What is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects. John Miller mentions different nurturing lead activities in his marketing blog. He speaks about the importance of marketing to set up programs and activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. At TechTarget we have seen that by re-messaging to your lead through email, you increase the value of the lead. It allows you to gain face time with the most interested prospects. What nurturing tactics have you found to be affective?

As the online marketing landscape expands, maximizing existing lead acquisition channels and trying to understand new channels is a challenge all its own.  But, the ultimate goal of building a valuable marketing database remains crucial to the success of today’s marketing programs.

In the beginning, our focus was on member quantity and establishing our brand to both vendors and the IT users. We relied on traditional web-based marketing channels such as list rentals and co-marketing partnerships. However, as online audiences, particularly IT pros, have gotten more sophisticated, so too have our audience development methods and marketing outreach. Today, we’re focused on building a quality member base with lots of defining criteria. The more we know about our members, the more we can target and customize our customer/ prospect marketing programs, which results in an increased client ROI as well as member satisfaction.

Two acquisition channels that currently enable us to capture qualifying member data, which we can later use when developing client programs, are search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO).

On the SEM side, we’re running ad word campaigns in Google, for example, to generate interest in specific products and IT topics. By running highly targeted campaigns that point to relevant landing pages with incentives, we generate members who indicate their IT topics of interest, as well as share their job or product needs. We also generate leads for products including events, print pubs and search-site specific programs. 

In contrast to SEM, search engine optimization is first and foremost a company-wide effort aimed at increasing site traffic.  Acquisition or conversion success is a result of how well we align our marketing messages and registration incentives with the content on those trafficked pages.

There are consistent challenges with both the SEM and SEO channels, however, through both channels we have converted and captured valuable information that can later be used to create a pre-qualified list or audience for vendor campaigns.

Now we use all three of these channels to support our marketing strategy and meet goals. Our approach to building and mining our marketing database has proven its value many times over to clients as increased ROI as well as member satisfaction.

If you’d like to hear how we made this work, join me for a webcast and I’ll share all the details.  “Building a Targeted, Receptive and Valuable Audience”

Lead Management includes data collection, lead qualification, nurturing, distributing and analyzing leads.
The result? To increase the likelihood that a lead will convert to a qualified opportunity.
A recent study, “CMO Advisory Best Practices Series: Marketing Lead Management Process”, states only a few Tech Companies surveyed were able to demonstrate their impact on the sales pipeline. Failure points include: data collection, lead qualification, sales hand off, lead nurturing and performance measurement.
Here at TechTarget, we provide our customers with a unique lead management tool. The tools provides reporting metrics detailing each user’s interaction with the specific content – such are time spent with a document, pages views and pages printed. This data combined with customized questions helps better identify quality leads for sales. Do you currently utilize a lead management tool? If so, how advanced is the tool?

There has been a lot of discussion on lead follow-up.
Do you nurture your leads via phone, email or a combination of both?
What do you do if a lead does not supply full contact information such as address or phone number?

We have seen that it is important to start with good qualifying questions to help segment leads.  From there, prioritize leads based on the qualifing questions and the actions taken by the leads.  Regardless of where they are prioritized, all leads need to be followed up within 24 hours. However, this does not mean all leads should be treated the same.
How do you follow up with your leads?

In order to prove success, marketers often need to recognize different buckets and show levels of values for each bucket of leads.

MarketingSherpa published a report interviewing B to B Marketers on how they handle leads on the back end.

The first question they ask, Do you recommend that the sales team be able to see all leads marketing gets in.. or do you think you should only allow them to access the best, most sales ready leads?  How do you handle your leads?

Last month Media Business (a BtoB publication) interviewed one of our product directors on our new email strategy that targets subscribers based on their topical interests. Not only does this focus represent a shift in TechTarget’s email strategy, it represents an overall shift in how we will organize our member database and then position media products and/or editorial content that they consume.

We are referring to this as “content-level targeting” also known as “contextual marketing”. As Agata cites in the article, targeting content accurately to an audience that has explicitly indicated interest in this topic has resulted in a 10% lift in raw leads from lists that are 30% to 60% smaller. The net take away from an ROI perspective is that we are seeing two times the normal response rate. So, even though the audiences are smaller because of their topical content interest, their interest level in our advertisers’ offers are actually much higher.

I wondered if anyone else has experimented with topical targeting and if you have experienced similar results?

For marketers everywhere, showcasing the number of qualified leads they receive from a campaign isn’t enough anymore to prove success.  Although revenue accrued might be the main metric of success, engagement levels throughout a campaign are also important.  I offer clients the average time spent with their content, number of pages viewed, and even whether or not it was saved on their hard drive.  And with online branding campaigns, I can share average time spent per page.  Is it important to showcase engagement with your (vendor) content or engagement with the topic overall (editorial and vendor)?  What are your benchmarks for time spent?  And how do you measure engagement with your branding and lead gen campaigns?

Last week, Michael Stelzner wrote an interesting article in MarketingProfs about the effectiveness of white papers. The article states, “New research shows that white papers are among the most compelling way to attract leads.”  He also comments on how to write effective white papers such as starting with a problem or need faced by the reader rather than the product or service offered.

After running thousands of campaings on our network, the results prove over and over again that education content combined with integrated media is the key to a successful lead generation program.  We have seen that product/sales focused papers result in poor performance. TechTarget also ran a recent study that points to White Papers as the most effective source when researching new technologies/vendors.  It shows that the majority of IT Professionals download between 10 and 24 white papers per year.

All these data points suggest, to garner success in your lead generation programs, invest in compelling white papers.

Defining lead quality varies from company to company. Lead quality is one of the key factors when measuring ROI in a campaign. Some companies define leads as respondents that have complete and accurate registration data. Others define leads any respondents that have one valid form of communication (such as email or telephone number). While, many companies define leads as valid based on specific demographics.

I believe any respondent that has shown interest in your solutions and has an accurate form of communication should be considered a good lead.  These leads may be in all stages of the buying cycle.  How these leads are handled is equally important to the lead quality. When a company does not have a plan in place, there is no way to distinguish a very high quality lead vs a low quality leads.  You’ll often find the overall quality of leads increase by applying the steps below.  Regardless of what point of the buying cycle, all respondents should be followed up on.   A follow-up marketing plan needs to be in place before the campaign launches.  Below are some guidelines to improve the quality of your respondents.

1) Ask the ask right questions during the registration process to help segment respondents.
2) Tailor/customize messages to the proper segment
3) Include name of the original offer in the follow-up to generate recall
4) Provide additional offers/incentives to help bring lead through the sales cycle
5) Re-message the leads immediately
6) Avoid generic e-mail follow up
7) Send multiple follow- up emails/offers