MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I was recently reading your blog “Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better — Marketing or Sales?“ on b2bleadblog.com. It’s been really fascinating to me to try and figure all this sales and qualifying a lead thing out.

I’ve been employed to do a tough task in a small composite company that doesn’t have the finances to employ specialists. Do you have any advice or books on how to effectively get leads and qualify them and the processes involved in doing so?

Kind regards,

Philip La Trobe, business development analyst

(A young man employed to revamp a business, increase sales and address the communication lines between departments whilst increasing overall company efficiencies.)

I emailed a little more with Philip after this note, and he explained that his background is not in sales, marketing or business development, but rather materials engineering.

That was a wake-up call for me.

The challenge for anyone in B2B content marketing is to not only to create content that would impress the most experienced reader, but also to have some content that appeals to someone new to the industry.

For that reason, here is a beginner’s look at lead generation with links to many additional resources so you can dive deeper where you would like to. I’ll focus on some fundamental questions you should answer as you craft your lead gen program.

Experienced lead gen marketers reading this: What did I overlook? Please add your own advice in the comments section of this blog post.

Question #1. What do your potential customers want?

Getting leads isn’t as easy as it sounds, if it sounds easy at all. No potential customer wants to wake up in the morning and become a lead for your company.

So first, you must understand what your customers want. To figure this out, you have to answer two big questions that result in an infinite amount of more specific questions:

• What are their pain points?
  • What keeps them awake at night?
  • What could get them fired?
  • What do they want to avoid so bad that they would dedicate 15 minutes in their busy day to learn how to avoid it? An hour? Pay $100 to know how to avoid out of their own pocket? $10,000 out of their budget?
  • What is the bad outcome they are trying to avoid?
  • What are the three questions they?re worried their boss or client will ask them?
  • And on and on

• What are their goals?
  • What could get them a promotion?
  • What excites them about their job?
  • What do they want to brag to colleagues about? Their boss?
  • And on and on

There are many ways to learn this — surveys, social media monitoring, interviews with current customers, A/B testing, conversations with Sales, Services and Customer Support…

But the reason this is the longest section of the blog post is because the lead gen journey begins (and sometimes ends) here — what do customers want?

Helpful resources

Why Empathetic Marketing Matters and 7 Steps to Achieve It

Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

Search Marketing: Can your marketing team identify your buyer personas?

Marketing Research Chart: Top tactics in developing buyer personae

B2B Social Media: 4 steps to get your listening dashboard started

Question #2. What value can your company deliver?

Your customers may want unicorns. But unless you run a unicorn factory, that information isn’t going to be very helpful.

What we’re getting to here is this: What promises can you make to potential customers and actually deliver on. What is your company’s value proposition?

Helpful resources

Value Proposition: A free worksheet to help you win arguments in any meeting

Powerful Value Propositions: How to Optimize this Critical Marketing Element — and Lift Your Results

Value Proposition: Why do customers act?

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

Value Proposition Development Online Course

Question #3. What is a lead?

Is it an email address that you buy from a list? Probably not. Is it someone who provides a phone number for a white paper download?

Or is it someone who raises their hand and asks for more information about your company and product? Is it someone who has a big enough budget and the proper authority to buy your product?

Before you can really generate a “lead,” you should create a universal lead definition and make sure all the key players in your company (this usually includes Sales) to agree on what you’re actually trying to get.

Keep in mind, there is an implicit trade-off here. If you want to generate higher-quality leads, you will likely get a lower quantity (and vice versa) or have to invest more resources to get the leads.

On the flip side, if you’re generating a lot of low-quality leads, the cost will probably get you when you send them to Sales, in both man hours and the relationship between Sales and Marketing, because Sales tends to involve more human resources.

Marketing, on the other hand, tends to involve less human touch, whether that’s due to marketing automation or the simple fact that a print ad can reach many more people at a much lower cost than a sales person.

Getting this step right can also help your Sales-Marketing alignment. In other words, making sure everyone involved in serving the customer before a purchase agrees on the strategy and processes to do that.

Helpful resources

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

Intro to Lead Generation: How to determine if a lead is qualified

B2B Marketing: Why Marketing shouldn’t promise BANT qualified leads for Sales

Lead Gen: A proposed replacement for BANT

Lead Generation: Balancing lead quality and lead quantity

Sales-Marketing Alignment: 8 tactics from a marketer who has worn both hats

Question #4. How will we get leads?

This usually comes from some mix of content marketing, paid advertising, sponsorships and even affiliate programs.

This is, essentially, what most beginners think of as lead generation — the campaigns you run to engage potential buyers with your company.

This, like all these topics really, is a much bigger topic than a simple section of a blog post. But here are a few things to get you started.

Helpful resources

Marketing Research Chart: SEO most effective tactic for lead gen, but also among the most difficult

Content Marketing 101: 8 steps to B2B success

Marketing 101: What is conversion?

Orphan Forms: Marketing 101 change drives 32% increase in form completions

Inbound Marketing 101: 5 steps to help you get started

Social Media Marketing: 4 basic tips for getting started

Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started

Web Analytics: 3 basic insights to get you started

Lead Generation: 3 basic tips for webinar newbies

Question #5. Did we get leads?

Once prospects start responding to your campaigns, you have to determine if you really have leads. Question #3 will play a big factor in this determination. This is commonly known as lead qualification.

Helpful resources

On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads

Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue

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

Question #6. What do we do with the lead?

The answer to this question probably seems fairly simple — send it to Sales.

But what you may find through this process (as you can see, one question informs another) is that what you have received through your campaigns aren’t really leads.

In the work you’ve done answering these questions with Sales, you may find that this is what Marketing would determine is a lead (Marketing-Qualified Lead) but not what Sales would consider a lead (a Sales-Qualified lead).

Lead nurturing is the process to move the prospects you’ve gathered through the funnel (or buying process) to the point they are ready to talk to a sales rep. The best definition I’ve ever heard of lead nurturing is from my colleague at MECLABS, Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Lead nurturing is helping prospects whether they buy from you or not.

Helpful resources

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects — not selling them

What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing: How a social business strategy can help you move from selling to helping your prospects

How lead nurturing improves lead generation ROI

Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Getting the right content to the right people continues to be a challenge in B2B marketing according to Byron O’Dell, Senior Director of Demand Management, IHS, who recently spoke at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014.

Byron explained how his organization transformed from batch and blast email sends to persona-driven campaigns.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want share the three simple steps for building customer personas Byron shared in his presentation to aid your targeted email marketing efforts.

Every solution starts somewhere

A big factor in solving the batch and blast challenge, as Byron revealed, rests in having the right people in the room to have a productive conversation about how personas can benefit an organization’s targeting efforts.

“It starts with some of the obvious,” Byron explained. “We needed to get the right Marketing folks and the right Product Management folks together and we knew we needed Sales and the voice of the customer as well.”

Step #1. Look to your existing customer data for insight into who buys from you

Once you have key people in the room, the trick to building personas is in looking at your existing customer data to gain insight into who buys from you.

“Initially we got the Marketing and product folks together and we [asked] what types of people are buying our products,” Byron said. “And we supplemented that with data looking at what types of [job] titles are we actually seeing in terms of net new deals.”

Step #2. Define your primary prospect personas

Byron also explained how the team used that insight to create six primary customer personas based on whom the organization would likely want to target.

Here’s the list the team created:

• Military/Government (Planning & Strategy)
• Military/Government (Technical & Program)
• Intelligence Analysis
• Industry (Commercial)
• Industry (Technical & Program)
• Media/Advertising/PR

Step #3. Never build personas in a vacuum

If there is one caveat to mention here, it’s that personas created in a vacuum outside of an alignment between Marketing and Sales is a fast track for missed opportunities.

Byron explained that the green primary personas were the ones Marketing believed were vital to their targeting efforts.

After some feedback from Sales, however, the team discovered there was some “granularity” that was also important to consider in building out personas.

The feedback led to the creation of a secondary set of personas that allowed the IHS team to really drill down into their targeting efforts in a way that would likely have been not possible had they not worked with Sales to develop the profiles of their ideal prospects.

Personas are only a means to an end

Personas can help you understand who is buying from you, but they are only a means to help you with the true goal of every email campaign: relevance.

Being relevant means you understand the needs of the customer and how you can serve those needs in a way no one else they encounter on the buyer’s journey can.

To learn more about the challenges Byron faced in transforming IHS’ email program, you can watch the on-demand webinar replay of “Marketing Automation: Key challenges a global information company overcame to transform from batch and blast to persona-driven email marketing.”

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Email Marketing: Do you test your legacy marketing? [More from the blogs]

Email Copywriting: 3 tactics for delivering value over perceived cost [More from the blogs]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Change can be tough, especially if your organization is entrenched in legacy marketing.

I call it legacy marketing because it’s marketing on autopilot, a pandemic of “we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way” thinking that is likely leaving a lot of ROI on the table.

Legacy marketing can be tough to shoulder because, according to Chris Hawver, Team Leader, Tennant, the only people who prefer change …

“The only person who likes change is a baby with a wet diaper.” – Chris Hawver #SherpaEmail … first time I’ve heard that one. Love it!! ? DJ Waldow (@djwaldow) February 18, 2014

 
I joined Chris last week at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 for his session on how making some changes to Tennant’s email program transformed the team’s marketing efforts.

A key component of the change Chris covered was testing subject lines for a new email campaign. So, in today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog, I wanted to share the results of Chris’ email test that you can use to aid your testing and optimization efforts.

Before we get started, let’s review the research notes for some background information on the test.

Background: Tennant, a global cleaning equipment company.

Objective: To increase email open rates and number of demos scheduled.

Primary Research Question: Which subject line will generate the greatest overall open rate?

Test Design: A/B/C split test

According to Chris, the traditional approach in subject line A was how Tennant was crafting subject lines prior to the new email campaigns, which focused on announcing new product.

Subject line B included elements of the new campaign that were front-loaded in the subject line.

The hybrid subject line was a combination of both the traditional and nontraditional subject lines.

What you need to know

The subject line focused on a mix of product relevance and target audience appeal outperformed the traditional subject line by 24%.

Chris also mentioned this was this most successful email campaign in Tennant’s history.

“It increased demonstration requests and revenue significantly and transformed the culture of marketing at Tennant,” Chris explained.

Test your way out of legacy marketing

Chris’ experience with testing and optimization serves as an example of why A/B split testing is so powerful.

Testing can help you learn more about what appeals to your prospects.

It can also help you challenge your legacy assumptions by putting them on trial to determine if those practices still are truly the best for your organization.

And it can also get you started on testing your way out of the legacy marketing trap when “we’ve always done like this” becomes “we can’t do it like this any longer.”

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B2B Web Optimization: 140% surge in mobile transactions through responsive design effort [Case study]

Email Copywriting: 3 tactics for delivering value over perceived cost [More from the blogs]

Email Marketing: 2 campaigns that used innovative creative to generate leads [More from the blogs]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

After a quick stroll through the Aria Resort & Casino’s brilliant collage of metal, glass and escalators, my journey to reach MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 is complete.

As luck would have it, I’ve arrived just in time for the Email Messaging (overview of the online version of the course at that link) Workshop on “Writing Effective Email Copy,” led by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS.

During the session, Flint offered an interesting perspective on the relationship between email copy and the value proposition you deliver to prospects in your email marketing.

According to Flint, optimizing your email copy is a big key to tipping the value and cost force exchange fulcrum with your prospects.

“Copywriting is fraught with claims, and the job of a marketer is not to craft claims, but craft a conclusion,” Flint said.

In sum, good copywriting is about recognizing perceived costs in the mind of a prospect and delivering enough value to overcome those costs.

So in today’s post, I wanted to share three copywriting tactics for increasing perceived value that you can use to aid your email marketing efforts.

Use personalization to “arrest attention” from prospects

Here’s a screenshot of the letter-style email Flint used as an example to begin walking through how email copy can be optimized to communicate value to your prospects.

One thing to keep in mind here is although the example is drawn from B2C marketing, the ideas are easily transferable and ultimately advantageous to any email program that realizes how rapidly B2B and B2C marketing segments are eroding.

A few things he pointed out in this example were:

• Personal – The email initially engages the recipient with a personal greeting
• Tone – Copy is written in relational language that is easy to understand

Connect your offer to a prospect’s behavior

The technology tools available to email marketers these days are amazingly sophisticated.

Marketers can segment, automate and personalize like never before.

But unless you can connect your offer to a prospect’s position in the purchase cycle based on behavior, you’re going to have a tough go of making a meaningful connection.

Flint’s illustration emphasizes that point by highlighting a known behavior about the prospect.

“Look at how the first sentence begins to connect the offer of the email to the specific behavior of the recipient, Flint explained, “This email is going to give the customers just enough to move forward in the conversation and it’s also reminding you why you’re receiving this.”

Build interest before the “ask”

Delivering value is all about building interest.

Copy that clearly answers the question, “What do I get out of this?” for a prospect while resisting the temptation to sell is key to doing this effectively, or as Flint simply puts it, “Clarity trumps persuasion.”

An email is just a vessel

One big takeaway from this session is essentially thinking not just about copywriting, but ultimately, thinking about email itself.

If you strip away all of the copy, images and expectations, emails are an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

They can be filled with valuable content, perceived as useful and delightful to the recipient.

Or they can be filled with another sales pitch thrown at the list with the hopes that a few a stick and click.

How we choose to fill those vessels for our prospects is truly how we are serving them.

And that choice is up to us.

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Marketing Automation: IT company boosts leads 59%, generates $1.5 million with system implementation [Case study]

Customer-centric Marketing: Survey program turned 30% of unsatisfied software customers into brand advocates [Case study]

Email Marketing: 2 campaigns that used innovative creative to generate leads [More from the blogs]

E-commerce: Harnessing the power of email automation and behavior-based marketing to increase conversions [Case study]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

One of the best insights into creativity I’ve ever discovered was scrawled into a Plexiglas window on a subway train.

“Boring is a choice,” the etching read.

As we zoomed through the dark tunnels, I wondered if the person responsible for the message was, in fact, so bored on their train ride that a little vandalism was just what the doctor ordered to cure their traveling blues.

While I’m not a proponent for vandalism, I do believe in the power held in those four simple words.

Boring is a choice.

I say this because boring marketing is often a pain point for B2B marketers.

Admittedly, it’s tough to create excitement around content in general, so I understand the struggle to find that wild spark in niche markets or with products and services that don’t seem to have an ounce of sexy on their surface.

In today’s post, I wanted to share a few examples from recent case studies of B2B email campaigns that used references to pop culture or “pop creative” to generate leads and win their battles with boring that you can use to aid your creative efforts.

Tennant invites prospects to take a ride on the wild side

When new products and services are set for market, the pressure is on as Chris Hawver, Team Leader, Americas, Tennant, can attest.

Tennant manufactures and sells floor cleaning equipment, ranging from the office vacuum to a massive street sweeper.

As Chris explained, its quarterly newsletter prior to the launch of two new products was on autopilot with no real strategy around the tactic.

“In quickly studying all of the campaigns of various manufacturers — including our competitors — it was like, ‘We’ve got to do something radically different,’” Chris explained.

Tennant added a few new members to its marketing team and brainstormed an email campaign using copy inspired by motorcycle culture that would appeal to the interest of Tennant’s customer base.

Chris, who will be presenting at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 next week, also found appeal in the campaign as an avid motorcyclist and founder of a nonprofit rider’s safety organization.

Results

The campaign increased open rates by 32.5% and added 20 demo requests to Tennant’s pipeline. The campaign was so successful, the company’s Australia team utilized creative in its own email campaign and a magazine ad.

To learn more about Tennant’s campaign, check out the MarketingSherpa case study, “Customer-centric Marketing: Adding fun to B2B.”

SunGard Availability Services ties zombie apocalypse to IT disaster survival

If there is an unsung beauty of using pop creative, it’s in the flexibility as one IT disaster company discovered.

SunGard’s zombie survival campaign was a multichannel marketing effort that used emails, a landing page, direct mail and social media to generate buzz – and a few leads. All of the campaign’s components served to deliver core messaging about SunGard’s products and services.

Results

The Disaster Recovery/Managed Recovery Program campaign created a 3% increase in click-to-open rates among president and owner titles, and the retargeting email reactivated 2% of contacts who had not interacted with SunGard in six months.

To learn more about SunGard’s campaign, check out the MarketingSherpa case study, “Multichannel Marketing: IT company’s zombie-themed campaign increases CTO 3% at president, owner level.”

If you’re interested, Christine Nurnberger, Vice President, Marketing, SunGard Availability Services, will also be speaking at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014, presenting more results from this campaign.

Pop creative is about connecting with people

You can look at the results of these two campaigns and take away the thought that the folks who help keep things clean around the office are perhaps bikers and your boss may be a fan of “The Walking Dead.”

Or, we can look a little deeper and consider the idea that pop creative, although not the best strategy for everyone, proves the point that good marketing is about making a connection with real people.

How you make those connections depends on the risks you’re willing to take.

It’s a choice to think outside the box and connect with others.

Lest we forget, boring is always a choice.

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B2B Email Marketing: Batch and blast, mobile, and other challenges [More from the blogs]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Lead generation is somewhat like a tightrope act.

Generate too many leads, and the rope between Sales and Marketing breaks. If you don’t generate enough leads that turn into sales, your ROI plummets.

As Debbie Pryer, Program Manager, Siemens Healthcare, discovered, finding the right balance between lead quantity and quality takes trust, teamwork and planning.

When the rope breaks, you get the Wild West

In the health care segment of Siemens, field service engineers interact directly with customers to repair medical equipment. This interaction was a great opportunity to capitalize on generating prospects interested in Siemens products.

Service engineers were considered trusted advisers for customers, so having them submit leads to an external website seemed like a great approach to generate leads.

But something went wrong.

A monetary incentive for sales-qualified leads seemed to be working until the number of unqualified leads skyrocketed to 12,000 after the program was released to thousands of employees.

Ultimately, the expansion also led to 65% of those leads being rejected, so while the program was generating leads, they were not high-quality leads.

“It was totally the Wild West; anybody could submit any kind of lead they wanted for anything,” Debbie explained.

Audit the situation and look for problems

Debbie’s initial challenge as she explained in her presentation at Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco was to realign Service and Sales after the program’s high rejection rate ultimately created a distrust between the two departments.

To accomplish this, Debbie shifted the lead generation approach from a linear model to a closed loop with a customer-centric focus.

She explained, “You learn from those mistakes and it’s what you take with that learning and what you do with it.”

Realignments in process are also important

Getting all the moving pieces to work together is tough. There’s buy-in from all of the stakeholders and then gathering all of the resources you need to make it happen.

The key to making this massive shift work, according to Debbie, is in communicating those changes across the organization effectively.

“If you don’t put together some kind of communications plan of what you’re going to communicate to whom and when, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of heartache,” she said.

To learn more about Debbie’s approach to revitalizing Siemen’s lead generation program and the factors she identifies as keys to success, you can watch the on-demand Summit webinar replay of “Lead Generation: How to empower your program like Siemens Healthcare.”

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B2B Social Media: SAP Latin America boosts followers 900% [Part II] [Case study]

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

One day at the office, I decided to put a dollar bill on my cubicle wall.

When people walked by, they would ask why I was putting money on my wall. My initial response was that I simply like money. Surprisingly, a couple of people added their own dollar bills to my wall.

I don’t really know why they did it, but the dollar wall ended up with about 10 dollar bills on it within a week or two.

Change drives growth

Then, my wall became stagnant.

People continued to ask what the money was for, and when I realized that my normal response wasn’t working, I changed their motivation by telling them it was for after work drinks and we were all going to go out on the money we raised.

I saw another surge in dollars with that response for a few more weeks. I was up to around $25 or so, when it started to die down again. It was time to change their motivation.

As I was trying to think about another way to get more dollars, I remembered that the mom of one of the guys in the office was diagnosed with cancer. I remembered him putting together an event to raise money for her medical bills, so I decided to donate my dollar wall to the cause.

Does your message connect with a change in motivation?

I sent out an email to the company describing what I was doing. And, to my surprise, within five minutes of the email going out, I had a line of people waiting to put dollars up on the wall. The change in motivation worked brilliantly.

By the end of the week, there was roughly $150 on the wall.

Although it wasn’t a lot of money in the whole scheme of things, it was still something and I was able to see how changing the motivation of a prospect can completely change revenue.

What motivates your prospects to buy from you?

In the business world, it isn’t that easy as most of the time the prospect’s motivation often ends at simply purchasing a product or service.

So, if you aren’t seeing a viable revenue stream from a product, you might have to cut your losses and either change the product or discontinue it altogether.

However, we can do things to change the image of the company in order to increase motivation. For example, we can promise to donate a percentage of profit to charity, promise to take a green initiative or manufacture everything in the USA.

I also realize that prospect motivation is difficult to measure with something like A/B split testing, and it may not have a hard metric we can measure at all. It’s just another way we can look at trying to increase revenue and possibly generate more leads at the same time.

But motivation is arguably the strongest reason people buy something.

When they search for your product or service in a search engine, they are clearly interested in what you have to sell. They may need to be sold a little more before they actually purchase, but the motivation piece is already set.

To learn more about how you can dial into prospect motivation, watch the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 video replay of, “How You Can Use Email to Discover the Essence of Your Value Proposition.”

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Email Marketing: Writing powerful email copy boosts CTR 400%

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

According to the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), nearly one out of three (32%) respondents perceive that email marketing will yield ROI “eventually,” while 60% reported email is producing ROI.

No matter where you stack up here, one thing is certain – creating email copy that engages your customers is vital to aiding your efforts to produce ROI.

To help you do that, Donna Krizik, Director, Client Communications, Crestwood Associates, explained how the craft behind creating a powerful email copy is serving the customer rather than pushing the sale.

In this video clip from Email Summit 2013, Donna Krizik sat down with Justin Bridegan, Senior Marketing Manager, MECLABS, and discussed the three fundamentals in creating powerful email copy.

As Krizik reflected on giving the customer relevant content, she asked fellow marketers, “If [the message] is not really of value, do you need to email them?”

First, understanding your audience and communicating with them in a meaningful way that relates directly to their needs is likely to deliver a far more compelling message.

“If I can’t relate to you, if I can’t engage with you,” Justin argued, “why am I going to continue the conversation?”

Donna and Justin also discussed how an email is the beginning of a conversation with the customer rather than a sales pitch. They also touched on the goal of an email, which is to get the customer to the website, not to purchase from the email.

Finally, they wrapped up with your call-to-action. The idea here is having a clear, concise link or button in your email that allows the reader to make only one decision.

In summary, writers of powerful emails should do three things:

• Understand who they are writing to
• Communicate why they are writing to the recipient
• Wrap up what they want the recipient to do

Watch the full free presentation to see Donna’s transferrable case studies.

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Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

How do you measure the return on investment of a LinkedIn InMail campaign?

This is becoming a fairly common question in B2B social media marketing, and it’s understandable given the increasing adoption of InMail as a B2B marketing strategy. Consequently, the need to quantify efforts in the channel is also becoming quite clear.

So, how do you approach it?

Consider engagement and awareness

According to Meagen Eisenberg, Vice President of Demand Generation, Docusign, one approach to tackling the challenge is to look at the overall awareness and engagement your campaigns generate in your target group and drill down on prospect behavior and metrics from there.

Meagen also mentioned the difference between how your prospects read an email versus an InMail.

“When we get email, we’re either opening it on our phone or on our desktop, but are we truly taking time to read it or a moment of time to digest it?” Meagen asked.

“And I think when you’re in InMail on LinkedIn, you’re taking that time, so opens are significant,” she said.

Determine how performance translates into business opportunity

“The main goal is to drive revenue, so the absolute best measurement [is] did we actually close business and have some significant opportunities come out of it,” Meagen said.

To learn more about how Meagen used InMail as a strategy that cut through the noise to successfully create large pipeline opportunities, you can watch the free on-demand MarketingSherpa webinar replay of “B2B Social Media Marketing: DocuSign’s targeted LinkedIn InMail strategy creates 3 large pipeline opportunities.”

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Why Fear and ROI Should Never Drive Your Testing

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

As the holiday season quickly approaches an end, and marketers prepare to make 2014 their best year yet, we pulled together the top blog posts on the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog to share the most popular topics, chosen by marketers just like you.

In 2012, the top focus for B2B marketers was understanding and leveraging social media. With the quickly evolving nature of this medium, it is no surprise it was also the top category marketers wanted to learn more about in 2013.

Read on for five more areas of focus that were top of mind in the B2B realm in 2013.

Topic #1. Use social media to generate leads and connect with prospects

Social Media Marketing: Dell reveals how it turns thousands of brand detractors into fans

This  post was the most tweeted B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post in 2013 with, at the time of this writing, 199 shares. Andrea Johnson, Copywriter, MECLABS, revealed how Dell leveraged social media to reach out to customers and monitor conversations online.

“Social media has made more of an impact on B2B than B2C” Richard Margetic @ByJove at @Dell http://t.co/c225Gql7nr @B2BLeadBlog #Social #B2B ? Anna Lee (@annaleenyc) May 6, 2013

Through Dell’s efforts in establishing its very own Social Media & Community University, which 105,000 employees have attended, and its Social Outreach Services, Dell has turned thousands of brand retractors into advocates.

Out of the approximately 3,000 issues the Social Outreach Services team receives a week, all but 3% come to a resolution and about 40% to 50% of the people who initiated them speak positively of Dell afterwards.

“Social media has made more of an impact, significantly on B2B than B2C. For us, B2B is about relationships, and social media is all about relationships,” Richard Margetic, Director of Global Social Media, Dell, said.

In addition to connecting with customers, social media is also an outlet for generating leads.

Honorable Mention: Lead Generation: 5 tips to generate leads faster on LinkedIn

In this blog post, Ellie Mirman, Head of SMB Marketing, HubSpot and Shreesha Ramdas, General Manager, Leadformix, discussed five tactics for generating leads using LinkedIn.

Through audience segmentation, building credibility, providing valuable content, taking advantage of paid LinkedIn programs, and communicating effectively, B2B marketers can utilize LinkedIn to its full potential for lead gen.

Topic #2. Content marketing is becoming more essential for success

B2B Marketing: 3 reasons for adopting video content into your marketing mix

Coming in second place at 141 tweets, John Tackett, Manager of Editorial Content, MECLABS, discussed three reasons B2B marketers should adopt video content into their content marketing strategies.

3 reasons for adopting video content into your marketing mix http://t.co/QF6RaRzkB4 via @B2BLeadBlog #B2Bmarketing ? Intelisys (@IntelisysCorp) August 8, 2013

“Not only is video a great way to share your story, it’s also a great way to build links back to your site. And, if users engage with your video, it helps to increase time on site,” Gaby Paez, Associate Director of Research, MECLABS, explained.

John also explained how it is projected that 77% of all Internet users will be viewing digital video content online by 2016. Therefore, it’s a great time to develop that aspect of content marketing into your own B2B efforts.

Honorable Mention: Lead Generation: Content among the most difficult tactics, but also quite effective

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), the marketers surveyed  indicated content marketing to be one of the most difficult tactics. However, it was also ranked as one of the most effective.

In this blog post, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, shared some insights from your peers on content marketing.

“… It’s all about feeling the pulse of your Web visitors. The power of content is that you can use different content pieces to speed up their pulse and get them to a purchasing decision by moving them deeper into the conversion funnel. Aside of email, hardly any other tactic is as effective of a convincer as content,” Igor Mateski, Owner, WebMaxFormance, said.

Topic #3. Understanding your customers

Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better – Marketing or Sales?

Marketing team FTW! RT @B2BLeadBlog Lead Generation: Who knows the customer better ? Marketing or Sales? http://t.co/YopZkJh2uP ? Grant Grigorian (@GrantG9) November 4, 2013

“We all feel that we have a golden gut to some extent, especially when we’re interacting directly with customers.” – Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS

In this blog post, Daniel discussed how to face a situation where sales and marketing departments are not aligned. Who really understands the customers better – Marketing or Sales?
Trust the data, not your gut. Are you choosing the appropriate keywords that will resonate with your audience the most?

When facing these types of challenges, use numbers to make your case on who knows the customer best.

Another method to discover what your customers want or need from you is to test your value proposition.

Honorable Mention: Lead Generation: How well do you really know what your customers want?

In this blog post, we learned that through testing value propositions, marketers can truly understand what your customers need.

Jon Ciampi, Vice President, Marketing, Business & Corporate Development, CRC Health, learned his customers craved trust, not luxury.

Using this, he reinvented his lead funnel and applied his discoveries to everything from landing pages to call scripts.

Testing a value prop can be tested through several key channels. Read on to discover which channels your peers are using.

Honorable Mention: Lead Nurturing: How a social business strategy can help you move from selling to helping your prospects

This year we heard from Todd Wilms, Head of Social Strategy, and Adriel Sanchez, VP, Demand Generation, both of SAP, at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013.

Todd and Adriel presented how engaged in a social business strategy to help teams around the world connect with local audiences.

“This idea of moving from ‘sell’ to ‘helping your customers buy’ is at the heart of social business. It’s a model that the customer is going to make the decisions already, they’re going come to you when they are ready,” Todd said.

Topic #4. Capitalizing on email for lead gen

Email Marketing: 4 steps to relevancy 85% of B2B businesses probably aren’t taking

Utilizing email is not a new marketing tactic, but many B2B organizations are not taking advantage of its potential to generate leads.

In this post, Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Revenue Optimization, MECLABS, discussed the importance of email as a tactic for B2B marketing and how to stay relevant with your audience.

Email Marketing: 4 steps to relevancy that 85% of #B2B businesses probably aren’t taking http://t.co/zFYiQB3fJD via @B2BLeadBlog ? Kurt Weisenberger (@KurtMW) May 14, 2013

Topic #5. Start developing a mobile site

Mobile Marketing: What 4 top B2B companies can teach us about mobile

Gaby Paez, Senior Business Intelligence Manager, MECLABS, reviewed the mobile sites of some fortune 500 B2B companies to gain a sense of how these successful enterprises approach mobile marketing.

What she found was shocking as  out of 12 she selected for her review, only four total had a mobile site.

Although her pool of companies is small, this is an interesting find given the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, (free excerpt at that link), reveals that 52% of B2B marketers considered mobile marketing very important to influence their company’s growth in the next three years.

Read on to see how top B2B companies are incorporating mobile websites into their strategy.

Examples of 4 good B2B mobile websites from http://t.co/64rZOQp7fz @B2BLeadBlog ? Jon Miller (@jonmiller) October 25, 2013

With all of those great insights on how a B2B mobile site should function, this next blog post focuses on where to spend your mobile budget to make those ideas a reality.

Honorable Mention: B2B Mobile Marketing: 3 ideas on where to spend your next mobile budget

With 12% of Americans consuming their media through mobile phones, B2B marketers should be thinking seriously about their mobile sites.

In this blog post, Michael Groszek, Business Intelligence Manager, MECLABS, presented three ideas for balancing value and reducing friction on a mobile experience.

Topic #6. Leads 101— Back to basics

Intro to Lead Generation: How to determine if a lead is qualified

Finally, one of the top blog posts for 2013 took lead gen back to its roots. How should you be determining if a lead is qualified?

Intro to Lead Generation: How to determine if a lead is qualified http://t.co/D93hYYwm via @B2BLeadBlog ? Data.com (@datadotcom) January 22, 2013

Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, explained that before marketers start qualifying leads, Sales and Marketing need to devise 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.”

From there, Daniel presented six methods, ranked in order of least to most difficult, of determining if a lead is qualified:

• Contact information
• Firmographics
• BANT
• Behavioral analytics and lead scoring
• Predictive analytics
• Hand raiser

Related Resources

B2B Marketing: 6 essentials for testing your teleprospecting

Lead Management: 4 principles to follow

Lead Generation: How using science increased teleprospecting sales handoffs 304%