The Pragmatic Marketer

Continue to Generate Leads 
When revenues head south, sales forecasts are bleak and the economy is in recession, the reaction of many technology CEOs is to cut expenses. All too often, it’s the marketing budget that takes a direct hit. 

This quick-fix mentality overlooks the fact that marketing is not a short-term activity. It’s the companies that steadily build and refine multiple marketing programs that enjoy sustainable success. And the most successful marketing programs are the ones that improve the quantity and quality of leads that flow into your organization.

By brutally shutting off the tap, you not only cut off your lead flow, you also lose significant momentum. When you’re finally ready to turn the tap back on, it’ll likely be a long time before you can convert a trickle of leads into the steady stream your sales team is expecting. Once the economy is back on its feet, your sales may not accelerate at the speed you need to keep your organization competitive.

Be Selective 
Good marketers continually measure their key marketing programs. This means they can take the time to assess the impact of budget cuts before implementing them. . When you make a habit of measuring your successes and failures, it’s easier to understand which programs are working best, and which should perhaps be dropped or postponed. Armed with this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about downsizing your budgets without cutting the heart out of your lead generation engine.

Redeploy Resources 
When you temporarily shrink your marketing programs, you also reduce your marketing team’s activities. Don’t take this as an automatic cue to trim headcount. When the economy eventually turns the corner, you’re going to need these people again. They’ve spent time getting to know your company and your product. Don’t waste this valuable investment.

Even in a downturn, you can keep these people gainfully employed. There are many low-to-no-cost activities that your marketing department can consider implementing to compensate for the cuts you have made elsewhere: 

• Start a blog and let all your customers and prospects know about it. It’s a great way to demonstrate industry and domain expertise, show prospects that you understand the challenges they are facing, and have solutions to address them. 

• Syndicate your blog and  your web site with an RSS feed. That way, every time you make a content addition or change, your RSS subscribers get an update automatically. 

• Take advantage of sharing tools like sharethis (  www.sharethis.com), that facilitate the dissemination of content like press releases, product announcements etc. to your various network locations simultaneously (your blog, email lists, facebook page etc.) 

• Start an email newsletter. But don’t treat it like another advertising vehicle. Make sure it contains content that is useful and/or educational. Use it in conjunction with your blog to establish a thought leadership position in your industry. And remember, you can likely use some of the content you create for the blog in the newsletter and vice versa. And remember to put a subscription field on your web site. 

• Kick off an email based lead nurturing program to gently coax that pile of none sales-ready leads you have into sales readiness. 

• Take the time freed up by postponed marketing activities to do a candid review your web site. Does it speak to your prospects? Does it speak to their challenges, in language that resonates with them? Does it provide them with content they are searching for? Does it offer varied value-added content that people will give up their contact details to download? If not, change it. 

• Do the same review for your Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns. Cut the outlying ad groups that aren’t converting and refresh/extend the ones that are. 

• If you haven’t already done so – and few marketers truly have – analyze the ratio of PPC conversions to closed deals, to ensure that you have a clear view of which conversions are delivering. Use this new intelligence to further refine your PPC program. 

• Ensure that your most popular PPC keyword phrases are reflected in your web site to improve your search engine optimization. The sooner you can get good organic ranking for phrases you are currently paying for, the sooner you can stop paying for them!

•  Get your marketing folk to do phone follow-up on some of the more tepid leads they have generated over the last little while. It’s a great way for them to understand why sales sometimes rejects the fruits of their labours and make them think about how to do a better  job of identifying sales ready prospects in the future.     
   

Once you’ve done all this, if you’ve still got time on your hands, use it to work out whether you can leverage facebook as a B2B marketing tool. I’m still trying to work that one out. If you have any insight on the topic, I’d love to hear from you. And as soon as I have something concrete to share, you’ll be the first to know.

Demand Generation? Why Online Wins

 As a tech marketer I’ve always believed that lead generation should be my number one priority. To feed business success, it’s essential to deliver a steady stream of actionable leads to the sales force. But it’s not an easy task – especially in recessionary times.

 Luckily, we’re living smack dab in the middle of a web 2.0 revolution, full of cool new tools and techniques that make it possible to generate the leads we need.

 Why Offline Tactics no Longer Work

If you’re generating leads using offline tactics like direct mail and cold calling, you’re likely to need around 7-10 suspects to create one prospect, about 7-10 prospects to create one qualified opportunity and approximately 7-10 qualified opportunities to create one closed deal. Do the math and you’ll see that generating any volume of opportunities using offline marketing tools requires that you maintain contact with a huge number of raw suspects.

 Marketing Blindfold

The problem with offline marketing is that you might as well be working blindfold. You have to reach out to a huge number of people via multiple, sustained and costly outbound sales and marketing programs just to identify the few that might be interested in what you have to sell. Once they are qualified you’re left with only a handful of people who might want to buy what you have. Even fewer will be in the position to do anything about it.

 There’s simply too much clutter out there for these tried-and-tested techniques to effectively break through the noise anymore. 99% of cold calls go to voice mail and messages are rarely, if ever, returned. Meanwhile, email and direct mail response levels are plummeting.

 Despite these bleak numbers, many B2B companies still pound away at ineffectual outbound marketing programs and sanity-sucking cold calling campaigns.

 Say Hello to In-Bound Marketing

Thankfully the online world is providing an increasing number of new and more fruitful avenues for savvy tech marketers to achieve their lead generation goals.

 Success comes in the shape of ‘in-bound’ marketing. And for that you need a strong online presence. Your goal is to attract visitors to your website and convert them to known prospects for follow-up by your sales team.

 A recent Marketing Sherpa report shows that 87% of all B2B product purchasing cycles start with an internet search. According to my own site stats, well over 80% of these searchers start with Google. That’s why every serious B2B marketer must operate a well-managed pay per click program, supported by compelling landing pages and a well-optimized, well-articulated and engaging website that’s focused on visitor conversion.

 The Search Ends at Your Website

As an in-bound marketer, you’re no longer searching for a needle in a haystack. Instead, you have the opportunity to tap into a stream of people who are already looking for a solution to a problem or pain they’re experiencing. They are already motivated enough to type their search into Google. Your job is to ensure their search leads them directly to your products and services, using online content that rapidly and clearly informs them that you have the solution to their problem.

 You can say goodbye to your offline metrics too. By attracting site visitors that are already somewhere in the buying cycle, the conversion ratios from identified prospect to closed deal improve dramatically. My own experience confirms this, because over the last few months over 20% of all my in-bound, web-generated leads have found their way into our opportunity pipeline. That beats every offline program I’ve ever run.

 Is Offline Marketing Officially Dead?

In the face of a recession, I’ve seen a few marketing bloggers state that their organizations are increasing their focus on lower-cost, on-line marketing activities, including pay per click campaigns, permission-based email, webinars and lead nurturing. At the same time, they’re toning down budget-sucking activities like trade shows, interruption-based direct mail and third-party tele-prospecting projects.

 Will this increased online marketing focus finally change the way technology marketers approach the job of demand generation? The opportunities that exist to build powerful in-bound programs are so rich, and the metrics are so compelling that I have to believe that this recessionary tactic may finally toll the death knell for many of our old offline approaches. 

I attended a great session on landing page design at my marketing leadership peer group a few weeks back. Our presenter, Marie Weise from CoPilot Group had just returned from a Marketing Sherpa landing page training, so she was fully tooled up to impart the latest thinking on landing page design from the world’s leading authority on marketing content.

Using the 3 C’s as our guide, Marie showed us how, as B2B marketers, we can create better, more compelling landing pages:

Continuity
Each step in the conversion process must consistently reflect the searcher’s intent > to find the most relevant information for the search term chosen.
When your content does not match expectations, you introduce discontinuity, the searcher’s connection with your site is interrupted and the visitor may simply click away from your content.

What can you do to make sure there’s continuity in your conversion process?

…Searchers use keyword phrases that they hope will yield highly-relevant results. To convince them that this is the case, your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad must reflect the search term as tightly as possible, ideally in the ad headline.

If searchers are intrigued by your PPC ad content, they will click through, arriving at your landing page. Again, it is essential that your landing page uses common voice and continues to reinforce the search term used. Ideally, this should be visible in the landing page headline —convincing searchers they are in the right place, and that they should stay to investigate the contents further.

Clarity
When someone arrives on a landing page they typically ask themselves three key questions:

1. Where am I? — Does my location appear immediately relevant to the search term that brought me here?

2. What can I do here? — Is the landing page content relevant to my search? What are my next steps?

3. Why should I take action? — If there is an offer, is it worth giving up my personal information to take advantage of it?

To help the visitor answer these questions, Marketing Sherpa advises you to let “clarity trump persuasion”, every time. This simply means keeping your landing page content clear and concise rather than relying on overly florid copy, clever creative and splashy offers. This is especially important in B2B, as you’re typically not trying to sell your product at this stage. All you really want the visitor to do is to stay on the landing page long enough to take some action, so:

• Keep it simple
• Reassure visitors they are in the right place
• Convince them to convert.

Consistency
Actually, the word Marketing Sherpa used was Congruency, but it’s a hard one for most people to define, so I have taken the liberty of replacing it with Consistency.

This is all about ensuring that every element of your page — design, copy, images, colors, logo — either states or supports the Value Proposition that you want to communicate to the visitor.

Marie shared a great before and after example to illustrate this:

A university that offers 100% online Bachelor of Education courses had created a landing page with a masthead consisting of multiple images of the university buildings and campus — all completely irrelevant to someone looking for an online training course in the hopes of becoming a teacher.

The updated, “congruent”, version of this landing page instead featured an image of an elementary school classroom, showing a teacher engaged with her students. Much more compatible with their key value proposition: by selecting our online course you will reach your goal of becoming a teacher.

Before I sign off, one last word or two about adwords and organic search…………

When you’re using landing pages as part of a Pay Per Click program, it’s a relatively easy job to tailor your content to meet the imperatives of the 3 C’s - once you’ve understood their importance. However, it’s a lot more challenging to do this with organic search, which typically directs visitors to existing web content rather than a tailored landing page. This means that certain web pages must do double duty as both landing pages and pure web content that must also make sense to someone casually browsing your site.

By they way, the Marketing Leadership Peer Group I facilitate is hosted by the York Technology Association. We meet the first Wednesday of every month in Markham, just north of Toronto. If you’d like to join us, ping me and I’ll fill you in on the details.