In honor of Canada Day, and the beginning of what will hopefully be a beautiful summer, we’ve put together some of our best tips on how you can keep your sales pipeline full in the slow, hot months. Often, during the summer, many B2B businesses find that their lead generation beings to lag. Fewer consumers during the summer months leads to less demand which in turn makes many marketer’s lead generation tactics less effective.  So--how can you keep your organizations sales up this summer?

1. Build relationships. A great way keep your sales up during the summer is to focus on developing relationships with your house list. This allows you to spend marketing time and budget renewing relationships with people you already know, who are already interested in what you have to say. This is a good opportunity to start a lead nurturing program. Don’t just stay in touch with current customers and prospects, but grow those relationships to see if you can upsell to your existing base.
2. Revive old leads. Summer is the perfect time to create a campaign to drive older leads which have lost interest back to your website and to restart conversations that have fizzled over the last year.
3. Get better at selling. When business is slow, your sales teams have the chance to re-learn best practices for selling and to refresh their skills and tactics. When there are less sales opportunities and prospects it’s important that you are using the best selling tactics out there to connect with your leads.
4. Use seasonal promotions. By starting summer promotions, you can reach out to the businesses that are still looking for product and services like the ones you sell. While there may not be as many consumers available to you during the summer, this can certainly help you drive the ones that are out there to your site.
5. Optimize your landing pages and calls-to-action. While this is an important tip year-round, the relative downtown during the summer is a good time to do a complete overhaul. When there are fewer customers it’s more important than ever to ensure that you are getting the most conversions you can. 

In our last post, we discussed the difference between features and benefits and why both are important for your product marketing.  In today’s post (part II) we’ll explain how you can make the most of features and benefits in your product copywriting.

1. Determine the problem that your ideal customers are trying to solve. Understanding the key pain points your target customers face can help you get a better idea of what benefits and features they are looking for. Once you know what your ideal clients are looking for, it is much easier to write about your solutions in a persuasive, customer-centric style.
2. Connect the solutions to those problems with the product or service that you deliver. Make it clear to your prospective customers that your product, service or solution solves their problem, in no uncertain terms. It also doesn’t hurt to target the features that make your products or services stand out above your competition. How can you help solve their problem in a way that your competitors can’t?
3. Tell them not just the results, but why those results matter. You can take this idea to the next level, by explaining not just the benefits of your product or service but also how those benefits can help their overall business or marketing strategy.  It’s important to explain how your solutions can benefit your customers, but by putting those benefits in the context of an overall business strategy, you can put the numerous ways your solutions help into the broader perspective of overall business improvement.

Many people don't understand the difference between features and benefits, and unfortunately, this can be a huge detriment when you're writing product copy. If you're not describing the right aspects or characteristics of your product or service then you could be wasting your time by trying to sell something that your target audience doesn't want or need. Since this is such an important part of writing product copy, advertisements and sales collateral, we've decided to give you a quick overview of the difference between features and benefits and how you can make them work for your business' content writing strategy.

What is a Feature?

A feature is a physical or tangible aspect of, or a factual statement about, a product or service that you are promoting.

What is a Benefit?

A benefit is what happens to your customers, when they take your product or service and implement it. In other words, a benefit tells your customers why  your features matter or "what's in it for them."

So--Do People Buy Based on Benefits or Features?

Common marketing knowledge says that most prospective customers like to buy based on benefits and there is solid reasoning behind that theory. People are often looking for solutions to the problems that they have in their lives and a benefit explains to them how your product solves those issues. When customers enter the buying process and begin evaluating vendors they want to know how owning your product or using your service will improve their business. For instance, imagine that you're a B2B organization that has 24 hour customer service. Great, so what is the benefit? The benefit from your customers' perspective is that they can get the help they need with your product anytime they need it, day or night.

But...

It is important to remember that a benefit is a result of a feature and without the feature itself, your benefit can seem untrustworthy, illegitimate, and sometimes, downright silly. It's one thing to tell your prospective customers that you can provide them the help they need, when they need it, but without first explaining to them that you have a 24-hour customer service call-center (for example) then they have no real reason to believe that they actually can get that kind of help, for all they know, that's just a persuasive sales pitch.

What Does All of This Mean?

At the end of the day, what you really need to effectively sell your products are benefits verified by features. If you list a relevant feature and then explain why that feature is important to your customer you can bring to life the exact reasons why a customer should buy your products or hire you for the services you provide.

Hopefully this post gives you a better idea of the differences between features and benefits when it comes to product marketing. Stay tuned for part II of this post, in which we'll explain how you can make the most out of features and benefits in your content.

Update: Part II of this post can be read here.

Most companies know that social media is a hot trend right now in marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that these companies understand how social media can help their marketing or why it got so popular in the first place. Well, in our opinion, one of the biggest reasons why social media is so popular (and effective) when it comes to B2B marketing is its ability to generate leads for your company.

How can social media accomplish this?

1. Social media can increase your company’s reach. Social media lets you publish your company’s best practices and expertise quickly and easily to platforms that reach millions of people instantly. The better your content, the more likely it is to get viewed, which means that with some good quality content, you have the capability of reaching millions of potential leads in a matter of moments.
2. Social media can establish your company as a thought leader. Thought leadership is an essential way to build trust for your company. Buyers often trust companies that can demonstrate their knowledge about their buyers’ problems, and can prove that they know how (and have the solutions) to fix them. 
3. Social media facilitates word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth has been, and continues to be, one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business. Buyers tend to trust peer referrals more than any other source of information and since social media allows people to share their experiences (both good and bad) with a wide range of people, this can help increase trust in your company’s products and services. 
4. Social media can help your company’s SEO. Social media sites usually have good authority in search engines and because of this, inbound links from these sites are extremely helpful to your SEO. The higher your company ranks in search engines, the more often you get found by potential customers and often, buyers trust companies that rank higher in search engines.
5. Social media can connect you with other local professionals. This is related to the word of mouth point above. Using social media allows you to connect with other professionals in your area or industry so that you can share information, and create discussions. Developing conversations with other professionals can help lead to business relationships that often generate quality business opportunities.
6. Social media let’s you search for interested parties.  Social media is a great way to locate and target leads that are looking for your products or services at the moment of interest. A quick search on a site like Twitter, can instantly show you all of the Twitterers that are discussing products and services like yours at the exact moment they begin the conversation. 

There are many traditional ways to generate more leads for your business, but social media is a great way to augment your current lead generation strategies, after all, you can never have too many sales-ready leads!

Here is Part 2 of my Top 10 Marketing Automation Must Haves post. You can read Part 1 here.

A while back I began tweeting my top 10 list of features that I would look for in any marketing automation solution. This was based on my experiences accumulated over the last 8 years, being responsible for demand generation at various technology companies. During that time I've used a mix of tools from simple web content management and email marketing solutions, to full blown marketing automation suites from various vendors.

Spreading the 10 tweets out over my time-line wasn't very helpful, and the 140 character limits made things a bit cryptic, so I'm going to split them over 2 posts with a little explanation and rationale this time.

#6: De-dup of leads. Salesforce.com web-to-lead forms create chaos. Don't ask reps to check duplicates.

There are a couple of problems with web-to-lead forms as they come out of the box from Salesforce.com. First of all, the forms don't offer any data validation unless you have a web developer to write some javascript for you. Secondly Salesforce.com will happily create duplicate leads all day long.

This creates chaos for sales reps who end up working the same lead. Even if they remember to manually search for duplicates, figuring out which way to merge leads isn't simple.

Although there are simple point solutions which solve these issues, consider it a must have for any marketing automation solution.

#7: Ability to execute integrated marketing campaigns across channels, not just email.

Creating killer topics for marketing campaigns is tough and requires imagination and empathy for your target customers. Developing compelling content based on your winning concept is far from trivial. Marketing campaigns get more powerful and efficient when you integrate several tactics across multiple channels.

Email campaigns are extremely effective, but don't forget direct mail, pay-per-click, banner ads, traditional media / trade publications. Each of these require landing pages with friendly URLs and tracking.

As marketers look to integrate social media tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter into integrated marketing campaigns, look for marketing automation vendors that recognize that this is another channel that needs to demonstrate ROI.

#8: Flexibility to match your customer buying process. Some folks need nurturing, some want all the information now.

A large part of the value of marketing automation comes from the fact that many potential customers are not yet ready to enter the sales process. They are looking to understand a problem or get educated about a topic and being engaged by a sales rep too early isn't productive for either party.

That doesn't mean everybody wants to be drip fed information one whitepaper or email campaign at a time. Some people want to consume as much information as you have on a subject at one time, but asking them to complete the same form twenty times doesn't build enthusiasm. I've noticed that technical buyers in particular like to load up on information before they engage in a real conversation.

Look for a marketing automation solution that can support gated resource sections that still track individual activity so you don't lose vital sales intelligence.

#9: Dashboard view of closed-loop campaign performance from lead source to opportunity and closed revenue.

Marketing Automation also promises to deliver big picture clarity into what demand generation strategies are really working. That doesn't mean counting how many leads come from what lead-sources, but rather identifying what sales revenue can be attributed to specific programs.

Doing this manually gets unmanageable very quickly, so look for a marketing automation solution that can give you visibility right through the customer funnel - from first click (from pay-per-click, for example) right through to closed deals.

#10: Make running web seminars that feel like part of an integrated nurturing program simple.

One of the most popular demand generation and nurturing tactics employed today are web seminars, aka webinars. Popular tools like GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting and Webex make it simple and cost effective to run online meetings, presentations and product demonstrations.

Whether somebody registered, attended or asked questions for a particular web seminar is important lead intelligence to use for segmentation and ultimately for sales context. Make sure your marketing automation solution integrates with your preferred web seminar platform, or at least offers a simple a quick approach for importing the data into your central marketing database.

I hope you found this helpful. I'd love to hear your comments on what I included and what you feel should have made the cut.

A while back I began tweeting my top 10 list of features that I would look for in any marketing automation solution. This was based on my experiences accumulated over the last 8 years, being responsible for demand generation at various technology companies. During that time I've used a mix of tools from simple web content management and email marketing solutions, to full blown marketing automation suites from various vendors.

Spreading the 10 tweets out over my time-line wasn't very helpful, and the 140 character limits made things a bit cryptic, so I'm going to split them over 2 posts with a little explanation and rationale this time.

#1. Fast landing page creation you can measure and a/b split test.

Whether your landing pages are for calls-to-action on your website, or part of your pay-per-click campaign, they represent a huge opportunity for optimization. A small improvement in conversion rate can yield staggering increases in lead capture. Any marketing automation solution must make it quick and simple for marketers (not web developers) to create landing pages because you're going need a bunch of them and they will change frequently.

Obviously you need to measure both clicks onto the landing pages as well as actual conversions. As you get more advanced you'll need to experiment with different designs, copy, images and form fields. Now you need the ability to run A/B split tests and multivariate experiments. This can either be part of the marketing automation solution, or provided as part of a tight integration with a third-party (free) solution like Google Website Optimizer.

#2: Simple form creation that integrates with your website call-to-actions. All leads into 1 funnel.

You don't just need forms on landing pages. Your website calls-to-action often require in-line forms that flow as an integral part of the web page design. Jarring redirects to landing pages hosted on sub-domains are likely to distract your visitors at the critical moment as they take the step from interest to engagement.

All inbound leads need to get routed into a single marketing database so you have visibility of all inbound lead channels.

#3: Bi-directional integration with your chosen CRM system with communication history for sales context.

Marketing Automation systems don't operate in isolation. For marketing and sales to work as parts of an integrated demand generation process, you need two-way communication between the people and the technologies.

Leads need to flow into your CRM system with as much context as possible to enable sales to have a productive initial conversation. As leads or prospects continue to interact with your business online, additional information must enrich the lead data in your CRM, without the dreaded creation of duplicate leads (see number 6 on the next post).

Inevitably not every lead passed to sales will engage with the allocated rep, let alone become an opportunity. Your chosen marketing automation platform must be able to accept leads "returned to marketing" for further nurturing. This is a huge black hole for many organizations with leads burned and lost for ever.

Finally for closed-loop marketing to work, your CRM system must be able to return pipeline / opportunity revenue and converted sales revenue for each campaign (see number 9). Only then can you invest in demand generation programs which create sales and not just clicks and conversions.

#4: Separate marketing database with dynamic segmentation based on explicit data and behaviors.

The days of email blasts to unsuspecting victims hoping that something sticks are coming to an end. Email campaigns are successful when the message is anticipated, personal and relevant (to quote Seth Godin). That means segmentation - identifying groups of customers with similar needs.

First of all you'll need to be able to segment based on explicit data such as title, company size, state etc. Next you'll want to segment on behaviors such as the lead did X, then did Y, but hasn't done Z within the next two weeks. This is a great example of a dynamic group that changes continuously as people continue to interact with your business online.

With these capabilities you can start building campaigns which comprise multiple communication touches which reflect a persons interest, level of engagement and even stage in the buying process.

#5:Lead scoring duh! But it needs to be simple to use and flexible enough to fit your business model.

This is really the feature which defined the category. It's really not marketing automation without some sort of lead scoring--but a word of caution: don't be tempted to over-engineer your approach right out of the gate. Plan to learn. You won't get it right first time, so allowing for incremental evolution of your scoring methodology will save you grief while trying to launch your marketing automation solution.

Better to tighten your criteria for passing sales-ready leads only once you have too many leads for sales to productively engage. This is especially true in the current economy. The goal here is more sales not less leads. Consider calculating a lead score and asking sales to validate the model when they start engaging the lead and verbally qualifying. You can get plenty of value from marketing automation without doing any form of lead scoring.