A Sensible White Paper www.sensiblemarketing.com

2016 Report: Marketing Has Changed Larry Levenson | @sensiblemktg | Jan. 24, 2016 The new face of marketing It you’ve been thinking that B2B marketing has changed a lot recently, you’re in good company. We’ve just had a chance to refresh ourselves on with updates on the direction of B2B marketing. Here is what we found. Forbes notes that “B2B marketers are forced to update their traditional practices to meet the requirements of a business buyer who behaves more and more like an individual consumer. . . Under increasing pressures to prove value, marketing is transforming from a cost center to a revenue-generator, and Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is transforming to business-to-individual (B2I) marketing.” Tony Pearce, CEO of GRABR, predicts “ a new form of micro-marketing – a consumer driven, increasingly personalised and relevant approach. Users are increasingly infuriated with being bombarded by promotions based on information collected through their browsing and viewing habits, which may not be entirely relevant.”

Table of Contents Marketing will never be the same.

Why traditional marketing methods are no longer enough

The upside of building a virtual marketing team

How to start thinking bigger

Additional Resources

About Sensible Marketing

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These trends and observations point to a simple truth: Marketing will never be the same. Marketing used to be a predictable activity— a mere line item on the corporate budget. Marketing used to thrive with a paradigm of buy names, plan campaigns, launch campaigns, collect responses, and send leads to Sales. But today, things in marketing are changing at a dizzying pace as new channels and strategies open up new possibilities, including: ● Social media marketing provides a new way to find and connect with prospects. It lets you lean on your customers’ networks to help market your products and services. Simply post a special offer or news update to your social page, and thousands of your followers can instantly see it, share it, and act on it.

● Content marketing rewards you many times over for creating good content once. Simply give away a helpful how-to guide, and you’ll have inquiries pouring in from people who want you to make their jobs or lives easier in some way.

● Lead nurturing gives you multiple opportunities to educate prospects or to supply them with information that’s designed to help them reach a purchase decision. With each offer of valuable content, you nudge them ever closer to a purchase.

● Blogging has turned the web into a potential pulpit for every product evangelist. Not only do blogs provide a fast, easy way for marketers to put their thoughts online, but they also lower the sales resistance of the target market by creating the illusion of a friendly conversation between company and prospect.

● Search engine optimization (SEO) involves making tweaks to existing web pages to attract more website visitors. It’s all about making sure that your website will be found when people are researching products and services that you sell.

● Pay-per-click advertising lets you put a price on leads. Willing to pay a lot for more visits to your landing page? With a little strategy and a well-written landing page, you can expect a flood of leads. On a tight budget? Just buy fewer clicks and trust your landing page to convert them.

● Landing page optimization cuts out the middleman and helps you make more sales to web searchers. A strategic, targeted page can accomplish what thousands of dollars of advertising spots can’t.

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● Marketing automation helps you codify and repeat your most effective processes for the greatest impact on your bottom line. Marketing automation is nothing short of revolutionary. Never before have marketers had access to such precise analytical data that allows them to measure how successful their marketing campaigns have been.

Why traditional marketing methods are no longer enough

You could try to keep up with the constant changes in the marketing arena. You could send your marketing staff to seminars and allocate a portion of your quarterly budget to each new marketing channel that emerges.

But if your company is like most, you’re already trying to do more with less. You’re probably running as lean a marketing department as possible and you have no desire (or budget) to add extra headcount if you can get the same results – or better – from your existing staff.

It’s may be tempting simply to invest more in traditional marketing methods. Problem is, they’re not working as well as they used to, and they often come with a high cost of involvement.

● According to the Direct Marketing Association, direct mail response rates have declined nearly 25% over the past nine years. (Direct Marketing Association)

● Direct mail delivers just a 3.7% response rate with a house list, and a 1.0% response rate with a prospect list. Compare this to 28.5% for email. (Direct Marketing Association)

● Telemarketing is now so disliked that one leading contact data provider actually offers to “suppress jaded urban areas like Manhattan and Los Angeles for an automatic boost to response.” (Melissa Data. “Boost Your Telemarketing Response.”)

Trade shows are still popular among attendees, even in a sluggish economy. But they provide only periodic access to the prospects you really crave. They should be a supporting player—not the star—of any marketing program.

Meanwhile, people are just plain over-marketed-to. In fact, those who live in large urban areas encounter thousands of marketing messages a day. Every day. How many of these

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messages do you think they remember for longer than a few seconds? How many do they even notice?

In this noisy marketing environment, it makes sense to focus on highly-targeted, effective marketing methods that help you reach your target audience where they’re at with relevant messages. And it makes sense to save money in the process. How are marketing departments accomplishing this?

The upside of building a virtual marketing team Hungry for a greater ROI, eager to keep up with new marketing techniques, and wary of adding new headcount, many marketing leaders are getting results by partnering with an inbound marketing agency to create extended virtual marketing teams. The smart folks at MarketingProfs outlined the benefits of outsourcing in a recent article. They suggest that by partnering with an agency you can achieve a positive impact in terms of: 1. Higher-quality output 2. Cost efficiency 3. Economies of scale 4. More collaboration 5. Faster work 6. A bigger pool of talented professionals 7. Greater flexibility 8. Increased ability to focus on your core competencies 9. Better technical expertise

It makes sense that companies would turn to marketing agencies to help them keep up with the latest marketing techniques that can boost their business results. Most of the skill sets we’ve discussed aren’t needed on a full-time basis. Here are some scenarios of how companies might use a marketing agency to their advantage as they explore new marketing channels. Buyer Personas: Well-defined buyer personas provide your marketing team and the sales team with the pains and challenges your ideal customer is facing, and provides clues

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on how to interact with that prospect. Oftentimes, looking for the outside is helpful for identifying and developing each buyer persona. A virtual marketing partner can interview your marketing and sales teams, as well as a few customers, to elicit the information needed to for a helpful and insightful set of buyer personas. Copywriting: Writing is hard, time-consuming work. Busy marketing departments never seem to find the time to write new white papers, ebooks, and blogs. Rather than continue to procrastinate producing the materials that can bring in valuable new leads, why not hand off the task to a virtual marketing partner? The process can be painless. A corporate blog only needs to be updated once or twice a week. A subject matter expert at a company can have a one-hour conference call with a marketing agency once a month in which they discuss topics for six to eight new blog posts. The agency’s expert writers can then write the posts and send them back to the company for approval. The company’s only job, then, will be to publish the blog posts once or twice a week. Social media: Updating a LinkedIn page or Twitter feed doesn’t take much writing—just good ideas on valuable tidbits and resources to provide to your audience. A marketing agency can take a fresh look at your existing white papers, brochures, case studies, and web pages and think of “teasers” to promote these resources through social media. Unless your company is very large, this kind of social media work is a part-time activity, not a reason to add full-time headcount. SEO: A company that wants to get better results from its website can engage a marketing agency to analyze the performance of its existing pages. As a result of this analysis, the agency will then optimize under-performing pages so that they will be more likely to show up in a search engine, and will write several new pages that take advantage of search terms the target audience is currently using. The company will be able to reap the benefits of this work every day for months or years to come. Email campaigns: Most companies are now using email marketing as the core of their marketing outreach. But are you reaching the right people at the right time with the right message? A marketing agency partner can help to segment your email database appropriately and make sure only certain segments of your database gets a particular email, and that your audience is not enrolled in more than one lead nurturing campaign at a time. This helps eliminate the complaint of receiving too many emails, while still messaging your target audience.

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Marketing activities such as these are ideal to outsource to a marketing agency, for several reasons: ● You avoid adding to your headcount.

● You have the flexibility to either pay by the project or keep your agency on monthly retainer—whatever meets your needs and budget.

● You can do a few projects at a time as budget permits, making small, incremental improvements to your overall marketing strategy.

● You avoid distracting your in-house staff from the activities they’re already good at. You avoid spending considerable time and money training your in-house staff in the latest marketing techniques.

● You can get expert help in the specific areas where your team’s skills run thin—a big plus in an age of new and evolving channels. As one commentator puts it, “Marketing is becoming like medicine: few generalists, a lot of specialists.”8

● The more you work with your virtual marketing partner, the better they’ll understand your business.

How to start thinking bigger Marketing isn’t what it used to be—it’s more. It’s bigger. It’s better. It’s more effective and more measurable. You have more channels at your fingertips, and more ways to reach potential customers anywhere, anytime. That’s a double-edged sword. Try to keep up with every new marketing trend, and you risk distracting your staff from their core marketing activities. But by assembling the right mix of in-house talent and virtual marketing partners, you can actually use new methods to augment what you’re doing now in ways that deliver more leads for your marketing dollar, while reducing your risk.

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Additional Resources 9 Signs You’re Ready for Outsourced Marketing In-house vs. Outsourced Marketing Agency [Infographic]

The Inbound Marketer’s Dilemma: In-house or Outsourced? [ebook]

Does Your Business Need an Outsourced Marketing Agency?

Why Should I Hire an Inbound Marketing Agency?

About Sensible Marketing There are so many aspects to successfully implementing inbound and traditional marketing. How do the pieces work together? How do you manage it all? How do you determine what to focus on? How do you bring sanity to marketing?

These are questions we frequently get from our clients and the answers are not always simple or straightforward. That's why we created Sensible Marketing - to make sense of all of the moving parts and bring them together in a cohesive marketing strategy.

Our inbound marketing strategy works because we use very specific processes that take the ambiguity out of marketing, without removing the creativity.

Our boutique marketing agency works with B2B clients across the U.S. Learn more at www.sensiblemarketing.com.

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