That's an interesting one - I do a fair bit of work in B2B and I find that so do around half the participants on courses I run, so it's a shame there's not more coverage of it since many have this challenge.
I think companies who do this well use the following tactics, which together form an online B2B engagement lead generation strategy:
1. Understand the relative importance of different customer and intermediary types involved in making the decision.
2. Provide segmented content to answer their questions and objections, compare with competitors and help them sell your solution to colleagues.
3. Offer different lead generation, engagement devices, and tools for the different audiences and different stages in the process (and promote them through offline communications and targeted PPC campaigns).
4. Make it easy for them to contact the right person via the web.
5. Define a communications strategy and lead maturation funnel to follow-up via e-mail, the web, phone, and mail channels in an intelligent way i.e. monitoring customer actions as they read specific pages, download papers or click on links in e-mail to discover their intent and degree of engagement.
Who does it well?
www.salesforce.com - landing page follow-up
www.omniture.com
www.alterian.com - see segmented content in tabs
www.i-to-i.com - consumer
Dr Dave Chaffey is director and lead consultant at Market Insights Limited, an independent digital marketing consultancy, and author of internet marketing books including eMarketing eXcellence: Planning and Optimising Your Digital Marketing, co-written with PR Smith.
You can read more of Dave's Insights on digital marketing on his Right Touching Digital Marketing blog
E-mail your digital marketing questions and problems to Dave at digital@themarketer.co.uk
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