Credit Crunch B2B Marketing: Demand Generation, Lead Nurturing and Online PR

The CEO is stalking the corridors, blood dripping from his Budget Axe — and he’s on his way to the marketing department.  Your department.

How will you defend your marketing plan? “That one won an award,” and “The sales guys really loved this,” might have cut it in a normal recession (probably not) but this time it’s Biblical. This is the Credit Crunch and there’s only one way marketers like you can defend your budgets, justify your existence and make yourself indispensable: you’ve got to deliver sales. And you’ve got to prove it.

At Velocity, we’re deeply into two powerful new weapons that are not only incredibly effective, they’re virtually Crunch-Proof™:

Demand Generation (ie, a spot of Lead Nurturing)

…an automated platform based on lead nurturing and scoring; it marches prospects towards your sales force one step at a time, treating each one differently according to his or her demographics (job title, industry, etc) and behaviour (web pages visited, emails opened, webinars attended…).  Better still: the system generates alerts to the relevant salesperson and killer reports that make it impossible to deny the power of marketing.

Online PR (ie, win friends and influence Google)

…Roger Warner, our intrepid ‘content optimizer’ is orchestrating a set of incredibly powerful tools that take a piece of content (like a white paper), drive it up the Google rankings, generate traffic and downloads from the new searches and document the entire process.  New, relevant traffic without paying-per-click or spending on banner campaigns.

What do these two emerging disciplines have in common?  They’re quantitative and measurable. They expose poorly-performing efforts and glorify successes.  They’re fairly instant, with no lag between campaign and result. And, because of all the above, they’re almost impossible to cut when the cutting gets tough.

Increasingly, B2B technology marketing is digital marketing (go on – click… that’s us!).  And these two weapons are perfect examples of where digital marketing has been headed since the first banner befouled the first browser.

Before the CEO storms in… talk to us about online pr, demand generation, lead nurturing and lead scoring.  And let the axe fall on the bastards in finance or HR.