Thank you to everyone who joined us today. Great questions and feedback for Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing. As promised, here are the slides from today’s event and you can sign up for a free marketing brainstorm with Matt by clicking here.
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Slides from Today's Webinar: How to Find, Influence, and Convert More Prospects Into Customers
Tuesday, January 17th, 20123 Tips for Content Marketing Success
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
Now more than ever content plays a dominant role in your marketing plan. They key is not the quantity of content you produce but the quality and value to your target audience. No, I don’t mean hire a copywriter to churn out 500 word blog posts on search term optimized topics. I mean make your content strategy central to your company and focus on both the creation and distribution of it.
Here a 3 tips for content marketing success that will get you pointed in the right direction: (more…)
Increase prospect & lead capture rates ... create an "Engagement Zone"
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011Organizations 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:
- Few attempt to engage visitors/prospects at all stages of the funnel. Engaging only at the bottom (ACTION step) of the funnel via a phone number and Contact Us form misses 80% of the opportunity to capture/nurture prospects until ready to close.
- Few automate the nurturing of prospects until they are qualified leads ready to be closed by sales, and most allow leads to slip through the net due to human mishandling.
- Few effectively enable access and distribution of marketing content at the right stage of the decision cycle.
- Most websites are ‘leaky’, losing prospects that would like to take a next step but are not ready to contact sales, and have no other available call to action or engagement step.
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:
- Company Blog(s)
- Thought Leadership
- LinkedIn/Facebook
- Feeder/Community Sites
- Online Ads/Adwords
- Emails/Texts/QR Codes (e.g. add links back to the zone from inside emails for next steps or additional content)
- Links in Current Website (e.g. for a PDF download link on a product page, point back to the zone)
- Links Inside Collateral
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
When Do Startups Need to Hire a Marketing Person?
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
Knowing when the time is right to bring on someone to focus on marketing can be a tough call for entrepreneurs running a Lean Startup. For most new businesses, marketing is seen as a luxury that is both inaccessible on a shoestring budget and, at the same time, essential to the development of a new venture. Customer development is needed to generate sales revenue, but knowing when to allocate precious resources to startup marketing can be a challenge. The issue of when startups need to hire their first marketer is one of the “chicken or the egg?” questions of the entrepreneurial world. (more…)
Hiten Shah's Startup Advice: Test All Assumptions
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Entrepreneur Hiten Shah, co-founder of KISSmetrics, knows what it takes to launch and grow a successful B2B high tech startup. As part of the “5 from 5″ video series, Hiten shared what is the most important lesson he’s learned as an entrepreneur: “Don’t smoke your own crack – or so to speak.”
In order to grow a successful business, he explains, test all assumptions with actual customers; otherwise, you may end up with a product and/or business strategy that simply doesn’t sell. This coincides with Hiten’s mantra for startup success: align product development, marketing, and sales right from the start.
To learn more, tune into the full interview, part of our “5 from 5″ video series.
The right marketing automation partner can help you avoid the avoidable mistakes
Thursday, November 18th, 2010On the surface, implementing a marketing automation tool appears fairly simple. The problem though, is in not knowing what you don’t know. Implementing a tool isn’t that hard, but getting it setup in a way, with the processes to match, to produce business value is another matter. This is not an effort you want to go alone. Like a tile floor, if it’s done wrong you have to rip and replace.
Someone that knows a thing or two about marketing automation, having installed and trained some of the earliest implementation of said tools is Don Dalrymple, President of AscendWorks. Beyond his deep knowledge of the inner workings of many marketing automation tools, Don is also extremely well versed in training marketing organizations to focus on the customer rather than the process.
Get big by starting small (Identify Niches)
Thursday, November 11th, 2010To get big you’ve got to start small. In business, as in many places in life the old adage rings true. When you are first getting started you need to figure out how to successfully solve problems. Take on too much, or problems too large and you may not have a runway long enough to discover the right formula.
This becomes a central key to messaging. Within your target market you want to start identifying niches where you can isolate common needs. The smaller the audience, the more likely you are to find a relevant point of view. Geography? Company size? You don’t need to get too cute, or overly complicated here just look for some obvious ways to segment your audience. Begin with the understanding you will need to iterate your groupings to come up with the right formula.
Unto Death Do Us Part (Go, No-Go)
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010Or… 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.
4Cs of B2B Marketing: Campaign, Customer, Channel, Content
Monday, November 1st, 2010When I originally had the idea to write this post, I decided to focus on our new marketing automation platform release and how the menu system had changed. I soon realized that the real story was not product-specific, but the underlying reason for the change; To align a menu system with how business-leaders today think about online marketing and sales.
So how is it that today’s B2B Marketing professionals think? Enter the 4Cs:
Friend or Foe (Competitive Assessment)
Thursday, October 28th, 2010As Sun Tzu, historical author of the Art of War, once said, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” When considering any marketplace it’s critical to understand the competitive landscape. You need to know not only who the competitors are, but also the axes of competition and relative positioning along them.
