Thursday, August 14, 2008

Going for the Money Shot – Leveraging e-Marketing to Drive Leads to Your Sales Person’s Doorstep

In my mind, one of the most effective mechanisms for lead generation today is the area of online, or e-marketing. Yet I’m consistently surprised by the number of companies who stick only to traditional marketing methods such as tradeshows and print advertising to attract and build the prospect funnel.

I would like in this blog to explore the field of e-marketing and discuss some of the methods I and my team have used successfully over time to drive and sustain successful lead generation activity.

There are a number of tactics one can leverage when engaging in e-marketing:

Banner Advertising

Probably the most familiar tactic, banner advertising allows you to both brand and engage in active lead generation in the online area. Just as the case with print advertising, investments in banner advertising can not be a drop in the bucket – one must aim for consistency of look and feel, frequency and reach in terms of eye ball views. That said, the online e-zine and blogosphere community, and specialized online communities of interest offer you a generous array of placement possibilities and for those seeking to do highly targeted marketing, some excellent communities specialized by role, or by interest area. Just make sure that you have a value added offer – a compelling whitepaper or a piece of independent third party research works well – as your offer to entice the viewer to click through and give you their contact information.

Electronic Newsletter Sponsorships


Where there are banner ads, there are typically electronic newsletter sponsorships as well. Where banner ads are a pull tactic – requiring the visitor to travel to the site, electronic newsletter sponsorships is a push tactic, with the newsletter (and your sponsorship ad and offer) out to a segmented audience of the site. For online magazines, electronic newsletters typically showcase the latest news and new feature stories. Through targeted PR efforts, you can actually double your visibility by placement of a sponsorship in a newsletter that features a story on your company. Again, the offer when sponsoring a newsletter is everything. It needs to be of high value and enticing enough that the reader clicks through to accept the offer.

Now there’s One Caveat …

With both banner advertising and newsletter sponsorships, a marketer should be aware that while these tactics may generate a volume of contacts, most of those accepting your offer should be considered “suspects” not “prospects.” It is vital that these leads receive further qualification attention as most are not advanced in the marketing funnel, and are not ready for a sales person’s call. Leads from these sources however, do allow you to build up a sizable database of contacts to regularly touch and work, and with a marketing campaign system such as Marketo or Eloqua, these leads can be matured and the wheat sorted from the chaff.

Search Engine Optimization

I’ll get this on the table now. I love search engine optimization. Fully and completely. Its painstaking work to achieve, but SEO provides that perfect intersection point between the buyer that is looking for a specific product or service, and the vendor who has exactly that ware to offer. SEO is achieved through pay for click advertising (PPC), auction bidding on key search terms, and most importantly, and most difficult natural optimization of your site (which affects rankings in the middle of the page where really, honestly, everyone looks). Some of our largest opportunities, and most rapid sales cycles came through leads from search engines. But again, the offer at the other end is critical to snag that prospect fully. Now find yourself a genius at SEO who has a passion for detail – because natural optimization is really valuable, but also really particular work.

Webinars

While all of the above tactics I view as primary lead generation tactics, Webinars are in my mind, a secondary – or advancing – tactic. We used to traditionally market our webinars to the pool of contacts we collected through the above sources in our leads database. They were then segmented and offered via an email invitation (HTML or text) a value-based Webinar (i.e. think about featuring a thought leader in the industry, or a customer to tell their success story). Our sales folk consistently shared with us that leads who had accepted an initial offer, then attended a webinar were more mature, and more ready for a discussion about our products. If the topic of the webinar is really compelling, or the speaker very well known there can also be a viral component to your marketing efforts. I remember one particular webinar we promoted to our database featuring an analyst firm, brought in a range of contacts from a banking organization representing six different locations, and all with similar titles and/or organizational responsibility. Clearly the topic had touched a nerve in that organization and the sales person responsible for that account now had a critical mass of interest to which to respond.