B2B Marketers: Five Critical Principles

A new Omniture white paper (free registration required) summarizes five important steps to success for B2B marketers:

1. Better Lead Generation
2. Nurturing Prospects and Customers
3. Retaining Customers With Better Customer Support
4. Tracking and Measuring Success
5. Measuring Five B2B Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

1) Leads Generated
2) Lead Conversion Ratio
3) Cost per Lead
4) Web Inquiries
5) Web Inquiry Failure Rate

While individually, there is nothing substantially new here, the five principles together are what create a powerful marketing system. And, as Omniture points out, the Web is at the nexus of this critical five-part integration. A table missing a leg isn’t of much use, and likewise a critical breakdown in any of these five key supporting principles severely diminishes the ability of the remaining elements to function effectively.

Often in B2B marketing the real success stories aren’t built on doing something profoundly new. Many times, true success is simply performing the fundamentals better than the competition and building those fundamentals into a system that provides good data today so you can make better decisions tomorrow.