Harvesting B2B Leads in Asia
Increasing Lead Quality
Increasing Funnel Volume
Marketing Automation
Communication between sales and marketing
Platforms and technology
Increasing Lead Quality
Executing successful marketing programmes in Asia, particularly in south east asian countries, can be a resource intensive task as you may have to deal with at least 4 to 5 countries in diverse locations and cultures. Assuming you already have a well-trained team of marketers, most B2B marketing endeavors will culminate in generating and harvesting sales opportunities leading to positive flows to your company’s bottom line.
Before starting your marketing campaign do have your in-country team vett through it’s content and ,if necessary, have localisation completed for your communication channels.
In order to maximise leads quality coming into your funnels content for all communication should be consistent and clear call-to-action should be agreed upon by all concerned parties; especially with sale leaders. More on that later. As campaign progresses expect some changes along the way and planning A/B options in content and CTA will help minimise last minute scramble.
Increasing Funnel Volume
Now that your prep work is completed you are looking at an optimal level of exposure to target audiences across countries in South East Asia. For languages, you should be able to get away with English only for Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. However, for Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam local domain is highly recommended.
If budget permits, social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook will expose your message to a wide array of audiences. Although it’s always good to have high response rate but sometimes qualifying leads can be very taxing to your people so remember to resource plan your human capital requirement earlier. Here, having an external B2B marketing agency can be useful as scaling can be easier than hiring new staff. Agency can be utilised on an ad-hoc basis as response rates peaks and troughs.
Another area to look at is in your own databases. If your list is older than a year it may be a good idea to update as people move quite a bit in Asia. A good way to initiate an updating exercise is to offer an invitation to an event or simply a trial or promotion. Email is usually a good place to begin as contacts who are no longer employed will have their email hard bounced. With a few calls discovery could reveal new opportunities.
Finally, securing an external list of contact based on criteria such as Industry segment and job title offer another way to widen the scope of your direct marketing communication. However, as these lists are generally cold to your solution and/or company, initiating activities for brand building is a better way to start with this group.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation in B2B focuses more on education,value sharing, networking for professional groups. Key intent is to aid B2B prospects by nurturing leads through a prepared work flow in the marketing automation software by timely responses and more efficiency in campaign management.
Content tends to be less personalised with emphasis in an industry’s trend and challenges as examples. Tactics usually involves event-based communications like seminars, workshops or white-papers.
Automation in marketing works, especially in modern times, as B2B audiences are exposed to endless content and in order to get ahead of competition timely responses are necessary for early engagement by sales.
For more on marketing automation please read “The 7 Best Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms in 2019“
Communication between sales and marketing
When sales and marketing work well together it is a sight to behold as the team’s lever punches through competition. Sadly most corporate teams work in silo sometimes even with its own agenda. But with marketing automation gaps between sales and marketing can be bridged especially when management keeping close tabs.
However, many organisation find that marketing leads still need to be better qualified before handing over to sale. Such leads may require light touches where a high performing team may find unproductive. Here is where an outsourced agency with experience in leads nurturing process may be an effective resources that will keep leads funnel stock with higher quality leads.
Platforms and technology
There is no doubt that technology has moved marketing towards better efficiency with timely delivery of content mixed with healthy levels of engagements.
But how are these tools evolving moving forward in 2020?
- ChatBots with AI
- Content created from sales and marketing can be a very useful tool when planning for chat flow.
- Besides a standard FAQ conduct a regular survey with both customers and prospect to understand issues better.
- Online Search Tool
- Voice Search is increasingly gaining popularity with mobiles becoming the default goto device.
- Map Search optimisation should be considered part of a marketer’s radar if location matters
- Visual and Video will increase in prominence which may will help in SERP positioning.
- Social Media
- Raise of social ecommerce
- Social video
- AI-enabled technology in CRM
- Collaboration Hubs