In this day and age, we have the ability to automate a lot of the processes that we previously did manually. But did you know that you can automate your marketing communications? It’s true! With marketing automation software, you can implement automated lead nurturing programs that play in the background on websites, e-blasts and other online communications. You can even be notified automatically when a prospect is ready to buy.

Sound far-fetched? Here’s how it works:

Say someone finds your website through a Google search. If they find an item of value that they’re interested in on your site (say, a research report on cloud computing), they type in a few bits of information like their name and e-mail and then the asset is ‘automagically’ e-mailed to them.

Once they raise their digital hand and volunteer this information, you are able to use marketing automation software to track their activity on your website and their responses to e-mail communications.

You can also send them automated marketing campaigns based on their behaviors. For example, if they visit the section of your website related to cloud computing, you can set up an automated e-mail invitation to a webinar on (you guessed it) cloud computing. You can also find out if they attend the webinar and send an e-mail to have them evaluate the content.

Now here’s the best part. As they’ve been exhibiting these behaviors, their activity is not only being tracked, but scored, so you have a quantitative measure of how likely they are to buy your cloud computing product based on their web track record. In addition, all of the follow-up e-mail communications happen ‘automagically’ so you didn’t have to manually set up these campaigns, view the tracking reports, assign them a lead score based on their behaviors and pass the lead on to a sales rep. The marketing automation software did this all for you. For more information, contact me and I can show you more amazing things you can do.

Are you using marketing automation software? Do you need help selecting the right marketing automation software for you? Do you have any marketing automation success stories?

In business-to-business marketing, we use a lot of acronyms and coded keywords, like ROI, SEM, VARs . . . even B2B itself. Well, let me add another one that should matter to anybody with something to sell: RYA. It means “Remember Your Audience.”

During my long career as a wordmonger, I was also a writing teacher and coach, which inspired RYA. My students taught me that it’s easy to fall into a self-imposed writing trap: Even though you know what you want to say, it’s always possible your readers (or viewers or listeners) won’t understand. You have to speak the audience’s language or else you lose them.

There was once a TV commercial about a famous American comedian whose act totally flopped in England, because the crowd simply didn’t grasp his cultural references. The same thing applies to your communications. Will a typical visitor to your website understand your buzz phrases and terminology? Even if he does, will he care? Is your message timely and relevant? Are you explaining your products and solutions clearly enough?

When communicating, be careful with what you say and how you say it. RYA . . . or they could be gone ASAP.

Suggesting a strategic marketing approach won’t surprise any who are reading this post, because you know that B2B marketers need to work harder and smarter to communicate in-depth information about complicated products and processes. You’re searching for hard-to-reach prospective customers that want to buy your not-so-glamorous products.

What you need is “smart marketing” from an agency that understands your business and can help you develop good strategic marketing direction, not just ads.

It’s not necessarily the vehicles or design that get you in front of new customers; it’s how they work together strategically that gets results.

Part of your “smarketing” strategy could include advertising, but a marketing assessment may point out that you could get better return on investment using other communication methods such as publicity, direct mail, outbound calling or online.

And lest we forget, your budget is limited too, so you have to do more with less. That’s where the right smarketing can help.

Have you managed successful campaigns that were ad-less? What’s the most unusual product you’ve smarketed? Call me to chat about it.

I’m fresh off a stint of conducting focus group moderation duties for one of our B2B technology clients on the East Coast, and it went extremely well. We were able to gather some valuable feedback from our group of technology reseller subjects and, as usual, some of our suspicions were confirmed and a few intriguing surprises were revealed as well.

Although focus groups are an excellent way to gather qualitative information from customers and prospects, there are several other ways to uncover this information. The research methods we utilize for our clients will all depend on what our client is trying to find out, the audience, budget, timeline and a variety of other factors.

In addition to focus groups, we typically recommend online surveys, telephone surveys, secondary research review, mailed surveys and ‘virtual’ focus groups that are deployed online using web-based meeting software. The most important thing to consider when gathering multi-channel market research is combining the results and using that information to improve your products, processes, marketing support programs and other aspects of your business. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.

What market research methods have worked well for your business? Do you have an ongoing customer service research program? What’s the most interesting or surprising fact you’ve discovered using market research? Do you want to find out more about how conducting market research can help you improve your business and relationships with customers and prospects?