B2B Conversations Now

All marketers are familiar with Offers used to motivate a prospect to take action. In the pre-internet era this usually manifested itself as a “Double your order by calling our 800 number now.”

The 800 number is certainly still in use today but is gradually being replaced with the more modern “Visit our Website”. For many companys, 100% of their marketing spend is focused on driving traffic to their website and good SEO/SEM processes can help with traffic. However, once visitors arrive at the Corporate website the hard part begins; qualifying and converting the prospect.

Is there a magic formula for creating a B2B offer to filter serious prospects and convert them to leads?

Typical web based offers are for things like Whitepapers, Webinars and Self-Service Pricing. B2B marketing depends on this stable of offers for a reason; they work. The reason they work is that they abide by the 5 rules for effective offers:

1. It must have high value to the prospect

2. It should only be available on the vendor’s website (scarcity)

3. It should appeal more to a serious prospect than a casual prospect

4. It should appeal to prospects in the early or “research” phase of a project when the vendor’s value proposition has the most impact

5. It must be easy to act on for the prospect

Typical offers satisfy portions of this list. Item #1 (high value) is hard to determine because most prospects realize that some offers are simply warmed‐over sales pitches. Keep whitepapers and webinars fresh with current issues and stick with solid whitepaper tactics.

Scarcity (#2) is an issue with the ubiquitous nature of the internet; make sure your content is not available via an easy Google search.

Items 3, 4 and 5 represent the true sweet spot for a successful offer because the combination will ensure high quality prospects that can be influenced early in the sales cycle.

Tags: B2B Marketing, Lead Generation //