A recent MarketingProfs survey, Marketing ROI & Performance Evaluation Study determined that 60% of marketers have lead quality objectives and 40% of marketers objectives are defined around lead quantity. Why do we have to think of quality and quantity as mutually exclusive? 

When discussing potential media buys, some clients say “I need the lowest cost per lead and largest number of leads you can deliver” or “I need highly qualified leads, who are further along in the purchase cycle and want to hear from our sales team”. In my opinion, one reason for these separate goals is to either satisfy senior management (quantity, low cost) or sales (quality). My advice is to work with your publishers and create campaigns that have both goals in mind.

Here are some tips to drive quantity AND quality from your lead gen campaigns:

• When determining metrics of success for your campaign, select both a primary and secondary goal. As an example, we recently had a client request a primarily lead guarantee based on a targeted named account list (quality). In addition they requested a secondary goal of a high volume of leads to fill their pipeline. They gave us assets positioned for both goals, we created two different promotional plans based on the different target audiences and delivered a low CPL along with a bucket of highly qualified leads.

• Your choice to use qualification questions will impact the quantity of leads and subsequently your CPL. Our recent Google/TechTarget research reveals that 61% of users are willing to provide contact information and qualification data once they are ready for purchase. Therefore, when you launch a campaign, it may be advantageous to utilize pre-populated demographic questions and remove qualification questions to increase the quantity of the respondents. As a result we see conversion rates grow 25% and CPLS decrease 25%.

• Take advantage of automated re-messaging capabilities. To maintain growth in quality of leads, always create (or take advantage of) some sort of nurturing program. When you are launching a campaign, it’s the start of a relationship. As our research states, users will not want to hear from you until they are ready. Therefore, it’s important to build their trust through re-messaging and personalization. Furthermore, while you re-message, append additional qualification questions such as time to purchase or being contacted by the vendor. The stronger the relationship, the more apt the user will be to provide qualification data.

• Have content available that drives both quantity and quality of leads. Be sure to syndication and promote content types that require lower level engagement (white papers, webcasts, videos) to satisfy your need to drive high volume of leads while also syndicating trials, demos that attract those further along in the purchase cycle. This also allows for seamless integration of a re-messaging strategy. Always pay close attention to the distribution of your media mix as it should always be determined by the maturity of your particular market.

• Segment your lead delivery. When using a publisher, request your leads be delivered or uploaded based on whether they satisfy your quality or quantity requirements. Request segmented spreadsheets on a daily or weekly basis. Also be sure to request reporting that highlights multi-touch leads. Delivering leads effectively and efficiently is half the battle when trying to prove ROI.

I’m curious.  Anecdotally, is your success judged by quantity or quality of leads?

A whopping 84% of users like receiving Email from companies in which they register and close to 60% of marketers plan to grow their traditional Email marketing spend in 2009. With these great stats, why is there a perception that Email marketing is not as effective as it used to be? Email is still one of the most effective marketing tools of today. However, I’m not confident that we are all optimizing our Email campaigns for optimal performance and conversion.

After investigating further, it seems that you, the IT marketer, are looking for tips and recommendations on how to not only make your marketing dollar go further, but also make your Email marketing dollar go further. As a result, my colleague Chris Olive and I were asked to run a workshop titled “Best Tips and Common Mistakes to Avoid for Improved Email Conversion” at this month’s TechTarget Online ROI Summit. The goal of this workshop is to go back and re-visit “your roots”. Specifically revisit the roots of your Email strategy. During this workshop, we will provide insight into steps to follow to get the best performance, review real-world examples of how to increase Email performance 2X, and discuss new strategies to assist in making the most of your Email lists.

How is your Email performance? Do you think it could be better? If not, what are your strategies?

If you can’t join us live at the Online ROI Summit, be sure to come back and visit MyEducatedGuess for a recap of the session.

At TechTarget, we have spent a lot of time in 2007 gathering data from our ongoing research and developing marketing best practices around the IT buying process.   Recently, evidence surfaced that both the type of content (i.e. webcast, white paper, podcast, trial, etc.) and the topic of the content (analyst review, case study, product comparison, benchmarking study) determines whether the user is in the awareness, consideration, or decision phase of the IT buying process.  

With our recent acquisition of Knowledge Storm (a top-ranked search resource for technology solutions and information), we now have a complete product offering of both targeted, “push” promotion along with “pull” or broad based search strategies.  With that said, when implementing search engine optimization strategies, where do those leads generated fall into the IT buying process? 

In a recent post on www.searchengineland.com, Patricia Hursh highlights research that shows business buyers use search engines in the “awareness, research, and selection phases of the b2b buying cycle”.  At this point, I’m not willing to place leads generated through SEO in any particular part of the IT buying process.  Although I would like an opportunity to review more research, I suspect that search strategies can get more highly target content, such as events and seminars, in front of the right audience.  They aren’t just used for awareness building.  A lot of the success depends in how the content is catalogued and what search terms are used when syndicating the content.

Can you share any experiences or evidence that shows the influence SEO strategies have on all phases of the B2B or IT buying process?

In one of my previous post, I discussed the strategy of hiring email marketing experts and developing a centralized email marketing unit that manages all email marketing initiatives.  Again, Loren McDonald of J.L. Hasley takes on this topic in a recent MarketingProfs article.  McDonald reminds us that centralization will free marketers to focus exclusively on their campaign strategy and goals.  The centralized group of email marketing experts will allow expert management of email best practices, permissions, privacy, brands, email products, data, ROI reporting, research and vendor relationships.  In addition, these email marketers will be charged with managing the relationships and expectations set by the individual product marketers. 
 
McDonald also sites a JupiterResearch study that says only 38% of companies have an email communications department.  Does that seem high or low to you?  For those who have one, how did you prove the need for this type of centralization with your senior management?

Our team had a discussion last week about some of the trends of email marketing; strategies such as micro/behavioral segmentation, personalization, and deliverability.  The more research I do on today’s email marketing strategies, the more I realize that email is much more complicated than I originally thought.  It’s not only a process of developing a successful strategy but it also requires the ability to build out a sound deployment strategy and integration plan with all the other marketing initiatives.
 
After reading Loren McDonald’s recent article in iMedia Connection, I also realize that it is up to the business owner of email marketing to prove ROI off of these sophisticated, integrated email campaigns.  He states that “deliverability, rendering and segmentation are logistical challenges that now require higher-level expertise. It takes skill to devise a forward-thinking marketing strategy that integrates email with SEM and other marketing imperatives.”  I completely agree.  Email deployment strategies have matured so much over the past couple years and there is a need for a full time email specialist to implement the complicated strategies that touch online marketing, offline marketing, user generated content, etc. 
 
Are companies investing a full time job in email marketing strategies?  If so, can you share some success stories?

I have attended hundreds of B2B marketing campaign performance presentations and asked numerous clients about their lead nurturing and lead conversion strategies.  Some clients don’t have the infrastructure in place to map the ROI on leads delivered and others who do, don’t have complete confidence in metrics delivered.  Plus, a lot of the metrics presented are more subjective than objective.  As a marketer, what is the best way you can become more confident in your lead management system besides implementing the newest software?

If you do a search on the topic “closed loop lead management”, the results are typically focused on technology solutions or tools that can be used to implement a lead management strategy.  But as Brian Carroll mentioned in a recent blog post, it isn’t only the tools that make a closed loop lead marketing successful.  It’s the people and the strategy.  I completely agree.  

I agree that a lot of success comes from “closing the loop” with the sales team.  Offering them ownership in developing the lead management strategy will offer them vested interest in making the process a success.  But at the same time, we need to remember that sales isn’t the only department who touch leads.  If you include your lead gen partners/publishers in the development of your strategy/process, they can offer recommendations based on past experiences and possibly offer seamless lead delivery options that can help shorten the sales cycle. In addition, channel and telesales groups can offer a unique perspective that your main sales team might not have line of sight into.  And finally, bringing in the expertise of your technical team will not only help with improving efficiencies, but it will also give them a stakeholder role.

Do you agree, as marketers, that managing a group of internal stakeholders will offer a more successful closed loop lead management system in the end?

Web 2.0 is changing the face of branding. Now it is all about creating an online community in which your brand can grow and achieve affinity. Social Signal, a specialist in building online communities, had a recent marketing blog post that introduced reflective glory marketing (RGM). They define this form of new marketing as using Web 2.0 to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company’s brand.

How will this marketing strategy impact technology branding? Are there specific types of IT professionals who respond better to user generated content? Developers were the first group of technology professionals to grow and develop user generated content. How do network admins respond? Are security professionals comfortable in contributing to UGC? These type of questions need to be answered to determine the most effective way to grow a community of technology pros who are aligned with your brand.

A couple weeks ago, I attended the Online Marketing Summit hosted by BusinessOnLine down in San Diego. One of the major themes of the event was how to measure website performance and ROI. The event featured a keynote from web analytics guru, Jim Sterne and a session from the ever entertaining Eric Peterson of WebSideStory. Both sessions helped me understand not only the power of website metrics, but validated that not everyone is doing it and/or doing it perfectly.

Being on the publisher side, I am highly intrigued with how all this data provided through website analytics can be used to determine the engagement level of our users. Discussions on Peterson’s blogs showcase engagement level as a customized, unique metric that is determined by the reviewing the goals of the website. As an example, if part of your marketing strategy includes a blog, what would you determine the level of engagement? When the user visits, responds to the blog, or reaches some frequency of response? It’s obvious that having the data is one thing, but using the data to define and reach goals is a hole other challenge.

What is your company’s strategy for website analytics and if you have a strategy, how do you use website analytics to determine and define engagement?

Based on conversations I have had with clients and reviewing some recent marketing survey results, it obvious that proving ROI is still one of the biggest challenges for B2B marketers. In his blog, Eric Kintz of HP provided some great insight into the need for initial investment in Marketing Resource Management (MRM) in order to prove ROI. According to Kintz, HP adopted a MRM strategy and process to help prove ROI for their global marketing initiatives. I would assume that this is not only the first step in proving ROI but also the most difficult to get funding for. I came across an article on Chief Marketer that highlights not only some potential vendors of MRM solutions but how effective it could be in streamlining your marketing initiatives and strategies.

Does anyone have some insights into researching MRM solutions or real world examples of how it has helped prove ROI?

For the past 3 or 4 years, the revenue associated with mobile advertising has grown extensively. With the launch of the iPhone and the announcement of paid mobile banner advertising from Verizon, the reality of buying banner impressions to advertise your brand on a mobile device is available now. Has anyone heard of using for this advertising medium towards the B2B audience?