Jennifer Hanford

It is becoming increasingly obvious in the B2B arena that inbound marketing works well for businesses, even the smaller ones.  A recent study released by the Hinge Research Institute revealed a remarkable correlation between profitability and online lead generation among professional services firms. The study concluded:

“Firms generating 60% or more of their leads online are 2X more profitable than those generating less than 20% of their leads online.”

You can read the blog for more information:  http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/28777/Companies-Relying-on-Online-Lead-Generation-Are-2X-More-Profitable-Data.aspx#ixzz1f2Du1iVs

You may be wondering how inbound online marketing can work for your small B2B business.  Here are 3 ways it is working for our company:

Inbound Marketing Works By Targeting Those Who Are Seeking Your Services

Outbound marketing involves directly contacting potential clients to tell them about you and your solutions. To use a fishing analogy, your company is expected to cast a wide enough net in order to capture at least a few interested members from a huge audience.  Conversely, inbound strategies let potential clients who are specifically interested in your offerings find and come to you. This concentration on being found by interested parties rather than going after them is certainly an efficient and effective use of the fewer resources available in a smaller business.  This efficiency can also be appreciated for B2B companies with limited marketing budgets and multiple time constraints.

Inbound Marketing Fits Small Business Budgets

When you are looking for services where do you go first?  I know I personally rely on the internet and specific search engines to find everything these days. I believe almost anyone can create an effective Boolean search on the internet that will allow them to locate what they need within a few seconds.  Small businesses, even those with a focus on B2B marketing, should be using inbound marketing tools like social media, SEO, and internet advertising, to help them be easily found via search engines.  Many of these tools are free (or inexpensive), efficient, and very user-friendly.  Even the smallest of B2B business will find that inbound strategies are affordable and viable, especially with their high levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

Inbound Marketing Maximizes Integral Exposure

Inbound strategies provide an additional and beneficial component as a cost-effective advertising tool for small businesses with a B2B focus.  This is done by borrowing the credibility and genuine interest of your leads, both actual and potential.  When interested parties have located your company via SEO and social media, they are more likely to share your information with their friends and followers.  Then those friends and followers will share with their friends and followers — and so on and so on. Many of these B2B companies have their own online followings through their websites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or blogs. Their names and/or reputations may even be more recognizable than your own.  This association will be beneficial for all parties who are involved.

In summary, OnTarget Partners is now able to connect with many more potential leads in cost-effective ways and at a fraction of the cost of our direct marketing campaigns.  One of the best parts is that the leads have found us and were interested in what we have to offer.  No cold-calling or hard-selling.  What’s not to like about that?

Jennifer Hanford is Director of Social Media for OnTarget Partners.  She can be reached at jhanford@ontargetpartners.com.

Ed Trachier, CEO

I am sometimes asked my opinion of marketing during the Holidays.

You know, that time between Thanksgiving and New Years, when everything seems to slow to a crawl.

My answer is surprising to some…

Prospecting during the Holidays tends to work, over the long term.

Our clients are unlikely to close net new business during this time, if initiation has not taken place earlier in the year.

However, for building a pipeline for Q1, prospecting during the Holidays just makes sense.

I think there are two main reasons for this:

1. People generally are just in a better mood during the Holidays
2. Gatekeepers tend to take time off during the Holidays, which enables more conversations and better qualifications with decision-makers

Thanksgiving 2011 is upon us here in the United States…already.  It seems like we just celebrated the holidays and here they are again — Ready or not!

Thanksgiving means different things to different people.  For some, like me, it means staying home and enjoying some down-time with my family – eating a wonderful meal together, watching football, and napping.  For others it means traveling a variety of distances to visit and spend time with their families.  For others it means hitting the stores at incredibly odd hours in order to get the perfect gifts for the perfect prices.  At the core of it all, the day provides a wonderful opportunity to remember all the things for which we are thankful.

I asked my co-workers to think about things they are thankful for this Thanksgiving and received many responses.  I would like to share their thoughts with you:

• “I’m thankful that we are one free nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty & justice for all. I’m thankful we are strong, in military & in might. We are strong in family with good morals, values & belief. We are inventors, innovators & entrepreneurs with capitalism, love & democracy. We are Americans, we are strong & we are free. Free to choose right or wrong, free to work or not to work, free to have an education or not, free to make a difference or not.
• I thank God I served in our nation’s military, I thank God I fought for our nations freedom, I thank God I know right from wrong, I thank God I have an education & a job. I thank God for friends & family,& I thank God I have the choice to make a difference.
• I choose to make a difference in this life, to my children, family, friends, strangers, work, this country & myself. I have the true freedom to make a difference. For that, I’m thankful. This will be a holiday of (Thanks), for many reasons. “
• “I am thankful for so much where do you begin.  I am thankful for all the things I take for granted each day. I am thankful for a friendly smile and hello from a stranger in the elevator. I am thankful for the glorious wonders of nature and I am thankful for the opportunity to wake up each day to a do my best for my family, my employer and my community. 
• “I’m thankful for the blessings that God has chosen to bestow upon me through his Grace, Love and Teachings.”
• “I am thankful for my family, my health, my dog and my job.
• “I’m grateful for EVERYTHING.  My daughter’s health & amazing spirited personality;  clean, fresh water to drink and bathe in…the beautiful office park we have that I get to take walks in every day, this AMAZING weather we’ve been having!!”
• “With all the “bad” I’ve been through in my life…I can honestly say I’m thankful for all of it.  Each event has led me to where I’m at today, (great job, great family, wonderful friends, a little money in the bank, and fulfilling my dream of living on my boat). Life is good today.
• “I am thankful for the good health of myself and of my family members.  I am thankful for the opportunity to learn something new every day and to live in a country that allows me the freedom to do so.”

From our OnTarget Partners Family to you & yours — Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Jennifer Hanford

One of the most important – and basic – steps for social media lead generation is to increase your company’s reach.  You may have the best content ever, but what good is it if there is no one to see it?  For most companies the ultimate goal of creating and maintaining a web presence is to attract visitors and prospective leads.

There are many proven ways to dazzle potential fans and followers.  The following are methods we are using with success at OnTarget Partners:

Generously promoting your social presence

Buttons for our social media platforms are embedded within each of our employees’ Outlook signatures.  This allows for the emails’ recipients to click on the buttons and be instantly connected to our Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn sites.  The more the email is forwarded, the more potential viewers, visitors, and leads.  These links are also visible and easily accessible on our company’s website, making it easy to “Follow,” “Like,” and “Connect.”

Gladly sharing your content – as well as the content of others

We enjoy blogging and hope our visitors enjoy reading our blogs as much as we do writing them.  We will ensure new blogs are pushed out into the social media world fairly quickly – we get excited about sharing our messages.  The beauty of sharing is that it is often a reciprocated process.  I find that when we share pertinent links from others within our industry then they often will return the favor.  It’s a win-win situation since our content is gaining even more exposure to a greater number of followers.  It has also helped us to gain more followers – and our reach – as a result.

Creating and maintain social media relationships

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn make it extremely easy to find people within your industry and those who have interests that are similar to your own.  Getting the hang of finding and following people within each platform then allows you to interact and engage with them.  The more activity you have, the higher the probability of increasing your company’s reach and exposure.

One of the most important things to remember is that successfully increasing your reach doesn’t happen overnight — nor will you become a social media superstar in 24 hours.  With time, patience, and perseverance you should see your social media reach and lead generation grow over time.

What tactics has your company been using to increase its social media reach?  I would enjoy hearing your success stories.

-Jennifer

Jennifer Hanford is Social Media Director for OnTarget Partners.  She can be reached at jhanford@ontargetpartners.com.

OnTarget Partners, as an operating company under Business Solutions Group, LLC holdings company, was honored during the Dallas 100 Event at the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center on November 16, 2011, which announced the 100 fastest growing private businesses in North Texas.

OnTarget Partners Associates

Scott and Laura Bratcher with Sheila Rogers

As you can see from these pictures, we had an enjoyable time celebrating and networking with other ‘movers and shakers’ in DFW.

OnTarget Team

Ed Trachier, CEO of OnTarget Partners, and Chairman of Business Solutions Group, stated “We are proud once again to be recognized by the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University as one of the fastest growing businesses in North Texas.  The credit for this award, and all of the recognition we receive, belongs to the great Associates we work with who believe in the vision of BSG, and produce the results that are valuable for our clients.  I thank them, and accept this award on their behalf.”

Jennifer Hanford

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to recently attend a fabulous webinar that was hosted by HubSpot.  The speaker was Kipp Bodnar, an Inbound Marketing Manager for HubSpot and someone who is very knowledgeable and passionate about this subject.  The webinar flew by and I was intrigued by the information I gathered.

I wanted to pass along a few key points that I picked up from Kipp in regards to creating awesome social media lead generation.  These are 5 takeaways that I especially liked:

1)      One of the most important – and basic – steps is to increase your company’s reach.  You can have the best content ever, but what good is it if there is no one to see it?  Follow.  Friend/Like.  Connect.

2)      The average “shelf life” of a social media link is 3 hours.  It is important to share content frequently in order for your company to be a presence in the social media world.

3)      Email marketing can help in building your company’s social media reach.  Your company probably already has a core group of vendors and clients.  Who better to start with to request their support?  It creates a simple, efficient way to get your presence out there.

4)      Calls to Action (CTAs) on your website are extremely important.  They are the key foundation of social media success.  The more ubiquitous and well-placed the CTAs, the higher the chances are of converting your website visitors into viable leads.

5)      “Failing” is always a terrible thing in social media.  It is important to test various methodologies and strategies to really determine which social media works best for your company in creating lead generation.  Testing and failing allows you to know what you can stop doing – this allows for more time and energy to do what is working.

Kipp brought up an interesting statistic that 73% of CEO’s still don’t believe that marketers drive revenue.  That is incredibly hard to believe.  With social media having a high visitor to lead conversion rate wouldn’t you agree that social media lead generation can be a catalyst for growth for within your company?

Has your company been using social media?  I would enjoy hearing your success stories.

-Jennifer

Jennifer Hanford is Social Media Director for OnTarget Partners.  She can be reached at jhanford@ontargetpartners.com.

As stated by Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research at MECLABS, lead generation is a “continuous, congruent conversation carried through a multitude of mediums.” Here is the article.   Mr. Carroll seems to describe lead generation as an art, which is a very nice analogy.  Online marketing is a world filled with numbers, metrics, and algorithms.  It helps to take a step back and remember that people – and conversations with people –will always be the core of lead generation.

ROI (Return on Investment) is achieved when marketers convert leads into closes.  I venture to guess that marketing professionals prefer to drive introductory conversations with their leads into successful closes as efficiently as possible.  “Sooner rather than later” is a common motto that I hear.  The good news is that blending offline and online marketing campaigns is creating a more efficient process that is apparently producing the higher ROI results that all marketers desire.

There are various ways of accomplishing the blending of offline and online marketing campaigns.  An example is one we have used at OnTarget Partners.  Members of our staff designed and created a marketing brochure with eye-catching graphics and verbiage.  The material comes in the form of a folder containing marketing slicks which provide information about our company and the services we officer.  The pages detailing our service offerings also include our website information.  We are blending this offline marketing campaign with an online component by affixing a QR (Quick Response) code sticker to the front of these packets.  Scanning this QR code with a smart phone will take the viewer directly to our company website’s homepage.  The information provided in the printed materials is identical to our website’s landing page, creating the opportunity to drive conversations with potential leads no matter where they originate.  Since starting this process we have noticed an increase in traffic to our website as well subsequent inbound online lead generation.

What is your company doing to blend its online and offline marketing campaigns?  We would be interested in hearing how this is working for you.

-Jennifer Hanford

Jennifer is Social Media Director for OnTarget Partners.  She can be reached at jhanford@ontargetpartners.com.

Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS, has stated that a central problem for many B2B marketers lies in their data.  A marketer often has a list of contacts that may not be as valid as it should be.  “Everything connects to your data,” Carroll said. “Your data represents relationships, and that’s the hub.”  In other words, effective and valid data increases the potential of optimizing lead generation.

Carroll touched on this issue at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week. He described how seven of the most common problems that B2B marketers face trace back to poor data.  I have listed these below:

Problem #1: Sales capabilities

Many marketers, Carroll noted, struggle with a feeling that some salespeople are incapable of converting the leads they generate. They wish they could give all their leads to a few select salespeople and avoid the others.

However, one of the most common reasons a salesperson cannot close a sale is that they do not have enough data about the lead, Carroll said. They cannot optimize where they spend time and energy because there is no data to direct them.

This problem can be alleviated when data has been qualified and verified prior to passing it along to the salespeople.  The potential for any member of the sales force to convert the lead should be equal when this is the case.

Challenge #2: Relevant content

“The challenge is how we progress people from early interest to purchase intent. Content is one of the ways of doing that,” Carroll said.

This is a common challenge for marketers, even though most understand that content is an extremely effective tool.  Additional research and examination may be necessary in order to uncover what is relevant content and subsequently further validate the lead.

Challenge #3: Technology

Carroll asked the Summit audience, “How many of you have problems with people updating your CRM?” Many attendees raised their hands, and the point was clear. Your CRM cannot be effective until the problems surrounding its data — which many times have nothing to do with a technology or platform — are solved.

OnTarget Partners has solved this problem by allowing limited administrative access to our CRM.  This way we can avoid many instances of “dirty data.”  Only valid, effective data is loaded into the database which optimizes each individual marketing campaign we manage.

Challenge #4: Internal processes

According to Adam T. Sutton, a senior reporter for MarketingSherpa, “Too many marketers have not sat down with their sales team to hammer out a specific definition for a sales-ready lead. “

The VP of Delivery Operations for OnTarget Partners, Scott Bratcher, has found it imperative to meet with our clients when kicking off a campaign so as to avoid this challenge.  That way he knows and understands from the very beginning of the campaign which leads we need to research, prospect, and nurture. This results in higher percentages of optimized lead generation and conversions.  Once again, an important component is producing valid data early in the process.

Challenge #5: Lead capturing

Capturing leads is probably one of the most important pieces of your company’s website.  Data can be used to determine which landing pages are weak, as well as sufficiently analyze from where your better leads are originating.

-Jennifer

Jennifer Hanford is Director of Social Media for OnTarget Partners.  She can be reached at jhanford@OnTargetPartners.com.

Q1 Award Winner Tim Hixson

Occasionally, we get out of the office here at OnTarget.

Q2 Award Winner Craig McDonald

We like to spend time together in different settings to create better teamwork and friendships.

Q3 Award Winners Jennifer Hanford and Michael Gruehn

Similar to other companies, we discuss success strategies and stories.

We talk about where we have failed and why.  We just try to get better…as a team.

Part of our process in these meetings is also to recognize the great work, via a top performer award, of our Associates on a quarterly and annual basis.

So, without further ado, I give you the OnTarget award winners for 2011.

We look forward to a tight race for the annual “OnTarget Associate of the Year for 2011″!

-Ed Trachier

Ed Trachier is Founder and CEO of OnTarget Partners, and can be reached at 214-618-4960, or via email at trachier@ontargetpartners.com