B2B Marketing for High Tech Firms (copy)

B2B Marketing, Lead Generation & Lead Nurturing for High Tech Firms

McCarthy & King Marketing is a B2B marketing firm providing direct response/digital creative services to support the lead generation, lead nurturing and content marketing efforts of technology companies. 

Download our report, Step by Step Lead Generation & Lead Nurturing

 

b2b marketing B2B Marketing starts with the sales process

High tech firms sell in many different ways.

  • Some sell direct – by mail or online.
  • Some sell with their own sales force – with inside or outside reps.
  • Some sell through third parties – using VARs, distributers and other resellers.

How you sell is your business.  Helping you sell is ours.

We can help you in four main areas – with lead generation, lead nurturing, content marketing and collateral development.

Lead Generation Activities

Direct Mail Prospecting
Direct mail is still a powerful tool for B2B marketers .  With careful list research, we can help you target your best prospects – people who actually buy what you sell.  We’ll create a comprehensive campaign that include offer strategy, choice of formats, complete creative, print/mail production and  a landing page or PURL to capture leads from your campaign. It’s all measurable and adjustable.

Email Prospecting
While most email marketing is developed for your house list, email prospecting targets outside lists.  We can help you reach your target prospects with a response-generating email campaign.  We’ll help you develop a compelling offer, create your email blast, develop a “linkable” landing page or PURL and build a strategy for testing multiple elements.

Search Advertising (pay per click Google Adwords)
Pay per click advertising on search engines (Google and Bing/Yahoo) has become a very popular option for all organizations, but especially smaller businesses.  When your ad comes up on a search engine, you are reaching people who are actually looking for the product or service you sell.  We’ll help you with keyword research, advertising creation, ad bidding, landing page creation and testing.

Remarketing Advertising
A remarketing campaign will place your online ads in front people who have already visited your website.  Past visitors have shown an interest in what you sell.  It only makes sense to stay in front of them.  Remarketing is part of the Google Adwords platform.  We can help set up and manage this program.

Print and Online Advertising
Use print or online media to reach your target prospects.  We’ll help you develop an advertising campaign that generates response and tests the effectiveness of each media outlet – both traditional print media and online media.

Keyword-Focused Content Marketing/SEO
Content Marketing/SEO is covered in more detail below, but it’s also part of the lead generation process.  By creating useful content (on webpages, blog posts and reports), you improve the chances of being found in searches.  By adding web forms and incentives, you can convert some of that traffic into leads.

 

Lead Nurturing Activities

Lead Nurturing Email Blasts
Email has become the channel of choice for lead nurturing.  It’s fast, efficient and cheap – and in many cases, it can be automated.  We develop individual email blasts to target your house list of opt-in email subscribers.

Email Autoresponder Series
When leads come in the door for the first time, it’s critical to make an immediate connection with those leads.  Autoresponder emails are automated emails that go out to your new leads on a scheduled basis starting from their date of inquiry.  It’s best to create a series of five or 10 emails.

Triggered Emails
Plan ahead and think about the actions you want your prospects to take – subscribe to your email list, request a white paper, sign up for a webinar, request a proposal, order now.  They all require an immediate response from you – and a triggered email is the way to do it.

Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are the most popular communications tool for businesses today.  They keep you connected to your target audience while building your reputation as an expert in your field.  Start with a newsletter calendar and focus on more frequent newsletters with shorter content.

Case Studies
Case studies help put your product or service in a real life setting which is often more relevant to your readers.  Develop a series of case studies to focus on specific products/services, industry segments, buyer job functions, company sizes and more.  Case studies can be used to generate leads and build your credibility with potential buyers.

Customer Interviews
Customer interviews serve the same purpose as case studies – and can be integrated into a case study – but is usually presented in a Question & Answer format.  Finished product  can be delivered in a written format, as a podcast or as a video.

Direct Mail Follow-Up
While most lead follow up activities are in the form of email, a follow-up letter or postcard can have a strong impact on your leads.  Mail is more tangible than email with longer stick-around potential.  You will also stand apart from the crowd, because follow-up direct mail is seldom used today.

Content Marketing/SEO

Pulling back to curtain on SEO

You may be familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the agencies that provide this service.  For most outsiders, SEO always seemed like a dark science – something that only the experts understood.  And so you had to trust the experts.

In the early years of the web (and to some extent, still today), some SEO experts used strategies and tactics that were designed to “game” the system.  Using tactics like link farms, “spinned” articles and  automated blogging and comments, these experts were able to fool the search engines enough to generate traffic to their clients’ websites.

Thankfully, Google caught on.  Now these tactics are being identified and taken them out of the equation for selecting search results.  And websites that continue to use these black hat tactics run the risk of being banned from Google’s search results.

Now that the curtain has been pulled back on SEO, it has become clear that in order to get high rankings on search engines, you need to provide useful content.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines want to recommend websites that answer the questions people have when they type in a search.

Whether you use a blog or your website pages, your search ranks will now depend on whether you have the content people want.

Our approach to Content Marketing/SEO

As a creative services firm, we can help you develop the content itself.

But more importantly and more immediately, we can also help you organize the process.  Our Content Marketing consulting service applies the following process.

1. Identify both broad and narrow topics of interest

2. Organize topics around product/service categories

3. Match topics to most commonly search-for keyword phrases

4. Create separate pages or blog posts for each keyword phrase

5. Optimize pages for search engine crawling

6. Build internal links to and from your own pages

7. Add lead forms and “gated” content to convert visitors into leads

8. Promote each new page or post on social media platforms

 

Marketing Collateral

Often forgotten in today’s world of marketing is marketing collateral – brochure, sales sheets, flyers and more.

Collateral materials are important to your sales people for face-to-face presentations, trade show handouts and mail fulfillment.

If you are using third parties to represent your firm, you may need to build an inventory of collateral for quick and easy distribution.

We can help you with:

  • Company Brochures
  • Product Brochures
  • Information Kits
  • Leave-Behind Kits
  • Trade Show Handouts
  • Sales Sheets
  • Spec Sheets
  • Sales Flyers
  • Annual Reports

Let’s get started

If you’re even thinking about any of the above, let’s set up a time to talk.

Contact  Bob McCarthy at 508-473-8643 or bob@mccarthyandking.com