Posts Tagged ‘lead roi’

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Five Steps to Measuring the ROI of Social Media Marketing

Friday, July 1st, 2011

The question of how to measure the return on their investment in social media marketing has some CMOs mystified.

Not all of the benefits of using social media to promote your brand are easily quantifiable.

Perhaps that’s why a recent survey discovered that 84 percent of marketers do not currently measure their ROI from social media tools such as video sharing, Twitter, Facebook, blogging and podcasts.

While it’s true that some benefits such as increased brand awareness are not immediately measurable, tracking a few key factors and comparing your social media activity over a period of time against your sales for that period can give you a good idea of what is working and what is not.

  1. Clearly define your objectives. Is your goal to generate leads, reduce sales cycles, or increase conversion rates? Knowing what you want to accomplish is a vital first step in determining your ROI.
  2. Establish your baseline. Where are you at right now in relation to these goals?
  3. Do the same for your social media activity. What specific tools are you using and how often? Continue to document all such activity during this period.
  4. Track your results using the corresponding monitoring tool for each activity. Google Analytics, for example, will provide reports on how well your web site is converting, visitor contribution, and search engine traffic, to name just a few. Mashable recently posted a list of more than fifty web site and social media monitoring tools.
  5. Look for trends and trace them to their point of origin.

This last step, according to Mashable’s Christina Warren, is the key to measuring ROI. “Take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

“If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.”

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Six Reasons Your Marketing Budget Should Include Highly Targeted External Lead Sources

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Staying productive and profitable during slow times can be an ongoing challenge. Every business experiences fluctuations and times when the demand for new leads is exceptionally high.

While your sales team may be able to generate some of their own leads during times like this, research shows that the majority of leads generated by sales are not highly targeted.

In order to meet these challenges, 51.9 percent of B2B marketers plan to substantially increase their marketing budgets in the coming year, according to BtoB’s “2011 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey. Of those respondents planning to boost their budgets this year, the majority said they plan double digit increases, and 25 percent will increase marketing spend by more than 20%. Customer acquisition is this year’s top marketing priority for 69.1 percent of the survey’s participants.

Whatever your marketing budget for the coming year, allocating a portion of it for purchasing targeted leads can prove to be one of your best strategies for several reasons:

  1. High quality, pre-targeted external leads can offset those inevitable slow times that virtually every business contends with periodically.
  2. Real-time leads with verified, contactable data will keep your sales team busy closing sales instead of scrambling to generate leads.
  3. Online lead generation companies use highly developed systems for gathering, scoring and verifying leads, saving your business the time and expense entailed in carrying out these processes in house.
  4. With a full pipeline of fresh leads from a reliable source, you can turn your focus toward other vital aspects of your business, such as customer retention and future growth strategies.
  5. Results are easily measured. Tracking and measuring are critical determining factors in marketing budget allocation. In-house social media and email marketing campaigns can be somewhat problematic to measure, but the process of tracking purchased leads is more straightforward.
  6. The best lead generation companies deliver warm, inbound leads who are already seeking your services. These leads will produce the maximum ROI for your marketing budget. In one recent case study, for example, leads purchased from InsideUp resulted in 125 percent ROI for the client.

As online marketing options continue to be refined and tested, you can ensure a steady flow of leads—and a reliable ROI—by augmenting your in-house lead generation tactics with ready-to-buy, real time leads.

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How to Get Better ROI from Inbound Marketing

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Embracing the latest online marketing strategies, businesses are spending countless hours and marketing dollars in an effort to keep their sales teams supplied with inbound leads.

Marketing teams are kept busy revising, perfecting and testing their inbound strategies using the myriad social media, content marketing, search marketing and public relations tools at their disposal.

Inbound marketing may seem like the latest trend but it is built on classic marketing principles. Closely related to the principle of “permission marketing,” a term coined by Seth Godin in the late ‘90s and now widely used by marketers, inbound marketing is an effective means of acquiring leads who are actively seeking your services.

A prospect’s permission to contact them is one of your most valuable marketing assets, especially since most people do not give out their information freely to just anyone who asks for it. It indicates that they are already interested in what you have to offer, so you don’t need to expend any effort convincing them on that count. The only thing that remains is to demonstrate that yours is the ideal company for their needs. And this brings us to the heart of successful inbound marketing.

Speak to your customer out of a genuine desire, not just to sell them on your solution, but to truly help their business succeed. Keep this motivation at the core of every piece of content you create and every interaction with your prospect.

Building a genuine rapport does take an investment of time, but the results will be solid and lasting. These are the same principles used by the best lead generation companies to generate warm leads who have demonstrated an interest in your services, supplied information about their specific needs, and are not only willing, but eager to hear about your solutions.

Treat these inbound leads like gold. Be the company who provides value before your prospect has even committed to using your service. Answer their questions and build their trust. Make sure your company’s message is aligned with your prospective customers’ needs. You will be building a loyal customer base while you strengthen your reputation and your brand.

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Get to Know Your Prospects Through Progressive Profiling

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

If you haven’t been getting to know your customers through progressive profiling, you could be missing out on one of the most powerful strategies in B2B marketing. Progressive profiling allows you to gradually engage prospects while learning more about their needs on each visit to your company’s website.

For example, a prospect who initially downloads a technical whitepaper and later returns seeking detailed product data sheets or a free trial is likely getting closer to making a buying decision.

Each subsequent visit gives you the opportunity to gather additional detail such as company size, purchasing budget and details regarding their company’s needs and interests. To do this effectively you will need to have a “smart” form on your website. This application saves each bit of data gathered during a prospect’s visits to your site.

One of the key advantages of this method of customer profiling and lead gathering is that it avoids the use of lengthy forms. Often, persons seeking business services will have already visited several sites by the time they encounter yours, and may have tired of filling out forms.

Progressive profiling can become an indispensable part of your marketing strategy, but it does require time to effectively plan the process and manage the data you gather.

If your site does not initially produce enough qualified needs, you may want to complement your efforts with pre-qualified leads from a lead generation company. Many businesses find that purchasing at least some of their leads helps keep the pipeline full and compensates for any lack of qualified leads gained through the company website.

To be certain you’re getting leads of the highest possible quality—ones that would be equivalent to those you gather through progressively profiling visitors to your site—make sure the lead gen company utilizes this methodology in their own lead-gathering process.

The ones who do are very adept at collecting information about your prospects and categorizing leads according to detailed demographics. Some have a highly refined scoring system that will rate leads by their online activity during each visit to the lead gen company’s site. This type of system delivers warm leads in real time, ones that will bring an excellent return on your investment.

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Could Your Company Use Leads with 125% ROI?

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Any company considering purchasing leads from an online lead supplier will naturally want to know what type of results to expect. Will the leads you receive prove to be worth the investment? One of the best ways to answer this question is to research the results other companies have achieved while using a third party lead supplier.

One such firm, TeleDirect, is a call center services firm employing more than 100 professional CSRs. The Sacramento Business Journal has listed the company as one of its “Fastest Growing Companies” in each of the past six years.

The company recently needed a continuous pipeline of qualified, high-ROI leads that would be sales-ready within a few weeks’ time. However, the company’s marketing executives had learned from experience to be selective when choosing third-party lead suppliers. Some vendors, they found, employ unrefined, generic lead-gathering methods, resulting in low-quality, unqualified leads.

Supplying their sales team with a continuous flow of fresh leads had been a key to company success, allowing TeleDirect’s sales force to concentrate on the sales process and conversions rather than spending too much time and resources on prospecting or qualifying potential leads. However, call center executives felt that they were using too many external lead sources and needed to bring efficiencies into their lead-gen program.

Knowing that call center service buyers rarely submit their contact information to an individual vendor, and that most prospects prefer comparison shopping, TeleDirect chose to purchase leads from InsideUp, where prospects enjoy the efficiency of using an online service to evaluate the pricing and features of several vendors simultaneously.

The results? TeleDirect Call Centers received an average 125% return-on-investment within the first 30 days of signing up new call center customers. This means that the total revenue it generated from customers within just 30 days of signup is 125% of the total cost of generating those leads using InsideUp’s platform.

On average, 80% of InsideUp’s lead prospects requested custom proposals from TeleDirect, permitting TeleDirect’s sales team to work with interested and engaged potential new customers. By using InsideUp leads, TeleDirect was also able to reduce its external sources of sales leads by 50 percent.

InsideUp’s lead verification process ensures that leads provided to TeleDirect have a high response rate. InsideUp remains one of the company’s core lead sources. TeleDirect’s CEO, Tom Coshow, put it this way, “InsideUp far exceeded our expectations. InsideUp leads were not only qualified and verified..they were either warm or hot to the touch! Plus they were exactly the prospects that hit our sweet spot. Thanks to InsideUp, our business has grown significantly.”

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Twelve Key Ways Marketing Automation Can Benefit Your Business

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

According to a new report by DemandGen, the number of companies that have adopted marketing automation solutions in 2010 is double that of the previous year. Several giants such as IBM and Oracle were among them.

With marketing automation’s capacity to help companies maximize their return on investment, manage revenue cycles, and create brand awareness, the number of B2B companies taking advantage of this technology is expected to continue to grow. But you don’t have to be a mega organization to reap the benefits of CRM and other forms of marketing automation software. So what, exactly, is marketing automation and how can it help your business grow?

According to SearchCRM, marketing automation software is used to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. Its use makes processes, which had been performed manually, much more efficient. It also provides new features and capabilities that companies have yet to exploit. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management (CRM).

Marketo further defines marketing automation as a tool for increasing operational efficiency and driving revenue. It automates the routine and repeatable tasks involved in lead management, lead nurturing and lead scoring. It will also build and maintain your company’s marketing lead database. It can also be integrated with your company’s existing sales force automation systems.

Automation software enables marketing departments to measure what works and demonstrate the impact of specific marketing and lead nurturing campaigns on company revenue. Used effectively, it can foster collaboration between marketing and sales teams and increase productivity.

The two main functions of marketing automation are campaign management and customer segmentation. Organizations use factors such as gender, age, and education to separate and categorize customer data. This helps marketers create campaigns targeted to particular demographics and measure the effectiveness of advertising and lead nurturing strategies.

Within these two main functions, marketing automation programs perform a multitude of tasks. Some of these will vary by provider, but most will help increase the effectiveness of your marketing in these 12 ways:

  1. Increase productivity by replacing repetitive manual tasks with automated systems.
  2. Help to manage your company’s revenue cycles.
  3. Automate lead generation and lead nurturing processes.
  4. Create marketing work-flow systems, budget plans and organizational calendars.
  5. Manage organization-wide marketing campaigns
  6. Manage mailing lists based on existing lead, account and contact data.
  7. Assist on campaign asset creation.
  8. Analyze campaign effectiveness based on customer data.
  9. Use information captured in lead details to qualify leads to next stage.
  10. Deploy mass email campaigns to targeted mailing lists.
  11. Import leads from external sources, such as lead suppliers and Web downloads.
  12. Create, automate and deliver multi-channel promotional messaging.

If you’re planning to purchase marketing automation software tools, it’s important to realize that your initial purchase is only the beginning. When companies express disappointment with their marketing automation system, this is often because they have not taken the time to learn how to use it fully. To get the most benefit from your software, you will need to integrate it with the right resources, people, and processes.

Think of marketing automation as one component of your complete marketing solution. When used effectively, it can help you build brand awareness and realize a higher return on your sales leads.

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New Iphone App Makes Customer Acquisition Easier

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

If you’re a B2B marketer, by now you have no doubt heard the buzz about the increased use of mobile marketing by B2B companies. One way to take advantage of this new channel for customer acquisition is with B2B iPhone apps such as the Vendor Quotes app, recently released by InsideUp. This innovative app helps marketers take advantage of the ubiquitous nature of mobile media to connect instantly with prospects.

This solution has the potential to greatly increase lead conversion rates. According to an MIT study, the chances of qualifying a lead that is called within five minutes decrease 21 times after just 30 minutes have passed. The key to making that crucial immediate contact lies in eliminating or reducing any processes that can eat into those critical first minutes.

By following a few simple steps outlined in the instruction document for the Vendor Quotes app, marketers will be able to receive leads directly to their Salesforce account. The leads will be posted using a standard Salesforce field, such as name, company, title, industry, phone number, etc. Category-specific questions and answers will then be posted to the “Description” field.

This new app will be an indispensable time-saver for businesses. The immediacy of such a system makes it simple and cost-effective for businesses to receive ready-access to service providers. It allows companies to respond the moment a potential customer submits a request, which makes this a valuable tool for both small and large business owners.

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Posted in B2B Lead Generation Tips, Lead Purchasing | 3 Comments »

Strengthen Your Sales Message to Boost Sales

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

When you receive pre-qualified leads who are ready to buy, they will still need compelling reasons to buy from you rather than from your competitor. You can increase sales up to 30 percent by creating a sales message that is relevant to your buyers’ questions.

A 2008 survey by International Data Group found that the chance of closing a sale was reduced by 45 percent when the content of the sales message was not relevant to buyers’ most pressing questions. The study also found that 42 percent of the time, sales teams had not been provided with adequate training and tools to help them answer these questions persuasively. Although the survey participants were IT buyers, the same principles of effective and relevant sales messaging applies to virtually all types of marketing.

Sales messaging is defined as offering a persuasive and compelling answer to a buyer’s primary questions regarding the services you offer. The three basic questions buyers have are:

  1. Why should I meet with you? (If an initial appointment is the next step in your sales process.)
  2. Why should I replace my current solution with your company’s services?
  3. Why buy this solution from your company and not from your competitor?

According to a recent poll by BtoB Magazine, 70 percent of marketers graded themselves at “D” or an “F” level in regard to how well they prepared sales messaging and supporting materials for their sales team. If you feel you fall into this category, the good news is that you have the opportunity to increase sales by analyzing and strengthening your sales messaging.

The first step toward stronger sales messaging is to know your target market well. This will enable you to replace weak generalities such as “great customer service” with specific information about how your company is uniquely positioned to fill a buyer’s needs.

A future post will go into further detail about how you can create a compelling sales message.

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Seven Tips for Effective Lead Management

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Even the best leads will not produce the results you want if they are not managed and nurtured well. A study by Marketo found that only 25 percent of new leads are actually sales-ready. The rest will require a long-term management strategy to bring in results.

An unofficial survey of several lead management companies produced the following best practices.

1. Nurture leads before sending them to sales. ( Unless you have purchased real-time leads from a lead supplier. Sales should contact these leads immediately, and any that do not close should be given to marketing for further nurturing.)

2. Become a recognized authority in your industry. Offer your expertise to help prospects make an informed decision. If you provide guidance without pressure, you will come to be viewed as a trusted source.

3. Work with sales to define a sales-ready lead. Take into account demographics such as company size, yearly revenue, and purchase time-frame. If you have purchased leads from a lead generation company, that work has already been done, and these pre-qualified leads can be sent directly to sales.

4. Keep your sales team informed about which marketing activities each prospect has responded to, so they can tell you which strategies are yielding results.

5. Compile qualifying questions, call scripts, and email templates to help with the initial contact. Using these tools, a rep can refer to specific interests the prospect has demonstrated, such as downloading a white paper on a particular topic. Ask questions that will help you gain new information, rather than what you already know about your prospect.

6. Don’t waste leads. Make sure sales follows up on each one. Reassign leads that aren’t contacted the first time around. Every lead should be valued and cultivated through the often very long B2B sales cycle.

7. Track the results of individual marketing activities to gain a deeper insight than you would by simply tracking the lead source.

If you are working with a lead generation company to supplement your in-house marketing strategies, many of the best practices listed above, such as lead scoring and qualifying to determine which leads are sales-ready, will have already been done by the lead supplier. Using pre-qualified leads can take some of the pressure off your marketing team while keeping the pipeline filled.

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High Quality, High Volume Leads Top B2B Marketing Challenges

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

If your company has been feeling the strain of increased marketing challenges, you are not alone. New research by MarketingSherpa reveals that generating high quality leads and a high volume of leads continue to be the two chief concerns of B2B companies. This chart represents the growing marketing challenges B2B organizations have faced from 2009 to 2010.

Many companies are still working with restrained marketing budgets and a smaller marketing staff, making the problem of generating a large volume of leads even more difficult. Combined with a lengthening sales cycle, these issues can seem like insurmountable obstacles to creating growth for your company.

Awareness of these trouble spots, however, is the first step toward overcoming them. Here are three key areas worth reviewing, which can be factors in closing the gaps you encounter in your company’s marketing strategy:

  1. Take a critical look at your marketing and sales data and closely track ROI to assess the most cost-effective sources of quality leads. Purchasing leads from an online lead generation company is one solution many companies are using to keep the pipeline filled with warm leads.
  2. Make sure no lead is wasted. Organizations are working harder to bring marketing and sales together to determine what constitutes a high quality lead and when a lead is ready to be turned over to sales. More companies are also employing lead management technology to ensure they are pulling the highest possible return on those leads.
  3. Meet the challenge of a longer B2B sales cycle by refining and strengthening your company’s lead nurturing process. This will enable you to capture sales and boost ROI even when leads don’t close on the initial call. Your lead nurturing efforts will have the added benefit of building trust and creating loyalty on the part of your prospects.
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