Red On Marketing Blog

B2B Lead Generation Blueprint: killer 12 week campaigns

Money talks

Over the last nine years, I have made a living at helping B2B companies generate leads. Through close collaboration with clients, we've helped produce $2B in qualified B2B leads and $225M in B2B sales opportunities for clients.

Take my client that in 2009 built $1M in B2B leads in 12 weeks on a $25,500 investment, for example. That’s a 3,922% return on investment. Another increased B2B sales by more than half, with less than 2% of its annual revenue invested in B2B marketing. Another grew B2B sales leads 500% in about 12 months, with less than $50,000 invested.

What is (and isn't) a sales lead?

Per B2B sales lead expert Mac Macintosh, "leads are qualified, sales-ready opportunities."

A guy visiting your website isn't a sales lead.

A guy you bump into at a tradeshow isn't a lead.

A guy who subscribes to your newsletter ain't a sales lead, either.

An inbound lead generation campaign is about jump starting real relationships with real business decision makers, while holding costs to a minimum.

B2B lead generation blueprint

To do it, we prepare and rollout a 12 week lead generation campaign focused on developing and promoting an educational guide (or ebook, executive brief, tip sheet, decision guide...). In each guide is a call to action that helps prospects to the next step.

1. BUILD CONTENT - First we interview you about topics important to your target audience. Drawing on your comments, we write one executive brief, guide, or ebook conveying important tips, insights, and steps to learn more. We write a search optimized landing page (LP), confirmations page, and email confirmation. We also adapt the content to prepare a search optimized press release. We prepare blurbs you can place on your website, email signature area, and other places.
2. ADAPT CONTENT - We optimize visit-to-lead conversions by having hard-working landing pages and attracting prospects to them using search engine optimization, social media marketing and an optimized press release. We adapt the content to other purposes as well, to get more mileage. For example, we help equip the CEO to offer information on the content via email, on his networking platforms like LinkedIn, and – importantly – in person to other executives.
3. PROMOTE CONTENT - On an agreed-on date, we publish the guide, issue the press release, send the promotional email, and post links on social networks. We meet weekly to track and discuss campaign ROI.

When we get started with content marketing, it typically benefits the client within weeks.

Your sales leads and experiences

Where do your sales leads come from? What does and doesn't work, in your experience?

B2B Website Disasters (giant blobs and other sightings)

Repel visitors with ease

By Rebekah Donaldson*

(*Note: To develop this article, I took Writing Web Content for the Online Reader by Cris Rominger and turned it inside out.)

Websites have been a standard business marketing tool for more than a dozen years, and yet some folks still don’t know how to present material well on the Internet.

People don’t look at the computer screen the way they look at the printed page, or even the television set.

The web demands its own approach if you want your content to grab the eye and get attention.

With that in mind, you may be headed for a B2B website disaster if you:

Get stingy with hard facts

Business-to-business buyers are information hounds. They spend a lot of time researching, evaluating, and compiling information online because it helps them make decisions. According to Enquiro research, a full 92% of respondents turn to online resources in the early stages of the buying cycle. What b2b folks don’t like is promotional fluff, mission statements, and other marketing blah blah.

Throw giant blobs of text at your visitors

As information seekers, we’re goal oriented, impatient and critical. We scan rather than read. People have a hard time dealing with more than 100 words in a solid block, according to Crawford Killian, author of Writing for the Web. (Also check out Killian's fiesty post How not to write for the web -- I'm e-swooning.)

If you have more to say, break the chunk into two or three paragraphs, each with a subhead, all surrounded by lots of white space.

Avoid transitional phrases so your content chunks can stand on their own. Information on the web works best in modular rather than linear style.

Take your time getting to get to the point

Heat maps and eye tracking studies repeatedly show that headings grab our eye. To leverage their impact, use descriptive phrases that tell the reader what the content is about.

Place information carrying words at the beginning of headings to quickly convey meaning and use language your readers understand. If they "pick up an information scent" (Cris' term), they’ll drill down. And if they find relevant information that serves their needs or interests, they’ll read.

Write in a flowery style

Use strong verbs. Write in the active voice. Get to the point. "Marketing prose" does more than slow readers down. It annoys them.

Make readers work for information

Help the reader learn what the paragraph is about by using boldface type for information-rich keywords.

But don’t go overboard. Too many bolded words are distracting and hard to read. Use bulleted and numbered lists when appropriate. They rank right next to headings as the most-scanned areas of a page. Bullets are a great place to convey key benefits.

Consider tables for voluminous information. Tables or matrices can quickly convey and compare information that is easily lost in text.

Make the page too gray

Use photos, graphics, and captions to guide the eye and reinforce your message. They are called anchor points. They are the places where we start looking at a page.

Don’t worry about the design

A sloppy or confusing design hides your message. A good design instills confidence and trust. The right visual segmentation and hierarchy will help readers see how to interact with you.

B2B Companies, Look Out Behind You

It may be time to give your marketing materials a refresher

By Robert Celaschi

If you check out the little bio under my photo at the bottom of this article, you’ll see that “Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years...”

But it’s not true.

The fact is, this month marks 25 years since I started writing for business publications. I bring it up not to brag, but to point out how easy it is to let the details of marketing copy slip out of date. Where did the last three years go?

Even after all the research, all the editing, all the nice graphic design, you still need to keep an eye on the finished product to make sure it doesn’t get left behind as the rest of the world marches on.

Often it’s the little things that trip us up. For instance there’s that little line on most newspapers and magazines that says something like, “Vol. XXVI, No. 49.” Every edition should get a new number, and the volume number typically changes ever year or six months. It’s so easy to forget to change the number that many publications make part of their standard production checklists.

Even then it’s too easy to let the mind coast. I have seen weekly publications that dutifully change the number of the edition each week: 49, 50, 51, 53, 54 ...

Eventually someone says, “Hey, weren’t we supposed to change the volume number after 52 and start over with 1?”

Your turn

If you have been using the same marketing copy for more than a year, go back and read through it with a critical eye.

• Have any of the facts changed since they went into the brochure or onto the website?
• Do the photos and graphics still show reality? (Of course we assume that they did originally)
• Do the press release dates include the years?
• Do all your web links still go where you think they do?

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

Need a fresh pair of eyes?

A fresh pair of eyes can help you ensure your marketing materials will be effective in 2010... especially if they're attached to an experience B2B marketer. Get help >>

2010 Email Marketing and PR - What's Different?

Using 2010 best practices to engage prospects and speed up sales

By Rebekah Donaldson

Hats off to Meg Arnold, Laura Good, and other members of the Sarta team for producing yesterday's seminar 2010 Trends in Marketing and PR. 

2010 email trends we discussed

• Prospects have control - adapt to succeed
• Email is competing with social media for attention
• Is email obsolete because of social media? (no)
• Far and away email is most popular for sharing
• Email marketing budgets are up
  

Top 4 tips to improve email results

• Use transactional emails
• Build permission
• Mix and test content
• Get Sherpa’s latest email guide

2010 PR trends we discussed

• Adapt to succeed
• Microphone vs interactive PR
• Is PR obsolete because of social media? (no)
• PR is social
• " Someone always pays"
• "'Solution’ is not the solution"

Top 4 tips for improving PR results

• Steadily produce good content
• Know your top 10 keywords
• Write optimized press releases
• Point to helpful landing pages

Get my slide deck.

(I also posted it using LinkedIn's presentation sharing app, here.)

 

Audience questions

 

My co-presenters Donna Chabrier and Ryan McCann were great. Authentic, insightful, and quick on their feet.

Being quick on one's feet was important because the audience was not taking our advice lying down! There were great questions during the session, and lots of post-seminar dialogue. I hope we can continue the Q&A in the comments section.

Special thanks

Laura Good did a great job pulling the event together. She has created a Twitter list of tweeters who came. Thanks Donna and Josh Morgan for recommending me as a speaker. Thanks to my colleague Robert Celaschi - though thousands of miles away yesterday, he was very helpful. And thanks Todd Lebo for access to the MarketingSherpa 2010 Email Benchmark Report.

B2B Lead Generation Results, By Source

Visits and conversions by source for www.b2bcommunications.com Sept 7 to Oct 6 2009

By Rebekah E. Donaldson

Here is a screenshot showing the sources of our website traffic that converted to leads over the last month. Looking at the chart, I answer:

• What does this chart tell you about lead sources?
• How much did you invest to get the site working this way?
• We need to generate leads - what's the best way?

Visits and conversions by source (1 month)

This chart shows how different sources have driven visits, leads, and customers to www.b2bcommunications.com. The key on the right shows the sources tracked.

What does this chart tell you about lead sources?

To see our lead sources, we open our Hubspot account (more on this below) and go to the "Reports" tab and pick "Sources". There we have a chart showing visit to lead ratios by source:

Totals for Sep 7-Oct 7, 2009
Sources	Visits	Visit to Lead	Leads
Organic Search	590	0.68%	4
Referrals	265	2.60%	7
Paid Search	0	0%	0
Direct Traffic	547	1.50%	8
Email Marketing	0	0%	0
Social Media	86	8.10%	7
Other Campaigns	0	0%	0
Totals	1,488	1.75%	26

According to the chart, visitors from social media sources convert at the highest rate. A visit-to-lead conversion rate of 8.10% means that in the last month, eight out of ten visitors who came to the site via LinkedIn or other networking sites, responded. Visitors referred to our site from an article, blog, or website are the next most likely to respond.

How much did you invest to get these leads rolling in?

Hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars over several years. The site re-launched in 2007 and it's been an ongoing process to make it so visitors find what they need and take the next step. And there's still so much work to do! Meantime, we've been at blogging, search engine marketing, and social media marketing since 2007 - and public relations since 2001. We've tried to always close the loop (see below), so we know which B2B lead generation activities work and which to avoid.

What is Hubspot?

Hubspot provides advice and software that helps businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of them into leads and customers. We use it to build landing pages, attract traffic, nurture contacts, track leads, and connect records about leads and sales with records about marketing efforts.

We need to generate leads - what's the best way?

Here are just two of many ways to get started. Do both or pick the one that work for you:

Get a 60 Minute Internet Marketing Planning Session.

Try Hubspot - Use all the powerful features of Hubspot for B2B lead generation. Free for 30 days.

NOTE: We are pitched weekly by companies looking for affiliates to rep their stuff. So far, we've partnered only with MarketingSherpa and Hubspot. In each case, we bought their stuff and recommended it to others before we were ever a partner. Now that we are a partner, we get a small % of sales we help generate. Just so you know.

Rebekah E. Donaldson ("Red") has led Business Communications Group since 2001. More >>

 

2010 Marketing Planning – Facts From MarketingSherpa

By Rebekah E. Donaldson

Everyone is supposed to be nailing down their plans for 2010 marketing efforts. What will go in your 2010 marketing plan?

As I write this, MarketingSherpa’s 6th Annual B2B Marketing Summit 2009 in San Francisco is winding down. And I don’t want it to be over. Every session, every speaker, and every piece of content was focused on helping attendees conquer the challenges of B2B marketing.

Here are links to get some of the facts you need for smart 2010 marketing planning.

Every marketer needs practical, up-to-the-minute planning and budgeting help when it comes to 2010 planning. And with B2B case studies, examples, and statistics from MarketingSherpa, you can justify spending using real-life results and plan new programs based on actual trends.

Here are some questions you may be thinking about this Fall, and my ideas on finding answers:

—

Q: What are the best-value ways to generate leads in 2010?

a. Let’s start with tactics to be wary of:

• Don’t depend on bought or rented email addresses — even if it’s somehow legal to email lists of strangers, your time is better spent pulling in prospects and building a permission-based house list
• Don’t  depend on cold calling — even if you can get past the front desk and call screening and voicemail jail, interrupting an executive is getting off on the wrong foot
• Don’t depend on a Flash video or wesite – usually, search engines can’t ‘read’ them and many busy business decision makers will skip them altogether
• Don’t rely on mailed letters — it’s increasingly expensive (think Fed Ex envelope made lumpy with some sort of item enclosed, etc etc) to get your mail opened… much less past the gatekeeper

b. If you only get one Sherpa resource, make it the 6th Annual ‘B2B Marketing Benchmark Report 2009-10’.

In it you’ll see:

• 2,631 marketing professionals surveyed
• 157 charts & tables
• First Ever: Social Media Marketing section
• 7 Marketing Insight sections, including: ‘Strategies & Tactics for a Rebounding Economy’
• 10 practical how-to best practices from the field

—

Search Marketing Benchmark Report 2009-10

Q: How should I balance PPC and SEO in 2010?

Should you bump up Adwords investment or focus on organic search?

a. Check out Cris Rominger’s article Effective Search Engine Optimization

b. Check out my article What’s Wrong with this Google Adwords Ad?

c. Consider diving deeper into what works and what’s a waste of time using Search Marketing Benchmark Report 2009-10. In it you’ll see:

• 679 marketers surveyed
• 176 charts and tables
• Stats on conversion, cost-per-click, and clickthrough rates
• Special Section: Worldwide & regional search
• Special Section: Critical Factors in SEO
• Special Section: Testing & ROI Tracking (B2B & B2C)

—

Q: Is business use of Twitter a flash in the pan?

a. Maybe. But probably you should get involved anyway. Here are 9 articles we’ve offered related to the business use of Twitter.

2009 Social Media Marketing and PR

b. Next, consider this resource: 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and Best Practices. In it you’ll see:

• 157 charts and tables on the emerging state of Social Media marketing
• 13 practical how-to best practices from the field
• Discover how Social Media is changing PR
• Find out the metrics and budgets of Social Media marketing
• Special report: Using Social Networking Sites for Demand Generation
• Special Section: “9 Steps to Social Marketing Success”

And now a question for you. What will you do differently in 2010?

Picking a Marketing Consultant: Get What You Pay For

By Rebekah E. Donaldson

We’ve all heard the phrase, “You get what you pay for.” The truth is, sometimes you get a lot less than you pay for.

This is the first in a seven-part series of articles to help you get what you pay for when you choose a marketing agency. I’ll start today with a decision tree that shows the five key decision points. As the series progresses, I’ll show you a framework that CEOs can use to sort out the answers.  In later articles I touch on the various types of marketers in the industry. You’ll also find 11 questions to ask an agency – with an example of what counts as a good answer (“pass”), and what counts as baloney (“fail”), for each. And in my seventh article in this series I’ll give five warnings, each of which begins, “Why to watch out if you hear…“

Outsourcing marketing – opportunities and threats

On the one hand, you need effective marketing because of competition and economic conditions; on the other hand, you risk:

• Wasting money
• Wasting time
• Making a bad impression on customers and internal stakeholders if marketing poorly represents the company

The real risk of taking the wrong path

A lot of marketing-related companies are vying for your attention — and your money. Cash vacuums like Google Adwords. Thousands of marketers with consulting practices. Marketing automation software companies, web hosts, email marketing tools, graphic designers, online directories, multimedia companies, social media sites and dozens of other types of vendors.

Fig 1 - Picking a marketing consultant decision tree

Five key decision points – overview

After you resolve to do more effective marketing, you need to decide:

1. Do we need professional marketing help?

This decision is easy to overlook. After all, vendors like Google Adwords include campaign set-up and support, so why not take their free advice? Or, why not redouble your efforts with mailers and telemarketing, which produce a trickle of leads? That just requires bigger lists and more investment in the same types of marketing as before.

In this series I outline why not. And if you do need professional marketing help, you need to decide:

2. Do we need to outsource marketing or should we keep this in-house?

In 2009-2010, talent of all kinds can be had at bargain prices. But maybe you feel ambitious. Perhaps you’re up to managing marketing directly?

If you are interested in outsourcing, you may wonder:

3. Do we need a formal RFP process to look for a consultant?

There are some benefits to doing a traditional request for proposals. But that process can take months to complete.

If you can arrive at a short list more quickly and easily on your own using search engines, social media and referrals, what sort of professional marketers should make the list?

4. What kind of agency do we need — specialists or an all-in-one firm?

Specialists in marketing subdisciplines are critical to overall marketing success — but it’s risky to grasp at individual tactics (see also our Six Marketing Gotchas CEOs Can Avoid ebook). If you decide you need a firm to be accountable for helping you move the needle for your firm (not just hit marketing-centric numbers), you’ll need to decide:

5. Who should we pick — what do we ask to ensure we get the best agency?

Some folks grapple with what I think of as “early” decisions, like whether to outsource. Others skip the early decisions and go straight to weighing one resource over another.

Now that you see the path we’ll be following, we’ll start looking at the individual elements in more detail. If you haven’t already, please subscribe by email.

B2B Email: Your subject line can kill your pitch (or, Hi, I want to talk to you about … uh, stuff)

By Robert Celaschi

Something strange happens to people when they send marketing email. They’ll take a powerful, persuasive marketing message, and torpedo the whole thing by slapping a lousy subject line on it.

What makes it really strange is that the email might contain a press release or other message with a really great headline. The sender could have cut and pasted it. But no, instead they type a vague or garbled mess of words that makes me shrug and move on.

I’ll confess I’m sometimes guilty of sloppy subject lines. I’ve struggled and sweated to craft the right message. I’ve set the right tone. I’ve targeted the right people. I’m ready to press the “send” button and then — oh, yeah, gotta put some kind of subject line on this puppy. Zip-zip-zip, done. Instead, I should take even more care with those precious few words that may determine whether the email even gets opened.

Let’s look at a half-dozen real subject lines that real marketing people emailed to me in the past month.

Subj: New Dilemma For Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment

Huh? Let’s see: I gather that there’s a new dilemma of some sort. For whom? Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment. Uhhhhhhh, sorry, does not compute. This one would work better with a simple colon after “Business.” Not great, but better. The story is about businesses transferring the leases on company cars, because they’ve laid off so many of the workers who used to drive them.

Subj: Non-Profit

That’s it, just “Non-Profit.” There are a lot of nonprofits out there. They do a lot of different things. I had to dig way, way down to discover that this nonprofit is a foundation that helps children. They are holding a fund-raiser this month in Miami. If I hadn’t picked this as an example for the blog post, I wouldn’t have bothered to find out any of that.

Subj: Survey: A Quarter of Firms Scaling Back Training

A direct hit. Tells me everything I need to get started. Now I’ll open the email and find out the details. Whoops — turns out that while 26 percent are cutting back their training programs, 28 percent have expanded. But, hey, they got me to read it.

Subj: Boston – Social Media Capital?

I don’t like questions for subject lines. Why are you asking me? Don’t you already know? If not, go do some more research and get back to me.

Subj: Time for Change in Credit Card Game

Maybe it is indeed time for a change in the credit card game, but since I have no idea what this means, it’s hard to say. The easy fix here would have been to condense the first line of the enclosed press release: Consumers now can say “no” to credit card interest rate hikes.

Subj: July home sales increased 12 percent; median home price declined 19.6 percent

This one delivers. I feel like a double winner, because I learn about sales volume and about price. This is about the California housing market, by the way. Bad news if you are a seller with a fat mortgage.

Your turn!

OK, you get the idea. Now take a look at the email you’ve sent in the past month. If someone didn’t already know your message, would they get the right idea from the subject line?

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

Get help to make marketing materials that encourage prospects to take the next step.

“Solution” is not the solution in B2B marketing communications

By Robert Celaschi

I won't buy your product or service if you don't tell me what it is.

Fun and games!

Here’s a fun game:

Guess what each company is selling, using these lines from their press releases.

“…an expert in the image solution arena.”

“This is a result of an improved customer focus and strong actions to improve our solution competitiveness.”

“… delivers business-aligned solutions

“… a provider of mobility solutions”

And my favorite of the moment:

“… a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries.”

Believe it or not, these companies sell specific things: elevators, servers, computer consulting services, camera phones, iPhone applications.

Drifting off message

I know how we got here. Back in the mists of the 20th century, some truly brilliant marketing folks got the idea that their company did more than push a product out the door; the product actually solved a problem for their customers.

“Mr. Customer, we aren’t just selling you a widget polisher, we are providing a solution to your scuffed-widget problem.”

But somewhere along the way, companies got so fixated on “solution” that they forgot to say what they are selling.

Think about the marketing material you are writing right now. When it falls into my hands, it may be the first time I have run across your company, and I’d really like to know what business you are in. But I don’t have time to play detective. Tell me the specific product or service, preferably near the start.

If you want to call it a “solution” later on, that’s fine.

Reality check

Here’s your homework assignment: Pick up some of your marketing materials and look at them through the eyes of someone who never heard of your company. Is it clear from the start what you are offering? Or are you merely providing vague “solutions” for an undefined problem?

Get help

We design and copywrite marketing materials that encourage prospects to take the next step.

Copywriting marketing materials? How to speak prospects’ language

By Robert Celaschi

Copywriting marketing materials? The challenge is to ensure prospects are informed, not befuddled. An expert marketing copywriter gives tips on speaking their language.

Fans of Steve Martin might remember his plumber joke, supposedly told for the benefit of all the plumbers in the audience. It’s actually a joke about the disaster of using language that people won’t understand.

The joke

“This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job, and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch gangly wrench. Just then this little apprentice leaned over and said, ‘You can’t work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch wrench.’ Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, ‘The Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.’ Just then the little apprentice leaned over and says, ‘It says sprocket, not socket!’”

[Worried pause.]

“Were these plumbers supposed to be here this show?”

Hitting the mark with marketing materials

When you are putting together materials to market your company, think about the audience you are reaching out to. When you talk about “plants,” will they assume you mean botanical or manufacturing? When you mention the AIA, will they know which AIA you mean? There is an American Institue of Architects, an Aerospace Industries Association, and other groups going by the same initials.

If your target audience is new to your product or service, help them get on board. They won’t be impressed if you dive right in with details about Langstrom wrenches and Findlay sprockets. They’ll be baffled, and they’ll go looking for some other company that they can understand.

On the other hand, your target audience may know more about Findlay sprockets than you do. In that case, they’ll appreciate you using their language. If you oversimplify your pitch, they might think you don’t respect their expertise.

Marketing copywriter’s reality check

There’s no standard formula for finding the middle ground between talking down to your audience and talking over their heads. But there’s one good test to see whether you’ve hit the mark: Ask them. Show a rough draft to a few people in your target market and ask them what they think.

Have you tested your marketing materials with someone in your target audience? Are there times when you need separate materials for the newbies and the veterans in your audience? Please comment.

Help with marketing materials

We can help you design and copywrite marketing materials that encourage prospects to take the next step. Learn more >>