The Best Media Options for B-to-B Retention Marketing
When it comes to media decision-making in B-to-B, it’s useful to separate acquisition media from retention media.
Defining acquisition is fairly straightforward. It means cold prospecting, attracting an entirely new contact and persuading him or her to respond and express some interest in your product or your company. It’s often known as lead generation, or inquiry generation.
To find a new potential customer, who may or may not have heard of you, takes a particular set of campaign strategies. The best media for acquisition include:
- Your website, enhanced with techniques designed to compel visitors to leave behind their contact information — namely, an offer and a call to action
- Search engine optimization, so your website is found in the first place
- Search engine marketing, meaning keyword bidding to attract businesses that are looking to solve a particular business problem
- Outbound telemarketing, including intelligent use of voice-mail messaging
- Direct mail, including dimensional mail and flats, like letters, postcards and self-mailers
- Trade shows, if there is a sufficient concentration of serious prospects there to justify the expense
- PR, which in business marketing usually proves to be a better prospecting investment than advertising
But once a relationship is in place, the media situation becomes quite different. You can now leverage your database, and use direct media very effectively.
So for media planning purposes, it makes sense to consider inquiry generation, lead qualification and nurturing, and retention in the same bucket. It may take years until the prospect actually buys. At that point, the retention objective then takes on its typical character — meaning, promoting repurchase, cross-selling or up-selling, and preventing defection.
Here are the best media for communicating with inquirers and current customers in B-to-B markets:
Email. Its low cost makes email, hands down, the number one medium for B-to-B retention marketing communications. Not only cheap, it’s also versatile, allowing you to communicate in with the intimacy of a text-based letter, or the graphic impact of an HTML advertisement. You can also use email in a newsletter format, delivering useful information that is welcomed by business people. Recent data from The DMA’s new study B-to-B Direct Marketing Benchmarks confirms: 71.2% of marketers said they used email for retention, and 60% said they use it to follow up on inquiries.
Webinar. Webinars arrived on the B-to-B marketing scene only a few years ago, but they very quickly developed a reputation as little more than a long-form sales pitch. Sign-up rates — and show-up rates — continue to decline. Which is a shame, since the medium permits marketers to tell their stories with great detail and variety. My guess is that overuse simply killed the Golden Webinar Goose.
However, if used intelligently, the medium still has plenty to offer. The secret is timing and content quality. Webinars are best applied at two key stages in the buying process — when your prospects are researching solutions and when they are comparing vendors. One interesting new wrinkle on webinar usage comes from Howard J. Sewell, president of Connect Direct in Redwood City CA, who pointed out recently that webinars can also be pre-recorded at the convenience of the speaker, and then delivered as if live, at the convenience of the customer.
Phone. Still the workhorse medium in B-to-B marketing communications, the phone can be applied successfully across the acquisition and retention spectrum. On the retention side, use the phone for inquiry qualification, lead nurturing, account management, new product introductions — whatever you can think of. The DMA “Power of Direct Marketing” study reports that telephone marketing was the largest media category for B-to-B DMers, representing a $28 billion aggregate spend in 2007.
RSS feeds. This hot new Web 2.0 medium is already looking good for B-to-B, since it instantly and proactively delivers whatever content your customer has requested—email newsletter, fresh blog content, anything. The problem is persuading customers and prospects to sign up, and keeping them interested in continuing the subscription. So the content is king in this medium. You’ll end up with highly qualified readers—but not necessarily everyone you want to reach.
Mail, including catalog. Just because email is cheap and easy, don’t neglect direct mail as part of your retention marketing toolkit. For one thing, you are unlikely to gain — or maintain — correct email addresses on 100% of your current customers and inquirers. So “dmail” can fill in the gaps in email coverage. But there’s more to it than that. Direct mail is still highly welcomed by business buyers. It generates healthy response rates, and is unparalleled in its ability to help you maintain ongoing business relationships efficiently.
Events. There is nothing like face time with customers, and events can give your sales and executive teams concentrated access at a relatively low cost. Corporate events come in all kinds of flavors, ranging from user group meetings, to technical seminars, to executive briefings and golf outings. Excellent for relationship building, for identifying customer issues, and for moving prospective customers along the buying process.
Media to Avoid
Print and banner advertising, with some exceptions. Advertising in the trade or business press, and on targeted websites, can be effective for building awareness, but it rarely makes sense once you have a direct relationship with a customer or prospective buyer. At that point, the direct communications route, whether by email, mail or phone, is likely to provide a stronger return on investment.
However, this conclusion is subject to change: Let’s keep an eye on such experiments as Google’s entry into print media sales, which may turn the tide by lowering the CPMs to an irresistible level — if it ever migrates to more targeted media than just newspapers and consumer magazines.
Another exception would be domain-based targeted banner advertising, which is being offered by some forward-thinking B-to-B sites, like Forbes.com, where you can serve up ads to visitors from a particular corporation with whom you are trying to nurture a relationship. Unfortunately, you can’t target more granularly than the corporate domain level, at this point, anyway.
Broadcast. The same argument can be made for broadcast media, especially television, where the cost of entry puts it off limits to all but the largest companies. But here, too, change is in the wind. Some local marketers are making radio and television work — but these are still primarily with an acquisition objective.
Trade shows. Compared to proprietary corporate events, trade shows are generally viewed as a place to find new prospects. So when it comes to planning retention campaigns, trade shows are usually supplanted by lower-cost media. But it behooves the wise marketer to add a retention mindset as a supplement to your acquisition planning when it comes to trade shows. If you are going to a show for acquisition purposes, don’t forget to contact your current inquirers and customers, and invite them to meet with you at the show. When the retention objective rides along with the acquisition investment, the ROI on trade show marketing can soar.