Summary:
The primary objective of a corporate website is to generate sales, create leads, increase brand recognition and establish customer loyalty. According to Jakob Nielsen, B2B sites earned a mere 58% success rate (measured as the percentage of time users accomplished their tasks on a site). In contrast, mainstream websites have a substantially higher success rate of 66%. We always recommend a careful step-by-step approach for building a successful site.

Step 1: Strategy and planning
Every good site starts with planning and strategy, followed by an in-depth Information Architecture (IA) analysis that drives design and usability.

Step 2: Information Architecture
The IA puts a high level plan in place that outlines the main and secondary navigations, the site map, on-site search, and any real estate required by each site element.

Step 3: User-centered design and usability
The IA’s recommendations drive design and usability. They lay the foundation for designers and give them a solid structure to which they can apply their creative and usability skills.

Step 4: Few elementary principles that apply to parsing and presenting technical information:
Don’t be stingy.
Reveal information: Hiding information behind registration barriers are usually not a good idea. It is still strongly recommended that you try to acquire the contact details as part of the lead generation process, but you should reveal enough information to gain

Group information wisely
Don’t put your model codes on the homepage. Instead, give users product families and groups that are based on what they will understand.

Show me the difference.
When presenting technical information, they key is to show benefits and differences. Comparison charts are an excellent way to give engineers a tool to make a choice between multiple, similar products

Step 6: Persuasive Copywriting
Good copywriting is a key to turning visitors into customers.

Direct Marketing for B2B in digital scenario

Even though businesses have been utilizing Direct Marketing for long, it is widely believed that not all B2B marketers have been able to fully leverage the growing clout of digital capabilities available today in the marketplace.
The existing digital environment today presents opportunities to convert the prospects into customers via a carefully crafted digital plan - listening, supporting and delivering along the customers purchase cycle.  This in turn results in generating referrals and plentiful opportunities to deliver a positive return on marketing spend.

Even though more and more users are spending large amount of their time online, how many B2B businesses do we know who have a full-proof plan to market their products online? How many businesses are able to create an integrated offline and online customer experience for its prospects? How many businesses do you know who can confidently track their customer thru his purchase cycle?

Today there are ample tools and technologies that will allow you to do this successfully.
However a strategic approach is required to understand how to apply, target and optimize the process of marketing across the various steps of customers purchase.

To understand the various tactical digital initiatives that one can pursue, we should first understand the general process. The Go-To –Market process for any B2B client can be broadly classified into a 7 step process:

1. Understanding Customer Needs
2. Communication Message
3. Fulfillment (information)
4. Generating and Qualifying Leads
5. Transaction (online or offline)
6. Relationship Management
7. Referrals

In order to drive a perfectly aligned marketing program across the various stages, the quintessential requirement is to have a tracking, measurement and reporting system in place.

Below are some of the tactics that can be utilized across the different stages.

Understanding Customer Needs:
 A brief from a client is the first bit of information that can be used to prepare a basic strategic draft and define one’s approach to the problem

Other than the information derived from client brief, your website analytics  and automated customer surveys can also play a part in defining a customer’s needs.

Communication Message:
You’re messaging in terms of creative and copy is equally important in closing the loop. By automatically serving a different message to your various target segments you can see visible increase in conversions and leads. Moreover, A/B testing of various creative messaging options or landing pages can help you successfully optimize your creative messaging and increase interest and engagement.

Fulfillment:
All users are searching for a certain set of information or content – it may be in form of a certain kind of whitepaper, or request for information or even a free trial. Fulfillment of any form of information draws the customer closer to eventual sale. An automated system that keeps track of user information consumption patterns will help you in re-targeting your customer and allow one to provide value to the prospect.
 
Generating and Qualifying Leads:
Lead generation and qualifying them as MQPs (marketing qualified) prospects are another process that can be carried out online or via a call-center. SEM or search engine marketing today is one of the most important lead generating tools out there. With more and more people dependent on Search Engines to acquire information, the search engines form a favorite hunting ground for such activity.
Webinars, Database driven marketing campaigns, Newsletters and online events they all form a powerful set of tactics to generate leads.
The other not so direct yet powerful ways of generating leads online can be Blogs, Social Media and Virals.

Transactions
As and when a transaction occurs, your prospect converts into a customer. To be able to track this transition and define the value of the transaction will allow you to tier your customer and know more about the various points of interception that he experienced. These in turn rolls back into the marketing campaign planning process and optimize future acquisitions.
Having a digital way of connecting leads to transactions and then data-mine to drill down on those transactions will provide you with powerful behavioral data of your customers.
Your messaging and treatment met to the customer at this point will make way for future referrals.

Relationship Management
Once a prospect is converted into a customer an equally important task of managing relationship with customer begins. Loyalty programs, rewards and recognition and a knowing more about your customer will allow you to build that relationship with your customer and provide value to them.
The emphasis on a relationship management is on one-on-one marketing – that knows your customer to an extent that you can tailor make your offering for him.

Referrals
Referrals are the greatest validation of a satisfied customer. Referrals can be in form of leveraging a testimonial of an expert who also happens to be a client or even someone who can pitch in with a good word for a Prospect.

In some products Referrals can also be used to generate a buzz or awareness and increase the interest levels of the prospects.

Even though the above describes the perfect set-up where one is tracking and end-to end  customer behavior thru his purchase cycle, a focused campaign aimed at any of the steps in a purchase cycle can be instrumental in generating leads and qualified marketing prospects and shortening the  time it takes to convert a prospect into a customer. With more and more people seeking that information online, Direct Marketing is going all Digital in coming days, much sooner than we think.

Product marketing as we have known all this time is changing with the growing influence of the digital world. The typical AARRR model of Dave Mclure has already been affected and is very well corroborated via numerous facebook applications, where the users are referring others without even using the applications ( read ‘referrals’ taking place without even ‘activation’, as opposed to the other way around). In this current scenario is your organization leveraging the changing dynamics  to market its products?

A typical product marketing starts with acquiring customers and drives well into establishing a relationship with its customers to culminate into Revenue. At various points of intercept in this cycle lies the heart of product marketing.

At Edynamic , our  strategic understanding of  the digital domain combined with our creative ability to plan, measure and execute our tactics allows us to flawlessly execute throughout a typical  product marketing process.
It is our this ability that can help a client gain that  visibility ,awareness, brand acceptance and strength that is needed to succeed in this competitive world

Some of the broad tactics that can be applied at various stages are :