MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

When John Johnston, Director of Digital Marketing, began his journey at Volvo Construction, he knew things had to be completely rebuilt, starting with the website and branching out into everything else. In this excerpt of a full video session from B2B Summit 2012, see how customer service topped the list for Volvo Construction when it began an overhaul on digital marketing, where email would bring customers to the website, and the website would convert them.

2:45 First, Volvo Construction created a website that acted as a useful and current resource for customers and dealers. Johnston wanted the website to be the ultimate guide for the visitor, so they could find everything they needed, including its social media posts, without leaving the site.

4:21 Subsequently, Johnston’s team structured digital marketing around the website so that PPC, SEO and email would attract customers and the website would be helpful enough for them to stay.

5:33 He also decided that email is how they would “primarily drive traffic to the website.”

Crafting the email to serve customer needs was vital to this plan. Since customer needs vary so greatly, Johnston’s team needed “to make sure the content changes,” to match customer needs and. The emails also needed to contain dynamic content and interactive functionality the customers appreciated, as well as the analytics that the company could use.

Related Resources:

Click here to watch the full free presentation to see the rest of Johnston’s digital marketing strategy and answer more questions from the audience.

Lead Gen Summit 2013: September 30 — October 3, 2013 in San Francisco

Email Summit 2014 in Las Vegas Call for Speakers — Bonus: Enter the MarketingSherpa Email Awards using the same form

Event Recap: MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012

Customer Connection: Does your entire marketing process connect to your customers’ motivations?

Email Marketing: Segmentation, triggered sends generate twice the revenue with half as many email sends for furniture company

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

“It is absolutely necessary. Don’t base your marketing on assumptions and allow your customers to identify your success.”

— Alex Corzo, Manager of Brand Integration, Orlando Health

How important is value prop testing?

The case studies at Optimization Summit 2013 reaffirmed the importance of value proposition testing for me. For example, through testing, Jon Ciampi, Vice President Marketing, Business Development & Corporate Development, CRC Health, learned his customers craved trust, not luxury. He reinvented his lead funnel based on this insight, changing everything from his company’s landing pages to his team’s call scripts.

So, how can you discover your value proposition?

At Optimization Summit, my colleague Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, shared “How You Can Use Email to Discover the Essence of Your Value Proposition (in 5 Simple Steps).”

But email is just one channel for testing value proposition. So, in the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked…

Q: Which methods have been the most effective at testing your value proposition? Select up to three responses.

We also reached out to our audience, and asked for their value proposition testing tips. The lowest response in the chart, offline advertising (in this case, using cold calling), received the most passionate response, as you’ll see below…

Different tactics work for testing (and challenging) different aspects of your value proposition

For example, you can’t test the “secondary aspects” of your value proposition with PPC advertising because of obvious limitations, but it’s an ideal method for finding out what are the strongest motivators (“primary aspects”) of your value proposition.

It seems many people forget landing pages aren’t as objective as they might think. The traffic source affects expectations (and who comes to your page). So, one aspect of your value proposition might appear to work best, but really you only know what those visitors respond to.

For example, you sell supplements and you’re running an ad at a site focused on marathon running. You get visitors interested in extreme endurance. Your landing page should then focus on endurance. In other words, if one aspect of your value proposition is about building endurance, that’s what will appear to be the most important aspect of it. But if the traffic came from a bodybuilding site, you’d better focus on other aspects or at least frame your value proposition differently.

— Peter Sandeen, Online Conversion Specialist

Cold calling

In a business-to-business setting, I make a few hundred cold calls myself.

By the time I finish those calls, I know with a fairly high degree of confidence whether there is a need in the marketplace for what I’m offering.

Since I make those calls myself, I also have firsthand evidence of whether the value proposition resonates with prospective buyers. Only after do I allocate marketing dollars to communicating the message.

I know this method is “expensive,” but I’m a founder, so for me it’s about making the time and for that reason spending on marketing first would be more expensive.

Anyway, guess what I’ve found over and over again trying this approach in a variety of B2B situations? If the value proposition doesn’t include making them money or saving them time, it probably won’t resonate!

— David Chevalier, Co-founder, SalesBlend

And more cold calling

In my opinion, there is no substitute for David’s approach of having the founder or equivalent making enough cold calls.

Using senior execs to personally do testing is still not cheap, but really talking to that many prospects is not only priceless but an incredible kickstart to building pipeline for the sales that follow the test.

— Chris Beall, Chief Product Officer, ConnectAndSell

Related Resources:

Digital Marketing: B2B marketers can get fresh, new ideas from B2C

Digital Marketing: How to craft a value proposition in 5 simple steps

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana — Boston, Mass. for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013. After a short (and rather scenic) water taxi ride from the airport, I’ve settled into one of the Value Proposition Development Course sessions being led by Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, as he teaches marketers how to craft and express value propositions.

“I want to take the theory that we have put in place so far, and bring it down to a ground floor level of application,” Austin said.

So, today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog will highlight that ground floor application from Austin’s session by showing you how you can craft a value proposition in five simple steps. Our goal is to give marketers a frameworkthey can use to identify and express a value proposition using the MECLABS value proposition worksheet.

However, before we get started, take moment to download this worksheet to aid your value proposition efforts and let’s get clear on what a value proposition is exactly…

What is a value proposition?

According to Austin, there’s a fundamental question every customer wants answered that directly impacts your ability to capture and convert — “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

“Your value proposition is the ultimate reason why your prospects should do business with you,” Austin explained.

To put this further into perspective, take a moment to ask yourself, “Can I clearly and succinctly state the core value proposition of the product or service that I am marketing?” and write down you answer.

If what you wrote down resembles any of these …

• “We empower your software decisions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help companies find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “We give XX% off for new clients.”
• “This site has the solution your company is looking for.”

Then it’s very likely your marketing campaigns are underperforming from poorly-crafted value propositions that are also likely leaving some serious leads and revenue on the table.

Step #1: Identify the value proposition question

Austin explained the first step in crafting a value proposition is to identify the type of value proposition you need to answer.

“Once you have identified the value proposition question you want to answer, you have already won half of the battle,” Austin said.

And so, you first have to choose which question you want to answer; be it the primary question of “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?” or a derivative value proposition that has a much more granular focus on your products or process.

Step #2: Identify potential claims of value

The next step is to list some potential claims of value that answer the primary value proposition question we identified in step one.

To illustrate this, I created a hypothetical email service provider and listed some potential claims of value.

Step #3: Rate the appeal and exclusivity for each claim

After you’ve listed some possible claims, rank them from one through five according to their appeal and exclusivity, of which:

• Appeal — “How much is this offer desired by the market?“
• Exclusivity — “Is this offer available anywhere else in the market?“

In keeping with our example, let’s take a deeper look at appeal and exclusivity of our highest-ranking example claim.

“We can integrate into any social media platform”

• Appeal: 4.5 — The ability to conduct multichannel marketing with your emails is going to have a reasonably high amount of appeal to our hypothetical ideal prospect.
• Exclusivity: 5.0 — While there may be other players in our market; our business intelligence has determined that we are the only ESP currently capable of integration into every social media platform.

Step #4: Identify evidentials for your highest-ranked claims

Evidentials are the backbone of your potential claim because they make your claim quantifiable, or as Austin explained, “Once you understand your appeal and exclusivity, you want to begin building supporting credibility with your evidentials.”

To help intensify the credibility of potential claims, Austin shared three key principles for selecting evidentials:

1. Specification — Substitute general descriptions with specific facts.
2. Quantification — Quantify your claims.
3. Verification — Let someone else do your bragging.

Step #5: Combine the highest-ranked claims with supporting evidentials

This is where you bring it all together — by taking your highest-ranked claims and their supporting evidentials and turning them into what Austin described as “the ultimate conclusion as to why prospects should buy from you.”

Related Resources:

Value Proposition: Congress has a value exchange problem … do your marketing offers?

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Optimizing form fields in emails can be tricky as sales and marketing departments don’t always agree on how to create an effective lead flow process that captures important customer information while minimizing elements of friction.

So, today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post will share two case studies featured at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 and how one marketing team increased its conversion rate 22% by removing its capture form. Our goal is to share with you some real-world email campaigns you can use to aid your lead generation optimization effort.

First, let’s get some backstory on the role segmentation played in these case studies …

According to Dave Mossop, Manager of Interactive Marketing, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, segmenting between prospects and return customers early on in the campaign was key to allowing the team to offer more relevant content in its messaging.

“We did a very simple split of prospects versus customers and that alone gives you enough information to talk to these audiences very differently,” Dave explained.

By segmenting between prospects and return customers, the team was able to deliver a greater relevance for:

• Price points – Lower for new prospects and higher for return customers
• Itineraries – Specific destinations for new prospects and a broader range of destinations for return customers
• Information – Answer first time cruise information for new prospects and explain the benefit of “Why book with us?”
• Special offers – Exclusive bonus offers for prior customers

“As our team grew, we started going one level deeper by going to customer segments,” Dave explained.

Additional segmentation of past customers allowed the team to:

• Focus messaging, sales offers and itineraries
• Discover upsell and cross sell opportunities
• Prevent down-selling to luxury cruise clients

The team took its segmentation efforts even further by grouping past customers based on previous cruise lines. Expedia CruiseShipCenters discovered past customers were likely to book on the same cruise line again.

By understanding past customer behaviors, the team was also able to:

• Promote cruise line loyalty program offers and exclusives
• Write content from perspective of experience

“We see phenomenal results as we get completely relevant and completely personal with the customer we have this data on,” Dave concluded. “Personalization makes a difference, but who we send to matters even more.”

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Customer relationship management (CRM) is defined a number of different ways. However, the most expansive definition takes a total end-to-end look at every interaction a person has with a company from simply becoming aware of the company at the very top of the sales funnel, all the way through customer service contact after the final conversion to a closed deal.

With a complex sale, many personal touch points in customer relationship management are present — such as directly answering a question posted on social media or an online forum. At the same time, the real engine driving CRM and keeping prospects moving through the sales funnel is technology.

The first technology that comes to mind is CRM software, such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. However, CRM technology potentially includes multiple pieces including email software and marketing automation (MA) solutions.

Paul Greenberg, Managing Principle, The 56 Group, LLC, and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, said although there are some technology suites that attempt to provide these solutions through the entire sales cycle, it is much more common for companies to integrate CRM technology from more than one vendor.

A common example is utilizing marketing automation software on the Marketing side of the funnel from one vendor and integrating that piece with CRM software from another vendor for the Sales side of the funnel, with a common database providing records on each prospect or customer for both pieces of software.

Paul said this creates something of a challenge because a number of different areas in the company are involved in implementing, and utilizing, CRM technology.

Marketing, Sales (and IT) alignment

Marketing and Sales alignment should be a goal for any company to improve the efficiency of the entire complex sale process Bringing multiple pieces of technology into the sales funnel adds another element within the company — the information technology department.

“Who owns [CRM technology] is a matter of the internal culture of a company,” Paul explained. “Could it be joint ownership between two departments? It could be, as we’re seeing increasingly.”

He added, “But, we’re seeing the CMOs are starting to own a lot of IT budgets, so it could be the CMO that owns that [technology].”

At the same time, the IT department traditionally has controlled technology pieces, so the CIO could possibly own the CRM technology, allocate usage, and make functional decisions based on the business outcomes Marketing and Sales are looking for in using CRM tech.

The role of marketing automation

Linda Athans, Marketing Manager, Tribridge, stated the size of the company might dictate how many pieces of CRM technology are deployed. “Ideally, your CRM can ‘do it all,'” she said, “but depending on your organization’s size and how it uses its CRM application, additional MA integration may be necessary to handle specific tasks.”

She mentioned a few areas where MA software can help Marketing:

• Automatically sending large quantities of emails
• Performing split testing on campaigns, such as email subject lines or copy
• Providing performance tracking and analytics on campaigns

Heidi Melin, CMO, Eloqua, obviously has a certain amount of vested interest as a MA software vendor, and she pointed out the value of MA for marketers.

“By integrating marketing automation with CRM [software], companies are able to get a better picture of their buyers and a better picture of how their marketing investments impact their revenue,” Heidi said. “That’s an area where companies are understanding that they can get a competitive advantage in tying a marketing automation solution into their existing CRM implementation to get more out of their investments.”

Brian Vellmure, Principal and Founder, Initium LLC/Innovantage International, added another advantage of bringing more than just CRM software into the customer relationship management technology picture: The nature of B2B sales has changed in recent years. Before, the sales team had a great deal of control over the information flow and education of prospects.

Now, according to Forrester analyst Lori Wizdo, two-thirds to 90% of the buying cycle is completed before a B2B buyer ever speaks with a sales rep.

Marketing automation helps the marketing team track prospects’ behavior, such as website visits and social media interaction, and then respond to that behavior with what the prospect is looking for, at the time they are looking for it and on the channel where they are looking.

“Then, [Marketing] offers an invitation to the next place on the prospect’s journey. I think that’s where marketing automation comes into play,” Brian explained.

How does your company handle CRM technology? What department “owns” each technology piece? We’d love to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments section.

Related Resources:

CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data

Marketing Research Chart: Social CRM is increasingly important for managing social customer relationships

Defining CRM: Thoughts from three experts

How Technology on the Trade Show Floor Can Help Your Sales Team Work Smarter and Sell More

Lead Nurturing: 9 questions answered on lead qualification, nurturing, and Marketing-Sales alignment

On the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action, Milap Shah, CEO, NexSales, discusses research from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report …

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Dear Daniel,

First of all, happy new year!

I thank you so much for your complete and interesting feedback. It has been very useful for me.

Just one thing: may you give me some objective parameters to define a lead as qualified? I found so many definitions, and I’d like to ask for your support to point my attention to the best definition you’ve in mind.

I thank you again for your kind cooperation and, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep you updated to this project we’re carrying on in these first months of 2013.

With my best regards

Felix Mathew, marketing director, Rome, Italy

Felix had earlier asked me some questions about cost per lead, which I won’t share here, since the information is private to his company. However, I thought it would be helpful to publicly answer his follow-up question, about lead qualification, on the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog. I thought it might assist many readers, especially those newer to the complex sales and marketing process (and thank you to Felix for allowing me to share this publicly).

Lead qualification is …

First, let’s start with a basic definition. Defining a lead as qualified basically means they are qualified to talk to a sales representative. Essentially, this is a prospect who has a high likelihood to buy and is ready for sales engagement. Simple enough, right?

Well, that’s where simplicity breaks down. There is no one single way to determine what makes a lead qualified or not. Just as, to wax philosophic for a second, there is no single definition of beauty or love or good art or what good music is (or else my daughter would listen to much more Pearl Jam).

The best place to start is with a universal lead definition. This involves a sales-marketing huddle since, much like good art, it is not only the artist but also the art viewer and buyer that must agree on a definition. To put it more bluntly — if Sales doesn’t think the lead is qualified, it ain’t qualified.

Some of that involves actually listening to Sales and understanding what works for them, and some of it involves a little soft marketing power to sell the sellers, if you will, on why you define a qualified lead a certain way.

Now that we’ve defined a qualified lead, let’s focus on the question itself … objective parameters. Here are a few parameters you might want to consider, from least to most complex. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather a starting point to help get your juices flowing in conversations with Sales.

Contact information

This is the weakest qualification criteria I can think of, and would not constitute a truly qualified lead for many organizations, except in the rare case when …

I worked with a tech company in a market niche that hadn’t yet had any real competition, yet was extremely fast growing. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a similar situation — a low competition, very high-growth market — it might not take much to qualify a lead. This is as close as you’ll ever get to “the product that sells itself.”

In this case, the biggest challenge is throughput, closing as many leads as possible before the competition enters the market (and, they will inevitably enter the market if things are really this good). The sales conversation tends to focus on areas such as contract terms or service availability, and Sales might simply want you to give them names and get out of the way.

Again, this is a very rare case, but if this is your situation, you might find by talking to Sales that all they want is contact information, and they can close the deal at that point.

Firmographics

This won’t be helpful to every sales department, but simple firmographics is also information that is on the easier end of the spectrum.

For example, if your organization is far and away the leading service provider in a certain geographic area, for a certain organization size, or in a certain industry, this might be enough information for Sales to consider the lead qualified.

However, if you are, say, the leading systems integrator for a certain technology in Jacksonville, you are only wasting Sales time by giving them a lead from Seattle. That would not be a qualified lead.

BANT

BANT stands for Budget Authority Need Timeline (or Timeframe). This is a lead qualification and scoring methodology originally developed by IBM, but now commonly used.

You can instantly see how this would be helpful for a sales force, and where it takes place in the sales-marketing continuum can vary by organization.

Based on your organizational needs, you might decide that one or all of these factors are necessary for a lead to be considered qualified.

Also, by understanding some of these aspects, even if you’re not identifying a qualified lead, you are identifying excellent candidates for a nurturing track that eventually results in qualified leads (for example, Timeframe or Authority).

Behavioral analytics and lead scoring

Lead scoring (most effective when combined with behavioral analytics) is a more thorough, and therefore more complex, way of determining a qualified lead.

Much like with a blind date, with lead scoring you are essentially giving points to different characteristics or actions that signal a (sales) engagement is a likely outcome of this relationship (she’s physically attractive, +2; she keeps talking favorably about that political candidate that I think wants to ruin our country, -114).

The benefit of including behavioral analytics is that you can use the prospect’s actions to help qualify them. For example, if they download a whitepaper on your company’s specific wireless display architecture, that might warrant more points than simply checking a box on a lead form indicating a general interest in display standards.

To help with your own lead scoring efforts, here is a look at the top factors your peers use in lead score calculations, from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Handbook …

Q. What actions or traits are currently considered in your lead scoring calculation?

Predictive analytics

This is on the harder end of the lead qualification spectrum because it involves math. It is also a non-traditional way to qualify a lead (and is used more often for lead generation).

But if you have a big old messy database, terms like predictive analytics, partition analysis, and regression analysis might be good to discuss with your data analysts … and might help you find some hidden treasure.

At a very basic level, you want to ask your data analyst to look for any commonalities between those already in your database of leads and your current customers. What attributes of your current customers might you have perhaps overlooked in leads that have gone cold?

This whole process might help your entire lead qualification effort, as well, by uncovering attributes that neither Marketing nor Sales has identified as predictors of the likelihood that sales engagement will lead to a closed deal, information that you can then use in your lead scoring or other lead qualification efforts.

Hand raiser

This is, by far, the hardest way to qualify a lead. These are also, in my opinion, the most valuable qualified leads.

By “hand raiser,” I mean someone that is actively in search of sales engagement from your company and is volunteering information and urging you to get in contact with them.

From my experience, this usually only happens with a really good lead nurturing or inbound marketing program.

Related Resources:

Why the Term “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Creates Serious Confusion — Part I

Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop

Lead Generation: How 64% of marketers starve Sales of opportunity

Optimizing the Lead: 4-step lead generation analysis

A recent B2B newsletter article, “CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data,” covered three tactics on customer relationship management, commonly known by its acronym, CRM.

In researching the article, and speaking about many customer relationship management concepts with six experts on the topic, one aspect of CRM that came up was, “How is CRM defined?”

Even between the story’s sources, there was no hard and fast definition. However, I thought it was also interesting to think about how different people define CRM, often depending on their role in a company or as a thought leader in the customer relationship management field.

Although there is an entire continuum of concepts, most can fit into one of these three general areas, completing the sentence, “CRM is ____:”

• Simply the software piece called a CRM solution, such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, InfusionSoft, Oracle Siebel, et al.
• All technology related to customer relationship management, including CRM solutions, marketing automation software and email marketing solutions
• Everything involved in the customer lifecycle and customer interactions with a company, including all of the above, customer service and more

Since this topic did not make it into the newsletter’s how-to article beyond the introduction, I thought I’d give MarketingSherpa Blog readers the opportunity to hear what several of those experts had to say on answering, “What is CRM?”

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

For the past seven years, trade shows have surpassed websites, email marketing and paid search to secure the top spot as B2B marketers? biggest investment, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

But, do marketers make the most of this investment? I can’t help but wonder given my own trade show attendance experience.

For weeks after, I unsubscribe from newsletters and sales pitches from companies I barely recognize.

Here’s what I suspect happens:

• They sponsor the event and set up a booth.
• They put together a list of attendees’ contact info based on collected business cards, contest entries and captures from the dreaded lead guns, which instantly gather contact information by scanning trade show badges.
• They dump this list into their database.
• Attendees automatically receive whatever they’re already sending to their email lists.

Trade Show ≠ Instant Engagement

Just because someone attends a trade show does not mean that every organization in attendance is relevant to her, or that she is eager to receive newsletters, the latest product updates or a sales call. Too many companies wrongly assume trade show attendance equals instant engagement.

If you don’t want to be banished to the spam file or voicemail, take the succeeding steps when following up with trade show prospects:

1. Invite or welcome them to your email list. Explain how you attained their names, make it personal and connect back to their motivation. Example: “I hope you enjoyed the conference as much as I did. We really believe in (core event values).”If they chatted with a sales professional, reference that conversation. Do what you can to show what you have in common (primarily, the event) and why they should engage with your company.
2. Create event-related content. Again, the event is what connects you. Write articles and blogs about it. Interview the event’s subject matter experts. Bring along a reporter. Demonstrate your value to attendees by providing a fresh perspective and helping them assimilate even more knowledge. After all, that’s why they attend conferences and trade shows. Use this content as part of a nurturing campaign, as outlined below.
3. Don’t sell, nurture. Only 5% to 15% of inquiries are ready to speak to Sales, so the rest require nurturing until they fit your universal lead definition (ULD).  (Don’t have one? Make one. Find out how here: “Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop.”)Develop a lead-nurturing campaign to guide prospects through the marketing funnel until they’re ready to speak to Sales. Find out how to do that here: “Lead Nurturing: You could be losing as much as 80% of your sales; here’s how you keep them.”
4. Encourage your salespeople to make personal connections. Make sure your sales professionals individually follow up with the people they spoke with, whether that’s through sending email, connecting on LinkedIn, or following them on Twitter. People build relationships with people, not companies.
5. Keep them engaged, even if they’re never going to be a customer. Don’t discard attendees who are not a fit; they could become a champion of your brand, or possibly a partner or collaborator. Engage them by developing a nurturing campaign that will keep them abreast of what’s happening in your organization. Invite them to subscribe to an online newsletter, attend online events, or connect via social media.

Want to learn more about how to make the most of your trade show investment? Check out this article: “9 Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment.”

Do you have additional recommendations to optimize trade show follow-up? Feel free to share them in the comments. I would love to hear your ideas.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 — February 19-22 in Las Vegas

How to Use Lead Scoring to Drive the Highest Return on Your Trade-Show Investment

Lead Generation: 39% say offline lead gen has somewhat decreased

Lead Generation: Trends in 2012 marketing budgets

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked 1,915 marketers about traffic volume and traffic that converts. Here’s what the data revealed …

Q: Which of the following sources generates the GREATEST VOLUME of traffic coming to your site?

Q: Which of the following sources generates traffic with the greatest CONVERSION RATES on your site?

Click to enlarge

In the chart above, the darker bar on the left shows response to the “greatest volume” survey question, while the lighter bar on the right shows response to the “conversion rate” question. Let’s look at what your peers thought of this data …

Start with SEO and Email Marketing

“We have over 1,500 clients, and they concur with your research findings … a lot of people in the market over the last two years have been asking me about what they should be doing on social media,” said Tracey Voyce, Director, Bloomtools. “Now it has its place, but, everyone, please don’t invest, as a company, too much time and money in these areas until you have mastered SEO and email marketing, as they keep on delivering time after time.”

“It’s an interesting study, but worth remembering, and I am in complete agreement with Tracy that getting the basics sorted first is a must,” said Daniel Lack, Email Marketing Specialist, Intelligent Visual Communications. “Yes, SEO brings in more traffic, but in terms of cost against conversions, direct marketing has to be the starting point, with email campaigns consistently providing the best ROI — less traffic but similar conversions, and at a much lower cost.”

“Obviously SEO and social have their place and are effective marketing tools, but it’s about finding mediums that work for you rather than finding a way your business can use a medium,” Daniel said. “Just because it’s available doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for your company or worth a huge investment in not just money, but time as well.”

Industry breakdown

“Great data. Thanks for sharing this,” said Fern Yit Lim, Online Sales Manager, Lufthansa. Based in Singapore, Fern was interested in industry and country breakdowns.

“Just curious in which industry and country was the data collected? Because the traffic and conversion rate from social channels really surprised me. In our developing markets, paid search still has the highest conversion rate, and in developed markets, it will be email for sure.”

This survey was fielded internationally. Here is a breakdown of respondents by industry …

Q. Which best describes the type of organization you work for?

Click to enlarge

Reality-based metrics

And, I’ll give the final word to Debra Kline, President, Business Wise: “Thanks to MarketingSherpa for reality-based metrics rather than hype. The hype often turns us away from what “works” to what’s new or what’s cool. Here’s three cheers for reality!”

If you’d like to be featured in a future blog post, simply sign up for the free MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week newsletter and share your actionable advice on a future marketing industry chart.

Related Resources:

Webinar Replay: How to Integrate Social Media/SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

B2B Social Media Marketing: Focus on leads, not likes

Marketing Research Chart: Most effective traffic sources for website conversion

6 Tactics for Increasing Site Traffic and Improving Content