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6 simple things B2B digital marketing gets wrong

By Jennifer Esty  |  May 18, 2018

At Sharp Ahead we often get asked to do audits of our clients’ (and prospects’) digital footprints, which is a great way to start to understand how to make immediate improvements to your digital marketing.

Here are six things that come up time and time again.

1. Phone numbers: most B2B products and services are relatively complex and will ultimately require person-to-person selling. The best outcome of your digital marketing campaign is almost always inspiring a prospect enough to call you. So make phone numbers prominent on your website, ideally in the header of your landing pages and website.

A few other phone number rules:
– don’t make your prospects choose from multiple phone numbers, more often than not they’ll just choose to phone someone else. And when they do call, don’t give them 6 different options to choose from.
– don’t charge your B2B prospects for phoning you
– and most importantly, during business hours, make sure the phone is answered by a trained member of staff. Every. Single. Time.

2. Don’t hide your best content. Content marketing is not a treasure hunt. If you hide your best content, no one is going to come looking for it. Social proof like case studies, testimonials, and client logos needs to be featured prominently on key entrance and landing pages.

3. The Ronseal Principle: tell visitors to your site exactly what you do in plain language. Taglines, mission statements, and post-branding workshop catch phrases are all well and good, but don’t assume your prospects know you already or that you naturally have enough credibility to be on their short list.

4. Most prospects don’t even want to visit your website. Google has taught us to expect its search engine results pages (SERPs) to answer our questions without visiting actual websites. Make sure the SERPs for key terms, like your brand and contact information, are as carefully curated as your homepage. Google gives you lots of good tools for doing this, including free ones like Google My Business.

5. Prices: do not be afraid of talking about price. At some point, the cost of your products or services is going to be very, very relevant to your prospects. You can save a lot of everyone’s time by giving at least an indication of price during the lead generation process. The hard work of establishing your price points and your place in the market should have been done already; be confident in your decision making and honest with your prospects.

6. Landing pages. Use landing pages for your lead generation campaigns. Make sure they are optimised for conversion, which includes paying attention to every detail from page load speeds to the wording and colour of your CTA to which fields you put on the form. Do not send your hard won and paid for traffic to a page on your website.

And last but not least, if you have any questions or need help with any of the above, please get in touch.

Woman taking a call via headset

5 Inbound Call Handling Basics to Improve your Lead Generation Campaigns

By Jennifer Esty  |  August 8, 2017

Too many lead generation campaigns fail to achieve their full potential due to poor inbound call handling. Maximise your marketing investment by getting these five basics right.

Answer the phone

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, but many companies really do falter at the first hurtle. A successful company properly focused on inbound sales enquiries will answer every single call, no matter what time of the day or day of the week.

Calls should never go unanswered because someone is on holiday, or at lunch, or in a meeting. And there are plenty of excellent call answering services that provide a high quality experience to prospects and customers outside of business hours. Use one.

Answer in their language

A similarly painful observation but equally important: B2B prospects considering high end products or services expect and deserve a local phone number answered by a native speaker who is well versed in the company’s products and services.

Again, for B2B companies looking to expand into international markets (or from international markets into the UK) who might not yet have a local office, it’s still worth in investing in a local number and consider outsourcing to a local company specialising in inbound enquiries.

It’s not just for rookies

Many organisations use their inbound phone team as a training ground for new employees looking to skill up to be ‘proper’ sales people. And while it makes sense for sales rookies to cut their teeth on less qualified prospects before putting them in front of the big fish, make sure they are surrounded by skilled peers and are given the proper training to do their job well.

Equally it’s important to remember that the skills that make a successful inbound sales operator are not necessarily the same as the ones that make for a successful sales person. Sales people are taught to keep talking and to ask the right questions. Inbound operators need to listen first and talk second.

Take nothing for granted

Organisations who outsource their inbound sales will no doubt have regular reviews with their agency, covering KPIs, listening to calls (live or recorded), checking up on staff training and generally ensuring high quality delivery. And if they’re not, they’re with the wrong agency.

Organisations who use internal resource, however, are less likely to have these sorts of quality checks in place and just assume their employees are doing a good job. Nothing could be further than the truth. Our experience doing mystery shopping for clients shows that not only do calls go unanswered (see first point) but many are answered by unskilled staff who see inbound calls as a disruption to their ‘real’ job.

Ensure your inbound team know what their KPIs are and put in place processes for monitoring quality.

No one likes surprises

Nothing makes an inbound operator’s job harder than not having the right information to help a prospect. Make sure your inbound team are familiar with your marketing campaigns, before they happen.

They will need to see ad copy, landing pages, be trained on any promotions or demos that have been offered, and be aware of any qualifying (or disqualifying) criteria.

Sharing your marketing campaigns with the inbound team before the campaign starts has the added bonus of getting feedback from the front lines before you waste time or resource on campaigns that are likely to miss the mark.

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