Stairway to Success – Nurturing your leads online

It’s not all about leads. The sales process in the B2B landscape has embraced a significant change. A purchase typically involves multiple decision makers, multiple teams and multiple stages. Creating awareness and interest about your products is just the first step of a long process. The bulk of your prospects, while having a fair idea of what their objectives are, are unaware of what your company exactly offers. Only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated, according to MarketingSherpa. The remaining 73% constitutes a glaring opportunity and a stairway to success for sales growth. There is a high risk of the leads generated being lost, ignored or scooped up by competitors. It is thus essential for marketers to educate prospects and move them ahead in the sales funnel in order to increase the lead-conversion rate. And this is where lead nurturing comes into the picture.

B2B Lead Nurturing caters to prospective buyers during the early stages of the buying process by providing them with highly relevant educational content. It can help build preference for your products and brand in the minds of prospects long before they are actively engaged and reach the buying stage. It is about building relationships and trust to ensure success at a later stage.

Traditionally, marketers and sales-reps responded to prospect enquiries and their interest in a company’s services and products. But with the advent of online channels and their ever expanding reach, prospects are spending more time online obtaining, researching and analyzing information. On average, customers progress nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales rep, according to the Marketing Leadership Council. The companies are hence, although indirectly, meeting their prospects at a much earlier stage than before. There is where companies have to leverage digital marketing and capture leads; with an aim to maximize the conversions.

After you first identify interest and generate leads from different channels and awareness efforts – Social Media, PR, Search Marketing, Content Marketing or Direct connection – the next step to build this buying interest through relevant and valuable education efforts. Online lead nurturing, as a process, can target specific audience sets at different stages of the sales process with a singular aim of moving them forward. Once you set up your lead nurturing process, your campaigns can cater to someone who opts in at any of the early stages. There are 5 key points to optimize your online lead nurturing process.

Audit your current state

Before putting in place a lead nurturing strategy, audit your existing campaigns, current lead generation rates, traffic levels and the corresponding conversion rates. Having a lot of website visitors is great, but they are of value if they do not lead to any conversions. It is also important to evaluate what information you gather as part of your lead generation process. By gaining data like an email address, website, social media handles, etc. you can continue to monitor and engage them.

Establish the target audience

Once you have established your lead generation strategy, you need to create a plan in order to reach the right people at the right stage. Typically, there are different types of prospects with different requirements and objectives, at different stages of the sales process. You have to validate your prospects and identify who needs nurturing. There are different ways in which you can segment your customers – seniority, company size, industry, role, etc. Once you have the types of prospects in the bag, segment them accordingly and map them to their objectives and requirements.

Offer valuable and relevant content

Your objective is not to hit your prospects with one sales pitch after the other. Instead, offer them valuable and relevant information (for example, webinars, eBooks, and whitepapers) that would educate them and drive them to make the buying decisions. There are various ways in which a company can share lead nurturing information. Content Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing, Mobile, Blog, etc. can enable you to share information different kinds of information depending on the nature of the content. To reach out to specific audience, you can target the prospects specific to the particular sales stage and deliver highly focused content.

Set concise and measurable goals

Once you zero in on the target audience and offer them content, you have to define the consequent actions that you’d want them to take. For example, once you share a white paper with your prospects, you may want them to visit a specific page on your website. After a webinar, you may want them to download a business case, or an ROI calculator that allows them to further investigate your products. It is important to define what you qualify and quantify as a prospect moving ahead in the sales process.

Establish timelines for your campaigns

Your prospects do not want to see a barrage of emails about your products, no matter how relevant and valuable, flooding their inboxes or on their social media profiles. It is always a good idea to have a lead nurturing cycle in place. How long do you want your lead nurturing process to be? How often should you share the content you have decided on? It is important to create a lead nurturing calendar for each campaign and set the timelines.

Analyze and optimize

As you kick off your lead nurturing campaign, you have to monitor its state with respect to the measurable objectives that were set in place before. The results can give you an understanding on what works and what doesn’t in terms of various parameters like prospect segmentation, timelines, types of content or even subject lines for the emails. Evaluate them against your set targets and optimize your campaigns.

Online lead nurturing, if done effectively, can work wonders for your sales process and improve the lead-to-customer conversion rates.

08/03/201308/03/2013

Digital Marketing for the B2B Landscape

The B2B buying process has undergone a transformation, and so has the B2B customer. Let’s roll the clock back in time. Information about your company, services, products and solutions was not readily available, or if it was, then not readily accessible. The sales representatives were the first touch points for your customers to gather any information about your services, and for your company to gather information about them and generate leads.

This was a time when salespeople were ‘actively’ trying to sell products and services to potential customers, which is otherwise known as ‘interruption marketing’. Traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc. were the means to reach out to prospects. And there was no way to gauge the interest of your target audience in your offerings.

Now let’s come back to the present. Customers are no longer waiting for your salesperson to ring the door bell, figuratively speaking. With the emergence of digital technologies came information abundance, and with it a highly informed B2B buyer. The internet, social media and other digital platforms have overwhelmed the target audience with information with a multitude of options and competitive offerings to consider. While earlier, the objective was to capture your prospects’ attention, the objective now is to focus the attention towards your company. The changing B2B landscape has thus necessitated a change in the tactics for marketers, and this is where digital marketing comes into the picture.

Take a look at the modern B2B customer. According to the Marketing Leadership Council, on average, customers progress 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales-rep. 78% of B2B buyers start their research with online search (Eloqua) and 33% of global B2B buyers use social media to engage with their vendors (Social media B2B). These statistics clearly show the upending of the customer’s role in the sales cycle.

The role of digital marketing is to address this shift in the sales process by reaching the target audience in the right stages. The one common thread running through the transformation is building relationships. How well marketers build strong digital relationships with the customer base can impact the success of the marketing objectives. Companies have thus modified their B2B marketing strategies to include the digital channels and platforms like email, social media, content marketing, etc. to improve the relationship-building process, establish a strong brand presence and drive lead generation and nurturing.

Digital Marketing helps marketers meet major marketing objectives that they face in a B2B landscape.

Strong brand presence: By reaching the target audience early on in the sales cycle with a focused and relevant approach, digital marketing helps establish a strong brand presence with the audience. Content marketing creates a strong impact by catering to the information needs of the customers throughout the entire sales process and drives the demand generation for the products and services.

Communication Framework: Gone are the days when marketers struggled to reach and educate your prospects with relevant information. Digital Marketing creates a communication framework through multiple options like email, websites, search engines and social media which expand the reach and at the same time, allow companies to establish communities where potential customers interact among themselves and with the company easily.

Lead Generation and Nurturing: By syndicating content and information across a variety of digital channels and networks, lead generation can be improved. Digital marketing enables implementing highly relevant and focused targeting for the campaigns which ensures that the number of ‘relevant’ leads goes up. Providing interesting educational content for these prospects can build a brand recall and product preference much before the buy stage.

Analytics and ROI: The challenge with traditional marketing tactics is a lack of, or minimal, scope for analytics and measuring the Return of Investment. Digital Marketing provides actionable, updated insights for marketers on their initiatives which allow them to fine tune and optimize them. It also enables the measurement of ROI for each initiative to evaluate which of them work at any specific time and make the marketing plans more effective.

With more innovations and technologies in the future, more and more companies are adopting digital marketing as a significant part of the marketing blueprint. Digital is indeed the future!

13/02/201308/03/2013

Content Generation – The 10 commandments

Content Marketing is increasingly becoming a key strategy for product marketers. With prospects and customers ceasing to be passive and, on the contrary, actively gathering information, comparing product offerings and alternatives, product marketers are now turning to content marketing as a key strategy for their communication operations.

The purpose of Content Marketing is to create a scenario where your customers and prospects interact, react, engage and market on their own. Instead of publishing self-proclaiming ads, the focus has now shifted to providing content that the target audience finds relevant and resourceful.

The key question then is how to ensure you publish relevant and resourceful content for your target audience. The basis for any content marketing strategy is the content itself, and how you shape and mould your content can define your success. The following 10 Commandments of Content Generation will serve as an effective roadmap for your content marketing success

YOUR CONTENT SHALL NOT BE PROMOTIONAL
Your prospects don’t want to read self-promotional messages all the time. The key to winning your target audience over is building credibility and creating content that matters to readers.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ORIGINAL
It does not matter how perfect you think your content is. The success lies in the appeal. The key to building brands and winning fans in the long term is creating content that is original, which is unique.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE RELEVANT
The content you create should be based on what your prospects are interested in and what is the most relevant in their space. Identify industry-relevant subject matter and popular topics before you create content.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE STRUCTURED
Your content needs a blueprint. Structure your message first and then create the content. Your prospects demand more than a bunch of loosely related words from you.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE DIVERSIFIED
Your prospects consume content in various forms – text, pictures, videos, etc. Your content must not be restricted to a single type. Instead, diversify your content to keep the interest high.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL CARRY A THEME
What message are you trying to push to your audience? Your content should carry an underlying theme that is aligned to your end objectives and goals.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL ADDRESS NEEDS
Most of your prospects and customers want to read things that benefit them. Your display of a deep understanding of the challenges they face can elevate your target audience from being interested readers to a highly engaged audience.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE EASY TO UNDERSTAND
The content, when it reaches your prospects and customers, must be easy to understand. If your target audience is forced to make an effort, there’s very little chance that they’ll go through your content till the end.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ENGAGING
The aim of your content generation is to attract and sustain the interest of your customers and prospects. Rather than making it one-directional, make your content engaging by including calls-to-action in your content – comment, subscribe, share, register, etc. Customer communication management should be a priority.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE BACKED BY PROOF
In today’s world, information is just a step away to be found and verified. Publishing content without enough proof can backfire as you may end up losing the credibility you built. You should use information, stats, reports and trends to back your content.