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. read more »

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. read more »

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. read more »

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. read more »

Posted by: Megan Amick, Marketing Coordinator

Lead nurturing is a process aimed at developing mutually beneficial, long-term relationships between a business and its prospects. Of course, a lost relationship can’t be nurtured, so nurturing efforts must be delivered carefully and always with the needs of the prospect in mind.

According to research by Brian Carroll, up to 95% of prospects on your website are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep. Rather than forcing an early connection between them, through a lead nurturing program, a company gradually builds a prospect’s profile over time. The sales team isn’t included in the process until the timing is right. As a prospect’s profile is created, offers are presented based on his indicated preferences. This allows the business to effectively target each prospect by extending the most relevant and compelling offerings. read more »

Posted by: Gloria Dutton, Marketing Coordinator

Customers are now able to research, shop and communicate online, and because more and more people are taking advantage of these opportunities, they’re able to share their experiences with a wider, Web-based network than ever before. They give opinions and browse others’ reviews in a variety of venues – blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, and within ecommerce sites that allow users to post feedback. And because consumers are basing purchase decisions on the information they find in these social media avenues, companies are making it their business to actively participate.

Social media includes an endless list of online communication outlets including blogs, RSS feeds, forums, message boards, podcasts and social networking sites. In a recent survey by Inc. Magazine, 121 companies varying in size and industry were questioned about their familiarity with and use of social media outlets. The survey found that companies are “very familiar” with social networking (42%), message boards (38%), and blogging (36%). read more »

Posted by: Brooke Caesar, Account Manager

Building the keyword list is the backbone to any successful search engine marketing campaign. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you end up chasing dreams of grandeur. If you target keywords that are too niche, you’ll get the results, but not the traffic. There are many steps in finding the right balance that will get the results and the traffic.

Begin your strategy by brainstorming keywords that are central to your organization and your audience. Once you have compiled a complete list, move onto what your competitors find important. One of the keys to creating that successful keyword strategy involves investigating what is central to your competitors’ strategy.

Review their meta data
What keywords are they using? How are they enticing people to come to their site (call to action)? Go to the competitors’ site and view their code. Take a look at the keywords that they think are beneficial by looking at their title, description and keyword tags. read more »