Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager

If only about a quarter of new leads are “sales-ready,” then the obvious main objective of lead nurturing for the manufacturing industry is ensuring that they’re qualified and mature enough to be handed off to sales. In other words, after pushing each lead through an offer flow and engaging them in higher level offers as they go, we are then able to push them to sales at their most ready. The benefit? Saving the sales team’s time and money and ultimately closing more sales.

A key to the process flow is thinking about the target audience. In the case of industrial manufacturing, we focus on the needs of design engineers (on the OEM side) and plant managers and operators (on the MRO side). That’s why we carefully select educational offers that will interest them on the right level without sending them so much information that they’re overwhelmed or so little that they become cold. It’s all about finding the right balance.

Posted by: Meg Archer, Marketing Coordinator

To help you wrap your head around all the social media talk these days, I thought I’d throw out an example of a company successfully leveraging the trend.

Consider Electronic Arts (EA), a leading video game development shop. They partnered with Context to create a Facebook application. It’s based on EA’s trivia game for the Nintendo Wii called Smarty Pants. EA repurposes the same questions from the Wii game for the Facebook application. In the application, the goal is to earn the most points by answering questions correctly. The faster you answer a question, the more points you get. Users challenge friends to beat each other’s score, and there’s also a leader board, displaying the smartest smarty pants. As you get more points, you grow into different pairs of pants like pajamas, safari pants and clown pants – virtual status symbols.

We’ve just been recognized as one of Denver’s fastest-growing, private companies by the Denver Business Journal. Open this week’s issue to page B19 to see us in the Flight V category, or read more about it here.

Posted by: Mackenzie Ross, Marketing Coordinator

A straightforward way to remain in regular contact with a lead is through an email campaign. To get started, you need little more than your prospects’ email addresses. Well, that and some compelling offers. With each email send, you include offers that require registration, as the forms allow you to learn more about the leads and build the profiles in your database. The offers your prospects choose to register for, as well as the ones they decline, can tell you a lot about their needs.

Posted by: Kerry Houchin, Marketing Coordinator

Of emerging forms of media today, social media is the fastest growing. Spending on social media marketing (SMM) is projected to grow 60.8% just this year. But how can it be used to generate business leads?

The usefulness of social media as a lead generator depends on your definition of a lead. A lead can vary, of course, from someone who registers to download a white paper to someone who signs up to attend a webinar – and everything in between. Methods for generating leads through social media are as diverse as the forms social media takes. But let’s consider how an event – whether live or online – might benefit.