We attended eConsultancy’s first FUNNEL event yesterday in London. The event brought together marketing strategists and sales professionals all under one roof to better understand how to attract, engage, nurture and convert our leads – and refreshingly for us the audience and content was B2B focused. Finally!

Overall lead nurturing, marketing automation and lead scoring were the main trends for the day. Luckily myself and Ricardo were both able to attend, so we managed to cover half of the sessions on offer. For us, some sessions were much better than others so here are our takeaways from the favourites:

Kate Shopper, Director Media Services, ECI Telecom - Making your site ‘buyer centric’ for optimised engagement

1. Interesting statistic – by 2015, 75% of all enquiries will be generated by web/inbound marketing

2. Kate made the important point (which we so often forget) that websites are for the customer not for us! Move away from the ‘Me-Me-Me’ type website and make it about the customer and their business needs.

3. ECI Telecom’s website hierarchy was related to their customer buying cycle, allowing them to tailor their messages to each buyer type

4. All visitor types needs to be engaged with the relevant content. So instead of one site fits all, they split their visitors types and content into:

• Education – for visitors committed to change and beginning their journey
• Solution – for visitors exploring a solution
• Vendor Selection – for visitors ready to buy

5. Each visitor segment was content mapped.

• Education - visitors are offered third party analyst/industry reports, webinars & blogs. Less about ECI more about the market trend.
• Solution - visitors are shown case studies and white papers – more specific to ECI’s offering
• Vendor Selection - visitors are drilling down into more detail so they receive newsletters, technical data sheets and videos.

6. ECI Telecom product videos and technical information is now delivered by engineers and employees – gone are the days of flashy corporate videos. “Peer-to-Peer” communication is what’s working best. Use your marketing budget more effectively!

7. The results – in a nutshell an uplift in visits, page views, time spent. The all important bounce rate was reduced too. Still early days but great results. No surprise that more relevant content = more engaged visitors = increased leads = uplift in sales.

Overall a solid presentation, sharing a very smart and precise solution for a diverse target market and buying cycle – and transferable to any B2B business. Looks simple in hindsight but it was no easy task according to Kate – a one year project to arrive at this new robust website and still in the making!

We’ll be continuing the write up on FUNNEL with part 2 later today – just to make it a bit more digestible! eConsultancy are also sharing the slides from the event next week so we’ll keep you posted on those too.