'Net Features : leads

Is Your Blog an Information Powerhouse?

Administrator — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:45:00 GMT

By Amie Marse, Content Equals Money

If there’s one thing your customers want to see in your blog, I can almost guarantee you it’s this: valuable information. We’re not talking about Wikipedia-style information. We’re talking exclusive, you won’t find this in Google’s 1.2 million search results kind of information.

I’ve been writing for the Web since 2005, and over the last 8 years I’ve learned a few things about creating content that matters. If you want to give your blog an edge over your competition, grab these five strategies by the horns, and put them to work for you.

Showcase Your Personal Knowledge

Here’s the thing about valuable content: In order to have something valuable to say, you don’t have to be the very best at what you do. You don’t have to have the most experience, the biggest clientele or the most expensive website design. Simply by being a part of your industry, you have a unique perspective that outsiders don’t have. Share your unique perspective, your personal experiences and your hard-earned knowledge on your company’s blog.

One of my favorite blogging tips of all time comes from The Sales Lion, Marcus Sheridan who recommends that bloggers, who are at a complete loss with what to write about next, should take out a sheet of paper and write down every question they’ve ever been asked about their business. Then, take those questions, and turn them into blog posts.

You might think you have nothing new to share, but I guarantee you that when you sit down to write out these questions, you’ll find that you have several topics that nobody could cover but you.

Stop Regurgitating Content

When you showcase your personal knowledge, you shouldn’t have this problem (the regurgitation issue). Unfortunately, most blogs read like old TV re-runs, sharing the same old things we’ve all seen before. On the surface, this is a creativity issue, but at base, I believe it really has to do with laziness and organization.

If you set aside time at the beginning of each month to create an editorial calendar, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll largely sidestep the regurgitation issue. Most bloggers slip into the trap of regurgitation when they feel pressured to throw a post up on their site. If you know in advance when you’re posting and what you’re posting about, you can take the time to create a post that uniquely showcases your personal knowledge.

For help with developing your own editorial calendar, I highly recommend this post from Copyblogger.

Use a Bounty of Resources & Links

As smart as you are, it’s still important to incorporate a variety of resources into your blog posts. On the one hand, resources give your readers easy access to extra information. On the other hand, they make you look more credible. Resources are a way of demonstrating that you do, in fact, keep up on your industry and market trends.

Types of resources you should include? That’s a long list, but a few of my favorites include peer bloggers, news articles pertaining to your industry, other writers’ how-to guides, and your earlier blog posts and resource pages. Find out why Ellie Mirman of HubSpot believes you should link to your competitors (a smart strategy for building thought leadership).

Create a Mission Statement (For Yourself)

The point of this post is to make your blog an information powerhouse. However, that doesn’t mean that all information – even good information – should appear on your blog. You might know a lot about SEO and a lot about banana plantations, but you wouldn’t make a blog that highlights both subjects. Your readers like to know what they can expect from your blog.

In order to avoid topical derailing, create a mission statement for your blog. This doesn’t have to be on the header of every page; just write it down for yourself. Keep it simple. For example, “The purpose of my blog is to help small businesses with no SEO knowledge or skills rank their websites on the first page of Google.” If a blog post doesn’t line up with that mission statement, toss it! (If you use an editorial calendar and a mission statement, you won’t even have to write a misfit blog post in the first place.)

Segmented Leads & Clear CTAs

While your blog needs an overarching mission statement, each post should have its own “mini-mission statement.” Of course, I’m talking about your call-to-action. Your reader should never get to the end of a blog post, and ask, What now? Each one of your posts should have a clear CTA that directs the reader to do something specific. Not only is this reassuring to the reader, but it also builds your blog’s reputation as a source of valuable information.

Think about all of your different leads (and what stage of your sales cycle they’re in), and create blog posts with CTAs that target each one. It could take a week or a month of blogging to create posts that target each lead, but when you use an editorial calendar, the process becomes much less intimidating!

So, remember…showcase your knowledge (without regurgitating) and use an editorial calendar and plenty of resources. Write according to a mission statement, and create content for all of your different leads with clear CTAs. Easy? Hardly. Doable? Absolutely! My challenge to you is to dedicate yourself to this style of blogging for one month, and then note the differences in traffic and engagement. I’d love to hear how it works out for you!

About the Author

Amie Marse, is the founder and managing partner of Content Equals Money, a content writing service for agencies and Web-based clients.

Why Good Leads Die Young

Administrator — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:15:00 GMT

By Rick Faulk & Seamas Egan, Campaigner

Leads are the fuel to your sales pipeline. You put considerable effort into developing inbound marketing activities so that your sales teams have a continuous flow of opportunity. Success however, does not come without challenges. Too many leads without an efficient system to manage them can clog your sales funnel. The result may be good leads growing cold while your teams work to clear the funnel.

Lead generation is only one part of the sales cycle. In reality, less than a quarter of inbound leads are sales ready. Yet, that small fraction can easily become lost in a sea of data. This inefficient process not only hurts sales numbers but increases tension between sales and marketing teams. Sales teams may complain about not having good leads to work with, while marketing points to the volume their efforts generate.

Lead Scoring - prioritizing sales-ready leads based on a pre-determined set of criteria - allows you to work your best leads first, rather than working from the bottom up. While organizations recognize the value of adding efficiency to the lead process, only 21 percent of B2B marketers have actually established a lead scoring program.

Lead development and management is a joint sales and marketing effort. To maximize leads and keep teams aligned, use the tips below.

Determine key criteria. What is a sales-ready lead? Did the lead visit your pricing page 2-3 times? Did they demo a product or download a whitepaper? Do they work in a certain industry or have a specific title? You will want to consider explicit data, such as title, industry and zip code, as well as implicit data such as their actions on your website, or their specific search string.
Fingerprint your customer. You can use your current customer base to help you identify the criteria. What did your existing customers do on your website? What implicit and explicit data do you know about them? For example, you may assign a higher score to leads that visit the pricing page rather than the ‘about us’ page.
Document your findings. Once you identify the criteria, put it in writing. Have a documented contract that clearly identifies the activities, behaviors and interests of sales-ready leads.
Assign a score. Now that you have your criteria, you can score your leads. Develop a scoring system (letter grade, points, or warm, hot, cold) that allows you to assign a value to each criterion. For example, you may determine that your ideal lead is a senior executive at a large company. Based on your current customer base, you may also know that the ideal customer visited at least three pages on your website, viewed the pricing page and downloaded your free whitepaper. Depending on what you learned through your assessment process, you may weigh each of these qualifications or activities more heavily than others.
No lead left behind. The next step is to develop a system for taking action on your lead intelligence. Using your criteria in conjunction with your CRM system will make it easy to develop repeatable sales processes to manage all of your leads. Your sales-ready leads can be prioritized to the sales team while other leads are channeled into nurturing programs.

Lead scoring allows you to be more efficient in your lead development and management. It not only allows you to close sales-ready leads, but prevents irritating those leads that are not quite ready to buy. Using lead scoring with your CRM system adds a systematic structure so that you can always apply best practices to your lead process.

About the Authors: With more than 30 years of experience in executive management, sales and marketing for some of the world's most successful SaaS and technology companies, Rick joins j2 Global® as its General Manager of Campaigner®, the sales and marketing brand of j2 Global, Inc.

Seamas Egan, corporate sales manager for Campaigner, has five years of SaaS sales experience working in SMB, corporate and enterprise sales.

B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:30:00 GMT

A survey by marketing automation solution provider Pardot reveals that a significant number of business-to-business (B2B) marketers aren’t actively or accurately tracking the revenue that their campaigns generate, a non-practice that can lead to missed opportunities in establishing B2B marketing’s “essential role” in the growth of a business.

For the survey, Pardot talked with dozens of anonymous B2B marketers about their strategies and how they implement their programs, including what they choose to measure, how they do it and the standards they use for qualifying leads.

According to Pardot, as many as 37 percent of all marketers simply aren’t tracking the revenue they generate. By not measuring the results of their lead management programs, many B2B marketers are not accurately reporting their value to their organizations.

Of those marketers who aren’t tracking and reporting their results, approximately 40 percent said that it was because they lacked the time and/or resources necessary to create and analyze these sometimes complex reports.

The survey also found that 20 percent of marketers don’t measure marketing-sourced leads at all, 30 percent don’t track “advanced” metrics, like marketing-sourced opportunities, 35 percent don’t use lead nurturing for less qualified leads and almost 30 percent lack the tools needed to track leads through the sales cycle.

These are pretty dire numbers for the B2B marketing industry, which does, at least, understand that it needs to adapt its analytics approach to a more data-driven model; as many as 80 percent of the survey’s respondents said that they want to spend more time in the upcoming year focusing on marketing metrics, and 85 percent will be initiating plans that require leads to meet a given set of criteria before they're passed on to sales teams.

In addition, the survey found that one-third of respondents felt that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the most important metric for them to measure, while marketing-contributed opportunities came in second. Metrics that were less revenue-driven, like site traffic or page views, were considered the least important.

Marketing Compliance in the Education Lead Space

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 20:30:00 GMT

When it comes to lead generation in the education (college and university) space, few things matter more than the quality of leads. With commissions and referrals very substantial in the place, it is often a well-known haven for, well, less ethical marketers.

PerformLine, a provider of marketing compliance monitoring technologies, announced the launch of its PerformMatch™ Private Link Service (PLS) today which aims to tackle the complicated issue of marketing compliance and referring URL privacy in the education lead industry.

The system provides education marketers and lead buyers with automated referring URL compliance transparency. That is a complicated way of saying that the service evaluates each referring URL from affiliates and sub-affiliates against a PerformMatch rules set which identities misrepresentations as outlined by the Department of Education.

PerformMatch™ PLS also protects lead sellers (affiliates) and their proprietary and confidential marketing information, including the identities of sub-affiliates and the key word lists used in paid search that are used to drive traffic.

So how does it work? According to the announcement, “Evaluated referring URLs are assigned compliance scores with a corresponding violation summary and then reported back to the education institution or their partners in a unique and anonymous fashion. Compliance managers can then notify non-compliant affiliates of the necessary corrections that need to be made to their landing pages and/or creative.”

“PerformMatch™ PLS solves the friction in the marketplace caused by both maintaining the confidentiality of proprietary assets of the lead sellers as well as ensuring compliance for the lead buyers,” said Alex Baydin, founder and CEO of PerformLine. “We listened and solved the problem by creating the only independent verification solution that enables lead sellers to provide the compliance monitoring data that schools are demanding while still keeping their vast array of affiliate referring URLs concealed though the PerformMatch™ PLS service. It’s a win-win for all.”