Top 5 Takeaways From the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation Summit

by Jason Stewart

Last week Demandbase participated as a sponsor at the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation Summit in San Francisco. The Boston edition is coming up on October 5th and 6th.

While we spent most of the time speaking directly with customers and prospects sharing information about our B2B lead generation solutions, we also took notes from the various sessions and did a little digging into Twitter and the blogs to document tips and trends worth sharing. It is interesting to note that the top three "tweeted" tips from the Sherpa summit were, interestingly enough, a return to the basics. An emphasis on the bread-and-butter topics that Sherpa has always done really well, and that keep coming back year after year.

• e-Newsletters: Email marketing ranks highest for topics that were tweeted and retweeted at the show, proving it’s still the top tool for B2B marketers in reaching prospects and customers at every stage of the buying cycle. Consistency, relevancy, and quality content make all the difference in your email ROI. Check out the Demandbase on-demand All Star Email Marketing Webinar for more tips focused on email marketing for B2B.
• Landing Pages: Second on the tweet list is tips on building better landing pages. Probably no surprise considering that Marketing Experiments, the kings of landing page optimization, are the parent company of Marketing Sherpa and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin gave an outstanding opening presentation. The key is to make it obvious what you want them to do and why they should do it - everything else is a distraction.On a side note, the Marketing Experiments folks took a look at one of our landing pages and said it was "one of the best they'd seen all day" but offered a few tips as well as the advice that we should share more information about benefits of the offer. Much better than last year's evaluation - it's always nice to hear you're on the right track...
• Quality Content: It's not enough to write a white paper. You need to write a white paper that people will be interested in regardless of whether they become your customer or not. Whether it’s a video, an on-demand webcast, or that ubiquitous white paper it’s likely the cornerstone of most of your campaigns - or at least the ones designed to generate new leads. According to Bob Johnson from IDG, if you get customers to engage with 2 pieces of content you’ve got a 25% chance getting them into your pipeline.

The other two takeaways fall into the "buzzworthy" category...

• Buying Personas: This is a topic that seems to be gaining a lot of traction in B2B marketing, and I have heard people speak about it at several events this year including the Inbound Marketing Summit. Fujitsu and Bulldog Solutions said they increased sales pipeline by creating "buyer personas" – and people took note. You may recall the having heard about "Personas" during the last election when campaign strategists spoke about crafting messages that would appeal to the “soccer moms” ... B2B marketers are getting into the game and are finding groups with common wants and needs around their products and creating "buyer personas" to keep their team on track when developing website content, email copy, and white papers that cater to specifically to those personas. You can get started by getting sales and marketing in a roomto discuss a few current prospects in each stage of your pipeline and talk about their demographics, peers, what they’re measured on, what they need right now, and what they have in common.
• Social Media: While the topic still fills a room, it's a lot easier to find seats at the back than it was at this time last year. There does seem to be a growing backlash as there has been a shortage of fresh content out there for a while. As a matter of fact, we got a bump in traffic in the exhibit hall during the social media sessions with visitors citing "burnout" on the topic. And the top questions about of social network marketing still focus on ROI. Social media does tie in very nicely with the concept of "buying personas" though, as when you create the buying persona you should definitely factor in where your buyers are spending their time on the web (online forums or communities, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, et al.). Social networking marketing tactics are great for extending the life of your well developed content, your email campaigns, your word of mouth and keeping tabs on customer sentiment and can be worth the time and investment - but are still not likely to replace more traditional B2B marketing methods any time soon. Small and medium sized businesses, especially, often have resource challenges and have difficulty launching a significant presence in social media while still managing to do all the other things that they are expected to do. This is not to say that one "Tweet" can't make a difference - clearly it can - but managing a growing brand online, monitoring your competitors, finding the trending topics in your space and continually finding relevant content to share can suck up resources very quickly. That's where the ROI questions come into play. No one denies that there is opportunity to build pipeline out there, the questions center on the cost in time and resources.

Finally, the message we took away and encourage our customers to consider is simple: once you’ve got the basics down for a quality campaign the business is yours to lose. Pay attention to what your prospects and customers are telling you by their clicks, downloads, pageviews and tweets and then nurture them based on the behavior will directly affect your pipeline and your bottom line.

See you next year Sherpas!

Comments

[B2B Web Leads]

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[Ricky]

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