B2B Lead Generation Blog

Marketing Leader’s Perspective: No cogs allowed in social media and content marketing

If you lead a team of marketers, you likely have a creative bunch. People who, ideally, have a lot of passion about what they do – the key ingredient for successful social media and content marketing.

But that natural passion can easily get buried under layers of indiscernible corporate fiat. So how do you help your team break free of the stultifying grind that makes the average enterprise run? How do you make sure they don’t just feel like a cog in the wheel mindlessly hewing to corporate policy and filling spreadsheets all day?

I sat down with Daniel Burstein, the Editor of MarketingExperiments, for an interview about the role and importance of heart and passion in sales, marketing, social media, and content marketing. And, well, inspiring passion in a sales and marketing team is one of my passions. So read the below interview, which initially appeared on the MarketingExperiments blog, and then let me know how you share that drive with your team, or how your leaders do (or do not) keep you fired up about your mission…

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?

Call for speakers: MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Summit

It’s that time of the year again – MarketingSherpa is sending out a call for speakers for their 7th annual B2B Marketing Summit, which will take place in October in both Boston and San Francisco.

This year’s Summit is focused on providing you with the interactive training, practical tools and proven techniques you need to generate more highly-qualified leads to improve your companies’ results, from the top of the funnel to your bottom line.  

If you have a great B2B marketing success story to tell, or have learned valuable lessons you want to share with your fellow marketers, MarketingSherpa wants to hear from you.The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, May 12 and they’re interested in sessions that will help marketers improve:

• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Lead scoring
• International demand generation
• B-to-B email
• Paid search advertising and SEO
• Content development
• Social media marketing

Share the details of your proposed session

If you’re not interested in speaking but rather attending the summit, don’t miss out on the Early Bird sale. If you reserve your ticket before May 14, you’ll save $700. The dates of the summit are:

• San Francisco, CA - October 4-5
• Boston, MA - October 25-26

Submit your speaking proposal

Register to attend the summit

How to Design Lead Nurturing Programs that Drive Sales webinar with Ardath Albee

You’ve probably seen a lot of discussions regarding lead nurturing lately. People want to know: How can I create enough content with my organization’s limited resources? How can we develop a nurturing program that actually builds our pipeline? What measurements will help us consistently create great outcomes?

To help marketers answer these questions, I have invited Ardath Albee to join me for the next B2B Lead Generation Roundtable webinar. According to Ardath, the buying process is changing and marketers need to adapt their lead nurturing programs to match.

Ardath is perfect for this discussion. She is a B2B marketing strategist and expert at creating contagious content and e-marketing strategies that engage prospects until they are ready to buy. Ardath and I often do work together at InTouch and I really like her Marketing Interactions blog. She's written a great new book called eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale (Disclosure: I wrote the forweword). I think it's perfect compliment to my book Lead Generation for the Complex Sale and Amazon.com must think so as well because they're selling our books as a bundle : )

Join me for this complimentary webinar, "How to Design Lead Nurturing Programs that Drive Sales." During this event, Ardath will show you how to create a nurturing program that will work in parallel with the way your prospects move through their buying processes. She’ll demonstrate how to get to know your buyers better and develop a content plan to engage them at each stage of a purchase decision. You’ll learn how to create a framework for execution and how to measure the results.

View recorded webinar ondemand and get the free "Lead Nurturing Guide" 

A multi-modal approach to lead nurturing

To be successful at lead nurturing marketers can't rely on one specific channel but rather they need to leverage a multi-modal portfolio of channels especially when you have a complex sale. 

Why? The goal of lead nurturing is to maintain a relevant and consistent dialog with viable future customers - regardless of their timing to buy. In short, it’s about relationships.

To help illustrate, I created a mind map of what multi-modal lead nurturing looks like (click image to enlarge).

Are there any lead nurturing channels/modalities that I'm missing?

Download Multi-Modal_Lead_Nurturing

If you keep the idea about that nurturing is about building relationships top of mind, the way you nurture leads will naturally go beyond a single channel like e-mail. You’ll start thinking about how you and your sales people can be a relevant resource. When you do that, you don’t have to sell to people. They will come to you first when they are ready.

Related posts:
What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing
How lead nurturing improves lead generation ROI
5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails

101 actionable tips from 50 business bloggers

I was recently asked for some of my best tips on lead generation to include in “101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers.” The blog appeared in Open Forum’s Idea Hub, a virtual ‘trading post’ of ideas and insights from industry experts and business owners. The response was so overwhelming I wanted to share it with you. 

Let me just mention a few names that you’ll get tips from: Seth Godin from Seth’s Blog, Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools, Mark Cuban of Blog Maverick and Rosalind Resnick of Entrepreneur.com.  They covered the gamut with some actionable tips on everything from the small business advantage to marketing and social media to financial planning and – believe me – everything in between.

It was a pleasure to be able to share, and I appreciate the opportunity. Check it out and then share the wealth:  “101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers”.

Social media's impact on web forms and landing pages

More marketers are embracing social media and inbound marketing practices for lead generation. That's a good thing.

I’ve written about how you can leverage social media tools like blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to drive interested visitors to your website or landing pages to register for educational content and other assets. It works.

But remember most people coming to your website aren't coming to your website to buy. They are coming to your site for information. People start to question the value of giving up too much info on forms before you've earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? Are you asking for far too much information before you've earned their trust?  I wrote about this in my post, Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads. I would add that you need to leverage a robust lead qualification process too.

Earlier this week, I came across a relevant post by Chis Koch (@Ckochster) on “how old-school data capture is poisoning marketing and what to do about it.”

In his post, Chris dares us to rethink how and if we should gather information from prospects. He writes, “As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.” Check out his post. I agree.

You'll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that build an opportunity profile over time, such as requesting an email address, then asking for first and last name, later requesting a phone number, and so on.

I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.

Related posts:

7 Tips on how B2B marketers can leverage social media
How to use social media for lead generation

Tips on 6 biggest mistakes to avoid in B2B content marketing

Each month ClickDocuments asks industry experts a specific question on content marketing. This months question is, “What’s the biggest mistake to avoid in b2b content marketing."

I'm in good company again this month with Patsi Krakoff, Maria Pergolino, Ardath Albee, Rebel Brown and Mac McIntosh.

If you want to improve your inbound marketing, social media and lead generation results, I encourage you to check out this post.

B2B Marketing Zone launched

A new B2B marketing community that I am participating in was just launched. The B2B Marketing Zone is a marketing community site that was launched as collaborative effort between Tom Pick and Tony Karrer.

The community features content from other B2B marketing bloggers I enjoy such as Ardath Albee (Marketing Interactions), Paul Dunay (Buzz Marketing for Technology) and Jon Miller (Modern B2B Marketing) as well many others. If you’re looking for insights from other experts in B2B marketing I recommend you check it out.

On Inbound lead nurturing

I had a great time with being a professor at the inbound marketing university. Here's my presentation deck on inbound lead nurturing (CV201) via #IMU for those who missed it.
#8 IMU: Inbound Lead Nurturing (CV201)

View more OpenOffice presentations from Hubspot Marketing.

You can check out all the other classes or register at: http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university

Related notes written by others:

Jennifer J. Breazeal on Inbound Lead Nurturing (IMU)
Peg Mulligan's on IMU Converting Leads (CV101, CV201, CV301)