Over the years, we've all read tons of advice about how to market effectively (and efficiently) from countless "experts". Each year, this list of advice grows exponentially while marketers find themselves overwhelmed with having to do more with less and not knowing where to start or what's most important. Marketers want to know what really matters... So, here's five simple pieces of advice that you shouldn't spend your marketing dollars without...
1. Invest in and fully leverage a centralized, relational marketing database. Consolidate all your company's potential data sources into a single marketing database, make this marketing container available to all of marketing's constituents, track every marketing activity and progressively understand your prospect’s interests and needs. Make sure the database architecture is flexible, enforces data integrity at every step of your marketing process, has the ability to store ALL marketing touches and provides visibility into every stage of the pipeline for all of marketing’s AND sales constituents. Every campaign response, every web page they visit, every link they click, every white paper they download tells you about their needs and interests. In fact, they’ll qualify themselves for your company with every interaction with your brand if you let them. It’s up to you as the marketer to use that intelligence to improve your marketing effectiveness.
2. Use targeted, integrated marketing tactics that leverage the combined power of push & pull marketing strategies. Effective lead generation requires a delicate balance of "pull marketing" efforts to build brand awareness and attract prospects towards your company as well as "push marketing" efforts to drive behavior.
3. Always remember that when it comes to lead generation, there is no such thing as a magic bullet. Effective lead generation takes multiple touches to initiate and nurture a dialog with your prospects. The combination of these touches along with an effective offer strategy will bridge the gap between your sales process and your prospect's buying process. These touches need to be well planned, to the right prospects, at the right frequency, using a consistent message with the right mix of offers in the right communication channel. Repeat after me: There is no such thing as a magic bullet. There is no such thing as a magic bullet. There is no such thing as a magic bullet.
If there is such a thing as magic in lead generation, the magic can be found in the mix of touches that are employed to engage a prospect in a dialog with your company.
4. Marketers must make a long-term commitment to lead nurturing in order to realize a maximized ROMI. If there’s one thing B2B marketers need to know about lead generation, it’s that more is not better. If you don’t know how to nurture or recycle the leads you’ve already worked so hard to generate, you're wasting your budget. Most business-to-business marketers want more leads and they want them now. As a result, they plan and implement lead generation after lead generation campaign and consistently ignore 75% of the opportunities they’ve generated by passing them to sales prematurely. According to a research report by BPM Forum, over 80% of generated leads are never followed up on, or are dropped or mishandled. And the negative impact on the company’s performance is staggering. An investment in a lead nurturing program to further cultivate the leads until they are truly sales-ready can have a profound positive impact on your company's overall profitability. An April 2003 article in BtoB Magazine citing a Yankee Group research study found that, in a business-to-business environment, "An 11% reduction in dropped/lost leads, combined with a 1% improvement in lead-to-order conversion rate, increased annual gross profit by 136%. While these numbers may seem extraordinary, from our experience with our clients, the numbers are right on target. Many B2B marketers think they need more leads, when in fact, they could see improved results just by better handling and nurturing of the leads they already have.
5. Don’t confuse your CRM tool with your marketing database. Make sure that your marketing applications and sales management (CRM) systems are being used for the processes they are best suited ... i.e. prospects remain in the marketing system until they qualified and sales-ready at which time they are passed to the sales (CRM) system where all subsequent sales interactions are managed. Intermingling the data from these systems at the wrong times will diminish the effectiveness of both systems and limit the productivity of both marketing and sales.
