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This blog is a guest post by Erik Gebhardt, digital media supervisor at Movéo.
In February, Formstack conducted a survey of U.S. senior-level marketers asking them what their biggest challenges are in 2016. One key finding is that 54 percent identified obtaining better quality leads to be their primary goal. More specifically, 67 percent of B2B marketers said it is their main objective. Partnering with a media vendor to distribute your content is one tactic to generate lead volume, but there are factors you should consider before working with one. Below is an overview of the different types of vendors and what questions you should ask to ensure you receive leads that drive high conversion rates and more sales.
There are two types of media vendors who can promote your content.
1. Individual Websites
Going directly to a publisher is one option as long as its audience matches the demographics/firmographics you want to reach. This is oftentimes preferred if you have a very specific job title target or want to run a campaign over an extended period of time utilizing many different tactics (i.e. webinars, white paper postings, display ads, etc.). The downside is it offers limited reach, can be expensive and may not guarantee a specific number of leads.
2. Content Distribution Networks
Content distribution networks come in different forms. Some will host your asset themselves and promote it through e-mail or e-newsletters to an audience who has opted in to receive those messages. You select the criteria you consider to be a marketing qualified lead before the campaign starts and those who don’t match your selections are filtered out.
Another type of network utilizes native advertising, which are text ads embedded within the content of a website. They rely on demographic, geographic, behavioral and contextual targeting to reach your desired audience with the ad directing people to a landing page on your website.
Whatever their methodology is, both reach a wider audience compared to advertising on a single website. It is also typically a less expensive option on a cost-per-lead basis. However, they are limited to promoting specific pieces of content like white papers as opposed to doing larger scale programs including webinars and display ads.
How do you determine which option is best for you? Here are some questions to ask.
1. What process does the vendor follow to generate leads and how is the asset promoted? There must be some level of advertising support. Leads are rarely collected without it. Dedicated e-mails tend to perform best.
2. Will they filter out any undesirable contacts, including students and retirees? Doing so will give you higher quality leads. Note, the more filters selected, the higher the cost-per-lead. You can expect to pay at least 2-3x more if you’re looking for sales-qualified leads rather than marketing-qualified leads.
3. Will they accept a custom registration question? Depending on what is asked, it can help indicate how sales-ready the person is.
4. Will they guarantee a specific number of leads or a minimum amount? Is it capped once the limit is reached? Receiving a minimum or set number of leads holds the vendor accountable for the campaign’s performance.
5. Is the cost a flat fee or based on a cost-per-lead (CPL)? A CPL buy is preferred, as you only pay for the leads delivered and it protects you in case the campaign doesn’t perform up to expectations.
6. How many assets can be posted at a time? If only one, can they be switched out? Knowing this upfront will allow you to outline a content marketing strategy for the vendor.
Movéo has worked with all of these vendors and can help you decide if one or more of them can work together to achieve your goals. Generating leads is only the beginning though. Contact us and we can provide strategic direction on what to do with the leads once they are in-hand.
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An effective lead generation campaign is one that quantifiably drives top-quality prospects to the sales team, giving them the platform they need to generate the most sales possible and drive new revenue. But to understand your marketing’s true impact on generative revenue, you need to track the right data across both your department and the sales team. Are you using the right tools to evaluate and track leads and making the most of the information you collect?
Integrated CRM
For marketing to make the best possible impact on sales, integrating your marketing automation and CRM systems is key. Aligning these tools and tracking systems ensures that marketing and sales don’t cross wires, and instead create a seamless experience for each prospect throughout the buyer’s journey. Marketing automation programs like Act-On and HubSpot smoothly integrate with CRM programs such as Salesforce to organize and track leads.
To ensure this integration happens smoothly, it’s essential for the sales and marketing teams to communicate how they both qualify and organize leads. Ensuring both departments have the same definitions for an opportunity, qualified lead and closed lost lead goes a long way in promoting cohesion and clean data.
Lead Scoring
According to MarketingSherpa, organizations that use lead scoring report a 77 percent better ROI than those that do not. But to see the positive impact of lead scoring, your organization has to implement it well.
Effective lead scoring is a mark of successful marketing-sales communication. To improve your lead scoring and make it as impactful as possible, the marketing and sales teams need to work together to establish lead scoring criteria. Determine if your existing scoring system needs to be adjusted to better deliver qualified leads who will be receptive to a sales call at this point in their lifecycle.
If the leads currently moving to sales are not qualified, consider adjusting your lead scoring or raising the number at which leads are flagged for sales. If too few leads are moving to sales, work with the sales team to determine if it’s appropriate to adjust your scoring system in the other direction. This is also an indication that you may need to troubleshoot your campaign as a whole.
Competitive Audit
To differentiate your brand, you need to know what your competitors are saying in order to create a need in your industry. Take a look at your competitors’ content. Then, decide what your organization can best add to the conversation.
Is there an important aspect of your industry that no one is covering? If your organization has plenty to say on the issue, make it your content niche, and become the thought leadership expert in that area. Or, if your competitors are creating content about a particular topic but in a way that your organization feels is inaccurate or poorly-framed, create content that challenges what they have to say and reframes the issue as your organization sees it.
Want to learn more about how Movéo defines and drives sales activation? Take a closer look at our process.
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Are your lead generation efforts falling behind your goals? Lead generation campaigns can struggle due to a range of issues, with results including the collection of too few leads, collecting unqualified leads and passing along insufficiently nurtured leads to sales. If your current campaign isn’t delivering, try the following approaches to get back on track.
Problem: Too few leads
When a campaign isn’t collecting your target number of leads, it’s painfully obvious. You can see your metrics falling short of the goal. But how can you fix the problem? Here are three options that may improve your lead collection.
Solution 1: Broaden your targeting
Are you targeting a very specific group of people, such as those with a given job title or in a narrow geographic region? Reevaluate if this tight targeting is necessary. Might there be potential buyers or decision-makers with a different job title? Would your solution be valuable in an expanded geographic area, and would this campaign be relevant there? If the answers to any of these questions are yes, broaden your targeting and you will see a greater flow of leads as a result.
Solution 2: Revise your forms
Potential leads may be deterred by forms that require too much personal information too early in the buyer’s journey. How much of the information you are requesting early on is strictly necessary? What is the most important information to know at each stage of the process? People are particularly hesitant to provide a phone number, as they know it may lead to a sales call. Limit requesting a phone number or particularly personal information before individuals are at a stage in the buyer’s journey where they want to hear from sales.
Solution 3: Adjust your budget
Ultimately, your lack of leads may be simply a question of budget. Are you able to devote more money to this campaign? If you can, you will see your leads increase. If you can’t, you may still be able to reallocate funds across channels to reach more potential leads in the places where they best respond to your outreach.
Problem: Too many unqualified leads
If you are gathering plenty of leads but they are largely unqualified, your campaign may have gone overboard in the effort to welcome as many leads as possible. It’s time to pull back in two ways.
Solution 1: Improve registration questions
Unlike a campaign that collects too few leads, a campaign that collects unqualified leads can benefit from more detailed form fields. Gather the information you need to know such as job title or company size. To balance collecting enough leads and making sure they are qualified, you may choose to collect this information not in the very first form a lead encounters, but in a subsequent one.
Solution 2: Work with the sales team
It’s possible that this problem goes back further than your campaign and back to a misunderstanding between sales and marketing. If so, it’s time to improve your marketing-sales alignment. Sit down with the sales team and have a conversation about exactly what they’re looking for in a qualified lead. Then, adjust your campaign’s targeting to better reach this type of buyer.
Problem: Leads lack nurturing
Is the sales team complaining that the leads they reach out to aren’t ready to hear from them and don’t have enough of an understanding of your offering and their need for it? If so, your leads are not being nurtured properly before they move to sales.
Solution 1: Lead scoring
To ensure that leads are moving from marketing to sales at the right point in their development, it’s essential that your team use lead scoring, and lead scoring that is set up appropriately for your sales team’s needs.
Leads need to be educated before they are contacted by sales. If they are contacted too early, they will be taken aback, and the sales representative won’t be able to make any progress. They may even alienate the lead. Proper lead scoring, in contrast, grades leads based on the ways in which they have engaged with your campaign, and marks them as qualified for a sales call only when they have reached a certain threshold. Work with the sales team to establish lead scoring that delivers leads to sales when they are nurtured and ready for a sales call.
Solution 2: Analytics for better content
In order to engage and nurture your leads, you need to understand what content resonates with them. To create more of the types of content that keep leads coming back to your digital presence and drive conversions, use analytics tools to track metrics like time spent on each page of your site, the behavior flow through your site, most share content and more. Then, create more of the most impactful forms of content.
Are you looking to better engage B2B buyers? Read our white paper, Engaging B2B buyers before the buying process: 4 key steps.
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For a demand generation effort to be successful, you need to first convince your prospects that they need your company’s products or services and second that your firm is best fit to provide them. It’s a two-step process.
Start this process by successfully identifying and targeting the actual pain your audience feels. You marketing communications should suggest what will happen if the pain is not addressed — and what can happen when it’s addressed by your company.
Establishing the need
When you’re trying to convince your audience that they have an unfulfilled need, consider the following: Is your product or service solving an obvious problem? Why do people need your product? If your company manufactures hardware supplies, for example, it’s easy to identify a need—it’s impossible to build anything without your products. But if you’re selling mascara, it will be more difficult to identify why people need your product. In either of these examples, you’ll also probably have competitors who may already be crafting messaging that identifies a need and positions themselves as the solution.
Here’s the thing: need is as emotional as it is practical. Those people buying your hardware are doing it because they believe your product is necessary for their success. Those people buying your mascara need to be convinced that your product will make them prettier. In order to identify a need, dig into the emotional core of your target audience. What do they want? Why do they want it? Once you have that information, you’ll be better equipped to craft messaging that addresses how your unique company solves this need.
Your solution
Once your prospects know they need the services performed in your industry, you need to convince them that your company offers the only solution that will truly work for them. To do so, first research how each element of your brand resonates with your customers. What initially attracted them to your organization, and what prompted them to convert? What is unique about your product or service that no other competitor offers?
Take your findings and use what you learn to amplify the most effective points for your leads. Use case studies and testimonials to show how your solution has benefited other organizations like theirs. Pinpoint your current customers’ pain points, and see if you can extrapolate this data onto your current leads.
Once you have this information, you can begin crafting your marketing to address this pain. Use inbound marketing to woo your leads over time and map the inbound marketing stages to your process. In the initial “awareness” stage of your marketing, build leads’ awareness of your product and identify their pain in each piece of content. Moving down the funnel, begin to address how you solve that need to compel them to request a demo or reach out to sales. Build a relationship between each lead and your brand, so that when it’s time for a sales call they have an emotional connection to your brand, not just a need that could be filled by anyone in your industry.
Looking for more ways to strengthen your marketing? Read our white paper, The five new laws of content.
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Frequently, Movéo experts share their expertise with the team with a short presentation on a timely marketing topic over lunch. Last week, John Reynolds, Director of Consulting and Engagement at Movéo, spoke on designing for behavior change. We’d like to share his insights with you as well.
Behavioral design
The concept of behavioral design — using applied psychology and frequent testing to create products and services that meet the needs and requirements of users — has applications in fields including education, patient care, human resources, finance and more. In marketing, it is key to encouraging customers to buy a product or service.
Behavioral design is a field with a robust scientific history, including the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose work in behaviorism focused on positive and negative reinforcement. Behaviorism seeks to understand why individuals’ behaviors change by understanding the environment around them as well as their personal and behavioral characteristics. In the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, directly linked theories of persuasion to marketing and business, creating the six principles of persuasion we will discuss below.
Emotional buying
While B2B purchasing decisions are often thought of as more logical and less emotional than B2C purchases, emotions play an undeniable role in business purchases. Although business decision-makers have to make certain purchases for work and are not doing so with their own money, those decisions still carry an emotional weight. Marketers must recognize and engage with the emotional side as well as the rational side of each buyer’s journey.
In your own marketing, successfully tap into prospects’ emotions by focusing your messaging on the benefits your product or service will grant and the harms it will remove. Often, focusing on the removal of harm is a particularly effective tactic. When crafting your marketing plan, consider where your product or service can minimize business risk, and how you can weave that throughout your messaging.
Video marketing provides a particularly impactful way to create an emotional link between your audience and your brand. When producing video content, focus on immediately creating an association by presenting someone who has a problem similar to that of your audience, and then tying its resolution to the solution you offer.
The six key principles of influence
Dr. Cialdini’s six principles of influence are:
- Reciprocity
- Commitment and consistency
- Social proof
- Authority
- Liking
- Scarcity
It’s likely you already practice several of these principles in your marketing. Offering downloadable content in exchange for personal information is an example of reciprocity in action. Demonstrating that a given solution is used by some percentage of companies in the industry is an example of social proof. If you’ve ever made an effort to make your prospects feel more connected to your work or organizations your solutions have benefited, you’ve practiced liking.
Together, Dr. Cialdini’s six principles provide a useful toolkit for marketers looking to increase the effectiveness of their operations. How else have you used these principles in your own work?
If you’re interested in learning more about the power of behavioral design in marketing, contact us.
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Movéo is proud to once again be partnering with the Mulliganeers, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds for children and families in need. After about five years of working to support the Mulliganeers in a variety of ways, Movéo recently helped the group rebuild their website from the ground up. The new website, built on the WordPress platform, required new architecture, design and programming.
“The new website… not only raises [the Mulliganeers’] professional look, it provides them with content management tools that will allow them to efficiently manage the website going forward,” says Dave Cannon, Vice President of Creative Technology at Movéo. “It also provides much needed support for mobile audiences, improved calls-to-action and new donation features that we hope will help the Mulliganeers raise even more money to help the families they sponsor.”
Telling an emotional story digitally
Movéo created a website that more prominently showcases the stories of children who rely on the support of the Mulliganeers.
These children and their families are at the heart of the Mulliganeers’ mission, and it was important that the new website create emotional connections between those children and families and potential donors. To do so, Movéo and the Mulliganeers put the children’s stories front and center, and added a content management tool so that those stories could be updated over time. The new section will dynamically display how the Mulliganeers have helped the families through every step of their journey.
The new site also prominently features the Mulliganeers’ mission and successes. Visitors can easily find information on annual events and can’t-miss opportunities to have a great time while supporting a good cause. Check them out here.
Making it mobile
A mobile-responsive website was also a priority for the redesign. Today, mobile-responsiveness is basically a prerequisite for any organization. For an organization that relies on donations as the Mulliganeers does, it’s critical to be able to reach people not only when they are sitting at a desk but in the micro-moments throughout the day when they could be prompted to do good, whether that is waiting in line for lunch or sitting on the couch in the evening.
Mobile is also convenient for event attendees. “Mobile usage continues to rise, and having an improved mobile presence allows their donors and friends to easily get the information they want, like the location or times of a fundraising event,” Cannon explains.
Improving donations
On the new website, the redesigned donation page uses the thoughtful presentation of options to encourage giving. The new page offers a friendly user experience, making it easier for site visitors to donate and offering clear options for donations at varying levels and on a one-time or recurring basis.
We look forward to continuing to support the Mulliganeers as they support children and families in need. To learn more about the Mulliganeers, donate to their cause or consider attending one of their events, visit Mulliganeers.org.
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As with any marketing campaign, a demand generation effort requires regular attention to optimizing its performance in order to generate the best possible results. You already know that Movéo recommends that every key marketing decision be informed by data. But how do we take our best practices and apply them within a demand generation campaign? Here are three ways we do so.
Analytics
At this point, using Google Analytics or a similar analytics tool to analyze your marketing KPIs should be a requirement for your organization. This is information you cannot be leaving on the table, because it gives your team insights into the ways that your audience interacts with your content. Take your data collection a step further with heat mapping tools that allow your team to see not only how often people visit your pages and how they flow through your site, but also how long they spend on each page and what sections or offerings they prefer within each page. This gives you insight into which information is attracting people and encouraging them to move throughout your site. Isolate the information that drives people towards contacting you—this is what you can prove generates demand. Then, use that information, copy and design to inform your demand generation efforts.
Scorecard
Successful optimization plans begin with clear goals. Set up a scorecard outlining your goals for key demand generation activities, and track metrics against these goals monthly and quarterly. Regularly evaluate where your demand generation work is meeting and exceeding your goals, as well as where it is underperforming. Then, consider the best course of action to improve underperforming metrics. Is your content weak? Start giving away better thought leadership. Are people simply not showing up on your pages? Determine how you can reach a larger audience, whether it’s by encouraging your existing audience to share content or by investing in ads. Remember: demand generation takes time. If you can track how prospects are progressing week over week, you can get a sense of how long it takes to generate demand.
Think critically about your audience
Demand generation needs to reach a lot of people: but who’s best to target? you need to be sure you’re reaching at least a portion of people who you can safely assume will have interest in your offerings. Start thinking about the best ways to target these people: whether it’s through buying a list from a trusted partner organization with targeted clients or personally prospecting, take the time to learn more about who you’re sending information to. Think of these aspects of your marketing as the early stages of building long-term relationships with members of your audience.
Remember, demand generation should build marketing and sales cohesion within your organization. Talk to the sales team as you work to optimize your campaign, and find out what their needs are and how your work can better serve them further down the line.
We’d love to talk more about how you can optimize demand generation campaigns at your organization and answer your questions. Interested? Give us a call.
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For any B2B or healthcare organization, demand generation is a critical marketing activity. After all, a brand needs to have an established level or recognition in the industry before marketers can successfully deploy lead generation and lead nurturing tactics. Demand generation creates that awareness and interest.
As we take a deeper look at demand generation, it’s time to dive into the three phases that make up any successful demand generation strategy. Take a look:
Building awareness
Building brand awareness is a vital component of demand generation. While the audience of a demand generation campaign is usually aware of their need, they may not be aware of your brand or the solution to their need. This stage of demand generation activities might include direct advertising, search engine marketing, social media, email campaigns and mobile marketing efforts. Unlike lead generation, much of the brand awareness activity occurs before any leads are collected, through actions like giving away valuable educational content in order to attract interest and build a reputation as a thought leader.
To stand out from the crowd, consider what your brand can offer that goes beyond your competitors and offers real value that your audience won’t find anywhere else. Consider the digital ad company Wordstream, which in 2011 launched a free tool, the Adwords Performance Grader, that allows anyone to assess the effectiveness of their Google Adwords campaigns, and where those campaigns could be improved.
Before launching a demand generation effort aimed at building brand awareness, make sure your brand is conducting the appropriate research and making data-driven decisions. Conduct market research to get a sense of your current brand awareness and perceptions, and work to determine what questions people have about your offerings. Create a campaign that will directly address the gaps in awareness that your research reveals.
Facilitating engagement
Another critical aspect of a successful demand generation effort is facilitating engagement with your audience. That means creating content that is truly clickable, that addresses your audience’s pain points and is well-crafted, compelling people to read or watch and share.
Create a demand generation campaign that is designed to encourage engagement by planning a robust, cohesive content strategy. Make every asset you create embody the same messaging and tie back to the same goals. B2B video is one particularly compelling and growing content type that can drive top-notch engagement.
At this stage, you may even consider hosting an event to tie into your larger demand generation strategy or plan an appearance or a giveaway at an existing trade event. Such events can always be repurposed into digital experiences to share with your broader audience. Again, data and research are key. An event requires extensive resources, and so you need to carefully assess what will best serve your needs and how to reach the right people. Then, track the expenses and results of your event to guide future decision-making.
The third aspect of demand generation is optimizing performance, an area that we will explore in depth in Thursday’s blog post. In the meantime, learn more about how we approach demand generation.
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No matter their specifics, demand generation programs all aim to do the same thing: get prospects engaged with a brand and interested in the brand’s products and/or services. To create successful demand generation campaigns, brands first have to ensure that they are providing marketing content in the channels where their prospective buyers are looking for solutions to their business challenges.
Brand awareness and demand generation
Demand generation casts a wide net to reach many potential customers, whether they are buyers or influencers.
However, demand generation efforts may include lead generation, especially when your prospects are unaware that they have a need for your solution. Generating demand means raising awareness and cultivating the community of people interested in your brand, sharing information about the problems your solutions address.
Generating demand through both inbound and outbound tactics
Demand generation incorporates tactics from both inbound and outbound marketing. On the outbound side, demand generation includes traditional advertising as well as digital ads. Direct mail marketing would also fall under this heading. While these ads may not reach individuals at a time when they are looking to buy, and may not even reach a highly-targeted audience, they build brand awareness and generate demand.
Those inbound tactics include much of what we discuss on this blog, including compelling educational content and blogging itself. Inbound marketing, especially content marketing, is a key part of the demand generation process because it aims to educate an organization’s audience about the need for its products and solutions.
Join us throughout the month as we take a closer look at the intricacies of lead generation and demand generation. While you’re waiting for our next post, review our white paper on the New Marketing Value Chain to better understand how these strategies fit into marketing today.
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Do you know the difference between demand generation and lead generation? We were surprised to hear that many marketers don’t. Each can play a huge role in driving business growth, but to think of the two as one and the same is a serious misstep that can lead to unsatisfying results.. This month, we’re taking a closer look at how they’re different, how they’re similar and how they each relate to brand success. To kick it off, we’re discussing the relationship and how to know which one will work for your business.
Separating demand generation from lead generation
Demand generation is any activity that creates awareness and interest of your business/product/service, and can include inbound and outbound tactics. Lead generation, on the other hand, is all about using content or other marketing efforts to collect names and contact information. Lead gen is often paired with a lead nurture strategy, where the marketing team and sales team work to convert those prospects into customers, to generate revenue. Successful lead generation campaigns begin with an established level of brand awareness.
Which should you use?
We’ll be discussing the tactics associated with demand generation and lead generation campaigns later in the month, but for now, you need to know which strategy will work better for your needs. Are you unsure if your current needs should be taken care of through lead generation efforts or a broader demand generation campaign? Consider the following:
- Who are you targeting and are they familiar with your organization?
- Are you looking to gather personal information on specific prospects, or impact a broad population?
- Are you looking to drive sales directly, or to build your brand reputation for increased sales down the road?
- Do you already have a robust community of interest to market to, or is growing one a priority?
Or, if you have a campaign in mind and you aren’t sure how to properly categorize it, ask yourself:
- Am I asking for individuals to exchange their personal information for content? (Lead generation)
- Is this about driving concrete prospects? (Lead generation)
- Is this campaign focused on growing awareness of the brand? (Demand generation)
- Is this about reaching people who have not yet entered the sales funnel? (Demand generation)
Check back every Tuesday and Thursday for a new post on demand generation and lead generation. In the meantime, take a look at our demand generation page for more on how Movéo specifically uses it to drive growth for clients.
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