Marketers have always walked a thin line between collecting as much information about a lead as possible and asking for so much that it scares them away. While nobody wants to incur high drop off rates for their assets, marketers struggle to learn as much as possible about users who are interested in their content.  Recently, this struggle has eased a little as online lead generation moves away from information collection and more toward activity monitoring.

Activity monitoring allows marketers to make use of a “show, don’t tell” approach, where rather than relying on a lead to provide data about themselves, information is gathered though watching the real time behavior of the lead. Most marketers find that knowing that a particular user has recently looked at a high volume of assets around a given topic is far more valuable than that user’s answer to a question about whether or not there is a project in place.

But as with any new technology, as certain challenges are alleviated, new ones appear in its place. While marketers are very familiar with how to bucket leads into categories based on answers to custom questions, dealing with the intricacies of an activity-based approach to lead prioritization is a new frontier. Smaller companies are often better equipped to make qualitative decisions about each lead on a case-by-case basis; larger companies are dependent on CRM tools and quantitative scoring methods. This is where it becomes extremely important for marketers to work with their lead generation vendor to come up with the best possible methods for using this new kind of data.  Because a good leads is only as good as the follow up process.

A great additional resource that explores this topic in more depth is: How to Capitalize on Highly Active Leads from TechTarget

I recently came across this article in B2B Magazine about how marketers should target their most profitable accounts.  http://www.btobonline.com/article/20110120/FREE/110129994/how-should-marketers-target-their-most-profitable-accounts

The article mentions that marketers are paying little attention to identifying, marketing and selling to their organizations strategic accounts.  While a lead can be identified as a contact wanting to learn more about a vendor, a named account program provides multiple contacts at the account level.  Why is this so important?  It’s those strategic accounts that are responsible for growing the business and gives sales the opportunity to connect with these accounts.  Named accounts are typically large organizations with multiple departments.  A named account programs provide sales with multi-level relationships at the account level for maximum return on investment.

The key to these account programs is to customize your email marketing and advertising plans to only target those accounts.  This can be done by sharing the account list with advertising vendors who can create customized lists guaranteeing the return on investment.  As a marketer, do you see the value in this type of marketing strategy?  What are some of the market proven methods you have used to develop and manage a named account program?

It seems every technology company has their own processes established for lead follow-up.  Some companies employ a team to pre-qualify leads before being passed on to Sales.  Other companies route all of their leads directly to Sales for immediate follow-up.  Then there’s the concept of email nurturing.   A recent article titled, Lead Nurturing: The New Tech Marketing Frontier talks about how to build a lead nurturing program that will deliver results.  This involves an active process of targeting the prospect with messaging that is relevant and consistent.

Great content is also key to a successful nurturing program – according to the article, “it should be educational in nature, promote thought leadership, and go deep.  Great content gets responses and gets you invited into deeper conversations with prospects.”  You want to persuade your leads to take next steps that create transitions forward in their buying journey.  Naturally, you should have appropriate content that speaks to prospects at every phase of the decision making process.

I always recommend to clients based on experience that having an intelligent content strategy means having content available that speaks to users in all phases of the buy cycle.  This means you need to have content that’s classified into the following three buckets – Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.  The key to successful email nurturing is to message prospects with content that will lead them further along the buy cycle.  For example, take a prospect early on in doing their research – they downloaded an Awareness piece of content. The appropriate next step is to offer up content that may speak to actual product comparisons, for example.

One of my clients, AMD, currently has a Custom Activity Nurturing program in place with TechTarget.  Their strategy originally began with the simple principle of nurturing prospects with content based on respondent’s purchase timeframe responses. So for example, if a prospect said their purchase timeframe was “immediate,” we messaged them with content that late-phase product-oriented.  Click through rates seen were about average in terms of what we saw across other Custom Activity Nurturing programs, right at around a 2.44% CTR.

AMD has since renewed that program, but made a slight tweak to how the nurturing works.  We incorporated a new custom question into their mix, asking prospects if they are open to considering solutions from another vendor.  If the prospect answered yes, we messaged them with “Decision” content (example: “AMD Opteron 6000 Series Platform and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Platform for Next Generation of Smart IT”).  If the prospect answered “maybe,” they were messaged with “consideration” content (example: “Frequently Asked Questions about Virtualization and the Microsoft/AMD Solution”).  If the prospect answered “no,” we then looked at how they responded to the purchase timeframe question, and messaged similar to how we did in Phase I of their program. This program saw a dramatic increase in the CTR seen from re-messaging emails sent after the change had been made, with the CTR increasing to 3.39% CTR.

If your organization is currently brainstorming ways to fine-tune your nurturing strategy, consider putting in place a program similar to how AMD is messaging their prospects. This is great way to persuade your leads to take the next steps that create transitions forward in their buying journey!

Demand generation. It’s not just about filling the pipeline with a volume of leads - but maintaining a relationship with those leads as they move through the buying cycle. Yes, the extremely active, sales -ready leads should be escalated to the sales team, but what about everyone else?

B2B marketers are continually faced with the challenge of fine tuning, the lead nurturing strategy of their demand generation efforts. It’s an endless pursuit of the Holy Grail of offering the “right content, to the right user, at the right time.” In this recent article, “Marketing Automation - The Importance of Lead Scoring in B2B,” the author discusses ways in which marketers have been approaching lead nurturing. He states that “the simplest example of how to implement lead scoring is to start with a multi-step (email) campaign.” TechTarget responded to this need for multi-step nurturing as a base level strategy by implementing automated email remessaging feature, for all lead generation programs.

However, our B2B marketers have found when moving beyond the simplest form, building out an organization’s lead nurturing strategy becomes much more complex. The product’s purchase cycle, available content/resources, and the unique actions taken by each user all come into play. This is where it becomes a chase for the Holy Grail.

The following are some takeaways we’ve found useful when building out lead nurturing strategy:

Key Considerations when Developing Lead Nurturing Strategy:

• Right Content: Leverage your entire content arsenal - These days B2B Marketers have endless types of content to choose from to motivate and stay engaged: blogs, microsites, video, and demos.  The more content to utilize, the better results

• Right Users: Factor in your target profile users’ cumulative activities - Number of assets, what types of formats, whether they’re reviewing editorial content, blogs - As noted in Handling and identifying your sales-ready marketing leads it’s important for savvy IT marketers to look and see what additional information they may be able to obtain about their leads

• Right Time: Cover content for the entire buying cycle - According to TechTarget 2009 Media Consumption Report, IT buyers spend a majority of their time in the consideration phase. It is important to maintain an appropriate balance of user relevant content - i.e. Awareness 25%/Consideration  45%/Decision 30%

• Understand what you want to achieve before creating a lead nurturing system - Lead nurturing is most effective when the system is built with your organization’s clear objective, in mind

          • Goal: Establishing repeat positive contact with relevant content, across all leads (Multi-Level)

          • Goal: Movement of lead through pipeline based on customized score based on user profile & activity (Customized Activity Nurturing)

What are your thoughts on the need for implementing lead nurturing strategies? What other considerations have you had come into play when building out your strategy?