by jbreazeale on June 29, 2009
Welcome to my new digs! I’ve completed my move to Wordpress.org and will be taking down my site at Wordpress.com in the near future.
If you’re new here, you might want to take a look at my latest series of posts about the Inbound Marketing University. These were my favorites:
I’m also looking for some tips on must-have Wordpress plug-ins, so please leave a note in the comments if you have any suggestions.
Thanks for stopping by!
by jbreazeale on June 26, 2009
Professor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch
Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls? Or, maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.
Brian’s definition:
Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable, potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy.
Much of the information included in Brian’s presentation would be helpful to anyone looking to better understand sales processes in general and he provides some very colorful mind-maps that would be useful when brainstorming some of these lead generation and nurturing activities.
Some of my key takeaways were:
- Lead nurturing can take a significant amount of resources (time, money, people). And, if you’re in a larger company, don’t discount the internal battles between sales and marketing that you’ll have to negotiate if you want to put one of these plans into action. (Who owns lead generation? Who owns lead nuturing? When do the leads pass from the nurturing team to the sales rep? How do we know that the sales rep is following up? Etc…)
- Don’t underestimate the power of the human touch. Although email and other online tools can be helpful, when it comes right down to it, you’re trying to build deep relationships with selected leads, not lots of shallow relationships with every lead. Building those deeper relationships requires more consistent and meaningful contact.
- Spend enough time at the beginning to clarify who your ideal customer is, how you’ll be able to identify and qualify them, how they’ll be scored and prioritized as they move through the pipeline, and how you’ll nurture them in a way that’ s meaningful to them (e.g. CIOs typically like to have printable reports, so don’t just send them webinar invites).
- Keep building your lead nurturing library of articles, reference guides, white papers, podcasts, etc. that may be of use to your leads. Not only does this help position your team as a trusted advisor, but it also gives you the opportunity to provide value in the form of meaningful and relevant data to your lead instead of just another sales pitch.
- Consider building custom lead nurturing “tracks”. For example, a CEO lead may get “targeted email #1″ in Q1, followed up with a phone call in Q2, and a personalized invitation to an executive briefing in Q3. If you can match these to your lead’s business cycle, even better.
- At a minimum, you should probably contact your leads on a monthly basis (with meaningful and relevant content, of course!)
Here’s Brian’s presentation:
by jbreazeale on June 26, 2009
My takeaway from this presentation: The folks at Marketing Experiments really know their stuff and if I ever have a business that needs (and can afford) their services, I would definitely sign up. Other than that, we seemed to spend most of our time breezing through examples without as much time digging into the details (those questions always seemed to be answered with “It depends…”)
Some useful tidbits:
- Don’t just send people to your home page. Instead, create targeted, clear, and concise landing pages with a meaningful call to action. “Click here” or a “submit” button do not count as meaningful calls to action!
- Conversion heuristic: C = 4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a
- C = probability of conversion
- m = motivation of user (when they arrive at your landing page; Do they want to learn more? Buy something?)
- v = clarity of value proposition (why should they take the next step? adding testimonials to your site is one way to boost this metric)
- i = incentive to take action (must outweigh the friction elements, gift cards are sometimes used as incentives, free trials are another method)
- f = friction elements in process (how much effort does the user need to exert? are you making them click through lots of pages or fill out very detailed forms?)
- a = anxiety about entering information (are you asking them too much information? or the wrong information?)
- Conversion Rate: CR% = (# successes/# actions) * 100
Here’s Jeanne’s presentation:
by jbreazeale on June 25, 2009
Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights:
- Expert opinion and correlation data both agree that links are still king – around 75% of Google’s ranking is based around (or affected by) quantity/quality of links.
- Use keywords in your title tags and as close to the beginning as possible; data shows a linear decline between the position of the keywords in the tag and the impact in search results. For example, “John’s Used Cars” would be better than “John’s dealership and repair shop for used cars.”
- Although experts recommend including keywords in your H1 tags, the data suggests that this will have little to no impact on your search results.
- Substantive and unique page content, along with page recency/freshness are some of the most of the important non-link factors.
- Getting lots of people to link to your substantive and unique content really cranks up your SEO.
- Static pages (with substantive and unique content, of course) aren’t bad, but they probably won’t be crawled as often (which may or may not affect your rank).
- Using W3C compliant HTML, another non-link factor, has little to no impact on your search results.
- The number of unique domains linking to you may be more important than the actual number of links. For example, 500 unique domains that link to you is better than 100 unique domains with 500 links.
- The fewer number of domains (and subdomains) you use, the better. Example:
- http://blog.company.com – ok
- http://company.com/blog – better
- It’s a good idea to use keywords in your URL and common keywords are probably readable even if you scrunch them all together. For less common keywords, it’s better to use a hyphen than an underscore. Example:
- http://company.com/healthinsurance.htm – ok
- http://company.com/health-insurance.htm – better
- http://company.com/health_insurance.htm – worse
Here’s Rand’s presentation:
by jbreazeale on June 25, 2009
I have to start this off with a rave of my own – David Meerman Scott. Wow! I’m not sure how he’s managed to stay off of my radar this long, but I think he’s going to quickly become one of my favorite resources.
David packed a ton of useful content into this presentation, but if you can only see the slides you’re missing at least half of the story. There’s a reason this guy speaks for a living! This was, by far, my favorite presentation at IMU.
Here are just a few of the lessons I learned:
- Social media is a powerful tool, regardless of the size of your company. Don’t be afraid to make the leap!
Cindy Gordon launched The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Orlando by skipping the traditional marketing channels and instead telling seven top bloggers. Within 24 hours, she estimates that 350,000,000 people had heard of this new attraction.
Dentist Helaine Smith was spending $2000/mo. for traditional yellow pages advertising for her practice. Fed up with doing things the same way, she created an ebook, Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex, launched a blog, and jumped into social media. Two years later, her business has exploded, growing from $150,000/yr. to $1,000,000+/yr.
- Use buyer personas to help you tell your story directly to an interested market. Don’t create content based on your needs or the needs of the nameless, faceless horde. Speak in language that’s meaningful to the persona.
Say you’re an independent business traveller. How would you feel about a hotel that had created content addressing your needs instead of promoting their products (rooms, restaurants, etc.)
Should Disney “create unparalleled entertainment experiences”, or are they in the movie and theme park business? And, all of those happy, multi-cultural office workers in the stock photography on your website – visual gobbledygook. Check out The GobbledyGook Manifesto and The GobbledyGook Grader for more fun with this one.
- Use social media to earn your customer’s attention. On the web, you are what you publish. Interesting, well-designed ebooks provide a welcome alternative to the traditional white papers and can provide far greater returns. For example, say you have 1000 downloads/yr of a white paper and therefore have collected 1000 email addresses (“leads”). Now, what if you’d had 50,000 downloads of an ebook instead (no registration required, but with a secondary offer requiring registration included) and 2% of those users convert? Now you still have 1000 email addresses, but of people who have already spend time with your information.
- Don’t be afraid to lose control. Losing control is required if you want people to share your stuff.
- Stop making excuses. What do you have to lose?
Here’s David’s presentation:
[slideshare id=1592776&doc=viralmarketinggf301-090616132030-phpapp01]
