Real Issues - Real Answers for Success In Online Marketing
Marketing Sherpa recently hosted a teleseminar with Anne Holland, who discussed the challenges companies face with lead generation. The audience submitted over 100 questions on this hot topic. We’ve summarized some of the concerns that speak to real issues people are experiencing in finding success with online marketing:
1. Small B2B Marketing Team with Limited Resources:
Anne’s answer: “The first thing I would do as a one person marketer is…[to] try to gain control of the website. You need to know that you’ve got control of the content that’s going out there because you’re going to make a bigger impact if you can control the home page and most of the content of the site. Maybe an easy content management tool – something where you’re not having to go to the IT Department and wait in line and wait for months and months and months. You also need to have email tools that you can use where you can send out email drip campaigns for nurturing people where you can change the email newsletter; you can do [it] yourself fairly easily.
In terms of bang-for-the-buck – search engine optimization: huge, huge, huge. ”
Genoo’s response: Gaining access to powerful online marketing tools that are inexpensive and don’t require IT involvement is highly beneficial to small marketing teams. If you don’t have control of your corporate website, don’t panic. An online marketing software provider, like us, can give you the tools to create a microsite for specific marketing content and landing pages—all with SEO—to serve as a destination for lead generation is easily accomplished. No matter which tool you choose, make sure you can also execute consistent email campaigns—and track the resulting lead behavior. This combination gives you a big tactical and strategic “bang for the buck.”
2. Get Started with Search Engine Optimization:
Anne’s answer: “If you don’t have the power to get control of the site from an SEO standpoint, then you better start developing alternate sites. In other words, you need to set up some websites that you control that will link back into the company website, so that you can have things where you do control the search engine optimization, so you can at least get some lead generation from the search engine any way you can.”
Genoo’s response: SEO doesn’t need to be difficult. Once you know your keywords and phrases, your online tools should only take a couple of clicks and typing in terms to specific pages to get your search optimization underway. The toolset you choose should also allow you to use tools like Google Analytics with ease. So if you go the alternate site route, consider a comprehensive online offering that gives you the array of content publishing, lead nurturing and SEO—all working together. [Shameless plug – Genoo’s features enable all this stuff]
3. White Papers For Effective Lead Generation:
Anne’s answer: “The key is your prospects want white papers that are highly relevant to what they care about; to their industry, possibly to their job function, and to what they’re really worried about. A generic white paper that is sort of just general, or a white paper that’s more of a sales paper won’t work.”
Genoo’s response: To further substantiate what Ann says, we’ve got a customer who’s getting great response from a white paper type campaign. Click here to see how they’re getting a great response from a microsite and nurturing campaign dedicated to educational content exposure.
4. Registration form optimization:
Anne’s answer: “Test your registration forms like crazy. Overall data shows that if you have more than seven items that people have to fill out in a registration form, responses tend to be very depressed. If you’re requiring a phone number, you’ll see response rates depress, or you’re going to see a lot of people lie.
Now, if the thing you’re offering in exchange for this information is incredibly valuable, or if these people are really far down in the sales cycle, so they’re very much involved with your brand and they’re really close to making a decision, they’re going to be more and more liable to fill all that information out.”
Genoo’s response: The ability to create and edit lead capture forms and use them on your site pages provides the ability to test different scenarios easily to discover what works the best for your situation. Being able to identify which links or downloads from your site requires lead capture before the download or link is delivered to the user means that you’re able to control when and where you capture that information. We thought about this when putting Genoo together, so Marketers are enabled and empowered to do what works. This doesn’t need to be a time consuming effort that is cast in concrete once it’s done.
5. Allowing Open Access to Content:
Anne’s Response: “If you have a marketplace that you would consider uneducated about what you sell – either they’ve never heard of your brand, or maybe they’ve never even heard of your solution, whatever it is that you’re offering, and they really needed to be educated on those things – then I would say lift the barrier because you need to get the word out.”
Genoo’s response: Ann makes a good point. If you’re educating the marketplace, or want to get the word out broadly, making it easy for people to access content without requiring they submit personal information helps. It’s about gaining the trust of your target market and engaging them for further communications. If they find value in what you have to offer you build credibility. Once they understand that value, providing their information won’t be perceived as a gamble or possible nuisance.
6. Lead Nurturing in Practice:
Anne’s answer: “What it looks like in practice is a series of drips. In fact, people often call it a drip campaign, where you are, over a period of time, sending that person a message. There may be an educational process needed. You need to know your marketplace. The process absolutely looks different depending upon the prospect. It all depends upon the buying cycle.”
Genoo’s response: If you can understand why leads come to your site, then you can develop different drip campaigns to address the interests of your segments that help you go a little deeper in providing more specific, targeted value. Once understanding your segments becomes easy, your time can be spent developing the content and messaging to reach those targets distinctly. And, once you have the content, your campaigns can run virtually unattended. Your time is now spent getting better insights to your prospects and tuning the messaging.
7. Closing the Loop on Leads:
Anne’s answer: “You need to qualify your leads in some way. You need to say, “How would I rate this lead? Is this person sales-ready? Can I toss them to the sales team? Develop the scale with your sales team.
Monitor when they move on the scale. How are you going to monitor when they get hotter? Maybe you’re going to see that suddenly a particular account has been visiting the website a whole bunch recently. That increased activity indicates they’re now really interested. You’re also going to monitor them using your email data. You’re going to say, “Wow. Normally, they only opened one of every three newsletters, but now they’ve been opening and clicking and forwarding and going crazy with the email. I think they’re ready to move up. I think they’re interested now.” The whole goal is to say when they are ready, when they are worthy, and then you’re going to move them on up.”
Genoo’s response: Providing qualified leads to sales requires understanding what patterns of activity indicate the lead is ready for a sales conversation when they don’t explicitly raise their hand and request one. Having the tools that allow you to monitor your lead activity profiles (which includes site visits, email responses, etc) and segment those most “active” in a myriad of ways, will help you figure out what activity patterns result in the highest quality of leads being forwarded to the Sales group.
8. Landing page or Website Home page?
Anne’s answer: “If you are marketing via the mass media then you absolutely want to make sure that your home page has a hot link to your marketing offer.
If you are marketing primarily through something that is clicked on, you have to realize that actually 50 percent or more of the people who respond to your offer still are not actually clicking. Often they’re just remembering, and then later on going to your home page and looking around for the offer. So add it to your home page.
That, however, doesn’t mean you don’t have to have a landing page. A landing page is super critical, because if you can get folks to click on a link for a landing page and go directly to a landing page, the conversion rate of those particular people is going to be so much higher than people who go to your home page, especially if your home page has all types of other stuff on it.
Hopefully there’s no other navigation and their only decision is to reply to the offer or leave the page… A landing page will always do better than a home page. Do your best to have a really great landing page, a very clean landing page.”
Genoo’s response: An online marketing toolset that enables you to create both microsites and landing pages makes it easy for marketers to produce campaigns and lead generation initiatives. Things change quickly today, so marketers need to be able to tweak, tune, and be responsive with messaging to keep leads and prospects engaged. With the right tools, marketers can focus on being relevant and gain advantage over their competitors that can’t be as nimble.
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There are a lot more topics and answers – we’ve only highlighted a few.
To view the entire Q/A session or download an audio, go to
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30747&pop=no