It’s that time of year again. In about 7 weeks we will be hosting our Online ROI Summit for about 300 marketers in Burlingame, California who want new insights on what’s working and what isn’t online - You can apply at www.TechTargetSummit.com.

However, before I plan the agenda for these conferences I make sure to check in with the marketers themselves about what they want us to cover — what is plaguing them the most when it comes to their online campaigns. And, no surprise, what keeps coming up is their need to know the latest best practices around “tightly” managing lead gen efforts and follow-up.

We all know “scrutiny” and “prove ROI” are the expectations du jour for the technology marketer and as economic times have tightened up focus on these aspects of their job have as well…

In rolling up trial and error stories from our actual technology customers what stands out is something that could appear as a huge contradiction but in reality makes sense, and that is the reality that the smaller the company, most likely, the tighter or “closed” is the process they have to stay on top of the leads they generate. The bigger, and often times more bureaucratic the company, the more complex it becomes. And so what we are left with is to figure out how do it the best regardless of company size. No easy feat but one we and our marketer participants will take on.

Check out the link to our Summit www.TechTargetSummit.com and if you want to hear what we all have to say please join us…  October 27th is only a blink away…

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 few weeks ago, I was reading the New York Times (the online version, of course) and came across an article that made me say “Huh?” This article, “Put Ad on the Web. Count Clicks. Revise,” showcased advertising agencies that are bringing former Wall Street analysts over to Madison Avenue to help them track ROI on their marketing campaigns.

Now I don’t know about you, but I feel like this is something Online Marketers have had to prove for some time. In my role as an ROI Consultant, I know I feel pressure from clients to help show initial ROI on a regular basis. This is especially true this year, as marketing budgets have withered away and we have had to produce more results with less money. In fact, we’ve tasked ourselves with helping clients achieve ROI for some time, as evidenced by TechTarget’s foray into responding to this pain point.

Aside from congratulating ourselves on how far ahead of the curve we are, what’s next for Online Marketers? You are being asked to innovate and do more with less. As an industry, we have progressed far past click thru rates, conversions and demographics; far past traditional ROI. We need to prove more, see how our lead generation efforts are working; actually watch what our target audience is doing so we can craft content appropriately. Learn what they aren’t telling us by way of registration questions.

One way we are doing this at TechTarget is by transitioning into behavior-based email messaging. As users interact with editorial pieces, vendor-sponsored content, websites and apply for conferences, we watch them to see where they spend their time. That helps us tailor our outbound messaging based on what is important to them now. The response is incredible-but what is most interesting is what we can ascertain from this intelligence.

We are now able to identify “hyper-active” leads and show exactly what they’re touching on our network. With this information we can show “mass activity” around topics so you can be present to influence our users, make recommendations on how to reposition your next program based on hot topics, and identify leads who might be more inclined to purchase based on their activity level.

Armed with this type of information, we push past ROI and into new territory that the New York Times can report on in 2 years.

Forrester’s much awaited study on B-to-B Social Media participation released this week, giving key insight into just how active IT Buyers are in using social technology. According to the results, 91% of these users are at least “Spectators”, meaning they actively read blogs, watch videos, listen to podcasts, and visit ratings/review forums. 69% of these users indicate they view social media for business purposes. More importantly, 58% (37% business use) are “Critics”, meaning they post comments in blogs, leave ratings/reviews of products, contribute to wikis, etc. Not only are they viewing social media, they are highly active participants. Now that we have covered the statistics, let’s get to the crux of the issue:  If you are a marketer targeting IT Buyers, it is clear that YOU MUST consider social outlets as part of your marketing mix.

So why does most research point to slow adoption of social media among marketers? In working with many clients in the space, we have found that adoption is slow due to a number of reasons, most importantly being lack of insight into prospect’s social behavior, and measurement/ROI.

Forrester’s study provides the insight into social behavior, but embracing social media means adjusting your traditional view on marketing ROI. It is not about generating “leads” or “pageviews” but about ROMO - Return on Marketing Objectives. Before embarking on a social initiative you need to decide as an organization what you are looking to get out of it. Is it thought leadership, is it gaining customer insight/creating a direct pipeline to your customers or prospects, is it monitoring conversations around your brand? Regardless, according to Forrester, you need to start with the audience and not the technology. In other words, don’t just launch a blog, wiki, or forum because you want to get into social media - like traditional media, you need to go where your audience is.

How are you integrating social media into your marketing efforts? If you’re not, what are your main hesitations?

Budgets are tight, the need for measuring ROI of your marketing investment has never been greater, and as a technology marketer, we can use all the help we can get. With the mantra of “Doing more with less,” we need to have an approach that can not only get us through these tough times but can put us in a better position than our competition when we get to the other side. Here are a series of tips for IT marketers to help market successfully in this tough economy:

10. Monitor the competition and the market. If your competition is cutting back, consider adjusting your marketing budget and attacking the market with your message. This will provide a great opportunity to capture - and retain - market share. A recent post on the MarketingProfs blog refers to a study of 600 b-to-b companies by McGraw-Hill Research.

In this study, they found that businesses that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession, averaged higher sales growth during the recession and in the three years following. By 1985, sales of aggressive recession advertisers (those that either maintained or increased spending) had risen 256% over those that cut-back on advertising. In 2001, another study found that aggressive recession advertisers increased market share 2 ½ times the average for all businesses in the post-recession economy.

Thinking post-recession maybe hard to imagine now but companies that do will reap the benefits. I found some good information from StrategicOxygen’s blog on this topic that you might find useful.

9. Focus on lead generation efforts with direct-response techniques. In email and online campaigns, use hard-hitting copy with simple benefit-oriented, convincing language, an informational offer relevant to the prospect’s topic interest, and a strong call to action. Focus on the problems that you solve for your customers and how you uniquely address them.

Lead generation is where the rubber meets the road and with this economic situation, you need to focus on the basics of the audience, your message, offer and the call to action. Getting focused so you have the right audience responding in the right way to the right offer taking the right steps will help your efficiency as well as effectiveness of your program and get you the results you want.

I am hearing from many technology marketers that — in a time in which marketing activities need to deliver tangible results within a tighter timeframe — it is imperative that marketers allocate a portion of their budget dollars toward campaigns which capture more late-stage, actionable leads.

To accomplish this, marketers often use pay-per-click programs that point towards product trials and online product demonstrations.  While these types of programs result in marketers competing for a relatively small pool of leads, they do generate significant results because they reach potential buyers in the late stages of the research and purchase process - the “ready-to-buy” prospect.  

Recent TechTarget market research indicates that “try-before-you-buy” programs are particularly effective in the Application Development software space, because the developer community is immersed in the types of tools and products that they are encountering or implementing on a daily basis.  In the developer community, we see that implementers have a high degree of influence on the IT purchase decision.  The “try-before-you-buy” method is very important in building their loyalty and trust, and provides the IT marketer with an opportunity to demonstrate both the quality of the product, and, in many cases, showcase the quality of the customer service supporting the product.

Also, because the developer community places a high value on peer feedback and product recommendations, marketers can leverage social media to reach this group by providing a platform for experts within their organization to engage prospects in discussions about market trends, not just to gain exposure for their product, but build a rapport with — and establish a degree of trust within — the community.

Finally, although there is a significant benefit to offering downloads and trial versions of software to generate leads from prospects in the final stages of the research and purchase process, it is important that this not be the sole focus of your marketing efforts to the detriment of campaign elements supporting your branding efforts or reaching potential clients at the early and mid-stages of the research and purchase process.  You still need to maintain program elements to generate leads that will generate sales over an extended period of time.

While there is no “silver bullet” formula for what percentage of your marketing budget should focus on long-term or short-term leads, it is important that your plans include a mix of elements - like topical whitepapers to reach IT professionals at the very start of the research process, Webcasts and Webinars to reach mid-stage prospects, and virtual tradeshows to facilitate direct contact with prospective buyers.

Having just returned from the TechTarget Online ROI Summit in San Francisco, I combed through a number of attendee survey responses as I was very interested to know which specific subjects were most interesting and relevant to the 240 IT marketers/clients attending the event.It’s a foregone conclusion that anyone attending is generally interested in Best Practices for Online Marketing and its relationship to proving ROI; however it’s important to note which discussion points resonated with them the most.

It turns out that our data and insights related to trends in “the IT Buyers’ Purchase Process” were most appreciated. Marketers expressed that understanding how their content and media investments line up in satisfying all stages of the buying cycle is critical information when planning a program or campaign.

This explains why our findings around search — and where buyers are in their purchase consideration relative to specific search practices — received such high marks. It also explains why our general session around content strategy as it relates to the buying process is a standing-room only session.

As much as we all live and breathe “the buyer’s purchase process” here at TechTarget, the subtleties of how IT marketing media types and content relate to the process were very much appreciated by Summit attendees.

This makes sense as our insights suggest that marketers must have very distinct content topics and media offerings to attract buyers at the various stages of the research and purchase process.  It also emphasizes the degree to which “content preparation and strategy” are an essential component to success.  Yet based on this reality, nearly two-thirds of our audience admitted to having few resources to build content, and are often expected to produce it themselves.

That is astonishing when you consider how important content is to program success,  and how busy these folks are.  It seems to there needs to be a resetting of priorities in the IT marketing arena so that budgets are allocated to support content development so the burden doesn’t personally fall on the shoulders of the marketing directors themselves, so they can be free to spend more of their time being strategic.

People often ask me to summarize the many questions a client asks at the outset of a working relationship with TechTarget.  Because the questions often come in a rapid-fire — and sometimes disjointed — manner at the initial stages of the new-client conversation, I really had to take some time and think this through to isolate and summarize important areas of client concern or interest.  The answer is: “What are the key components and stages that make up a successful closed-loop lead management system?”Rather than attempt to answer this question in a single blog entry, today’s posting will be the first in a series of three entries I’ll make - Inquiry/Lead Management, Prospect Management and Opportunity Management — to answer this question as thoroughly as I can.

So, what’s the goal of Lead Management? In one sentence: To increase the likelihood that a lead will convert to a qualified opportunity and then a new, satisfied customer. Having an approach that can rapidly and effectively create, nurture, distribute and analyzing leads in the stages of Inquiry Management, Prospect Management and Opportunity Management is critical. ROI measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) need to be associated at key points throughout the process. But before any programs are launched, leads are captured, systems are purchased or ROI is calculated, there needs to be communication, teamwork and consensus between sales and marketing to get the results you need. It all starts up front.  Here are some best practices to consider before launching a campaign.

1. Clearly define your target audience. The process always begins and ends with the audience.
2. Content is critical to obtaining the desired results. Understand what action you want your audience to take and define what content will get them to take that action.
3. Give the audience the choice of how they can access your information –Podcast/Webcast, white paper can all be used with the same content.
4. Define the characteristics of a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) (key attributes and profile) and a sales-qualified lead (SQL) (key attributes and profile).  Get input from sales when defining these!!
5. Determine how inquiries transition from MQLs then to SQLs.
6. Qualification questions and processes - again, get input and agreement from sales!
7. Lead distribution rules - Did you get agreement with sales?
8. Lead scoring: specific definitions of A, B and C-level leads to prioritize follow-up - How’d that discussion go with sales?
9. Define the milestone points in the process and the questions you want answered at each milestone. Example: Number of inquiries to MQLs to SQLs to Meetings to Opportunities to Forecasted deals to closed sales; Velocity metric - the time it takes it takes to reach each milestone. Over time you will develop your own benchmarks.
10. Define key benchmarks
11. How to manage atypical or out-of-profile leads
12. Ownership of each stage of the process - get agreement with all the owners as to what is expected entering and exiting each stage!  And, in all seriousness, work closely with your sales team throughout this process so the leads you generate are what your sales team needs.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defining an ROI based Lead Management approach. But most of all, early on, work with and get agreement from sales. At the end of the day remember: sales is marketing’s customer!

Coming up next: “Prospect Management: MQLs, SQLs, Scoring… What?”

On September 20 and 21, TechTarget had the opportunity to host our first Online ROI Summit, and for those of you unable to attend, the discussions, presentations and the feedback were excellent. You can see a couple of our attendees’ independent, post-event blog posts here: PushtoTest: The Cohen Blog and The Scrappy Software Marketer

My intent for the event was to assist our technology vendor customers in understanding the latest online marketing best practices and to help them meet the ongoing challenge of proving ROI.

We got great validation on our overall content direction from the post event survey. It reinforced that IT marketers need help and guidance on how to customize their campaigns to effectively reach their specific technology market.

Both the market-specific breakout sessions, where we received 100% positive feedback on a survey, and the individual comments expressed great appreciation for explaining the specific differences between each technology market - such as Storage, Information Security, and Enterprise Apps.

Additionally, technology marketers are challenged by how to use “new” media and integrate them into their ongoing efforts.  Finally, and no surprise, the struggle to generate leads and get them through a useful sales pipeline persists and is as strong as ever - check out Brian Carroll’s presentation on nurturing leads through your sales pipeline. We specifically adressed the new ROI metrics that cover new media and emerging media.

As deeply immersed as my team and I are in online media, it was partly amazing to us that marketers still need as much support and guidance as they do.  But, in all these areas, I believe we delivered quite strongly and the survey feedback agrees with us.

Feel free to check out any of our presentations and see what the discussions were all about. We’d love to hear your feedback on this content too.

View them all here: TechTarget Online ROI Summit Presentations

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?