These days our social interactions and our online interactions are overlapping. And, if you read any marketing blog, or watch any entertainment television, you’ve likely been led to believe social media is the holy grail. Lately the common thought seems to be: by integrating social media into your marketing plan, your business plan will magically take off.
Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.
While there is clearly value and power to be found within social media, it is also important to remember:
• There are levels of involvement and not everyone should do a deep dive
• It's no magic bullet -- we're talking a serious time commitment
• It does not eliminate the need for traditional media efforts
If you look at this great diagram by Gary Hayes you'll see that there are degrees of involvement that correlate with different activities.
The Consumer: This is the person/company who actively listens to what is being said online about themselves, their company, their industry etc. This, I believe is the level that ALL people/companies need to be at. (check out this great post by Jason Falls about listening)
The Sharer: This is where you go from reading it to sharing it. Maybe you tweeting great reads or you have one of those blogs where you just list other blog posts worthy of reading. You might also be an association or company leader who wants to create word of mouth or keep your team current. (Word of mouth elevates you as well as what you share.)
The Critic: I take exception with Haye's label on this one. Yes, at this level of activity, you might be criticizing something, but I think in most cases you are reacting to something that's been said. You are adding additional facts, correcting a misperception or asking a follow up question. (If you're doing a good job at level one (The consumer) you'll be able to respond quickly.)
The Editor: There's nothing that says you have to create all new content if you want to deep dive into social media. You could create a site like MarketingProfs that has many authors creating and re-purposing content or perhaps you belong to a group (like my agency networking group) and everyone writes a little...which adds up to a lot.
The Creator: This is where many will tell you that you need to be. It's mandatory. I think that's rubbish. In fact, I think most people should not be here. Why? Because of the time commitment is huge. Because there may not be any ROI for your company to be blogging/content creating. And because most people will start...and then stall. I'm not saying this isn't a smart strategy. I'm just saying it's not for everyone.
I believe that everyone needs to be a consumer. And as a result of actively listening...they can and should be sharing and critiquing when need be. For many, that's where it should end. And there's nothing wrong with stopping there.
What do you think? Should everyone have a blog? Are we all content creators at heart?
July 22, 2009
On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads
A common lead generation practice using B2B inbound marketing includes offering white papers, demos, trial software, or other content assets in exchange for registration information.
The problem is that many marketers immediately turn these form registrations (aka web inquiries) over to the sales team as "leads."
If your sales team perceives the majority of "leads" passed to them are no good, they're unlikely to spend time tracking prospects down.
I’ve already written about why lead quality should be emphasized over quantity. But, how do you weed through all those web inquiries to get to those that are truly ready for the sales team to engage so you can nurture the rest?
Here's a lead qualification process that may help you turn your web inquiries into viable sales leads:
Step 1 - Create a marketing funnel.
The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring inquiries (aka leads) into one spot and qualify them. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready. Lead qualification must first classify leads according to their "sales readiness" and business fit; and second, to manage all the incoming leads effectively.
Step 2 - Create the universal lead definition, and apply it to the remaining inquiries.
There are must-have questions your sales team must know in order to feel that an inquiry is worthy of being called a lead. Ask yourself:
• What’s the company’s size, industry, and geography. At this point, you may want to remove inquiries based on specific marketing requirements or limitations. For example, you may remove foreign email address, student email addresses or contacts residing in locations or industries that you don’t serve. This step could reduce 5 – 10% of entries.
• Ask business situation questions such as number of users, current systems platform, etc.
• What is registrant’s role in the organization, or what is their authority in the buying process?
• Based on their business need, how can you help?
• What stage of investigation are they in the buying process? Many registrants are actually still early in the buying process and are conducting general market research. These contacts are very valuable and should be nurtured and managed over time—but these folks clearly aren’t people who are ready to buy. Be honest about what the search marketing effort is designed to achieve and is capable of accomplishing.
Purge those inquiries containing bogus information. It’s amazing how creative people can get. Remove duplicates and invalid names and email addresses. Keep in mind that simple forms tend to generate less invalid info rather than lengthy, time-consuming forms. People start to question the value of giving up too much info. Trim the form by about 20% to avoid this.
I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.
Step 3 - Create a behavior model to prioritize leads based on activity and data.
Apply lead scoring to prioritize your leads on order to follow-up in step 4. What lead scoring does is assign a point value to who prospects are, how they interact with your company and what their need is for your product. Most marketers give higher scores to those further along in the buying process based on their engagement. Lead scoring works best if you have 200+ inquiries per month. Otherwise it might be overkill.
Use your CRM or marketing automation suite to prioritize based on:
• Level or engagement through touch points such as repeat web visits, downloads, or clicks.
• Size of organization
• Fit
You can measure all these touch points, but in the end if you want to know something you’ll need to talk to someone and engage them in conversation.
Step 4 - Use the phone (or email) to qualify high priority leads based on the scoring.
The phone is the gold standard for qualifying most leads. There’s no better way to engage. We have also found email to be a great way to create a one-to-one dialogue by asking questions. (Test this first with your audiences.).
Using these channels to nurture web registrants, learn more about each one, and then provide personalized and relevant information over time. You should be spoon-feeding prospects, provide truly valuable information, while moving them through the buying process.
Related Posts:
Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads
Lead Nurturing is about Relationships, not e-mails
Using Kaizen to improve your lead generation results in 90 days or less
Thought Leaders as Problem Finders
Genuine thought leaders all exhibit some extraordinary characteristics, some of which we’ve already covered in our various articles on thought leadership.
One of the core values that true thought leaders, and thus, thought leading organizations, exhibit is the trait of being a ‘problem finder.’ Moreover, they demonstrate intellectual curiosity in their industry, the services they provide and the products they make;
follow a model of systemic thinking that helps them find the root cause of the issues that their clients and industry face and they have a healthy sense of ‘paranoia’ in the Andy Grove sort of way that guides them to find the problems beneath the problems and come up with solution after solution no matter how “good” things may look on the surface.
The ‘problem-finder’ notion came across my email inbox this week from the Knowledge@Wharton email newsletter. This article, “The Mindset of a Problem Finder“, is an excerpt from the book “Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen” by Michael A. Roberto”. In the article, Roberto illustrates the difference of having a problem-finder mindset by sharing the story of structural engineer William LeMessurier and his efforts to seek out and correct some of the structural flaws in his original design of the Citicorp building in Manhattan. Roberto states that problem finders use several key characteristics that differentiate them from everyone else. Those same characteristics are what thought leaders use to keep themselves and their organizations ahead of the market, the industry and their competitors. Here’s how they do it.
Thought leaders demonstrate intellectual curiosity - Thought leaders are intrigued by questions rather then threatened by them. In the article, LeMessurier was questioned by a student, of all things. Rather than dismissing the student’s perspective, he explored it and found it to have significant merit. The thought leader in an industry explores problems, seeks out opportunity in sticky situations and maintains integrity throughout the process. Thought leaders demonstrate their intellectual curiosity by:
- Having a restless mind that’s never satisfied with a one-dimensional understanding of an issue
- Thriving on novelty, details and nuances in the challenges that they confront
- Focusing on ‘always learning’ and never forgetting ‘how to learn’
- Seeking out the unfamiliar and upholding the ‘curiosity imperative’
Thought leaders embrace systemic thinking – Systemic thinking means that you, the thought leader, recognizes that nothing, even the smallest of occurrences, happens due to one-off events or through outright negligence of human beings. There’s always a root cause. There’s always more to the story. For example, thought leaders in the banking industry have shared their perspective over the past year on how the multitude of players in the financial scene contributed to the current state of our financial system. Systemic thinking brought them to the multiple sources, issues and conclusions where no one event caused the entire effect. Systemic thinking thought leaders establish their point of view on working on the underlying issues and errors en-route to positing solutions to the larger problem. Thought leaders demonstrate their systemic thinking by:
- Stepping back and questioning “why” things occurred (in fact, they often do the 5-Why’s exercise)
- Recognizing the complex issues are never caused by a single occurrence
- Having the resolve to always “dig deeper”
- Take every opportunity to look holistically at every issue they approach
I’ll describe what a strategic inflection point is a bit later in this book. For now, let me just say that a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end. - Andrew Grove
Thought leaders maintain a healthy sense of paranoia by:
- Never allowing themselves to get too comfortable
- Getting comfortable with problems – there are always problems (the absence of problems is a problem…)
Thought leaders, I mean, real thought leaders, have many more traits that just these three. However, success depends on embracing some core values such as these, and living by them each and every day. In order to attain thought leadership status in your industry, you need to work each and every day on these values and incorporate them into your habituated way of being and infuse them into your corporate culture. Successful thought leaders see every problem in their industry as an opportunity to offer solutions from their unique point of view and add immense value for their clients.
July 20, 2009
Is ‘Voluntary Registration’ Smart Marketing for White Papers?
Are you using white papers to collect business leads? Are white paper registration forms ‘old school marketing?’ Is it better to let white papers roam free with the hope that they’ll magically draw opportunity?
These are very important questions you should ask yourself. And perhaps nothing has spurred the debate more than the mass adoption of social media marketing.
Many businesses are experiencing the viral marketing benefits of unleashing their white papers. Some of the benefits of letting the paper free include:
- Quick access for readers
- Less barriers to the actual paper, increasing the number of readers
- Greater likelihood people will share the white paper among their social media fans
Heck, I’ll be one of the first to say that the value of this method really does work IF your primary objective is exposure. Case in point, the Social Media Marketing Industry Report was read by 40,000 people in mere weeks and did not require registration.
However, marketing isn’t just about numbers of readers. Yes, numbers matter. However, if your objective is to generate quality leads then you really need to ask yourself what’s more important, lots of unknown readers OR many qualified names, e-mails and phone numbers.
Here’s one thing I can share about the success of the above report: Among its 40,000+ readers, less than a few dozen voluntarily e-mailed me and said this is really great, we’d like to work with you. In fact, I can only recall three or four strong prospects from among those tens of thousands of readers. If my goal was lead generation, it would have been a dismal failure (that was not my objective).
The real fine balance we face as marketers is:
1. Do we focus on collecting the lead by gating a paper with a registration form, or
2. Do we focus on exposure by providing free immediate access to a white paper.
Now it seems, a new idea has emerged, known as voluntary registration. What follows, is my assessment of the value of voluntary registration.
So here’s the deal, I came across an article from MarketingSherpa that introduced the concept of voluntary registration. Simply said, voluntary registration asks readers to fill out a form prior to reading a white paper, but says the form is optional.
The theory behind voluntary registration forms is: you can increase your readership and increase the number of quality leads. So, in not so many words, the claim is you can have your cake and eat it too.
The practice is to drive someone to a landing page where they are presented two options. Option one is to fill out the form to receive the white paper. Option two is to simply hit the submit button on the form, leaving all the fields blank and also receive the white paper.
MarketingSherpa presented Australian-based PharmOut as a case example. I was able to locate their optional registration form and take a close look at it. Click here to view the form.
At first glance, it looks like any other white paper registration form, but the words “(no registration necessary)” are included. Beyond the obvious flaws of the page (not tied to a specific white paper, …), I have some major concerns to share.
But first, did the page actually improve readership and lead generation? According to MarketingSherpa, click-through rates on the registration form increased 15.38% when prospects were told registration was optional. In addition 16% of people visiting the page provided contact information over the course of six weeks.
Does this prove that optional registration is a viable option for white papers?
Honestly, I’m not sure. And the reason I’m not sure is because of all the flaws on the registration page.
For example, the page says, “If you think the downloaded document is useful and would like to be notified when others are available, please fill out the form below. But only is (sic) you want to…….. We’ll send you an email when a new white paper, protocol is available.”
So it’s not very clear how this form was used in the sales cycle. It seems that they’re referring to something that already was downloaded based on the above text. If that’s the case, then you have to question how people are finding the landing page in the first place.
My guess is that this company drove people to this landing page, telling them they could register for a specific white paper.
One of the other problems is that after the submit button is filled out, they dump you to this page—simply a long list of stuff you can download.
What does this mean? It means that there really is no connection to any specific white paper going on here.
Summary: MarketingSherpa picked a really BAD example to introduce an interesting concept. I think the jury is still out on whether voluntary registration is viable. And, I have one last concern. Some folks might not realize the form is optional because they are skim readers. So I think the right case study needs to make it ultra-obvious the registration is not required. It’s my guess that most folks will skip registration when given the option, ultimately lowering the number of qualified leads.
What say you??