MarketingProfs Panel Discussion at B2B Forum

On the second day of the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to sit on a panel led by Roy Young, President of MarketingProfs and including online marketing experts Chris Brogan, VP Strategy & Technology of CrossTech Media and Joel Granoff, Co-founder and CEO of Be Greeted.

We presented highlights from our recent research on how B2B marketers were using online media.

We discussed how webinars, search and email were widely deployed by B2B marketers (see chart `Lead Generation Goal by Medium`).

Although Chris was somewhat surprised that 49% of respondents are using blogs for lead generation, I noted that this in sync with other surveys. B2B marketers have leveraged blogging to boost their organic or natural search rankings. Higher rankings translate to more web inquiries.

Traditional content such as newsletters, press releases and case studies ranked highly for lead generation.

This chart pertains to a question asking marketers about content residing on their website.


Although media such as blogs, video and podcasts are ranked much lower, their ranking is signifcant given their newness.

Although these results were similar to previous studies, some marketers were confused by the findings. See Mike Stelzner`s blog for some comments.

B2B marketers ahead of B2C on New Media Adoption

On August 13, BtoB Magazine announced the results of their research on new media conducted with the Association of National Advertisers.

In June, BtoB and the ANA interviewed 326 B2B and B2C marketers from their respective house files.

The research confirmed a number of tiers of new media tools. The top tier includes proprietary Web sites, e-mail marketing, online ads, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and webinars. The middle tier includes blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and video on demand. The bottom tier consists of wikis, mobile, viral video, social networks and Second Life.

It was found that B2B marketers allocate a significantly higher proportion of their budget to new media than B2C marketers. While B2C marketers view new media as best suited for brand building, B2B marketers look to new media for demand generation.

As far as I see it, the irony for B2B marketers is that although their solutions require extensive communication (often through a sales force), the budgets and tools at their disposal for marketing are often inadequate. The opposite is true for B2C: humongous budgets to communicate simple messages.

With new media tools and in particular Web 2.0 tools, B2B marketers are bolstered by tools where the cost of entry is the development of content, rather than price of the tools or cost of the marketing medium.

For more details and a PowerPoint summary of the BtoB/ANA research, follow this link to the BtoB website.

A new category of LeadGen Tools materializes

In our research on LeadGen Tools, collaborative and dialog marketing tools made a prominent showing with email marketing, blogging and web conferencing tools leading the way.

Although our research was not scientific in a statistical sense, it does illustrate a trend of B2B marketers to deploy more ‘engaging’ tools. In a consumer-driven world, this only makes sense.

I suspect that these tools, as well as the Web 2.0 tools (e.g. blogging, wikis and social networking) will coalesce to form a new category of tools available to the B2B marketer. Let’s call these tools, LeadCom Tools, a name appropriate given the tools’ positioning between MarCom and Direct Marketing.

Unlike traditional direct marketing such as direct mail or telesales, the linkage to revenue is not as strong for LeadCom tools. And unlike mass media or MarCom options, LeadCom Tools do not amplify the message to the same extent as traditional MarCom but share some of the broadcast quality but to a narrower audience.

Taking the best from both ends of the spectrum, LeadCom tools are measurable, by level of engagement and scalable to niche audiences.

One of the most promising segments for LeadCom are nurture leads who expect a higher level of engagement with more relevant content balanced by a low-cost content delivery model.

As adoption of Web 2.0 tools increase, the use of these tools for LeadCom will be a very encouraging development.