B2B Lead Generation Blog

100 Tips for Trade Show Lead Generation

Lead generation remains the top reason most companies exhibit at events and tradeshows. And B2B marketers are constantly looking for ideas they can use to drive more ROI from their events budget.

I came across this helpful post by Mike Thimmesch on 100 Trade Show Lead Generation Ideas that's worth checking out. The following is a sampling of Thimmesch's tips that I though were useful:

4. Go to fewer trade shows, but put more effort into booth staff preparation and promotions for each remaining show.
6. Track leads to determine and expand in the shows with the best ROI
9. Get a booth space closer to the hub of traffic, or by a bigger competitor
28. Have your sales people invite their prospects to visit your booth and set up meetings in advance
29. Send an email invitation to the show’s pre-registered attendee list for this year, and the registered attendee list from last year
30. Use social media to reach more attendees
32. Post your trade show schedule on your website with a link to sign up for appointments
45. Giveaway something useful to your target audience
46. Have a contest for attendees in your booth

After reading the list of 100, here’s a few more tips I would add:

1. Follow-up quickly after the event. Think about your follow-up process before the event happens not afterwards.
2. Create event follow-up content pieces, talking points and email templates for your sales team to use to add value and continue the conversation in a relevant way rather than "pitching" everybody.
3. Develop a nurturing track that for event attendees connects with the theme or the content of the event. Try to do this at least for a few months at minimum.
4. See the event as a conversation (or conversation starter) not a acampaign. Don't stop the dialog. Brainstorm ways you can keep the dialog going.

What other tips would you add to this list?

Related posts:
Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences

8 Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation 2.0

The single biggest issue for B2B marketers is effective lead generation. I wrote an eight part series on building an effective lead generation program a while back. To help readers who missed the series, I pulled all the posts together in order.

In this series, you'll read the following posts:

1: The Right Mindset: Conversations, not campaigns
2: Sales and Marketing - One Team
3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile 
4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition
5: Treat your marketing database as a valued asset
6: A Multi-modal lead generation portfolio approach
7: Effective lead management
8: Lead nurturing for lead development

You may also find this ebook that connects with the series relevant.

Ebook: Start With a Lead: Eight CRITICAL Success Factors for Lead Generation

View more presentations from Brian Carroll.

Can you think of other critical success factors I’m missing?

Targeting for better Lead Generation results and ROI

Effective lead generation really depends on how much you know about your target audience and how well you use that information to tailor a relevant messages and conversations.

I thought this post by Carolyn Goodman for Target Marketing Magazine was a good reminder of how we can improve our lead-gen results by being more targeted with our messages.

I know this is a basic idea and many of you do this this already but knowing something and actually doing it are two different things. This article prompted me to make really make sure I'm doing this consistently. Hopefully, it will prompt you too.

Here's a quick summary of Goodman's 6 steps: 

1. Do Your Homework.
2. Find Prospects That Look Like Your Target.
3. Determine Your Target's Pain Points.
4. Gather Sales Support Assets.
5. Create a Destination of Information.

Read Target Your B-to-B Lead-Gen Efforts by Vertical and Job Title

I wouldn't stop at targeting by vertical and job title. There's many additional ways you can can segment and target messages including; Stage in the buying process, Company size, job function, trigger events, role in buying process and more. 

Related Posts:
5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails
Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile

B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group on LinkedIn

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called 5 steps for using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and step number five was ‘create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.’

Well, last Thursday I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. I wanted to create a group to discuss and share ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting and more.
 
I’m jazzed at how fast the group is growing and even more excited about the discussions that are already taking place.

My first question to the group was if lead distribution should be fair or optimized? What do you do? Do you invest your hard won leads on your top performers or do you try to help your weaker sales people? In this economy should we take a Darwinian view of lead generation and focus on helping the strong sales people get stronger?

What’s your take on lead distribution? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable group and let me know your thoughts.

Losing Leads and Sales With Bad Search Marketing Decisions

There are so many tools that help marketers with their search marketing but marketers have to know how to use the analytics in order to focus on the right things to generate leads and sales.

So often I find that marketers are only looking at conversion rates of how specific phrases or banners perform and are ignoring other valuable information. While conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.

I came across an interesting article by B2B Internet marketing consultant Todd Miechiels, and I liked what he had to say about those B2B marketers that make bad decisions based on “solid analytics data.”

Marketers need to look at more than the quantity of conversions. Quality is just as important. If you look solely at what phrases convert a higher percentage of whitepaper downloads, for example, you could be missing the fact that another phrase brought in 2 or 3 of your top prospects, which in the long run, could be better for your company.

Todd goes on to say: “If you are spending thousands of dollars per month on search marketing and not capturing visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that don't), you are shutting down phrases and scaling back campaigns by using only half the truth. Equally as dangerous, you are likely routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear to perform better but in reality are merely clogging the marketing database and sales pipeline.”

According to Todd, there are three things you should remember:

• Make sure you're capturing and reporting on visiting organizations referred by specific search phrases.
• Factor in the number of legitimate organizations you've captured when assessing the effectiveness of your search terms and campaigns.
• Don't fall into the trap of optimizing campaigns based solely on quantitative conversion data.

 Don’t clog the pipeline. Take Todd's advice and take the broader view.

Here's some related posts:

Web analytics for b2b lead gen
Tracking ROI for web generated leads

Looking for a little marketing wisdom?

Well, I’ve got, oh about a hundred suggestions for you all courtesy of MarketingSherpa’s latest Wisdom Report.

Sherpa’s free report is filled with mini-stories from our colleagues in the marketing world who have learned through trial and error. The topics of this year’s report touched on just about every aspect of marketing out there – from tradtional tactics to Web 2.0 and mobile marketing.

According to the editors at Sherpa, there were three main trends represented in this year’s edition:
1.    Email  - It’s clear from this book that email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s far from it. Sherpa editors noticed that marketers are looking for ways to tweak their email correspondence. Marketers are personalizing messages more than ever, segmenting their lists to create the most focused targets possible, and are testing to the hilt. You could learn a lot from the stories included in the email section.

2. Build Social Networks - Marketers are starting to see the value of building relationships using LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. There are some interesting “Case Studies” that will hit home for marketers investigating ways to integrate social media marketing into their 2009 plan.

 3. Search Engine Optimization - It seems that more and more marketers are focusing on making their websites search-engine friendly.  Marketers give advice on everything from making PPC more affordable to concentrating on niche keywords. One marketer shares how 2008 was the turning point that made him realize that after 25 years in the business he had to get with the program.

Download a copy here today

Lead Nurturing Best Practices Research and Data

MarketingSherpa just published data on lead nurturing best practices based on a survey of 1,000 marketers. Sherpa's research focuses on the following nurturing best practices:

• Using multiple tactics rather than relying on email only.
• Timing of teleprospecting response to web inquiries – the velocity of follow-up dramtically impacts lead conversion.
• Measurement of lead quality and the impact of lead nurturing.

I encourage you check out their advice. Read MarketingSherpa: Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics

When it comes to lead nurturing, I find that marketers lose their momentum because they lack enough edu-focused content. My advice is to start building your lead nurturing library now. Here's a post where I share content ideas for lead nurturing and the best tactics to use. I hope you find it useful.

Related posts:
Lead Nurturing is about Relationships, not e-mails
Lead Nurturing as trusted advisors with the Human Touch

How to make B2B marketing messages more memorable

In B2B marketing, when you have many potential buyers who are involved in the buying process, how do you connect with these people in a memorable way?

If you look at most lead generation messages, they often contain industry jargon and abstract ideas. Interestingly, that’s part of the reason many of them don’t work.

Our future customers are weary of messages, pitches, hype, buzzwords, and corporate speak, that they quickly forget them. So how do you create marketing and lead generation messages worth remembering?

Podcast: Interview with MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland

Would you like some inspiration or some fresh ideas for your marketing and lead generation strategy?

If so, MarketingSherpa just released their “Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08” and I had the privilege to interview Anne Holland about this year's findings. Very useful stuff. Download the Executive Summary

During our in-depth interview, Anne shares some terrific insights and helpful data on numerous marketing and lead generation tactics.

Three data points that I found particularity interesting:

1. Teleprospecting works. As we all know, tech buyers are a notoriously tough crowd to cold call. Sherpa's findings contradict the "calling doesn't work" line we've heard for years. Their data shows that over 50% of tech buyers admitted to short listing a vendor after receiving a well timed and relevant phone call.

2. Sherpa's data shows that more decision makers (not just influencers) are attending webinars and watching archived events. This indicates the importance of relevant educational events and online content for lead generation.

3. Companies who provided fewer but higher quality "sales ready" leads to their sale people have better sales conversion rates than those that send lots of early stage leads and that creating a "cost per lead" culture just does not work.

Listen to podcast now (31 min MP3)

How Lead Nurturing Improves Lead Generation ROI

I know there's a lot of emphasis on lead generation (that's a good thing) but, getting a ton of leads doesn't guarantee that increased sales will follow. In a complex sale, my experience is, most of the selling actually happens when the sales person isn't there.

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from ten years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 80% of potential sales. You can increase your odds success by adding a lead nurturing program.

What’s lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution) regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following-up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet?” Lead nurturing about building trusted relationships with the right people.

Continue Reading at the INSPIRE SmartMarketers.com Blog (a new blog I'm contributing to monthly) presented by Netline.

On June 6th, I’m doing a webcast on a multimodal approach to lead nurturing as part of ON24's Wednesday Webcast with Experts Series. I hope you can make it. Register here.