HiveMind Marketing - Intelligent Lead Generation

Increase Sales Leads via a Web Design Resurrection. Part 3

In past blogs, I’ve talked about the need to identify:

• Audience – Identify who your website needs to attract and support. Good websites anticipate who will be visiting and proactively plan for them.
• Search Strategy – How will visitors arrive at your site? What pages will they land on? What will they be looking for? Where will they come from? Make sure that your search strategy focuses on what the hivemind wants to learn.
• Content – What fresh content do you have to interest your audience? You not only have to plan for the launch of your website but for the many months after.

In this blog I want to concentrate on Content.

Content

People in the hivemind visit websites not to hear your sales pitch but to obtain content, either in the form of information or services. To fulfill that need, you need to generate new case studies, whitepapers, research reports, press releases, blog entries, product updates, industry overviews, comparison charts, and more. Content must be:

• Relevant – Don’t simply tell your story from your perspective. Create content that answers questions and satisfies the hivemind.
• Fresh – The Internet is a dynamic and interactive environment. Users expect up-to-date content. Don’t make the mistake of stuffing your website with filler content that has been directly transplanted from print. Advertising copy seldom provides enough detail. Brochure copy drags on, assuming the audience will follow a linear progression of information. While public relations copy forgets to sell.
• Well-structured – The content must be organized so that people can easily find what they are looking for.

While many types of content require objectivity, when you get the chance, make sure you tell your company’s story with some passion.

It’s easy to forget, but your company has an important story to tell — one that interests investors, customers and partners, a story with character, set in a particular place and time, with color, imagery, energy and perspective, a story that defines and differentiates. Finding this story requires time and effort, investigation and debate, filling-in and polishing.

You need to define your company’s story — its vision, values and intent — in a way that differentiates ideas, reflects passion, and confirms your organization’s relationship to the world.

Don’t settle for anything less.

As someone told me recently, “giving” is the new mandate of marketing. Give as much as you can. Give as often as you can. In fact, give away the most valuable information you have. But it’s not really giving as much as it is “trading”.

It’s common practice these days to trade information, that is, to ask for information before providing information. You tell consumers a little something about your company and its products, they tell you a little something about themselves, you tell them a little more, they tell you a little more — and over time, you create a mutually beneficial learning relationship.

Increase Sales Leads via a Web Design Resurrection. Part 2

In the not too distant past, websites were created as a necessary evil to present company and product information. Today, however, you must ensure that your new or redesigned website drives leads and business to your company, projects a global image, reduces the cost of marketing transactions and improves customer satisfaction.

In past blogs, I’ve talked about the need to identify:

• Audience – Identify who your website needs to attract and support. Good websites anticipate who will be visiting and proactively plan for them.
• Search Strategy – How will visitors arrive at your site? What pages will they land on? What will they be looking for? Where will they come from? Make sure that your search strategy focuses on what the hivemind wants to learn.
• Content – What fresh content do you have to interest your audience? You not only have to plan for the launch of the website but for the many months after.

In this blog I want to concentrate on Search Strategy.

Search Strategy

Search strategy is a big topic. A topic for books, companies, strategies, tactics, and implementation. For the purposes of this post, I’m only going to address the importance of keywords. Why would even start a website refresh or redesign without first doing keyword research? You wouldn’t.

You start the process of identifying keywords for your website by trying to understand your hivemind audiences. Forget about what you’re selling. You need to find out what they are talking about and what they are searching for and try to bridge the gap. Do some research, visit some relevant blogs, hang out on social networks, use social media tracking tools...whatever it takes to get inside the hivemind.

Then using various keyword tools, build a list of keywords based on traffic, competition, and relevance to your hivemind audiences. You can determine the viability of each keyword using the following criteria:

• The estimated amount of searches for the keyword in a 24 hour period
• The number of sites competing for the keyword
• The quality of the sites competing for the keyword
• The ability of the site to support the keyword
• Relevance between keywords

Your number one goal is to accurately depict what your site is about — but in the language of relevant search terms as much as possible. Make certain that every content contributor incorporates identified keywords into titles and page headings, as well as articles, product descriptions, and other content. If your site is not properly described by the keywords you’ve selected, then you’ve probably selected the wrong keywords.

Do this one thing successfully and every marketing dollar spent afterwards will work harder and reap bigger rewards.

Increase Sales Leads via a Web Design Resurrection. Part 1

Is your web site driving leads and business to your company? Is it reducing the cost of your marketing transactions? Does it project a global image? Almost every B2B web site we see is an underachiever; not fulfilling its huge potential to deliver leads, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.

But there’s hope. You can transform your impotent website into a strategic competitive weapon, a living, breathing representative of your company. Here’s how:

Definition

Identifying what a website must do is more difficult than it seems. Rather than simply presenting company and product information, you need to create a broader definition and vision that includes:

• Audience – Identify who your website needs to attract and support. Good websites anticipate who will be visiting and proactively plan for them.
• Search Strategy – How will visitors arrive at your site? What pages will they land on? What will they be looking for? Where will they come from? Make sure that your search strategy focuses on what the hivemind wants to learn.
• Content – What fresh content do you have to interest your audience? You not only have to plan for the launch of the website but for the many months after.

Audience

One way to think of audiences is in terms of their needs. You’ll have people arriving at your site at varying stages of their buying cycle. And you need to address each of those stages with information and offers appropriate to the questions being asked. You cannot simply cherry-pick C-level executives and sales-ready leads. If lead generation is the primary goal of your website, you need to broaden your definition of leads.

Different offers for business and technical decision makers makes obvious sense. But you should also try to address the needs of information gatherers, influencers, purchasers, and researchers. These are all part of the hivemind.

You should also include multiple ways for prospective customers to request assistance or additional information about your company, and its products or services. These may include providing company or staff phone numbers, chat functionality, email addresses, landing pages, and downloads.

Another important way to look at your audiences is through personas. You create a fictional person (a persona) to represent each of your hivemind audiences. Now your marketing campaign can be developed from a very personal point of view – “what would Phil think about that?” with some real advantages:

• Developing personas makes you really think about your hivemind audience and what motivates them.
• Seeing your website from your intended audience’s point of view is difficult, but seeing it from Phil’s point of view is much easier to do.
• When you can answer each question specifically, you can translate those answers to stronger navigation, content and functionality.

Start with your audience and you’ll be on the right track. I’ll cover Search Strategy and Content in subsequent blogs.

Lead Nurturing for the Complex Sale

Intelligent Lead Nurturing

It seems today that everyone is talking about some aspect of lead nurturing. Of course, a lot of the buzz is from the software manufacturers that sell automated processes for lead scoring, lead grading, automated responses and more. Many of these are great solutions, but as with all things related to automation, you have to start with a good plan and a good process. Otherwise, you’re simply speeding up a bad process.

As I see it, the major challenge in Intelligent Lead Nurturing is understanding what’s important to the hivemind. Who are these people out there and what do they want? Names gathered from trade shows or free webinar registrations often amount to little. And we all know that the days are long gone when you could saturate your market with advertising and direct mail and expect brand recognition and qualified sales leads.

For most B2B products, services and solutions, legitimate leads require serious conversation. Scores of people are involved in the purchasing cycle: from manufacturing managers, IT professionals, and purchasing agents to vice presidents and C-level officers. Team-buying initiatives have created empowered armies of evaluators that put your product or service under a microscope. Who are these decision makers? Who are the key influencers? Where do they hang out?

Information that Informs

Keeping in mind the nature of your audience, lead nurturing is more important than ever. Valuable longer-term B2B leads must be nurtured at critical points in their decision-making process with compelling, interactive, just-in-time messaging designed to help potential customers clarify their thinking one step at a time. To get started, ask yourself:

• How do we best deliver messages to the people who will influence or make the final buying decisions?
• How do we stay in touch with our audience as they move through their consideration and buying processes?
• How can we communicate in a way that addresses the audience’s issues and reduces the perceived risk of buying from our company?
• What can we offer that will engage the audience when they are ready to move forward with their buying processes?

Building a Sales-winning Relationship

To assist the education of your audience, you need to create marketing programs that compel people to actively seek your company out in search of further insight, ideas, and solutions.

You might structure a series of ongoing communications — by mail, email or phone — designed to keep pace with your audience’s information needs. Multiple offers that appeal to audience members at all stages of the buying process are essential.

For example, if prospective customers are early in the buying process, they are more receptive to offers for free information in the form of how-to guides, white papers or email newsletters.

As your audience moves further along in the buying process, appropriate offers may include those that require a higher level of interest or commitment, such as webinar invitations, demonstrations, checklists and other decision-making tools.

Finally, as your audience approaches being ready to buy, they may be more receptive to longer, in-depth seminars; needs assessments; or receiving a proposal or quotation.

Keep in mind the nature of your hivemind audience and you’ll be more successful nurturing these leads.