You are here: Home / Archives for lead generation

Do You Trust Your Content?

By 5 Comments

TrustLooking at most B2B marketing, the answer is clearly “no, you don’t.” You do not trust your content to tell your story, grow your audience or sell your solutions. Instead, you put your trust in your outbound marketing and sales process.

Don’t trumpet your content as your communication king, as the key way you connect with your audience, if the real way you connect with your audience comes after they fill out a registration form.

Your content is like the teen that still needs a chaperone, you aren’t willing to send it out on its own yet. And that is ok! [Read more…]

Getting Out of the B2B Lead Generation Trap

By 12 Comments

TrapsMost B2B marketing organizations miss the biggest opportunities to impact their business because they have not identified the right goals.

Why isn’t business coming out of your ears?

Dig into that question, ask why of every answer or assumption you come up with, and you will eventually get to the root challenge and the basis for goals that can move your business forward.

It is easier said than done. [Read more…]

B2B Marketing Has a Perception Problem

By 14 Comments

Do you care if potential prospects see your services as high value or a complete rip-off? Of course you do.

This is about the perception each individual has about you. This is about your brand.

Perceptions are created by experience with your products, service and people, through what other people say about you (even competitors) and through your own marketing.

No one buys from a company they distrust or pays a premium for a solution they see as a low cost provider.

However, in B2B, the value of perceptions have been set aside, in favor of the new holy grail of B2B marketing: lead generation. [Read more…]

The Path to Value from Content Curation

By 5 Comments

Increasingly, marketers are adding content curation to their marketing activity, often with objectives of sharing a certain amount of content each day. Ardath Albee (@ardath421) has a sample to-do list for a content marketer in Show Quantity the Door.

Three weeks ago I published Three Reasons Content Curation is Overrated, my reaction to research published on eMarketer and advice we frequently see about curating content in order to establish thought leadership.

That doesn’t mean curation is not valuable. It may be one of the primary ways you stay in touch with your audience. But the path to value from your curation is a winding one. [Read more…]

9 Marketing Words That Have Lost Their Meaning

By 21 Comments

Thought Leadership Marketing ComicThe following 9 terms are so overused or misused in B2B marketing that they have lost nearly all meaning. If you are using these terms today, it is time to stop and explain what you really mean.

Otherwise, we may hear you, but we will think you mean something completely different. [Read more…]

B2B Marketers Are Begging For Bad Data

By 13 Comments

In B2B marketing, bad data represents a huge lost opportunity. According to SiriusDecisions, companies with the best quality data drive 70% more revenue through marketing programs than those with simply average data quality.

Despite the cost of bad data, the practice of the average marketer guarantees bad data, and it may be getting worse each year. With a growing body of research showing current marketing practices are consistently delivering bad data, it is time for change. [Read more…]

B2B Marketers Are Turning Away Prospects

By 12 Comments

Staircase and Way Out SignAccording to recent research from IDC, lead generation is a top B2B marketing priority, and in the next four years Sirius Decisions predicts 75% of all registrations will be captured online. (Sirius Decisions actually labels this as inbound marketing, however I use a more limited definition of inbound marketing.)

One of the primary ways B2B marketers capture leads online is asking prospects to register for content. Doing it effectively requires creating content prospects want in a format that is easy to engage with while capturing the information you need.

However, based on recent research from DemandGen Report, marketers are turning away prospects [Read more…]

There Is No Vending Machine For Marketing Qualified Leads

By 6 Comments

If you talk to a publisher or lead generation firm, it would seem leads have become a commodity. Nearly every B2B publisher offers lead generation under a broader heading of demand generation.

Here is a hypothetical, yet very realistic, snippet of a conversation with a publisher:

Marketer: We are looking for demand generation opportunities that will deliver leads for sales.
Publisher: Sure, we have a number of programs that will do that! What is your target audience?
Marketer: Rattles off target industry, role and seniority. Oh, and we have two new white papers we can use in this program.
Publisher: No problem, we can do that. How many leads do you need and when do you need them by?
Marketer: 500 by the end of the quarter.
Publisher: Shouldn’t be a problem, I will confirm inventory and get back to you tomorrow.

[Read more…]

B2B Lead Generation vs B2B Advertising: What You Need to Know

By 7 Comments

Caution signAmong paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.

For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.

In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions. [Read more…]

It’s 10:00 PM. Is Your Content Where It Belongs?

By 2 Comments

Comscore recently issued a release showing 31% of banner ads from a sample of advertiser had no opportunity to be seen.

The problem is, advertisers often do not know where their ads are running. Increasingly, marketers don’t know where their content is either.

B2B technology marketers running lead generation programs are finding their content or offers on a wide range of sites they never intended to place their content on, yet they are paying $20 to $60, or more, every time someone downloads their content from these sites.

Here are two examples and four steps you can take to protect your content. [Read more…]