THE PAYOFF

B2B firms can avoid the pitfalls of tactical soup by being selective in the type and volume of marketing tactics they apply. Most importantly, they must identify a specific and measurable strategic outcome in advance of any tactic's design or application. For example, a 25-person CPA firm with an emerging practice among medium-size, privately held businesses sought to add a pharmaceutical company to its client list. Leveraging the life science industry background of one of its senior partners, the firm proposed and published a bylined article on Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) revenue-recognition compliance-a supply chain issue of great interest and value to pharmaceutical industry executives-in a leading life science publication with more than 35,000 print subscribers and an even greater number of online readers.

Instead of simply posting the bylined article on its website and adding article reprints to its marketing kit, this firm understood three important considerations regarding the real value of media placement as a marketing tactic:

The article's content was not as valuable as the firm's indirect affiliation with a respected pharmaceutical industry publication.
On its own, publication of the article was unlikely to generate any viable, near-term new business prospects.
For the firm to benefit from the credibility associated with publication of its partner's life sciences expertise, it would need to proactively merchandise this inherent 3rd party endorsement.
Now that its marketing toolbox contained validation of the senior partner's intellectual capital in a leading vertical trade magazine, the firm leveraged the value of that exposure. It used the article reprint as the cornerstone of a direct [url=https://www.latestdatabase.com/b2b-email-list/]b2b email list [url] campaign designed to raise awareness of the firm and to initiate substantive conversations with CFOs at pharmaceutical firms matching the criteria of prospective clients it had targeted-in terms of geography, ownership, revenue growth, number of employees and apparent levels of sophistication.

The firm's mailing included a hard copy, personalized cover letter to those targets, offering to provide a pro bono analysis of the prospect's SOX exposure, which was followed by a courtesy phone call designed to measure levels of interest and to schedule an introductory meeting. Over the course of this six-month campaign, which effectively combined two marketing tactics-media exposure and direct mail-this accounting firm netted two new pharmaceutical industry clients.

Instead of generating marketing activity for its own sake, this B2B firm effectively applied specific marketing tactics to yield a predetermined business outcome.