Generating Leads While You Sleep

Transcription

1 Generating Leads While You Sleep May 2013 CommuniGator 2013 Page 1 of 14

2 Contents Introduction... 3 Setting up the right infrastructure... 4 Page Scoring, Link Scoring and Lead Scoring... 7 Generating leads while you sleep... 9 Here s how we do it The sky is the limit About CommuniGator CommuniGator 2013 Page 2 of 14

3 Introduction If you re involved in B2B marketing then Lead Generation will be one of the things on your mind. How do you generate more leads? How do you ensure they are of suitable quality for your sales team? What can you do to make them convert quicker and improve the bottom line? All valid questions we re sure you ll agree. If we could answer them we d be able to sit back and watch with a nice cold beverage of choice in one hand and a smug grin across our faces. Unfortunately reality doesn t quite work this way and so we need to find the tools and methods to give us a helping hand. This whitepaper aims to cover some methodology and tools to help you generate leads while you sleep. CommuniGator 2013 Page 3 of 14

4 Setting up the right infrastructure When it comes to lead generation there are two key considerations; getting people to your website and the ability to track what they do when they get there. Google Analytics is a way of tracking what happens when someone visits your website however the downside is all that anonymous data. Good as a snapshot of overall activity but it doesn t help you drill down in to the specifics of who is doing what. Let us take a step back before we consider analytics and tracking. The first consideration is getting people to your website. Things like your SEO strategy will play a large part in this so that your company and pages are visible in natural search. The extension to your SEO strategy is your Content strategy; you might have a great SEO strategy with the right keywords for your industry or sector but part of it comes back to link strength from other sites and the quality of the content you ve produced. How much Evergreen content have you got? Evergreen content is the sort of thing that ranks well in search engines; the tips and tricks, best practice guides or research pieces that people can link back to and refer to at any point in time with their being little to no change. Once you ve managed to cover this off in partnership with your SEO strategy what options are there when someone does click through to your website? Do they have the option to sign up to a mailing list or register for Product or Service demo requests? It is this part of the journey that we often neglect. We run around the office giving high-fives when we notice a month-on-month increase in web traffic without stopping to consider whether those are the right people we want visiting and whether we ve been able to start qualifying them on behalf of the sales team. CommuniGator 2013 Page 4 of 14

5 What about your lists? Do you send to them on a regular basis and direct them back to fresh content on your website? If not this is something worth considering, especially if you ve got a sizeable list with good quality data. Chances are there may be some low hanging fruit that only need a gentle nudge before they become a lead. Ways to drive traffic to your website: SEO strategy for natural search Content strategy for content that can be shared and linked to lists as a captive audience Paid campaigns like PPC Tradeshows and events Now that we ve looked at ways to drive traffic to your website and the type of content it s useful to create we can go back to the tracking and analytics point. Google Analytics gives you that anonymous mass of data and that s useful for being able to segment and compare natural search visits vs. visits, visitor flow and which pages are the most heavily consumed but it doesn t help you identify individuals or companies. Finding tools that can help with that identification moves the conversation on a step, and away from the high-fives of general traffic increases. The questions you now start to ask are things like of that percentage increase of traffic this month how much of that is from my target audience? To be able to answer these sorts of questions the tools you use need to work on at least one of two levels; company identification or individual identification. CommuniGator 2013 Page 5 of 14

6 Your marketing platform may be able to display the contact records that clicked through from specific campaigns and the content they clicked through to however it isn t likely to help when it comes to tracking those from natural search and general web page consumption, those still remain anonymous. Disclaimer: The CommuniGator platform can help you track on both levels. We re slightly biased but we purposefully built a tool inside the CommuniGator platform to enable us internally to start identifying the companies that visited our own website from natural search, referring sites and campaigns. It means we ve been able to join the dots and at the top end link companies with individuals and track their web browsing history and their campaign activity. For those that don t interact with s (or aren t on our lists) we track the company activity across the website as these are identified based on IP. For tools that identify individuals you may first need to wait for them to complete a form on your website in order to capture sufficient data and then link that back to previous browsing history based on cookie placement. Whichever tools you choose to use the objective remains the same; the ability to identify and track actions taken against your campaigns and across your website whether at an individual, named person level or at an anonymous company level. CommuniGator 2013 Page 6 of 14

7 Page Scoring, Link Scoring and Lead Scoring There s a great quote from a film you may or may not be familiar with that relates nicely to the title of this section as it paints the picture of a flow and elements being inter-connected; Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. It essentially outlines a sequence and how one thing leads to another (no pun intended). In the B2B universe (fortunately not in a galaxy far, far away) prospects can only build up a Lead Score if you ve first put in place mechanisms for them to generate that score. This is done through page scoring and link scoring. The links in your s should all have scores assigned, these may be based on their placement in the (below the fold generates more points) or the importance of the content being linked to. For page scoring your most important web pages should naturally be scored higher. Your homepage scores minimal points as that is the page most people will land on by default. Your product related pages score more highly and your contact us (if there s a form) or demo request page higher still. CommuniGator 2013 Page 7 of 14

8 These scoring mechanisms mean that prospects (the people you may want to start talking to) can build up a lead score based on both their and website activity. Depending on the tools you ve opted to use they may integrate in such a way that you have a single score you can base future activity and decisions on. If they don t you may then need to defer to your CRM if all the data is being written there and you ve got separate scores for activity and website activity. The other consideration is website activity for companies where a named individual hasn t been identified. In situations like this it is worth doing some digging to find the name of the person most likely to be a senior stakeholder or budget holder for the product or service you are offering and then add them to your system so you have a named individual building up a score. The next consideration once you ve enabled prospects to build up a lead score is what the hell to do with them afterwards. This is where your marketing platform will come to the fore as the quickest and easiest way to interact with these people. CommuniGator 2013 Page 8 of 14

9 Generating leads while you sleep So we ve looked at ways to drive traffic to your website and mechanisms for scoring activity but how does this generate leads while you sleep? The secret is in the automated activity you create. Not all prospects are created equal and neither are leads. Likewise, levels of activity across your s and website doesn t always equate to intent. When a prospect hits a lead score (we suggest 30) they should drop in to a bucket labelled hands off or else. This is telling the sales team that the prospect has started consuming content and interacting with you as a company but that you don t yet class them as ready for full on sales engagement. What you are looking to do instead is begin the process of drip-feeding them sales related messages. This is a series of automated s over a period of time that contain information about your products and services, customer testimonials, awards and accolades and whatever else you can dig up that tells them how wonderful you and your products / services are. Notice how we didn t start with this? You ve warmed people up first before you send them sales related messages and that s the key. Hitting them straight away with a buy now is a way to turn them off completely and make them run for the hills. Not a good idea if you are trying to generate new business. CommuniGator 2013 Page 9 of 14

10 This drip-feed process can be spread over a period of weeks or be short-sharp hits (e.g. one a day for a week). Only after the completion of this process should the sales team consider picking up the phone to these people. Certainly, if your prospects express immediate interest on the back of the sales messages i.e. a demo request, direct response to your s or clicking through to browse product pages, then it makes sense to get dialling. You should also include an offset on when the first sales message is sent against when the prospect becomes eligible to receive it i.e. +12 hours after they become eligible. This automated part is where you can start to sleep more easily at night. You re setting up a process that looks to move people further down the funnel without regular interference from the sales team or it eating up all your time. The marketing platform you use, or your CRM, may be able to automatically create groups or segment when that lead score trigger is hit (30 points) so that you can then assign that segment to the campaigns with your sales messages attached in such a way that it will automatically send. The considerations for the marketer come down to three things; what to say, how often and the quality of your data. If your data isn t accurate and you try to personalise the sales messages you may end up turning off a perfectly good prospect. It is also important to point out that if these people have been part of your general mailing lists that they should still receive the weekly or monthly comms you send out. You aren t cutting them off from any of the other great content you create but adding extra messages in the mix based on the behaviour they ve exhibited. Another important point is what happens if those prospects continue to build their score. They could be in two groups; one for receiving sales messages and one for your weekly content-driven (informative, supportive comms) s. They currently sit on 30 points so are eligible for the sales message but they then interact with your next weekly marketing and suddenly jump to 50 points. In this situation they should be removed from the group for the sales messages, they ve exhibited behaviour above and beyond. They should now be purely the domain of the sales team for sales engagement, your job as a marketer is simply to continue the informative weekly content-driven s. CommuniGator 2013 Page 10 of 14

11 Here s how we do it Here at CommuniGator we ve set up a number of automated processes in the platform so that our focus shifts from spending lots of time creating campaigns to creating content that serves multiple purposes. A weekly on a Tuesday that contains 3 articles linking to the CommuniGator website Prospects build up a score based on the website pages they browse At 30 points they automatically move in to a group to receive sales related messages Sales related messages are sent weekly for a 3 week period At 50 points prospects are handed to the sales team and removed from the sales message group They still receive the weekly Tuesday s Anyone that interacts directly with the sales messages immediately gets handed to the sales team and is moved from the sales message group, they remain in the Tuesday group CommuniGator 2013 Page 11 of 14

12 Tuesday Prospect clicks link Builds up lead score A simple flow diagram of what we ve got set up NO SYSTEM CHECK Do they have 30 points or more? YES Do they have more than 50 points? YES No sales message NO 3 weeks of sales messages Add to group Sales Message NO Engaged with sales messages? YES Hand to sales team CommuniGator 2013 Page 12 of 14

13 The sky is the limit The beauty with automation is that once you ve got to grips at the basic level and you ve started to create automated flows the sky is the limit. Similar processes and flows can be built for managing event promotion, segmenting based on other actions like shopping cart abandonment, grouping based on specific interests (continually clicking a certain type of link in your s) and so the list goes on. CommuniGator 2013 Page 13 of 14

14 About CommuniGator CommuniGator is a marketing automation platform with a history that includes marketing. Established in 2005 we ve gone through a period of evolution as the marketing landscape has changed. The core platform functionality caters to marketing with automated welcome series, a HTML editor for designing your s, templates, responsive design, dynamic groups based on behaviour, integration with the leading CRM platforms, an event management suite, robust reporting and so the list goes on. On the marketing automation side we re able to track prospect activity across the web pages they visit on your website and the content they consume and take action against. This means you can build up a really detailed profile of who has done what. To read all the juicy details of what the platform offers and how we can help your business jump on over to our website: CommuniGator 2013 Page 14 of 14