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Your boss wants to see evidence that the money and resources invested in the company’s business-to-business marketing activities are really paying off. You start to sweat.

Relax. It is surprisingly easy to prove that B2B marketing is contributing to your company’s bottom line. Here’s how.

Show the relationship between your marketing and your revenue

Start by looking for sales and revenue that can be linked to marketing activities. Simply compare lists of new customers or invoices to companies or prospects in your marketing database and look for matches. You don’t have to find every sale that resulted from your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is one big sale to justify a campaign.

If sales haven’t closed yet, count the number of qualified leads and use estimated conversion rates and average sales size to quickly determine the sales potential of those leads. Or look at the forecasted sales in the company’s CRM system and compare them to the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.

You can also send “Did you buy?” surveys to inquirers and qualified leads, using their answers to show that the prospects being targeted by your marketing are buying from you or the competition. Ask if they bought, and if so, from whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If your sample size is large enough, you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of revenue that are represented by all the inquiries and leads you’ve generated.

Show how much you saved the company

Just give it some thought and you’ll probably come up with a list of things you’ve done to save your company money or time. For example:

- Printing and postage savings after cleaning the mailing list or delivering the company newsletter by e-mail.

- Savings accomplished by offering electronic versions of literature.

- The money you saved by eliminating non-productive marketing activities

- Time and money saved by automating the capture of Web forms and eliminating some manual data entry.

Show other ways your marketing is more effective

This can range from showing how many more prospects you reached with your marketing messages to indicating the improvements that have been made in cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per attendee or cost per qualified lead.

List all the marketing projects your marketing team completed

Marketers often don’t think about their own productivity when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or they simply have no idea what’s involved in creating a mailing or designing a new Web site.

Pointing out the number of marketing projects completed, and all the work steps involved, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely unaware.

Always be ready to make your case

I recommend that you block out a couple of hours to create your business-to-business marketing accountability reports every month so you’ll always have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you’re pressed for time, use an intern or temp to do it for you.

Your results may vary, but consider this …

A marketer I know recently reported to her management that awareness of their company and products among target prospects more than doubled, the cost per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent, 58 percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing, and 48 percent of the sales closed and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came from marketing-generated leads.

The result? She received a bigger marketing budget and senior management executives no longer doubt marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh, is one of America’s leading business-to-business marketing consultant and an expert on the subject of B2B lead generation. Mac’s Accountability Audit helps marketing communications, advertising and tradeshow managers increase their B2B marketing budgets by proving a return-on-investment. For more info visit http://www.sales-lead-experts.com/blog/news-audits.cfm.

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Meet Bill, he’s the owner and CEO of a growing, mid-sized manufacturing company. Bill is in his early 40s, wears glasses and tries his best to squeeze in an early-morning workout whenever he can. He prefers to wear golf shirts and khakis, donning a suit only when he has to. Bill drives a late model SUV with a booster seat in the back seat for his four-year-old daughter. He’s harried, and worries about managing his company’s growth. He wants to leverage technology to increase operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, and to offset the rising costs of doing business, but doesn’t know where to start.

Helen is his director of sales. She’s 32, single, a competitive runner, and is partial to 80s rock. She drives a new BMW convertible. She struggles with managing a dozen salespeople, many who are 10 to 15 years older then her. Helen wants the company to invest in a new CRM system to replace the contact management they long ago outgrew, but wonders how she’ll convince Bill and the company’s CFO to spend the money.

Bill and Helen are not real people, but they’re examples of one of the most powerful tools you can use to better connect with prospects and customers: persona-based marketing.

Persona-based marketing is part Hollywood characterization and part business analytics. It involves constructing a fictional customerbased on real-life data and intelligenceand then using that character as the touchstone for promotional and selling decisions.

Persona-based marketing goes beyond simple demographic data

Persona-based marketing describes who a prospect or customer is, by also answering questions about their behavior such as: what keeps this person awake at night? How does he spend his time? How does she like to be sold to?

This concept can help you, as a business-to-business marketer by creating a vivid, tangible picture of your best prospects or customers, and then sculpting a marketing message that’s pertinent to their concerns, and move them to inquire and buy.

Let’s get back to the example of Bill and Helen. Say you’re a systems integrator who is targeting mid-sized companies like Bill’s. Using what you know about Bill as a representative of the typical business owner, you can make some tactical marketing decisions.

Because Bill is pressed for time, he probably won’t attend an all-day seminar, or an evening dinner meetinghe’s got family responsibilities after work. But he would be interested in a 45-minute, executive-level Web seminar he could attend from his desk. He might also say yes to an executive breakfast briefing with his peers from other local mid-sized firms.

This fictional CEO can even help guide decisions about minute matters such as brochure or Web site design. Because you know that Bill is over 40 and wears glasses, you’ll make sure that the font is big enough for him to read easily. And because you know he’s time-pressed, you’ll break down key messages into bullet points he can scan quickly.

Helen, your customer’s sales director surrogate, meanwhile, will respond to an offer that speaks to her needs. She might raise her hand to a half-day seminar on “convincing your CEO and CFO to invest in CRM.” She might also request a white paper on “How to get salespeople to use your new CRM system.” Because she’s younger and has upscale tastes, she’d probably attend a lunch seminar at the hot new bistro in town. She’s also more likely to notice an ad or seminar invitation or other promotional materials that are designed in a modern and colorful manner.

Granted, Bill and Helen are composite characters, not real people. But referring to them as you formulate and execute your messages can make your marketing more effective. And it can prevent your promotions from becoming too generic to be noticed. Performed correctly, your persona-based decisions will stop being about “I think” and start being about “what would our customer or prospect think?”

How do you get started?

1. Convene a group of employees who interact with your customers and prospects. Bring in lunch and a white board and ask them to help you build a persona for each of your target customers.

2. Start by describing the customer’s role in their company: CEO, CIO, CFO, COO, sales manager, purchasing agent, user, and any other important influencers.

3. Next describe the kind of company they work for. What industry is it in? How big is it? How up-to-date is it? Does it have a lot of competition?

4. Then describe the person and their behavior: Give each persona a name, a title, an age, and describe how he or she looks. How does he dress? What kind of car does she drive? What does he do in his free time? What kind of educational background does she have?

5. Flesh out as many attributes as you need to give a full, rounded picture of who this person is. Then, turn to your persona’s problems and goals.

6. Think about what does this person’s daily calendar look like? What are his or her most pressing concerns? What product or service attributes would be most helpful in solving this person’s problems? Is he or she looking to roll up 20 databases into one, getting ready for an IPO, dealing with a new competitor who has just entered the market?

7. Then, when formulating your marketing messages, think about what path this prospect or customer might pursue to solve this problem. Will he or she turn to white papers or articles in trade publications or Web sites? Would this customer or prospect seek input from a speaker at a networking group of their peers? Let the personas steer the route, which you can pave with information that can help your prospect and customers move forward in their consideration and buying process.

If you’ve never used person-based marketing before, give it a try. It can be a powerful way to focus your business-to-business marketing messages and offers, driving more leads and sales.

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh is a business-to-business marketing consultant and an expert on the subject of sales leads. He is president of Mac McIntosh Incorporated, a sales and marketing consulting firm specializing in helping companies generate qualified sales leads and turn them into sales. For more information, or to request a free subscription to his newsletter, Sales Lead Report, please visit http://www.sales-lead-experts.com

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Pay-Per-Click advertising plays a significant roll in the success of small-to-medium sized B2B companies during all phases of the buying cycle.

Is your company covered across the entire buying cycle for your behavioral segment keywords relating to your products and services? This article will answer these questions.

What is the B2B paid search buying cycle?

What keywords should you bid on?

When should you bid?

How much should you bid?

Do you have compelling call-to-action?

What other forms of advertising work well with pay-per-click efforts?

Lifetime Value of a Customer

The value of a new customer for B2B marketers is very high. Each B2B transaction is high and leads to an even higher lifetime value that could be worth hundreds, thousands or even millions.

Researching Through Search

Pay-per-click advertising delivers immediately to searchers who are researching companies; capabilities, specifications, usage practices, liability, reliability, product integration, reputation, location, costs, etc.

Searches vary depending on stage of buying cycle. According to a study released by Google and Millward Brown, “22 percent of respondents would turn to search as their first source of information during the purchase process’s first stage (research and engagement). Another 16 percent would turn first to manufacturers’ Web sites, 15 percent would go to colleagues, 12 percent would talk with IT consultants, and 10 percent would go to content Web sites.”

Stages of the B2B paid Search Buying Cycle

1st Stage - Aware
Buyers tend to use broad category search terms to conduct their initial awareness search.

2nd Stage - Research
Buyers use additional add-on terms such as, reviews, articles, etc.

3rd Stage - Compare
Buyers tend to use comparative words to extend awareness such as, comparison, compare, difference, etc.

Final Stage - Purchase

Finally, buyers do branded or product name searches to confirm their findings and make an information buying decision.

Now that you understand the when to bid and what to bid on, now we will discuss how much to bid?

Bidding Strategies

Prior to launch of your B2B pay-per-click campaign, you should understand the metric that makes your business successful. Savvy marketers will have a mixture of manual and automated bid techniques to make sure their keyword bids align with performance thresholds. Typical B2B thresholds are usually based on cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This is the amount you are willing to pay to get an action; telephone call, contact us form, download, request demo, newsletter signup, etc. Positioning your ads is one part of the pay-per-click process. The other is how to improve conversions. Anyone can send traffic to a site, but getting the traffic to convert requires analysis and pro-active marketing to create good call-to-actions.

Call-To-Action Sells

ClickZ writer, Pamela Parker, has some good sound advice that we follow to form our B2B best practices.

“Among calls to action, those surveyed found an invitation to compare prices the most attractive, while calls to download a demo or learn more came in next. Among benefits, promises of easy integration rank most favorably, with solving business problems or having multiplatform support come in second and third, respectively.”

Payperclicker- http://www.payperclicker.com
Small Business Ad Management
“We Know Targeting”

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