Digital Marketing Gets A Boost In 2009 B2B Budgets

April 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

While I was hanging out at the Forrester Marketing Forum last week, I missed a milestone. The report I mentioned in my blog about the impact the economy is having on B2B budgets popped out of the editing queue and made it onto the Web site.

Maybe not so surprising to many of you – but reassuring perhaps? – is the finding that digital marketing tactics are gaining B2B marketing budget share because of the rocky economy. Over 40% of the 317 marketers surveyed said they would allot more marketing dollars to online channels like the corporate Web site, search marketing, video, Webinars, and email.

B2B Marketers Turn To Digital Tactics In 2009

B2B Marketers Turn To Digital Tactics In 2009

 

But here’s the thing.  B2B marketers have said this for the past three years. Since August 2006, when I published my first report on the state of B2B marketing called “B2B Marketing Needs A Makeover – Now,” marketers say they plan to funnel budget dollars online and away from traditional broadcast channels. But the evidence shows they continue to spend the lion’s share on trade shows and direct mail.

Most B2B marketers cling to traditional channels because 1) executives like them, 2) sales complain if marketing tries to stop using them, and 3) measuring the impact of various marketing tactics – over long B2B selling cycles – is difficult. The lesson here? Tuning the marketing mix is an ongoing challenge. Everyone struggles with it, so get more systematic about how you measure marketing mix results. Making those precious budget dollars pay off requires focusing on programs, not campaigns.

Conventional Tactics Get The Lion's Share of Budgets

Conventional Tactics Get The Lion's Share of Budgets

To make an integrated, programmatic approach to marketing work, you should:

1) Lay a solid foundation online. Your Web site, email, and search marketing provide the base to build digital marketing programs on. Use personas and scenarios to help buyers achieve goals online.  Use email to continue conversations, not start them. And profile buyers’ information-seeking behavior and motivations to master keyword advertising and organic rankings.  Only when search, email, and Web marketing churn out qualified and more measurable leads do you get to experiment with other, emerging media.

2) Peel of a little of that field marketing spending.  Cutting out a trade show or two can counter steep budget cuts. But don’t make these decisions without involving field marketing and sales. Use a financial model – not conjecture — to decide what gets the ax.  Show field and sales skeptics how blending in digital tactics can drive interest and excitement for little additional spend. This also helps them get behind the cuts if they think they are getting better in return.

3) Structure budgets to drive community interaction and returns. Instead of building budgets around campaigns and launches, focus on business outcomes like “build thought leadership with IT managers virtualizing the data center” to align digital and conventional spending programs. Showing that marketing spend shortens sales cycles, produces better qualified leads, and reduces costs will help you preserve marketing budgets.

Want to know more?  Join me Monday, May 18, 2009, 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Eastern time (16:00-17:00 UK time) for my Forrester Teleconference where I will talk about this research in some more detail.

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Orlando Marketing Forum: Day 1

April 23, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Only Shar VanBoskirk can open her forum speech by singing the Mickey Mouse song! Welcome to Orlando everyone. Shar’s keynote presentation, as is her style, was exceptionally entertaining this morning.  (Post-forum note: Shar’s speech received the highest score ever at the event.  Congrats, Shar, it was exceptional!) A tad more B2C focused, for my taste, but she told me later that a large industrial products and adhesives manufacturer backed out from allowing Forrester to use an example that illustrates Shar’s key point: accessible innovations don’t have to be eath-shattering to be effective. (They are making interactive marketing a corporate wide priority and they have a number of projects in the works but wern’t ready for press at this time — stay tuned.) Most can have real business impact you can easily pursue from within your role as a business marketer.

How do you do this? Shar outlined four ways to innovate in marketing during this economic downturn. Each lets marketers approach new tactics by making them seem more familiar and less risky:

 1) Enhance. Sovereign Bank integrated email with their student loan direct mail and, according to Shar’s calculations based on available DMA data, saved over $173,000 since full-cost email is about $4 to execute versus $26 for the physical version. You don’t have to completely replace your campaigns with cheaper digital or social tactics, but the enhancing your existing programs with a digital element can give you broader reach and more visibility.

2) Include. Get your customers involved in your marketing. HP hosted a contest that asked home office and hobbyists “what do you have to say?” As part of the campaign they launched a wiki that helped customers express how they use HP online tools to easily create and publish digital content in new ways. HP used this information and contest participation to create specific offers and messages that appeal more directly to the wiki contributors.

3) Empathize. Show your customers that you care about them and have walked in their shoes. Comcast created the Comcastcares Twitter handle — and regularly monitors Twitter traffic — to not only keep ahead of complaint trends, but to show customers that they hear their frustrations and want to help solve problems using the channels the customers themselves want to use to communicate.

4) Iterate. You won’t get it right the first time.  That’s ok. Best Buy built the Remix API so partners and retailers can include product info on their Web sites more easily.  They knew retailers use their brand, situations are bound to arise where the brand might be abused a bit — intentionallly or accidentally. But the benefit of “distributing” their brand through a broader community — and the preference and engagement that comes along with this interaction — outweighs the potential downside. Best Buy’s example of interating with partners works for B2B marketers like United Stationers and CDW as well.

I’m spending a lot of 1-1 time with clients like Leopard Communications, Orange Business Services, Saepio Technologies, N-tara, IBM Americas, IBM Global Services, Ascentium Corporation, EffectiveUI, Quaero, TFC, Tideway, Xerox Global Services, and Silverpop exchanging views on marketing in the current economy and the expanding use of the social Web.   I think they would all agree that innovating through enhancement, iteration, empathizing, and including help marketers gain deeper connections with customers.

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See You At Forrester’s Marketing Forum – April 23, 24 in Orlando

April 22, 2009 — Laura Ramos
Forrester Markting Forum 2009: Orlando, Florida

Forrester Markting Forum 2009: Orlando, Florida

 

 

Tomorrow marks the start of Forrester’s third annual Marketing Forum.  I am thrilled to be presenting here on three key topics, but I have to admit that this forum still feels more like “Consumer Forum Redux” for my B2B-centric tastes. (Forrester hosts a  forum targeting retail, CPG, customer experience professionals in the fall — and has for years. I feel like there’s more content and topic overlap between the two events than there should be to strongly differentitate them.)

Overall, Forrester does a decent job of addressing B2C and B2B audiences in a single venue. It’s intimate: 300+ attendees and we invite our FLB members to spend quality time together the day before the conference kicks off. Maybe the problem is this: I’m not seeing a lot of events, forums, or community sites dedicated exclusively to the CMO/executive marketer in B2B. Where is the content and interactions that deal with issues like fitting social media in the B2B marketing mix, sales alignment/support best practices, managing demand and nurturing leads, measuring marketing impact when a sales force is involved, and setting marketing strategy in a product-driven environment?   I’m not seeing much; are you?

Here are some of the session topics we will offer (well, me, in particular) to benefit B2B marketers:

1) How B2B Direct Marketers Are Weathering The Current Economic Storm. My buddy Dave Frankland, who covers database marketing services and direct marketing best practices, and  I are teaming up to put this question to top marketers from United Stationers, Avocent, Analog Devices, and Microsoft. We’ll tackle an interesting blend of tech, non-tech, enterprise and SMB issues in this discussion.

2) The Social Technographics of Business and IT Decision Makers.  Oliver Young and I will take a deeper dive into the tech buyer social behavior survey we ran earlier this year, that I blogged about previously. This session looks to answer the “so what” question for B2B marketers wanting to know how to engage with socially active technology buyers. (We spent a full day with a group of B2B marketers today working through the ins and outs of setting social strategy.  Too bad the workshop didn’t FOLLOW the forum session… I’ll work to get that right the next time.)

3) Community Marketing: A New Discipline For Shaping Business Marketing Leadership.  Presenting with Peter Burris, I think I’m most excited about this presentation. Pete and I will look at how social media, and the social Web, will reshape the “4 Ps” of marketing and what B2B marketers should do now to capitalize on these fundamental changes and come out ahead when the economy turns around.

4) Catching The Next Wave: Emerging Markets And SMBs Will Rise From the Sands.  Jennifer Belissent and Tim Harmon are teaming up to look at why non-US, non-Euro, and SMB firms will be the first to break out of the current, worldwide economic slump.  Interesting implications for B2B marketers who target emerging geographies and firms with less than 100 employees.

5) Strategic Sales Enablement: Rethinking Traditional Siloed Product, Marketing, and Sales Relationships To Compete In the New Economy.  Hold onto your hats: Scott Santucci and Eric Brown team up to argue that marketing should better engineer sales conversations that help close business faster and easier.  Probably a talk the VP of Sales will appreciate more than the CMO, but the perspective is particularly provocative for firms with long-standing sales/marketing conflicts.

The one key note that I would love to see (but will likely miss due to customer 1-1 meetings) is Craig Dewar, Director of Community Marketing at Microsoft, talk about Driving B2B Customer Engagement Through Community. I hope his content turns out to be as thought-provoking and insightful as it sounds. It risks becoming cheerleading form yet another community marketing enthusiast hyping that every company should create its own communities as the “the future” of firm-to-buyer communications.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll capture my reactions to the forum here and give you a taste of the event from my (atypical?) B2B perspective. You can compare it to posts from my Forrester colleagues who will blog their impressions as well.  Or follow the proceedings on Twitter by searching for the #FMF09 tweets.

In the meantime, let me know which venues, associations, blogs, community pages, etc. you find particularly useful for the B2B executive marketer. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this topic and how Forrester could better capture attention in this arena.

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