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B2B Gamification: Bold strategy in conservative industry increased website visits 108.5%

MarketingSherpa’s goal is to “give marketers of the world the stats, inspiration, and instructions to improve their results” - we hope by sharing our marketing success story we’ve done our little bit to inspire marketers to embrace risk and change!

Read our blog on the game concept and why it was nominated for an Innovation Award this year.

It’s a quick, no fuss read and could make all the difference to your strategy by outlining some of the essential basics to take into consideration. Having worked within the events industry ourselves for over 20 years, we’ve put this guide together to get you on track for a successful event.

Simply email sonia@brightbull.co.uk or complete the contact form and we’ll email it right out to you.

We promise your email address will never be sold or rented.

We’re looking for someone with fantastic communication skills, who is highly organised and brings bags of ideas and enthusiasm to the team. You need to have a ‘roll your sleeves up’ attitude with a willingness to learn. Never a dull moment here!

What You Need
o Experience in online marketing – specifically email marketing/execution
o Social media savvy
o Experience in PPC a bonus
o A commitment of 3 days per week minimum
o Ability to multi task and prioritise

What We’re Offering
o A great opportunity to be part of a creative, dynamic team
o Hands on online marketing role, working on key client accounts
o Managing email campaigns, social media activities, PPC
o Agency experience
o Marketing training and mentoring
o Flexible working
o Package dependent on experience

What Next
If you think you fit the bill and can add real value to our team, please get in touch telling us how!
Email: sonia@brightbull.co.uk with your CV and any examples of your creative work.

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The chart nicely illustrates the positive outlook for social marketing next year. 20% of the marketers surveyed are already seeing a measurable ROI and an additional 64% see social marketing as a ‘promising tactic’. We’ve come a long way from the early days of B2B social media just being some hyped, fuzzy, non-measurable medium. It’s here to stay and budgets are now being invested to leverage social media channels even further.

If you’re not considering social media as a key channel in your activities for 2012 then you’re certainly part of a minority!

Read the full article from MarketingSherpa to be further enlightened.

For me this was the most relevant session for our own client base (online communities, events and conference companies), as eConsultancy was the actual case study. Ashley took us through the evolution of the business and the journey of its targeting tactics.

1. PPC and Social Media is low down on website traffic for eConsultancy

2. Organic search and Email drives the most traffic

3. Ashley talked about the ‘window of attention’ – the short time to enhance (or indeed ruin) brand perception. With emails, open rates start to drop quite quickly.

4. 57% of people buying paid membership, purchase on their first day/first visit – indicating that people become a member to take advantage of the discounts.

5. Interesting to see the website stats showed that eConsultancy has an overall bounce rate of  71.4%

6. Social Media bounce rate is 77% – not good as this traffic isn’t as ‘sticky’.

7. Interestingly 53% of social media website traffic is from existing members and 95% of sales from social media is also from existing customers

9. Shows that social media is great for generating buzz, engagement, retention and loyalty but not necessarily a strong tool for attracting new customers.

10. The true value is in content to attract and then engage – content is king!

11. Perceptions of paying members being more socially engaged are challenged – Silver members are more proactive than Diamond members.

12. Employee LinkedIn and Twitter accounts have more success than eConsultancy’s corporate account – back to the point from Kate Shoppers session – ‘Peer-to-Peer’ or Individual-to-Individual is what works best.

13. eConsultancy track everything! They measured staff answers in Linkedin groups/forums and it out-performed PPC. Fantastic success story for companies still not recognising the value and power of social media. It may not bring in much bottom-line revenue, but the value is in being positioned as an industry expert. Brand awareness is much more effective through social media than paid advertising.

14. Ashley shared their new funky real-time visualisation tool ‘Arachnid’. Do check it out – it’s very hypnotic!

15. Great for a bit of visual fun – but what’s the true value? Well the tool internally alerts staff to follow up on hot member activity – the drawback being members have to be logged on to be able to harness the power of this tool.

16. A double-edged sword – as caution needs to be taken on the ‘big brother’ approach, but can be cleverly and subtly used to integrate with direct mail, email and sales campaigns.

16. Ashley shared his views on the future for marketers –  it’s all about data visualisation, social CRM, realtime location and gamification (the latter two are pretty unexplored by B2B).

I was pleased to hear about gamification being on the future list – as we were recently nominated for an innovation award for  a B2B Online Viral Game, “Kill The Paper Invoice“ launched early this year – a bit of trumpet blowing there!

Check it out and play for yourself – hopefully illustrates a refreshing marketing tactic for the B2B space and financial industry, which is often thought of as “boring”.

That nicely comes back to the memorable quote from FUNNEL “Your industry isn’t boring, your marketing is boring!”.

Come on B2B marketers, let’s give B2C a run for their money!

Sonia Molina

Read ‘Gold Nuggets from eConsultancy’s FUNNEL event – Part 1‘

Overall lead nurturing, marketing automation and lead scoring were the main trends for the day. Luckily myself and Ricardo were both able to attend, so we managed to cover half of the sessions on offer. For us, some sessions were much better than others so here are our takeaways from the favourites:

Kate Shopper, Director Media Services, ECI Telecom - Making your site ‘buyer centric’ for optimised engagement

1. Interesting statistic – by 2015, 75% of all enquiries will be generated by web/inbound marketing

2. Kate made the important point (which we so often forget) that websites are for the customer not for us! Move away from the ‘Me-Me-Me’ type website and make it about the customer and their business needs.

3. ECI Telecom’s website hierarchy was related to their customer buying cycle, allowing them to tailor their messages to each buyer type

4. All visitor types needs to be engaged with the relevant content. So instead of one site fits all, they split their visitors types and content into:

- Education – for visitors committed to change and beginning their journey

- Solution – for visitors exploring a solution

- Vendor Selection – for visitors ready to buy

5. Each visitor segment was content mapped.

- Education -  visitors are offered third party analyst/industry reports, webinars & blogs. Less about ECI more about the market trend.

- Solution - visitors are shown case studies and white papers – more specific to ECI’s offering

- Vendor Selection - visitors are drilling down into more detail so they receive newsletters, technical data sheets and videos.

6. ECI Telecom product videos and technical information is now delivered by engineers and employees – gone are the days of flashy corporate videos. “Peer-to-Peer” communication is what’s working best. Use your marketing budget more effectively!

7. The results – in a nutshell an uplift in visits, page views, time spent. The all important bounce rate was reduced too. Still early days but great results. No surprise that more relevant content = more engaged visitors = increased leads = uplift in sales.

Overall a solid presentation, sharing a very smart and precise solution for a diverse target market and buying cycle – and transferable to any B2B business. Looks simple in hindsight but it was no easy task according to Kate – a one year project to arrive at this new robust website and still in the making!

We’ll be continuing the write up on FUNNEL with part 2 later today – just to make it a bit more digestible! eConsultancy are also sharing the slides from the event next week so we’ll keep you posted on those too.

Sonia Molina

One of the old tricks, but a good one is to send the potential prospect a letter/email that they can use and present to their boss. I have not seen this one for a while but I like the way it’s been reinvigorated in ExactTarget‘s annual event website. It was posted as a “Need to justify your trip?” button.

How many prospects will actually use it is difficult to know – but it’s certainly another tool to add to your arsenal of converting a prospect to a customer.

The examples below, courtesy of ExactTarget.

It was all the clever details that impressed me the most – aside all the great new contacts and learnings, it’s these details that made it a truly memorable experience for me and I’m sure many others. The objective of the event I’m sure was getting the brand in front of a captive audience (with hopefully some conversions) – so marketing certainly achieved their goal. Delegates would have left with the Nimbus brand on the forefront of their mind and with 600 delegates in the room that’s pretty good news.

Here are some of the refreshing things Nimbus did at the event…

Upon arrival we were given a simple pocket size booklet with the two day programme, a pack of coasters and a plastic box with M&M’s. The mini booklet was perfectly sized and unconventional from the usual plastic bag full of literature and stress balls. The coasters were a clever play on the ‘brewery’ theme that in fact had Nimbus’ client testimonials on the back – brilliant and definitely more engaging that an A4 sheet of quotes. The fab M&M’s were customised with the slogan “We are putting the M back into BPM”.

To continue with the theme, the beers served in the evening were “Nimbus” branded (I later found out they discovered this existing Scottish beer, so they didn’t have to go through the pain of relabelling!)

… and finally the clever choice of ‘Naturally 7′ who truly were an ‘Inspiring Performance’ and that’s precisely why they chose them!

Like I said, aside the top content and networking opportunities the event left people talking about it, inspired and definitely looking forward to the next one.

It’s a great case study for all those in the events and conference industry on how the small things can make such a big difference!

Here is a short video published 24 hrs after the event

They’re specifically talking about the art of engagement. As we all now, marketing is no longer about push but all about the pull. It’s about what the customer wants, not what we want them to want! Customers have wised up – content, communications and promotions need to be relevant and engaging. Get that right and you’ll see your leads increase. Sounds simple and pretty obvious right. Not if we’re seeing statistics like this:

“Just 2-3% of websites earn the respect of a visitor so they identify themselves and become a contact.”

Pretty worrying when you think how many potential leads companies must be losing at the data capture stage.

Definitely take a read of the article – there’s a great visual to illustrate digital funnel management and also some real examples of what an engagement zone is all about.

Check it out.

Check it out here.

Enjoy

Ricardo