B2B Lead Blog

We’ve all heard about how the digital age has been brutal for print media, and I fully expected direct mail to be taking a hit as well.

After all, who pays attention to print anymore?

It turns out your prospects are.

That’s the word from Joy Gendusa, Founder and CEO, Postcardmania, and Ken Pikulik, Director of Process and Strategy, ResponsePoint. And, they have the numbers to prove it.

Pikulik pointed to three recent campaigns with multiple B2B corporate clients.

“We’ve seen a 12% lift in response rates by incorporating the use of letters and other mailers to supplement email communication,” he said.

One organization in particular received 50 leads for a service package priced well over $100,000.

Gendusa explained the success of her own client base of smaller businesses:

• A bookkeeping service attains five new clients each month and nets more than $60,000 over the lifetime of each customer.
• A $10,000 campaign of 12,000 brochures, including postage, has an estimated lifetime return on investment of $1,250,000 for a national credit card processing company.
• A report-writing software generates $12,000 in weekly revenues from a direct mail investment of $1,930.

These direct-response campaigns did not achieve success with old-school batch-and-blast direct mail approaches, however. Gendusa and Pikulik are expertly combining the best of old techniques with new technology. They offer these tips to help you do the same.

1. Pinpoint your audience and painstakingly segment it.

Know the issues that will be most compelling to them, and use their jargon in your direct mail pieces.

“We do a lot of segmentation,” Pikulik said. “In the healthcare field, for instance, we segment based on practice knowing that different specialties will respond to different incentives. Doing simple things, like using the terminology of their specialty, will grab their attention. Keywords aren’t just for the Internet.”

2. Make them want to read it.

“If you have space available to put a marketing message on an envelope, do it,” Pikulik said. “Grab their attention from the outside.”

3. Drive them to the Internet.

“Give them something that will make them want to engage with you,” he said. “This could be a whitepaper, a discount, a video – something that they will value regardless of whether they buy from you.”

Pikulik cited the client who got 50 leads for the $100,000-plus solution: They offered prospects a template for an RFP – essentially, they gave their prospects everything they needed to know to evaluate their solution.

“The client knew that their prospects would evaluate five or six competitors with that proposal template,” he noted. “But, they included questions that would demonstrate their product’s superiority over the competition.”

4. Make sure your website looks like your direct mail.

“The postcard will pique their interest, but when the prospects go online, they will likely look at you and your competitors,” Gendusa said. “It’s critical that when they see your site they can instantly connect it to your postcard. Make sure your marketing channels are in sync.”

She advised using Google Remarketing, which she considers remarkably inexpensive, with your direct mail campaign. After visitors come to your site, ads for your product will show up wherever they’re searching online.

“It adds tremendous credibility when their prospect sees the business everywhere they go online,” Gendusa said.

5. Measure and track.

Pikulik is a proponent of using PURLs (personalized URLs) to see how many people are responding and what they’re looking at online.

Gendusa advised using a phone number specific to the direct mail to make it easier to track response. She also advised recording those phone calls. State laws may require you to notify callers that they are being recorded, so we recommend receiving legal advice before doing so.

6. Follow up.

Gendusa and Pikulik insisted direct mail is not the once-and-done deal it was two decades ago. In fact, it’s a powerful kick-off to lead nurturing.

“Not everybody is searching for what they need. In fact, sometimes they don’t know what they need until direct mail puts it in front of them,” Gendusa said.
Once they do realize what they need, they go online to learn more, and that’s where effective follow-up happens.

“You can include them in an email campaign, you can make a phone call. You can invest marketing money strategically by focusing on people who have expressed specific interest in your product,” Pikulik said.

Related Resources:

How to Build a Quality List and Make Data Drive Leads

Lead Nurturing: 3-part funnel campaign creates 70% increase in inbound calls to sales reps

The New Marketing World: Conversations not Campaigns

Direct Marketing

If you attended our most recent B2B Lead Roundtable webinar, you found out why Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, is passionate about investing in the very best data possible: it may cost more upfront, but the return is more than worth it.

During the presentation, Brandon details an experiment with a $3.6 billion Cisco partner where the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was almost $600 per lead. They lowered their cost-per-lead by 60% by testing and improving the quality of their marketing lists.

Brandon expanded on this topic even further during an interview with David Kirkpatrick, a MarketingSherpa reporter. Brandon reveals why:

• Your database is probably not what you think it is.
• You should only collect the data you need.
• You’re never done cleaning lists.

For some insight on how to maximize the top of your marketing funnel and why that makes revenue flow faster, be sure to check out Brandon’s interview:

MarketingSherpa: B2B Marketing: Building a quality list

Let us know what else you would like to learn about attaining and maintaining data to drive more leads; we’ll be happy to address your questions here or in future webinars.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Direct Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Sales, Web/Tech

Have you had some great marketing successes this year? Then you’ll want to let my colleagues at MarketingSherpa know. They’re compiling their ninth annual MarketingSherpa 2011 Wisdom Report. It shares the best thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and takeaways from marketers in 2010. 

In fact, even if you’ve had disappointments, and are willing to share, they’d like to hear from you as well. After all, failure is often the best teacher.

Tell us, what are some of the best lessons you learned this year?   

Great marketers are always working so diligently to put everything and everyone else in the spotlight. That effort deserves attention. That’s why I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to attain some very positive publicity. 

Share your wisdom here, but you’ve got to do it soon because the deadline’s December 21.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Cold Calling, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Trigger Events, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

Lead generation remains the top reason most companies exhibit at events and tradeshows. And B2B marketers are constantly looking for ideas they can use to drive more ROI from their events budget.

I came across this helpful post by Mike Thimmesch on 100 Trade Show Lead Generation Ideas that’s worth checking out. The following is a sampling of Thimmesch’s tips that I though were useful:

4. Go to fewer trade shows, but put more effort into booth staff preparation and promotions for each remaining show.
6. Track leads to determine and expand in the shows with the best ROI
9. Get a booth space closer to the hub of traffic, or by a bigger competitor
28. Have your sales people invite their prospects to visit your booth and set up meetings in advance
29. Send an email invitation to the show’s pre-registered attendee list for this year, and the registered attendee list from last year
30. Use social media to reach more attendees
32. Post your trade show schedule on your website with a link to sign up for appointments
45. Giveaway something useful to your target audience
46. Have a contest for attendees in your booth

After reading the list of 100, here’s a few more tips I would add:

1. Follow-up quickly after the event. Think about your follow-up process before the event happens not afterwards.
2. Create event follow-up content pieces, talking points and email templates for your sales team to use to add value and continue the conversation in a relevant way rather than “pitching” everybody.
3. Develop a nurturing track that for event attendees connects with the theme or the content of the event. Try to do this at least for a few months at minimum.
4. See the event as a conversation (or conversation starter) not a acampaign. Don’t stop the dialog. Brainstorm ways you can keep the dialog going.

What other tips would you add to this list?

Related posts:
Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences

Direct Marketing, Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads

The single biggest issue for B2B marketers is effective lead generation. I wrote an eight part series on building an effective lead generation program a while back. To help readers who missed the series, I pulled all the posts together in order.

In this series, you’ll read the following posts:

1: The Right Mindset: Conversations, not campaigns
2: Sales and Marketing – One Team
3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile 
4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition
5: Treat your marketing database as a valued asset
6: A Multi-modal lead generation portfolio approach
7: Effective lead management
8: Lead nurturing for lead development

You may also find this ebook that connects with the series relevant.

Can you think of other critical success factors I’m missing?

B2B Telemarketing, Books, CRM, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

Effective lead generation really depends on how much you know about your target audience and how well you use that information to tailor a relevant messages and conversations.

I thought this post by Carolyn Goodman for Target Marketing Magazine was a good reminder of how we can improve our lead-gen results by being more targeted with our messages.

I know this is a basic idea and many of you do this this already but knowing something and actually doing it are two different things. This article prompted me to make really make sure I’m doing this consistently. Hopefully, it will prompt you too.

Here’s a quick summary of Goodman’s 6 steps: 

1. Do Your Homework.
2. Find Prospects That Look Like Your Target.
3. Determine Your Target’s Pain Points.
4. Gather Sales Support Assets.
5. Create a Destination of Information.

Read Target Your B-to-B Lead-Gen Efforts by Vertical and Job Title

I wouldn’t stop at targeting by vertical and job title. There’s many additional ways you can can segment and target messages including; Stage in the buying process, Company size, job function, trigger events, role in buying process and more. 

Related Posts:
5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails
Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile

Direct Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called 5 steps for using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and step number five was ‘create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.’

Well, last Thursday I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. I wanted to create a group to discuss and share ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting and more.
 
I’m jazzed at how fast the group is growing and even more excited about the discussions that are already taking place.

My first question to the group was if lead distribution should be fair or optimized? What do you do? Do you invest your hard won leads on your top performers or do you try to help your weaker sales people? In this economy should we take a Darwinian view of lead generation and focus on helping the strong sales people get stronger?

What’s your take on lead distribution? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable group and let me know your thoughts.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Cold Calling, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Podcasting, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Trigger Events, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

There are so many tools that help marketers with their search marketing but marketers have to know how to use the analytics in order to focus on the right things to generate leads and sales.

So often I find that marketers are only looking at conversion rates of how specific phrases or banners perform and are ignoring other valuable information. While conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.

I came across an interesting article by B2B Internet marketing consultant Todd Miechiels, and I liked what he had to say about those B2B marketers that make bad decisions based on “solid analytics data.”

Marketers need to look at more than the quantity of conversions. Quality is just as important. If you look solely at what phrases convert a higher percentage of whitepaper downloads, for example, you could be missing the fact that another phrase brought in 2 or 3 of your top prospects, which in the long run, could be better for your company.

Todd goes on to say: “If you are spending thousands of dollars per month on search marketing and not capturing visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that don't), you are shutting down phrases and scaling back campaigns by using only half the truth. Equally as dangerous, you are likely routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear to perform better but in reality are merely clogging the marketing database and sales pipeline.”

According to Todd, there are three things you should remember:

• Make sure you're capturing and reporting on visiting organizations referred by specific search phrases.
• Factor in the number of legitimate organizations you've captured when assessing the effectiveness of your search terms and campaigns.
• Don't fall into the trap of optimizing campaigns based solely on quantitative conversion data.

 Don’t clog the pipeline. Take Todd's advice and take the broader view.

Here's some related posts:

Web analytics for b2b lead gen
Tracking ROI for web generated leads

Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Web/Tech

Well, I’ve got, oh about a hundred suggestions for you all courtesy of MarketingSherpa’s latest Wisdom Report.

Sherpa’s free report is filled with mini-stories from our colleagues in the marketing world who have learned through trial and error. The topics of this year’s report touched on just about every aspect of marketing out there – from tradtional tactics to Web 2.0 and mobile marketing.

According to the editors at Sherpa, there were three main trends represented in this year’s edition:
1.    Email  – It’s clear from this book that email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s far from it. Sherpa editors noticed that marketers are looking for ways to tweak their email correspondence. Marketers are personalizing messages more than ever, segmenting their lists to create the most focused targets possible, and are testing to the hilt. You could learn a lot from the stories included in the email section.

2. Build Social Networks – Marketers are starting to see the value of building relationships using LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. There are some interesting “Case Studies” that will hit home for marketers investigating ways to integrate social media marketing into their 2009 plan.

 3. Search Engine Optimization – It seems that more and more marketers are focusing on making their websites search-engine friendly.  Marketers give advice on everything from making PPC more affordable to concentrating on niche keywords. One marketer shares how 2008 was the turning point that made him realize that after 25 years in the business he had to get with the program.

Download a copy here today

B2B Telemarketing, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Social Media, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

MarketingSherpa just published data on lead nurturing best practices based on a survey of 1,000 marketers. Sherpa’s research focuses on the following nurturing best practices:

• Using multiple tactics rather than relying on email only.
• Timing of teleprospecting response to web inquiries – the velocity of follow-up dramtically impacts lead conversion.
• Measurement of lead quality and the impact of lead nurturing.

I encourage you check out their advice. Read MarketingSherpa: Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics

When it comes to lead nurturing, I find that marketers lose their momentum because they lack enough edu-focused content. My advice is to start building your lead nurturing library now. Here’s a post where I share content ideas for lead nurturing and the best tactics to use. I hope you find it useful.

Related posts:
Lead Nurturing is about Relationships, not e-mails
Lead Nurturing as trusted advisors with the Human Touch

B2B Telemarketing, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Sales Leads, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars