Impacting Your Pipeline More Effectively
May 6th, 2010 | Dave BaileyOne of the challenges I often hear from online marketers is figuring out what to do with the hundreds of leads they generate from their online campaigns. Understanding the best way to identify the real opportunities for marketers and sales people can be found in the content they download, the stories they read, and the emails they respond to. This can provide an unbiased profile of the prospect that reveals their true intent and gives valuable insight as to what’s important to them as they are researching their solution choices. The result is a clear identification of the most active and engaged prospects with topics related to the solutions that matter most to them. But how do you attract the prospects that can impact your pipeline now?
Specialized content helps drive activity
Attracting the serious technology buyer versus the “tire-kicker” often lies in the specific technology information that helps them in all phases of their research process. How this information is organized in topics, sub-topics, and sub-sub-topics is critical to the buyer to get them the answers they need sooner. The serious technology buyer looks for volume, depth and specialization of technology information from three perspectives: independent editorial, vendor information, and peer-to-peer communication. Capturing and analyzing the actions your prospects take can provide a deeper level of intelligence allowing you to communicate with them at “that” point of their research for an active project. However, making sense of what they are doing and pulling out the pearls of wisdom amongst the intelligence can be challenging.
What to do with the information and intelligence?
With almost infinite data available from the activities your prospects take online, it is challenging at best to figure out your target prospects, and decide who to contact first and what to talk to them about since your sales team is most interested in prospects with active projects. However, the actionable intelligence that you get from capturing your prospects activities can provide you with an understanding of their urgency and the information that is most relevant to them at that point. As a marketer, this is so valuable since you can identify those prospects most likely to be in an active project, helping you to optimize your content, messages and communications. Once captured as a lead, this extends to active follow-up, where the intelligence can inform a nurturing program to be much more precise with the content and messaging that is more relevant to your prospect, and can assist sales to carry on a better, more meaningful discussion by meeting the prospect where they are in their buying process. Looking at a target audience’s activities online can provide you with more actionable sales leads and the information necessary to improve all aspects of lead generation, nurturing, and sales follow-up.
