• Nine out of ten B2B marketers are using some form of content marketing.
• The top content marketing tactics (by usage) are articles (79% of respondents), social media other than blogs (74%), blogs (65%), e-Newsletters (63%), and case studies (58%).
• Comparing 2011 to 2010, the use of blogs and videos both increased by 27% and the use of white papers grew by 19%.
• Companies are spending about 26% of their marketing budgets on content marketing efforts, and 60% of respondents said they will increase spending on content marketing in 2012.

Although more time and money is being allocated toward content marketing and management there is still a long way to go before most business professionals fully understand the true potential of proper content management. For example, only 39% of survey respondents identified lead management and lead nurturing as a primary content marketing goal. This could mean that marketers are focusing on brand more often.  Being on the pulse of lead generation activity for our clients Mercury pays particular attention to identifying where the prospect is at in the buying cycle.  Consistent lift in conversion rates result in catching buyers in early research phases of an intended purchase.  We’ve identified many different steps in the prospect lifecycle. Different, compelling content needs to be generated for each stage to nurture your sales leads and convert them into clients. Mercury Leads increases your opportunities by bringing you qualified sales leads through our developed content management strategies.

B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Released! is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

• 23 percent had bought the product or service advertised from the advertiser or a competitor.
• 67 percent said they were still in the market planning to buy.

And, looking back at older inquiries, they found that of those who bought:

• 11 percent purchased within 3 months of inquiring.
• 17 percent purchased within 4-6 months.
• 25 percent purchased within 7-12 months.
• 47 percent took more than a year to buy.

What are the best practices for lead nurturing?  To us it’s a combination of touch points that involves a multi-channel ongoing effort (not a campaign) to place your company “top of mind” with your prospects. 

A process which we’ve found to resonate with prospects particular if you’re doing lead generation of the complex sale involves some or all of the following:

• Targeted Profiling – The 40/40/20 rule in Direct Marketing of the importance of list/offer/package needs to be updated, particularly when you use your website and internet marketing as the lever. The list or prospect profile is vitally important. Mercury Lead’s experience has shown that up to 60% of your sales success can come from some simple tricks of the trade and a razor sharp profile.
• Intelligent Engagement – Requires highly trained teleprospecting talent who are expert in nurturing (there’s that word again) gatekeepers, and motivating the prospect to consent to the personal meeting, virtual event, or minimally future communications so you can win mindshare over time.
• Creating Interest – You can’t hook the big fish if you’re using the wrong bait!  All aspects of your lead nurturing effort need to be considered.  Today’s Chief Executives are increasingly being held accountable for performance and you will too.  Your brand or solution better come equipped with a quick path to ROI.  This requires that you articulate the WIFM (What’s In It For Me?) equation, through a multi channel lead generation process including targeted website and landing page content, killer value propositions,  all centered around your prospects problem or missed opportunity. 
• Call-To-Action – Remember in today’s impatient world you have 8 seconds or 2.3 clicks to make this happen or you lose the fish.  Every time you communicate with your prospect whether through a personal call, email, user group, or social mechanisms you need to provide a reason for your prospect to take action.  Some channels require direct and motivating CTA’s like pay-per-click advertising or vertical specific landing page deployment while other tactics are more of a soft sell.  SEO Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are examples, but in all cases a Call-To-Action is needed.
• Creating Thought Leadership – Let’s face it, the best lead generation strategies will yield a small percentage of immediate opportunities (or A leads) for your company.  What then happens with B& C opportunities?  This is where most companies fail to have a long term vision.  Mercury Leads has customers where up to 20 touches are planned over a period of 2 or more years.  This is particularly important when selling a high ticket item with a long sales cycle.  Creating thought leadership is done through creating value in your prospects eyes over time.  Tactically this can incorporate many of the channels discussed above, and you need to strategize what works best with your prospect.  There is a fine line between being informative, staying in touch with useful information and being obnoxious. 

Lead nurturing is very much like fishing.  You need to plan to fish in the right spots, have the best gear, and irresistible bait, but most importantly patience and you will catch your limit.

Lead Nurturing Your Prospects for Higher Yield is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

When you stand back and look at what really makes a consumer buy something it boils down to trust. Sure the features, the packaging, the warranty, the status symbol, the logo, the brand history and a whole host of other factors come into play when determining if a product will be accepted by the general public, but do they trust the product enough to solve their needs? Does your product or service convey enough trust to make the consumer take a chance and spend their budget with your internet marketing company? What about B2B Buyers? B2B Buyers are not simply risking their personal money but the company’s money, as well as their reputation in the corporation. Are you, the sales lead generation company, doing enough to establish trust with your prospects? In this article I will discuss some direct marketing strategies you can do to establish trust with your prospects.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is trust. You, as an internet marketing company, have to establish a reputation as a trustworthy and creditable organization. The best way to go about doing this is to build rapport with your prospects through ongoing direct marketing such as email or direct mail communications. Nobody likes to be bombarded with spam so give your prospects something. Through direct marketing you can give them something that will pique their interest such as an article you would like to share, a podcast, a webinar invite or helpful tips that make their job easier. The longer you are in communication with your prospects, the shorter the time it will take your prospects to learn to trust you.

When it comes to establishing trust it is nice to have proof of your creditability from an unbiased 3rd party organization. We recommend joining various respected sales lead generation or direct marketing trade associations or groups. One of the best things any company can do is join the Better Business Bureau. Once you have joined these organizations feel free to use their logos on your website and on any direct marketing communications you use on a regular basis. Another good idea is to freely share testimonials of other clients as well as client case examples. Attach some actual numbers as proof to show your prospects exactly how much your internet marketing company increased revenue or cut costs. Prospects will immediately feel more at ease with you as an internet marketing company, knowing others have been down the same path where they are about to go.

Another sales lead generation strategy you can use to immediately establish trust with your prospects is to create a guarantee program. If you are able, offer a no questions asked guarantee vs. a guarantee that has stipulations or hidden clauses. The more open you are with your guarantee the better. The guarantee, especially important in sales lead generation, acts like a safety net against B2B buyer’s remorse. The guarantee will help put the prospect as ease and they will be more willing to buy from your company now instead of doing more research or going with a competitor.

One of the biggest mistakes we as sales lead generation professionals see every day with clients is that their content is focused on them instead of the prospect. When a prospect reaches out to you, the internet marketing company, they are looking to fulfill a certain need they have. It is your job as a direct marketing organization to uncover that need and solve their specific problem. If you spend your time bragging about how long you have been in business for or that you offer quality products and service you will be pretty much wasting the prospects time. B2B Buyers have heard it all before. They are looking for tangible solutions to their unique problems from a fair and decent internet marketing company at an honest price. Spend the majority of your efforts focused on their needs not yours.

Lastly, learn to be patient. The majority of B2B Buyers are not ready to buy today. It takes diligence and commitment to win the hearts and minds of B2B Buyers. If you can stick it out for the long haul and really work on establishing relationships with your prospects; eventually those prospects will turn into life long clients.

Good Selling,

Paul J. Plvan
Mercury Leads, Inc.

Simple Direct Marketing Strategies to Establish Trust with Your Prospects is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

Ask any lead generation marketer what the most important aspect of a campaign is and you will get 50 different answers. Many marketers love to tout about how fancy their new CRM System is or how effective their pay-per-click ads are running. Those are all nice and well but these tools are only as good as the person using them.

In this Web 2.0 era we as lead generation marketers often forget that marketing isn’t about tricks of the trade, it is simply about what your company can do for your client. It boils down to sales and getting your client more them. So what is the most effective sales lead generation strategy to convert more prospects into sales? It all starts with the offer.

The offer is the most important aspect of any landing page, website copy, teleprospecting call or pay-per-click campaign. All too often the business offer is poorly written and does not emit an emotional response in the prospect. Companies tend to brag about how good their product is and how poorly the competition is doing. The fact is the prospect does not care about your industry reputation, how long you have been in business, what awards you have won or certification classes you have taken. The prospect is looking for specific information to help him/her make an important buying decision.

On average you only have 5-8 seconds to convince someone to stay on your website. If the prospect doesn’t find something compelling they simply go onto the next website. There are 6 characteristics of a great offer.

A compelling business offer is:

1.   Of Value to the prospect.
2.   Exclusive- something the prospect can’t get anywhere else
3.   Tangible- something the prospect can visualize
4.   Relevant- to the business or the prospect’s personal needs
5.   Easy to deliver message that is simple and clear
6.   Entertaining and Engaging

Hands down the most compelling offer is the informational offer. Your information should help the prospect research solutions quickly and effectively and ultimately solve their problem. The informational offer should include a strong appeal with high perceived value and be relatively low cost and risk to the prospect. It should be focused on taking action.

Put yourself in the prospects shoes when coming up with an offer by asking yourself these questions:

•    What is the best way to solve my business problem or corporate goal?
•    What solutions does your company offer to help me solve my problem?
•    What are all of the issues I should be concerned about when researching this problem?
•    How do I know what solution is best for my particular problem?
•    Who are the market leaders in the industry? Why?
•    What do peer reviews say about your company? Who can I trust?
•    What is a fair price I should pay for this product or service?
•    What type of ROI can I expect from this solution? What company will give me a fair assessment without inflating their numbers?
•    What other costs such as (training and support) will there be? Are these long-term costs?
•    How soon can we see the benefits from your solution?

Once you have addressed these questions you as a sales lead generation marketer need to come up with tangible solutions to these problems focused on getting the prospect to take action. At each stage of the buying cycle you should be gaining your prospects trust by lead nurturing with whitepapers, trend and 3rd party studies, webinars, flash videos, testimonials, case studies, e-books, competitive analysis of your company vs. competitors, ROI calculators, podcasts and seminars.

Keep in mind that your company is not in the business of selling products; your company is in the business of selling solutions. Once you focus on these aspects of lead generation marketing and lead nurturing you will start to see more prospects be converted into lifelong sales.

Yours in Selling,

Paul J. Plvan
Principal
http://www.mercuryleads.com

Writing a Strong Business Offer is Crucial in Sales Lead Generation is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

In today’s tough business environment it is increasingly important to do 2 things very well as you execute your demand generation process:

• Have a well executed multi-channel communications strategy
• Create a closed loop lead generation process that includes a planned lead nurturing process

As a B2B lead generation and sales lead company we see these 2 items most often missed or just overlooked by Marketing Executives working on lead generation strategies. As you can see below independent research companies have validated that this is a major mistake. Consider these facts:

• Closed loop lead management process including database segmentation, lead qualification, lead scoring, and lead nurturing leads to 50% pipeline growth.
• Well-executed multi-channel marketing campaigns generate a sales lift ranging from 7-34%.
• Companies that develop nurturing programs increase their average order value by 47%.
• An estimated 70-90% of all leads generated by marketing are never followed up by sales.

This is indeed sobering information for Marketing Executives and their lead generation campaigns. These tactical elements are generally considered the most vital part of any lead generation process, and we have realized even higher lift than this in client lead generation and demand generation processes so the payoff is obviously worth the effort.

Discipline is the operative word and a great deal of it is required. Whether implementing these processes in-house or using an external vendor your job just may depend on accomplishing these aspects of your sales lead generation program. You have to look at this through the eyes of your target prospect. The C-Suite is more and more involved in key purchasing decisions of the organization. They also have the least amount of time. Therefore your communications, and messaging for demand generation has to be expertly coordinated in order to gain top of mind awareness for your product or service. To use a Mercury Leads analogy you have to “fish where the fish are”, the CEO, CTO, or CFO can be found in the most remote estuaries.

The statistics listed above are common sense but with a little discipline your company can prosper when other organizations and competitors are stagnant. I’ve attached a link to a document we’ve compiled over the past several years something we call “Lead Generation Facts of Life“. By taking your campaigns to the next level and exercising common sense and discipline your lead generation strategies will enjoy a substantial increase in overall performance. For other helpful white papers please visit our website and of course we welcome your comments.

Yours in Selling,

Paul J. Plvan
Principal
http://www.mercuryleads.com

C-Suite Demand Generation is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!