The Best Media Options for B-to-B Prospecting

Here I go out on a limb, to take a stand on the controversial issue of B-to-B campaign media selection. What are the most productive vehicles for reaching business buyers? You know the arguments: Some marketers swear that direct mail is still the best, because targeted lists are so widely available. Others invest most of their budgets in trade shows, where both customers and prospects are likely to be in attendance. And others simply use email, because it’s so darn cheap — at least it seems to be.

The smart marketers know that the real answer is: “It depends.” There are so many variables involved, it’s hard to make blanket claims for one medium over another.

But there are some rules of thumb that have emerged. Let’s look at some of these, with a focus on customer acquisition. I will go out on a limb about the best media for retention in a later discussion.

Successful Prospecting Media
Here are the best media for prospecting among business buyers.

Search engine marketing (SEM). The hottest of the hot, these days, with good reason. Business buyers use the Internet as their primary research tool when seeking solutions to business problems. Marketers can hardly find more targeted media than keyword search bidding. Given that most search engine marketing opportunities are offered on a pay-per-click basis, the risk is relatively manageable. The problems with SEM are two-fold: 1) aggressive competition means that SEM requires constant attention, and 2) there are natural limits to the medium’s availability. If people are not searching on your category, you’re sunk.

Outbound telemarketing. The phone is still the workhorse medium of B-to-B direct marketing. According to The DMA’s 2005 Economic Impact study, B-to-B marketers spent $28.5 billion on telephone as an ad medium in 2005, compared to a mere $11.7 billion spent on direct mail in 2005. Of course the reason phone is so powerful is that it is the closest thing to a face-to-face selling environment. In sophisticated buying environments, when you are trying to find a technical buyer or a senior decision-maker, a sophisticated phone-based sales force can have serious, productive conversations, explaining product features and benefits, probing on needs, networking around to the right parties and even closing sales.

At a lower level, the phone makes a great tool for “data discovery,” to identify the right contacts, or to verify address and title. It’s also useful later in the prospecting cycle, for lead qualification and nurturing.

Direct mail. Reports of direct mail’s demise are greatly exaggerated. The ol’ reliable medium still delivers for us. With literally 18,500 business lists recorded in the MIN system, most prospective business buyers can be found through the mail, even for obscure products or very targeted niches. Business buyers themselves are looking for information to help them do their jobs, and they generally welcome — and open — letters. The DMA’s 2005 Response Rate Study reported a healthy 2.045% response rate to B-to-B direct mail, and 1.593% to its cheaper cousin, postcard mail.

Dimensional mail. For marketers trying to get past gatekeepers, dimensional mail is the ticket. Also known as “lumpy” mail, dimensionals tend to be perceived as valuable by mail rooms and secretaries, and more likely to be delivered to the executive in-box. The DMA’s recent studies confirm: dimensional mail produced a 5.14% average response in 2004 and 4.66% in 2005, for B-to-B marketers.

Trade shows, if the audience is highly qualified. Business marketers spend an average of 18.6% of their budgets on trade shows, according to a 2004 study from the Business Marketer Association. Most of that is targeted to sales lead generation and finding new customers. But trade show marketing is expensive, costing an average of $215 per contact, according to Exhibit Surveys, Inc., in 2005. So my recommendation is that marketers select shows very carefully, based on the likelihood of a strong concentration of potential buyers on the show floor. Broadly based, horizontal shows simply involve too much waste. And at those prices, watch out.

PR. At the early stages of the sales cycle, awareness is the business marketer’s critical objective. But awareness generators customary in consumer markets — broadcast television, for example — are out of the question for all but the broadest B-to-B categories. This is where PR comes in. Simply the best bang for the buck, PR, in the form of media relations and analyst relations, delivers awareness in business markets at a low cost and with high credibility. Not that it’s easy to generate. But trade publications need to fill their news holes. The tried and true techniques — contributed articles and news “manufactured” by original research — should be a part of every B-to-B prospecting program.

Your website. You may be surprised to see this on the list, since a website is usually viewed as a passive medium, versus an outbound media channel. In truth, your own website is the tool that can provide the cheapest, and the most qualified, sales leads.

But here’s the rub: you must take steps to convert the site from its normal function as “brochureware” to an interactive environment that stimulates visitors to leave behind their contact information.

The secret, of course, known to every direct marketer, is an offer and a call to action. Invite visitors to download a case study or a white paper. Or to sign up for your email newsletter. The sign-up form can be as simple or complex as you see fit. The more information you ask for, the lower the response, but the more likely they are to be qualified prospects for your ongoing marketing efforts.

As Mary Ann Kleinfelter wisely points out, one of the reasons the website is so powerful is that it allows you to tell as deep and rich a story as prospects want to hear. “The Web allows the B-to-B marketer room to give prospects the complete information they need to make buying decisions, especially for complex, expensive technical products and services.”

It’s a wonder how few business marketers take advantage of this opportunity for free marketing.

What To Avoid When Prospecting
Not everything works. Here’s a list of what to avoid. Again, I hide behind my disclaimer: There are plenty of exceptions to these so-called rules.

Print advertising. I’ll be interested to see if DIRECT’s publishers allow me to get away with this one. I am not condemning all print. Solid direct response ads can work brilliantly for lead generation in trade and business publications. The problem is that most ad budgets are controlled by marketing communicators who are unschooled in direct marketing. They don’t know how to develop an effective offer and call to action. They let designers, instead of copywriters, drive their creative. They don’t measure their results. So I am condemning the strategy, versus the medium.

But there is one print ad medium that has failed miserably, namely Reader’s Service Cards, aka “bingo cards.” This is the pathetic attempt print publishers made some decades ago to add value to their medium. They bound in card-stock inserts filled with 3-digit numbers, assigned a number to each advertiser, and inserted the number at the bottom of any ads run by that advertiser. When readers circled numbers on the insert and dropped it in the mail, the publisher turned around and sent out the readers’ names as “leads” from the advertising. The problem is that the so-called leads arrive months later, and are generally worthless. My advice: marketers are better off declining the opportunity to participate, and instead create their own hard-hitting direct response ads when using print media.

Broadcast advertising. Broadcast, whether television or radio, is so effective as a ad medium because it combines a rich communications environment with some ability to target audiences. The problem for business marketers is the targeting. In most cases, there is simply too much waste involved to justify the expense. And in television, the barriers to entry posed by creative development are too high to scale.

But there are major exceptions to consider. As Bill Hebel, SVP and media director at the Chicago agency Slack Barshinger, points out, radio can be highly effective in certain business categories. For some clients, Hebel found that he could reach blue collar targets like plumbers and electricians during early morning slots, before the expensive “drive time” rates kicked in. These contractors were already out for the day in their trucks, and open to hearing business messages over the radio.

Solo email. Despite its promise, email has failed business marketers as a prospecting medium, due entirely to the scourge of spam. There are some categories where rental email names can still work — technology and engineering, for example. But overall these day, we are seeing better cost-per-lead results using direct mail.

This is not to say email should be banned from the entire prospecting process. Au contraire. Email is superb for lead management and nuturing. Once you have persuaded someone to raise his or her hand, email is the perfect medium for staying in touch and moving the prospect along the sales cycle. Karen Breen Vogel, president and CEO of the interactive agency ClearGauge, points out that e-newsletters are particularly effective in this regard, especially in narrow niches when the content can be made highly relevant to the industry.

Where Are Prospecting Media Going?
Media productivity evolves over time. There are some exciting potential prospecting tools for business marketers on the horizon. For example, Hebel has found online contextual advertising to work. Text links, especially, are viewed as editorial, so they can be very attractive when served up on a keyword-specific basis. “People are ignoring banners these days,” says Hebel. “Contextual ads are not only more relevant, the CPMs are cheaper, too.”

Vogel points to early experiments with “social networking” media like LinkedIn, which use the Internet to stimulate word of mouth. And everyone is talking about blogs, podcasting and RSS feeds. Let’s hope things continue to develop for productive B-to-B prospecting.

A summary chart as an illustration for this article:

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