Possible reasons why your Lead Generation numbers are not going up

There will always be times when your marketing efforts don’t produce the numbers you've expected. And in those times, it might be hard to shift focus away from failure and instead look at the reasons why it happened. Emotions can get in the way, and that prevents us from seeing things logically. B2B lead generation is one those fields where an element of “chance” is always a part of the game. Sometimes, campaigns fail because of things that are beyond your control, and there’s really nothing you could do about it.

What you can do, though, is to evaluate certainaspects of your efforts and see if they “contribute” to the occurrence of failure.

Below is a checklist that you might want to try for yourself:

Your content may not be generating enough traffic. It might be because of lack of quality or poor search optimization, but whatever it is, it’s the very first thing you need to check. To be able to generate leads, you need a large bulk of traffic, and without that, you can’t expect numbers to go up.

Your calls-to-action are in the wrong places. CTAs are like the pearly gates that lead to conversion heaven. They must be scattered everywhere within the prospect’s decision-making phase, and it should clearly define what’s in it for them. If they couldn't see your CTAs, you wouldn't see them either.

Your social media use may be misguided. A lot of marketers are disillusioned about the number of likes or followers they generate on social media. What you really should be looking at is lead potential, and your social media posts should go hand-in-hand with your other efforts, not as an independent campaign.

Your landing page forms are either too long or too short. Studies show that the optimal number of form fields that lead to conversion is from 5 to 10. If yours doesn't fall within that average, then perhaps you need a re-evaluation.

Your leads are not of high-quality.Again, the battle of quantity versus quality. While campaigns may survive by getting tons of mediocre leads, the ultimate success can only be determined by high-quality leads – meaning, those that rake in large sums of revenue and are more likely to stick.

Your promos are outdated, unoriginal or boring. Prospects may lose interest in offers that keep getting recycled over and over. This lessens the likelihood of sharing and loyalty, thus also affecting conversion rates. Come up with something fresh, although risky, to see if it can put back life into your dying efforts.

To Win, You Have to Do More than Create Better Services—An Interview with RainToday

When managers are asked why their customers buy from their company, very
few of them say it's because their company has the best services or
product—or even that they have the best price.
Listen to the complete interview here.

How to Build a Better Profile of Your Ideal Customer

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with ideal customer profiles. An ideal customer profile is a description of the kinds of companies that would make the best customers for your business. The goal of creating and using an ICP is to focus your marketing and sales efforts on those prospects with the greatest likelihood of becoming good customers and to avoid wasting valuable resources on prospects that aren't a good fit.

Most companies base their ideal customer profile(s) on the characteristics of their existing customers. They first identify their "best" customers (which usually means their largest and/or most profitable customers), and then they identify what those "best" customers have in common. Most ideal customer profiles use "firmographic" attributes such as:

• Annual revenues
• Number of employees
• Industry vertical
• Location

Some companies will also include other attributes when possible, such as:

• The "footprint" of the organization (local, regional, national, global)
• The most relevant organizational unit or department
• The business situation (for example, is the company in growth or decline)

While this process for creating an ideal customer profile is used by many companies, it doesn't go quite far enough. When I work with clients to develop ICP's, I ask them to consider three additional questions as we go through the process just described. Answering these questions will add depth and context to your ICP and ultimately make your ICP more insightful and useful.

Here are the three questions I add to the conventional process:

• What kinds of companies have derived significant (i.e. above-average) value from using our product or service, and why have these companies obtained greater value?
• What kinds of companies will be receptive to our marketing and sales efforts and thus be more likely to buy from us?
• What kinds of companies can we acquire as customers at an acceptable cost?

Of these three questions, the first is the most important. Companies that have derived exceptional value from using your product or service are likely to be among your largest and most profitable customers. Common sense says that similar types of companies will make your best prospects.

Understanding what is driving the exceptional value may enable you to expand the definition of your ideal customer. For example, you may find that the companies deriving exceptional value are primarily found in one industry. However, when you identify why those companies are obtaining greater value, you may find that the same issue or challenge also exists in other types of organizations that you do not currently serve. So, by answering the why question, you may well uncover an entirely new group of "ideal" prospects.

The 7 Deadly Sins of B2B Lead Generation

There are only two kinds of things that can bring any business endeavor to its demise: unfortunate circumstances and human errors. Obviously, the former is something that’s out of anyone’s control. It could be anything from a paralyzing economic recession to physical disasters like fires or earthquakes. The latter, however, are the flaws and lapses that key people have in making decisions and performing actions. These things are controllable.

When a business engages in B2B lead generation, it embarks on an elaborate campaign to seek and attract potential clients. The task requires careful planning, patience and cooperation between and among marketers and other functions of the business. The things that could destroy that effort – the ones that are controllable – must not be tolerated. As marketers, it is important to understand why these things can be roadblocks to success. 

These are 7 of the worst things that could happen to your campaign:

1. Lack of strategy – Even the simplest marketing activities require a strategy. It’s the framework that guides marketers to their goals and puts and everything in order for them. Without it, management of time, budget and other resources would be topsy-turvy.

2. Lack of commitment – Lead generation is not the sole obligation of marketing, and that’s true. However, if a marketing team engages in lead generation only to perform it half-heartedly, then goals would be difficult to achieve.

3.  Lack of quality content – If lead generation is a restaurant business, then content is the menu list. It’s what draws people into engagement. If the type of content is not compelling enough to spark interest, lead generation would be stagnated into a dead campaign.

4. Lack of collaboration with sales – Marketing should not work independently from sales, especially in walking prospects through the entire sales process. Both departments should have a shared vision as to how a prospect’s experience would be enhanced.

5.  Lack of nurturing – The responsibility of marketers do not end when prospects are turned into leads. There must be a thorough follow-up system to maximize the potential of doing business and establishing a long-term relationship.

6.   Lack of fun – B2B doesn’t have to be a boring enterprise. Even within an industry composed of professionals and executives, the element of fun and camaraderie could still be encouraged. No one wants their business to come out as a square to the public eye.

7. Lack of risk-taking – Eventually, the things that the B2B industry practices now would become obsolete in the future. That may still be a long time from now, but for a business that doesn’t have the guts to take risks even today, tomorrow would be a quandary.

The Sound of Music ... and Advertising.

Whether you're Mozart, B.B. King, John Lennon, Hank Williams or Ne-Yo, sitting down to a blank page of music opens up a limitless world of possibilities. Boundless, untapped creativity. The dots you splash on those lines can be the next great ballad or the next great ballet. They can make people laugh, cry, love and dance ... it's totally up to the musician.

That's what I love about what we do. To me, creative is like music.  Eddie Wilson in the movie Eddie and the Cruisers said, "words and music, man - they need each other." I couldn't agree more. But so do words and images.

I share this rant because I just heard about an interesting client conversation. They didn't want to provide too much creative input because they didn't want to stifle the creative process. In essence, they were providing blank sheet music and asking us to write the next great song.

Which is GREAT!!! No creative wants everything dictated to them. BUT...we didn't know if we are writing a love song, pop song, western or jazz.

For advertising, the strategy is like providing the stye to a musician. It provides the ground rules that allow creative to flourish. Yes...creative DOES need rules. Are we writing an eight-bar blues riff? A concerto? Will it be acapella? We at least need to know what instruments to include.

And within each musical style, the creativity is varied by tone. How do we want people to feel. Is it reminiscent? Inspirational? Foreboding? Your advertising creative needs a defined tone too.

You can give 100 musicians the same 8 notes and you'll hear 100 totally different tunes. They just need to select a style and define a tone.

Give 100 writers and designers the exact same well-defined strategy, and you'll get 100 different well-positioned ads. If you truly want to set your creatives free to keep their feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars, give them the freedom of a tight strategy.

For the cheat sheet to a tight strategy, click here: 

A Cheat Sheet to Perfect Creative

We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too. Contact us to see how.

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Leadership Traits That Inspire Loyalty In Your B2B Telemarketing Team

Loyalty – the one quality that many business owners and managers want to develop in their employees. This is also the quality that compels marketers to stick to their bosses through difficult times, convincing them to look for viable answer to many B2B telemarketing concerns. Well, you have to admit that generating qualified sales leads through this medium could be a pain. And not many people will stay working for you, what with all the pressure and challenges that they will have to face here. It is your job, as the leader, to inspire loyalty in your people. Mind you, doing that is no walk in the park, but if you know what to do exactly, then you will be on your way to a productive appointment setting campaign.

Let as look at the following, for starters:

1. Be honest – nothing can be more inspiring than being honest with your people. I know, this may sound cliché, but you have to admit that leaders who can remove ambiguities and promote accuracy and openness in the office are the ones who are most likely to succeed in fostering respect and loyalty from their employees. So try to keep that in mind as well

2. Stick to the job description – when you hired someone, you hired them specifically for the job you have in mind. Making them do things that go beyond their job description not only results in poor results (if that employee lacks the proper skill for the new job) but also resentment from your employees. Think of what would happen if you put your researchers in a big-time telemarketing job. They would not like that.

3. Get real – basically, you remove the barriers that keep people from interacting and working together. You know you have something good if people collaborate and contribute towards a better lead generation process. I mean, you can only get that if all the inputs from other members of your company share their thoughts to the one making the marketing plans. Some might even get the courage to go straight to you and share their marketing ideas.

4. Show fairness and openness to everyone – simply put, you want to be transparent, whether it is about that needed to be done or the problems that your company is experiencing. You have to show them that you are someone who appreciates good work and is not reserved with the praise, or critical analysis and advice in case things go wrong.

5. Do not tell them, show them – action speaks louder than words, so to speak. That is how you teach employees how things are done in the office, and in the way you prefer. Sure, you can let them do things their way, but you have to make sure that everyone is heading to the direction you desire.

Having loyal employees is very important in your B2B telemarketing campaign. Try following these tips and you will be able to keep your employees working for you. This is a good investment.

Marketing to White Rabbits

Earlier this month at Princeton University, I had the honor of being invited to Filene Research Institute’s annual big.bright.minds meeting.  It was an incredibly cerebral event and I found myself wondering what the week would entail as we took a deep dive into behavioral economics and the concept of scarcity - financial and bandwidth (time).  What this means for us marketers is that EVERYONE is stretched beyond his or her capacity in one form or another.

The economy has affected everyone to varying degrees.  People have gotten more creative about their financial lives from how they take vacations to doing without certain things because of budgetary constraints.  Financial woes take a drastic toll on the amount of attention that can be focused on other things because it is instead focused on making ends meet. 

Lack of time – or bandwidth, as it was referred to – is also something everyone (your customers and members included) struggles with.  And statistics show that there is only so much to go around – you can’t just increase your personal bandwidth by multitasking or getting less sleep or concentrating more.  We only have a limited supply of bandwidth.  Enter...the White Rabbit.

It isn’t so much the choices we present to our audiences in the form of messaging, products, or services, it is the WAY in which we deliver those choices that truly matters. 

While we are trying to figure out how to get out of the office on time so we can go take our kids to practice and then somehow get food on the table for our families, we just have no room to listen to or see important things we would ordinarily consider. 

Take your financial institution’s messages for example.  You may have the best new loan product, but getting that message across to your customer or member will be next to impossible unless you specifically design the message around the direct value to your target market.  What problem are you going to solve for them?  How will having this product or service make their life easier?  How will it save them time?  How will it help them be a better mom or help them better reach their goals for their lives and families?

And forget spelling everything out to them in a way that you think will appeal to anyone.  You have a specific person in mind for your message.  Tell THEM what you have to say in words that will appeal to THEM specifically.  Don’t use 25 words when 10 will do. 

When you try to come up with the perfect message that appeals to everyone, you are saying way too much and you aren’t specifically appealing to anyone.

For your next campaign, put on your own behavioral economics hat and think about how strapped for time you are in your own life.  Think about how your financial institution’s new product would make your own life easier, shape the messaging around that value in a succinct way, and you’ll have a much greater ROI for your marketing efforts.  

Amanda

We bring these philosophies to credit unions and community banks all over the country to help them with their strategic planning, marketing, and branding initiatives.  Contact me to learn more about how MarketMatch can help your financial institution define its "why" and achieve sustainable growth in the future.  Don't forget to ask about our ROI Guarantee - the only guarantee of its kind in the entire financial industry!

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Why There's Still So Much Bad Content

In a recent article at LinkedIn, Joe Pulizzi, the Founder and Executive Director of the Content Marketing Institute, observed that most of the marketing content produced by companies is "flat out awful." He wrote, "In many cases, the content is self-serving, not useful and, maybe the worst, pointless."

Pulizzi argues that companies produce bad content for three reasons.

• The vast majority of companies do not have a formal content strategy.
• The content marketing efforts at most companies lack focus. Many marketers feel compelled to develop content around all of the products and services they offer. The result is often content that is too broad (and too shallow) to be effective.
• In many companies, no one is accountable for the overall content marketing program.

I agree that the lack of strategy, focus, and/or accountability can result in "awful" marketing content. I also believe, however, that there's a more fundamental problem contributing to the continuing use of bad content.

We now know that most effective B2B marketing content is primarily educational and non-promotional. The goal of content marketing is to provide potential buyers information that is insightful, useful, and valuable, and thereby demonstrate your company's expertise, credibility, and trustworthiness.

The problem is, this approach runs counter to the basic paradigm of marketing that's existed for decades. For years, we've been trained to think that the best way to sell more stuff is to effectively promote our brand and our products or services. In the traditional paradigm of marketing, content is primarily about us - our company or our products or services.

Shifting from promotional content to content that's primarily educational and non-promotional is a difficult and counterintuitive change to make for most marketers.

In his new book, Ctrl Alt Delete, Mitch Joel provides an example that illustrates just how entrenched the traditional marketing mindset still is. Joel writes:

"Last year, I was in a business meeting when the idea for an iPhone app came up. It was a smart idea (you know, the kind of idea that you wish you had thought of). The chief marketing officer smiled during the presentation, put his hand up to ask a question, removed the glasses from his eyes and placed them on his notebook, folded his hands, leaned forward, and said, 'It's genius. . . but can we put our four key brand messages in there as well, because if we don't force people to look at them, what's the point of this app?'"

Companies are still producing "awful" content primarily because many marketers can't resist the urge to "always be promoting." Strategy, focus, and accountability are all important to building an effective content marketing program, but the starting point is adopting a different mindset about what constitutes good content and what role content plays in the marketing function.

Who Is Better At B2B Lead Generation? An Expert Or A Consultant?

You know that marketing is no easy job. Customer trends and tastes change all the time. And it is up to you to make sure that your B2B lead generation campaign becomes successful. Now, as a marketer, approaching potential sales leads requires that you know how to deal with them best. Basically, you have to assume one of the two common roles that appointment setters make: an expert or a consultant? But here is an interesting part, which of these two roles will fit you? Understanding whether you are an expert or a consultant can affect your marketing style. So, which is which?

  

1.    An expert will tell you what to do, while a consultant asks what you might do – Some business prospects do not like being told straight to their faces of what they should or should not do. Consultants, on the other hand, may not be able to get much, especially if the B2B leads prospects they are talking to are not exactly sure of what they should be doing in the first place.

2.    An expert starts a trend, a consultant follows it – honestly, there is nothing wrong about being a trend-setter. What makes it a problem is when it backfires on you, especially if the trend you want to create actually messed up your lead generation campaign. You might as well observe the trends and deal with what you see.

3.    Experts explain the facts, consultants learn facts – business prospects find it harder and harder to analyze the facts and get things straight, so most of them would love to have someone who could make things easier for them. Experts can do that. But consultants are pretty good as well. They just spend more time studying the market and getting the facts straight. Now that would take a lot of time, but it is worth it.

4.    Experts bring a lot of things in, consultants do not bring much – since experts are pretty much knowledgeable of how the market works, it is only natural that you would be telling them everything they should know about. In the case of consultants, they would want to know more about your business first before they can give a concrete answer. There are a lot of problems and issues that may not be seen by experts that consultants might be able to point out. But still, it may work the other way, depending on the business you have.

5.    Experts talk, consultants ask – knowledge is power, so to speak, and in a B2B telemarketing campaign, you need to know how your prospects prefer to be talked into business with. Do they want to hear what you have in mind, or do they prefer someone who listens to their concerns?

Think about it. This might affect your decision on what exactly is the kind of b2b lead generation specialist you are going to be. You can bet that your approach to sales leads prospects will be influenced by the way you deal with them.

5 Questions every B2B Lead Generation Company must mull over

The luxury that a marketer may have if he’s in the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) industry is that he can just pour in the right ingredients into the mix and the product will practically cook itself. That is not to demean their efforts, which are for sure very intensive, but the fact that their audience is the general buying public makes it largely easier for them to perform marketing.

In Business-to-Business (B2B) lead generation, however, buyers’ interests are not easily gained by preppy, bourgeois-eque publicity. The B2B audience is more or less “experts” in the field they are in, and they generally have the tendency to rationalize their purchases by learning about the product or service.

That in turn makes it a little bit more complicated for B2B marketers to evaluate the well-being of their marketing campaigns. It’s more than just asking “Are people buying our products ?” but it entails a lot more concerns to consider:

Does your target market know you?

Oblivion is marketing hell, and the first thing you should shoot for is recognition. If you’re a company that sells, say, technology products and software, the least that you could ask for is for your audience to know you exist, considering the tight competition in the IT industry. That should be your basic requirement; ask yourself, have people heard about my company?

Are you getting good traffic?

The biggest chunk of your B2B lead generation efforts will most likely come from inbound traffic, and if you’re getting none of that, then you should be worried, and you might as well just take down your site.

Do your visitors get converted?

It isn’t enough that people visit your blog almost every day to read your posts and see updates on events; they have to get converted to customers, or at least provide leads for future use. A lot of sites get an awful lot of traffic but end up not increasing sales anyway.

Are you attracting the right people?

Even when people do sign up for newsletters or contact your sales team, what are the realistic odds that they will convert? For all you know, you could be driving the wrong people (or perhaps the right people but for the wrong reasons). Make necessary adjustments to point your aim at the people who are actually going to make business.

Is your sales cycle functional?

Your sales cycle (in partnership with your sales team) is the machine that takes in the heap of fish, takes out the bones, processes the meat, adds the sauce, and puts the finished product inside shiny aluminum cans. If it’s not working, then your leads would just remain as they are – just plain leads. 

How To Prioritize B2B Lead Generation Tasks

As a business owner or manager, it is understandable if you want to generate the most number of IT sales leads for your company. The IT industry, while profitable, is also the most competitive. A lot of IT companies rise and fall every day, and only the strength of their products and the skills of their B2B lead generation team is what keeps the ones who survive afloat. And with all the things that you have to deal with, you cannot just cover everything in a single day. You need to learn how to prioritize. Otherwise, you would be stretching yourself so thin you have to chance to recharge or recheck your bearings. Now that would be more damaging to your IT business. So, how would you prioritize your tasks?

1.    List down your tasks – the main reason why you end up so overwhelmed with your work is because you do not know how many tasks you have to fulfill. Take stock of your work load. Only then will you know which one would be the most important in B2B leads generation.

2.    Identify the most draining tasks – to be honest, the one activity that would really drain you would be appointment setting. I mean, this is a process that requires constant monitoring and follow-up. You have to do that one right, before you deal with the rest.

3.    Forget about the perfect time – honestly, there will never be a perfect time to decide on things. You just have to deal with the challenges that get thrown your way. If you need to deal with your IT telemarketing campaign fast, then you really have to deal with it. Delays by waiting for the perfect time will not get you anything.

4.    Try not getting stuck on the big picture – sometimes, looking at the big picture makes you lose focus on the small details. And to tell you the truth, it is the small details that matter in your everyday operations. As a marketer, you should ensure that the small details are properly attended to. The big picture would take care of itself.

5.   Move on – there are so many tasks that you need to do in a single day that you just cannot afford to linger on one that you have just taken care of. If you think of each of these tasks as a sort of stages, one that will get you to your intended goals once the day ends.

6.    Rinse and repeat – basically, you do the cycle all over again the next day. The thing about marketing, and its accompanying tasks, is that the process never ends. You know that there will be more tasks coming up on your plate, and it is up to managers and entrepreneurs like you to put some system or process in place to help you go about your work, every day.

That is how you prioritize your tasks in B2B lead generation campaigns. Your IT business would be in a better spot with this.