The Partner s Guide to the Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation

The Partner s Guide to the Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation

Executive Summary Professional services firms may not be left with a choice as to whether or not to do inbound marketing and online lead generation. It s rapidly becoming a must have for doing new business, so the only choices are when you ll commit and what you ll promote. 83% of firms say adding new clients is a top marketing objective and 2 out of 3 firms are going to spending more on lead generation this year. Best Kept Secrets Successful Firms Are Shifting budget and resources into online lead generation Place more emphasis on strategy and less on executions Paying attention to competitors inbound marketing efforts Using marketing technology like HubSpot for lead capture, nurturing and campaign measurement Using thought leadership in the form of content for offers built around prospect issues or pain Building comprehensive, integrated lead generation campaigns Using multi-touch automated lead nurturing campaigns Using market segmentation techniques and technologies to deliver the right offer to the right prospect at the right time Always measuring results of lead generation campaigns and making changes Tying lead acquisition technologies into a CRM system Using compelling, well written landing pages to capture leads Use SEO optimized blog posts and web pages to draw prospects into their website Adding resources, technology and commitment to a program of online lead generation will result in more web site traffic, more leads, and more new business for your firm.

The Partner s Guide to the Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation Table of Contents Introduction What s an Online Lead? Critical Pieces of Online Lead Generation & Lead Generation Campaigns Where s the Smart Money Going...Branding or Lead Generation? Overview of Online Lead Generation Channels The Top Challenges of Online Lead Generation 15 Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms Conclusions About Vitberg LLC 1 2 3-5 6 7 8-9 10-15 16 17

Introduction The Fight for Leads and New Business Has Never Been Greater It s likely that 80% or more of your new business is rooted in the network of contacts and referral sources that you ve built over the years. 1:1 marketing - socializing and building relationships with people who can refer business to you and vice versa is the one approach that s more powerful than virtually every other lead generation strategy and tactic combined. Most of the leads that you get this way are toward the middle or the end of the sales funnel and are sales ready. If you have all of the leads and new business that you can possibly handle from this approach, then this white paper is not for you. We re not looking to convince you to replace 1:1 marketing; we want to convince you that adding resources, technology and commitment to a program of online lead generation will result in more web site traffic, more leads, and more new business for your form. 13 Awesome Lead Generation Statistics 1. Inbound Leads cost 61% less than Outbound Leads! (HubSpot) 2. LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook & Twitter. (HubSpot) 3. 57% of companies with a blog have generated a lead from it. (HubSpot) 4. 65% of B2B companies have generated a lead from LinkedIn. (HubSpot) 5. 77% of B2C companies have generated a lead from Facebook. (HubSpot) 6. 62% of companies say that social media has become a more important source of leads. (HubSpot) 7. 81% of businesses have reported their blog as useful or critical to generating leads. (HubSpot) 8. 42% of businesses name email as one of their most effective lead generation channels. (Circle Research) 9. 80% of users said they would register for a whitepaper/ebook, while only 31% would register for a webinar. ( Lonely Marketer) 10. 77% of buyers say they are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO uses social media. (Jeff Bullas) 11. The number of marketers who say Facebook is critical or important has increased 83% in just 2 years. (HubSpot) 12. Case Studies are the most effective lead generating tool. (Lead Generation Tools) 13. Over 40% of marketers report that Google+ is critical to their business. (HubSpot) 1

What is an ONLINE Lead? Let s start our best kept secrets about online leads and lead generation by defining a few terms. In the online universe, a lead is any individual who has responded to an offer your firm has made. In order to convert someone from a prospect to a lead, they must take an action to make contact with your firm. This can come in the form of requesting a whitepaper you ve developed, filling out the Contact Us form on your website, or even handing you a business card after you ve made a presentation. A lead is not a name in your database or on some sort of telemarketing list. There s an important reason to use this definition: most digital marketing analytic software products considers a lead in this fashion, and builds their metrics and conversion statistics platform around this use of the term. 2

Critical Pieces of Lead Generation and Lead Generation Campaigns There are 10 must have pieces for online lead generation: Pain Issue/Need Lead generation campaigns need to be centered on a compelling pain point or issue faced by your prospects. Items like recent law or regulatory change requiring compliance; business, financial, or operational thorns that are impacting top or bottom line performance; or micro or macro economic trends that are keeping prospects or clients up at night are just a few examples of the types of issues that can be used to build a campaign. The Offer There are basically two types of offers to choose from when designing a campaign. Educational offers are based on providing thought leadership, insights or guidance around pain, with a promise that the information provided will help in taking that pain away for example, 10 Tips on Complying With State Reg 101.34 Without Breaking the Bank. Promotional or sales offers are built around financial incentives to buy or try; for example, Get a 10% discount on Expatriate Tax Consulting Until. The Device Offers need to be packaged into a device, like a white paper, seminar, ebook, report, etc. Each type of device you might consider comes with its own unique set of logistical requirements (i.e. where do I get the content and who s going to write the white paper?), and each will have indirect/resource and possibly direct costs. 3

Critical Pieces of Lead Generation and Lead Generation Campaigns (cont ) Database Lead generation involves both on-website and off-website promotion (outbound) to reach eyeballs for conversion to leads. A critical and challenging part of lead gen success is having a large and accurate database of prospects, with e-mail addresses, that represent opportunities to promote your offer and device. Landing Pages Your lead gen efforts need infrastructure for lead acquisition and capture. This is done through constructing a landing page in the background of your website where you can capture an eyeball s contact information and start the process of generating lead tracking and conversion metrics. One of the best tools to accommodate this is a software program called HubSpot. The Campaign Lead generation starts with campaign planning. In addition to the determining the nature of the offer and device you ll be employing, your campaign needs to identify outbound and onsite marketing tactics, logistics and costs how are you going to reach eyeballs? It s likely that you ll want to employ and integrate a number of tactics that might include on-site calls to action, e-mail blasts and pay per click. On-site promotion A visitor to your website is an opportunity for conversion to a lead. You do this by strategically placing call to action buttons promoting your offer that is linked to a landing. 4

Critical Pieces of Lead Generation and Lead Generation Campaigns (cont ) Off-site promotion There are a variety of paid and non-paid media tactics you ll want to consider and integrate into your campaign. These include paid e-advertising like Linked In and Google Ad words, or banner adverting; and non-paid tactics like promotion of your offer through your social media accounts or your e-newsletter. The centerpiece of off-site promotion should be e-mail it s relatively inexpensive and produces the first set of metrics you ll want to employ for measuring ROI. Metrics and analysis A significant part of the transformation in professional services marketing is based on the quantity and quality of metrics that can be easily acquired. You ll not only want to measure things like quantity of leads secured through the campaign, but also, conversion metrics like visits to leads, landing page effectiveness, and the effectiveness of the various tactics you ve deployed for promoting the offer. Lead Nurturing and Automation - Since it s likely that most leads you acquire through your campaigns will not be sales ready, you ll want to consider including a lead nurturing strategy as part of the campaign planning process. You may need 3 or more touches before a lead is sales ready, and with the marketing technology that s available today, this process can be automated and virtually hands-free. 5

Where s the Smart Money Going...Branding or Lead Generation? According to a recent study done by CPA Trendlines ( Accounting Firm Marketing Strategies, 2012 Edition) 83% of firms surveyed cited adding new clients as a top marketing objective, and 70% cited lead generation as one of their top 3 marketing objectives. Not surprising, the survey found that firms were sacrificing branding and awareness and it s no wonder: that spending is not contributing to making the cash register ring. So exactly where are firms spending money? According to the 2012 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Poll, about 2 out of 3 firms are going to spending more on lead generation this year: Overall Demand Generation Spend Plans for 2013 The chart below shows how marketers will adjust their spending plans relative to what they allocated for programs in 2012. Source: Inboundify s Inbound Marketing Blog, 1/9/2013 The insight: Put your money where the market is going. 6

Overview of Online Lead Generation Channels When we re talking about lead generation channels, we re talking about the different tactics your firm can employ to promote an offer. All of them require infrastructure and resources some more than others and each comes with benefits and limitations. At the end of the day, firms that are great at lead generation use a combination of different tactics to fill the top of the sales funnel. They pay close attention to which tactics are driving the most leads so they can focus their marketing investment on those that produce the greatest ROI. According to the 2012 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Poll, firms are going to be focusing their efforts and budget on in-house email marketing, SEO and social media as the top channels for generating leads. Most Popular Channels The graph below illustrates the percentage of marketing respondents that use each channel for demand generation. 7

The Top Challenges of Lead Generation If lead generation was easy everyone would be doing it, right? The fact of the matter is that firms face a number of challenges when it comes to lead generation, from issues of quality and quantity of leads to having the right type of content at the right time of the relationship with a prospect. Couple these challenges with barriers firms are facing with their lead gen programs like lack or resources, and you get a recipe for inactivity, abandonment or ignorance of lead generation. 8

The Top Challenges of Lead Generation (cont ) Like any marketing initiative in the professional services world, overcoming the challenges of lead generation starts with belief and commitment at the Managing Partner and Management Committee level. There s no magic here either it s there or it isn t - and often (and unfortunately) overcoming a lack of commitment only occurs after getting a grade before learning the lesson. 9

15 Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms Shift budget and resources away from marketing tactics that don t work into online lead generation strategies and tactics. If lead generation is one of your firm s major objectives, then it s got to be funded at the appropriate level. Inbound marketing and online lead generation is not a zero cost budget item, but it is the one marketing approach that tends to outperform traditional marketing when it comes to ROI. It may be time to go through your budget with a keen eye toward eliminating those marketing activities that aren t meeting your strategic objectives or contributing to top line growth. You might find, for example, that eliminating print advertising or yellow pages from your marketing budget will be more than sufficient to find everything you need to do inbound marketing and online lead generation. Place more emphasis on strategy and less on executions. Firms that excel at lead generation worry less about vanity issues like colors, font sizes and graphics, and more about developing lead generation programs that: 1. work towards making the firm s strategic objectives come to life and 2. are targeted to the right audience with the right message at the right time. Although visual appeal is important, it s the quality of the offer that drives the lead, not the artistry of the page. Always look over your shoulder and see what competitors are doing. Here s a quick competitive sniff test: go to your top 3 competitors websites and see if they are using call to action buttons for a piece of thought leadership that requires the reader to complete and submit a form. Or, check and see if they have social media accounts and whether they are using those accounts to drive fans and followers to landing pages on their site. If they are, they re doing online lead generation. If you re not, then you re at a competitive disadvantage because they have a lead generation machine that s now working for them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 10

Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms (cont ) Put the necessary resources and infrastructure in place to do lead capture, nurturing and campaign measurement. Online lead generation requires marketing technology and infrastructure like that provided through HubSpot software. This technology will help you to create and publish call to action buttons and landing pages, automate the promotion of an offer through your social media accounts, automate the process of nurturing leads through the sales funnel, and capture data and metrics on the effectiveness of different components of your lead generation campaign. Use thought leadership in the form of content, and turn it into offers that can be used for lead generation. Offers in the professional service firm world all center around thought leadership delivered through a wide variety of different content media. It s likely that your firm has an abundance of content sitting around and collecting dust. One of the first steps in any lead generation program is to find content that can be re-purposed for lead generation. If your firm doesn t have a treasure chest of fresh content for lead generation, then you ll need to develop a content acquisition plan using either internal resources or outsourced content developers. Here are some examples of thought leadership turned into an offer for lead generation: 11

Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms (cont ) Create exciting, dynamic, compelling offers built around prospect issues or pain. From a marketer s perspective, the best part about professional services is that change is a given regardless of whether it s rooted in new legislation, regulation, standards, or technology. Marketers love change because it breeds chaos, and chaos breeds opportunity. Online lead generators will take an issue and then: 1. Create a piece of thought leadership around it (i.e. a white paper, seminar, video, etc.), 2. promote the offer through various media channels, and 3. deliver a sales message via a landing page about why a reader should do a download and give up their name and e-mail in clever and compelling ways. Build comprehensive, integrated lead generation campaigns (all points of the compass). Firms that excel at online lead generation know that it involves a lot more than just creating an onsite landing page and a call to action button for an offer. Comprehensive lead generation campaigns have three main pieces: 1. CTAs and landing pages, 2. tons of activity to promote the offer using social media, newsletters, PPC advertising, on-site placement in strategic locations, and 3. nurturing activities featuring a series of touches after a landing page has been submitted to move someone from the stage of being a prospect to becoming a warm, qualified lead. But you also need to consider using traditional marketing strategies and approaches. Even though this whitepaper has been focused on online lead generation, that doesn t mean that traditional lead generation is dead. Your job as a shareholder or marketer is to use both online and traditional approaches to generate leads. You need to think about direct mail, advertising, and even telemarketing as part of a comprehensive all points of the compass lead gen strategy. Balancing these requires a combination of art and science as most partners will have grown up in a world of 1:1 marketing, and may be skeptical of lead generation via marketing of thought leadership. Our advice: work with the early adopters and get a few wins under your belt, in order to make inbound marketing and online lead generation more palatable. 12

Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms (cont ) Deploy a multi-touch automated lead nurturing campaign that moves a prospect from lead to an engagement. The professional services sales process is often a complex experience and finding buyers for does not happen overnight. Industry studies show that it takes an average of 12 touches to convert a cold prospect to a fully qualified, sales-ready lead. In order to make that happen, companies must continually engage prospects with relevant messaging until they are thoroughly qualified Lead nurturing is built upon the principle that even after completing and submitting a form for an offer, a prospect will generally not be sales ready. Firms that are adept at lead generation use software like HubSpot or Infusion Soft to create drip emails that are used to warm prospects into sales ready leads. Do market or target segmentation and maintain a clean and segmented email database to deliver the right offer to the right prospect at the right time. It s critical that you present your offers to the right target market, or you face the possibility of tuning them out of your online marketing efforts. You don t want to expose them to every offer only those that are appropriate to their industry, position or critical issue that s keeping them up at night. Now more than ever before, the sophistication of email technology allows you to do this. Most email programs give you the ability to create profiles of prospects, which can then be segmented into smaller lists and used for a targeted email. That way, if you re looking to reach a CIO for example, you ll be able to keep any offers that might be better suited for the firm s legal counsel off of the CIO s radar screen. Always measure results of lead generation campaigns and make changes accordingly. Digital marketing comes with the ability to measure everything for results and ROI. There s no more guesses or anecdotes about whether or not a marketing program worked if it s digital, you can see quantifiable results. This means you can start lead generation campaigns with defined goals and development of key performance indicators, and then continuously measure (and analyze) results. You ll be able to see what s working and what s not, and make changes to tactics that you can immediacy assess. Beyond Google Analytics, there are a number of different software applications that will help you do a deep dive on your digital marketing metrics. Our favorite is HubSpot because it s an all in one package. 13

Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms (cont ) Tie any infrastructure used for lead acquisition into a CRM system. More professional services firms are turning to sophisticated CRM applications like Sales Force and Microsoft Dynamics for their customer relationship management capabilities. While the rationale for a CRM system is easy to understand, their deployment and maintenance has proved to be very challenging for them. However, if you are going to online lead generation, check with your CRM software supplier if they have a way to automate and integrate lead acquisition into their system. For example, a prospect submitting a landing page should not only be identified through lead acquisition software, but also entered into the CRM for the appropriate sales resource follow up. Use compelling, well written landing pages to capture leads. There is an abundance of research and guidance that suggests that the relationship between a well written landing page and high conversion rates is very strong. Your landing page needs to be easy to understand, the benefits of the offer need to be clear, the action requested unambivilent, and it needs to be brief. If you can t answer the question, why should I give you my name and contact information? after you re completed a landing page draft, then it s time to go back to the drawing board. Use SEO optimized blog posts and web pages to draw prospects into the website where they can be exposed to your offer. Blogging had many different purposes, from assisting in your SEO optimization strategy to building personal brand through thought leaders. However, one the most important responsibilities of your blog is to present offers for lead generation purposes. Every blog post should try to present the reader with a relevant offer. For example, if your post is about intellectual property issues, than you might offer a white paper on key ways to protect intellectual property. Note if you can t present a relevant offer accompanying a specific blog post, then don t do it! 14

Best Kept Secrets of Online Lead Generation for Professional Services Firms (cont ) Make sure there is a process in place to hand warm, qualified leads to a rainmaker or BDE. All of your lead generation will come to naught if you don t have a process in place to hand off leads to the right sales resource within your firm. But while your sales people are hungry for leads, there s always going to be an issue about the quality of those leads that you ll need to address. Your sales resources are going to want to see warm leads from you either someone that has submitted a contact us form, or someone that may have taken more than one offer. That s why nurturing is important. A best practice for lead generation is to get the ales staff involved very early in the process so you can get their input and insights on prospect pain points, as well as getting everyone on the same page when it comes to lead acquisition and follow up tactics. Make sure your offers and landing pages are optimized for mobile. With so many people now using mobile devices, it s important to make sure that your landing pages are optimized for mobile. Run a quick check on a couple of different mobile devices, and if you can t find or complete a form simply, then you may need developer assistance to make your landing pages mobile friendly. Source: HubSpot s ebook How to Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions 15

Conclusion A recent study of 500 different professional services firms by Hinge Marketing ( Online Marketing for Professional Services Firms ) found that over 77% of firms generate at least some new business leads online. Most commonly (in 48% of responses), firms generated less than 20% of total leads online, although almost a quarter generated no online leads at all. Approximately 15% of firms generate 40% or more of their new business leads online. Professional services firms may not be left with a choice as to whether or not to do inbound marketing and online lead generation. It s rapidly becoming a must have for doing new business, so the only choice is really when you ll commit. And that the last best kept secret of online lead generation: being there first, with the most, is going to separate the winners from the losers in the battle for new clients. 16

About Vitberg LLC Another Best Kept Secret: Firms that want to do lead generation right use Vitberg LLC as their marketing agency... Vitberg LLC was founded upon the belief that professional services firms don t get enough ROI from their investment in marketing and business development. We re focused on business development and top line growth for our clients. Our services are a combination of strategy and creative executions: Develop marketing plans, strategies and tactics Websites built on strategy, designed for lead generation, created for impact SEO strategies and tactics for helping firms get found first Tune marketing budgets for more ROI Convert website visitors to leads Content marketing white papers, articles, case studies and more Make social media a new business tool Bring firms into the new world of marketing analytics Design lead nurturing strategies Fill sales pipelines with dynamic and measureable lead generation campaigns Put blogs and blogging strategies into place Visit our website or call us at (585) 425-2552 to discuss your inbound marketing, internet marketing or content marketing needs. 17