MarketingSherpa Blog

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?

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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?

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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

In the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked 1,915 marketers which lead gen form fields were most important to them. Here’s what they had to say …

Q: Please select the most important fields you need to collect from your leads on lead generation forms.

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Interestingly enough, most of the discussion about this chart surrounded one of the lesser-used form fields – key pain point.

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I’ve been put in the audiences’ shoes a little more than usual this month. My idea, The Tomato Upstairs, has been chosen as one of five finalists in a national idea program. And since there is daily voting on the ideas until November 26, I’ve been promoting and marketing away to get some votes.

One thing I did was create a t-shirt to sell on the site, with proceeds going to a worthy cause. I created these sites and helped the cause open a store on CafePress.com, an online retailer of stock and user-customized on-demand products.

Then, something really caught my eye …

Like you, I see retargeting ads all the time. In fact, I’ve jokingly talked about them this way … “I visit your website once, and you stalk me across the Internet for the rest of my days.”

However, these ads really caught the attention of even my keenly skeptical eyes. After all, they were showing shirts that I created.

So, I reached out to Sumant Sridharan, VP & General Manager, CafePress.com, to get a quick background about the site’s retargeting efforts, and thought you might find these insights helpful for your own efforts …

Read more…

This week’s MarketingSherpa Book Giveaway features Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing by Rob Garner, VP of Strategy, iCrossing (a Hearst company).

This book is based on six years of columns for MediaPost Search Insider and Social Insider, along with Rob’s speaking engagements, blog posts and experience as a marketing practitioner. The depth of this experience and knowledge really shows in the detailed, actionable information Rob provides readers.

I had the chance to hear Rob speak on this material at a recent Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association meeting, and later got the opportunity to pick his brain a little on search, social and content marketing.

Here is the result of that conversation …

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Content marketing is hot right now, but unfortunately won  very important stage in the process is often an afterthought, or even overlooked completely.

If “won” word in the opening paragraph didn’t totally give it away, that stage is editing the content before it goes out to the rest of the world.

And, although the tips in this blog post are geared toward written word content pieces such as whitepapers or blog posts, it’s just as important to edit slides in presentations or webinars, audio/visual content like video and podcasts, and other types of content in your overall strategic mix.

In my career, both here at MECLABS and as a freelance writer, I’ve been on both sides of the coin – edited by a variety of people when creating journalism pieces and writing for corporate clients, and I’ve worn the editor hat at other times.

To provide some insight into the importance of editing, and to offer tips on incorporating an editing stage in your content creation process, I reached out to two of the best I’ve worked with over my career.

During my freelance writing days, Amber Jones Barry, now a freelance editor, had the opportunity to wrestle with my monthly copy for a consumer magazine, and Brad Bortone, Senior Research Editor, MECLABS, gets his fingerprints on a lot of the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments content you read, making all of us sound a little better in the process.

In fact, we have an excellent editorial staff here at MECLABS, with more than one person poring over every bit of content we publish.

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At MarketingSherpa, our benchmark reports provide marketing executives and practitioners with extensive reference guides for strategic decision-making and tactical planning. The survey for our Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report is currently open (feel free to share you insights — respondents receive a free copy of the special report, Evaluating Website Optimization), and we’re currently working on the survey for our next benchmark report on email marketing.

What questions would you like asked in the Email Marketing Benchmark Survey?

Here’s where you come in. What email marketing information would help you do your job better?

Please use the comments section of this blog post to share your feedback, and we’ll take your insights into consideration as we shape a survey that we hope yields valuable data to help you do your job better.

Here’s a little more background to help as you consider this request. Marketers tell us they use these benchmark reports to:

• Prepare budgets
• Make informed business decisions
• Develop marketing plan forecasts
• Support proposals with data and charts

To help you see the result of these survey questions, here are a few charts from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

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Some fields seem more resistant to social media than others, and the transition strategy isn’t always readily apparent. Marketers in these fields know the benefits social media can bring, but need to find a way to engage their consumers in a way that is familiar and will breed genuine excitement.

Reading, for instance, is usually a solitary pursuit. It is cherished by the people who love curling up in a comfy chair in a sunlit corner with a worn Penguin classic, or who craft their own alone time while in the middle of a crowded subway or city park.

Readers emerge from this private world to connect with other readers in two ways – local book clubs, and lining up to meet authors at book signings.

Penguin Group (USA) found a way to integrate the book world’s most social activities into social media.  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

When you think of the word optimization, you might think of writing keyword-stuffed blog posts for search engine optimization or running split tests for landing page optimization. But, in reality, any marketing process can be optimized. Including lead generation.

On a webinar today for ReadyTalk at 1 p.m. EST — “Planning for 2013: How to best utilize top lead gen tactics in the New Year” — David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter, MECLABS, and I will review the basics of the lead generation funnel. We’ll provide a few back-to-the-basics tactics that you can consider as you work on planning your campaigns and budgets for 2013.

Among other things, we’ll take a basic look at conducting a lead generation analysis, to help you optimize your lead generation process, campaigns and programs. It’s really quite simple, but it requires taking the time during an already hectic Q4 close to evaluate what really works while building a deeper rapport with an equally (if not more) busy team of quota-carrying sales reps.

Step #1: Review closed deals

The best way to determine what will work is to look at what has worked. Begin with an analysis of the deals that have closed.

How did these closed deals enter the system?

Here are a few pieces of data you want to record during this review for each channel and specific campaign (and you likely want to add a few attributes that are unique to your company, as well):

• Number of deals won
• Total revenue
• Average deal size
• Buyer persona traits

Step #2: Review new leads

Now that you know what works, take a look at what you currently have. Break down your pipeline by marketing tactic used, and determine:

• Total lead volume — How many leads does each tactic generate?

• Qualified lead volume — How many of these are qualified leads as defined by your universal lead definition?

• Percentage of qualified leads per marketing channel — Determined using the above numbers

• Cost per lead — How much did these leads cost?

• Buyer persona(s) targeted — Which ponds are you fishing in, and whom are you trying to catch?

Step #3: Ask Sales

Check in with Sales to gather feedback on the performance of lead generation campaigns. You want to back up your data with real human experiences. What type of leads works best for Sales in their opinion?

This human interaction might help you uncover that although a certain tactic generates leads that close, they require many more resources from Sales to close the deal, while other leads are much easier to close. (For example, leads from a lead generation vendor may take a lot more work from Sales than leads that came in from a detailed content marketing program that provided all of the necessary info, and they’re much closer to having a discussion about contracts with Sales instead of simply requesting a RFP.)

Step #4: Identify opportunities

Use this complimentary data to identify the most effective channels and campaigns.

Consider what KPIs to optimize for, which may include lead volume, qualified lead volume, percentage of qualified leads per channel, and percentage of closed leads per channel.

Now that you know what has closed and what types of new leads you’re generating, where are there overlaps? Where do you fall short? For example, if you’re investing a lot in a tactic that generates many leads but they never close, you may want to shift some of that money to a tactic that generates a lower volume of leads that are more likely to close.

Not only will this help you optimize your marketing investments and lead generation capabilities, it can help optimize your relationship with Sales. When you have specific reasons to back up why you’re investing budgets in a certain way (which they may or may not agree with), they are more likely to support your decisions.

If nothing else, the human interactions of a Sales-Marketing huddle shows that you’re actively seeking input from Sales to help serve them better, and not allocating your budget and resources in a vacuum.

Related Resources:

Ideal Customer Profiles: 5 steps to ensure your lead generation stays on target

Lead Generation: 5 steps for managing cost and quality of leads (via MarketingSherpa blog)

B2B Lead Optimization: Why cheap leads can be so expensive (via MarketingExperiments blog)

An email recently came across my inbox with an interesting attachment, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with the MarketingSherpa blog audience, because it’s a positive example for something I’ve seen many marketers struggle with – internal marketing.

In fact, when we asked 1,646 marketers their most pressing challenges in MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s what they had to say …

Chart: What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential?

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As you can see, roughly three-quarters or marketers said, “either a lack of funding or resources inhibit our growth and development.” So how can you get the resources and budget you need?

Back to that email I was telling you about. It was from Karen Doolittle, Director, Marketing Research, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Karen said, “While not a member of your organization, I quite often visit your website and attempt to glean information on the current state of affairs of email marketing.”

From the first line alone, I could tell that Karen is, what I like to call, a high-information marketer. The type of marketer that constantly looks for ways to improve her department’s performance. So I’m including her email attachment here, because I think all the other high-information marketers who read the MarketingSherpa blog can learn from it. She called it an …

Email Performance Whitepaper 

As you can see from the above link, what Karen did was quite simple, yet also pretty profound. I’m going to use an old quote that I love from Todd Lebo, Senior Director of Content and Business Development, MECLABS, to explain why, “Business leaders will never storm into the IT department and say, ‘I was taking a shower this morning, and had a great idea for some new PHP code.’ But they will come into the marketing department and say, ‘I was taking a shower this morning and thought of a great idea for an email send or a headline or a print ad.’”

What Karen’s piece says to business leaders is, “Hey, trust us over here; we know what we’re doing. And if you give us the funding and resources we need, we can keep doing it and keep improving.” But it uses data to prove that point, without having to make any claims at all.

Karen was kind enough to hop on the phone with me recently, go over the background of her internal whitepaper, and provide some tips to help you replicate this idea in your own organization. Below are selected edits from our conversation.

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We surveyed 1,915 marketers for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, and asked them about the importance of offline lead generation tactics. Here is what the data revealed …

Q: How do you feel the importance of OFFLINE lead generation has changed over the last three to five years?

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