Cold calling as a primary outbound marketing tool just doesn't work for ad agencies. Never has, never will. Yet I still run into agency principals who think that blanketing selected targets and industries with sales brochures and unsolicited telephone calls or emails is the best way to grow their business.
The latest edition of Marketing News from the American Marketing Association has an interesting case study on how a small Indiana service provider doubled their revenue last year through web-based marketing in lieu of cold calling. Here's what they did, and what any b-to-b service provider can do to grow their business.
The first step was a redesign of their web site to move it from a brochure site touting their background and experience to an interactive experience that walks potential customers through the steps of deciding if they need their service to why they should choose their firm. Along the way, they adopted several best practices to simplify the navigation and reduce copy to add more graphics. They rewrote copy using direction from Google Adwords and adopted some other simple SEO principles to re-write title tags and add keywords to their code.
The next step was to launch a blog to feature their knowledge experts' insights on topics of interest to their key audiences. They used SEO tactics to ensure that blog posts ranked high for searches related to their content matter, added a link to the blog to the company's web site and shared blog posts with LinkedIn groups. According to their marketing director, tracking analysis found that LinkedIn was particularly effective in driving traffic to their blog which in turn led to more attention to the company's web site.
Although they did not use Twitter, I believe that tweeting with a link to the blog post is another way to effectively drive traffic to your blog and ultimately to your site.
They extended the company's thought leadership profile by expanding selected blog posts into magazine articles, white papers.and presentations that led to conference speaking engagements based on their demonstrated credibility and subject matter expertise. They also began a concerted effort to establish strategic partnerships with complementary service providers.
The combination of web-based marketing efforts and new partnerships has led to a "snowball effect" according to their marketing director. Traffic to their web site jumped from an average of 10 to 15 visits per week to 1,500 to 2,000 visits per week.
Prior to launching this intensive web marketing program, nearly 80% of their new business came from cold calls and traditional outbound selling. This year, more than 80% of new business has come web driven initiatives and revenues have doubled.
These changes weren't rocket science. And they weren't particularly expensive. What they did is take advantage of an integrated marketing effort to allow prospects to move through a decision thought process before they even talked. That led to a much more cost effective way to invest their time and efforts to grow their customer base. Is it time to rethink your business development strategy?
