As marketers come under increasing pressure to justify their budgets, they are turning to technology to help measure and demonstrate the return on investment of campaigns.
In an economic downturn, B2B marketers can struggle to reach key decision makers, something that makes generating leads and acquiring new customers that much harder.
The keynote speaker at this year’s TFM&A event (see p34) is BBC marketing’s head of technology Mark Kelleher. He says B2B marketers face tough challenges ahead and must use technology to their advantage or risk losing out to their competitors.
“In many B2B sectors we are seeing fragmentation and increased competition, but technology allows you to market more effectively in an era of cost-reduction,” says Kelleher.
Andrew Basham, founder of independent B2B marketing agency Basham Business Communications, says technology is helping him to compete against larger agencies when offering services such as graphic design and advertising. He uses integrated small business software from Microsoft to manage a team of remotely-based experienced independent marketing specialists. “Technology allows me to be very cost competitive – by operating a remote team we do not carry the in-house overheads,” he says.
When it comes to technology trends every business needs an effective online presence. Indeed, some of the most dramatic technological evolutions in recent years have come in online marketing.
As the downturn tightens its grip, more marketers have migrated from a cost-based online marketing strategy, for example, to one that is more profit-driven.
Pay-per-click
This is already prompting extra investment in pay-per-click (PPC) software. In fact, when it comes to lead generation, PPC is effectively an online version of the traditional trade press advert with a coupon or reader enquiry form and a reward.
Online experts estimate that B2B activity represents about 40 per cent of the overall PPC market.
Companies are installing technology that removes the traditional B2B marketing silos and replaces them with an integrated solution that helps marketers with processes they might struggle with. This could be planning and budgeting or campaign performance management and measurement.
One company providing integrated marketing software is Alterian. Its CEO, David Eldridge, is urging companies to ensure the money they do have to spend works harder.
“Companies are not making an effective use of the channels already available to them, such as their website,” says Eldridge.
He adds: “Many businesses are only paying lip service to the idea of ‘interacting not interrupting’ and are not making their website engaging or relevant.”
Campaign management
All B2B activity is coming under the microscope and marketers are being held accountable for the success or failure of specific campaigns.
In response, campaign management technology has effectively become the decision engine for many marketing teams keen to demonstrate a strong ROI from what they do.
In a downturn it becomes even more important that a consistent brand message is conveyed across different channels. If not, the creativity involved in planning any activity can be wasted or at least diluted.
Campaign management software is helping marketers to manage the relationships they have with corporate marketing and procurement teams, field marketing staff, suppliers and external marketing agencies.
Equally, the technology designed to run the marketing department’s back office, technically known as Marketing Resource Management (MRM), is also proving crucial as companies attempt to measure the ROI from their marketing spend.
B2B marketers have begun to realise the importance of ensuring that any MRM technology is integrated.
It is also important that any decision to purchase new software takes into account future organisational and process changes and that technology is not bought simply to automate existing ways of working.
Chris Hopwood, managing director of MRM vendor Marketingunity, says we are seeing an even deeper collaborative approach to how marketing technology is used.
He believes this is benefiting every internal and external party touched by a specific marketing campaign.
“Most B2B activity involves multiple companies and different computer systems, so each exchange of data between them introduces delay, administration overheads, data re-keying and risk of error,” he says.
Marketingunity’s software collates data from a variety of sources and provides prompts and reminders to ensure everyone is delivering on time and there is a full audit trail.
One of its clients is agency Iceberg Marketing, which supplies print management and marketing services. Managing director Simon Knibbs says being able to bring different forms of data together speeds up the approval process because clients can review, request changes, approve and reject artwork online.
Customer relationship management
There is a demand within organisations for marketing programmes to show a quick return. This is why a collaborative line of attack when it comes to technology is also helping with B2B CRM strategies.
CRM systems need to evolve as customer loyalty becomes strained in the B2B marketplace.
It is a reality that for many companies it is price rather than service that is driving business negotiations. Of course, customer relationships stretch across sales, customer service and finance as well as marketing so, again, investing in an integrated approach to technology has been crucial.
Today’s CRM software allows marketers to communicate with their clients and collate insightful data revealing how much revenue is received from each one and how much it costs to generate that revenue in terms of marketing budget. This helps marketers plan future activity aimed at particular business decision makers.
Enterprise relationship management
As well as CRM technology, there is growing investment in Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) software which focuses more on business networking. ERM technology includes online networks such as LinkedIn that marketers are using to find potential clients, service providers and business opportunities.
One provider with a strategic partnership with LinkedIn is LexisNexis Interaction. Its software is popular amongst B2B professional services organisations such as law and accountancy firms.
The software gathers the collective knowledge and experience of all the partners and staff within a company by tracking who people have had meetings and email contact with, and makes this information available to the marketing team.
“The data tells the marketers what relationship, if any, the firm has with potential clients,” says LexisNexis Interaction director Daniel Von Weihe.
Event technology
Business events such as seminars are also benefiting from investment in technology to boost attendance figures and encourage more interactivity. This can be invaluable when trying to convey brand messages to an influential business audience.
There is template-based technology from companies such as LexisNexis Interaction which enables a firm’s various offices around the world to share details of different online events and their timings. This should mean events are not duplicated unnecessarily and are better attended.
Meanwhile, accountancy firm Ernst & Young is employing touch screen technology so audience members can express their views and opinions openly or via a multiple choice option using tablet handsets.
Lead generation and conversion
The technology companies themselves have realised they must evolve too if they are to win new business from B2B marketers.
Omniture is traditionally a web analytics firm but it has decided to partner with pan-European marketing agency Curious Digital. Together they are jointly promoting new software designed specifically to generate business leads and boost conversion rates.
Its Multi-Variate Testing (MVT) software ensures that email, search and advertising campaigns – as well as a company’s website – become lead-generation channels.
It means the content on a company’s website landing page or ecommerce store changes depending on the time of day a customer visits, how they came to the site and what products they looked at during any previous visits.
One of the problems with this area of marketing technology in the past has been that international B2B campaigns have tended to be centrally controlled.
Adrian James, client services director at Curious Digital, argues that with systems like MVT, local field marketers still have control over their regional website.
They can upload relevant trade offers, pricing testimonials and case studies, and can even make subtle changes to the website’s design.
This could include altering the colour of the call-to-action button if research reveals this will have an impact on leads and conversions in a particular territory.
Multilingual considerations
There is a feeling that despite the technology available to marketers many companies are losing out on business because they are not doing enough to attract enquiries from non-English speaking executives around the world.
Greig Holbrook, managing director of Oban Multilingual, says that about 70 per cent of Internet users do not speak English.
He says it is crucial search trends and specific keywords used in different countries are also taken into account.
“On one client campaign for business travel into the UK we discovered that in India many business people search using the phrase ‘LHR’, but no other country uses this term,” says Holbrook.
The progression of marketing technology will never be halted and applications now exist to capture every interaction a business has with its suppliers, retailers and external agencies.
Whether that is offline or online, inbound or outbound, finding the right software to help demonstrate whether a B2B campaign is working or not was never more important.