Most Knowledge Workers Are Social

While Facebook may or may not be the right channel for your B2B marketing messages, LinkedIn’s popularity with the white collar crowd is worthy of your attention.

Consider a company of 100 employees with an average of 25 connections (outside the company) per employee. That’s 2,500 1st degree contacts. Interesting?  A little, but probably not enough to hold an emergency company meeting about.

However, when you include the combined 2nd and 3rd degree contacts of your colleagues, the potential audience is an extended LinkedIn network of 20+ million. What would be the result if everyone in your company with a LinkedIn account posted corporate marketing content in their status updates?

But, Isn’t This Marketing’s Job?

I’d argue that it’s in everyone’s best interest to promote their own company. The assumption here of course, is that employees like paychecks and like to see their paychecks grow. The more promotion, the better chance for a company to be successful and with success, the greater the likelihood that employees will be rewarded.

Marketing (or by extension, PR) is certainly responsible for creating the corporate messaging, demand generation strategy and managing the corporate social media accounts (plus their own personal accounts), but they are usually limited to a few social media accounts.

What about sales and account services?

There’s obvious motivation for anyone directly compensated by maintaining and growing existing accounts and generating new business.  Plus, sales and account services likely have networks filled with the target customer.

Okay, what about HR?

There’s a lot of value here because HR folks tend to have fairly large LinkedIn networks for recruiting; plus they are often viewed as a representation of the company. Also, as a company’s brand and awareness is elevated, that can result in higher quality applicants (and more jobs as the company becomes more successful).

How about IT, Accounting, Production, etc.?

Well, they often deal with vendors who would have a vested interest in propagating your company’s message, and those vendors likely have customers who could be potential customers of your company.

Making It Happen

I admit, this is no easy task, but it’s not without rewards. I’m quite familiar with a company that generates a full 20% of their leads through a similar strategy.

You might consider starting with the obvious candidates, sales and account services. Recruiting a few executives to adopt the program will help, too.

Start by illustrating the scope of their networks and the potential impact that their social sharing can make. Then, develop a basic process that minimizes their time involvement.

For example, send them an email with the suggested status update and corresponding URL after you publish a blog post, white paper, etc. If needed, educate them on how to show an image (or not) in the LinkedIn status update and discuss when they might want to add content updates to their LinkedIn groups.

To create some excitement, consider rolling out a monthly contest to recognize those that drive the most visitors, leads, pages viewed, etc.  Whichever metric is important to you.

Here’s a simple trick to track results; have folks add: ?source=TheirName at the end of the links they post (this works nicely with URL shorteners like www.bit.ly ). Set your Google Analytics, Sales Force or Marketing Automation solution to track the referral source (or another parameter if that one competes with something you have set up already). Then, you can easily create a report showing who generated the most traffic and share it with the team.

Interested in more demand generation tips? Get a free copy of “The High-Tech Direct Marketing Handbook”, a compilation of tips and techniques on demand generation strategy, offers, creative, media and more.

“Paid search doesn’t work for us.”  I heard it again the other day and it won’t be the last.  This time, it was on a call with a software company that wanted us to help them generate more sales leads.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a blind advocate of sending money to search companies, but like it or not, in most cases paid search is the workhorse for demand generation programs.  So, when I hear that it’s not working, it raises a flag.

The fact is, in addition to an SEO program, paid search is simply one of the best ways to reach undiscovered intent-based prospects.  Most SEO’s would likely agree that even in the best organic conditions, having a paid search program can provide valuable intelligence in predicting consumer behavior, testing conversion variables and in positioning offer content in search results.

So, I replied with my usual, “We’d be happy to take a look at the program to see if we can uncover areas that may be contributing to poor performance.”  They agreed, and our team proceeded with their observations.

Given that this is a well-funded company with smart leadership, it was no surprise what our team came back with:  robust ad groups, good bid strategy, well-written copy, high quality scores, etc.  The client’s SEM team had done a fine job with what they had to work with.  They had been bringing traffic to the site, it just wasn’t converting.

The problem was simple, there was no offer content.

There were a total of two calls to action on the site:  a contact sales submission form and a phone number.  Now, given that most prospects are not ready to buy (read:  not sales-ready), guess how many visitors to the site were eager for sales to contact them?  Right, not (m)any.

Creating Leads vs. Creating Traffic

Web traffic is just that, people going by on their way to another destination – unless you can offer them a reason to take pause.  Providing visitors with valuable offer content (whitepapers, webinars, research papers, etc.) that is actually helpful, along with clear benefit statements as to “why” it is helpful, will attract leads that can be nurtured to sales-ready status.  Offer content will also attract leads that are immediately sales-ready.

People are willing to exchange their information for valuable content, but not so willing to give a phone number and email address at first visit just have a sales person call them.   Remember, paid search filters those with intent – but not necessarily intent to buy from you.  There’s a big difference.

While it’s probably fine to have sales reach out to these leads with a “thank you” and “here’s some more information”, it would probably be a bad idea to have them go into “sales mode” right off the bat.

There are ways to identify new leads as sales-ready, but ultimately you want to have a lead nurturing campaign in place to help move these leads into sales-ready status.

Develop Offer Content as a Qualification Mechanism

There are techniques to developing offer content that pre-qualifies leads.  Creating offer content that is targeted for the right audience will help to filter out those unqualified leads and allow your nurturing program and sales team to concentrate on quality leads.

For example, if your customers are human resource managers, create offer content that will appeal specifically to them; like “The 10 Most Successful Programs for Retaining Top Talent” or “The 2011 Guide to Using Social Media to Recruit Top Talent”.

Sensitively including qualification form fields in the registration pages can further qualify leads – just be sure to limit use to only the ones you absolutely need, at the risk of lowering lead conversion rates.

Two Helpful Resources on the Topics of Offer Content and Paid Search:

For more tips and strategies to improve the success of your lead gen programs, download the free white paper, “How to Choose Your Carrot:  Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers from the lead generation experts at Spear Marketing Group.

To learn the key pitfalls that hundreds of B2B companies encounter when setting up their paid search (SEM) program and how to avoid making the same mistakes, download the free white paper, “Top 10 B2B Paid Search Mistakes: Why Your Google Campaign Isn’t Working And What To Do About It

For what they’re worth, here are a few observations you might find valuable:

1. Give Prospects Something Tangible in the Call Out

I found the white paper on the footer of the homepage under the call out “Get Smart” (I already knew it was there from previous visits).  A new visitor to the site may not quickly identify “Get Smart” with a free content asset (white paper).

In fact, there’s no mention of a white paper or that it’s free in the copy at all.  You might consider replacing “Get Smart” with a more straightforward call out like: “Free Whitepaper”.  Telling a prospect exactly what to expect is a good way to increase content asset downloads and qualify leads (more on that below).

2. Show Prospects the Benefit of What They’ll Receive

In the same space, the benefit statement reads:  “Learn more about Custom Content Publishing, how it can increase your bottom line and the elements that are involved in piecing it all together.”

Again, if I’m a new visitor to the site I may not know exactly what I’d be getting by downloading this asset (or for that matter, whether this an asset at all or whether it’s a page on your site, an article, a white paper, a video, etc.).

You may be better served to specifically call out what the asset is and something tangible as the benefit statement (e.g. Download our white paper to discover the Seven Steps to Creating Effective Custom Content Publications and how custom content can increase your bottom line).

3. Make White Paper Titles Reliable and Consistent

After clicking the link from the homepage, I’m taken to a download page on which the white paper is titled:  The Power of Custom Content Publishing to Acquire and Retain Customers.

However, after I download and open the white paper, the title seems to be:  “Why Custom Publishing” with “The Power…” as a sub-title.  This is a subtle nuance, but could prove to be at least a distraction to a prospective customer and at worst it may create the slightest sense of distrust.

Yet still, the majority of the content (pages 3-7) is about Seven Steps to Creating Effective Custom Content Publications.  You might consider retitling the white paper to:  Seven Steps to Creating Effective Custom Content Publications.  It seems to be the essence of the white paper and provides a valuable, compelling and tangible benefit statement for prospective customers.

4.  Make Your Download Pages Irresistable

Still on the download page, while the use of white space is typically an admirable design quality, in this case it works against funneling the prospect to download the white paper as it fails to deliver on many of the best practice elements of a download page [in this case, virtually the entire page was white space with no benefit offer], mainly providing additional benefit statements about why a prospective lead should download this white paper.  More on this subject in the following blog post:  5 Ways to Make Your White Paper Irresistible.

At minimum, consider including copy like (this is in rough form):

“In this insightful white paper authored by the award-winning team at XYZ, you’ll learn the secrets of successful custom publishing and how to:

• Engage with prospects and customers to drive
  actions and build loyalty
• Evaluate the right type of media to use to
  distribute your custom content
• Plan for ROI
• And much more…”

Additionally, you might consider removing the “click to download pdf” option entirely and make it available only via registration gated (form) download.

Contact information (so long as the requested information is limited to only what you absolutely need for marketing/sales efforts) is a fair exchange for good content.  Plus, how else will you obtain the lead?

5. Minimize The Outbound Links on Landing Pages

As a final observation on the download page, it contains external links from the site CSS which may cause a prospective lead to become distracted (oh, I’ll look at their job opportunities) and fail to convert.

Typically, we recommend a privacy policy link (opening in a new page) and maybe a link back to the home page discreetly placed at the footer of the page.  Consider a custom landing page designed specifically for downloading this white paper.

To wrap up, a couple of quick comments on distribution of the white paper.

6. Leverage Content for Social Distribution

In addition to the obvious email marketing, organic search and paid search methods, you might also consider pulling content snippets from the white paper into articles for the blog.

I noticed you have been hard at work in producing some great content on the blog (nice work) and the technique I’m describing can help with both content production (by leveraging the existing content from the white paper) and by creating a next step for readers of your article (by ending blog articles with something like:  Learn more secrets of successful custom content publishing by downloading our free white paper: Your White Paper Title Here).

Additionally, you might consider using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as ongoing distribution channels for factoids contained within the white paper (more on this topic on our blog:  Factoids: How to Tweet Multiple Times About the Same Offer).

Learn the secrets to success and fundamental lead management principles that can increase response rates, convert more leads to opportunities, and accelerate the ROI from marketing automation software:  Free white paper download:  “Top 10 Tips for Lead Nurturing Success:  How to Get the Most From Your Lead Nurturing Program, and How to Plan for Success If You’re Just Getting Started”.

According to legend, these tunnels were also used by miscreants to “shanghai” unsuspecting laborers to sell them as slaves to ships at the waterfront.  Apparently, there are trapdoors leading from the bars to the underground passages and these poor souls would be drugged or knocked out while enjoying their drinks, only to wake up in a prison cell awaiting slavery.

After my colleague finished the story, I turned to him and asked, “What was their marketing strategy? Free beer?”

I was kidding of course, but while listening to his story I couldn’t help but conjure the image of a villainous crimp talking to his “marketing” henchman, “Listen, I don’t care how ya do it, just get them drunks in the bar!  Me an’ tha boys’l take care of the rest.”  Yikes!  Success means you’ve just enslaved someone, failure means you’re likely the one who will wake up in chains on a ship in the harbor.  Either way, sucks to be that guy…

Maybe we’ve come along in modern times, but there’s still some serious “shanghaiing” going on in business.  And there’s no denying that sometimes sales and marketing can have a tendancy to throw one another under the bus.  I’ve spent my fair share of time in both capacities and I’ve heard the banter in both circles.

From the sales side:  “Marketing needs to deliver more leads”, “these leads are crap!” or my favorite, “I don’t care how you do it, just get me in front of some qualified leads and I’ll close them!”

On the marketing side:  “These leads are good, you just aren’t closing them”, “sales just doesn’t understand the process of marketing” or the one I’ve heard frequently since the economic downturn, “I can’t market without a budget!”

The scary thing is that all of these complaints are legit, but there are solutions to make everyone a winner.  The trick to creating a synergistic marketing and sales team is to establish the following fundamentals:

View Marketing as an Investment…and Invest Wisely

Even when revenue is down, marketing needs to be treated as an investment.  Just like your personal
portfolio, you need to allocate monies for marketing by measuring risk tolerance and by taking a best practice approach to investing those dollars.

Some programs will work, some won’t.  But frankly, if you don’t have the proper insights to evaluate the risk in a particular program investment, then you’re just gambling and if so, you are bound to lose.

So rather than gamble marketing dollars away and instill a paralyzing fear of failure in marketing, empower marketing to make calculated decisions that will accelerate ROI.

Some of the biggest returns comes with a bit of risk but if you’ve scared the marketing execs into staying within their comfort zone, don’t expect any phenomenal results.

Listen to Sales

Sales are in the unique position of hearing directly from the “horse’s mouth” on how the market is reacting to your products and services.  Filter the banter but don’t ignore the message!

Even the best salesperson in the world isn’t going to be successful selling something that isn’t a good fit for the lead.  Sure, they’ll get some wins, but are they really “wins” if the solution doesn’t really match the need?  That sounds more like buyer’s remorse in the making.

If the leads are “crap” and the marketing department is taking the right approach to the programs, then the target market may be in question.   If the target market is right and the approach is right but the leads are still crap, you might have a product or service solution issue.

Group Hug on the Wins

Nothing is more irritating to a marketing team than when the sales team starts high-fiving, ringing bells, playing music and getting drunk because they just landed a big deal – if the marketing team wasn’t also congratulated.

It really doesn’t matter how awesome you were at closing them or how many painful objections you had to counter, if that lead or prospect was influenced at all by the work of the marketing team, it needs to be recognized.  Marketing is not a support-player, they are a player.  So, celebrate the wins together…and piss off the development team.  Just kidding!

Make the Marketing and Sales Process Transparent

At the end of the day, claiming influence on a sale is moot unless you have solutions in place to support the claim.  Luckily, sales and marketing solutions have evolved to the point in which there are a myriad of opportunities to not only improve the performance of your campaign, but also measure ROI as a result of the team’s efforts.

If your current system doesn’t easily provide transparency to marketing-vital information like:  where leads are originating from, which leads are the most qualified, which nurturing programs are advancing prospects in the sales funnel and what the return on marketing investment is for your campaigns, then you may well be setting yourself up for a surprise meeting with the crimps.

And before you say it’s too complex or expensive, check out this great article by Howard Sewell:  Top 5 Lead Management Excuses.

While looking for a resource page, I found a ‘whitepapers’ graphic on the sidebar of the products page.  The graphic had a thumbnail image of a non-descript white paper and a caption reading:  Download Free Whitepapers Today.

• Instead of presenting a general link to whitepapers, you might consider presenting me with a graphic of an actual white paper that is relevant to the page I’m on with copy detailing the benefits of the white paper (i.e. Learn How “X” Can Drive Higher Sales, Reduce Support Costs and Improve Productivity).

Break Out Content Offers and Deliver Descriptions for Each

Upon clicking the sidebar graphic for white papers on the products page, I was presented with the Request for Information page with a form listing eight (8) whitepapers, titles only.  After scrolling down the page, I noticed a paragraph description of each of the whitepapers, below the page fold.

• While it’s valuable to present a substantial list of resources, presenting them all in a single form may limit the opportunity to provide the most relevant and valuable piece of content for that particular prospect.

• Additionally, some visitors may miss the white paper descriptions below the fold and abandon the page as a result.

• Instead, you might consider presenting the white papers, datasheets and other content assets in a list format – linking each content asset to individual form pages containing benefit details specific to that asset.

• You may also consider serving prospects a “thank you” page (after form submission) which presents opportunities to:

* include a link to download the content asset (which can also be tracked if you are using a marketing automation solution)

* continue the dialogue with the prospect (perhaps by offering another relevant content asset or demo)

* advance him/her to the next stage of the sales cycle.  (See this blog post for a discussion on the same topic).

Deliver Downloadable Resources as Links and Use Thank You Pages to Advance the Prospect

Shortly after submitting the form, I received an email, subject: “Here is the information you requested from ‘X Company’.”  The email presented the white paper as an attachment (again, you might consider a download link instead of an attachment for tracking purposes) with several calls to action (click to chat, phone number, email address for sales and a “Limited Time Only” promo).

• As with the thank you page (comments above), emails are a great opportunity to present information to advance the prospect in the sales cycle. Presenting an immediate opportunity at this stage to contact sales may be a bit premature for some prospects and it may be valuable to include a demo or another relevant content asset as means of nurturing the prospect.

Present Prospects with What They’re Expecting

Out of curiosity, I clicked the promo graphic and was taken to a page which doesn’t contain any contact or call to action information (I expected to be presented with some sort of form page on which I could input the promo code:  “whitepapers”).

• You might consider redesigning the promo landing page to include a field to enter the promo code and receive the “Limited Time” offer.

To discover how to generate more leads, get a free copy of “The High-Tech Direct Marketing Handbook,” a compilation of 65 tips and techniques on demand generation strategy, offers, creative, media, and more. Now available as a downloadable ebook.

First off, let’s identify the people behind those 100 companies because companies don’t buy, people buy. How many decision-makers are there on average in each of the 100 companies on your target list? His answer was, “Three.”

Okay, so we have a target of 300 people we want to influence and for sake of argument, let’s assume that 90 of them are already having conversations with the sales team. That leaves a little over 200 that aren’t currently being reached.

You might consider a first initiative of building the list of those 200 people that sales aren’t currently reaching and start reaching out to them. The company didn’t have a CRM solution in place so I suggested he consider SalesForce as his CRM solution and use Jigsaw or a similar service to identify the right targets and build his list.

Also, using tools like LinkedIn can be valuable in identifying the most appropriate suspect and verifying their role. I’ve found that fact-checking Jigsaw with LinkedIn can save time and energy. At a pace of 10 prospects entered a day (I’m being conservative, it could easily be a lot more), your list is developed within 3-4 weeks.

After crafting an introductory email (with a link to “offer content” like a white paper, webinar, datasheet, etc.) and getting the sales team’s approval on it, use the intro email as a first touch to these new prospects. Responses from the email and registrations as a result of the offer content can be scored appropriately and delivered to sales to follow up on.

You should consider sending out the intro email as you enter the new prospects in the list – you just might start getting early wins, unless there’s a compelling reason to wait and create the list first.

2. Start Content Marketing

As a second initiative, you might consider creating a content marketing program to nurture the list and qualify leads for the sales team.

While a content marketing program can be come in many forms, you might consider starting with a blog and post (at least weekly) articles with information and tips that are relevant to your audience (and align with your product).

This strategy is relatively easy to manage, provides good branding and thought-leadership and also (when properly optimized) contributes to the organic search rankings for your site.

In order to leverage content, your list can be nurtured with a monthly “blog newsletter”, with summaries of and links to the articles on your blog. Including links to relevant “offer content” in the sidebar of the blog and newsletter and within the articles is also a good lead generation tactic.

3. Broaden Your Distribution

After you have your target list developed and a content marketing program in place to nurture that list, it might be time to experiment with broadening your distribution efforts to create demand beyond the 300 contacts in your database.

Consider promoting your offer content with a targeted paid search program or content syndication program. These distribution strategies will help brand your business, build your list (for nurturing) and provide leads for your sales team.

Plus, if the contacts in your database happen to come across some of your content outside of your nurturing program, that will only reinforce your brand with them.

4. Consider Marketing Automation

At some point, likely once you’ve developed lead scoring criteria for prospects, you might consider adopting a marketing automation (MA) solution to assist in your efforts. There are a number of MA solutions available usually at an average cost of around $1,500 per month, although some are much less.

Almost all MA solutions integrate with SalesForce and provide you with the ability to:

• set alerts for sales and marketing based on visitor activity on your site
• execute automated email response campaigns in response to various prospect activities
• easily access intelligence and reporting such as campaign ROI measurement, sales funnel activity and inbound source tracking

By following the above four steps, the new marketing director will be able to easily prove his value to the company by aligning marketing and sales efforts and delivering the sales team with qualified leads to concentrate on.

Looks nice but where's the traffic?

1. Lack of an On-Site Keyword Strategy

An On-Site Keyword Strategy is the most important element of either building a new website or redesigning an existing one if you expect to be found in search.

It is vital that you have a strategy for building page depth, inbound links, and website content, and that you understand the keywords you use for search optimization. This is the key difference between having an easily found site and one that sits lonely in cyberspace without much traffic.

Because of this, the best path to success involves creating a highly refined site architecture that funnels content through specific keyword phrase categories and sub-categories.

2. Keyword Stuffing: Don’t Do It

It’s a common mistake for novice web marketers to approach their on-site keyword strategy like it’s a yellow page listing: trying to stuff as many phrases in the home page as would be relevant to a directory-type search.  This approach is futile and will lead to poor search performance; confused search bots will likely default to the first keyword phrase listed.

Instead, the strategy should involve defining each keyword phrase and optimizing specific pages and subpages around each keyword phrase.

Uncovering all the relevant keyword phrases and then optimizing specific pages around them is the best practice technique for SEO.

Individually, each page should be treated as a separate SEO strategy and developed accordingly. The main site will receive all the benefits for subpage SEO optimization and inbound link strategies.

3. Only Optimizing for the “Industry-Standard” Keyword Phrase

Do not assume that customers will search for your services based on industry labels and language or by your competitors’ keyword strategies.

Customers, as much as we love them, have their own language when it comes to searching for information about our services.

Start by doing your research.  For example, let’s say we’re building a new site for a real estate brokerage firm.  On the surface, it may seem like an obvious choice to optimize for “real estate”. Unfortunately, that could be a costly assumption to make.  Why?

First, “real estate” is a highly competitive phrase for which hundreds of thousands of sites compete for.

So, unless your site has plans for thousands of indexed pages optimized for “real estate” and hundreds of thousands of inbound links from high quality sites, you probably won’t be found within the first few Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPS).

Second, from a search marketing prospective, “real estate” may not be the most accurate description of your services.

What type of real estate does your firm sell? Are you geographically focused? Do you cater to specific types of clients (first time home-buyers, rental property investors, luxury property owners)?

Refining your target keyword phrase to match your company’s offerings will not only be more likely to achieve desired rankings, but the strategy will also do more to qualify traffic – thus improving conversion opportunities.

If your real estate brokerage firm specializes in luxury real estate, the keyword phrase “real estate” may be too broad a match to make optimizing it worthwhile. Perhaps “luxury real estate” is a better fit.

Another important part of keyword strategy is looking for other phrases that prospects may use when searching for your relevant products and services (i.e. “mansions for sale”). These observations can lead to opportunities to optimize for phrases that may have been beyond the initial plan.

Having a clear keyword strategy in place prior to designing and developing a website will save time and money that would otherwise be wasted in post launch edits and changes.

1.  Demand (Lead) Generation:  marketing to a targeted audience.

2.  Lead Nurturing:  marketing to existing prospects or customers.

In either case, a landing page is simply a web page that should deliver exactly the information that led the visitor to the page, usually in exchange for the visitor’s contact information.  However, based on “why” the visitor is engaging with you determines how you should develop your landing page.

Demand /Lead Generation

If you are creating a landing page for demand generation, you should probably assume that the visitor may not be familiar with your company (brand).  Whether you are distributing content via paid search, organic search, content syndication, email marketing or social media – there are specific techniques to creating a good landing page that will convert these visitors into actual leads for your company.  Here are a couple to keep in mind:

1.  Bestow the Benefits of the Next Click

Typically your landing page will have a registration-gated submission form – something that the visitor needs to fill out in order to receive the offer you are promoting.  Bestow the benefits of the next click!  Don’t tell the visitor about all the great things your company offers but instead, tell them about how they’ll benefit by obtaining the content you’re offering.

2.  Limit the Navigation

A website is designed for a visitor to easily access tons of information about your site – from “About” to “Products/Solutions”.  But, your landing page needs to be focused on the message that brought the visitor in; namely the “offer” you were promoting.  A good landing page communicates a clear message and delivers specifically what the visitor came to your site to find.  Additional navigation at this point is just confusing.

Lead Nurturing

If you are creating a landing page as a part of a lead nurturing campaign, you should probably assume that the visitor is familiar with your company (brand).   Whether the visitor is engaging with you via emailing marketing or social media there are specific techniques to creating a good landing page that will convert these visitors into actual leads for your company.  Here are two you should consider:

1.  Offer New, Unique Content

Be sure that the content “offer” you are promoting is new to this visitor.  If they are an existing
prospect or client, presenting them with resources they have already seen is a turn off.  Consider using a marketing automation solution to define and deliver relevant content based on the prospects interests and activities.

2.  Give Them Something To Share

Sometimes a prospect can’t move on in the sales cycle because they aren’t the decision-maker.  But, if you provide them with content that is easily passed along and makes a compelling case for purchasing your products/services, you might get more traction.

For more information on getting the most from your landing pages, check out:  Top 10 Tips for Lead Nurturing Success: How to Get the Most From Your Lead Nurturing Program, and How to Plan for Success if You’re Just Getting Started and  Lead Recycling™: A More Cost Effective Approach to Demand Generation for High-Technology Companies

Okay, I get it.  Twitter is for kids.  Twitter is for journalists.  You’d rather be doing something more interesting than typing 140 characters into your computer and hoping someone out there responds.

Which they probably won’t respond to…at least at first.

Until you finally get that response from someone you don’t know, but would like to.  Then, things get interesting…interesting like business deals, job offers and more.

But, like all things in life it doesn’t come overnight.

Well, here’s the thing, Mr. Client, you just asked me for ideas to market your business organically.
And, you’re bitching because no one reads your blog.

Well here’s the painful truth; aside from the prayer that someone will pick up one of your looooong-tail keywords in search, nobody is going to read your blog unless you talk it up through Twitter and other social media status updates (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).

So, like any routine, here are some easy ways to make your Twitter experience more enjoyable.

1.  Use the Desk Fitness Tips to Your Advantage

I love the article intro from FitWatch, “One of the drawbacks of our evolution from hunter-gatherers to a civilized society is that our work tools morphed from the use of spears to computers, causing our waists and backsides to expand from the lack of energy we’ve had to expend on our survival”.

So true!  Except that I’m still in hunter-mode.  Aside from that, my backside and waist are definitely in question (especially given these Honey Roasted Peanuts I’m munching).

Still, I take breaks from the desk during the day.  Yea, they don’t come every half hour like FitWatch recommends, but they probably come every hour.  And, I’ll do things like stretch, go for a quick walk…and I’ve been known to drop down and bust out some push-ups every now and then.  I can’t let the gun-show down.

Well, do you know what I do before taking a break?  I jump on Twitter or TweetDeck and see what’s going on in “my world”.  That world is different from your world.  It’s a world surrounded by marketing and tech geeks, firing off knowledge and links.  And I’ve developed that world by listening and chiming in.  I react by retweeting or sharing someone’s link because I think it will be valuable to my network.

Then I do my push-ups.

2.  Realize It’s More Than a Popularity Content

I used to tweet about great things that were happening to me.  Then, I started reading someone’s tweets about great things that were happening to him, and I realized that I needed to change directions.  Because as great as I thought this person was and as interested as I was in what he was doing next, I couldn’t stand his constant self-absorption and me-me-me tweets.

Yes, I think God is great but I don’t need you telling me about it all the time.  Yes, I want the best for you but stop talking about how great you are.  Because, whether I  believe you or not, you still look like an asshole.  And I actually liked you when you were a jerk, but not so much when you’re an asshole.

So, I resigned myself to try and not look like a jerk (or worse) and just post updates that are useful and meaningful to my network.  While I might not be a rock star Twitter-guy, people click on my stuff.

3.  The Really Mind-Blowing Realization:  Bottom line, Your Content Might Stink

Sorry, but it’s the truth.  If your content stinks you’re really not offering anything back to this big ‘ole inter-web.  You might get lucky with a tweet or two, but after that people are onto your game.

You need to step it up.  You need to produce something that’s from the heart and valuable to
other people.  People are already producing tons of stuff from the heart and volumes of stuff that’s valuable – so for you to have any real impact you either need to be working at Google or combine both value and heart.  It’s that simple.

Okay, really it’s not that simple.  You can develop a powerful voice in a niche.  It happens all the time.  Especially when you have a quality distribution list to work off.  But remember to create things that are interesting and compelling.  Don’t be afraid to open yourself up a bit.  Be true and be original but not self-absorbed.  And most importantly, remember to be cool and do your push-ups.

A lot my time is spent answering questions that prospects and clients have about marketing, which I love doing.  I have to admit a secret, I have a fantastic paid search team that I can turn to for answers.

Recently, I had a prospect with a ton of great questions around paid search.  These folks are sophisticated marketers, so I realized that many people may be asking the same things.  I thought it would be cool to share a few of their questions (and our answers):

1.  Remarketing is a concept that’s new to us.  Tell us a bit about what it is and how you will use it?

Remarketing is a strategy in which code is placed on a website which identifies the browser as a prospect and retargets them by serving advertising as they navigate the Google Display Network.

We’d evaluate opportunities to create a remarketing campaign for the site or specific pages on the site that would constitute a remarketing campaign and work with you to craft a strategy around it, whether it is an offer or a branding strategy.

2.  We’ll be using Salesforce.com (SFDC). How do you integrate your tracking and reporting with SFDC? Anything beyond standard Adwords “Lead Source Details”?

When integrated with Adwords, each Salesforce lead can be identified by keyword source.  With client assistance highlighting which leads are quality versus junk, we can report Quality leads and Cost Per Quality lead.  Overtime, this process will show which keywords might be more important based on volume of quality leads and we can optimize accordingly.

3.  Talk to us about Google “quality scores.” What are they, how do they work, and how do we keep ours high?

Quality scores are the primary factor in a successful AdWords campaign.  High quality scores will serve your ads more frequently and at a lower bid rate than low quality scores.

We keep quality scores high by writing tight ad copy, optimizing bid strategy and architecting ad groups and campaigns to be relevant to the desired keyword phrases.

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