This month’s issue of BtoB Magazine includes a story on how 90octane helped Fortune 500 manufacturing company Gates Corporation generate leads and engage prospects through a virtual tradeshow.

The show, organized by Penton Media’s New Equipment Digest and Machine Design magazines, took place in May. Visitors browsed through the online booth to find various pieces of Gates content, such as white papers, case studies and brochures. They also participated in an online chat with Gates employees and attended a webinar, “Designing Belt Power Transmissions Systems for Energy Savings.”

Find out about the results when you read the story.

Posted by: Neil Broome, Marketing Coordinator

Email is a very cost effective tool that reaches thousands of people at once and creates qualified leads for your business. Before sending out an email, be aware of some basic email metrics that you should use to track your email campaign’s success.

Sends
-The number of email addresses in the list you’re sending to.

Bounce Rate
-The total number of emails that were returned as undeliverable divided by the total number of emails sent. Multiply the number by 100 to express the result as a percentage. This helps you gauge the cleanliness of your database and is an important metric because each time you send an email to an undeliverable address, you risk being labeled as spam. After each email send, check the bounced addresses and delete them from your database.

read more »

Posted by: Paul Vangura, Project Manager

Email marketing is a great way to stay top of mind with your prospects and customers, but it’s increasingly difficult to make it into the inbox and catch attention. Check out the tips below to help improve your email marketing performance:

• Use good design and formatting to make your message stand out. Include your company name in the “from” field, write an engaging subject line and keep important content near the top of the message. Also keep in mind the limitations of email services; most programs have a display area of 500-650 pixels wide, for instance.
• Develop a Web version of the email message. Some recipients may be using an older email client or have HTML turned off; in either case, your message won’t display as intended. By providing a link to a Web version, you provide another option for proper viewing. read more »

Posted by: Kayla Wagner, Account Manager

Like many industries, technology is under pressure in this downturned economy. Though tech marketing spending will increase this year, it will do so at a slower rate than last year due to financial concerns, according to IDC’s 2008 Tech Marketing Barometer. With 2009 just around the corner, that’s all the more reason to focus your lead generation and nurturing strategies.

As always, it’s important to tie your marketing efforts to analytical, measureable results. First, focus on the quality of your leads. Whether you choose to nurture them through a lead scoring system or an action-based system, cull out all spam and unqualified prospects. Send the sales team only those leads that are the best candidates for follow up. read more »

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: 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: Janessa Seewald, Project Manager

According to MarketingSherpa, approximately 53% of Salespeople agree that leads generated by Marketing have low credibility. In addition, a majority of the leads that are passed on to the Sales team from Marketing are not actually leads, but merely inquiries, which makes closing any leads a time-consuming and difficult process.

With Marketing under pressure to generate a large quantity of leads and Sales expected to close the deal, how can the communication process between the two teams be improved? Two key conversations must take place to ensure that the process starts on the right track:

1) Sales and Marketing must meet in order to discuss what defines a qualified lead.
2) Sales and Marketing must agree on sales-readiness of the leads before they are passed on. read more »

Posted by: Ryan Greene, Senior Interactive Designer

As interactive designers we all want to create that next big thing, and with the ever-changing Web, we are bombarded with new ideas daily. While most of us strive to put out the best work possible, many times we forget that what looks great to us and our colleagues is not always what’s best for our client application, and more importantly, for conversions.

When designing for conversions we are faced with many different challenges involving client expectations, branding standards, subpar resources and time constraints. In an ideal world we would conduct thorough focus group analysis, test and measure metrics and create the “ultimate” piece. In actuality, most of the time we must simply create with conversion in mind, cross our fingers and hope that best practices will create a productive lead generating website. read more »

Posted by: Sam Eidson, Partner

One of the tough things about lead generation registration is that it’s moving in two opposite directions.  On the one hand, as users get more experienced the amount of information they are willing to provide decreases. On the other, as marketing and sales hone their lead generation and closing practices they recognize the need for more information about a prospect. To prioritize leads and get to the right decision maker at the right time, Sales wants to know who they are, their role, their budget and where they are in the decision process.

The trend toward shorter registration forms is good for the user and good for registration form conversion rates. By reducing your form from a long, all-encompassing form to a quick contact info-only form, you can increase the conversion (people arriving at the form / completing the form) from an unfortunately typical 5% to at least 20%. That’s a 400% increase in conversions. The flip side is, you end up with a lot more unqualified leads, because you haven’t gathered enough information to determine whether the prospects are the right people to talk to, and whether they are ready to buy.

There’s no one answer to this problem, but there at least two approaches – and a straightforward way to figure out which one to pursue: read more »

Posted by: Kelly Hall, Project Manager

It’s a topic that comes up again and again when I’m working with clients to strategize online lead generation programs. Registrants are savvier than ever before. They’re also inundated with more advertising offers than ever.
 
What does that mean for a program? When it comes to registration forms on microsites and landing pages, we should only ask for the information we really need. Sure, we want it all, but what information is actually passed to Sales and acted upon?
 
When you first meet someone in person, say at a networking event, do you immediately barrage him with questions concerning all of the details of his job? Hopefully not. Instead, you get his contact information so that you can continue the conversation – continue to build a relationship – over time. So what happens when you present a user with a lengthy registration form on your web page? Honestly, I think it can vary. There are a few different scenarios: read more »