Archive for category Lead Generation
What is Lead Management?
Posted by Michael White in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Pay-per-click on February 28th, 2010
If you increase automation in Marketing, you can generate more sales leads, make more sales and earn more money. You can achieve scale. In this post I look at Marketing Automation, and at one specific example of automation known as Lead Management.
Lead Management and sales funnel
Marketing units in business-to-business companies spend a lot of their time trying to identify and obtain the contact details of people who might be interested in their products or services – this is ‘lead generation’. They pass these contacts to Sales who pursue them and try to convert them to customers.
But the way Marketing units generate and handover contacts is often badly automated and inefficient, and these contacts are often not processed effectively. Business-to-business Marketing Automation is a broad term referring to the use of technology to improve the generation of demand for products and services and the subsequent management of that demand to increase sales and revenue. Lead Management refers to the specific processes around generating leads and managing them as effectively as possible to drive sales. (Other areas in Marketing Automation include Campaign Management, Marketing Resource Management and Customer Analytics).
But how can you automate marketing? Isn’t it all golf umbrellas, brochures, t-shirts, and tradeshows? Well, there is a creative and branding element, but a lot of business-to-business marketing can be made more structured. For example, to generate a contact, you can use traditional methods like tradeshows and telemarketing, but now we also have contacts coming in over company web-sites, through Google pay-per-click ads and from email marketing campaigns.
Once these contacts have been captured, you can automate a lot of what happens next:
- Qualification, which means figuring out how likely the contact is to become a buyer based on information about her company, her location, how often she’s come to our web-site, other online behaviours we can observe etc.
- Routing to sales: you can apply sensible rules about which sales guy should get what lead, you can specify how quickly a lead should be acted upon, and you can provide your sales staff with much richer background information on the contact.
- Monitoring: you can see which sources tend to generate high quality leads, and what kind of leads are more likely to convert to customers; this helps you learn how to spend your marketing money with greatest effect.
Using this kind of automation will help you:
- Generate more leads, faster
- Pass better quality leads to Sales, so they don’t waste time chasing someone who has no real interest in your products
- Cut down wasteful spend
There’s a clear return on investment from automating lead management. A CMO Council Survey estimated that 80% of leads are either lost, ignored or discarded. MarketingSherpa also estimated that around 75% of leads generated by most companies are not followed up if they’re not a short-term opportunity (i.e. going to close in this quarter). With the average lead costing about $100 to generate, that can quickly add up to a lot of money. Or to put it another way – calculate the proportion of your marketing budget you spend on lead generation; how much is 80% of that?
So, if you want to scale up your sales, you’ll have to scale up demand generation and that in turn means you should to start looking at marketing automation technologies. Luckily, there are a lot of technologies becoming available, most of them delivered as software-as-a-service, with low entry costs and no installation or desktop deployments necessary.
Global time spent on social networks rises 82%
Posted by Michael White in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on January 27th, 2010
A news item from MarketingCharts today reports an 82% rise in time spent on social networks, based on research from the Nielsen Company comparing December 2009 with December 2008. Global consumers spent an average of 5 hours 35 minutes in December 2009, compared with 3 hours 3 minutes a year previously, and unique audience figures rose 27% from 242 million in December 08 to 307.4 million in December 09.
Facebook had an almost 100% increase in unique visitors from December to December, while Twitter recorded 579% growth from 2.7 million visitors to 18.1 million.
The MarketingChart piece also cites a recent survey by Prompt Communications of 300 consumers in Boston. This showed that 96% of them used Facebook to communicate with friends and family on a regular basis, which trails the phone (at 99%) but beats text messaging (93%) and email (91%). We saw something similar during a recent client engagement. As part of the assignment we helped create some ‘buyer personas’ for digital music consumers and validated some of these personas on a college campus in Ireland. The 10 students we interviewed rarely used email, and stayed ‘within’ Facebook for the majority of the time they were online each day, using it almost exclusively to interact with classmates, friends and family, partly driven by their wish to keep their mobile phone bills as low as possible.
I’m note sure what the takeaways for B2B marketers and sales teams are just yet – this will depend on the social media usage of decision makers and influencers at your target customer organisations. But based on this research you can assume a lot if not all of your target buyers are active on the social networks. Combined with a predicted surge in smart phone sales (which means more people accessing Facebook and Twitter using these devices while on the road) there are obviously implications for your 2010 promotional plans if you want to be noticed by your prospective customers. One big long term impact could be on email marketing strategy – will email begin to decline in importance as a promotional tool over the next 5 years, replaced by intra-social network messaging?
Creating content that generates awareness and demand
Posted by Michael White in Content, Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing on January 25th, 2010
People don’t buy things they way they did 10 or 15 years ago. Whether it’s a hotel room, a house or a $200k software system, their search begins online. This means that your prospective customers need to find you online, and when they find you there needs to be enough compelling information (a.k.a. “content”) for them to choose you over a competitor. Creating demand for your products and services depends on creating the right kind of content for your potential customers, meeting their information needs as they move from being aware of a potential problem they want to solve through to selecting a particular solution and vendor. You put that content online on your website, on your blog and on third party sites and then take steps to ensure it’s easily found by your prospective customers. As your prospects access that information you interact with them, establishing your relevance and persuading them to choose you as their preferred solution provider.
In the last post I highlighted advice from the MarketingSherpa B2B Lead Generation Handbook on the ‘information need’ phases through which buyers move as they begin to consider a product purchase (from Awareness, through Consideration and then to Risk Avoidance/Decision). (We will come back to the question of modelling buyer behaviour in later posts, using a technique called Buyer Persona Analysis).
Once you understand the ‘information needs’ of your buyers at different stages in the buying cycle, you can start to match that up with corresponding types of content. The output will be a table or matrix that lists
- each of the buyer types who are involved in a typical purchase of your product or service,
- the phases they go through during the purchase cycle, and
- the specific types of content you should offer them at each point in that cycle.
Here’s a selection of some of the types of content MarketingSherpa suggests you should consider for your marketing programs:
- Research – people like to know what’s going on in their industry and specialisation. You can meet this need by publishing research and survey results – there are a host of online survey tools that can help, you can run in-person surveys at conferences, or you can commission an academic or research firm to carry out the research for you.
- Education – this means providing tutorials on specific topics, using multiple media ranging from .pdfs through webinars and online videos. The key here is not to make them overtly product-promotional i.e. provide information that is generally useful to a broad audience, rather than a spruced up user manual for your own product.
- Tours and overviews – an animated or video tour of your product or service could be the most effective way to communicate its differentiators and benefits. It also appeals to prospects who can’t make the time to read a white paper or product brochure.
- News – try to generate news that will be of genuine interest or value to prospective buyers. This could be a round-up of online blogs on a particular subject, or updates on recent industry analysis.
- Thought leadership – this is the creation of content that helps you develop a reputation as someone with real knowledge and insight in your particular sector. Developing thought leadership isn’t easy – there’s no easy way to fake it. You have to work at it yourself or else buy-in the insight. If you have clear views on your industry or speciality based on experience and reflection then it is worthwhile recording and sharing these . Alternatively you can hire someone to prepare a paper for you or else pay to re-use a paper from a research firm such as Gartner or Forrester
- Case studies and success stories – case studies help explain the application of your product or service clearly to your prospective buyers and they build your credibility as someone who can deliver a successful solution. With low cost web-video cameras it is worthwhile seeing if you can get customer to provide a video case study in addition to or in place of a written case study, as a ‘direct-to-camera’ interview is generally more compelling.
- Q&As – an easy type of content to create once you have someone willing to respond. Send an expert a list of your questions and publish the answers
- Company and product information – this is the kind of information needed when a prospect is seriously evaluating your product or service, and they want lots of it. Provide as much information as you can about the company and its products, including press releases, product fact sheets, technical implementation, buyers guide and competitor comparisons.
- How-to tips – short articles illustrating how to overcome a problem or achieve a particular result, illustrated with graphics or charts and augmented by video or audio where possible.
Over the coming months I’ll come back to the topic of how to plan the creation of content as part of your overall marketing and sales plans. I also want to look at how you can develop a better understanding of your target buyers and how to reflect that understanding in your online presence, through your web-site and blog and through the kind of content you make available to your audiences. And I’d also like to look at how you can reduce the effort in producing content – what are the easiest ways to generate content, to re-use it in different ways, to make the most use of what you have? You want to spread your content over the web, having it proliferate in as many places as possible to achieve maximum impact, so we’ll look at the tools that can help you do that, from Twitter to Slideshare.
What kind of content should you create for B2B Marketing?
Posted by Michael White in Content, Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing on October 27th, 2009
Business to business marketing depends more and more on creating ‘content’ – material that provides information that is not necessarily sales or marketing related. Examples include business articles, technical white papers, YouTube videos and presentations. The purpose of generating this content is to indirectly influence your target audiences – if they think what you have to say is interesting and insightful then they’ll come back to talk to you when they’re buying your kind of product or service.
MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com) provides some great tips on the kind of content you can use to promote your business in their B2B Lead Gen handbook. They provide some important points to consider:
- the content you create should always be about your audience, their interests and their industry, not about you, your company or product
- you should create different types of content targeted at different audience segments
- you should create content for each stage of the sales cycle (or buying cycle, if you think of it from the prospective customers’ point of view).
On this last point they recommend your content should suit the information needs of potential customers as they move through three broad stages:
- Awareness: at this stage you are trying to make them aware of the problem you solve, persuade them it’s a problem they should be concerned about, and make them aware that you’re the best vendor to solve it
- Consideration – here you’re trying to provide information that helps them educate themselves in a bit more detail e.g. what do they need to know to pick the top 3 vendors; what information do they need to finalise a purchase decision for your product type
- Risk Avoidance/Decision – how can you convince them that you are a safe brand; that you are the best fit for their needs; what do their peers or market commentators say?
I think this is a great starting point when planning the kind of content you will need to generate to support your marketing plans. It also prompts you to think about the information needs of the different buyers you are trying to influence. Does a technical buyer move through Awareness, Consideration and Risk Avoidance/Decision the same way someone working in procurement does? Do you have to provide content for both of them? In the next post I’ll summarize the types of content you can generate to meet the information needs of buyers.
B2B Marketing use of Pay-per-click
Posted by Michael White in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Pay-per-click, Search Engine Marketing on September 15th, 2009
A great post on B2B marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, called “Don’t sabotage your own PPC Campaign“ at the Emagine blog. The post, by Matt Roche, highlights an interview with CPC search’s Terry Whalen carried out by Jep Capelstein at the LeadSloth blog. In the original interview, Terry Whalen discusses how B2B use of pay-per-click differs from B2C. He makes some good points e.g. the search volumes are usually lower for B2B so it can take a little time to draw good conclusions on things like overall lead quality and Return on Investment. The Emagine post summarises the interview and then adds a few comments, one of which in particular I think is worth quoting, as it refers to the underfunding of B2B campaigns, which I think is likely to be an issue for a lot of tech marketers. Here’s the quote:
“Too often we see good B2B clients struggling under mandated PPC budgets in the $1,000/month range …which gets them maybe 3-5 leads a month, for some big-ticket, highly-considered products or services. But to get the one or two solid sales leads per month that the CMO probably wants, something more in the range of 100 raw leads/month is needed. To see how that budget constraint is in fact hindering growth: if even one of those two solid leads closes, at a modest high-ticket price of $100K and profit margin of 15% (which included the budgeted $1,000), clearly the extra $9K spent to obtain those 2 solid leads (@$100/click) is covered …with room to spare. If your situation is this good or better (and being sure about it is why the ROI numbers are so vital), then clearly you should be throwing as much money as possible into PPC …until/unless you can come up with a demonstrably higher-leverage marketing tool.”
I’m not focused on the precise figures quoted by Matt Roche here for the monthly B2B Pay-per-click budgets ($1k per month seems very low), but I am interested in the general principle – when and how do you decide you’re spending enough on PPC? To make a good decision, you’ll have to know how many sales you’ve made out of PPC generated leads over some period – which means you have to track this accurately. (This probably seems easy but it may not be – do you record the original lead source against every sale you make? Is there more than one source for that sale? – If so which one(s) gets the credit for the sale?). You should also be able to compare the cost of the PPC generated leads with those from other sources e.g. organic web-traffic leads or email leads. So it could all get a bit complicated.
But as a first cut, and here’s where I’m in strong agreement with Matt Roche, you can probably make some simple decisions. If you knew that a third of your sales, say $10x dollars, came from PPC, which costs you $1x dollars, then it’s worth checking whether investing $2x dollars in PPC will generate $20x sales. If so, and your margins are sufficient, the decision on investing more in PPC should be fairly easy. It would then seem sensible to keep increasing the PPC spend until you stop getting a corresponding increase leads and sales. (If there’s a big flaw in this logic, please post a comment, I’m interested to hear what others think about the issue of setting PPC budgets in B2B Marketing).
This subject also leads to a larger question of bugeting for lead generation/marketing and the relative allocation of budget across various marketing and lead generation activities, which I hope to tackle in a future post.