I was speaking with a few colleagues the other day about the different benefits of social media as a whole, and blogging in particular.  The folks in the room had varying levels of social media involvement, from no involvement at all to heavy involvement.  Each of us discussed what we hope to get out of social media, why we blog or might consider it, and how businesses can benefit from blogging.  The discussion went on for some time, covering the wide ranging benefits from SEO opportunities to more frequent customer touch points and everything in between.  After a while, it quieted down a bit and somebody asked me if they had missed anything on the list.

Skip the First Meeting

While our blog serves many purposes, one of them I hadn’t heard mentioned by the group was one of the things that I find most useful.  Having a well planned blog and social media presence, with what we hope is interesting and insightful content, allows us to Skip the First Meeting.

So what do I mean when I say Skip the First Meeting?  Unfortunately, despite how well you may try to vet things ahead of time, inevitably in our business you run into an opportunity that 5 minutes into that first meeting, after you’ve sniffed each other and gotten a bit more of a sense of your businesses –  you both know isn’t a fit.  You don’t think alike, you don’t value the same things, really whatever those components may be.  Of course generally by this time somebody has ordered food, or driven out of their way, or fired up a PowerPoint or laser lights show, or something else entirely, and it’s too late to do anything but spend the next 45-60 minutes or more there despite you each knowing this isn’t going to work out.

Now, we often head this meeting off at the pass.  We’ll send a contact or prospect a link to our blog ahead of time, and also encourage them to connect with and follow us on social networks, and ask them to read through these pieces ahead of time before scheduling that first get together.  By doing this, we make much more efficient use of their time and ours.  We try to convey the idea here that we want to be involved in strategy and planning and believe in taking a holistic view of marketing, and that shines through in our posts.

When we discover the poor fit, we each save ourselves the time of an unproductive meeting where we just won’t be a fit for each other (although sometimes we do miss those laser light shows).  And just as importantly, for those that could be a fit, we’ve fast forwarded over the glossy part of the first meeting and are digging right into the important and meaningful parts that are usually saved for a second meeting.

So while there are probably 100s of reasons to blog and to get involved in social media, if it works for your business you may want to try to Skip the First Meeting.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

It should come as no surprise to any business executive that marketing dollars are shifting to the web at breakneck speed.  To give you an idea of just how significant this shift is, Forrester forecasts that interactive marketing spending will reach $61.3 billion in 2012, from $18.4 billion in 2007.

Every organization needs to address interactive marketing.  There are no exceptions, not anymore.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re small or large.  Or whether you’re selling products or services.  Or whether you’re growing rapidly or flat lining.  You cannot ignore interactive marketing.

That’s the easy part.  Most organizations know that interactive marketing needs to play a role in strategic planning.

Here’s the unknown part, at least for businesspeople that aren’t involved in marketing on a regular basis.  The average organization fails in their first attempts to execute an effective interactive marketing strategy.  There are many reasons for this failure, but the most common one we see is a lack of interactive marketing expertise.  In particular, this lack of interactive marketing expertise manifests itself in the planning stages, which then trickles down and impacts individual tactics.

In order to help organizations build a comprehensive interactive marketing audit and interactive marketing plan, today we launched Interactive Shift, a program designed to identify the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in your organization’s internet marketing strategy.

I don’t want to regurgitate all the information you can find on the Interactive Shift page, but I do want to touch on the concept of timing your interactive marketing audit and planning.  I could make an argument that a marketing audit should be conducted every month, quarter and year.   And you should absolutely revisit your interactive marketing plan annually, if not more frequently.  That being said, there are some situations that lend themselves to conducting your audit and planning process:

• You are considering overhauling your web presence.
• Current interactive marketing programs are underperforming.
• You’re trying to determine budget allocations for interactive marketing.
• Your competition appears to be ahead of you in the interactive marketing category.
• You’re in the midst of developing a strategic marketing plan.

Regardless of when or how you handle this process, make sure you embrace the interactive audit and planning process.  If done right, it will expose significant opportunities for improvement, and in some cases spur a significant shift in thinking about how you’ll market your organization overall.

So you’ve managed to create a marketing program that is generating leads.  Real, ready-to-be-qualified, hopefully big budget leads.  Fantastic.  What do you do next?

If you’re structured like a lot of organizations, that lead is entered into a CRM system, perhaps assigned to a sales or marketing representative, and the dance begins.  A small percentage of those leads will become hot, sales-ready, take-the-next-step type leads.   A larger percentage of those leads will become qualified but not ready to fully engage type leads.  An even larger percentage of those leads will not be ready to engage with anyone at all.  That could indicate a host of different things, but never assume that means the lead is unqualified.

All three categories – the hot lead, the warm lead, and the cold lead – require lead nurturing at this point, yet the average organization fails to nurture leads effectively.  Why?  Too many organizations still assume that their primary lead nurturing weapons are a salesperson and a phone call.

Let’s take a look at a 4-step lead nurturing plan, and briefly describe why each step is important and how you can begin to address each one.

1. Understand why lead nurturing is important.

It’s no secret that the average B2B buyer prefers to work with someone they perceive as a trusted advisor, as opposed to just a sales representative.  So how can your sales representative become that trusted advisor?  The trusted advisor is able to prove the following over time:

• That the advisor – and the company in general – is an expert in the field being considered.
• That the advisor – and the company in general – understands the problem or issue facing your company, and can help solve it.
• That the advisor – and the company in general – will be easy to work with.

You think all three of those things can be established in a single phone call?  No chance.  Those three components are generally proven out over time.  Sure, referral business may move quicker through this process, but they still need to check off all three stages.

2. Identify the tactics you can use for lead nurturing.

This is typically the area where sales/marketing organizations sell themselves short, and ultimately revert back to using phone calls and email as their primary lead nurturing tactics.  If you’ve read this blog previously, you know that content is king in marketing.  Here’s a partial list of all the different forms of content that can be used to nurture leads:

• Case studies
• Press releases
• Free trials
• Whitepapers
• Webinars
• E-Newsletters
• Printed newsletters
• Events
• Third-party articles
• Phone calls
• Emails
• Research reports
• Blog posts

The list could go on and on.  Make your own list.  You likely have some of these materials already, and some you’ll want to develop.  Next comes the easy part – use them, and use them without abandon.  If your content is well-developed, most prospects will appreciate you sending it.

3. Schedule your lead nurturing activity.

You understand why lead nurturing is important, and you’ve now identified the materials you have at your disposal.  What now?  Make a schedule for when and how you will touch each lead.  This doesn’t have to be complicated.  It may be as simple as the following:

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As part of my normal procedure before meeting with a prospective partner, I explore as many of the company’s marketing vehicles as possible.   Sometimes that list is short – a website and a brochure.  Sometimes that list is longer – a website, brochure, blog, social media profiles, search engine listings, executive LinkedIn profiles, etc.

Over the weekend I went through this process to check out a prospective partner, and ran into some good news and bad news.  The good news is that this company has clearly embraced the idea of expanding its footprint by using a variety of offline and online marketing tactics and properties.  The bad news, however, is that as the company has expanded that footprint, it seems to have lost control of its brand and core messaging.

Here’s a sampling of what I found:

• Archaic website design
• Outdated content on all properties
• Disjointed messaging and copy
• Inconsistent color schemes and logo usage
• Mismatched fonts
• Broken links
• Blog created from “packaged” industry-specific software
• 5-6 different company descriptions on website, brochure, search engines, etc.
• Links to other poorly-branded companies
• Sporadic social media usage
• No consistency in messaging across social media platforms

You get the point.  Some of these things, when considered as individual items, might seem nit-picky.  Combining them all, however, took me from legitimately excited for the meeting to nonchalant about the meeting at best.

That’s branding folks. Or in particular, that’s how poor branding and brand management can negatively impact your chances of landing that next big account or partnership.

It’s time to do some fall cleaning.  Don’t wait for the recession to end.   Make no mistake: business people are making decisions now, and your brand and overall identity is likely removing you from consideration sets on a daily basis.  The fact that you don’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

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A colleague of mine often says “Your website should be as good as your best salesperson” – which for many organizations is easier said than done.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know we always advocate looking at your overall marketing strategy, your web marketing strategy as a set of that, and your website itself as a piece of that.

In addition to looking at the big picture, sometimes it helps to slice off a few clear and actionable improvements you can take.  Some organizations have never done all 3 of the steps outlined below, while for others this is a chance to get back to basics and make sure you haven’t lost site of these 3 keys.  Here’s 3 key steps you can do to make your web presence work harder.

1). Take an Honest Look at Your Search Presence

We all know that search engines play a huge role in the web — In fact, 80% of online session start with a search  engine (via  PC Magazine).  So, even if you are doing everything you can to get the word out on your brand and website in other media, if you don’t have a significant presence in search you may be sunk.  Since search is where people go first when they go online, you need an effective search strategy — both paid and organic — to make sure that you will be found.  So take an honest look at your search presence, look with a keen eye and really re-evaluate everything.  Once you ahve done that and reformulated your strategy (or confirmed it was right all along), start working on keyword testing in paid search and SEO (learn more in a  previous post The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program) and continue to monitor and adjust as you go, utilizing your analytics systems as a guide for what’s working and what isn’t.

2). Segment Your Audiences and Match Their Expectations

Too often we see campaigns where all visitors are sent to the same generic homepage, which may not speak to a segment’s particular needs.  One of the things we love about the web as marketers is it is trackable and customizable. So, for example, if you are a bank and know you have a prospect looking for CD rates, make sure you take them to a page about CDs.  If they are looking for mortgage refinancing make sure you take them to a page about refinancing, not new loans.  Utilize targeted landing pages and microsites in order to better match the prospect’s expectations and you’ll see much better results (see our previous post Microsite or Landing Page? to learn more on when to use landing pages and microsite ).  While these examples seem obvious, I’m constantly amazed by how many organizations aren’t doing them.  This feeds right back into #1, if you match your customers expectations when they come to your site, your campaigns — whether search, social media, print, or anything else — are just about guaranteed to perform better.

3). Optimize your Conversion Opportunities

So you’ve knocked down items 1 and 2 – what’s next?  Well, some people still think getting traffic to your website and getting a few leads is doing the whole job.  Getting visitors to your website is really just the first step, what we really want to do is convert those visitors by making them take your key actions.  That generally means converting them to leads by an activity such as filling out a form, converting them to customers by an activity such as an online purchase, or sometimes by an activity such as viewers of key information like using a retail locator to the nearest store.  By reviewing your analytics, you can develop a baseline for your conversion activity.  Then, begin to test different variables against this baseline, including copy approaches, offers, calls to action, imagery, landing pages, form fields and other variables.  By understanding and continually optimizing your conversion opportunities you’ll get much more value out of your marketing activities.

Whether you are new to online marketing or a seasoned veteran just circling back to make sure you are still doing the basics right, these 3 steps will make your web presence work harder.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.