media presence of your business in the global market.

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