Driving Your Business Forward Ridge Consulting is a business to business marketing consultancy focused on helping B2B companies to develop new business and new markets. Our specific expertise is in helping business to business companies to increase their market share and sales with both new and existing customers. We help our clients to achieve this through a range of marketing tactics, including: Developing B2B marketing plans with Clients Developing new contacts and relationships at target accounts B2B pipeline nurturing, management and conversion to "wins" Content marketing and thought leadership Online and digital marketing B2B social media marketing campaigns Freelance marketing consultant support Benchmarking internal and external teams against industry norms "CandidateBuddy": We have developed a specific offering to help recruitment agencies and consultants to dramatically improve their candidate engagement process. For more information on CandidateBuddy, please click here. We are not about branding, and we are not about PR. We are business to business marketing consultants that will bring a systematic process and structure to help you increase your business with new and existing customers.   If you want to systematically drive new business, contact us today: +44 208 816 7729 info@ridge-consulting.com   As a provider of business to business marketing consultants, Ridge Consulting delivers a wide range of business development consultancy services to clients in the UK and Ireland, EMEA and worldwide.
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Selected Blog Entries

Top 5 Challenges for the B2B Chief Marketing Officer in 2013

 

As 2013 really starts to get underway, people are wondering what new challenges are going to face them over the course of the next twelve months. Chief Marketing Officers for companies are going to have a set of challenges for B2B marketing that might seem a bit similar to the ones that they’ve faced before. However, with more reliance upon marketing automation software, it seems as though this area is going to be where much of the focus is going to lie. By meeting these challenges head on and by utilizing the right software, the CMO should be able to take their marketing to the next level.

 

Here are 5 of those challenges:

 

Tracking the History and Scoring the Lead

 

You have to be able to track the history of the B2B clients that you have and that you are trying to nurture. Knowing the history of interactions with these clients will help the CMO determine which of those leads is going to be ready for more contact with the sales team, as well as which leads still need more nurturing before approaching. You have to be able to “score” the lead to help you determine this. Those who have a higher score are more likely to become a sale. You have to be able to come up with parameters that help you determine where these leads fall.

 

Understanding Context Marketing

 

It is important to learn as much about the different leads that you have as possible and then to classify them into different categories or segments. Doing so will let you offer different marketing strategies to these groups. The challenge is trying not to utilize the same marketing tactic for all of your B2B clients. Different clients have different needs and are at different places. Market appropriately based on the data that you are able to gather.

 

Keep Nurturing the Leads

 

One of the challenges that CMOs might face is in the aspect of continuing to nurture leads. You have to have effective nurturing that will move those B2B leads into a state of mind where they are ready to become actual clients. You can do this partially by continuing to provide those leads with valuable information and tools, which leads nicely into the next challenge CMOs will face.

 

Continue Creating High Quality Content

 

While you might have the right automation software in place for your marketing, you still have to make sure that you are continually coming up with quality content for those to whom you are marketing, as well as for your current crop of clients. For some companies, this challenge is going to mean stepping up the production of blog content, article content, whitepapers, e-books, and more. You may find that bringing in new people to the company, or hiring freelancers, is the best way to meet the challenge for new content on a regular basis.

 

Reevaluating

 

The final challenge is one that everyone has to face. You will have to reevaluate your campaigns as well as how the B2B marketing is going, and you have to do so with regularity. You have to be ready and willing to make changes whenever needed. Never become complacent as a CMO.