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Thousands of marketers registered for our live digital B2B marketing webinar, sponsored by GoToWebinar.
Below are answers from the panellists to a selection of the hundreds of questions you submitted, which we did not have time to address during the live presentation.
Nick Baggot, CIM digital marketing course director
I recently read a blog on LinkedIn where people were discussing the difficulties of gathering statistics about your audience on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Do you have any tips on capturing this information?
There is not a perfect solution. Facebook and Twitter provide limited information, but there are tools available that can help you. In fact, monitoring social media and online PR is challenging, not just Twitter and Facebook. There are many sentiment-tracking tools available that scan the web, including social media, for mentions of your brand or products and produce reports. Most of these are subscription based, such as Radian 6 and Buzz Metrics. They are not perfect, but provide a wider view than just individual social media mentions. If you are in B2B, you may well get more mentions on blogs than in social media, so you should keep your analytics as wide as possible.
We have a Facebook page and my boss wants us to keep it very bland, with no mentions of client names – she is worried that our competitors will see them. For example, we have to say “pharma company in Swindon” rather than Pfizer. Doesn't that fly in the face of the open nature of social media?
Yes it does, however you also need to be aware of commercial sensitivities. You need to treat social media as you would any PR. So if you need client permission to mention them in PR, then you should also get it for social. I would be driven by client issues rather than competitor issues. I am sure there are many other ways that a competitor can use to find out who your clients are (they only need to ask one of your employees for an interview for example). So if your clients don’t have an issue with it, then I would be as specific as you can be, without giving away any commercially sensitive information. If in doubt, check with your clients first. Social media is all about content; you need to have an opinion, a view of some kind. Bland content will probably defeat the object of doing it. So try to persuade your boss to ask your clients if they have any objections, in fact whether you can help them by talking about them in your PR. Find a story or two which helps your client relationships and the benefits with your client should outweigh any information that a competitor could use. If you are helping your clients, why would they want to switch, even if they are approached by one of your competitors.
If you operate in both B2B and B2C markets, can you combine your social media approach or should you have a separate presence for each market?
This is a good question. It depends on whether you have different products, brands and distribution networks. My advice would be that if you operate in different markets, whether the markets are B2B and B2C, or UK and abroad, or high-end and low-end, then you should have different tailored communications for each audience. Therefore the logic is that you need different communications channels. In B2B you may focus on blogging and Twitter for example, with a B2B Facebook page just being a hub that drives viewers to the blog and tweets or the consumer Facebook page. Content should be relevant and specific for whichever markets you operate in. Your social media activity should be thought-leading, using whichever expert you have in your organisation who has credibility in that sector. Bear in mind that this person may not be the marcomms person. It could be the technical expert, engineer or sales person, for example.
Tim Watson, operations director, Emailvision
In a B2B world how do we best engage with opted-in customers who haven’t interacted with our e-mails (show no opens or clicks) for a given period of time?
Firstly, just because they have not been tracked as clicked or opened, doesn’t mean to say they are not reading the subject lines or indeed the content. This is because open tracking can be blocked. In a B2B environment you will be likely to have more information about some of your subscribers. Segment the disengaged subscribers. Contact the high potential value prospects or high value customers by phone or another channel. Your sales or account managers will hopefully be talking to them anyway, so include as part of the conversation a question about what they think of your e-mails. With the lower value subscribers or for those for who you have no other contact channel, then change your e-mail message and your subject line. Ask for feedback on your e-mails, or provide a simpler and lower cost reason for them to click and engage with you.
For automatic nurturing e-mail campaigns, what would you recommend is reasonable timing for sending e-mails? One a week?
While many people say they don’t want frequent e-mails, they actually mean they don’t want frequent low value e-mails. Nobody minds e-mails that provide lots of value, even daily. Consider the length of your sales cycle and plan content over that period. Create content that would be helpful to your prospect immediately. That is something they can learn, use or gain from without yet making a purchase. Think about how frequently you would phone or knock on their door. Would you do it weekly? Then send weekly. E-mail is less intrusive, so it could be higher.
Do you think customers are being savvier around lead capture? Our inboxes are becoming ever more loaded with sales messages from suppliers. Do you think this is becoming a turn off? I understand it's a value share, however often the information the customer receives is packed full of sales messages and really contains little value.
I think a clue to the answer is in the question here! “Packed full of sales messages and really contains little value”. Those messages will suffer the delete key quickly. The e-mails that help to make the reader smarter, to be more efficient or to save time, such as with insightful tips relevant to their role or a round-up of industry trends, will have better chances. The value content supports some sell content.
Roger Courville, Principal, 1080 Group
What are the typical ratios of people attending webinars who are real potential leads rather than competitors, students and so on?
I've never seen a broad study of this, and I know that exact effectiveness of any programme is something organisations often keep closely guarded. I generally advise clients to use their current metrics as a baseline. If you know that website leads, for instance, have an X per cent good to Y per cent bad ratio, that's a good start. Better, if you have any other direct-response mechanisms you are using (such as using e-mail to drive e-book downloads), start there – they will be a good indicator of how your list and other factors are performing, and it's likely that your webinar response will be similar.
Is a webinar appropriate for all levels of audience? Would you recommend one for chief executives and directors?
When a client asks me that, I always respond by asking them how well two things are working for them with regard to senior prospects: conference calls and seminars. A webinar is simply a communication medium, and if you know your audience responds to conference calls (a similar synchronous but remote communication) or seminars (which generally implies a format of content), the webinar should do wonderfully. The only study I know of on that topic is a decade old, but it did find that senior executives appreciate content they can access without travel. One thing to consider: shorter, topically specific webinars – don't assume they always have to be an hour. I've seen successful campaigns promising a focused 20-minute topic.
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