Inbound Marketing - Lead Generation, Metrics and Growth Hacking

Marketing and Sales have been growing closer together in many areas over the past few years.  One such area is lead generation.

Lead Generation itself has recently morphed into growth hacking -- finding new sources and channels for high quality leads and nurturing lower quality ones into opportunities that indicate "near-buying" behavior.

NO MORE COLD CALLING!  Today, marketing can completely relieve the sales team from majority of lead gen tasks, such as cold calling, dialing for leads, "pounding the phones," etc.  The idea is to get prospects educated and sold online - before they even speak with a sales rep.

Unlike the interrupt-driven outbound model, by implementing inbound marketing, you are reaching a completely different type of prospects.  These prospects are more qualified, since they have a specific need and they are actively looking for a solution.  By providing them a variety of relevant tools and information, you are helping in their decision-making process.  By the time they decide to contact you, they are well educated on the product and are most likely willing to take the next step.  Contrast that with a sales rep cold calling and trying to pitch a product to people that don't have a problem they are trying to solve in the first place.

Implementation.  This approach significantly shortens sales cycles, increases conversion rates and drives down cost of each sale.  But how do you implement it?  The first step is lead classification -- understanding what are the most and least desirable leads, as well as all types in between.  Here are some recommendations:



1. Lead Types.  Find out what kind of leads are you getting today.  For example:

- Demo Requests
- Free Trials
- Phone calls
- White paper downloads
- Email contact requests

Brainstorm with your sales team to see what works for them best and worst, as well as what other types of leads you may want to be getting moving forward.

2. Analytics.  Look at your metrics for the last 12 or 24 months.  Even though you can build some very complex models, I would start with basics:
     - Conversion rates - lead to opportunity, opportunity to deal, lead to deal
     - Time to conversion - same as above
     - Costs -  per lead, per opportunity and per closed deal
     - Effort - how much time does your sales team invest in converting these leads?

3. Trends and scalability.  How did these numbers change over time?  Can you grow them easily? Would scaling costs be linear or would they require a significant investment -- to take to the next level? Can your marketing team handle the growth (team size, budgets, skills)?

4.  Pyramid Map.  Next, build a pyramid like the one on the left, as a visual representation of types of leads you are going after.

5.  Lead Inclusion / Exclusion.  Decide on which types of leads you are going to focus moving forward.  At this point, you may decide that some types of leads are too expensive.  You may find out that some low quality leads are even not worth pursuing due to the effort required. 

For example, after this type of analysis, we have decided that leads generated by an outsourced lead generation agency were too expensive and required too much effort from our sales team, making them completely ineffective in comparison with other lead types.  Instead, we shifted our focus on higher quality leads that required significantly less effort from our sales team.


6.  Planning.  Once you have the lead metrics, analysis, lead map and your sales plan, it is very easy to put together weekly, monthly and quarterly plan of how many and what type of leads you need.  Knowing the cost per lead and conversion percentages will help you accurately forecast marketing budgets - in terms of their size and timing.

7.  Metrics.  Finally, I suggest monitoring lead metrics daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually - to measure how you are executing against the plan.  Sometimes, you may need to to adjust activities - due to market changes, competitive moves, opportunities, etc.

You can add more advanced metrics later, like lead scoring, heat map, etc. But it is critical to intimately understand the effectiveness of each lead type before implementing these, otherwise lead scores are useless and the sales team will stop taking them seriously.

We have created a daily lead generation report that gets emailed to marketing, sales and relevant executives at the end of each business day.  This report covers number of leads in each category, broken down by source, type, relevant lead details, etc.  The same group of people receives a weekly lead composite report that looks not just at weekly numbers, but weekly and monthly trends in each category, enabling us to discover very interesting and useful micro and sometimes macro trends.



In my next blog entry in CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing, I will discuss the lead gen mix: outbound vs. inbound.

CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing - Overview

One of my observations from SMX 2012 was the disconnect between marketing executives and their marketing teams around the importance of online marketing and SEO.

It was interesting to see hundreds of marketing managers and directors struggle with selling the true value of SEO, PPC, rich content and inbound marketing to their executives.

Looking back at the path I traveled from brick and mortar to online / inbound marketing in the last 3-4 years, I thought it may be useful to put together a series of blogs for fellow marketing executives that are starting this journey.

Here are the key elements I will cover in my subsequent posts:

--------
1.  Inbound Marketing (vs. Outbound) 

2.  Keyword strategy

3.  Messaging

4.  Content and editorial strategy

5.  SEO

6.  PR

7.  Social and Community Marketing

8.  PPC

9.  Online Brand Building 

10.  Growth Hacking

11. Offline marketing

12.  Metrics and attribution

13.  A/B testing   

14.  Marketing team building / mix / talent acquisition 
-------

Just to give you an idea on the results so far, this approach has helped us to bring down lead and account acquisition costs by more than 70% and significantly decrease conversion times.  Today, high quality inbound leads constitute over 90% of all leads, enabling sales people to focus on converting prospects into customers instead of wasting all their time on cold calling.
   

It's all about content... and metrics

How important is content quality in your marketing efforts?  Lip service aside, many organizations treat it  secondary at best.  Yet, in the modern world of online marketing, content is one of the most important components of your success.

Let's take an example of email nurturing.  Last week we were planning an email campaign with a very strong article written by an expert and a decent landing page.

We wrote the email and were thinking about the subject line.  My team member had it as "7 ways to ..."  To me, it seemed a little too "fluffy."  So after some more brainstorming we came up with another line that was more informative (at least IMO), like "xx  xx failure rates."

The theory behind it was that the "email receiver" would click on it because it would appear to be more of an informative email vs. "push my products" one.  We spent about an hour on the subject line debate.  Most organizations I know would have considered this as wasted time.  Was it though?

We conducted A/B test during the next few days.  Same email, same call to action, same landing page.   Different subject lines.

Results:

Subject Line 1: "7 ways..."   Open rate: 4.4%, click through rate: 0.2%
Subject Line 2: "...rates"  Open rate: 7.0%, click through rate: 0.5%

As you can see, there is a huge difference in these rates, which translated to 12 (SL1) leads against 50+ (SL2).  This is one of the best demonstrations (supported by metrics) of the difference that content quality makes.

The next A/B test will be this week.  We are going to be testing the email text.  We tuned it on Friday.  Given we see interesting results, I will blog about it later.

7 Steps for Turning Twitter Into an Effective Market Research Tool

Twitter:  Waste of Time or a Business Tool?
I used to think that Twitter represented no significant value for business needs.  Just to be familiar with it, I opened an account a while ago, and tweeted here and there.

That all changed as I began working on a startup, developing a technology to prevent cyberbullying.  In that process, I discovered very effective ways of using Twitter as a practical tool for market research.

Challenge
Many business executives, product managers, marketing professionals and sales reps find it hard keeping up with  industry news, competitive info and market trends.  Even though there are plenty of tools, keeping up with the news still requires hours of finding, sorting and reading articles.  People are usually busy with tens of different tasks, leaving market research as something that often gets pushed down in priority.

Enter Twitter
There are armies of people who are tirelessly tweeting 24 hours a day.  Tweets are brief.  It takes less than a minute for us to determine if they are useful or not.  We can use Twitter as tool to quickly get up to speed with the relevant news, spending just 5-10 min a day.  Here is how I do it:

1.  Create a Twitter account that contains the words of the main business problem you are trying to solve.  In my case, it has "Cyberbullying" in it.  This will be useful later, when you would want to use Twitter for marketing needs.

2.  Find people tweeting on the subject of your interest.  You can use the search bar for that.  Play with multiple keywords to get the content you want.  Then check profiles of people you found and make sure they fit your needs.

3.  Create your Twitter list.  Follow as many relevant users as possible.

4.  Get a mobile app.  It may be easier to get quick updates on an iPhone or Android.  I am using TweetCaster on Android.  It gives me updates in a very easy format.  It takes me only 5-10 min to go through the daily news.  I often discover news before they show up in RSS feeds or other major news sources and tools.  The most relevant ones get lots of retweets from many people.  It is sort of "crowd voting."

5.  Trim your list.  As you are finding people who are tweeting irrelevant things for whatever reasons, unfollow them, until you have a "golden list" of sources that bring you the best quality news.

6.  Check few times a day for 3-5 minutes each time and you will be abreast of the latest industry news.

7.  Augment this with your more in-depth research from various sources when you have time.

That's it!  
In military terms, Twitter became my Special Forces team for getting the dirty job done quickly and effectively.  Other tools are like my regular military units for thorough, longer-term type projects.

8 Steps for Creating an Effective Main Message

 It's a familiar situation.  A company or division is formed.  It develops a product, then races to launch.  Somebody throws together an initial message and a web site.  Product launches.  Revenue starts flowing.

It's time to hire a marketing exec and build a team.  Founders emphasize leads and conversion rates.  Good things like SEO, lead nurturing, online marketing get implemented. But one fundamental is often missing.

Sin #1.  Positioning / Main message.  Let's look at the main message from two companies web sites:

-  Zoho

- Workday


Are these accurate and good in the eyes of these companies?  Probably.
Is this the way their customers think?                                      Probably not.
Do these miss a chance to communicate the true value?          Yes!

A strong main messages gives the best opportunity to grab prospect's attention... the right way. It also flows into the rest of messaging, impacting  PPC, SEO and the conversion rate.  In fact, vague main message  results in wasted money and ineffectiveness of marketing campaigns.  This is especially painful for startups with little brand recognition.

Here are examples of effective and clear messages from Pandora and AppAssure:







How do you develop a strong main message?  Here are some key principles:

1.  Grab attention.  It has to be unique enough to grab visitors attention and encourage further browsing.
2.  Differentiate.  Has to communicate at least one unique angle or a customer benefit.
3.  Specific. The benefit has to be specific.  Statements like having "all-in-one," "complete," "best" are often subjective and indicate vendor's point of view.  In the examples above, the word "complete" may have a very different meaning for target customers vs. the vendor.  It can discredit the message.  What I like about the message from AppAssure is that is specific.  "Recover in Minutes" sets a pretty specific expectation.
4.  Believable. It is important to keep the balance between reality and outrageous statements that prospects discount as zealous or exaggerated.
5.  Language.  The message has to be in the language used by target customers, which is often different from the vendor's language.  If your target customer is CIO, too technical of a message may be a mistake.  If you are targeting sysadmins, you may want to be fairly technical and specific.
6.  Easily understandable.  The prospect has to be able to quickly grasp the message.  Don't make them think too long - often people don't have time or desire to do that.  They will just leave the site.
7.  Customer tested.  It is critical to test the main message with a number of customers and prospects before going live.  You can start with a qualitative test via customer conversations.  Then, you can finish with an online survey.
8.  Not Perfect.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  You don't have to spend months on this.  It OK for some internal folks to struggle with it.  It can be work in progress, however you don't want to change it very often.  It just has to be effective.

To summarize, a strong main message could drastically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and ROI of your marketing spending.  I will discuss the sin #2 in the next Hack Marketing blog entry.

Here is an example of a message that we developed about 6 months ago: www.forgetsecurity.com

5 Practical Steps For Increasing Website Conversion Rate

Congratulations!  Your web traffic is good!   Now what?  How do you convert visitors into business?  The 5 approaches below came as a result of my own experience of running marketing in several companies, as well as from the practical feedback from my marketing colleagues.

1.  Understand your traffic.  Most likely your web traffic is coming from many different sources.  For example, some people may be visiting your site as a result of reading a blog; some - from a banner ad at a community forum; some may be responding to an email.  Each traffic type has unique characteristics that are important to understand:

• Function.  IT Manager vs. CIO vs. BU Manager, etc.
• Buying cycle.  Research phase (traffic source: just read a magazine article, realized had the same challenge) vs. shopping for a solution (source: read a customer testimonial at an industry forum while looking for a solution to a known problem) vs. ready to buy (source: responding to a price promotion.)
• Topic / Trigger.  Visitors came to the web site after reading a blog entry on a nasty Trojan Horse vs. an article about disaster recovery vs. a  promotion on your product, etc.  

2.  Multiple landing pages.  Each traffic type requires a unique conversation with a category of prospects  (based on function, topic, etc).

For example, let's say you have a group of IT managers that came to your web site as a result of reading a blog entry on the complexity of managing file servers.  Sending them to the main page may disrupt that conversation.  Most of them may feel tricked and will probably end up leaving.  Instead, a simple landing page continuing the discussion, perhaps explaining how this complexity can be solved with a practical implementation, would retain them and encourage to continue exploring the site.

It is important to have as many landing pages as necessary for a meaningful traffic segmentation (based on unique types of conversations) and driving them to a logical conclusion (more info, trial, contact, purchase, etc.)  Many content management and marketing automation tools (like Marketo,) can help in accomplishing this quickly and easily.

3.  Unique messages.  Each landing page requires a specific message to continue the unique conversation started at the lead generation phase.  The message should take into account all the factors from above.

For example, if visitors are coming as a result of reading an article on the risk management in CIO Magazine, you want a landing page with an "executive" look and feel, focused on best practices for solving this problem, and not getting into too many technical details.  It is also a good practice to speak to several of your CIO customers to craft this message.

For a number of webmasters coming from a blog entry on solving Apache web server performance issues, you may want to have a landing page that is be fairly technical and specific.  Again, I would suggest talking to a couple of webmaster customers to craft the message.

4.  Unique elements.  You probably already have a collection of elements, such as videos, podcasts, white papers, blogs, customer testimonials, etc.

Each landing page needs the elements that are appropriate for its audience.  The best way to find right elements is to talk to your existing customers fitting the profile.  This can be an eye opening experience.

For example, one of my customers told me that most of the elements we were planning were irrelevant for him.  He told us that many SMB IT Managers typically look for product screenshots first.  If they like them, they continue browsing.  After verifying this point with a few other customers with the same profile, we ended up giving screenshots a very prominent position on the page.  Very quickly it became the most visited element for the whole site.  The landing page ended up having a great conversion rate.

Another very successful element we added as a result of a direct customer feedback was a "sandbox" for a cloud product we were marketing, where IT managers could play with the product in a "sandbox" environment.

5. Unique call to action.  For this step, it is important to understand prospects' phase in the buying cycle.  If they are just researching, a big red "BUY NOW" button will most likely turn them off.  However, "watch a video" or a "free trial" may work well for them.  Alternatively, if the traffic is coming as a response to your "30% off" promotion, you may want to have the "buy" button in a more prominent location.



These are just 5 ways of increasing your web site conversion rates.  These steps require a bit more planning and execution from your marketing team than usual.  However the conversion rates and revenue results are well worth it.  

There are important steps like monitoring, measuring, and adjusting pages and campaigns that I did not discuss in this entry.  I will try to cover these in a future hack marketing blog entry.

Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions of other conversion approaches that have worked for you.