Marketing Trenches

Had a discussion with a professional services firm today regarding a problem they’re experiencing.  The problem revolves around a very simple yet often overlooked page on the typical company website - the contact form.  This company recently redesigned their website, and while site traffic has been rising, their lead volume from these site contact forms has been declining.  As a matter of fact, the numbers from their web analytics package were pretty staggering - in the last month alone, 476 page views of the contact page, and only 3 form submissions.

While we looked under a bunch of rocks to rule out other problems, one look at the contact page told me everything I needed to know.  Here are the problems, and the prescribed medication:

Problem #1: The page is waaaay too crowded.  Lots of links, lots of imagery, lots of reasons to leave.

Solution #1: Treat someone sitting on your contact page like someone sitting at your cash register ready to make a purchase, except in this case remove the Snickers bars, the US Weekly and the Chapstick display.  Remove all clutter other than the essentials.

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I sat in on a particularly terrible webinar today, and it left me scratching my head.  The host company usually nails these types of events, but today was a complete mess.  A mess at the beginning, a mess in the middle, and a mess at the end.  Makes you wonder why I stuck around, doesn’t it?  Me too.  Nonetheless, it inspired the following simple list of reasons why webinars fail:

• Technical problems: Come on folks.  If you’re going to run a webinar, test the technology beforehand.  Use a reputable vendor.  If attendees can’t join your meeting or can’t view your presentation, it’s over before it even started.
• Too Salesy: We all understand that webinars are designed to start or continue a sales cycle.  But if you advertise the webinar as educational, don’t beat us over the head with 10 “About Us” slides to kick things off.
• Content Isn’t As Advertised: The simplest one of all.  If your webinar was advertised as “Best Practices in Email Marketing” and the title of your actual presentation is “Social Media for 2009 and Beyond”, that’s like buying a ticket for one movie and being forced to watch another movie instead.
• No Concrete Examples: Educate me on the basics, then provide me with real examples I can latch on to.  I may not remember the basics, but you can bet I will remember that Aurora Widgets Company used the solution to increase revenue 10x in 2008.
• Don’t Read the Slides: Presentation 101.  Inject some enthusiasm.  Pretend you’re going off script even if you’re not.  Do anything to make me believe you’re thinking while you’re presenting, and not just reading slides.
• Don’t Run Over:  If the webinar is advertised as 45 minutes, make it 35.  If it’s advertised as 30 minutes, make it 20.  Many webinar attendees are interested in the typical Q&A session that occurs at the end of the session, but if you run over on the standard part, they may miss the only portion they really cared about in the first place. 

If you provide compelling content, market your webinar appropriately, and avoid these mistakes, the webinar can be a very effective lead generation and nurturing tool.  If you aren’t willing to pay enough attention to these areas, then don’t run webinars.  It’s that simple. 

So your boss just dropped the following task on you - you need to cut marketing spend, and you also need to figure out how to make that spend work better from an ROI standpoint.  If it makes you feel any better, you’re not alone.  Marketing department heads are getting hit with that same task in every type of organization. 

The better news is that this task is really not that difficult, especially if you are using the appropriate tracking mechanisms.  The potential solutions to this problem are endless, yet the implementation can seem complicated.  Here are 3 basic places to start:

1. Assuming you know which marketing vehicles are your most efficient performers from a lead generation or customer acquisition standpoint, cut out the poor performers for the time being and focus on the top performers.  If search engine marketing drives leads at half the cost of direct mail (without sacrificing quality of course), then cut direct mail and focus on search engine marketing.  If your affiliate program drives new e-commerce customers at a $20 cost per acquisition while your email marketing program drives new e-commerce customers at a $75 cost per aquisition, cut the email marketing and focus in on the affiliate program. 

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I was recently talking to a marketing executive at a mid-sized software company, and he brought up a problem he was having with “closing the loop” between marketing’s lead generation efforts and the sales team’s revenue output.  He mentioned that while the company had recently invested in a CRM solution and some accompanying marketing automation software, that there was still missing data, incorrect data, and a general distaste for the new solution within the sales team.

Having run into this situation a number of times, I followed with three simple questions:

Question 1: Who actually implemented the CRM/marketing automation solution for you?

Answer: We used an outside consultant who focuses on these specific types of implementations.

Question 2: Who built the process and rules surrounding the treatment of leads both inside and outside the CRM solution?

Answer: The same guy, the CRM consultant.

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My apologies on the use of the modern acronym.  For those who don’t know, “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever”.  Now, on with the post…

I was recently re-reading a post from Brian Carroll in his B2B Lead Generation Blog, titled “Collaboration Huddles and 35 Other Ways to Improve Sales and Marketing Teamwork”.  Although I can always grab something useful from Brian’s posts, within his list of 35 I immediately stopped when I read #15:

15. Get the marketing team out in the field with the sales team regularly.

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When I hear clients make a statement like “we rely exclusively on pay-per-click to drive leads into the business”, I cringe.   Don’t get me wrong - I am as big a proponent of using pay-per-click SEM for lead generation as anyone else, but it’s the word “exclusively” that frightens me.  The most successful lead generation marketers I know follow some simple rules:

1. They start with identifying the metrics that matter for any lead generation campaign - initial value of a new customer, lifetime value of a new customer, average lead-to-sale conversion rate, target cost per lead, target cost per new customer, etc.
2. They set up the appropriate tracking mechanisms (web analytics, CRM, lead scoring tools, etc.) to ensure that their lead generation campaigns are measurable.
3. They diversify their lead generation sources as much as possible.
4. They test, test, and test again.
5. Based on testing, they refine each campaign tied to each source of lead generation.
6. They test, test, and test again.
7. Based on testing, they narrow down what works and what doesn’t and adjust their lead generation “portfolio” to reflect that.

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