Businesses must strike the right balance between inbound and outbound techniques to succeed at lead generation
An existing B2B lead generation process may work well with existing products / markets but what happens when a business tries to grow? In this article I present the four most common growth strategies and suggest some associated lead generation techniques.
A Cautionary Tale
To illustrate what can go wrong, an example may help. The company was a dominant force in components for high-reliability markets like oil and gas. Business was good but the company identified the limitations of its existing market and decided there was a need to diversify into commercial markets to grow.
Their approach was to take their most successful products and using different materials and manufacturing methods produce cheaper and simpler variants for the commercial market. They identified potential volume markets for the products, assessed price points and designed and manufactured products to fit.…
How does your lead scoring rate against this benchmark?
Integrated 'SMarketing' is more than generating enquiries to pass them onto your sales team; leaving the ball in their court to qualify the leads, identifying if they are serious buyers or just researching. Qualifying these leads with the help of Lead Scoring Tools is proven to support companies not only to be more efficient, but to connect 'with sales-ready leads', so boosting conversion.
By setting scoring criteria for your leads, your Sales team can reach out at the right time in the buying cycle, with relevant information and more likely to convert as they will communicating with serious leads, ready for more information'.
Lead Lizard's lead scoring summary identifies which companies are adopting this process, their objectives for lead scoring and which is the most valuable asset when scoring.
Read our …
Marketers agree Email Marketing Automation is the future, yet 4 in 10 automation programmes Fail
Email marketing is one of the top two channels for realising ROI yet email marketing budgets are declining. Alongside this, the use of Email Marketing Automation is becoming less effective - how do we know this? Econsultancy's Email Marketing Industry Census 2015, produced in partnership with Adestra has conducted research. After nine years of surveys, they bring together a wealth of information to show how email marketing has changed and the views of over 1000 in-house marketers, and experts.
How are companies using Marketing Automation?
48% of respondents with a email marketing automation rated its capabilities as 'basic' and 9% as 'non existent':
What are the barriers to effective email marketing automation?
Companies realise that MA is important yet there still appears to be many barriers or challenges to…
How to build a marketing automation programme to score leads
How do you know which leads to follow up, when to follow up and what's relevant to communicate based on where leads are in the sales funnel? These are challenges for any business using inbound marketing to generate demand and manage leads. Lead scoring is a vital methodology to ensure your leads are sales-qualified, ready for your sales team to follow up, so they are not left dormant and become missed sales.
The research from Snapapp and RingLead identifies that over 44% of companies have active lead scoring programs yet 32% are not successful with their programs. It goes on to say that companies will automatically fail if they do not address their data cleaning and accuracy, and shares both scoring indicators and how to improve your programs through a scoring hierarchy.
As well as planning…
Choosing the right metric to measure ROI
Learn what metrics can help you truly understand the value of your spend and what technologies really deliver on this most important metric. Small-to-medium businesses are investing in their marketing at jaw-dropping new levels.
BIA/Kelsey predicts that 2015 will be a banner year for local media expenditure on the part of these organisations, with investment exceeding $50 billion.
Digital investments are at the forefront, with 28% of marketers reducing their traditional advertising budget to fund more digital marketing and search marketing capturing the largest share of online spend at 47% according to Business2Community. But with so many dollars on the line, how can a business know what investments are really paying off?
Return on Investment is the gold standard that today’s marketers are seeking. But with each new media channel, there is new complexity in the…
How to generate leads from small B2B audiences in a niche market
Dominating a niche B2B market generally reduces competition, reduces price pressure and the ‘me too mentality’ brings a supplier closer to their customers and increases their loyalty. So why do so few companies make a success of niche marketing? What are the challenges associated with lead generation? What is the best combination of marketing tactics to achieve success?
Niche market definition
First let’s define a niche B2B market – the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines it as ‘A clearly defined segment of the market. It is about satisfying a specific customer need that is, in general, not covered by any major competitors’. Philip Kotler defines a niche as ‘a portion of the market in which individuals possess homogeneous needs and characteristics and the latter are not covered by the general offer…
Research showing how Marketing Automation can support the lead-sales pipeline
Marketing automation has received a lot of attention over the past year. But you may still be sceptical, asking how can it actually grow my business’?
In this post, I want to dig into some of these benefits to explain precisely how marketing automation can help you grow your business.
In March 2014, Regalix conducted a study to identify the most common benefits of marketing automation, as told by marketers who had implemented the software.
1. Improve your lead nurturing
According to the Regalix study above, the number one benefit of marketing automation software is the ability to manage and nurture leads.
In every business, you will have a mixture of hot and cold leads. It’s common sense to have your sales team focus their efforts on the hottest leads, as they have the…
Barriers to adoption of Marketing Automation and how overcome them
In research TFM&A (2014) identified that there were 5 main benefits to marketing automation: personalisation, campaign management, triggered emails, control and insight. But with such clear benefits why are more organisations not adopting the tools that can lead to greater business success? In this blog I’ll be explaining the key barriers to adoption of marketing automation and give an action plan for marketers who want to persuade their organisations to adopt an automated approach.
Who are the non-adopters?
The barriers to adoption of marketing automation vary greatly depending on the type of company, their needs and their previous investments. In research carried out by CommsBox we identified 4 key types of non-adopter. Although by no means exclusive, they give an in-depth insight into the difficulties that companies face when making major investments in change. You might recognise elements of your own organisation here:
Trailing…
5 ways to extend the use of popup technology on your site
Using the latest technology to engage visitors to your site is a must. In a recent post on using popups to grow email subscribers, Kath Pay discussed some best practices for capturing email addresses using popup technology.
In this post I’m looking at some of the ways you can extend popup technology to do more for your site. You’d be surprised how much that popups can do. Popups can be used to:
1. Ask for feedback
The latest popup technology allows you to fine tune who you show your message to. For instance, let’s say you only want your message to appear to people who leave your site without browsing for more than a minute.
When these short-term visitors go to leave your site, you can ask them, 'Was there another product or topic you would find interesting?'. Using popup technology this…
Does our business need CRM or Marketing Automation, or both?
Whilst most of us are now familiar with CRM (customer relationship management) systems, Marketing Automation is a relatively new approach. So it's often not clear how the scope of these marketing techniques and the tools used to manage them vary. In this post I'll introduce each and look to show the main difference.
At the heart of both CRM and Marketing Automation is the need to manage your customer relationships. By keeping data about our customers we are able to get to know them better over a period of time, developing better relationships, which leads to greater profitability.
Managing customer relationships
Managing customer relationships relies on our ability collect, store and manage customer data, and then and trigger business processes which lead to sales. So whether it’s a filing drawer, an excel spreadsheet, a CRM system such as Salesforce…
