If the saying, “Man cannot live by bread alone” were adapted to comment on an effective business-to-business (B2B) marketing plan it might read, “A business cannot succeed on one marketing tactic alone.”  Just as a well-balanced diet is important to the health our bodies, a well-balanced marketing plan is essential for optimal company growth.

Unfortunately, B2B marketers don’t have standards like the food pyramid to guide them.  There is no magic formula that determines the right mix of tactics your company needs for a healthy marketing plan.  And sometimes even when you’ve devised a smart plan to follow, changes in the marketplace make it necessary to adjust the amount of emphasis you give to each tactic or force you to change your key messages.

Just like our bodies need certain nutrients to help others work efficiently, one marketing tactic can boost the success of another.  A pre-show direct mail piece drives traffic to your booth.  Your Web address in your trade ad drives traffic to your site.  Synergies between tactics give you multiple opportunities to touch prospects using more than one tactic.

Here are some tactics you should consider putting on your marketing plate:

Trade advertising: Build mindshare among your customers and prospects.  A well thought out media plan includes both horizontal (i.e. food ingredients) and vertical (i.e. natural food ingredients) trade publications.  Don’t try to say too much in your ads.  Practice the five C’s: clear, concise, coherent consistent and (strong) call-to-action.

Web site/electronic communication: Your site shouldn’t be an electronic version of your brochure.  It should be dynamic with new information that encourages visitors to check back often.  Post news releases, white papers and articles to keep content fresh and raise your search engine listings.  Send e-newsletters to visitors who opt-in to build your e-mail database and inexpensively communicate with customers and prospects on a regular basis.

Trade shows: The main reason that trade shows aren’t successful for companies is they just show up.  Have a plan for choosing which shows to exhibit at and know your goals for each show.  Most importantly, make sure your booth staff knows your goals.  Having the right people with the right mindset working your booth is a must to ensure that you qualify prospects that are most likely to turn into a sale after the show.

Print materials: While the role of collateral materials is changing, it is still an essential tool in B2B sales.  Even though prospects may do their research on the Web, there comes a point when they want something that they can hold in their hand and share with others.  Literature is a key fulfillment tool for Web site requests and tradeshow prospects as well as an effective leave-behind for face-to-face meetings.

Direct response: This isn’t “junk mail”.  When done right, direct mail is still one of the most effective marketing tactics.  Start with a well-refined mailing list that targets only the audience that meets your demographics parameters.  Create a mailer that will cut through the clutter and standout.  Build in a strong call-to-action and most importantly, follow up with phone calls.  One mailing with no follow up is doomed to fail.

Public relations: You can say what you want in your ads but you can’t put words in a customer’s mouth.  Third party endorsements in case studies go a long way towards building the credibility of your messages.  At tradeshows, set one-on-one appointments with trade editors to share your news.  Proactively contact them throughout the year to discuss editorial opportunities.  Be available to help make their jobs easier in anyway you can to make them more likely to call you to contribute for upcoming articles.  Ongoing communication is essential to ensure you take advantage of editorial coverage opportunities.

Promotions/premiums: Don’t overlook the power of this touch point. Remember how you felt the last time you saw a clock sitting on your prospect’s desk with your competitor’s logo beaming back at you?  Items imprinted with your brand have the potential to be a part of your customers’ and prospects’ everyday lives.  They can increase the effectiveness of a direct response piece and leave a lasting impression after a trade show.  Be sure your sales staff has access to a wide variety of items for wearing and sharing.

Just as each ingredient in food formulations provides a specific functionality, each of these tactics has a unique function in brand development.  Because all customers are different and vertical segments have different sales cycles, your marketing mix may look totally different from year to year.  The mix also depends on your specific company goals for that year.  Perhaps you want to focus more internationally.  Maybe you have anew product to roll out.  Be flexible but always have a plan to follow.

There is no cookie cutter way of using these tools. But your goal is to move prospects and customers along a sales continuum from awareness to interest to desire to action.  And the best way to accomplish this is to evaluate the health of your current marketing plan and develop a balanced mix of the right communication ingredients.

Although the management team at Cedar Crest had more than 80 years of experience in supplying writing instruments to the promotional products industry when they opened their doors, the company had zero name recognition.

We collaborated with their industry’s premiere trade association to put together a feature article that appeared in their monthly magazine.  Our client shared these results:

“Today we already received a call from a distributor in Texas who wants to be a customer of Cedar Crest based on reading the PPB article in the January issue.   Hopefully others will follow his lead.  We are going to print out additional copies of the story to hand out to distributors at the upcoming Orlando and Vegas shows to help share our story.  It should be very helpful.”

Doug Miskimen – President

Cedar Crest Mfg. Inc.

Public relations builds credibility for your company and augments the rest of your marketing activities.  If you’d like to learn more about generating leads from editorial coverage, contact Felicia at fwyrick@adfinitymarketing or 319.363.3338.

Your sales and marketing staff probably think working a trade show is a long, exhausting ordeal.  How would they feel about working a booth for 6 months?  The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, considered to be the first trade show promoting products of the Industrial Revolution, ran from May to October, occupied 991,857 square feet of exhibit space showing over 100,000 products and services.  Now that’s a lot of gellin’.

6,039,205 people attended.  Wow!  Now that’s a lot of prospects!

But that was 1851.   What did they know about trade shows?  Vendors thought they could just show up and people would buy stuff.  But we’re way more sophisticated than that 106 years later, right?  Fact is, many companies today think they can put up a snazzy booth and offer a cool giveaway gizmo and the leads will just pour in.

Not true.  As with any other marketing program, a successful trade show depends on a plan derived from strategic thinking about objectives and developing the most effective ways to engage prospects.  It’s not just about “the booth”.  It’s about communicating with prospects before, during and after the show.  Consider the following tactics to touch potential customers beyond a handshake in your booth.

A successful pre-show direct mail campaign begins with a good list.  Pre-registration lists exclude on-site registrants.  Past attendee lists assume the same folks are coming back.  Depending on the integrity of your internal database, consider customizing your own list based on prospects that your sales staff is already working who are likely to attend.  Takes more work and lead time, but it ensures that you’re inviting people to your booth that already know you and have an interest in your products.

Your pre-show mailer should give them a reason to show up in your booth.  A chance to win something is always a hook, but the piece should do a good job of highlighting any new products you are rolling out and/or sell the benefits of core products you’ll have on display as well.

Booth graphics should tie into the pre-show mailer so your targeted prospects recognize the connection.  Remember that your list was highly refined and that the majority of show attendees haven’t been invited in before walking by your booth.  Treat signage like a billboard that you drive by on your daily commute; communicate key messages in 3-5 seconds.

If you’re rolling out a new product that, remember another key audience:  trade editors.  Call them before the show (and early) to schedule an appointment for them to come in and get an up-close-and-personal walk through of product benefits with your technical experts.  Coach presenters on focusing on benefits, not features.  Always ask:  what will be interesting to the magazine’s readers, a.k.a. your prospects?

Close the loop.  Track booth visitors who were on your pre-show list.  Follow up with those who didn’t stop by with a post-show mailer.  Circle back to the information about new product intros or special offers promoted in your pre-show mailer.   Better yet, have your sales staff (who hopefully helped develop your contact list in the first place) follow- up.

Speaking of follow-up, a recent Center for Exhibition Industry Research report found that more than 80 percent of leads gathered at trade shows are never contacted.  A critical part of trade show success is a structured plan for getting back to prospects with brochures, organizing leads by territory, doing everything you can to make it as easy as possible for salespeople to make that call.

If you’d like help gellin’ your next trade show campaign, Adfinity will make you stand out in the crowd.

It may be Project QAQ-450² in-house. Lock the doors and keep it there. Out in the world, it’ll be toast. When customers can’t remember a product name, attach a mind-picture to it, or even pronounce it, they’re not likely to be talking about it either.

Of course, we can all name the exceptions. Ever hear of Xerox? But it takes serious advertising dollars to turn a less-than-familiar collection of letters into an industry colossus. Consider the resources Nike expended to teach the world’s runners that it didn’t rhyme with “hike.”

For both business-to-business and consumer marketers, a good product name is like a mover on the sales team; the alpha-mover, in fact. Your attitude, personality and differentiation are fronted by it. In food inspection, Sorter Model 3000-A wouldn’t say “hi-tech vision” the way Optyx^® does. And a generic juice is hard pressed to cut it in the cooler beside Tropical Tornado^®, Baha^® Red or Naked^®.

Equipment manufacturers, particularly, have long carried the torch for letter-number conventions because they give order to numerous permutations. Michael Mace, however, a strategist with Rubicon Consulting, says, “Every company that has half a brain somewhere in its marketing department wants to use real names for its products rather than numbers. Names are easier to communicate, and easier for customers to remember.”

So Much to Say, So Little Space…

Coming up with a concise, powerful, trademarkable name is being handed more and more to linguistic specialists, market researchers and psychographic mappers, not to mention creative professionals who live for the “aha moment.”  Landing on a winning name – whether straightforward, clever, fun to say or a buzz to the tongue (a high-scoring communication attribute, by the way) – is both science and art.

Gurus will tell you there are, more or less, four species of names: descriptives (Martha Stewart Cooking, for example); cooked-up (Zonkers, Fruitopia); experience reminders (Cracker Barrel); and attitude positioners (Green Giant, Rock Star). As parameters go, these aren’t etched in stone. Personally, I find that cooked up names can leak over into “experience” territory or exhibit a whole lot of ‘tude. Experts tend to steer companies to name the desired positioning (a mind picture) for a product rather than simply describe its function.

All the Good Ones are Taken…

A typical stumbling block is that there are only so many words in the English language (ones that don’t mean something startling in French or Chinese). Rivkin & Associates, publishers of the Naming Newsletter, conducted a survey showing 3,000 new trademark applications are added every week to the nearly 4 million already on file. “A new name has to hit the trifecta,” notes founder, Steve Rivkin. “It has to be available, it has to be distinctive, and it has to be memorable.”

Scarifying math aside, with focused thinking and strategy, there are still unique, on-target names to be mined. My colleagues and I have learned not to break out the champagne too early in the brainstorming though. It’s incumbent to do a measure of due-diligence from the beginning to confirm that a front-runner – so brainy, original and promising – hasn’t already been trademarked by an outfit in Escondido. We check the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s online database and gather what I call “Surf Reports” from the Internet for any potential conflicts. Client companies will unleash their legal departments on the final choice before stepping out in public.

Whether working internally or with consultants, keep these touchstones in view. A name should:

• plant your stake in the market (you’re going to dominate the category, right?)

• demonstrate that you’re different (originality is a hot property)

• support your brand positioning (technological? emotional? edgy? healthful?)

• be easy  (say it out loud; does it get tangled in the teeth? could it be misconstrued? can anybody spell it?)

• have legs – (will it survive time and intercontinental use?)

And the winner of the last word goes to Patents, Copyrights & Trademarks for Dummies:  “Holding a public or employee contest to coin a name makes as much sense as practicing medicine by popular vote. It’s haphazard at best. Have a company picnic instead.”

And that’s the game of the name. It beats herding numbers every time.