Have you ever taken the time to pull your team together and discuss how to get more customers? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. It’s not something businesses typically take the time to plan ahead for. Here are four ideas you can focus on to get more customers into and out of a revenue cycle.
• Know who your customers are • Focus on inbound marketing • Stay in touch • Keep your sales team efficient
First, if you want to know how to get more customers you’ve got to understand who your customers are. What is your ideal customer profile? In other words, identify what industries they’re in, how much revenue they produce and where they hang out. Study your last 12 months of customer wins and analyze the profile of each customer. Do they fall into common categories? If so, jot those down into your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Once you know where your customers are you’re ready to progress to the next phase, focusing on inbound marketing.
Second, create an inbound marketing strategy and execute a plan. Inbound marketing is really not about how to get more customers, but how to be in the right place at the same time as your customers. Customers will come to you. See our article on Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing for a better understanding of inbound marketing. In summary, inbound marketing means you’re actively participating and distributing content through blogs, social media, SEO/organic search and paid search. Traditional outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail and trade shows. More and more marketers are shifting budget dollars from outbound to inbound marketing as they recognize buyers jump online to research solutions before they select a vendor to contact. Here’s why, see the projected growth for social networks and blogs over the next several years:
Choose your inbound marketing investments carefully when planning how to get more customers. Ideal channels vary based on the type of business you’re in – B2B or B2C. For example, see the chart below. If the green bar is higher than the orange bar it’s an ideal channel for B2B marketers.
Inbound marketing is like the bait on your fishing pole. Once you get the fish on the hook you’ve got to know how to reel them in and get them on the boat. A solid inbound marketing strategy combined with cohesive lead management life cycle processes that include sales prospecting, lead capture, lead follow up, lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution and lead nurturing will help you reel in the big fish.
Check back later this week for part two of how to get more customers.
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A recent study by Marketing Sherpa showed a breakdown of B2B marketing budgets in 2011. Frankly, I’m shocked to see how businesses are allocating their marketing dollars. I propose B2B marketing companies re-prioritize their budgets by re-allocating dollars from one marketing investment to another to produce a higher ROI and generate more revenue. Specifically, marketing investments in website design and trade shows should be decreased while marketing investments in social media, marketing automation and lead nurturing should be increased.
Increasing B2B Marketing Budgets
Marketers must recognize it’s a buyer’s world. More and more buyers conduct research online before ever contacting a vendor. The internet-era changed the landscape of sales and marketing. Data sheets, white papers, webinars, blogs, forums, public profiles, employees, competitors and more can be researched without ever picking up the phone. It’s the same concept as in the B2C world when consumers buy a car. Case in point, Polk and Autotrader.com conducted a survey of 4,005 U.S. consumers and found 71% of those surveyed conducted research online before buying their car.
The same process applies to the B2B world. More than 80% of B2B buyers research the internet for answers about products and services before calling a sales rep. With the proliferation of mobile phones and tablets this percentage will surely rise. B2B marketers have got to be in the right place at the right time (social media), monitor/listen to buyer’s behavior (marketing automation) and engage prospective buyers (lead nurturing). As the volume of online and/or digital activity increases, so does the opportunity to interact and engage with potential buyers. Lead nurturing helps B2B marketers create meaningful dialogue with prospects based on their research and interests. The net result of lead nurturing is stronger relationships and shorter sales cycles as prospects will keep you top of mind through consistent and on-target communications. For these reasons B2B marketing budgets should include social media, lead nurturing and marketing automation as a high priority.
But, what if there’s no more money in the budget for these items? That’s an easy problem to solve. Reduce investments in website design and trade shows and re-appropriate the funds.
Decreasing B2B Marketing Budgets
Trade shows are generally a thing of the past and put pressure on B2B marketing budgets. We’re not implying you completely do away with trade shows; however, reduced investment should be considered. Trade shows are expensive and usually cost about $10,000 minimum just to get in the door. Do yourself a favor and analyze ROI from past trade shows. The easiest way to do this is to look at past sales wins and identify if the lead came from a trade show. If you can’t tie revenue to your trade show investments they’re not worth it. Although, attending a trade show might help prospects recognize your brand/image; sometimes you’ve just got to show up. My advice is to pick a few select trade shows that you must attend and get an exhibitor pass for the others.
As for website design, I encourage B2B companies consider moving their website into a content management system (CMS) such as Drupal or WordPress. These tools have very professional off-the-shelf themes and several plug-ins for search engine optimization, blog authoring and more. You might spend a little more up front to change your site but its well worth it over time. Many of the processes which you rely on 3rd parties for can be automated and you’ll have more control over your content and of course, reduce costs.
Take your money saved from trade shows and website development and invest in social media, lead nurturing and marketing automation.
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In July we wrote about “Marketing Automation Challenges – Avoiding Status Quo” and “New Marketing Technology” as two obstacles facing adoption of marketing automation. The third obstacle, which we’ll discuss today, is being “content challenged”. Whether you’re using marketing and sales automation technology to help your business or not, a good content marketing strategy never hurts.
Personally, I’ve worked for several companies with a bad content marketing strategy. All companies had three things in common. First, they knew they had to create content. They did so in a reactive way, they were not proactive about content creation. Second, they had no schedule. They created content on a whim at infrequent periods. Third, their content was misguided. The marketing teams thought like the sellers, not the buyers.
Now that we’ve defined what a bad content marketing strategy is, let’s discuss a good content marketing strategy:
The truth is – we live in a digital content era and the internet completely shifted business to business sales. Buyers conduct the majority of their research online instead of calling the vendor. A good content marketing strategy requires a company to become a “content creation machine” – stretching their marketing footprint far and wide across a multitude of internet outlets; including social media, blogs, corporate websites and partner websites. Content should be re-purposed into emails, whitepapers, webinars and more. See our article on 101 business to business lead generation ideas and tips to light a spark.
Framework for a Good Content Marketing Strategy:
1. Blog at least two times a week 2. Put on monthly webinars 3. Produce quarterly whitepapers and/or eBooks 4. Tweet at least two times per day to promote new content and share relevant material 5. Comment on other blogs and/or forums at least two time a week 6. Produce a useful and/or educational tool for your buyers at least two times per year (ROI analysis, calculators, templates, guides, etc.)
Most importantly, stay committed for the long run. Do not start, stop then start again. It does you no good. Part of a search engine’s ranking formula is content-freshness; i.e. how often content is updated or added. If necessary, hire a marketing assistant to help create and distribute content. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to a good content marketing strategy, one hell of an inbound marketing program (see Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing) and more leads for sales!
We’d love to hear from you, how do you create a good marketing content strategy? What would you add to our framework?
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We recently had a meeting with one of our prospects who told us they do no outbound marketing (or “push marketing”) and focus solely on inbound marketing. At first, they said they didn’t need Lead Liaison because they don’t do outbound marketing. They couldn’t be more wrong. Coincidentally, if you’re only doing inbound marketing you can’t afford to not have Lead Liaison. This meeting as well as the overall public debate on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing sparked a discussion internally on how to increase ROI of inbound marketing using Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software. We documented some of these reasons for you, enjoy!
Using technology to increase ROI of inbound marketing
Lead Liaison provides a revenue generation platform that boosts ROI of inbound marketing. Here’s a list of how our solutions can help you:
Lead tracking
As prospects find you as a result of your SEO, content and social media strategies (three core components of inbound marketing) they’ll eventually find their way back to your website. Lead tracking technology identifies the name of the business visiting your website along with business intelligence information (revenue, location, description, etc.), telling sales when someone is interested – all in real time. Lead tracking also records a website visitor’s online behavior including pages viewed and keywords used in searches to help sales and marketers understand what prospects care about.
Content creation
Revenue generation software helps marketers spin up new landing pages and web forms in minutes. Instead of relying on HTML programming or IT support, marketers create professional looking landing pages and web forms using a visual designer. The visual designer is similar to PowerPoint and uses drag and drop technology to construct content. Generous use of landing pages and web forms is typically a good thing. It’s common to create a landing page with a web form for each new content area or content piece in your marketing library. Doing so will increase the probability of capturing leads and increase ROI of inbound marketing.
Database segmentation
As an alternative to buying purchased lists or list rentals, which typically offer ROIs in the 1% – 2% range, marketers can leverage technology and their own internally developed database to increase ROI of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing typically implies buying large lists and sending out generic, non-personal email blasts. Using database segmentation marketers can “carve out” specific sections of their database to deliver optimized content relevant to prospects interests.
Lead nurturing
As new prospects discover you via your inbound marketing techniques, revenue generation software will help you nurture your leads. Lead nurturing delivers consistent communications to your new-found leads based on the prospects interests, demographics, and lifetime interaction with your marketing content. Recycling and nurturing your database will increase ROI of inbound marketing by lowering investments in inbound marketing as highly qualified leads never fall through the funnel or get left behind.
Lead qualification
A growing investment in inbound marketing probably means a growing number of inbound leads. Lead qualification, sometimes referred to as lead nurturing, uses technology to automatically score leads and identify who’s hot and who’s not. Lead scoring helps sales prioritize time effectively.
Emphasizing inbound marketing over outbound marketing while leveraging revenue generation software will shorten sales, produce higher quality leads, and improve organizational efficiency.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How do you feel revenue generation software can help your inbound marketing efforts?
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Inbound marketing is growing in popularity due to low cost of implementation and efficiency, especially relative to outbound marketing. In this article we’ll compare inbound marketing vs outbound marketing, discuss which is more effective and identify a handful of resources for your follow up.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing focuses on getting found whereas outbound marketing focuses on finding customers. Inbound marketing typically has three components; SEO, content, and social media. SEO is the process of creating optimized web pages and content based on keywords that people search for. Content is the process of creating many landing pages, web forms, blog posts, images, videos, whitepapers and eBooks to attract interested people. Social media is the process of leveraging facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media to promote your content. All three components are important to any inbound marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, we estimate about 80% – 90% of all marketing investments relate to outbound marketing whereas 10% – 20% of all marketing investments relate to inbound marketing. There’s a paradigm shift in marketing though wherein investments in inbound marketing are increasing due to lower cost and better lead generation results. Let’s compare two investments. Classical outbound marketing calls for cold calling campaigns where inside sales people “dial for dollars”. Instead of marketing blindly, a better investment might be inbound marketing. For example, search engine optimize one of your pages around the cold calling message to attract relevant web traffic and layer landing pages and forms around your optimized content. Would you rather attract and market to people interested in your solution or would you rather go on a hunting expedition not knowing what you’ll bring back?
Which is more effective, inbound or outbound marketing?
Inbound marketing tends to be much more effective vs outbound marketing methods since you aren’t interrupting people to get their attention with emails, cold calls, advertisements, email blasts, trade shows and so on. Inbound marketing makes it easier for solutions to be found by prospects already seeking what you offer. Moreover, it’s more efficient since only people who qualified themselves beforehand approach you whereas outbound marketing is making your customers aware of a product they may not know they need.
More info on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing
• Check out the book above by Brian Halligan, Darmesh Shah and David Meerman Scott who combine to write one of the best-selling books on inbound marketing.
• Check back later this week for an article on how revenue generation software like Lead Liaison’s can support and improve your inbound marketing efforts.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How do you define inbound marketing vs outbound marketing? What inbound marketing tactics do you find effective?
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Organizations must continually measure performance to improve and grow. Measuring marketing performance is critical as marketing plays a vital role in an organizations strategy and execution. The trend in measuring marketing performance is shifting from activity-based measurement to results-based measurement. In this article, we’ll discuss the change in performance measurement and suggest ways to effectively measure your marketing performance.
From activities to results
Historically, marketing performance has been measured on activities. For example, consider a trade show event. Marketers were typically measured on number of trade shows attended in a given period along with number of leads collected from the show. Similarly, consider email marketing. Marketers were graded on number of email opens or click throughs. It’s true, what gets measured gets done. When measuring marketing performance focus on what really matters, results. Instead of counting email opens and number of cards collected from trade shows, measure marketing based on revenue. What percentage of contacts results in an opportunity or a closed deal? If marketing and sales are both measured on revenue performance companies will benefit from closer sales and marketing alignment.
How other companies are measuring marketing performance
A recent study conducted by MarketingSherpa on more than 900 marketers asked which key performance metrics helped them evaluate marketing ROI. Interestingly, the top 5 measurements each pertain to a deal (end of the sales cycle) and cost of the contact (beginning of the sales cycle), which both greatly influence the revenue cycle.
How to impact important marketing metrics
With a renewed focus on revenue results and new metrics in mind, marketers can execute their revised strategy. To accomplish this, many marketers use technology, such as marketing automation, to achieve their goals. Lead Liaison provides revenue generation software, which includes marketing automation, for this reason. Here’s how Lead Liaison’s technology supports each metric:
• Closing percentage. Lead nurturing uses customer/prospect profiles to send scheduled, intelligent communications that build relationships and close more deals. Lead scoring automatically qualifies leads to send only the best leads to sales. Sales remains focused on sales-ready leads and optimizes their time around revenue, resulting in more wins and higher close percentage.
• Cost-per-acquisition. Lead tracking and lead generation technology creates leads from various inbound marketing activities. Leads opt-in to Lead Liaison via web form submission, response to an email campaign, or manual opt-in to become a lead in the system. Generating more leads with the same amount of inbound marketing results in higher marketing ROI and lower cost-per-acquisition.
• Cost-per-lead. Marketing segmentation allows marketers to segment a database based on a number of demographics (revenue, location, etc.) and activities (product interest, recent website visits, etc.). By re-marketing to an existing database, a company’s most valuable asset, marketers get “stale” leads on nurturing programs. As a result, marketers do not have to acquire as many leads via list brokers or trade shows. By using what a marketer already has they reduce cost-per-lead.
• Average deal size. Companies end up paying more for quality solutions from trusted advisers whom they’ve built relationships with. Lead nurturing builds the necessary relationships with customers and prospects over time while establishing the vendor as a trusted authority.
• Time to close. Lead nurturing ensures companies are in constant communication with leads using relevant messaging. Leads will always have the company and/or solution at the top of their mind. Additionally, leads won’t “stray”. In totality, these factors result in shorter sales cycles and less time to close.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How is your company measuring marketing performance?
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Does your organization struggle with lead follow up? Does your sales team have a less than stellar process responding to marketing generated leads? If you’ve answered yes to either of these questions help is on the way. Follow 3 rules to lead follow up to help your company produce a higher number of well qualified leads.
The 3 rules to lead follow up are speed, process, and persistence. Let’s analyze these rules to better understand how they support and improve the lead management process.
Speed – Follow up quickly with leads
A recent study done by Leads360 sampled 25 million data points to find conversion rates (people converted from inquiry to qualified lead) increased dramatically with faster response times against initial inquiries. Below is a short list of data points from the sampled leads:
• When called within 1 minute of inquiry, conversion rates are 391% higher
• When called within 2 minutes of inquiry, conversion rates are 120% higher
• When called within 3 minutes of inquiry, conversion rates are 98% higher
• When called within 30 minutes of inquiry, conversion rates are 62% higher
• When called within 60 minutes of inquiry, conversion rates are 36% higher
As evidenced by the data, the lead follow up advantage is less significant after the first 2 minutes have passed and greatly decreases after the first hour. It’s undeniable that fast response time drives loyalty. Businesses create strong psychological and social bonds with rapid lead follow up. If the prospect sees sales ultra-attentive to their inquiry and pre-sales interaction with your company it gives them a feel for how they’d be treated once they are a customer. Additionally, fast lead follow up blocks out competing offers as your prospect invests time into a relationship with you, who is the fastest responder.
Process – Lead follow up is not a one-and-done thing
Companies must not think once initial follow up occurs the lead follow up process is complete. In fact, it’s just started. Unfortunately, most sales and marketing teams heavily invest in the first 3-5% of inquiries that have short-term potential. However, sales people who are not aggressive and tenacious may lose interest in continued contact and neglect lead follow up with these 3-5% of inquiries. Then you have the other 95% of leads that don’t have short-term potential, which businesses commonly ignore. Sadly, 70% of those leads will buy from someone. If companies neglect follow up it results in lots of opportunity left on the table.
The first thing sales, and marketers, need to do is stop thinking a sale will happen in the first call. B2B buyers do not buy on a whim. A relationship must be built. Lead nurturing technology will automatically send personalized and intelligent communications to your prospects to develop your lead until they’re ready to speak with sales. Put the inquiries not yet ready for sales into a lead nurturing campaign. See our post on Lead Nurturing Programs to get an active of 5 different lead nurturing tracks you can drop your leads into.
Forrester Research reported companies that implemented an effective lead nurturing process have a 300% (3x) higher closing rate than their competitors who fail to make a long-term investment with their prospects. – Forrester Research
Concentrate on how buyers buy before you can master how to sell. Buyer’s usually want educational content in smaller, bite-sized chunks, over a period of time.
Persistence – Make a concerted effort to reach your leads
In a similar survey, 15 million sales leads were analyzed. Results showed persistence increased the probability of contacting a lead. The same study revealed a disappointing 50% of leads are never called a second time. When making two calls versus one it increases the chance of contacting a lead by 87%. The report also found six contact attempts resulted in the maximum possible contact rate; however, nearly 60% of sales people made less than sixth contact attempts.
Timing contact attempts will also increase conversion rates. New inquiries should receive a response within 5 minutes and include a 6-call lead follow up process to produce the maximum conversion rate and minimize workload. Here’s the suggested contact attempt schedule to maximize lead follow up ROI:
• Day 1: call 3 times. The premise is new inquiries should be called immediately and in two subsequent time windows during the first day until contact is made.
• If contact has not been made, call on day 3, 4, and day 11 or 12 to maximize contact and conversion rates.
• Day 3, call once.
• Day 4, call again.
• Day 11 or 12, make 2 more call attempts.
Realizing the effort to track and schedule lead follow up, businesses can use marketing automation software to automate scheduling of tasks. For example, revenue generation software from Lead Liaison can schedule call follow up tasks and reminders at once. At Lead Liaison we use 6 sales pipeline stages to map the flow of a person through the revenue cycle. Once a lead becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) by achieving a particular lead score the lead is handed off to sales. Our system automatically assigns a lead to the sales lead owner and schedules the reminder process in a CRM, such as Salesforce.com.
Keeping the 3 rules of lead follow up in mind and leveraging revenue generation software to help deliver lead nurturing and schedule sales lead follow up will help businesses become more efficient in lead management and generate more revenue from marketing dollars. Contact Lead Liaison to better understand how we can help your business with lead follow up.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What lead follow up tactics have helped you?
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Marketers spend a lot of time on inbound marketing activities to drive traffic to their site; investing in SEO, thought leadership, trade shows, blogs, social media, and advertising are a few examples of inbound marketing. As awareness builds and new contacts enter the sales funnel it is important businesses define the right sales pipeline stages to manage, nurture, and distribute leads. Sales pipeline stages tend to vary across companies; however, we’ve established 6 sales pipeline stages appropriate for most businesses. Here at Lead Liaison, we use these exact stages to manage our business. Let’s explore how we’ve defined the 6 stages in the sales pipeline.
The 6 sales pipeline stages are
1. Just a Name
2. Engaged
3. Prospect
4. Marketing Qualified Lead
5. Sales Qualified Lead
6. Opportunity
Prior to adding a lead to your sales pipeline we suggest tracking the lead source. Marketing automation technology can help you identify whether the lead source is from a paid search, SEO, trade show, facebook, general website visit or other source. Lead tracking will help you report on marketing ROI down the road. Let’s briefly explain each of the sales pipeline stages.
Just a Name
As the name implies, these records are just a name. If you have the person’s name or email and no other insight they are simply a record, or a person, in your database. Often times marketing and sales have conflicting definitions of a lead. Separating these people from your marketing defined leads and sales defined leads helps avoid confusion over what is a lead and what is not a lead.
Engaged
When a person finally responds to an inbound marketing program they are moved to the sales pipeline stage, Engaged. For example, the person could click a link in an email campaign or fill out a web form to become engaged. Please note that just because someone is in the engaged status does not mean they are a lead as there’s a good chance they’re not yet ready to speak with sales. We suggest using marketing automation technology to automatically respond to the person with a personalized message a few hours after they respond.
Prospect
If the person meets the ideal profile of a buyer they become a prospect. Ideal profiles could be determined by demographics (location, job title) or firmographics (industry, company size, revenue). Again, we suggest using a marketing automation system to help qualify if someone should become a prospect. Lead scoring, a feature of most marketing automation systems, provides a mechanism to automatically qualify leads using an incremental scoring system. For example, add 10 points if their companies revenue is more than $50M and/or add 20 points if they are a Vice President. Conversely, scores can be decremented. For example, subtract 50 points if the person is a student.
Once the person becomes a prospect start lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the process of creating meaningful dialogue with the prospect at each stage of the buying process. See the post under lead nurturing programs for 5 examples of this dialogue. The beauty of lead nurturing is that different lead nurturing “tracks” can kick in according to the prospects online activity and/or interaction with other marketing assets.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
We suggest using the score generated from your lead scoring programs to determine if a prospect makes it to the sales pipeline stage as a marketing qualified lead. Sales pipeline stages leading up to this point do not require human interaction; interaction has been personalized using lead nurturing technology. In our lead management model, we use a scoring threshold of 65 or higher. When the prospects lead score crosses that threshold we change the lead status to a marketing qualified lead.
At this stage in the sales pipeline, marketing will pass the lead over to sales. In some businesses marketing may have a sales development team or inside sales team manually qualify the lead further via a phone call or some other type of screening. At Lead Liaison, we do not change the status of the lead until sales accepts the lead and determines it’s qualified. A lead may also be put into the “Disqualified” status if there’s no match whatsoever.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Once sales accepts a lead and deems it qualified the lead becomes a sales qualified lead. Leads at this stage typically require high-touch, personalized interaction. Sales will call the lead to further qualify them. At this point, sales can move the lead to one of three statuses: Deferred, Recycled, or Opportunity. If the lead is not quite ready to buy sales should recycle the lead. Recycling puts the lead back into a lead nurturing program managed by marketing until the lead is sales-ready. Alternatively, sales can move the lead to a Deferred status if no additional lead nurturing is warranted and there doesn’t appear to be an opportunity. If marketing, and the marketing automation system, has done its job the lead should be moved to the Opportunity status. When the lead becomes an opportunity it will have its own opportunity sales cycle.
This is the most important stage of all sales pipeline stages since quick response to hot leads must occur. We strongly recommend using an alert system to make sure marketing and the rest of the organization holds sales accountable for follow up. A marketing automation system will help you setup a closed-loop accountability process similar to the one below:
1. Send an alert via email to the responsible sales person.
2. If within 24 hours the lead status has not been changed send an alert reminder to the sales person.
3. If another 24 hours pass, send another alert reminder to sales and copy the sales person’s manager.
4. If another 24 hours pass, send the same alert to sales and the sales persons manager but this time copy a C-level executive.
This closed-loop process ensures no lead falls through the cracks while holding sales accountable for follow up and providing marketing peace of mind as the person seamlessly transitions from marketing responsibility to sales responsibility.
Opportunity
The Opportunity status is important for marketing to measure cost per conversion, cost per lead, and effectiveness of various lead sources. Today’s marketer is being measured on results, not activity (email opens, web visits). ROI analysis on a person’s path through the sales pipeline stages from Just a Name through to Opportunity then Customer is vital to keep a pulse on revenue generation.
Graveyard and Contact
At any of the sales pipeline stages a person can be moved to the Graveyard or Contact status. Graveyard status is a person record with a bad email or incorrect contact information. Usually, this occurs if the person has changed jobs. Contact status is when a person is converted out of the sales pipeline stages into a contact management database and is not a lead. This typically occurs when the person is a partner, reseller, or just a contact in your system that you never plan to sell to.
Contact Lead Liaison to see how our revenue generation software can help you setup your lead management process to distribute, qualify, and nurture leads through your sales pipeline stages.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What sales pipeline stages to you employ? How do you manage your stages?
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Marketers are tasked to continually create useful marketing content to disseminate to prospects, customers and partners. The advent of lead nurturing and marketing automation has further fueled the need to have a library of marketing content on hand. Additionally, marketing campaigns typically leverage marketing content for a call to action. However, creating effective content is hard work and takes time. Marketers can focus on two rules of marketing content creation and follow a few tips to simplify the process.
First, think like the buyer, not the seller. Marketers must empathize with their buyers and put themselves in the buyer’s shoes. If you were a buyer what marketing content would you be interested in? Second, map out the phases your buyers go through before purchasing a solution. The B2B buying process varies with each company.
After thinking like your buyer and mapping out your buyer’s stages begin creating content relevant to each phase. For example, most buyers go through an “awareness” phase. Create marketing content commensurate with this phase such as analyst reports, glossaries, industry articles or checklists. Focus content on education and problem solving. Make the messaging all about them, not you. Create fresh content that helps your buyer meet their goals such as ROI calculators and measurement or optimization tools. Useful content can have 5X return over “self indulging content”. Don’t try to close the sale with a prospect right away, that will come after you build the buyer’s trust and garner a relationship.
Here are some more tips for creating marketing content:
Marketing Content Tips
1. Start by conducting a marketing content audit to assess your resource library. 2. Eliminate rarely used marketing content. 3. Separate content that’s all about your product or service (data sheets, eBooks, website copy) from marketing content that helps the buyer. 4. Keep your content short. It’s not necessary to write multiple page documents or 5 paragraph articles. People are busy and like to consume useful marketing content in bits, not bites. 5. Consider a compilation of check lists, glossaries, analyst reports, executive briefs, and industry overviews. 6. Think about how you can repurpose your marketing content. For example, take screen shots of videos and make a transcript of the audio for a blog post or document. Produce various iterations of a “How to Buy Product ABC” based on your customers industry or persona. 7. Stay committed to content marketing. Creating relevant content is not a one-time event and should be viewed as a long term commitment.
Check out the Content Rules book for additional content marketing tips. They discuss how to create killer blogs, videos, eBooks, and webinars.
Also, our article on 101 Business to Business Lead Generation Ideas and Tips might also stimulate ideas for good marketing content.
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Email marketing campaigns are very different from lead nurturing campaigns. Unfortunately, many marketers believe they already nurture leads by sending random, generic, and untimely email messages to their database. In reality, what they are doing is annoying prospects and diminishing return on assets. Marketers must understand that lead nurturing campaigns infuse consistency, relevance, and patience into traditional email marketing campaigns.
“If all you do is send generic email marketing messages to your early stage leads over and over and over again, you’re missing the point. Consistency is good but being relevant and then consistent is even better.” – Brian Carroll, B2B Lead Blog
Lead nurturing campaigns create consistency
Let’s examine a few key words in Brian’s statement. First, let’s discuss “consistency”. Email marketing is typically a very manual and inconsistent process. In the world of email marketing it’s very easy to forget about sending a campaign or lose track of a marketing plan. Marketers must manually schedule email messages on a periodic basis. There’s no systematic way of scheduling campaigns. The frequency of traditional email campaigns is usually monthly or quarterly in the form of a newsletter. Lead nurturing campaigns are different as they allow automatic scheduling of emails. Experts estimate it typically takes 8-12 touches for a lead to start becoming familiar with you. Lead nurturing makes it easier for marketers to be consistent and build relationships over time by automatically scheduling a series of relevant and consistent communications.
Lead nurturing campaigns send relevant communications
Second, let’s touch on the key word “relevant”. Blasting out generic email campaigns demonstrates you don’t understand what your prospects care about. Marketers typically send email messages to the entire database. Lead nurturing campaigns allow marketers to leverage marketing segmentation to segment a database based on demographics, likes, dislikes, website activity or any other profile information stored in the database. Knowing your prospects interests enables lead nurturing campaigns to send tailored and relevant content. Sending relevant content increases the chance of advancing a prospect through the sales cycle through personalized and intimate communications.
Lead nurturing campaigns instill patience
Most marketers who send “static” email campaigns are impatient. They feel once they obtain a new contact/lead they’ve got one chance to turn that contact/lead into an opportunity. If they can’t, they ignore the lead. Marketers must go through a paradigm shift in the way they think about a lead. A lead should be a lead for life. Lead nurturing campaigns help marketers continually leverage their database as a holistic asset by providing frequent and relevant contact touch points with the lead regardless of their stage in the sales cycle. Patience truly is a virtue. Once the lead is ready to “sprout”, you’ll know about it. Brian Carroll shared an interesting analogy related to lead nurturing campaigns:
“…in Minnesota, where I grew up, I worked on a farm with a seed corn farmer and he said you don’t dig up your corn to check and see if it’s growing. That’s the truth with lead nurturing, it’s something that you’re investing in over time and building a relationship with someone” – Brian Carroll, B2B Lead Blog
Lead nurturing campaigns “ready” leads by feeding them topical information to keep your company and solutions top of mind with your prospects. The automated and dynamic capability of lead nurturing campaigns makes lead nurturing very different from email marketing campaigns. If marketers are patient and invest in lead nurturing for the long haul they’ll learn to grow their seeds and harness the fruits of their labor.
To learn more about how Lead Liaison’s lead nurturing campaigns can help you contact us today.
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