Websites and online marketing are your most important Business to Business (B2B) marketing tools. Making use of your website and online marketing channels is intrinsic to the success of your brand and using them to their potential truly is the centre of your B2B marketing universe.

Your web presence needs to satisfy many different stakeholders with buying cycles which can often be a lengthy process. The most efficient way to satisfy the hopes and allay the fears of different professionals at different stages of the buying process is to have a website that is both logically segmented and easy to navigate. A clearly defined contact form is a must when showcasing products and services to ensure sales enquiries can be generated.

In order to maximise your return on investment, defining the main user group, or groups, your website needs to focus on will mean that it is as profitable as it can be for your business.

Once the key user groups are defined, the content and structure of the website must be set up to deliver an outcome or action. This call to action is effectively a user journey through your website – different users have different needs and, in turn, will take a different journey. The objective is to send your users on a relevant journey exposing them to key messages, engaging content and ultimately to a sales opportunity.

Our strategic approach to delivering the best value in your brand communication ensures that we create a campaign contact strategy with your website at the heart of the dialogue. We believe that online and offline communication channels should exist in harmony to ensure the user journey’s can be best signposted in all of your communications.

Here at Fifth Ring, we typically try to adopt tactics such as:

• Driving traffic from a Google search to a specific landing page that contains a case study, product or article relevant to the search term
• Clear segmentation of user referrals using direct mail and email. Personalised URLs and pin code access can be implemented to provide personalised content
• Using direct marketing techniques perhaps allows user profiling and measurement of activities to be logged allowing user profile information to be obtained such as visit frequency, page views, downloads and so on. This information can be mapped against sales, contact and customer relationship management (CRM) databases to build a plan for ongoing client communication planning
• Online dashboards can be used to create a reporting structure on the level of success of a campaign
• Using analytics software measures campaign effectiveness from a statistical point of view. The importance of analytical data is in the interpretation. We constantly strive to take an objective view as to how a communication method can be maximised.

Harnessing the power of the Internet has proven effectiveness in the B2B arena. Integrating online and offline marketing strategies provides a platform to qualitatively and quantitavely benchmark the effectiveness of your communications.

The Internet also allows you to manage the dialogue around your brand by tracking and measuring the activity and popular content. Creating a profile of your customers has never been easier and at the end of the day, mapping this against the stakeholders you are targeting allows you to constantly evolve your communications to ultimately deliver focus and value.