Are you a US organization struggling to feel the effects of your influence in EMEA? Perhaps you're already running a successful Demand Generation program in the US, but feel that it could be working a little harder overseas. Regardless of the challenges you face, this guide is designed to give you an insight into the issues you need to consider to optimize your EMEA Demand Generation activities.
3. 3
B2B buyers are
67% through their
buying cycle before
interacting with
suppliers
Source: Sirius Decisions
Change is a constant. The internet
has fundamentally redefined the way
your buyers go about their business.
They have a problem to solve?
They go online to research solutions
that could solve this problem,
comparing products, prices,
functionality, manufacturers.
They join forums to find out what
other users have made of the options
and suppliers they’re considering.
And it’s all on their own terms without
the intervention of your sales people.
Chances are they’ll be two-thirds of
their way through the buying cycle
before engaging directly with suppliers.
All of which is more manageable when
it’s on your territory.
Further afield, in markets where
the culture, the language and the
business needs are different, it
becomes more of a challenge.
Make more
of your
EMEA
marketing
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4. 4
The tools and the information
to meet needs precisely
Regardless of geography or business
service, demand generation has
emerged as the marketer’s best ally to
counter the fundamental changes in
buyer behavior and to take on broader
audiences. Today’s technology gives you
the ability to understand and to meet
customer needs more precisely than
ever before. With the right tools and
the right information, you can engage
in conversations at the earliest possible
opportunity, to influence their
decision making process.
If you’re running an effective demand
generation program in the US, your
efforts will be around generating
more opportunities, converting those
opportunities into sales, and increasing
the revenue to the business of retained
customers. The processes and people
you have in place will support you
doing these things well, giving you
an appropriate return from your
marketing investment.
If this is the case, then you’re already
ahead of the game in terms of being
able to replicate success in other
regions. It may be that you already have
a marketing presence in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa that you feel
could be working a little harder. You
might just be starting out on expansion
into the region.
This guide is designed to give you
an insight into the issues you need
to consider to optimize your EMEA
demand generation activities.
Make more of your EMEA marketing
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5. 5
US marketers are more advanced than
peers almost anywhere else in the
world. The vast majority of marketing
automation platforms are designed and
developed in the United States, and
53% of the US B2B audience
are actively using marketing
automation platforms.
EMEA marketers might not be as
mature in demand generation and
marketing automation, but in a diverse
marketplace with different cultures,
expectations and goals, languages,
business environments and legislative
restrictions amongst other things, these
disciplines offer the most efficient
means of reaching the right people with
the right message at the right time.
Talk to prospects on an individual level
Marketing automation enables you to
address the audience at an individual
level. Big data and a dynamic analytics
function can help you to customize
communications and build relationships
with prospects based on their business
needs and circumstances in the
markets in which they operate.
If you’ve managed to achieve deep
buyer insight, strong sales and
marketing alignment, and the ability
to use technology to your best
advantage in existing markets, you’ll
be well-placed to succeed.
This, after all, is one of the key
premises of demand generation,
approaching customer relationships
with their needs and goals in mind,
not yours.
Why demand generation is
your best buddy in EMEA
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6. 6
The fact that the internet has had
such a fundamental effect on the
marketing process is a positive.
Wherever your prospects are in the
developed world, whatever their
industry or sector, the web has
changed the way they buy.
To run an effective modern-day demand
generation programme in EMEA, you’ll
need to apply the same core principles
you’d use in any demand generation
activity while recognizing and
accommodating the differences
into your strategic approach:
• Generate more opportunities
Attracting, engaging and identifying
more prospects whose motivations,
goals and business circumstances will
be different to those of US customers.
By using relevant content and inbound
marketing strategies and platforms
that take account of these and other
variables including culture and language.
• Convert opportunities into sales
Being attentive and understanding
enough to turn prospects’ interest into
sales. Through the empowerment and
expertise of your regional EMEA
team, and by using personalized
content and marketing automation
tools that drive their buyer journeys.
• Retain customers and
increase their value
Keeping customers and increasing the
number of purchases. By cross-selling
and up-selling using digital marketing
techniques, supporting increased
revenue and enhancing your
reputation in the region to maximize
word-of-mouth endorsement.
Adapting your existing strategies
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“Your website is a key research
tool used by visitors during
their purchase process, so make
sure it’s just as targeted and
relevant as your other demand
generation marketing efforts.”
GetSmartContent
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7. 7
Moving alongside prospects on
their buyer journey
You’ll be aware of the tools available to
map and manage a prospect’s journey
towards purchase. With the breadth and
depth of analytics available, it’s possible
to see exactly where in their journey
your audience is, and what you can do
to support or influence their decision-
making at each stage.
It may be that priorities for EMEA
customers aren’t the same as those
for their US counterparts depending on
the scale and nature of their business.
Bear in mind that quite often, a new
technology or process is first used in
North America and subsequently taken
up by other markets. Novelty will be an
attractive asset, but so will proven case
study success.
90% of business buyers
say when they’re ready
to buy, they’ll find you
Source: DemandGen Reports 2012
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8. 8
The mechanics of successful
demand generation
Successful demand generation is about
using a mix of inbound marketing,
content marketing and marketing
automation to lead prospects toward
purchase. Best practice is a scenario
where a central function and a
geographically-removed regional
hub will share resources to achieve
agreed goals.
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9. 93% of business
buyers use search
to begin their
journey
Source: Marketo
9
In markets where English isn’t the first
language, your key priority is to put
together translated words and phrases
that will improve your rankings. Work
with your teams and, if necessary,
external resources to define authentic
keywords and phrases that will reflect
prospect searches.
Google Trends can help you review
keywords and trends relevant to your
business propositions across countries,
and to identify keywords for optimal
performance in these regions.
Inbound
To attract your audience from an
inbound perspective you have two
main vehicles – search and social.
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Search
At its simplest, ‘search’ represents the
act of being found when a prospect
looks on a search engine for something
they want. The goal is to be found by
your audience when they are looking for
something that you can help them with.
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10. 50%+ of tech
buyers seek
information
about products
on social sites
Source: B2B Tech Buyers,
IDG websites
10
Social
Social media increases your ability to be
found through communities. It enables
communities to be the voice of your
company and spread your reach beyond
your known contacts, identify prospects
you can actively nurture and even boost
search performance.
Within B2B environments, search and
social are fuelled by content. Without
content, you will have little to attract
audiences with through social media
and receive less search traffic. More
importantly, without content, the
visitors you do generate will remain
unknown to you.
Your local team will be expected
to research and know the most
important local B2B platforms,
industry commentators and forums,
though LinkedIn, Twitter andYouTube
are ubiquitous and will probably
feature to some extent.
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11. 11
Develop a united inbound strategy
Having an integrated inbound marketing
strategy is key to reducing the silo
effect of specialist teams who are
geographically dispersed. With this
strategy in place, each team can act
independently, but with the aim of
contributing most effectively to overall
direction and goal. This drives synergy
but also empowers each team to own
responsibility for its actions for the
greater good of the enterprise as a
whole, and its balance sheet.
The importance of blogging
One of the most effective ways of
enhancing keywords on your website
and building backlinks is blogging.
This requires the continual creation
of newsworthy material that people
want to share socially and link to
from their websites.
By sharing the responsibility of regular
contributions to a blog, you support
your local team in forging their own
identity and voice under the umbrella
of your brand.
B2B companies that blog generate, on average, over 50%
more leads per month than non-blogging organizations
(Source: Socialmedia B2B)
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12. 12
Content Marketing
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Content must be relevant to your
business as well as to your potential
customers. Effective content should
support your business objectives and
demonstrate your thought-leadership –
and accelerate the customer along the
pipeline toward a sale.
A business problem is still a business
problem, irrespective of geography
Where content is concerned, it makes
sense to talk to prospects in their
language. Translations that reflect the
original meanings need to be carefully
thought through, especially if your
product range is technically complex, but
this is easily achievable with the right
support, either internally or bought-in.
Remember that even though your
brands are really important to you,
prospects are more interested in learning
about, and finding solutions to, their
problems. A customer-centric approach
puts every piece of information in
the context of a journey, making it
more relevant to more people,
more of the time.
Make your assets openly available
to your team
There’s no reason not to repurpose
existing content to fit the appropriate
stages of the EMEA buyer journey,
sense-checking for local relevance in
terms of prospect’s business priorities.
Statistics that reflect the local business
environment will help, as will case
studies readers can identify with.
Again, your team on the ground is there
to monitor industry trends and events
where they’re based. Open channels
of communication will help to identify
assets you have that they could
use productively.
95% of B2B buyers
viewed multiple
pieces of content
from the vendor
they ultimately
selected
Source: DemandGen Reports
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13. 65% of
management
decisions are now
based on data, not
guesswork
Source: MIT 2011
13
Marketing Automation
Fundamentally, the reasons you
invested in a particular marketing
automation platform for use in
domestic markets will apply wherever
you’re focusing your activity.
Data quality is crucial
In multiple markets, it’s important
to verify the quality and accuracy of
data on a regular basis. Simple things
like prospect lists become potential
minefields when not just the language,
but character formats, naming protocols
and greeting conventions are different.
One of the main causes of failed
marketing automation campaigns is
poor data quality. Marketing in new
regions brings the additional challenge
that data may include not just more
than one language, but more than
one font or format. Creating a data
action plan will help to ensure all your
records are complete, de-duplicated
and up-to-date before uploading them
to your automation platform. Regular
reviewing will help to maintain
quality and consistency of data.
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14. 14
Make more of your EMEA marketing l marketing automation
Central management,
regional empowerment
From a campaign management
perspective, marketing automation
platforms give you central
management of marketing
activity with regional
empowerment, enabling you to
run integrated campaigns targeting
multiple stakeholders via numerous
channels across boundaries and
language barriers.
This is vital when you’re in the process
of creating demand in a new market.
Used effectively, these technologies
help you to create a unified momentum
where all stakeholders are informed
and motivated.
Central resources, regional intelligence
At the same time, you retain ultimate
budgetary control and can quickly and
easily assess ROI, while your local teams
have the flexibility to leverage brand
assets all the more powerfully when they
combine them with local intelligence.
Using the same platform, they can
customize messaging for their needs,
within pre-set boundaries, without
compromising brand values, visual identity
or tone-of-voice, cost-effectively targeting
distinct audiences, in the right language
and formats at the right time. The result
is that they feel they have control and
responsibility, which leads to greater
motivation to roll out campaigns
developed centrally.
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15. 15
Driving demand by getting the
message right
The key to success in EMEA is
knowledge and its application. The most
advanced marketing automation platform
in the world isn’t going to work for you
unless you have the audience insight
and an understanding of their needs
and expectations.
Who are you talking to? What are their
pain points, channels of consumption and
areas of interest? From first touchpoint to
purchase and ongoing support, you need
an understanding of what information
customers need, and how they go
about getting it.
You can now incorporate the ‘always on’
channels of display and social advertising
to marketing automation – to nurture
beyond the inbox, sequencing ads to
prospects on the web based on business
demographics and online interests. This
has resulted in more than 400 new leads
from anonymous prospect targeting; a 64
percent increase in additional conversions
from known contacts; and a 233 percent
ROI for leading B2B companies.*
Building personas
Having personas of your audience types
will help. You can start to build these
through a combination of previous
experience, existing user profiles,
market research and local
knowledge. Refining by title, role,
industry or stage in the buying
cycle are the first
steps in identifying core communications
attributes that will help to establish
prospect relationships.
Progressive profiling will help to build an
invaluable picture of your prospect. Each
time you interact with a potential lead,
exchange information that’s useful for
them with data that helps your cause,
gradually building a more detailed picture
that, in turn, helps you to refine your
resources to meet their needs.
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*Statistics represent results from the Bizo Multi-Channel Nurturing for Eloqua beta program, 2013.
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16. 16
Fine-tune in real-time
The ability to aggregate and analyze trend data in
real-time helps you to reduce costs by helping remove
ineffective campaigns, while fine-tuning the performance,
productivity and effectiveness of campaigns that work.
And of course this works both ways. If you find a product
proposition gets cut-through when presented in a certain
way in one region, you may well find that a similar
approach delivers the same results in another.
Talented analysts based centrally will support the most
efficient, cost-effective and impactful use of the
information. You have to target the right prospects, at the
right time, with the right messaging at a regional level.
European B2B email
legislation made easy
If you’re considering, or are actively email
marketing to European B2B recipients, you
need to be aware of the different country email
legislations. Many believe that the same law
applies to the whole of Europe or that laws
don’t apply to B2B communications. With 27
EU member states there is, at present, no
consistency of data protection rules for use in a
B2B context across the region. Some countries
insist that B2B email activity should comply
with existing, and more stringent,
B2C regulations, some don’t.
You’ll find a summary guide of existing
legislation here
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Marketo Top Tip:
“Make the effort to localise nurturing emails, e.g.
by including local customer proof points, language
appropriate to your target market, references to
events being held in relevant locations and time
zones, and most importantly, local contact details.”
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17. 17
Why the mass market approach
won’t work
In a new or underdeveloped market,
there will always be the temptation to
go for quantity over quality. This might
materialize as a one-size-fits-all
‘batch‘n’blast’ email campaign. Avoid it.
This technique works on the mistaken
notion that frequency beats relevance,
and that if you shout loud enough and
long enough, you’ll bully your customers
into buying. Customers aren’t like that.
They buy when they are ready to buy.
You need to be present when they are,
or actively accelerate the process in
making them ready to buy.
With the tools available, you can monitor
online activities of customers and
prospects, read their digital body
language and assess which contacts
will view your proposition favorably.
This will help to increase engagement,
cut wastage through perceived
spamming and unsubscribes, but also
reduce the risk of being alienated by
those you’re trying to attract.
In this respect, it’s as well to remember
what lead nurturing isn’t, as much
as what it is:
• Generic emails sent randomly to your
prospect database aren’t conducive to
lead nurturing. Email campaigns based
on existing insight and local market
needs, and that adhere to an agreed
buyer journey, are.
• Producing an eNewsletter full of
company and product information,
and sending to a sketchy prospect list,
isn’t lead nurturing. Contributing to
local industry forums and providing
relevant industry information, is.
• Giving a remote telesales team a list
of contacts and telling them to work
their way through it isn’t lead
nurturing. Listening to your prospects
and reacting to their digital body
language, where they’re looking
for information, is.
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18. 18
Using customized, country-specific
communications
The most successful demand generation
and lead management programmes
involve messaging individually
customized for prospects at specific
points in their customer journey. And
you may well be doing this already in
domestic markets. The change here is in
mindset, moving to a robust, long-term
programme concentrating on filling the
sales funnel rather than a short-term,
tactical approach that costs more and
converts less. Marketing automation
enables you to streamline your
marketing, to increase the chances of
turning an interested individual into a
committed, sales-ready prospect.
The more processes that can be
automated, the more cost-effective the
exercise as a whole. Low-touch or
zero-touch programmes cut costs
dramatically, and are possible when your
regional team is engaged and lead
scoring, nurture marketing and data
management are automated. When you
use the capabilities of the platforms
available, and combine them
with the experience, insight and
intuition of a good marketing
team on the ground,
success will follow.
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19. 19
EMEA Campaign
delivery and execution
Operationally, setting up and
maintaining a profit center out-of-
heartland brings up some challenges.
None of these are insurmountable,
however, if you have a strategy in
place and stick to it. Here are a few
project management issues you’ll
need to bear in mind:
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Don’t get lost in translation
Insist on dedicated, in-country,
culturally-aware translation services.
In B2B, it’s more likely that the language
you use will be technical, with a need
for precision and understanding of the
subject matter.
Choose a supplier who is prepared
to invest time in building a library of
terminologies and preferred phrases
with the appropriate translations. If the
technical detail is correct at the outset,
you’ll save yourself significant time
and money in the long term.
If your first project consists of a
large volume of collateral, it’s a good
idea to request that your translators
review and analyze all relevant
documents and work on the most
complex pieces with the highest
volume of repetition first. Feedback
from this work will help to inform
translation of the remaining collateral.
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20. 20
Widening the reach of your content
Marketing automation applications can
provide marketing collateral via secure
cloud-based applications that can be
used by partners, distributors, resellers,
dealers, agents and subcontractors. The
central marketing function still controls
core branding and messaging, as well
as user permissions and access levels.
Cloud-based applications can then
be accessed from anywhere by
any stakeholder in the marketing
supply chain. This enables collateral
to be customized for the specific
requirements of each stakeholder.
Adapting for cultural differences
Marketing automation technology
can offer invaluable insights into
local attitudes to different media
and messaging.
The German business community, for
example, isn’t generally appreciative of
cold-calling. In these circumstances,
a communication, followed by some
thinking time and then a sales call,
is the most likely way to generate a
positive response.
Again the beauty of a marketing
automation platform is that you can
adapt activity, in real-time if necessary
or beneficial, to allow for country-
specific attitudes or behaviors. Using
response rates to inform and fine-tune
subsequent activity is well worth the
time invested to make budgets work
even harder.
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21. 21
Getting the detail right
Running a ‘regular’ demand generation
campaign in your own region with your
own team, there will be a number of
things you take for granted, things you
don’t even think about.
Some of these things, such as
the legislative implications when
sending email, can be researched and
established quite quickly. But what
about greeting conventions that might
vary per region? Non-roman typefaces
like Arabic will mean adding to font
libraries and testing to ensure they
work on a given marketing automation
platform. The length of a paragraph
of text will vary by language. And
operating in different time zones will
impact on approvals procedures and
production deadlines.
Local authority
Issues are far easier to manage
when the local team, the people with
the knowledge and understanding
of regional markets and cultures, are
given the tools, the autonomy and
the empowerment to implement a
campaign framework according to
local needs, attitudes and behaviors.
Getting the balance and the
understanding right between centralized
and local teams is key. Unified, strategic
direction from a centralized source will
maximize brand assets and consistency.
And rather than operating in silos, an
inclusive, shared approach to campaign
management and results opens up the
possibility of successful work being
adapted and implemented in multiple
regions more time- and cost-effectively.
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22. 22
Phased roll-out
By adopting a scalable strategy, trying
a campaign in one market at a time and
learning from each new deployment,
you can implement learnings into
future deployments, consistently
evolving campaigns and improving
results as you go along.
EMEA campaign follow up
Telemarketing has a key part to play
in demand generation. Marketing
Qualified Leads will help maximize your
investment and nurture leads through to
a point where you can share leads with
your sales team.
Calls no longer have to be cold. An
intelligent nurture campaign will give
the telemarketers the information they
need to have an informed conversation
with the prospect at the right stage in
their buyer journey.
So what skills does your telemarketing
team need in EMEA?
• Experience – at least 3 years in
business plus an understanding of the
sector you are working in – sales and
customer service skills are ideal
• Intelligence – tear up the script,
ask the right questions and hold
an engaging conversation with
your prospects
• Language – you’ll need the coverage
and skills to deliver pan-EMEA
campaign follow up
• Cultural awareness – telemarketers
that understand the business culture
of their target country and what it
takes to be successful in that region
are vital to any campaign
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23. 23
About Ledger Bennett DGA
We are a B2B Demand Generation agency that uses
sales and marketing know-how to help customers
increase revenue by deploying Inbound Marketing,
Content Marketing and Marketing Automation
strategies. Our highly focused Demand Generation
programs drive our customers’ business
performance, helping them to:
n Generate more opportunity
n Convert that opportunity into sales
n Retain customers and grow their value
Using more measurable and cost effective
techniques than traditional full service marketing
agencies we are able to maximize business revenue
in the modern world where the internet has
fundamentally changed the behavior of the buyer.
www.lbDGa.com
Telephone: +44 (0)8458 383883
Email: info@LBDGA.com
Milton Keynes:
Ledger Bennett DGA
Tungsten House, Warren Road
Little Horwood, Milton Keynes
MK17 0NR
London:
Ledger Bennett DGA
1st Floor Centric House
390-391 Strand, London
WC2R 0LT
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