Intelligent Lead Generation

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Today’s marketing requires engagingaudiences who are strongly connectedin fundamentally new ways. Intelligent Lead Generation, based on engaging the hivemind, requires a fundamental rethinking andrebuilding of traditional marketing strategies. This whitepaper looks at how this perspective affects your day-to-day efforts to generate and nurture leads.

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Intelligent Lead Generation
Today’s marketing requires engaging audiences who are strongly connected in fundamentally new ways.

2009 HiveMind Marketing, Inc.®

Table of Contents

Introduction ..................................................................3 1. Nurture Valuable B2B Leads .....................................5 2. Align Sales and Marketing ........................................7 3. Make Your Website Come Alive.................................9 4. Exploit Social Networking Opportunities ...............12 5. Measure Everything ................................................14 About HiveMind Marketing, Inc...................................18

HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation Introduction
The rapid proliferation of media for communicating with customers – traditional media as well as the web, guerrilla marketing, email marketing, social networking, podcasting, blogs, etc. – has created an abundance of marketing opportunities. But today’s marketing requires engaging audiences that are connected in fundamentally new ways.
Audiences today read blogs. They use RSS feeds and Google Alerts to stay in contact with minimal effort. They join social networks to affirm their bonds. They pass along information about themselves and about others. They have conversations about your products and services, your company, your services, your support, your pricing, and more. This is a fundamentally different scenario where the audience has more control than ever before. And that control is only going to increase. Marketers who remain on the outside spouting the same old sales pitches will be ignored, abandoned, even ridiculed. And there is no fast, easy entry point to exploit. You can’t force your way into this audience, even using new techniques like blogs. In fact, Forrester Research recently reported that only 16% of people surveyed said they trust corporate blogs. That makes corporate blogs the lowest-rated source of reliable information among the 18 categories Forrester rated — lower even than personal blogs.

Today’s “hivemind” audience is an intelligent, collective consciousness that acts independently, connects with other like-minded individuals spontaneously, can’t be controlled, and has significant impact on your company’s brand and ultimate success in the marketplace.

Understanding the Hivemind
To be successful requires shifting your perceptions about the nature of the audience you’re trying to reach. We call today’s audience a “hivemind.” It is an intelligent, collective consciousness that acts independently, connects with other like-minded individuals spontaneously, can’t be controlled, and has significant impact on your company’s brand and ultimate success in the marketplace. Engaging the hivemind requires a dramatically different approach to all aspects of marketing. Marketing to the hivemind isn’t something that can be done from the outside. You can’t blast them with ads, spam them with emails, fill their mailboxes with junk mail, disrupt their work with cold-calls, interrupt 3
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
their TV programs with commercials, or expect them to read the canned sales pitch on your static website. It simply doesn’t work.  You have to understand and relate to the hivemind as people, rather than prospects. You need to supply information with the purpose of helping them, rather than selling them. You must engage them about topical issues that matter to them. You have to put aside your sales, marketing and business agenda, and trust that your transparency will engender sympathy trust and support.

The Fundamentals of Intelligent Lead Generation
Intelligent Lead Generation, based on engaging the hivemind, requires a fundamental rethinking and rebuilding of traditional marketing strategies. This whitepaper looks at how this perspective affects your day-to-day efforts to generate and nurture leads.

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HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation 1: Nurture Valuable B2B Leads
The major challenge in Intelligent Lead Generation is understanding what’s important to the hivemind. For most B2B products, services and solutions, legitimate leads require serious conversation.

Names gathered from trade shows or free webinar registrations often amount to little. Breaking down the barriers to serious conversation with the right audience is extremely difficult in an environment where time is the most precious resource. Gone are the days when you could saturate the entire market with advertising and direct mail. In B2B marketing, scores of people are involved in the purchasing cycle: from manufacturing managers, IT professionals, and purchasing agents to vice presidents and C-level officers. Team-buying initiatives have created empowered armies of evaluators that put your product or service under a microscope. Who are these decision makers? Who are the key influencers? Where do they hang out?

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HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
Information that Informs
Keeping in mind the nature of your audience, lead nurturing is more important than ever. Valuable longer-term B2B leads must be nurtured at critical points in their decision-making process with compelling, interactive, just-in-time messaging designed to help potential customers clarify their thinking one step at a time. To get started, ask yourself:
To assist the education of your audience, create marketing programs that compel people to actively seek your company out in search of further insight, ideas, and solutions.

• How do we best deliver messages to the people who will influence or make the final buying decisions? • How do we stay in touch with our audience as they move through their consideration and buying processes? • How can we communicate in a way that addresses the audience’s issues and reduces the perceived risk of buying from our company? • What can we offer that will engage the audience when they are ready to move forward with their buying processes?

Building a Sales-winning Relationship
To assist the education of your audience, create marketing programs that compel people to actively seek your company out in search of further insight, ideas, and solutions. For example, you might structure a series of ongoing communications — by mail, email or phone — designed to keep pace with your audience’s information needs. Multiple offers that appeal to audience members at all stages of the buying process are essential. For example, if prospective customers are early in the buying process, they are more receptive to offers for free information in the form of how-to guides, white papers or email newsletters. As your audience moves further along in the buying process, appropriate offers may include those that require a higher level of interest or commitment, such as webinar invitations, demonstrations, checklists and other decision-making tools. Finally, as your audience approaches being ready to buy, they may be more receptive to longer, indepth seminars; needs assessments; or receiving a proposal or quotation. 6
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation 2: Align Sales and Marketing
It’s a fact. Salespeople are paid for winning the race for short-term sales, usually causing them to focus on the easy sales opportunities while ignoring the longer-term B2B leads. As a result, nearly three-quarters of B2B leads that convert into sales are ignored.

To reverse this trend requires patience. Industry experts estimate that only one-quarter of those who are going to buy do so in the first six months. Roughly another quarter buy within a 7-to-12-month period, another quarter within a 13-to-18-month period, and the final quarter sometime after 18 months. Fixing the basic processes within your organization enables you to: • Add accountability or measurability to marketing programs. • Coordinate marketing campaigns with sales efforts. • Break down barriers in the sales process or the hivemind’s buying process. 7
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
• Develop messages or value propositions for multiple hivemind audiences. • Wrestle with long, complex sales cycles. Operating without understanding the hivemind nature of your audience limits your organization’s chances for success. A mistimed marketing campaign could actually lengthen your audience’s buyOperating without understanding the hivemind nature of your audience limits your organization’s chances for success. A mistimed marketing campaign could actually lengthen your audience’s buying cycle by raising more questions than it answers.

ing cycle by raising more questions than it answers. However, if the message and timing are right, the cycle could be reduced dramatically. How do you know if this is a problem in your organization? Ask yourself if your company exhibits any of the following behaviors: Sales believes marketing produces low-quality leads. Often, the marketing team is accused of generating “useless” leads at trade shows or through unfocused marketing initiatives. The sales team may not understand the concept of lead nurturing and complain that the contacts being collected are low-level non-decision makers. Marketing believes that sales wastes good leads. If marketing is throwing leads over the fence to the sales team, and sales pays no attention to the leads or only cherry-picks the hottest prospects, the rest of the leads are wasted. There is no agreement as to which leads should be nurtured and who’s responsible for nurturing. What is the point in generating a large volume of high-quality leads if the sales team can’t close due to bandwidth, skill set, or product availability? Sales and marketing have not defined and agreed on the sales process. There is huge value in having the marketing team gain an understanding of the sales process. Working collaboratively, barriers can be identified and removed by a joint marketing and sales understanding of the hivemind. Sales and marketing have not jointly defined the hivemind audience’s buying process. Hivemind audiences almost never buy according to the sales process you have internally designed for them to follow. They have their own process, which may include web searches, requests for proposals, blog research, peer evaluation, internal sign-offs and other steps which may not be apparent. Both sales and marketing need to understand and be aware of the hivemind buying process. Marketing hasn’t characterized the entire hivemind. If marketing has only been targeting technical decision makers, but hasn’t developed messaging or tools to address the needs of CEOs or CFOs who are also part of a big-ticket IT product sale, sales cycles could be derailed prematurely. 8
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation 3: Make Your Web Site Come Alive
Is your web site driving leads and business to your company? Is it reducing the cost of your marketing transactions? Does it project a global image? Almost every B2B web site we see is an underachiever; not fulfilling its huge potential to deliver leads, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.

Applying the audience-centric principles of Intelligent Lead Generation, you can transform your website into a strategic competitive weapon, a living, breathing representative of your company.

Definition
Identifying what a website must do is more difficult than it seems. That’s why there are so many “brochure-ware” sites on the Internet. Rather than simply presenting company and product information, you need to start with a broader definition and vision that includes: 9
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
Audience – Identify who your website needs to attract and support. Good websites anticipate who will be visiting and proactively plan for them. Search Strategy – How will visitors arrive at your site? What pages will they land on? What will they be looking for? Where will they come from? Make sure that your search strategy focuses on what the
Create fictional people – personas – to represent your hivemind audiences. Include: • • • • • • • • A picture Attributes/demographics (age, sex etc) Personality Profile / bio Needs as a customer What answers do they seek Motivations Stage in the buying cycle

hivemind wants to learn. Content – What fresh content do you have to interest your audience? You not only have to plan for the launch of the website but for the many months after. You need to generate new case studies, whitepapers, research reports, press releases, blog entries, product updates, industry overviews, comparison charts, and more.

Engaging Prospects
Another way to think of audiences is in terms of their needs. You’ll have people arriving at your site at varying stages of their buying cycle. And you need to address each of those stages with information and offers appropriate to the questions being asked. You cannot simply cherry-pick C-level executives and sales-ready leads. If lead generation is the primary goal of your website, you need to broaden your definition of leads. Different offers for business and technical decision makers makes obvious sense. But you should also try to address the needs of information gatherers, influencers, purchasers, and researchers. These are all part of the hivemind. You should also include multiple ways for prospective customers to request assistance or additional information about your company, and its products or services. These may include providing company or staff phone numbers, chat functionality, email addresses, landing pages, and downloads.

Personas
A third way to look at your audiences is through personas. You create a fictional person (a persona) to represent each of your hivemind audiences. Now your marketing campaign can be developed from a very personal point of view – “what would Phil think about that?” with some real advantages:

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HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
• Developing the personas makes you really think about your hivemind audience and what motivates them.  • Seeing your web site from your intended audience’s point of view is difficult, but seeing it from Phil’s point of view is much easier to do. • It helps target parts of each campaign or website to specific interest groups.  • When you can answer each question specifically, you can translate those answers to stronger navigation, content, usability, and functionality throughout your website.

Content
People in the hivemind visit websites not to hear your sales pitch but to obtain content, either in the form of information or services. To keep people interested, your content must be: Relevant – Don’t simply tell your story from your perspective. Create content that answers questions and satisfies the hivemind. Fresh – The Internet is a dynamic and interactive environment. Users expect up-to-date content. Well-structured – The content must be organized so that people can easily find what they are looking for. Keyword-rich – Don’t optimize your website after the fact. Determine the keywords for your products, services and company and make certain every content contributor incorporates them into titles and page headings, as well as articles, product descriptions, and other content. Don’t make the mistake of stuffing your website with filler content that has been directly transplanted from print. The web is a different animal. Advertising copy seldom provides enough detail. Brochure copy drags on, assuming the audience will follow a linear progression of information. While public relations copy forgets to sell. In general, you should be succinct, writing scannable compelling stories that communicate clear messages that the hivemind cares about.

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HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation 4. Exploit Social Networking Opportunities
Social media is all the buzz representing a new low-cost avenue for engaging the hivemind at a much deeper level than is typically achieved with traditional advertising and direct response media.

Social media markets are by definition small. This is a difficult concept for many business executives because marketing has historically focused on messaging to large groups of prospective customers. For Intelligent Lead Generation, you need to think quality, not quantity. Where do you begin? Build your framework for social media on the following six key considerations: • Audience – Listen and understand your audience and how they communicate/interact on the social web. What types of social networks, media sharing and assets do they engage?  • Objectives – It’s important to consider both the goals of the company as well as the audience you’re trying to reach. Marketing on the social web is about giving to get. Knowing 12
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
what your hivemind wants is key in reaching your own organization’s goals because you’re going to give it to them.  • Strategic Plan – What approach will you take to meet the needs and interests of your audience in order to meet your own?  Will you engage influencers, will you energize brand
What specific tools will you use to efficiently monitor, communicate, create and promote social content? WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. While there are many to consider, don’t let the tools dictate the strategy.

advocates or will you create demand by offering non-branded resources? • Tactics – What social media marketing tactics and corresponding technologies will you use to implement the plan?  There are many to consider, including blogging, microblogging, social networks, video, forums, blogger relations and outreach. • Tools – What specific tools will you use to efficiently monitor, communicate, create and promote social content? WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. While there are many to consider, don’t let the tools dictate the strategy. • Metrics – How will you measure success according to the objectives you’ve identified? What tools will you use? When will you take benchmark measurements and interval measurements? Are there success metrics you can share with the hivemind?

Blogging
Blogging is a huge topic for B2B corporations. It represents one of the easiest entry points for corporations and it has received some early press that it might have lead generation value. The problem is that most corporate blogs are terrible. They are started without a clear understanding of the objectives, the medium, and the metrics.  What corporations need to understand is that speaking directly to an audience doesn’t do you any good if you’re simply mumbling the same old platitudes. Instead, you should be ready to engage with the hivemind about topical issues that matter. However, it’s not for the timid. You must take a stand, go out on a limb a little bit, and say something interesting. Corporate blogging needs to be more genuine and open. In an age where so much is hype, customers respect and trust companies that provide unvarnished, fresh information. The few businesses that have bared their souls have found that their transparency engenders sympathy, trust and support. 13
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation 5. Measure Everything.
You have a website. It’s beautiful. It’s alive. It offers content that the hivemind craves. It’s the landing area for leads from all your marketing initiatives. But unless you can actively measure its effectiveness, you’re operating blindly. You can’t respond appropriately to changes, build on your success, learn from your mistakes, uncover hidden motivations, or improve the experience.

Web analytics is a collection of data generated from your website — traffic, transactions, server performance, usability statistics and information collected from website visitors. As part of your Intelligent Lead Generation program, you need to use web analytics to understand how people from the hivemind are using your site and how you can enhance their experience.

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HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
Understanding Behaviors
Human activity on websites can be powerful information. As a website owner, you can collect data to make useful predictions and assumptions. Web analytics can tell you: • How many people are visiting?
Intelligent Lead Generation isn’t dependent on high numbers. It’s relies on quality. Which referrals are sending the best traffic versus the most traffic? Metrics help you understand your conversion ratio – which referrals, search phrases, and pages are bringing in business.

• Where did they come from? • Were they led there by search engines? If so, what keywords lead them to you? • Were they lead to you by links from other sites? • How often do they return? For what are they returning? • What are they doing? What are they not doing? • How deeply do they dig into your site? Did they visit one page of your site and leave or did they look around for the information? • How much time are they spending on your site? Do you want them to come, find what they need and leave or do you want them to stick around for a while?

Understanding Your Website
Many people say lead generation is a numbers game. But Intelligent Lead Generation isn’t dependent on high numbers. It’s relies on quality. Which referrals are sending the best traffic versus the most traffic? Metrics help you understand your conversion ratio — which referrals, search phrases, and pages are bringing in business. What are your top entry pages? Believe it or not the page that people see most when they enter your site is not always your home page. Typically, something else pulls them in. Search engines may direct them to a secondary page – a bio, news item or article, for example. This is exactly what you want! Landing visitors on the home page is simply forcing them to click again to get to the information they want. The next trick is to lead people who are not landing on your home page to other important areas of your site. 15
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
How many visitors get to action pages and how many act upon them? Action pages represent the beginning of the sales funnel. They could be download registration pages, check-out pages on an ecommerce site, or simply contact us pages. Metrics can tell you what percent of people visit an action page and leave before completing the action. Armed with this information, you can make adjustments to your action pages. You can make them clearer. You can ask fewer questions. You can restate the benefits of filling out the information.

Usability Studies
Don’t guess at how people are using your site – actually watch and see how they find information and get direct feedback. You might also set up a survey on your site to determine what people like and don’t like. In most cases, a properly executed usability test will uncover two key things: • Areas of confusing navigation. There is no doubt that your web design team knows how your site navigation functions. But does the new user know this? It is important to realize that about an hour into designing your project, you have probably lost all perspective on how the interface appears to others. You need to test and see. • Roadblocks in the flow or delivery of information. Not everyone in your target audience may know that the e-mail address for the author is at the end of the text or that the panoramic photograph moves when the arrows on either side are clicked. What seems normal and natural to the designer is not always so with the user. If you discover that 3-out-of-5 people can’t find registration links, you can make a quick change to the site and easily increase the conversion rate.

Using Web Analytics to Your Advantage
Most small companies install an analytics package and believe their job is done. But Intelligent Lead Generation is all about continuous improvement. Your hivemind audience is not static. It’s changing all the time. To ensure that your website provides the best experience, you should do the following: • Establish baseline data. Most websites are built with the ability to track this basic information including number of visits, page views, and referral sources. Basic web analyt16
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation
ics applications are typically included in your hosting agreement. You should also measure transactional data, such as the number of orders, registrations, newsletter sign-ups, and downloads. Measure your stats and then, in a day, week or month, measure again. Compare your new data to your old data to identify trends. • Measure and change. One of the great things about websites is you can easily make improvements. Once you have baselines established you can begin to experiment with making changes and then observing whether the changes have affected user behavior — positive or negative. • Measure and change – again. Keep on making changes. To continually improve your website, you need to continue to measure and change again.

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HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

Intelligent Lead Generation About HiveMind Marketing, Inc.
Founded by Tom Lauck, a long-time Silicon Valley marketing practitioner, HiveMind Marketing, Inc. is a different kind of marketing firm that specializes in digital lead generation, helping mid-size organizations manage prospects from cold inquiry through opportunity by integrating advanced lead generation and social marketing activities into websites and outbound marketing activities. HiveMind Marketing understands that marketing to the hivemind isn’t something that can be done from the outside. You can’t blast them with ads, spam them with emails, fill their mailboxes with junk mail, or interrupt their TV programs with commercials. It simply doesn’t work. You have to engage them...and that means understanding their collective consciousness, their hivemind. HiveMind Marketing strengthens a company’s overall sales and marketing effort through a broad range of techniques which may include: • Aligning sales and marketing • Improving the company website • Fine-tuning landing pages • Enhancing search engine results • Automating lead nurturing processes • Building online communities • Strengthening outbound marketing activities • Measuring the results HiveMind Marketing’s progressive lead generation methodologies, which increase critical pipeline capture, flow and conversion, are redefining the way progressive organizations select business-critical leadgeneration resources. With offices in San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, HiveMind Marketing, Inc. is primarily focused on clients in the technology industries. For more information on HiveMind, please visit HiveMindinc.com or contact us at [email protected]. 18
HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T: 408.266.3162 E: [email protected]

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