More leads, more leads, more leads. Every day B2B marketers are continually under pressure to produce more leads to help the sales organization meet its quota. But are more leads the right answer? In an ideal world, you would generate one lead that would convert to a customer. While this may not be possible, generating a consistently higher quality of leads will ensure that the sales team gets a better swing every at bat, and you won’t see those leads coming right back at you or just ignored.
To produce higher quality leads on a consistent basis, your company may need to implement a lead scoring system that can act as a filter between all the leads that you do generate and the ones that end up in the hands of the sales team. Those leads that are not ready to be passed over should be incubated in a lead nurturing program until they show signs of being ready to buy.
It could be that your organization actually needs fewer leads that are truly sales ready. Take the following quiz and use the matrix at the end to determine what next steps you should take.
1. Do you currently have a formal methodology for scoring leads?
a) No process
b) Manual Process, Inconsistently Enforced
c) Manual Process, Consistently Enforced
d) Automated Process, Consistently Enforced
2. Which factual/demographic attributes are you using to help score your leads?
a) None
b) 1 or more of the following: Budget, Authority, Timeline, Revenue, Industry
c) Business Need
d) B and C
3. Which behavioral attributes are you using to help score your leads?
a) None
b) Email Opens and Clickthroughs
c) Website Activity – 1 or more of the following: Key Content Pages, Visits, White Paper Downloads, Form Submissions, Trial/Downloads
d) B and C
4. Which statement most closely pertains to your organization?
a) No leads are distributed
b) Most to all leads are distributed to either a single person or a lead queue
c) All incoming leads get distributed to the sales team
d) A and "B" leads get distributed to the sales team, and "C" leads get nurtured by marketing
e) All "A" leads get distributed to the sales team, and "B/C" leads get nurtured by marketing
5. How would you describe your lead management process?
a) We do not know what happens after leads are handed off to the sales team
b) We can manually review lead status in our CRM system and use that data in our marketing analysis
c) We have an automatic reporting process in place that lets us know when leads are followed up on
d) Answer C plus a mechanism to reassign leads that aren’t followed up on within a specified time period to someone else.
6. Your organization uses the following lead scoring scale:
a) No scoring scale is used
b) A/B/C or How/Warm/Cold based on criteria
c) Numerical score based on criteria
d) Numerical score and Grade Ranking based on criteria
7. You adjust and modify your lead scoring scale:
a) Never
b) Annually
c) Monthly
d) Quarterly
8. Once you have scored a lead, your organization:
a) Never changes it
b) Changes it when the lead moves forward in the funnel
c) Changes it when the lead moves backward in the funnel
d) Changes it based upon your nurturing and prospecting criteria dynamically
9. With your lowest scoring leads, your organization:
a) Discards them and/or never uses them
b) Distributes them to the sales or inside sales team
c) Nurtures them for up to 6 months
d) Nurtures them for up to 1 year
10. When building your lead scoring model, you solicit input from:
a) No one
b) Marketing
c) Sales
d) Sales and Marketing
11. In your lead scoring model, you:
a) Have None
b) Score leads but don't weight them
c) Weight each criteria equally
d) Weight each criteria differently based upon historical conversion rates and available information
12. Your organization separates incoming leads:
a) It doesn't separate leads by any distribution method
b) By Direct Channel Only
c) By Direct and Channel
d) Direct, Channel, Named and Non-named Accounts
13. Does your marketing/sales organization look at past interest and changes in baseline activity to prioritize follow-up?
a) No, our team doesn't do this
b) Yes, Sometimes
c) Yes, Most of the time
d) Yes, Always
14. When aggregating lead data, your company:
a) Has no way of aggregating lead data
b) Can aggregate data by campaign and provide score
c) Can aggregate data by campaign, division, and product line and provide score
d) Can aggregate data by campaign, division, product line and company level and provide score
15. Your company follows up on new leads within what time period?
a) 1 week
b) 1 day
c) 4 hours
d) 1 hour
SCORING GUIDELINES
Give yourself 1 point for every A, 2 points for every B, 3 points for every C, and 4 points for every D answer. After totaling your scores, use the matrix below to see how your organization compares.
49 – 60 – World Class Lead Effectiveness. You have a great process in place and should be using automation to get consistent results. Next Steps: Look at doing Company Level and Profile-Based Lead Scoring. With Company Level Lead Scoring, you can aggregate all of the individual scores into a composite score. For those of you engaged in complex sales, this is invaluable as the sum of the parts is greater than any one individual. Profile-Based Lead Scoring establishes different scores for a person based on the role that they occupy. A given individual can be a partner, a vendor, and a customer of one or more products. A score for one product or role can be completely different for another product or role based upon the key requirements for any given situation.
37 – 48 – Very Good Lead Effectiveness. Your systems are fairly well defined, but you can optimize and improve them in several areas. Key Considerations: Are you consistently automating the process? Do you have a closed-loop process in place with your CRM system to provide you with the feedback you need to continuously make adjustments? Are you tracking both explicit and implicit criteria? Once you can get consistency and automation in all facets, you can explore Company Level and Profile-Based Lead Scoring.
25 – 36 – Good Lead Effectiveness. You have some scoring in place, but it is mostly manual. Chances are, you are not tracking both explicit and implicit criteria and you don’t have a weighting system in place. Next Steps: Begin by developing a scoring model that looks at both explicit and implicit criteria. Next, look at ways you can automate the process. Examine your distribution and assignment rules – can you hold back some of the leads and develop a lead nurturing program that will market to them? After this, look at how you can integrate your CRM system with your marketing system to give you better closed loop analytics. Once you have taken these steps, continually optimize and make adjustments over a 4-6 month period until you have a consistent model in place.
< 25 – Poor Lead Effectiveness. You don’t have much of a model in place. You are most likely sending all inbound leads to sales with little or no filtering and this is affecting your conversion rates down the pipeline. Next Steps: Begin by setting up a manual scoring system that both sales and marketing can agree to. Have your inside sales or telemarketing function use this criteria consistently and record the results in your CRM system. From there, you can look at ways to automate the function. Take some time and examine your marketing campaigns and how visitors are behaving on your website. Can you extract some key observations and turn this into a consistent behavior score? Once this is in place, you can look at fully automating the function and investing time into developing a lead nurturing program.
The job of the B2B marketer is harder today than ever before. Don’t let the company view your department as an expense. Expenses get cut, investments get nurtured. Help sales close more business and be accountable for driving revenue. Do this with an effective lead scoring system. It is an essential tool in your arsenal and will help you and your company grow consistently over time.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
What they didn't teach you in Business School: 5 Critical Things Today's Professional Marketer Needs to Master
Today's business schools have come a long way since the day I graduated. The programs are more involved, internships are more prevalent, and the case study programs continue to impress. With all the improvements, I find that today's graduates are still lacking some key skill sets that will ensure their success on the job in years to come. Additionally, professionals that have been in the field for more than five years are also lacking key skills that threaten their job security. In this article, we examine 5 critical things that every professional marketer needs to master.
How to use technology to scale demand generation: There is no questioning that today’s marketing professional is much more tech savvy then previous generations. They can text, blog, engage in social networks, and use the internet in a variety of ways. What they haven’t learned how to do is leverage these technologies to build sustainable revenue streams for their companies. Marketers tend to overuse email at the expense of other channels and miss opportunities to engage with their prospects and customers in a meaningful fashion. Instead of using technology to scale, many marketers spend their days in hand-to-hand combat, performing a variety of key tasks manually. This is very inefficient and slows top-of-the-funnel growth. The first thing marketers need to do is build processes that can source leads from a variety of channels. These processes should include target profile, messaging, scoring, routing, follow-up, management, and disposition. Once these processes are in place, marketers can then select and use technology to drive demand. The most successful marketers leverage an ecosystem to drive a continuous flow of leads. There is no silver bullet. By building a variety of acquisition channels, marketers can more predictably grow their business. Key technological components should include:
Automating Event Marketing, Registration and Follow-Up. This includes webinars and live events.
Implementing website tracking at an individual level to monitor digital body language and build active buyer profiles and personas.
Implementing lead scoring and lead incubation programs to determine sales-ready leads and market to the remaining leads not ready to buy.
Integrating online forms with CRM systems and developing automated form handling routines in addition to the auto-responder.
Using RSS to syndicate content and drive traffic to the website.
Building or sponsoring specific social networks.
Hosting an active blog on the corporate website.
Integrating website tracking with online and offline demand generation programs.
Leverage streaming video and audio as part of podcasts or viral campaigns. This is just a starting point, but the above items should be considered a staple in every marketers demand generation arsenal.
How to develop a sustainable and healthy relationship with sales: This topic has gotten a lot of press over the last year. One of the biggest reasons sales and marketing are not aligned is because they are not measured on the same things. A sales team is always measured on revenue and thinks short term – this month, this quarter. A marketing team is typically measured on leads, programs, or softer metrics and has a much longer time horizon – 6 months, 1 year, etc. To ensure a better working relationship, there are several critical things every marketer needs to do:
Ensure you are measured on revenue, not on leads. As long as you continue to be measured on your spending, you and your department will be considered an expense. In business, expenses get cut, investments get nurtured. Get your team to be measured on revenue and this will significantly change your alignment with sales. Once you are being measured on the same things, your approach to marketing will be completely different. You won’t think about how many leads you drove this quarter, you will think about whether your programs helped make the quarterly sales target.
Have a shared and written definition of what constitutes a qualified lead. You can deliver all the leads you want to sales, but they will continue to reject them as long as you have different ideas about what a lead is and isn’t. Set up a working session with the sales team and determine what constitutes a qualified lead. Examine both traditional measures such as budget, authority, need and timeline. Also take a look at online behavior – content downloads, webinar attendance, key page views. Develop a scoring matrix around these components and ensure that you deliver only those leads to sales that meet these criteria. Revisit the matrix on a quarterly basis and adjust as needed.
Set up working teams. Instead of having siloed functions, pair up field marketing with the regional sales team and give them a shared goal. It is amazing what will happen when they have to work together instead of pointing fingers at the other.
Reporting on Marketing Success in Financial Terms: Remember those accounting classes we took in school – the ones we slept through while we anxiously looked forward to the creative ones? Guess what? The awards we have been giving each other over the years for our creativity don’t count anymore. Today’s board wants to know how we are spending the company’s money. It is no longer sufficient to report on leads, clickthroughs, impressions, or campaign awards. Today’s marketing professional needs to be financially savvy. They need to know lead to customer conversion ratios, return on marketing spend, lifetime value of a customer, net present value of a lead, and a variety of other business metrics that indicate how well marketing is managing the company’s money to grow revenue. It’s time to dust off that textbook and get back to basics. Your job security depends upon it.
Develop strategies, to get, keep and grow your customer base: It is easy to focus on programs that bring in new customers – that typically gets most of your budget. But what about your customers? We have all heard the adage, it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one – but is it? If you are not allocating more than a token amount of your budget to service your customers, they could be looking elsewhere. Many companies have a variety of products and services that they want to sell to their installed base to build wallet share and improve loyalty. With all the talk about Net Promoter and the clear correlation between customer loyalty and long-term profitable growth, it is essential that today’s marketing professional implement programs that address customers at every stage of their need cycle. There a number of methods that can be invoked here, from customer advisory boards to using technology to deliver automated cross-sell/up-sell campaigns, today’s marketer can reach their customer and grow the long term value of the relationship. It just takes a focused effort.
Understand and Align with the Customer Buy Cycle: I have lost track of how many professional sales training courses I attended over the years. They all prescribed one process or another for controlling the sales cycle and getting in synch with your customer. These methods worked for a long time until the Internet came along. Now, your customers have the power to initiate the buy cycle, long before you even know about it. We are not in control of the sales process. The customer is in control of the buy process. They go through various phases – awareness, identification, evaluation. The key to selling today is to understand where the buyer might be’ at any given time and to develop strategies and tactics that serve up the appropriate content and messaging. Do they need a white paper or an analyst briefing? Do they need a demonstration or an ROI calculator? The marketer that changes their focus from selling to helping customers buy is the marketer that will succeed in today’s competitive climate. Search engine optimization, site navigation, pay per click, link referral, decision/offer maps are all techniques that can and should be leveraged to help you align with your customer. There are many skills today’s marketer needs to master to not only keep their jobs but to grow and enjoy a satisfying career. At the root of it, understand how to leverage available technology and implement the proper financial metrics. Doing this will put you well on the way to marketing success.
How to use technology to scale demand generation: There is no questioning that today’s marketing professional is much more tech savvy then previous generations. They can text, blog, engage in social networks, and use the internet in a variety of ways. What they haven’t learned how to do is leverage these technologies to build sustainable revenue streams for their companies. Marketers tend to overuse email at the expense of other channels and miss opportunities to engage with their prospects and customers in a meaningful fashion. Instead of using technology to scale, many marketers spend their days in hand-to-hand combat, performing a variety of key tasks manually. This is very inefficient and slows top-of-the-funnel growth. The first thing marketers need to do is build processes that can source leads from a variety of channels. These processes should include target profile, messaging, scoring, routing, follow-up, management, and disposition. Once these processes are in place, marketers can then select and use technology to drive demand. The most successful marketers leverage an ecosystem to drive a continuous flow of leads. There is no silver bullet. By building a variety of acquisition channels, marketers can more predictably grow their business. Key technological components should include:
Automating Event Marketing, Registration and Follow-Up. This includes webinars and live events.
Implementing website tracking at an individual level to monitor digital body language and build active buyer profiles and personas.
Implementing lead scoring and lead incubation programs to determine sales-ready leads and market to the remaining leads not ready to buy.
Integrating online forms with CRM systems and developing automated form handling routines in addition to the auto-responder.
Using RSS to syndicate content and drive traffic to the website.
Building or sponsoring specific social networks.
Hosting an active blog on the corporate website.
Integrating website tracking with online and offline demand generation programs.
Leverage streaming video and audio as part of podcasts or viral campaigns. This is just a starting point, but the above items should be considered a staple in every marketers demand generation arsenal.
How to develop a sustainable and healthy relationship with sales: This topic has gotten a lot of press over the last year. One of the biggest reasons sales and marketing are not aligned is because they are not measured on the same things. A sales team is always measured on revenue and thinks short term – this month, this quarter. A marketing team is typically measured on leads, programs, or softer metrics and has a much longer time horizon – 6 months, 1 year, etc. To ensure a better working relationship, there are several critical things every marketer needs to do:
Ensure you are measured on revenue, not on leads. As long as you continue to be measured on your spending, you and your department will be considered an expense. In business, expenses get cut, investments get nurtured. Get your team to be measured on revenue and this will significantly change your alignment with sales. Once you are being measured on the same things, your approach to marketing will be completely different. You won’t think about how many leads you drove this quarter, you will think about whether your programs helped make the quarterly sales target.
Have a shared and written definition of what constitutes a qualified lead. You can deliver all the leads you want to sales, but they will continue to reject them as long as you have different ideas about what a lead is and isn’t. Set up a working session with the sales team and determine what constitutes a qualified lead. Examine both traditional measures such as budget, authority, need and timeline. Also take a look at online behavior – content downloads, webinar attendance, key page views. Develop a scoring matrix around these components and ensure that you deliver only those leads to sales that meet these criteria. Revisit the matrix on a quarterly basis and adjust as needed.
Set up working teams. Instead of having siloed functions, pair up field marketing with the regional sales team and give them a shared goal. It is amazing what will happen when they have to work together instead of pointing fingers at the other.
Reporting on Marketing Success in Financial Terms: Remember those accounting classes we took in school – the ones we slept through while we anxiously looked forward to the creative ones? Guess what? The awards we have been giving each other over the years for our creativity don’t count anymore. Today’s board wants to know how we are spending the company’s money. It is no longer sufficient to report on leads, clickthroughs, impressions, or campaign awards. Today’s marketing professional needs to be financially savvy. They need to know lead to customer conversion ratios, return on marketing spend, lifetime value of a customer, net present value of a lead, and a variety of other business metrics that indicate how well marketing is managing the company’s money to grow revenue. It’s time to dust off that textbook and get back to basics. Your job security depends upon it.
Develop strategies, to get, keep and grow your customer base: It is easy to focus on programs that bring in new customers – that typically gets most of your budget. But what about your customers? We have all heard the adage, it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one – but is it? If you are not allocating more than a token amount of your budget to service your customers, they could be looking elsewhere. Many companies have a variety of products and services that they want to sell to their installed base to build wallet share and improve loyalty. With all the talk about Net Promoter and the clear correlation between customer loyalty and long-term profitable growth, it is essential that today’s marketing professional implement programs that address customers at every stage of their need cycle. There a number of methods that can be invoked here, from customer advisory boards to using technology to deliver automated cross-sell/up-sell campaigns, today’s marketer can reach their customer and grow the long term value of the relationship. It just takes a focused effort.
Understand and Align with the Customer Buy Cycle: I have lost track of how many professional sales training courses I attended over the years. They all prescribed one process or another for controlling the sales cycle and getting in synch with your customer. These methods worked for a long time until the Internet came along. Now, your customers have the power to initiate the buy cycle, long before you even know about it. We are not in control of the sales process. The customer is in control of the buy process. They go through various phases – awareness, identification, evaluation. The key to selling today is to understand where the buyer might be’ at any given time and to develop strategies and tactics that serve up the appropriate content and messaging. Do they need a white paper or an analyst briefing? Do they need a demonstration or an ROI calculator? The marketer that changes their focus from selling to helping customers buy is the marketer that will succeed in today’s competitive climate. Search engine optimization, site navigation, pay per click, link referral, decision/offer maps are all techniques that can and should be leveraged to help you align with your customer. There are many skills today’s marketer needs to master to not only keep their jobs but to grow and enjoy a satisfying career. At the root of it, understand how to leverage available technology and implement the proper financial metrics. Doing this will put you well on the way to marketing success.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Debbie Qaqish Joins The Pedowitz Group
It gives me great pleasure to write that Debbie Qaqish has joined our team. I have known Debbie for over 2 years and she is first class all the way. Our clients are lucky to have her and we are all thrilled. Debbie can be reached at debbie@pedowitzgroup.com
Friday, November 2, 2007
Lead Generation Strategies That Start With "R"
Today we look at several lead generation strategies that start with "R":
RSS, or really simple syndication, is the easiest way to publish your content and distribute it throughout the web. It also allows you to re-syndicate other people's content. Tools like RSSInfo can grab content from other feeds and display them as part of your website in HTML. This has several advantages. Creating the feed only takes a few minutes. From then on, your website will have fresh content everyday. The converted HTML will contain search-engine friendly keywords. If you aggregate content from several good sources in your industry, you have now done your customers and visitors a favor because they don't have to go anywhere else. All of this increases your SEO, and drives more visitors to your site. Make sure you have a good call to action on your blog landing page so that you can convert visitors into leads.
Reference Program. We all talk about having a reference program, but the reality is that customer-focused marketing is often near the bottom of the priority list. However, if you have been following the work by Fred Reicheld and The Ultimate Question, you know that customer loyalty is a key indicator of long-term growth. Instead of having your key prospects call your best reference near the end of the sales cycle, why not videotape your top 10 customers and post the videos on your website? Organize the videos into 2 minute segments and then track which segments are getting the most hits and organize future marketing messaging accordingly. This now allows salespeople to point prospects to your references much earlier in the sales cycle, not burden your key customers, and ultimately close more business.
Recency. A recent study by Knowledgestorm showed that sales teams that wait more than 24 hours to contact a new lead have less than a 10% chance of reaching them. This is often one of marketing's biggest challenges. You create all the leads and get upset when sales does not follow up on them. By implementing lead scoring, you can filter out the tire kickers and browsers ahead of time and reduce the total amount of leads sales has to follow-up on. Adding in a autoresponder to your form, combined with an IVR phone message can instruct the prospect that you value their business and forward them to a landing page for specific instructions. Tactics like these can greatly help the response rate and make the visitor feel important, while guiding the salesperson to follow up on the most relevant leads right away.
Stay tuned for the letter S...
RSS, or really simple syndication, is the easiest way to publish your content and distribute it throughout the web. It also allows you to re-syndicate other people's content. Tools like RSSInfo can grab content from other feeds and display them as part of your website in HTML. This has several advantages. Creating the feed only takes a few minutes. From then on, your website will have fresh content everyday. The converted HTML will contain search-engine friendly keywords. If you aggregate content from several good sources in your industry, you have now done your customers and visitors a favor because they don't have to go anywhere else. All of this increases your SEO, and drives more visitors to your site. Make sure you have a good call to action on your blog landing page so that you can convert visitors into leads.
Reference Program. We all talk about having a reference program, but the reality is that customer-focused marketing is often near the bottom of the priority list. However, if you have been following the work by Fred Reicheld and The Ultimate Question, you know that customer loyalty is a key indicator of long-term growth. Instead of having your key prospects call your best reference near the end of the sales cycle, why not videotape your top 10 customers and post the videos on your website? Organize the videos into 2 minute segments and then track which segments are getting the most hits and organize future marketing messaging accordingly. This now allows salespeople to point prospects to your references much earlier in the sales cycle, not burden your key customers, and ultimately close more business.
Recency. A recent study by Knowledgestorm showed that sales teams that wait more than 24 hours to contact a new lead have less than a 10% chance of reaching them. This is often one of marketing's biggest challenges. You create all the leads and get upset when sales does not follow up on them. By implementing lead scoring, you can filter out the tire kickers and browsers ahead of time and reduce the total amount of leads sales has to follow-up on. Adding in a autoresponder to your form, combined with an IVR phone message can instruct the prospect that you value their business and forward them to a landing page for specific instructions. Tactics like these can greatly help the response rate and make the visitor feel important, while guiding the salesperson to follow up on the most relevant leads right away.
Stay tuned for the letter S...
Friday, October 26, 2007
Lead Generation Strategies That Start With "Q"
Today we will explore several lead generation strategies that begin with the letter "Q":
Questionnaire:
Questionnaires or surveys are a great way to generate leads and gather more information about your prospects and customers in the process. You can leverage the phone, direct mail, email, or your website to ask questions about industry trends, business need, budget allocations, processes used, technology or just about anything that will allow you to gain a greater insight. People respond to questionnaires if there is a perceived benefit, such as getting the results of the survey for free, a coupon to Starbucks, a free trial, etc. Over time, you can develop themes for your questionnaires and add these to your thought leadership repertoire.
Quizzes:
People always like to test their knowledge, especially if they are industry veterans. Hosting an online quiz that gets updated regularly is a great way to build a loyal following and also gauge just what people do and do not know. Use the gaps in knowledge to create more targeted product and service offerings. Don't forget to offer a small prize for the best scores as an additional inducement.
Stay tuned for the letter R...
Questionnaire:
Questionnaires or surveys are a great way to generate leads and gather more information about your prospects and customers in the process. You can leverage the phone, direct mail, email, or your website to ask questions about industry trends, business need, budget allocations, processes used, technology or just about anything that will allow you to gain a greater insight. People respond to questionnaires if there is a perceived benefit, such as getting the results of the survey for free, a coupon to Starbucks, a free trial, etc. Over time, you can develop themes for your questionnaires and add these to your thought leadership repertoire.
Quizzes:
People always like to test their knowledge, especially if they are industry veterans. Hosting an online quiz that gets updated regularly is a great way to build a loyal following and also gauge just what people do and do not know. Use the gaps in knowledge to create more targeted product and service offerings. Don't forget to offer a small prize for the best scores as an additional inducement.
Stay tuned for the letter R...
Friday, October 19, 2007
Why Delta Doesn't Get It
I was flying from Atlanta to Dayton, OH to visit a client and was sitting in first class. A couple on their honeymoon came on board. He was in the Air Force. For some reason, the woman got upgraded and ended up sitting next to me. Her husband was in coach. Half of the first class seats were empty. The woman asked the flight attendant politely if her husband could move up and sit with her. The flight attendant said she wasn't in charge and would have to check. She ended up doing nothing, so I decided to help the woman out and motioned the managing flight attendant over. I explained the situation. After 5 minutes of conferencing and furiously looking at paper, he came back and said there was nothing they can do. Mind you, this was an hour flight; at most this was going to cost a glass of wine. Here we have a patriot for our country on the plane, a newly married couple - imagine all the goodwill that would generate. Instead, Delta chose to follow some stupid rule, alienate passengers and show once again why the airline industry is losing so much money. They don't understand the customer, and obviously don't care enough to make the extra effort. As a frequent flyer, I found this to be very disturbing. When will the airline industry wake up and deliver an experience that actually helps the customer?
Monday, October 8, 2007
Lead Generation Strategies That Start With "P"
Today we explore the letter "P' for lead generation strategies:
Podcasts.
One of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 strategies, podcasts allow you to deliver audio and video presentations via the web. Since it leverages multiple senses, it allows your target audience to interact with your website much more effectively than just reading text. Podcasts can be effective for playing archived webinars and seminars, interviews, customer testimonials, analyst briefings, and many more. Use your imagination. Think of your website not as a place to store written text, but as a multimedia platform. The possibilities are endless.
Personalization.
In today's marketplace, we are bombarded with saels messaging from multiple channels. Marketers that take the time to personalize their messaging and market one-to-one will yield a much greater return. You may have received a direct mail piece that has your name on it and a unique URL. When you type in the URL you are directed to a page that seems to speak directly to you. Email sent with dynamic content that tailors to your demographics and interests is another form of this tactic. Websites that allow you to self-select your interests and needs and then morph the pages to your profile and remember you the next time you come back are perhaps the holy grail of this strategy. Whatever you do, remember that everyone wants to be treated as an individual, even if they fit in a larger marketing profile.
Public Relations.
PR is still one of the most cost-effective strategies you can leverage to drive demand. But you shouldn't settle for a PR firm who can't tell you what kind of demand they are driving for your business. Impressions are yesterday's metric. Instead of using generic URL's in your press releases and articles, insert specific links to a dedicated landing page that will reinforce the PR program. Then use your web tracking software to measure the number of hits and subsequent conversions. Tie your PR firm to performance rather than expensive monthly retainers.
Partners/Channels.
Selling indirect through the channel can be a very effective strategy for growing your business. Over time, investing in a channel strategy can deliver superior leverage and grow your business exponentially. It does take a good 18 months for any good program to start showing solid benefits. You also need to be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time and energy up front to get the program up and running. In most cases, the partners you recruit will not have your product as their primary product or service, so it takes extra attention and a good economic return for them to get established. Once you have gotten the program going, your costs of sale drop significantly and you can see some solid positive growth.
Personas.
Instead of trying to track 100+ fields of data, consider aggregating your prospects into several categories and label those categories. For example, "Set and Steady" may be a 50 year-old male CIO with 2 children who is risk adverse and relies on a tight circle of contacts to advise him on key decisions. An "Up and Comer" may be a 34 year-old woman who is assertive and willing to take risks. She is an avid reader and uses research along with instinct to make decisions. Neither is right or wrong. They are just possible representations of your target audience. Once you identify the profiles that most likely describe your prospects, it is much easier to market to those profiles or personas. Your prospects will think you are marketing directly to them, but what you are really doing is marketing to the representation of who they are; attempting to guide their thoughts and actions based on perceived behavior or anticipation of what they will do. This is a very powerfule form of marketing and is really starting to have an impact in B2B.
Stay tuned for the letter "Q".
Podcasts.
One of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 strategies, podcasts allow you to deliver audio and video presentations via the web. Since it leverages multiple senses, it allows your target audience to interact with your website much more effectively than just reading text. Podcasts can be effective for playing archived webinars and seminars, interviews, customer testimonials, analyst briefings, and many more. Use your imagination. Think of your website not as a place to store written text, but as a multimedia platform. The possibilities are endless.
Personalization.
In today's marketplace, we are bombarded with saels messaging from multiple channels. Marketers that take the time to personalize their messaging and market one-to-one will yield a much greater return. You may have received a direct mail piece that has your name on it and a unique URL. When you type in the URL you are directed to a page that seems to speak directly to you. Email sent with dynamic content that tailors to your demographics and interests is another form of this tactic. Websites that allow you to self-select your interests and needs and then morph the pages to your profile and remember you the next time you come back are perhaps the holy grail of this strategy. Whatever you do, remember that everyone wants to be treated as an individual, even if they fit in a larger marketing profile.
Public Relations.
PR is still one of the most cost-effective strategies you can leverage to drive demand. But you shouldn't settle for a PR firm who can't tell you what kind of demand they are driving for your business. Impressions are yesterday's metric. Instead of using generic URL's in your press releases and articles, insert specific links to a dedicated landing page that will reinforce the PR program. Then use your web tracking software to measure the number of hits and subsequent conversions. Tie your PR firm to performance rather than expensive monthly retainers.
Partners/Channels.
Selling indirect through the channel can be a very effective strategy for growing your business. Over time, investing in a channel strategy can deliver superior leverage and grow your business exponentially. It does take a good 18 months for any good program to start showing solid benefits. You also need to be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time and energy up front to get the program up and running. In most cases, the partners you recruit will not have your product as their primary product or service, so it takes extra attention and a good economic return for them to get established. Once you have gotten the program going, your costs of sale drop significantly and you can see some solid positive growth.
Personas.
Instead of trying to track 100+ fields of data, consider aggregating your prospects into several categories and label those categories. For example, "Set and Steady" may be a 50 year-old male CIO with 2 children who is risk adverse and relies on a tight circle of contacts to advise him on key decisions. An "Up and Comer" may be a 34 year-old woman who is assertive and willing to take risks. She is an avid reader and uses research along with instinct to make decisions. Neither is right or wrong. They are just possible representations of your target audience. Once you identify the profiles that most likely describe your prospects, it is much easier to market to those profiles or personas. Your prospects will think you are marketing directly to them, but what you are really doing is marketing to the representation of who they are; attempting to guide their thoughts and actions based on perceived behavior or anticipation of what they will do. This is a very powerfule form of marketing and is really starting to have an impact in B2B.
Stay tuned for the letter "Q".
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