Category: Lead Generation Programs

Branding vs Lead Gen – Can’t we just get along?

Creating an Umbrella for both Branding and Lead Gen

Challenge: Corporate brand guidelines can often stifle tactical lead generation

Every company lives by driving revenue.  In the case of B2B technology companies, marketing ensures revenue results by driving the quality and quantity of the prospects in the pipeline in order for the sales organization to reach its sales targets.  Marketing provides the fuel with which the sales organization can meet and exceed business plan targets.

Many times brand guidelines can be seen (or enforced) in a way that limits pipeline creation.  This can take the form of narrowly interpreting brand principles that stifle advertising innovation or can limit more tactical/direct messaging that drives advertising response rates.  That said, the marketer needs to protect the brand and ensure that every outbound message reinforces key tenets and principles. Color palettes and visual IDs are frequently not the issue here. 

A formal messaging ladder that encompasses key product differentiation is what can really drive alignment.  Messaging needs to be detailed enough to enable the prospect to understand capabilities and differentiation while being consistent with higher level brand promises.  This can be challenging for large organizations with wide product portfolios,  where the messaging ladder also needs to be updated (sometimes frequently) to support the product portfolio.  There needs to be a clear set of messages that marketers can use to create and execute programs – while remaining brand compliant.  In the ideal scenario, the marketing group clearly understands the messaging platform and all creative is developed from the ground up in a way that is consistent with the overall brand. 

Scenarios where brand trumps demand generation must be avoided, and brand guidelines should be broad enough to support product and solution messaging that drive awareness, interest and consideration.  The purpose of the brand guidelines is to leverage messages over the long run and not limit pipeline in the short run. Brand should serve the needs of pipeline creation – while ensuring consistency of overall message, voice and visual structures and constructs. 

I am reminded about a time many years ago when my kids were little and they asked me what I did at work.  What is ‘marketing’ after all?  My answer at the time was, “marketing helps sales people sell.”  Focusing on brand purity at the expense of pipeline development seems to be putting the cart before the horse.  So brand guidelines need to provide a framework where demand generation can survive, grow and become increasingly effective.     

Lesson: Brand guidelines should serve product marketing and demand generation – not the other way around.

Freemium and Frictionless

Challenge:  While companies are chasing freemium and frictionless sales motions, they are missing the main point.

It’s clear that the freemium sales model, where prospects can download products for free, has taken off.  Successful companies like Dropbox are clear winners, but will this work for enterprise B2B marketers?  Well Box, Zendesk, Atlassian, Splunk and others prove that it certainly can.  It’s obviously a marketing model that works.  Prospects try a free version and upgrade to a more robust, paid version easily and seamlessly. This breathes life into ‘see-try-buy’ or frictionless sales models.  So is that all we need?  Freemium sales model is our salvation?

The challenge is that you can’t automate or accelerate a bad experience.  What is important to deliver is a positive and engaging customer experience, and it must be enticing very quickly.  Your prospect must be able to easily understand how to use your product and find it engaging right away.  If they need training or other have requirements to meet, you may be setting yourself up for disaster.  Your prospects will freely download your application only to be confused and wander off – not upgrading to the paid version.  In this outcome, you have just proven why yours is not the right solution.  Even if you convert a small portion of users, you’re building up a base of prospects who now ‘know’ that your solution is not the right one.

So you need to consider a few things as you pursue a freemium strategy.  First, do you have a process where your prospects will be highly successful in their free trial of your product?  If the product is not immediately intuitive and usable, can you provide supporting materials to make their usage successful?  Then, do you have a process either inside the product or as a separate communication path to help them explore your product and ensure a successful outcome?  Finally, what is your process to monitor usage and outcomes from your trial/free users?  How will you know if the process is working?  To quote Stephen Covey, “Start with the end in mind,” or in this case, start with a plan to measure success.  This may be tracking trial usage, getting usage surveys, measuring conversion rates and more.

Strangely enough, your path down a freemium model may start with improving or adding components to the product itself.  A more fool-proof usage process will drive greater success.   Constant learning and adjustment will yield great results and hopefully drive that hockey-stick growth curve we all seek.

Lesson: Charity starts at home.  Give a hard look at your product before chasing a freemium model.

Money for Nothing and Leads for Free

Challenge: Turn your customers into your best lead generators.   

Salespeople have very short memories.  Certainly the old adage, “what have you done for me lately” springs to mind.  Unfortunately, lead generation programs often have diminishing marginal returns – meaning that as you look to drive more leads, often the conversion rate to sales will drop.  So just driving more leads will not necessarily drive profitable growth.  So what is a marketer to do?

No one can better advocate for you than your customers.  Leveraging your customers to speak to your prospects is an ideal way to drive new leads.  Current customers understand the challenges prospective customers face and exactly how your solution can address their needs.  The materials coming from your company are ‘discounted’ in terms of their value.  Prospects come to your website for data sheets, demonstrations, solutions and even customer case studies and videos.  However, even case studies sometimes feel ‘produced’ by your organization.  Prospective customers are looking for ‘the real story’ about your organization, and they’d rather get it from other customers.  But how can you systematically gather the details about your current customers in terms of their deployment, usage and benefits?  You need information like industry, geography, use case, competitive comparisons, deployment, integration, value realized and other key dimensions related to your outbound and inbound marketing. 

Gathering data is the first step, and encouraging specific groups of customers to take certain actions on your behalf is the second step.  Both are challenging tasks, especially the latter because these customers are busy and have many other things to do BEFORE helping you!  The solution – make it fun and competitive.  There is a new social media tool that encourages your customers to become advocates – it is called Influitive (www.influitive.com).  This tool uses gamification to make it fun AND easy to be an advocate for your company.  The concept of gamification (gam(e) +‎ -ification) is hot (http://gamification.org/) in B2B marketing.  With Influitive, you create challenges for your customers and reward them with points as they meet those challenges.  For instance, you might reward them for Liking you on Facebook, re-tweeting one of your posts, commenting on a blog post, serving as a customer reference, taking a customer reference sales call, or any number of other actions.  Your customers can use these points for value added items like training, time with executive staff, access to a product roadmap presentation, company apparel or any number of other items.  You’re limited only by your creativity!

The result?  You’re able to create your own competitive environment for customer advocates to earn points by advocating for your company and its solutions.  You turn your best and most loyal customers into an extension of your marketing team.  They can take natural steps and actions that fit within their interest and ability.  This product is currently in beta – so stay tuned to see more developments.

Lesson: Leverage your most valuable asset – your customers – to drive new prospects!

CPC Part 6 – Alternate Search Engines – Can Anyone Compete with Google?

Challenge: Should I consider the time and effort involved to run a separate PPC campaign alongside of Google?
Lesson: Google is king – in terms of volume and quality. Marchex is one of the only other PPC programs we have been able to successful run alongside Google.

Challenge: Should I consider the time and effort involved to run a separate PPC campaign alongside of Google?

Running a PPC program takes time and effort to structure, optimize, manage, etc…  Is it worth the time to run with smaller search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Marchex, Business.com and others?  Of course, the answer is – it depends. Here is a quick list of many B2B search engines.

Google makes it relatively easy to export your program so you can import into another search engine.  In fact, other search engines may be motivated enough for your business to take this export and build your campaign for you.  In some cases I have seen some who are willing to even replicate the changes to the program over time.

However, even with this assistance, you need to test the search engine to see the comparative cost per lead and revenue generated.  You may find that despite a duplicated program, the source of traffic from other engines decreases the quality of leads acquired.  The only way to know for certain is to run a test.  Based on my experience with B2B enterprise IT products, I have not yet been successful with Yahoo or MSN/Bing.  While I tried several experiments and ongoing optimization, I could not ramp the quantity of the program as well as the quality of the programs I had run with Google to make this worth the effort.  On the other hand, I have been able to run successful programs with Marchex.  While not the same scale as my Google campaigns, the quality and volume justified their ongoing investment.

There are new search engines and innovations happening all the time.  So keep your eyes open.  I would also be open to hearing your experience!

Lesson:  Google is king – in terms of volume and quality.  Marchex is one of the only other PPC programs we have been able to successful run alongside Google.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

CPC Part 5 – PPC Closed Loop Reporting – The Holy Grail

Challenge: I think my PPC program is performing well – but how do I prove it?
Lesson: The true proof of any marketing campaign is comparing program costs to revenues (ideally gross margin). Closed loop PPC revenue reporting is possible with a bit of effort and analysis and will guide your future decisions.

Challenge: I think my PPC program is performing well – but how do I prove it?

In a previous blog, we talked about tracking metrics like CPC and CPL.  These are good measures as you get started, however the real payoff is in driving revenue.  Given the relatively simple integrations between search engines like Google and SFA systems like Salesforce.com, you can track leads driven by PPC into SFA and through to a closed sale. 

Basic closed loop reporting is pretty simple and can be done by combining cost data from AdWords with sales progression shown in your SFA program.  If you are tracking Ad Group and Keyword sources, you can then run reports on closed revenue by these fields.  Generally, I have found, that tracking down to an Ad Group level is sufficient level of detail given that your PPC campaign has relatively small ad groups.  Even starting at the Campaign level can provide satisfactory results when starting out.  This can immediately give you visibility into which areas are driving revenue and which are not.  You can then use this information to guide your future optimization and bids in your PPC engines.

That said, what is best is to compare you spend to the revenue generated on an ad group basis.  This requires the integration of spend data by ad group with the revenue data by ad group from your SFA program.  You need to work out time periods and have similar naming structures in both sets of data to effectively build this integration.  While not exactly simple, this can be done via Excel and matched on a weekly basis.  The resulting reports will directly show ad group spend compared to revenue.  The remaining challenge is to account for the average sales cycle – since your spend today may not pay off in sales for weeks or months.  To the degree that your sales cycle is longer than 2-3 months, you may also need to consider a means to time shift your PPC spend to more closely match your PPC revenue.

Sales cycle time adds further complications in that changes you make to optimize your ad groups today will not show the full impact until these new leads have a chance to run through your average sales cycle time.  It takes significant discipline to wait this long to evaluate the impact of these changes.  Being impatient, my preference is to identify early indicators of future revenue.  This can be the lead rating or status of these leads.  If you see a spike in the Junk or Unqualified lead rating after a change is made, you can be somewhat sure that revenue will likely drop in the future from that ad group since the conversion rate to qualified lead has immediately dropped.  While not perfect, this allows you to make faster assessments of your ad group optimization efforts.

You may be surprised at what you find.  In the past, we have found that some campaigns looked great on a cost per lead basis. However, later it was discovered that these leads were not closing in terms of revenue. At this level of analysis you may find that your sales team is not well trained on how to position a certain product or that the product itself does not compete well in the marketplace.  So you may be generating quality leads but there are other issues in the sales funnel that are preventing this ad group from being a real success in terms of revenue. 

Lesson:  The true proof of any marketing campaign is comparing program costs to revenues (ideally gross margin).  Closed loop PPC revenue reporting is possible with a bit of effort and analysis and will guide your future decisions.

CPC Part 4 – Are You Getting Your PPC Money’s Worth?

Challenge: How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your pay per click spending?
Lesson: If you don’t measure, any road will take you there. Decide on which metrics are important to your organization and measure them weekly. Over time you will optimize your metrics and reporting which will, in turn, optimize your PPC program.

Challenge: How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your pay per click spending?

So you have your PPC program running, optimized and well designed landing pages.  Are you doing as well as you could?  What metrics should you use to evaluate your program?  You should evaluate your program at several levels.  

First, there are a few metrics built into your PPC program that can be useful – these are cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL).  CPC gives you a good idea of your traffic costs in order to compare to other opportunities.  That only gets you so far, as lead generation campaigns have to produce leads to be effective.  Thus, CPL is an important metric in any B2B search marketing campaign.  You can measure CPL directly in AdWords by placing their conversion tracking codes on your post-registration form pages.  You want to compare your CPL to other marketing programs you are running.  How does this compare to your direct mail campaign or your lunch and learn program?  In the end, PPC is only one area out of many marketing programs where you need to balance your overall marketing spend.

The next level of analysis is looking at revenue generated from your program.  The great news is that most SFA programs like Salesforce.com and others provide great ways to track results using Campaigns and tracking fields. You can pass key variables to your SFA system like: search term, keyword, Ad Group, or campaign so you can then report on how well a given ad group, key word or campaign is performing in terms of lead qualification or revenue generated.  With relatively simple SFA structures and usage, you can track the progress of these lead throughout the sales process.  Here is a really useful guide to setting up AdWords conversion tracking.

Typically I have found that leads generated by PPC programs are frequently the first step in the sales process where other programs like webinars help to qualify and move these prospects along.  The good news is that the leads coming from PPC into your SFA systems will frequently be net new leads and therefore you can then trace lifetime of this lead throughout the sales process.

What is required is the ability to integrate all future activity into this lead record.  This may require a marketing automation system like Eloqua, Marketo, Aprimo or others.  See more on this in other blog….

Lesson:  If you don’t measure, any road will take you there.  Decide on which metrics are important to your organization and measure them weekly.  Over time you will optimize your metrics and reporting which will, in turn, optimize your PPC program.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

Landing Pages that Land Customers – CPC Part 3

Challenge: Visitors to your website are nice, but how do you turn them into buyers?
Lesson: Put yourself in your prospects shoes when reviewing your landing page? Does it sell the product or materials in a clear and compelling way? Would you fill out the form or complete the sale?

Challenge: Visitors to your website are nice, but how do you turn them into buyers?

OK – so you now have your ad groups, key words and offers working well for you.  You should see your click thru rate (CTR) increasing nicely.  Are your prospects converting on your website?  Can you get them to fill out a form and opt-in to communicating with your company? Can you get them to convert to a sale on your website?  Here is where landing page optimization comes into play.

When your prospect clicks on an ad, where will you take them?  Best practice dictates a landing page that encourages a sale or conversion, not your home page.  In some cases this may involve a two step process to qualify and then convert, but most frequently you will want to ask them for the sale or the form registration on that first landing page.  How to structure this page? There are several key elements to consider.

The first step to is your headline – or the large words listed on the landing page.  These need to reinforce the value proposition from the keywords the prospect used and your ad text. Inclusion of the keyword in this headline is a best practice, but can only be implemented if your ad groups are tightly organized for relevancy (see the entry on account structure). 

Next you want to consider a large image of the offer for this page.  What will the prospect get if they register or buy from you on this page?  Show them a large image of what they will receive – either the product, the whitepaper, the video demonstration, etc.  This large image is effectively your advertisement to encourage them to register – with supporting text.

Certainly the landing page copy needs to be well written text giving a description of the asset or product and what the prospect will learn or receive from registering.  I prefer brief text that supports both the ad that the prospect just clicked on and also supports the image on the page.  This tight linkage should confirm that they have arrived at the right location to learn more or purchase the product.  My bias from past campaigns has been for driving new leads for the sales team.  It is important to note that you may have a sales process where you need more education before a registration or purchase.  In this case you may need a landing pages focused on education versus lead generation. 

Finally, you need to have a simple and clear form for the prospect to complete.  Typically the landing page text will be on the left with the form on the right. This layout is common because people read web pages from top to botton and from left to right.  Ideally we hope that they will first read the text on the left and then fill out the form on the right.  Combining this with a clear call to action and a button draws the eye toward your objective and will help move more visitors from prospects to leads.

Here is a good example:

Here are a few links that do a nice job of describing landing page optimization:

Lesson:  Put yourself in your prospects shoes when reviewing your landing page?  Does it sell the product or materials in a clear and compelling way?  Would you fill out the form or complete the sale?

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

Ad Groups, Ad Text, Offers, OH MY! – CPC Part 2

Challenge: My cost per lead is too high to support my sales objectives.
Lesson: Optimizing ad groups, key words, ad text and offers is an ongoing exercise which may take months and years to truly perfect – and even then requires constant attention and management.

Challenge:  My cost per lead is too high to support my sales objectives.

Now you have an account structure you like and is designed around your prospective customers.  Let the optimization begin!  No matter how well thought out your account, it can ALWAYS be optimized.  While campaign optimization could fill many books, here are a few common starting points to review to ensure you have covered the basics.

First you need to put all the wood behind one arrow – more succinctly, you need a tight linkage between your ad group, adwords in that ad group and ad text.  The more closely you can align the search terms your potential customers are using with the ad text you provide, the better your chance for success.  The implication?  You may need to divide your ad groups far further than you planned to achieve better results.  Most commonly, as you optimize your program you will be subdividing your ad groups to make them even more focused over time.  While this will increase your ongoing management effort, it will improve your overall results.

Review your keywords and don’t forget the power of negative keywords in these ad groups.  As you review the actual search terms, you may find they have meaning to search for other products.  You may want customers for web conference software – but clearly the word ‘conference’ could be used to search for a face to face event or venue.  You need to both clearly use keywords based on exact match or phrase match instead of the default broad match as well as add negative keywords.  Examples of negative keywords vary by industry, though most B2B companies could benefit from adding the following negatives to their accounts: home, consumer, personal, free, shareware, freeware, job, salary, position, and consultant.   For more information on using negative keywords, see this post by Lindsey Walsh.

Next, review your offers – are they really relevant to the keywords searched?  Is this offer something the potential customer would be interested in seeing or reading?  Is the offer too much of a lead – such as asking for a face to face meeting when the prospect is only just learning about the product or solution?

Another area that many people miss is the traffic distribution settings which declare whether your ads are shown only on a search results page for a relevant search or if they are also shown on the Content Network for web pages which mention your keywords.  While the Content Network can be an excellent source of traffic and leads, it needs to be managed in separate campaigns to allow for different bidding strategies.  If you didn’t make this choice specifically, Google opted you into the Content Network when you first set up your campaign.  Simply change your network settings and create a new campaign for the Content Network if you still want to pursue that traffic – but beware that your results may be very different than the search results.  More information on the Google Content Network is posted on the AdWords blog.

Lesson: Optimizing ad groups, key words, ad text and offers is an ongoing exercise which may take months and years to truly perfect – and even then requires constant attention and management.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

Even the House Google Built Needs a Good Foundation – CPC Part 1

Challenge: How do I get started with AdWords?
Lesson: Review the structure of your account to make sure you have aligned to the needs of your target audience.

Challenge:  How do I get started with AdWords?

If you are just getting started or looking at optimizing your ad words campaign, the first step is to review the structure of your account.  Pay per click advertising is built upon relevance.  The reason that Google achieved dominance as a search engine is because their results were more frequently relevant than the competition. This emphasis on relevance carries through to the structure of your ad words campaign.  Your ads need to show up on searches that are directly relevant for your search offering.  The first step in achieving relevance starts with the structure of your account.

Campaigns set the boundaries within your account.  Budgets, geography & language settings, and traffic distribution all are set on the campaign level.  Within a campaign, you can create one or more ad groups, which are used to segment out groups of keywords and ads.  Each ad group should be a focus area for relevancy so that ad text can be linked to the keywords within an ad group.  Bidding happens on the ad group and keyword level, allowing you to group keywords that might be more or less expensive for easier tracking.  Negative keywords and sites can be added at either the campaign or ad group level depending on the amount of fine tuning you’d like to provide.  Any tracking URLs can be placed within ads, thus targeting the ad group level, or on individual keywords. 

So what do you place at the campaign versus the ad group level.  Google has a great posting that explains these tradeoffs. While it is difficult to later make structural shifts between ad groups and campaigns, it is not impossible – so don’t stress out.  But do think about what tests you may want to run or budgets you may want to set to help guide your decision.  There is also a graphical depiction of this structure .  As a final thought, you may also want to consider using different campaigns to manage Google’s Content Network (discussed in another post) compared to traditional Google search results.

Lesson: Review the structure of your account to make sure you have aligned to the needs of your target audience.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating

Challenge: Turning Prospects into Active Buyers

Lesson: Online demonstrations qualify your prospects and excite them to take further sales actions making the entire sales process more efficient.

Challenge: Turning Prospects into Active Buyers

Your prospects buy your solution to solve a problem. Nothing better demonstrates your solution’s key attributes and its ability to solve that problem than an actual demonstration. Think about late night infomercials. These programs show products being used and how they’ll enhance the lives of potential buyers. They quickly get to the point with a dramatic demonstration – the absorption power of some new patented cloths, the ease with which new mops pick up dirt and liquid, or the rapid pace at which one can lose weight using the diet pill or exercise program being pitched.

Demonstrate how your solution will make the lives of your prospective customers better. Remember that there are two slightly different, but related, value propositions. The first is the impact that your product will have on the prospect. How will your solution make their work day easier or better? What problem do you solve for them? The second value proposition is how you assist the prospect’s company overall. This proposition will assist them in making the case to their superiors.

Your demonstration must be delivered at a convenient time and in a suitable venue for your prospect. Most often, this venue is the Internet, and the demonstration is in the form of a web demonstration – live or recorded. The prospect can see the product in action and ask questions. The early stages of your lead development programs (e.g., initial email series) should be designed to drive prospects to these demonstrations. Ideally, these program components should demonstrate how your product will make your prospects’ lives easier and also pay dividends for their company. The combination of these two benefits will help start true sales engagement because now the prospect has personal motivation and a way to ‘sell’ your solution inside the company.

Finally, these demonstrations offer a way to scale your lead qualification efforts as this first step is an important step in driving sales accepted leads. If your lead development reps ensured that all prospects have already seen this introductory demonstration and then further qualified the prospects, imagine how much more productive your sales team will be throughout the rest of the sales process. Prospects will be highly qualified and they will be on a faster sales track, making your sales process more efficient.

Lesson: Online demonstrations qualify your prospects and excite them to take further sales actions making the entire sales process more efficient.