Supply Chain Marketing: Five Ways to Grow Business When Your Customer Isn’t the End User

Editor's note: Joe Sullivan, partner of Gorilla 76, mapped out five tactics to help guide supply chain professionals in their marketing efforts. Supply chain marketing can be tricky, he says, but with the right strategy in place supply chain professionals can effectively reach and maintain their goals.

Cold calls, trade shows, spec sheets, brochures, more cold calls. Supply chain marketing can be monotonous. For the thousands of businesses out there that sell to companies who sell to other companies who in turn sell to the end user, marketing isn't about flashy ads or big consumer marketing budgets. It's about generating awareness among very niche markets and establishing, developing and maintaining strong customer relationships. But are there more effective ways to accomplish these goals? Yep. Here are five good starting points.

1. Answer common customer FAQs with robust content

One of the best ways to gain awareness and generate website traffic as a B2B supplier is to simply answer the questions your customers ask you on a regular basis and post them as separate pages on your website. This may sound counterintuitive. If a prospect doesn't know who I am, how can I answer their FAQs? Well, the truth is that they're probably going to ask similar questions in Google searches. And if you've stated those questions and sufficiently answered them in the form of blog posts or pages on your website, Google will point them in your direction. Once written, you can also email links to these blog posts to current prospects and customers. After all, you're the expert and they value what you have to say.

Action step:
• Write down three questions you often receive from prospects during the sales process. Think about how you typically answer those questions and understand the importance of B2B writing that informs. Then write down your answers in a few paragraphs and work with your marketing team to post them as separate pages or blog posts on your company site.

2. Give in order to get

Consumers guard their personal contact information today more than ten years ago. Yet email addresses and phone numbers remain the “currency” of B2B lead generation, and prospective customers will still “pay” you with that info under one condition: you give them something of value in return.

As a marketing strategy firm that specializes in industrial and supply chain marketing, the single strongest lead-generation tactic for our clients has been the downloadable guide. What (non-proprietary) information can your company package in the form of a downloadable PDF, post on your website and ask for a name, phone number and email address in exchange for it? For one of our clients – a bioplastics company committed to creating sustainable materials – we included a link in their blog post called “Processing considerations for wood-plastic composites” to an in-depth white paper about wood plastic composites. Visitors entered the site through the blog post, were directed to a detailed white paper, and lastly converted on a contact form before downloading the white paper.
What's the equivalent for your businesses? This concept is simple. Exchange your expertise for permission to start a conversation with a potential customer.

Action step:
• Talk to your sales team (unless that's you). Compile a few pages worth of content from sales decks or company literature that can provide value to your prospects in their vendor research process. Button it up and package it with a catchy title and work with your marketing team to place it behind a lead-capture page on your site.

3. Invest in lower cost, higher return, trackable advertising opportunities

Have you ever run a print advertisement in an industry trade publication? They're not cheap! Sometimes a quarter page ad can cost a few thousand dollars or more to run once. Tracking effectiveness is no simple chore either. So what about this idea instead? Many of these same trade publications offer banner ads or email newsletter ads for as little as 10-20% the cost of a printed ad. And guess what? Because those ads are clickable, they're also trackable. Learning how to measure marketing success will clue you in to whether or not your marketing efforts are working. Try an experiment. Run a print ad that drives to a lead-capture-equipped page on your website. Now you'll not only benefit from awareness generated by the ad, but also create opportunity to collect that valuable contact-info currency from a prospective customer.

Action steps:
• Contact some of your industry's trade publications and request the pricing for their website banner ads and e-newsletter sponsorship ads. Request data on the amount of traffic their website receives and the size of their email distribution list to evaluate opportunity.
• Run a campaign for three months with the right measurement systems in place to track effectiveness. Then evaluate the results.

4. Manage business leads with a CRM system

CRM stands for “customer relationship management.” As part of a B2B company, managing customer relationships is probably a familiar subject, but are you effectively managing and tracking your leads in an organized way? CRM systems like Salesforce, Highrise or SugarCRM provide a platform for you to record info on conversations, store email dialogue, set follow-up reminders and sync with your email marketing database. In short, a CRM system bridges marketing and sales to assure no prospects are forgotten or neglected.

Action step:
• Watch a free demo of Salesforce – the industry-leading CRM software. Seeing it in action may open your eyes to a CRM's place in the supply chain marketing process.

5. Support business development with email marketing automation

No two leads are created equal. And because your time is limited, you can't spend the same amount of it with everyone. Email marketing automation lets you craft chains of marketing emails ahead of time and distribute them to prospects based on demographics or actions taken on your website. Whether you segment your lead database by industry, job title or hot/cold leads, automated email campaigns help you target your marketing messages for each individual.

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