Every facet of the B2B sector is now touched by technology. The marketing activities your business undertakes have a range of software and hosted solutions available. These applications can enable your business to sustain a commercial relationship with its customers, and gain new market alliances that themselves can be maintained via new technology.
Geoff Hurst, marketing director of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, says, “The key is to try to tailor any technology you buy to your specific needs. There’s a vast range of applications that will give you data, but data isn’t good enough unless you can turn it into information. Even then, information on its own is only useful if you can transform it into insight.”
Tim Norman, Northern European sales director for SDL Tridion, believes pushing forward with your technology installations is essential, but caution is also highly recommended. “Fail fast and fail quick!” he says. “You have no real way of knowing how your partners, customers, suppliers and regulators want to engage, or even whether they do, so don’t build monoliths that cost lots of money, take months and may fail. If the concept fails with your audience, move on.”
General technology sectors such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), Business Information (BI) systems, Customer Reference Programs (CRP) and Media Relationship Management all have their own strengths that must be carefully evaluated. The market sectors that your enterprise trades within should give you clear guidance to reveal what technologies your business requires to remain competitive.
What has become clear is that the plethora of technology available in the marketing sector is now a rich and diverse environment. This enables your business to closely align its marketing requirements with the platforms that are available. With a clear strategy for implementation, and calculated ROI, all B2B enterprises can successfully identify marketing technologies to help them weather the economic downturn.
To help in this process, we’ve identified and profiled some core tech options.
Technology: CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Key vendors: Salesforce.com, BScaler, Entelllium, RightNow, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Soffront, C2CRM and Aplicor
With so many platforms available choosing the right vendor and product that can deliver the customer interactions you are looking for is crucial. CRM systems are available with a wide variety of features that your business should closely scrutinise. Matching the CRM system’s capabilities with your existing systems is vitally important to ensure a smooth implementation. And as your CRM is customer facing, test a new system thoroughly before you roll this out to your live business.
Social networking is now becoming an important component of all CRM systems. B2B organisations will need to make their web presence more open with systems such as Google’s Open Social leading the way.
Clare Millar, managing director at Brightwire, comments, “In terms of CRM, businesses need to manage their customer base and sales funnel much more effectively than before. Customer acquisition, retention and loyalty are at stake in a marketplace that is becoming more cost conscientious and technologically savvy. As such, CRM systems allow a business to enhance sales force effectiveness by managing and tracking new sales opportunities, improve customer relations by implementing smarter marketing techniques, and provide clarity by enabling full visibility and auditing of customer accounts.”
Technology: Content management systems
Key vendors: Sitekit, Ektron, RedDot, Emojo, Hyve, Typo3, Third Eye Vision and Contribute CS4
Traditionally, CMS platforms have been used to manage the content of websites. Large businesses have benefited from the massive economies that a CMS system can bring to their enterprises, which often have vast websites that need updating sometimes on an hourly basis. In the B2B sector, website updating is still the core reason to implement a CMS system, but these platforms have evolved.
Today you can use an integrated CMS system to update content on just about any digital platform. The ability to automate what can often be a labour intensive operation should not be underestimated. Set-up costs can be high with some more sophisticated packages, but the market now has a range of options to choose from. Look closely at your needs and match these to a CMS platform that is effective and efficient is the core advice when buying in this technology sector.
Technology: BI (Business Intelligence)
Key vendors: LexisNexis, OneSource, Factiva(SalesWorks), Hoovers (a D&B Company), Experian and BvDEP (Mint)
BI systems can offer a superb way of gaining not only insight into a customer base, but they can also offer a means of vastly improving how you utilise the information that is currently available in your business. BI systems are now available for all businesses, no matter their size. What was once a decision that few smaller businesses had to make is now firmly on every business’s agenda.
But take care with the installation. BI systems can be a great asset, but only when they benefit your existing structure. The equation is simple: the more your business knows about its customers, the more effective your sales team will be. With BI systems being constantly developed, this technology sector will continue to expand. Expect to see more niche markets becoming components within the leading BI platforms over the next few years, including event management and social networking.
Roger Hodson, marketing director at D&B, says, “Currently the single biggest driver for the business information industry is accessibility – especially being able to access the data you need through the systems you rely on. Advances in technology mean that suppliers are now able to instantly deliver up-to-date, accurate, extensive information online for customers to use in their familiar applications. As customers become more demanding about ease of use and access to richer data, business information suppliers, which naturally want to get their solutions into as many businesses as possible, are stepping up to the plate and providing that integration.”
Technology: CRP (Customer Reference Programs)
Key vendors: Newsweaver, Concep, Confirmit, Netrank, Reference Sites, Boulder Logic and eDigitalResearch
For the B2B enterprise with a specialised audience, customer referencing can offer a huge amount of credibility to a business. As contracts in the B2B space can have a high value, it is important for buyers to make the right decisions when choosing partners to trade with. Personal recommendations via customer referencing is one way this can be achieved.
What began as simply a request for current and past customer data is now being interrogated with a focus that requires every B2B organisation to raise its game and provide potential partners with detailed referencing material as one of the foundations of their contract bid. Also evaluate what your business’s core drivers are moving into this market. This will guide you to the correct platform and how this can be integrated into your existing B2B marketing activity.
Technology: ESP (Email Service Providers)
Key vendors: Concep, Newsweaver, Experian, eCircle, Goodmail, Alchemy Worx, Adestra, Lyris and Mail Central
Many businesses see email marketing as a way of slashing their advertising budgets. A wholesale move to email marketing should, however, be avoided as email marketing should only be one thread of your overall marketing campaign. Choosing the right emailing marketing platform to adopt is a crucial decision you should take very seriously as an inadequate platform can drain resources from your business and potentially damage customer relationships.
How you handle the creation and mailing of your marketing collateral will be determined by how much control you want to retain over each step in the process, and how much of the email marketing mechanism you want to keep in-house.
Traditional email marketing uses a pre-selected address list that the ESP will tailor to your needs and then design and send your message. Today, we are seeing a move away from these systems towards Application Service Providers (ASPs) that can take a mailing list that your business provides, and handle every aspect of your email campaign from list management to spam blocking analysis and tracking.
Paul Bates, managing director of StrongMail, says, “The most common pitfall occurs before the marketing technology is even implemented. Believe it or not, many marketers don’t have a clean and easily modifiable database of target recipients. This means its difficult for them to make unsubscribe updates and almost impossible to keep track of comprehensive marketing metadata – such as recent purchases, birthdays or anniversaries and hobbies. The more current your list, the more relevant you can make your emails – and the more likely you are to achieve cross-sells, up-sells and impulse buys.”
Technology: Media Relations Management
Key vendors: News Wire, Vocus, Cision, Gorkana, Durrants, PRCA and RealWire
Media Relations Management technology can certainly help all businesses in the B2B sector better manage their marketing activity. Mounting campaigns and tracking effectiveness can be achieved; but with a lack of cohesive standards for systems can be judged against, your choice of system will be largely determined by your own particular needs. Evaluating competing systems is possible to a degree, but it’s important your business puts any PR technology into the context of its wider PR and marketing activities.
One of the problems with PR technology systems is the methodologies they use. Currently, there are no industry standard methodologies that analytical systems use to return their metric results. A set of standards is being formulated at the moment, but the market is fragmented to the point where you should look closely at how a technology you are considering investing in actually generates the ROI or KPI for the sectors you’re interested in tracking.
The PR technologies available to your business today must always be implemented in context and with a well-thought-out strategy to ensure you understand what your business will gain from implementing the new systems. Often overlooked is the fact that PR today is still driven by interpersonal relationships that no IT system can duplicate.
Technology: DAM (Digital Asset Management)
Key vendors: CompanyNet, InBrand, Software, Be the Brand, Interbrand, AssetBank, Resourcebase, Brandworkz and Extenis
Closely associated with brand management systems, DAM is often used as a catch all to illustrate how a digital platform can help a B2B enterprise cement and develop its market presence and create collateral for its marketing campaigns that themselves may be operated by a Media Relations Management system. DAM technology at its heart is a database of your brand and marketing assets. In a typical B2B company these digital assets could be resident in many different areas of your business. DAM applications streamline the creation of brand based assets and vastly improve the efficiency of marketing campaign creation.
Generally speaking there are three basic types of asset management system:
1. The first and most expensive offer a complete enterprise wide management system.
2. The second type of system is better suited to smaller organisations as they are easier to set up and manage. These systems usually only use one database, so if you need to manage a wide range of marketing collateral for instance from one central office, these systems are ideal.
3. The third type of system is hosted asset management. What this means in practice is that all of the digital assets you want to manage will be held again on a database, but this will usually be hosted on the suppliers systems. This type of asset management is usually the cheapest to set up, but you will have to commit to at least a one year minimum hosting contract. Look at your last brand exercise or marketing campaign. If these proved to be a nightmare to organise and set up, a DAM system could be the ideal solution.
Technology: Web Analytics
Key vendors: FuseStats, Google Analytics, Nedstat, WebtraffIQ, WebTrends Unica’s NetInsight, Clickdensity and OneStat Pro
Web analytics are akin to auditing a shop window or store layout in the tactile world. If you know which areas of your store are attracting the most paying customers you can develop those sites and increase your turnover and profit. Online you can perform a similar feat with web analytics that enable you to track how the pages on your website are being used by visitors. A simple relocation of a promotional banner can produce significant upswings in interest that directly connect to more lucrative business.
As B2B companies don’t normally have the high levels of traffic that B2C regular receive; costs tend to be much lower for B2B enterprises. The decision whether the analytical systems are hosted or bought in-house can also have a major impact on costs. If you have a mature IT infrastructure with the staff to support this, in-house web analytics can be very cost-effective.
Clearly search marketing is where the vast majority of analysis will take place. The rise of Google AdWords can’t be ignored. As a central marketing tool for many B2B enterprises, analysing the effectiveness of this marketing channel is essential. However, try and analyse all of your web traffic as a whole and not in isolation.
