Marketingsherpa Blog

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve noticed a recurring theme in my conversations with B2B marketers: This is the year to get serious about lead management and lead nurturing.

It’s not that lead management is a new concept – in fact, many marketers I talk to already have some kind of nurturing and scoring process in place. But many of those same marketers admit they haven’t fully realized all the benefits of their system and need to optimize it.

And now, a range factors are coming together to push those teams to get more out of their lead management systems – while pushing teams that haven’t adopted lead nurturing or scoring to create a system of their own.

Here are a few of the factors I’ve seen:

- Lead nurturing can address some of the biggest challenges B2B marketers reported facing in our 2009-2010 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report:
• Generating high-quality leads
• Marketing to lengthening sales cycle
• Marketing to a growing number of people in the buying process

- Staff and budget cuts brought on by the recession are forcing teams to streamline and automate more of their marketing processes. Things like automated drip-email nurturing campaigns look more like a “must-have” when your staff and budget for campaign execution shrinks.

- On a more positive note, optimism about an economic recovery has some teams thinking about future growth. They realize that the manual systems they use now won’t scale when their volume of leads and sales activity picks up again.

Any of those factors would be a good reason for you to revisit how you manage your own lead flow and qualification process. I have to note that, unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy route to lead nurturing nirvana.

The process requires a lot of work – collaboration between sales and marketing, planning and development of automated campaigns, monitoring and analysis of data, and routine testing and modification of your process, among other tasks.

On Thursday, June 10, I’ll be conducting a free webinar with Jennifer Horton, Best Practice Consultant, Eloqua, that provides research data and case study results to address some of the key challenges in optimizing lead management. (Here’s the registration form with more information.)

But if you’re ready to put in the effort, you can transform the way your marketing team operates, improve your relationship with sales, and make an even bigger contribution to your company’s revenue.

Want to share your B2B marketing expertise with hundreds of your marketing peers, or recount a particularly successful campaign?

We’re looking for speakers to take the stage at our 7th-annual B2B Marketing Summit this fall. This year’s event takes place Oct. 4-5 in San Francisco and Oct. 25-26 in Boston. During those two days, we’ll be featuring a mix of research, hands-on training, panel discussions, case studies and how-to presentations that will help you optimize your lead generation process.

To be considered for a spot on that agenda, share the details of your speaking proposal here.

We’re looking for presentations that provide practical, actionable advice for B2B marketers based on measurable results and real-world experiences. Think about your own success stories in the following areas:
o Lead generation
o Lead nurturing
o Lead scoring
o International demand generation
o Email marketing
o Paid search advertising and SEO
o Content development
o Social media marketing
o Metrics and analytics

Once again, please use this form to provide details of your proposed session.
(Deadline: Wednesday, May 12)

And stay tuned to this blog, the MarketingSherpa home page, and our B2B marketing newsletter for more details on the Summit as we develop the program.

Thanks!

Our recent case study about Level 3 Communications’ video eBook highlighted a great tactic for getting non-marketing colleagues to help create marketing content. It can be hard to convince a busy VP or engineering-type to write something for you, but they’ll often agree to be interviewed on a subject for a video or audio piece.

Interviews are a great way to let knowledgeable staff members share their expertise in a low-pressure, low-commitment way:
o You can give them questions in advance so they can gather their thoughts
o The process can take as little as 15 or 20 minutes
o A little post-production editing can highlight the best bits, even if they ramble a little.

But you have to choose the right people to interview and manage the process carefully to ensure the content is trustworthy and relevant to your prospects. Here are a couple more tips on getting the best out of your subject matter experts:

- Avoid using salespeople for lead-gen interviews.

Nothing against salespeople – they are great at what they do, and know your products’ features and benefits inside and out. But using a salesperson may send the wrong message to prospects.

The vast majority of the audience for your video or podcast isn’t yet ready to talk to a salesperson. Instead, you should feature an authoritative voice from within your organization, such as a technical expert or product manager, who can project an educational, authoritative tone. Save the sales team’s role for negotiating with leads once they’ve been qualified through your marketing process.

- Don’t let subjects read their answers.

People reading off a script almost never sound natural. You want the content to be conversational, not scripted.

If the interview subject is working off of notes and it’s not sounding great, ask them to try it again without reading their notes. Tell them to focus on talking to the interviewer as if it were a one-on-one conversation — not a presentation.

And remember, editing is your friend. You can always delete pauses, “ums” and “ahs” or repetitive statements after the fact.

I recently talked with Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant in the Best Practices Group at Omniture, about how to best measure and monitor a site’s SEO results (keep an eye out for the article in our search newsletter).

Knoch provided a wealth of information. One bit I found particularly interesting was about connecting offline conversions to online behavior. Many marketers invest loads of time and effort into search marketing to generate leads that will convert offline. Most of these marketers are certain of how many leads they’re getting, but are less certain of which channels generate the best leads; those most likely to convert.

A rental car company, for example, might collect leads online by pointing traffic to an online registration form. The customers convert and pay when they arrive on-site to pick up the car. So leads are generated online, but not all of them will arrive on-site to complete the conversion.

For marketers in this boat, connecting online lead gen to offline conversions is essential to determining which efforts are pulling in the best leads. Is it paid search? If so, which keywords? Is it natural search? Is it display advertising? You should strive to segment the performance of each channel, Knoch says.

“If you’re not mapping your online [lead gen] to your [in-store] conversions, you may be judging your natural search just the same as your display–which is not a good thing to do,” Knoch says. “If you’re not optimizing to offline data metrics, then you’re missing the full picture and you may be spending money on the wrong keywords or the wrong channels.”

Teens are using social network sites, video-sharing sites, online games, iPods, and mobile phones. That’s no news flash.

What’s new is a study of 800 interviews with youth and their parents that has shed light on why young people use digital media. Here are the major findings:

Read more…

It hadn’t occurred to me that most brands and companies large to small are embracing social media or at least thinking about it. It hadn’t occurred to me until I spoke with Rob Merritt, Senior VP and Director of CKPR, one of the largest independent public relations firms in the U.S.

He said during an interview for a Fame article:

“From a PR standpoint I don’t think we execute a PR program right now that doesn’t have an online component and some kind of social media aspect to it.”

In this case the article was about a campaign his company did for AirTran involving a YouTube contest, stunts, and traditional PR to grab the attention of the college-age demographic.

I know it’s only anecdotal evidence that social media is taking a strong hold. But I can say that based on several interviews I’ve conducted with PR staff at companies and agencies social media is almost always part of the marketing or PR strategies.

And if you want to reach younger generations with your company’s message, it’s almost imperative.

Last week, we invited 35 MarketingSherpa Members to a virtual roundtable discussion to tackle a question we’ve been hearing quite a bit about recently: “Are white papers still effective?”

From our standpoint, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Data show that white papers are still an integral part of the business buying cycle:

Read more…