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Customizing Your Lead Generation Programs to the Right Stage of the Buying Process

May 15, 2012 by

Building a successful B2B lead generation program requires anticipating requests and integrating into your response both an answer and an incentive to help the prospect take the next step toward making a purchase decision. This is particularly true for B2B organizations that have a complex sales process. For these organizations, an inquiry from a prospect is only the first step in the lead development process. A process that hinges on your ability to effectively maintain a dialog with and the interest of your potential customers.

To do this, you must clearly understand your prospect’s decision making process and have predefined actions that will help them move through each stage. These actions must also address the specific needs of the individual based on their stage of the buying cycle. Examples of incentives for the 4-stages of our simple buying cycle include:

  • Awareness
    This stage is designed to articulate the need and value for your product or solution without overwhelming the individual with details. Once they are aware of your basic value, offering more information in the form of white papers, case studies or webinars can help move them to the next stage.
  • Interest
    Once a prospect is interested in your solution, you need to validate your features and benefits in order to impress upon them a clear fit between your abilities and their needs. This is a critical stage as it establishes the position your company will take among all available solutions. To move your targets to the next stage in the cycle, offer product demonstrations, free samples or personal consultations as a way to further enhance their knowledge of your solution.
  • Understanding
    Prospects who reach the understanding stage are looking for more than what you can do. They want to know what makes you different from the competition. This is your time to establish the selection criteria and highlight your unique value propositions. Incentives at this stage are often related specifically to cost or implementation strategies.
  • Acceptance & Purchase
    When a prospect has achieved this stage of acceptance, your role switches from sales to validation. Validation that they have made the right decision and should continue to make similar decisions in the future. At this point in the cycle, your focus should be on securing repeat business and recommendations. Incentives at this stage should be around added features and additional service that can be bundled with their previous purchases.

How you manage these stages of the buying process and build in the appropriate incentives takes time and awareness. Anticipating the types of questions prospects will ask at each stage will help you develop processes to simplify the entire process and will enable you to guide your audience to the information that is right for them based on their sales stage. This will then enable you to address the needs of a much larger target audience and thereby produce a higher quantity and quality of lead for your organization.

Filed under Direct Mail, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy

Don’t be a Habitual Marketer

May 8, 2012 by

I cringe when I hear the phrase “because we’ve always done it that way.” That’s the battle cry of the Habitual Marketer. It’s often heard when asked why they decided to invest in a B2B lead generation program that doesn’t have a clearly defined return-on-investment. In most cases, these are marketing programs that were once strategic or highly visible, but have not evolved with their target audiences.

Trade shows and advertising programs are great examples. These activities serve a very specific purpose and can be incredibly valuable lead generation activities. That doesn’t mean they should be continued year after year without evaluating their performance. Unfortunately, they often receive approval because they are highly visible, a pet project of senior executives or an attempt to counter competitive pressure (i.e. keeping up with the Joneses).

To avoid becoming a habitual marketer, you should evaluate all of your marketing programs regularly and determine the cost-to-lead ratio of each program. You can then make a financial determination about which programs should be continued and which should not. This will not only help you avoid wasting money, but it will help you further optimize the B2B lead generation programs you do implement, by allowing you to focus your funding on programs that work.

This doesn’t mean you should immediately abandon programs with poor cost-to-lead ratios. The main purpose of some programs is to support the growth of the brand and customer awareness, which is ultimately beneficial to your overall B2B lead generation efforts. For these programs, you need to determine the value they provide to your marketing efforts and evaluate them against other alternatives in terms of their importance to your business.

Filed under Advertising, Direct Mail, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Trade Shows

Making Your Captcha User Friendly

May 3, 2012 by

While you may not know the technical term “Captcha,” you certainly know what it is. If you’ve spent any amount of time online, you’ve come across those tiny little text images that are nearly illegible. Captchas are a byproduct in the fight against machines (or automated bots) that troll the internet completing forms and randomly posting blog messages.

What is unfortunate is that most B2B lead generation programs have implemented Captchas with little regard for the customer experience. Asking the user to decipher a skewed image goes against the basic principle of making the customer experience as easy as possible.

The solution to this problem is relatively easy when you evaluate both the technology and how it influences the user experience. It starts by understanding that bots are looking for forms and see only code, not how it is displayed on your screen. This includes hidden variables that are not displayed through browsers. By hiding a variable and using it for validation upon submission you can determine if the form was completed by a person or machine. (If the field is not empty, a machine entered the data because a user viewing your form through a browser would not have seen this field.)

This process removes the need for a Captcha and enables you to easily filter out a large percentage of malicious entries. But it’s not perfect. Google Chrome and other browsers are starting to auto complete forms for users based on stored information. For these people, there is still a chance that this hidden field will be populated.

To sidestep this hurdle, adding a validation page after submission will do the trick. This page may include a review of their own personal information and require a second input, or you could simply ask them a yes or no question such as “Are you a machine?”

The important thing to remember is that this extra step is only necessary for those individuals that trigger the extra validation. For the majority of your users, they will simply follow the normal process and be satisfied with a customer experience that doesn’t require them to jump through hoops to contact your organization. And making life simple for customers and prospects will improve the results of your lead generation programs.

Filed under Email Marketing, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Online Marketing

Building a B2B Lead Generation Database

April 30, 2012 by

The importance of your customer and prospect database cannot be understated. It’s by far the most important element of any B2B lead generation program. Without it, even the most creative and enticing marketing campaign will ultimately fail. On the flip side, if you have a good list, the rest should come easy.

How you build, acquire and manage lists for B2B lead generation purposes is important. Unlike the consumer market, the universe of potential B2B customers is limited; as are the marketing budgets needed to target them. For that reason, you need to develop a formal marketing process for managing customer and prospect data that will maximize the potential of every lead. This process needs to include clear and concise lead qualification criteria as well as the structure for how you will maintain accurate records of each contact.

Once you have the process, you can then focus on collecting data on customers and prospects to populate your database. There are numerous strategies for how to obtain contact lists, and every marketing program should be evaluated in terms of its database development potential. For example, trade shows and sponsored newsletters can offer a tremendous opportunity to grow your databases if you establish a clear method of identifying the individual and categorizing their potential to buy. Magazines and professional organizations can also be excellent sources for data, but come with certain limitations as to how purchased lists can be used.

But names and phone numbers are only a fraction of the information you need. Profiling those individuals is critical and can be an even bigger challenge. Profiling takes time and money, but it can also be a tremendous source of active sales leads when done right. E-mail campaigns, telemarketing, and, every other touch point you have with your prospects and customers, should be designed to build out these profiles and add to your knowledge of your target audience.

Ultimately, the value of your database centers around your ability to understand the potential of each contact to make a purchase, and the triggers that will make them take action. This once again hinges on your data management processes, the quality of the data, and, your ability to interpret this data. With these three elements in place, your B2B lead generation programs will cost less and have a higher success rate.

Filed under Data Management, Direct Mail, General Marketing, Lead Generation

Use Bad Leads to Optimize Marketing Performance

April 25, 2012 by

Successful lead generation programs produce high-quality, sales-ready prospects for your sales team. They also produce a ton of data about your customers and prospects that can be utilized to optimize the ROI of your future marketing programs. Unfortunately, this data is often overlooked because it is overshadowed by the need to follow-up on the leads that are produced.

This is particularly true of data gathered about unqualified prospects that may have responded to your promotion for alternative reasons (i.e. they wanted the give-a-way, not your product). If you’ve taken the time to disqualify these individuals, using that information to optimize your future marketing programs is critical. Another source is email bounces and returned direct mail pieces.

Start by marking these individuals within your CRM as low priority. Don’t make the mistake of deleting them from your database because they still present a potential sales opportunity. Even if they don’t, keeping them in your database eliminates having to waste resources re-qualify them again if they show up in a future list source.

Next, remove these individuals from future promotions that have a variable cost based on the target size, such as direct mail and telemarketing. This should be easy enough to do, with even basic data management skills, after you have identified them as low-priority. This will reduce your cost-to-lead ratio by eliminating people you have already disqualified and allowing you to focus on higher potential target prospects.

Finally, continue to promote to these individuals with your fixed-costs marketing lead generation programs such as e-mail. Regularly, you should create specific programs targeting this low priority group. Include built-in triggers for removing their low priority status. This could include possibilities like watching a product demo, sending an e-mail inquiry or multiple actions that would represent a growing interest in your product. Avoid adding financial or merchandize incentives to these programs as they will artificially inflate your responses.

Filed under Data Management, Direct Mail, Email Marketing, Events, Lead Generation, Marketing Budgeting, Marketing Strategy, Trade Shows

Promoting and Managing Customer Events

April 19, 2012 by

Customer events are a vital component of your marketing portfolio. They come in all sizes from simple Lunch & Learns to full blown user conferences, and provide a great avenue for sharing information and building relationships on a more personal level. They also offer you the ability to capture critical information from your prospects and customers about their wants and needs in a way that few other mediums can.

Successfully promoting and managing customer events requires a great deal of preparation and the ability to anticipate your guests’ needs long before they realize they have them. Experience, dedication and a commitment to building a process that is truly customer centric from start to finish are the keys to doing this.

Setting the tone for your customer event is an important first step. This begins long before customers and prospects arrive or even when invitations go out. It starts with a clear vision of your events goals and objectives and is supported by a detailed process managing inbound and outbound communications with customers and prospects. This includes the registration process, welcome kits, presentation reviews, entertainment, transportation and dozens of other details along the way. It also includes building and planning a follow-up plan for gauging your events success as well as capturing critical data about potential leads and nurturing them to fruition.

For smaller events, this can be relatively straightforward. Account managers, sales people and other customer facing personal are often required to handle the majority of these communications. For larger events, there should be a person or team of individuals dedicated to understanding the intricacies of the event who are available to answer questions. In either case, it is important understand and minimizes the burden placed on customer-facing personal that already have enough to do, and need to be focus on other customer issues or closing sales.

If you’re making the investment to bring your customers and prospects together, take the time to build a plan that focuses on delivering an exceptional customer experience without overwhelming your existing staff. And then review that plan with people who have been through the process and can provide insight into potential areas of customer confusion. This will allow you to rectify them, long before they become an issue and potentially shift the tone of your event from positive to negative. If you need help at any stage in the process (i.e. building, reviewing or implementing a plan), feel free to reach out to ResponsePoint for advice and consultation.

Filed under Events, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Trade Shows

How to Increase Lead Generation Response Rates

April 16, 2012 by

There is no magic formula for making prospects respond to your marketing promotions every time. Even giving “it” (whatever “it” is) away for free will be met with skepticism and mistrust. When applied to B2B lead generation programs, this mistrust is further compounded by a lack of an innate personal motivation and self-interest.

Incremental improvements in your lead generation response rates, however, are not as difficult to achieve. Increases can be achieved by making minor modifications to your marketing processes to help streamline prospect participation. Even a 1% or 2% bump in response rate can be extremely valuable.

At the top of this list is the use of pre-populated registration forms as part of your lead generation activities. These dynamic forms automatically populate the users data within the form based on your contact database. Not only will this simple change in your process streamline how visitors respond, it will also eliminate the anxiety felt by customer and prospects at providing personal information.

This has proven true for both B2C and B2B lead generation response rates. When combined with e-mail marketing, web site promotions or most integrated marketing programs, the impact can be significant.

Filed under Direct Mail, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing

The Four Essentials of Web Page Design to Improve Your SEO

April 13, 2012 by

Web page design isn’t rocket science. There are numerous tools available to help you build and manage a website, so it’s not unheard of to consider doing this yourself. The first step is to determine how your site will look visually and invest the time to adapt your design to a template that you can manage for the long-term. This is critical because even the most visually appealing designs can go astray over time and begin to look more like the inside of a high school locker.

Once you have your design, the next step is to get it noticed and that’s when understanding the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important. Below are the four essential elements of your website design as related to SEO. Please note, that we’ve intentionally left off the most important SEO factor “link building” as this is an activity outside the visual design of your website.

  1. Write valuable content
    Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Google changes their search algorithm to optimize the users search to show the most relevant content. Their direction to website developers has always been “build content people want and your search rankings will improve.” This means that unless you are willing to invest in meaningful, topic rich content that people want, you’re SEO rankings will never be high. This means writing content that engages visitors and encourages them to stay on your site for more than a cursory glance. It includes rich media as well such as blogs, podcasts and other multimedia.

  2. Incorporate Keywords into your site
    Keywords are essential. You should define what keywords you want to target even before you build your site then shape your content around this. What’s important to remember is that keywords are not just located in the text of your site. They are also associated with pictures, links, downloads and every other element of your site. Be careful how you use them though. Don’t try to trick the system by loading pages full of a single keyword. Google and the other search engines have spent millions to identify these tactics and will rank your page accordingly.

  3. Make your page titles meaningful
    Look at the top of this page and read the title in your browser tabs. This is the page title specific to this page and its critical to telling search engines what this page is about. Certainly it is only one element of SEO, but it’s also one that will show up in search engines as the link to your page when someone does a search. Be descriptive with this title and help identify what users will find on this page and it will go a long way to improving your SEO rankings.

  4. Use text based links
    When you pick a content management system and design a site map, spend time understanding the many different options you have for storing your pages. WordPress, for example, gives you several options for managing links such as date, number or topic. Choose to use topic, because this is not only meaningful to your reader, but it will also add additional keywords to your SEO ranking. Similar to page titles, these links will show up within your Google searches and will give that much more visibility to the reader on why they should choose to view your page, and not the next one on the list.

Once again, managing your SEO program isn’t difficult, but it does take time, understanding and a commitment to doing it the right way. There are no tricks or shortcuts. Your goal needs to be to create a program that works for you and your target audience. When you’ve combined these two elements together, you can then focus on creating inbound links to further optimize your SEO ranking.

Filed under General Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing

Extend the Life of Your Marketing Materials

April 10, 2012 by

As marketing professionals, we spend a lot of time creating materials that will entice our target prospects to identify themselves and their interests. In most cases, they respond by filling out forms or clicking on links within e-mails to gain access to white papers, videos, calculators and other educational tools. The impression these tools make is a critical component in helping a prospect decide whether or not to continue their relationship with your company and move through the sale cycle.

One common mistake companies make is to date materials such as white papers, case studies and other collateral. The simple act of placing a date on the cover page, footer or back page of a document immediately limits its usable life. This is particularly true for thought leadership articles; even those that are significantly forward thinking. Once a date is added to a document, that document becomes less credible as reliable, timely information.

A better strategy is to remove the date altogether and create promotions that incorporate current events. This allows you to leverage incentives of any age (assuming they are still relevant). Consider for example a white paper entitled “Best Practices for Social Networking.” The white paper may be 5 years old, but your promotion could include references to new media such as LinkedIn or Pinterest. In this way, you can increase the value of your existing marketing materials, rather than recreating new materials for each promotion.

Filed under Direct Mail, General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Online Marketing

Lead Generation Requires Giving . . . a Little

April 5, 2012 by

There are numerous strategies and tactics to generate leads. The common element, regardless of your choice, is the need to entice your target audience to take action. This could be something as simple as clicking on a link or as complex as actually making a sale. To encourage activity, you need to provide an incentive to take action.

If your product or solution is simply too good to pass up, your job should be easy. In most cases however, a little nudge may be necessary to start the ball rolling. How much of a nudge depends on the value of the information you are asking for in return. If you’re giving away product samples or trial software, it’s fair to ask for more information than if you are simply offering a white paper or brochure download. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for something in return for those items.

Increasing your lead generation effectiveness requires balancing both halves of this equation. To be successful, develop a plan that identifies the things you want to know about each prospect. Then determine the value each element of information has. Next, build your programs to obtain it. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to gain everything at once. Use multiple interactions and with each interaction, give a little and take a little until you have all the information you need to turn a prospect into a customer.

Filed under General Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy

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