Research Center >> Advertising

Lead Gen, Customer Acquisition Still Drive B2B Marketing Objectives
But the mix is changing for 2008.

“Generating leads and closing sales are clearly emerging as top priorities for today’s B2B marketers,” said Rick Telberg, popular CPA Insider™ columnist and co-author of Beyond the Click: Matching Online Marketing Tactics to Sales Cycle, a new report from Bay Street Group Research and AICPA Custom Media Solutions.

“If you’re a CPA channel marketer, you’re far more likely to be seeking new sales over other marketing objectives,” added Telberg, “and our research bears this out. It’s all about educating the prospect in the further learning phase of the purchase decision cycle.”

Nearly 70 percent of early respondents to a CPA Marketing Insider poll expect to increase their ad budgets in 2008, but the priorities are shifting. At this time a year ago, Customer Acquisition was twice as likely as Lead Generation to be cited as the No. 1 priority (39% to 20%). Today, the gap has closed to four percentage points (32% to 28%). Branding has dwindled to the No. 1 priority for just eight percent of respondents down, from 12 percent a year ago.

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON 2008? TAKE THE SURVEY.

We’ll discuss the survey findings in more detail next month.

Our Q&A with Steve Rappaport in last month’s CPA Marketing Insider
(Web Puts Consumer in Control of B2B Advertising, Marketing) generated a number of follow up questions. Steve, who is the Director of Knowledge Management for the New York-based Advertising Research Foundation, was kind enough to respond to many inquiries:

Q: Customization, hand-in-hand brands and the shift from “urban to urbane” are just a few of the trends that are at the intersection of branding and creative for the coming year. How can firms leverage these trends to strengthen their brand?

Rappaport: Figure out how best to engage with your customers so that their hand stays clasped with yours and that they continue to see you as attractive and as hip as they would like.

Q: Click fraud has become a fact of life for online marketers. How can companies minimize its effect on their bottom-line?

Rappaport: Diligence through regular reporting by your ad server and consulting with them regularly about click-through rates for your and competitor brands.

Q: Can you measure how effectively a promotion engages its target market — and from there determine which promotional strategies would be most effective for a company or brand?

Rappaport: There are many ways to measure engagement, but the techniques fall into two broad categories: onsite behavior (time spent, downloads, etc.) and emotional connection. Site behavior properly analyzed can furnish powerful insights into engagement. For instance, note how much time visitors spent on the site, where visitors spend their time, how they traverse the site, and what actions they take. The picture comes into focus most sharply when registered visitors are tracked. Emotion is studied through a variety of methods such as surveys and physiological responses. Often it is best to work with experts on staff or with research firms specializing in this type of work in order to capture it effectively and relate it to the brand.

Q: When you think about e-mail tests, traditionally you think about stuff like subject lines, copy, offers, and text vs. HTML. But I’ve heard that marketers reap a greater ROI from testing their landing-page copy. What exactly should firms be testing on those landing pages and how?

Rappaport: You can test the page elements — copy, offer, graphics, position, etc. But once you get to the landing page, you’re most interested in performance — does the customer or prospect take the desired action? It’s one thing to have a prospect walk in the door, but can you move them to signup for a newsletter, ask for more information, identify themselves as a qualified buyer or close the sale?”