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Organizations are employing a variety of digital sales and marketing tools, channels, content and practices to generate awareness and traffic to their web assets. The percentage of that traffic converted to contacts, prospects, leads and actual business is woeful. Why is that, and what can we do?
Marketing’s Expanding Complexity and Closer Role with Sales
Marketing has changed dramatically over the last 5 years, where prospects and customers need to be engaged on their terms with relevant content, engagement and respectful communication. Marketing’s role has also expanded and coexists more with sales than ever before, especially as 90% of all purchases are researched online and decision makers no longer want to talk to sales until they are 60-70% down the decision cycle.
The purchasing process has also changed significantly, and so must your ability to create and leverage your digital ‘assets’. Marketing must attract and move prospects much deeper into the funnel than ever before, intelligently monitoring and engaging them with easily accessible content and automating more self-service until they are ready to connect with sales or business development.
Missed Opportunity + Need for Funnel Management
The diagram below shows how a mix of digital and traditional marketing creates traffic to a company’s prime online asset, its ‘master’ website. Once the traffic has arrived (at the top of the sales and marketing funnel), today’s tools and techniques used to engage/capture/convert are limited and ineffective. The discipline of digital funnel management is foreign to most companies, but is essential to generate strong ROI from marketing investments. Generating 25%, 50% even 100+% more business from digital traffic is absolutely possible with intelligently placed content + innovative conversion tactics/tools (such as Loopfuse).
What Limitations with Today’s Online Conversion Strategies Do We Need to Overcome:
Create an “Engagement Zone”
One way to overcome these limitations is to create an “Engagement Zone’ that integrates content access, next steps, calls-to-action and marketing automation. This zone is so much more than a ‘Contact Us’ form as it should include all the possible options for connecting with your company, with the prime intention of allowing a visitor to select a next step or piece of content that would enable them to identify themselves to you. That is the lowest conversion stat of them all; 2-3% of websites earn the respect of a visitor so they identify themselves and become a contact. Execute this effectively and a greater % of those contacts will be genuine and not mickey@mouse.com.
Rather than try to explain in words what an engagement zone is, take a look at a couple of examples out in the real world. Click on the “Take Action Now” orange button at http://www.mikewittenstein.com/ and see an engagement zone appear. There are 7 menu options which provide ways for a visitor to take a next step and educate themselves more. Another example is at http://www.banyancapital.com where the zone is accessed via the ”Quick Info Access” green menu option. This one has 8 options for a visitor to engage. Tying marketing automation behind this type of engagement and capture solution ultimately creates more business out of the bottom of the funnel. It connects with visitors, prospects and leads no matter where they are in the funnel, as it can be designed to deliver content at the appropriate funnel stage. For example, you could have a menu option called “Competitive Benchmark” for someone evaluating your product(s) or service(s).
Once you have your engagement zone in place, take the next step which really can supercharge your contact and lead generation …. engage people from any digital location, placing links to your zone directly in content delivered via:
An important point to note here … by bringing a visitor/prospect/customer into your zone, they are able to see other engagement options and may well connect in additional ways, increasing the acceleration down your funnel.
The idea of an engagement zone makes sense in many ways, so consider designing one for your organization, and let me know the improvement in your capture and conversion stats!
Regards to all,
Andy McCartney
andy@imccmarketing.com
If you run a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business or happen to be the Vice President of Marketing at one, you need to have marketing automation in place. Why you may ask?
Most, if not all, SaaS companies offer a free trial of some kind whether that is based on a period of time or staying below a usage threshold. Either way there is a large volume of user registrations at the top end of the funnel and these can vary from curious passers by to genuinely interested sales opportunities.
Sorting and segmenting out those opportunities from the rest can be time consuming not to mention highly frustrating for the sales team as they lack an understanding of just how interested each “lead” is in the product and can end up wasting time on unqualified opportunities. (more…)
When asked what he believes is the biggest startup failure in the past 5-10 years, marketing guru Sean Ellis, Founder and CEO of Freejit.com, says that what Google is today, Yahoo could have been. “Ten years ago Yahoo was in a position to dominate the web,” says Sean. “It was a hot brand, loved by customers. Where they lost track is that they focused on their own business needs.” According to Sean, Google focused on what customers really wanted: a pure search model– and the company layered a business model on top of that.
Today, the mantra for B2B startup success, according to Sean, is ROI [Return-on-Investment]: “Demonstrate you can deliver ROI, and you’ll have a better business.”
Tune into to Sean’s full video interview, part of the “5 from 5″ video snapshot series, to gather more insight, trends and tricks of the trade.
Continuing on with the theme of Lead Nurturing and how important it is for SMBs, we would like to share best practices from a practitioner’s point of view like we have for other marketing best practices. For Lead Nurturing, we asked Andy Ellicott, a marketing expert for early stage companies, to share his thoughts and ideas on how to implement Lead Nurturing. Having headed up marketing for several early-stage B2B software companies such as Vertica, VoltDB, Nexaweb and others, Andy has put lead nurturing programs in place a number of times and has agreed to share his experiences, best practices and results. Hopefully, these real world examples will help you round out your understanding of lead nurturing and provide you with tips you won’t find in the theoretical papers on this topic. Here’s the first Q&A of the interview with Andy: (more…)
Think about how much you forget while surfing the internet. When you are learning about something new or searching for something you are not quite sure exists yet, you may navigate a multitude of pages until you hone in on your desired content.
If all the while you are entering and leaving storefronts, valuable content and building blocks of knowledge, you will likely forget more than you remember. The sheer amount of information becomes irrelevant. Very few sites are designed to engage and follow up with you. They stop at creating awareness rather than create a process for you to engage or be nurtured with. (more…)
Or… at least until some critical thresholds have been exceeded (like leaving the seat up one too many times)! Seriously though, opening a new market requires considerable time and energy and if you aren’t committed to getting yourself across the Dip, as Seth Godin defines, then your first steps are better laid in another direction.
Yes, there is a successful formula for transforming your approach to the marketplace by arming your marketing, social, and pr teams with a sales mindset that can give you unfair competitive advantage. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should be targeting all marketplaces.
Before you make that commitment you need to make sure the marketplace in question is financially viable. One of the first questions you need to answer is how big the proposed market for your offering is. Keep in mind this isn’t a mathematical proof you are trying to solve. You just need to develop a rough estimate that justifies the costs and time associated with targeting a new space.
Just because a market is big does not mean it’s desirable. When evaluating entering a new market it’s important to try and assess the space’s future prospects. Clearly, there is a lot of masked complexity here. What you really want to be looking for, however, is the obvious problems.
Technology innovation is often a predictive indicator. From typewriters to answering machines, or floppy disks to CD’s there are countless markets that have faded away due to technology. You need to ask yourself if the market is going the way of the dinosaur.
When you are fairly unfamiliar with your new target segment one mandatory step is to begin an online research program. In our ubiquitously digital world there is an enormous amount of content that is easily available that can give you a head start. The objective here is to arm yourself with a thorough understanding of the current terms and trends and a high level outlook on the market.
If you are totally new to the space and don’t even know where to start you should try setting up a social monitoring program. Plug in the names of potential customers and competitors in the space, which you should have identified in the sizing exercise, and start to analyze the terminology, sites, and authors that are being used.
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