Can you couple audio with white paper landing pages and improve online registrations?
Read on to find the answer.
I was recently hosting a teleclass with lead generation expert Brian Carroll. One of the attendees asked about marketing strategies with white papers.
Brian brought up an idea I had not heard and frankly I think it is brilliant. He said:
I interviewed Paul Dunnay, who’s senior director of marketing at BearingPoint and asked him how he uses white papers.One of the cool things BearingPoint does is they have a little bit of an executive summary that’s done as recorded podcast.
What’s really cool is it gives people a preview and we find that there’s a bit of a buzz factor there.
So the idea is this: Create an audio abstract that readers can listen to.
Paul explained that by including the audio abstract he can increase the response of white paper registrations by 200 percent!
If you want to listen to the podcast with Brian and Paul, click here.
Take this one step further: You can also embed audio into your PDF files!! See http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/tutorials/pdfsound/
What are your thoughts about audio introductions to white papers?
Marketing’s Role in Closing Deals
When people think of “Marketing” they often think “advertising”, “PR”, or “promotions.” But Marketing can also play a valuable role in helping sales reps close deals. How? We offer three areas where Marketers can focus their efforts, where the rubber meets the road–at the point of sale. We believe a purchase occurs when all three factors exist in the customer’s mind–motive, means, and belief. Let’s look at each of these.
Motive – A Compelling need
Customers don’t buy unless they have a need. You can either create it for them or they may perceive one on their own. The issue is whether this need is compelling enough to justify spending money and resources. Marketers can help sales teams by:
• Lead generation campaigns that emphasize smaller, more focused customer events such as “lunch & learn” seminars where only a dozen or so prospects are invited to hear an expert talk about best practices. Such events tend to help prospects crystallize their needs far better than trade shows, whitepapers, and webinars.
• Arm sales reps with qualifying questions such as: what is the business imperative (must-have versus nice-to-have) for this project/purchase? Why buy now? Why not wait? Who cares about the successful deployment of this solution? How would you quantify the benefits?
• Excellent value proposition. Take time and even hire messaging/positioning experts to hone your product value proposition. Taking the form of an elevator pitch, this tool can even help the prospect sell the project internally.
Means – Money and resources
Besides motive, customers will obviously have to be willing to spend money and apply resources to deploy the solution. Help your sales team help the customer’s project sponsor line up the necessary bucks and headcount.
• Killer ROI – using the customer’s own data, help them see how your solution can help them make money and save money. But beyond typical ROI analyses, explore creative ways to help the customer match revenue gains with expected cash flows, capital outlays, and expenses.
• Budget pools – sometimes a $250K deal can be put together by getting funds from 3 different organizations. Yes it presents a more challenging sales cycle but the deployment may involve multiple departments anyway and you might as well get their buy-in and skin in the game upfront. Help reps by mapping out the org chart and focusing them on the budget line items they should pursue.
• Resources—technology customers, especially, the middle management, will appreciate your proactively showing them how much, if any, resource it will take them to reap the full benefits of the solution. If you have a services team, show how your organization can reduce or shoulder the customer’s burden.
Belief – Trust that the solution will work
So you have a prospect that has a burning need and money to burn. That doesn’t mean you’ll get the business. Now you show them that your solution is the right one for them and that your company is the right partner for them. Marketers can shape beliefs by:
• Customer references – nothing builds credibility and reassures better than a satisfied customer. Deliver strong references that will accept phone calls from prospects.
• Product reviews – independent auditors, magazines, and industry organizations can play a key role in validating the performance/value of your product. We had one client that generated 10 qualified leads/day as a result of one glowing product review.
• Proof-of-concepts – do them only if product usage really helps speed the sale. Too often sales teams waste time feeding customers’ RFP and evaluation processes rather than picking the right games to play and win. Give your reps the recommended success criteria for a proof-of-concept and when to best use this tool and when to run.
In conclusion, a technology sale usually occurs when there’s an intersection of motive, means, and belief. Marketing can assist sales reps very directly by delivering tools, programs, and expertise for each of these three success factors.
Where's the Passion in B2B Marketing?
I recently spoke at MarketingSherpa's Demand Generation Summit Boston and I felt led to go off topic for a bit to address why I do, what I do. Personally, I've been pondering the idea of passion and what role it plays in our careers as marketers or leaders.
Read Mike Volpe's summary of my presentation at the Small Business Hub Blog.
In my short aside, I ended up talking about things we marketers often don't talk about. Our heart. What drives us? What role does the heart play in our job as marketers?
How do we create relevance for ourselves, our colleagues, and those future customers we hope to reach and influence?
Can you market something without passion and still be successful? If so, why would you want to?
I've wondered how we can be passionate advocates to others outside our companies if we don't have close relationships and trust inside our companies.
To me, disharmony is the enemy of execution. I liked something Seth wrote a while back, "...just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed." I agree.
In this age of automation, depersonalization, scoring and measurement, I'm not seeing the "human touch" in B2B marketing. So how can we humanize the process and actually build relationships?
I'm sincere in my vision to profoundly change the way people think about marketing and lead generation for the complex sale.
I believe the complex sale presents a set of unique sales and marketing problems that benefits by a shift away from the traditional lead generation mind-set to a new way of thinking centered on these basic tenets:
• More ROI is reaped from the patient tending of potential customers (relationships) over time. Customers for life.
• Lead generation is a conversation, not a series of disjointed campaigns.
• Build relationships with the right people and companies regardless of their timing to buy.
• Engage people early (preferably before) in their buying process as possible so you can create and influence their vision.
• The first impression matters. So does the second. So does every single touch after that. Consistency and relevancy is key.
• Sales and marketing must work together as one team. Seeing each other as internal customers.
• A multi-modal and multi-touch lead generation portfolio will always outperform marketing tactics that stand alone.
• Sales and marketing should have a unified understanding and consensus in their language on things like ideal customers and universal lead definition.
• If used properly, the phone is the single best way to reach decision makers and to begin a dialog when you have a complex sale.
• Buy-in from sales and marketing as well as executive leadership is critical to the success of any lead generation program.
• Be willing and prepared to close the loop with every opportunity that is identified.
• The purpose of marketing is to help the sales team sell.
• Trusted advisers win more sales than slick brands.
• Companies don't buy - people do. Don't ever forget the human touch.
Again, I think the complex sale requires the human touch as a central element. It starts with our individual heart and our passion (Do I believe in what I'm doing?). Then we orient ourselves to our company’s collective heart and passion (Do I believe in my company and what my company does?). Finally, we carry heart and passion outside our companies (Do we believe in what we're doing?).
The Drive Toward Social Marketing
A couple of months ago I made the audacious, or maybe obnoxious, comment that lead generation is dead. A few people took me to task for that comment—after all, marketing plans and programs are all predicated on finding people to buy our products and services. But the cost and effectiveness of tactical lead generation programs is becoming increasingly more challenging. So I want to provide a specific example this month of how I see demand generation changing in the age of social media.
The problem with typical lead generation programs is that they’re mercenary. Far too often, the mentality is more about efficiency than about building a meaningful and profitable relationship with customers. More effort goes into profiling prospects than dialoging with them, and rapidly sorting out qualified prospects who are closest to making a purchase decision. That’s great for the company, but often less than ideal for the average consumer. That’s why we have do-not-call lists, TIVO, email filters and a CAN-SPAM act.
The approach too many companies pursue is like lining 100 ducks up on a fence, shooting all your ammo at them and hoping you knock down 1.5 percent—and then creating an ambitious goal for the next campaign to achieve 1.7 percent. Unfortunately, the remaining 98.3 percent become increasingly unavailable to line up on the fence in the future because they don’t like being shot at. But marketers are getting smarter.
One of the recent evolutions in lead generation focuses on “nurturing” or “cultivating” leads. When you run a campaign and only 1.5 percent convert today, another large group of prospects may be qualified, but not ready to buy. The idea is to keep the lines of communication open with these prospects until they’re ready to buy, rather than letting them fall out of the funnel altogether. Marketers are increasingly responsible for building a continuous and actively engaged crop of prospects, rather than treating every campaign as a self-contained window of prospecting after which all of the unconverted leads are forgotten. Many call this the continuous campaign, and it’s certainly an improvement.
But if you look at the trajectory of this trend, it’s quite obvious that it’s still one step short of its logical conclusion. What cultivating leads is reaching toward is, big surprise, building communities. Think about it. Cultivating is about sustaining an open line of communication. The problem is that too often it’s not a real dialog. It’s more like: “Are you ready to buy now? How about now? Uh. Now?” It’s not about sustaining an open dialog, where you’re actively engaging members of your market community on issues that matter to you both. The other problem with most cultivation techniques is that they’re isolated lines of communications—one-to-one. The power of social media is the power of sharing ideas. Peer-to-peer. There’s a lot more value, authenticity and trust in open public dialog than there is in one-to-one communications that are typically one-sided discussions about sales.
The challenge with developing communities is the same challenge companies are facing with all social media channels. You can’t control the message as well as you can when you’re churning out propaganda. But people are growing increasingly resistant to all forms of propaganda, so you really don’t have much of a choice any way. The question is how to go about what I call the new era of social marketing. I wrote about this in detail in an earlier post, so I won’t rehash it all now. But I will tell you about my experience doing community development on Facebook, as one example of community driven marketing.
Recently I ran a traditional lead generation campaign with a white paper offering 12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media. The response was overwhelming. The paper is still generating qualified leads, well over 1000 since the campaign started during the summer. A friend of mine challenged me to drive the same campaign online through Facebook, and I learned some important tactical lessons about social marketing.
My first step was to spend some time searching the existing Facebook groups focused on marketing. One of the most active is Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy Group. I engaged in some of the discussions going on in various forums, talking about social media and marketing technology. I started building my network of friends. My first surprise was discovering how many smart and engaged marketers are hanging out on Facebook.
After a couple of weeks playing around on existing groups, I started my own group under my agency’s name, MotiveLab. I posted my white paper as a featured link in my group, and then went out to other groups and talked about it. The response was similar to the lead generation campaign. In less than a week I had over 400 new downloads of the whitepaper. But more important, I gained more than 150 new members of my group. The seed of a community. Now what?
One of the challenges on Facebook—and on the Web in general—is getting people engaged. It’s one thing to have people read your white paper, but it’s another thing to get them to comment or engage in public discussion. After basking in the glow of having a successful community as measured by the relative number of new members, I quickly realized I needed to do something to keep the energy going. I started by posting a few discussion topics, but no one responded. I posted some links to content I’d written on my blog, still no comments. Finally, I took a page from LinkedIn and started my own Q&A. I started writing “Questions of the Week”, and sending them out to members of my group. What’s the secret to great community content? What’s the best software for building corporate communities? What’s your favorite online community?
And this is where I learned the real value of social marketing. Instead of plastering the Web with invitations to buy my services, I was engaging in dialog with members of my market community about issues that matter to them. I was inviting their insight, their opinions, and tapping into their ideas. In the process, I was learning a lot of things about my market, meeting a lot of very intelligent peers and, surprise, getting requests for proposals. What was interesting about these prospects is that none of them asked the typical sales-process questions I usually get during lead generation campaigns. Because these prospects were already members of my group, and already engaging in dialog, I didn’t have to educate them about who I was or how I do business. They already knew what they wanted to know about me and my business.
Now I’m not by any means suggesting that Facebook is the next generation marketing vehicle, or that this exact approach will work for any company. But the principal will, and it’s only growing. Social Media has created the opportunity for consumers to connect and share information that helps them make better purchase decisions. Chances are, your customers are already participating in these groups somewhere online. You can try to pick them off using traditional lead generation techniques, but look at how these techniques are evolving. Everything is pointing toward the development of customer communities, in which businesses play a role as a member of the community—sparking dialog, assessing needs, offering products and accepting feedback. The only question now is whether you jump in early, or jump in late.