7 interesting reads - from Inbound to B2B funnel conversion

If you’ve been meaning to swat up on marketing for a while, but are time poor, here are the top 7 things I suggest worth reading so far this year.

If you read only 1, I suggest scrolling down to the B2B sales process and how to get ahead. It’s not teaching you how to sell, but how to breakdown what you do - so you can identify where/how you can increase your conversion.

Source: State of the Connected Customer report by Salesforce.com

Source: State of the Connected Customer report by Salesforce.com

New customer expectations of digital

During this unsettling time, getting up to speed on digital and marketing is key as customers are expecting businesses to improve their digital capabilities and are looking at how they conduct themselves through this crisis.

Salesforce have written a great whitepaper called State of the Connected Customer where they surveyed 15,000+ consumers ang businesses. In this report, they reveal how the rapid shift to digital channels will impact long term customer engagement expectations with 88% expect businesses to accelerate digital initiatives.

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Email will only get more important

Email marketing specialist Jordie van Rijn wrote a great article on how email is forecast to change in 2021 and tips on email marketing, automation and messaging in crisis communication. Including: Lockdown emails take 5 main forms: The first Lockdown emails, The ‘Changes to Our Service’ Email, The ‘Reassurance From an Authority’ Email, The ‘Camaraderie’ Email, The Mixology email. More details about email marketing in crisis and coronavirus in his blog.

In his Future of email marketing and automation blog, 6 experts where asked their thought email would be in the next 10-20 year. Forecasts included: Most emails will be fully automated, 100% personalized messages driven by artificial intelligence with batch and blast being a thing of the past and email will be a direct result of behaviours, history, preferences, and interests. Before you start automating… there are a few things to think about first.

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How to stay on their subscribed list

Whilst we’re talking about emailing. I’m very passionate about reminding us that every email you send, you’re having to earn the right to stay as one of their subscribed sources. If you’re not offering value to each person, expect unsubscribes to go up. I assume it was hard enough to get that subscriber in the first place, so consider doing everything to keep them. If you’ve got a high unsubscribe rate, other than improving your content, letting customers change their preferences or using images and copy to win them back can help. A good read is this “How to us your unsubscribe page to win back subscribers” best practice tips article.

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B2B sales process and how to get ahead

Jordie van Rijn also wrote a recent article outling how B2B sales are getting more complex. There are more steps in the sales funnel and more decision makers. Online events have overtaken offline events. The rise in use of video & B2B customer’s expectations for personalised & relevant content.

This reiterates why I recommend every B2B businesses needs to map out their sales process. Breaking it down into steps, what interactions happen with which individuals in an organisation. What are common barriers or stages that you lose prospects. Freshworks have written a useful article on how & why to create a sales process. It takes you through what a sales process is, why you need it and what tools you can use at various stages. It then gives you some great starter tips on how to automate some of your sales process e.g. lead assignment. Once you’ve read this, have a go yourself or at least start thinking and talking about it internally. Then I usually recommend a half day group workshop to whiteboard & map them out by customer or product type. Contact me to talk about where you’re at and where you need help next.

If you’re ready to understand more about the sales process and various types of sales automation, I’d then recommend reading some of Hubspot’s Sales automation guide that take you through what you can automate, which may help you create a roadmap to how much automation you will increase over the next 5 years.

Marketing Automation software

You’ll no doubt have heard that marketing automation is also a key part of the future to market and sell effectively. These tools help attracting leads with a higher propensity to convert, help the sales team nurture them until they’re ready to buy, avoid repetition of sending the same content manually and making the complex B2B sales process and buyer journeys more manageable. My preferred marketing automation software by far is Hubspot. I consider them to be the market leader and interestingly G2 have reviewed the main players and mapped automation tools and put them top too (see top right orange spider logo). See their in-depth comparison if you’re already considering other providers.

If you’re new to marketing automation & want a summary, Freshworks have written a simple “What is marketing automation” article explaining the differences between marketing automation, CRM & where it sits in the sales process. Detail around the different types of marketing automation including:

  • Email marketing, Workflow automation -automating some of your business processes and minimising human tasks through the customer journey,

  • Lead management - from acquiring, qualify, nurture and convert,

  • Content management - tools to create, modify and optimise for SEO,

  • CRM customer relationship management and integrating that with your marketing and sales, to analytics to understand A/B tests, which leads came from which campaigns,

  • Social media automation - write one post and assets can be auto generated to the correct size required

  • And finally business intelligence - a centralised way to set criteria and automate relevant activity e.g. lead scoring & when a lead goes to sales & which one.

They also explain what exactly marketing automation does. This article is a great intro.

Marketing automation where to start

Often businesses are using free email tools like Mailchimp and upgrading to the automation function can be a good first step. However, depending on your CRM/segmentation & growth ambitions, this may not be the right next move as the resources to set this up for 6-12 month period of time may not be the most cost or time efficient step and you may be creating a nightmare for the future. Consultants like me can help you work out which automation is right for your business and at which stage, as few can afford the budget or internal resources to go from none to all. It would be too much.

Pivot inspiration

We’re constantly reminded that we need to be adaptable to what our customers want and the changing ecosystem. Vistaprint is a really good example of a firm that pivoted and did it quickly. They saw that their customers biggest problem had shifted from networking and exchanging business cards to needing to protect themselves, their families and their staff from the pandemic. This was backed up by their Google Trends analysis of the term “mask”. In 2 weeks (apparently) they pivoted their business and started selling masks. Not ill-fitting ones, but ones that wouldn’t slip off your nose and with a design you may actually like to wear/reflect your personality. Econsultancy recently interviewed Emily Shirley, GM at Vistaprint UK to find out what and why they did it.

Google Trends comparison of Business card, face mask and car insurance.

Google Trends comparison of Business card, face mask and car insurance.

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I would add to this by pointing out that it’s not until you compare keywords e.g. “face mask” to business cards or car insurance that you have some context as to its competition. Face masks, although half of the competition score to car insurance is still a relatively hard keyword to rank for.

If you don’t really know what SEO is. One of the leaders in SEO tools explains it well in their “what is SEO” blog by AHREF.

Finally, a bit of the light hearted /ridiculous. There is a website that does this…. you email a page to dumpsterfire@hey.com, a printer automatically prints it and you watch it on a conveyer head off to a bin where the page is burnt.

Further Reading

Sarah Joy