Posted by: Gloria Dutton, Marketing Coordinator
It’s no secret that times are tough. But mandatory spending freezes and budget cuts are not insurmountable. Your customers’ current spending trends will eventually turn around. Now is the time to put your company in a position of strength as a thought leader and partner, so that when the good times return, your company’s products and services come to the top of your prospect’s mind.
Lead nurturing is one of the top ways to prevent an overall downturn in customer acquisition during times of recession and to ensure more business when the economy improves. By continually keeping your prospects in touch and informed while they are unable to buy, your company is looked at as more of a long-term partner and smart long-term business choice. It also will help customers to see that you are there in support of their interests and will most likely not end the relationship once the sale is final if you did not drop interest in them when they were not even making a purchase.
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Posted by: Jenny Bachner, Media Specialist
You’ve done a lot of work to prepare for your lead generation or lead nurturing campaign. You’ve assessed the audience, strategized offers, determined the best timeline, drafted a media plan and created a landing page based on conversion marketing best practices. It’s easy to let the details of the program’s final execution slip under the radar. But how you craft your landing page’s registration form(s) is too important to pass over.
The registration form is ideally your prospect’s final destination. So take advantage of these tips for making yours as user-friendly as possible:
Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager
MarketingSherpa recently surveyed some of the largest B2B marketers about their top priorities in 2009 as well as the difficulty associated with executing each tactic. Shown below is the chart they provided. The size of the circle indicates the percentage of companies already implementing that specific tactic.
What are top priorities for marketers at the biggest B2B organizations in 2009?
With the crunch of the economy bearing down on B2B companies, retention marketing and identifying new audiences are proving to be top priorities. As you probably already know, it is easier (and cheaper) to keep your current customers and grow their programs than it is to retain new customers. However, with the customer base shrinking, and with current customers cutting back, marketers have to uncover new audiences in order to expand their businesses.
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Posted by: Kelly Hall, Account Manager
When you start any lead generation or lead nurturing campaign, one of the biggest questions to answer is what you’ll offer your prospects. What you offer is very influential in how prospects will interact with your company. If you offer something requiring very little involvement, then you may wind up with a large volume of unqualified leads. However, if you offer something requiring a lot of involvement then you may wind up with a very small volume of leads – albeit more likely to be highly qualified. Using the purchase cycle, and your goals therein, can help to identify what offers to lead with.
How your lead generation campaign speaks to your prospects is entirely in your control. First, you need to identify the goal of your campaign. Are you just looking for people ready to buy? If so, your offer should align with Decision Phase needs. Are you looking to educate your audience? Then an offer that assists with prospects in the Research Phase would be most appropriate.
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Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager
Most marketers are in the same spot: do more with less money. As you’re facing this challenge, here are three things that you can do to improve the efficiency and results of your lead generation program:
#1 – Stay Visible Even in a Tough Economy
Through these tough times it is more important than ever to stay visible to prospects whether or not your competitors are doing the same. There are many cost-effective and even free opportunities to help us accomplish this. Use social media and social networking sites to your advantage. Even though it may be out of your comfort zone, consider being present on tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and more. In addition, if you are planning online media buys for 2009, work to negotiate tactics that include freebies such as e-newsletters and ad units. All of these things help keep you in front of potential leads.
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Posted by: Kelly Hall, Account Manager
When you’re mobilizing to create an email campaign for lead nurturing there are two very important considerations to make. Number 1, timing.
We’ve all gotten them – the automatic email you receive, after registering for something from a company, thanking you for your interest. Great, right? Definitely. But what about when you get another email, pushing you to take action less than a day later? And they just keep coming, every day? All of a sudden you’re not quite as interested in what that company has to tell you. Instead, you may be tempted to unsubscribe, or worse, put them on your blacklist. We, as marketers, need to walk the fine line of staying top of mind for our prospects, and simultaneously not being annoying. 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: 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: 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 »