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  • B2B Marketing to Niche Industries
    When it comes to creating a niche marketing strategy for B2Bs, there are no off-the-shelf options.



    It’s a blessing and a curse.



    On the one hand, you can adapt the way you sell to match how customers like to buy.



    But doing that involves anticipating how they'll want to buy before they're actually buying that way because it takes time to get systems in place that can deliver on their expectations.



    This is particularly true at a time when B2C giants like Goole, Amazon and Apple are continuously lowering ease-of-use expectations, shortening B2B buyers patience thresholds for a cumbersome UX in stride.



    Plus, with a finite B2B market, you can’t afford to invest in the types of solutions that B2Cs can. The market size doesn't justify it. It's a balancing act, because you can't afford to deeply solutions that frustrate and alienate people either.



    So it's tough. 



    The evolution of B2B digital marketing to music directors, a niche, niche market is something Adam Taylor, President of APM Music has been living and breathing for 2 decades. I breathed the first one with one. I was his PR guy.



    He spoke with me for my book on digital marketing about what he’s learned from his experiences, walking me through his migration from analog to digital. It's compelling because he explains what it takes to pivot a digital based his 20-year experience.



    In this post -- written from the interview which you can listen to at the top of this page (subscribe to the podcast) -- Adam discusses how digital technology changed the music industry as a whole, and why there’s never a shortage of business opportunities, even in emerging or niche industries.



    How APM used technology to fulfill customer demand



    Digital pivot requires digital infrastructure, which takes time to specify and deploy. And the B2B lead generation strategies executed by those systems take even longer to get up and running. 



    “Technology was a great way to serve our customers with a digital library. At first, that WAS the selling proposition.”APM Music CEO Adam Taylor



    At APM Music, it started by creating tech that helped customers find and download production music for use in film and television, by making their production music library searchable and tracks downloadable online, rather than shipping CDs. Then, it moved into translating the value of that music search engine to music directors, who were accustomed to getting and cataloging physical media with their own systems themselves.



    It may sound crazy today. But not everyone had broadband, and people were still getting comfortable with browser software. Si in spite if the fact that it seems so obvious today that digital is a better, easier way to go, it wasn't back then.



    So as Adam was migrating APM Music's B2B customer journey from analog to digital, he had to find ways to convince music directors that his online solution made sense for them, he had to help them make the pivot and he had to maintain digital and analog channels simultaneously for years while he pivoted.



    Now, Adam has the data analytics to prove the value and continuously improve and personalize the customer experience, but it wasn't always that way.



    To be precise, his pivot from a brick-and-mortar music library to a digital one took around six years.



    Bringing together the tech and B2B marketing message



    Everything about the supply chain of music, from discoverability and production to delivery, has changed. But APM has solidified their place in the market with a niche ...
    37 min
  • How to Hire a Digital Marketing Expert
    It’s not the best business that wins.  It’s the one with the best marketing.



    Which means that marketing -- digital marketing specifically during this lousy pandemic -- has become the single most important way to survive and thrive. 



    After all, it’s marketing’s job to communicate value, generate leads, bring in, and win new clients. 



    Without clients, you don’t have a business, you just have a really expensive hobby.



    To be truly successful at B2B marketing, you may want to enlist the help of a dedicated digital marketing specialist.



    But finding and hiring someone for your business can be a challenge.




    https://youtu.be/yrnnDKt57VU




    To help startups, change-ups, and scale-ups find and hire the right freelancer or agency, I spoke with Adam Erhart, a YouTube marketing specialist, course creator, and educator. 



    Adam has also amassed over 45,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, The Marketing Show, where he shares marketing strategies and best practices.



    I asked him, “how does a company hire a digital marketing consultant?” And here’s what he said.



    Download this chart here



    Learn the marketing basics before hiring 



    Before you even begin your search for help with digital marketing, you need to get the basics down yourself. 



    Here’s the deal: if you need an expert content agency, you will pay top dollar. 



    And you get what you pay for. 



    So until you can afford the big digital marketing guns, the onus is on you to know how to write a basic headline, know a bit about email marketing, understand sales copy, and know when to deploy owned, earned, shared, and paid media channels. 



    You must buy the books, hire the coaches, and do the courses….to be the strategist yourself.



    Don’t rely on a digital marketer as a crutch because you don’t want to learn something. Think of it like this:




    Startup, no budget >> You become that person. You don’t have money, so you have to spend time becoming your own digital marketing specialist.



    Change-up, small budget >> In search of a product-market fit, you are in pivot mode trying to light a fire that can catch wind and take off.



    Scale-up, medium budget >> You follow the steps laid out here to find the right person with the digital marketing specialty skills you need, so you can spend money, not time, trying to figure it out.



    Grown-up, big budget >> You have a team on in-house marketers and outside agencies maintaining and growing market share.




    Download this chart here



    Follow that logic and, when it is time for you to hire an individual or agency, you will also be equipped with enough know-how to effectively manage the relationship.



    How to become your own digital marketing expert



    The world of digital marketing is broad. You have content marketing experts, paid advertising pros, SEO consultants, PPC...it can all be overwhelming. 



    Adam assures us that anyone can do marketing, but they DO need to dedicate the time, energy, and money toward studying it.



    Even after 10 years of being a professional digital marketing consultant, he spends a minimum of one hour each day dedicated to learning. 



    Top tips for keeping your marketing skills current:




    Learn how to establish a target market



    37 min
  • How to Use Proverbs & Persuasion for Better Brand Storytelling
    While B2B lead generation has changed a lot since the Rolodex days, one thing has remained the same - word of mouth. If you want to translate the world of media into word of mouth, people have to be able to remember your message. 



    And people remember information best if it’s conveyed in a story.



    Storytelling in marketing has always been crucial. After all, as humans, we’re programmed to remember stories more than facts. 



    So, how do you tell a business-related story well?



    To learn how to strengthen your brand storytelling muscles, there’s no one better to consult than Ron Ploof. 



    Ron is the author of Edison Effect: Success Strategies for the Information Age.



    He also develops tools that help you with your brand storytelling. His The StoryHow™ PitchDeck has some great tips on developing persuasive storytelling that converts awareness into purchase consideration. 



    4 keys of brand storytelling in B2B markets



    The art of storytelling marketing boils down to 4 essential keys. For better B2B lead generation, you should: 



    1. Use proverbs



    In a B2B market, building relationships with customers early and often -- before they are in a buying mindset -- is important. 



    Let’s turn that into a proverb: “Purchasing decisions are best before budgets.” 



    Proverbs make your brand memorable. 



    To make your own, you can do a Google search for existing proverbs, and create derivatives of them.



    For example: “A spoonful of story helps the data go down.” 



    Did you recite that in a sing-song voice in your head? That’s the power of storytelling.



    2. Use persuasive selling techniques



    Customers won’t buy your product just because you are the biggest company in your market. You need to use persuasive sales enablement techniques. 



    Persuasive selling helps people see their needs in full color and shows how your product or service is the best thing for those needs. 



    In the words of Aristotle: “In order to persuade...you need logos, pathos, and ethos.” 



    Logos = logic, factsEthos = credibility, ethicsPathos = passion



    Customers don’t buy on facts alone. In fact, deciding which products or services to purchase -- even in the B2B world -- is often driven by emotion. 



    You may be working with enterprise accounts, but you are still working with people. And people buy based on emotion, only then justifying that purchase with logic. 



    So, the core focus of business storytelling should be forming an emotional connection with the reader.



    3. Match the message to the media



    Having a great message isn’t enough. You need to match your message to the right form of media.



    Practice brand storytelling with short blog posts. 



    Then, if the customer connects with that message, turn the post into a whitepaper or a longer-form ebook. 



    If the story could be told in a visual format, use video. 



    Think about which format or medium will give the story the most impact and lasting power in the minds of your customers.



    4. Make your customer the hero



    First, you need to find a story that resonates with your ideal customer. 



    Then, you can worry about where it fits into the marketing funnel. 



    Ask yourself: 

    46 min
  • How to Improve the B2B Lead Qualification Process in Niche Markets
    One of the biggest challenges when it comes to B2B lead generation is increasing lead quantity without compromising lead quality. 



    In the B2B growth marketing world, marketers of niche products and services simply don’t have a big pool of potential customers to draw from.



    Which is why the golden rule of niche marketing strategy is marketing early and often. 



    The idea is to build awareness through B2B content marketing before the customer shops. But what happens all too often, is marketing hands the lead over to sales before it’s qualified, and the prospect bounces.



    “We all want a seamless customer experience. Yet our companies are full of interdepartmental seams. If you want to know how to improve the customer experience, stop handing leads off from one department to another,” says Roderick Jefferson when he answered the question, “what is sales enablement?” in a previous interview.



    So deciding when, why, and how to move a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is tricky business. If you’re a sales development rep, you must take the time to double-confirm that they’re qualified and ready to hear from a sales person.



    To solve for not just more, but better, leads, I sat down with Greg Reeder, Director of Marketing at SAP National Security Services. Working in a niche market -- the US government sector -- he had plenty of smart insights on how to improve the B2B lead qualification process. And his insights are transferrable to any sector. 



    3 ways to improve your lead qualification methods



    At its core, lead gen is all about understanding your customer. The better you are able to do that, the less time you’ll spend having the wrong conversations -- or missing out altogether on the ones you should be having.



    For B2B marketers in a finite market, taking a few extra steps to build a reliable lead qualification process is the easiest way to increase conversion rates. 



    If you want to learn how to generate leads, here’s the most important thing I can tell you:



    Leads x Conversion Rate = Revenue



    Nothing has a more direct impact on the bottom line than the number of leads you generate and the percentage of them that you close.



    1. Audit your current lead gen process 



    Take a look at your current leads. Are they:




    A real person with the correct contact info so your sales team can easily get in touch? To enrich lead data, check out services like ClearBit, Datanyze, and LeadGenius to help round out customer records and fill in missing data fields.



    Genuinely interested in what you have to offer? If there’s not interest, and you qualify the lead to be contacted by your SDRs or sales people, your team is going to lose confidence in lead quality across the board.



    Experiencing a problem or challenge your company can solve? In smaller B2B markets, you can use problem-solution oriented content marketing campaigns to build visibility and credibility.




    If you can confidently check all these boxes, your leads are qualified. If you can’t, though, your lead qualification tools and techniques are not effectively optimized.



    Your team must be able to answer all of the leads’ questions. To do this, you may need to...



    2. Work on your sales scripts



    ...and ask better questions!



    Your team needs to intimately understand the customers’ needs and challenges and be well-versed on how the different benefits and features of your product or service c...
    35 min
  • Is the Skyscraper SEO Technique Dead?
    If you were to ask a room of digital marketing consultants, “What’s the best plan for creating content for startups?” the overwhelming majority of them would swear by the skyscraper blog post strategy.



    I’ll give you a hard and fast definition of the skyscraper technique deeper in this article, but from a big picture standpoint, it’s essentially about overwhelming the reader with an encyclopedia-style article that covers everything under the sun related to a search term.



    It’s a significant time commitment, because you have to check what’s currently ranking and out do it. And, given the time constraints startups are under, most of them take one look and give up before they even get started.



    But what if there was an alternative to earning your search ranking without having to produce giant guides? What if, instead of beating the top posts by word count, content agencies a more Spartan approach and win with simplicity and elegance instead?




    https://youtu.be/qjI7dEcF2mI




    If we are taking a customer-first approach and making the searcher’s experience the top priority, then serving up dense copy blocks that provoke a TLDR (too long didn’t read) response often doesn’t align.



    And why would Google simply default to rewarding the longest post, when a shorter, more succinct post may give the reader exactly what they’re looking for, in less time?



    This idea of matching the intent of the query (ie: how it can best serve the person who typed the phrase into Google) is the topic of this article, podcast, and corresponding video. 



    I’m not suggesting SEO, organic content marketing and the skyscraper technique aren’t still effective approaches to content for startups. 



    But, as you’ll discover after this summary of my talk with Nigel Stevens, Founder of Organic Growth Marketing, they’re no longer the only viable way to secure a top ranking in the modern world of B2B content marketing. 



    Why SEO and organic content are important



    SEO and content are two sides of the same coin. 



    Search engine optimization helps your business get found in a Google search.



    And content is the vehicle you use to differentiate yourself and be seen by the Google algorithm. Without content, there’s nothing for Google to index and return to searchers.



    “When you look up anything in Google (the results below the paid part…), my job is to propel companies to the top of those listings for the type of queries that align to their customer’s journey,” explained Nigel.  



    SEO can also be broken into two categories:



    Foundational: If someone is looking for you, can they find you?This is really about brand search. If I’m doing business with you already, or trying to check you out online, will you show up when I search your brand name and services? 



    Going a little deeper, do you have a knowledge graph Panel? Can I see your tweets? What about links to your social media profiles? All these things reinforce the level of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness people have when they evaluate you.



    Growth: This involves creative content to connect with customers across multiple touchpoints. 



    Growth-based SEO is all about those “know, like, and trust” factors of marketing. Repetition and visibility helps people get to know you, then they become familiar, and begin to like you. And, over time, they will start to trust the thing, person, or brand that has become so familiar.



    You could say that repetition and visibility are what drives sales in B...
    59 min
  • What is Sales Enablement? Breaking Down Barriers Between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success
    What is sales enablement? Ask 10 people and get 12 different answers.



    In short, great sales enablement should help break down barriers within your organization, allowing sales and marketing to align against shared KPIs.



    In theory, that sounds great, but in practice, it doesn’t always happen. At least not as smoothly as we’d like. 



    To get some insights into what successful sales enablement does - and doesn’t - look like in business, I spoke to Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associate, a global sales enablement consulting firm.



    You can listen to our discussion at the top of this post. But here’s what I learned from our discussion.



    What is sales enablement, and how does it help your company? 



    To define sales enablement, you must first understand what it is NOT.



    A sales enablement team is not the IT department. But they don’t report to the sales department, either. 



    Sales enablement teams work for the customer and with sales to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard.



    Think of it like this: in order to make a beautiful piece of music, an orchestra needs a conductor. 



    Sales enablement is like the conductor of your company. 



    They talk to marketing, HR, sales -- anyone who controls a touchpoint in the customer journey -- and make sure everyone is on the same page so they come together in harmony. 



    So what does it look like when the instruments are out of synch?



    The most common scenario is when your marketing team is bringing in lots of leads, but your sales team can’t close them.



    There is a disconnect. 



    More likely than not, that disconnect is happening because the individual teams at your organization aren’t aligned on the KPIs.



    Marketing is measuring leads in, while sales is measuring deals done. Both need to be focused on the same metrics. That’s called alignment.



    This is a common problem that sales enablement teams can help solve by uniting teams against common goals.



    3 ways sales and marketing teams can put the customer first



    When engaging potential customers, we normally focus on three things: key differentiation, competitive advantage, and business value. 



    Companies are usually great at the first two.



    But customers really only care about the last one: business value. 



    In order to (re)connect with your customer, your sales enablement people work to inspire your sales and marketing teams to remember these three things: 



    Be genuinely curious - During the discovering qualification phase, you are laying the foundation for your relationship with the customer. Make that foundation rock solid.



    Understand what is important to the individual - You can help move your customer’s career forward. Understand your impact on the person you are speaking to, not just their business. And use deep empathy to show them you understand their problems.



    Articulate how you will help them - You must help your customer do one of two things - increase productivity or decrease pain. At the end of the day, it all boils down to one of these two things.



    Conclusion



    It’s time for your sales and marketing teams to align on goals and focus on how they can help the customer. 



    For those engaged in complex sales with extended sales cycles, examine the B2B customer journey.


    39 min
  • When Mapping the B2B Customer Journey, Your Mission Given is Data-Driven
    You wouldn’t expect to arrive at your destination without following directions. So why would anyone invest in B2B digital marketing without a roadmap?



    The reason so many fall short when it comes to data-driven marketing is they lack direction. And social media engagement, website usage, email marketing data are the digital breadcrumbs you use to find your way.



    In B2B customer journey mapping, your first order of business is making sure you’re accurately tracking how people consume your data. If you’re using a service like Shopify, that means you need to track sessions across subdomains in the same account to measure the path visitors take between your website and your Shopify subdomain as one session.



    It also means you should be using Google Tag Manager to run Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Hotjar in your domain and subdomain. That way, you can track the path to purchase, regardless of how it transpires.



    If you want to ensure you’re getting the absolute most out of the data you are collecting, you’re in the right place. 



    Thanks to my friend John Wall, a partner at Trust Insights, I will break down what data-driven marketing is, how machine learning may or may not influence the path to purchase, and how you can use data to create a B2B customer journey that drives sales. 



    Or you can listen to my interview at the top of this post and hear it from him.



    Me and John Wall podcasting at a marketing conference in Palo Alto.



    A quick lesson on data-driven marketing



    What is data-driven marketing? Data-driven marketing is a method that uses data from customer interactions to:




    Enhance the customer experience, which basically means making it easier for people to get what they need from your website. Online, ease-of-use drives adoption.



    Optimize marketing performance, which is focusing on how quick your site loads on desktop and mobile. Google penalizes sites that load slowly, so it’s important to make sure that’s not getting in your way.



    And increasing revenue, which is about targeting the right customer, in the right place, at the right time. This is sometimes called a target audience, which is a kind of tacky expression, since it plays off a hunting metaphor. SimilarWeb and Talkwalker are tools you can use to find customer-rich environments.




    “Data can show which programs are the most successful...and what terms are trending at what times so that you can time your content and your advertising to take advantage of it,” says John Wall.



    It is worth noting, though, that the amount of data you have at your disposal can vary. 



    With small B2B companies, you may not have enough content creative or traffic to collect a lot of data. Larger scale companies and most B2C brands are using machine learning to find insights, but that requires a big enough data set to be statistically relevant. Small companies can accelerate the acquisition of user data by buying traffic through paid media.



    And we’re only just beginning to integrate data from the internet of things, which are devices with GPS tracking that are tethered to the web.



    In his best-selling book AI Superpowers, former Google China President Kai Fu-Lee writes, “Smart Finance’s deep learning algorithms don't just work too obvious metrics, like how much money is in your WeChat wallet. Instead, it derives predictive power   from data points that would seem irrelevant to a human loan officer. For instance, it considers the speed at which you typed your date of birth, how much battery power is left on your phone,
    56 min
  • What You Need to Know About Data Privacy Laws, GDPR & CCPA Compliance Requirements
    If you’re marketing to a variety of online audiences, you’ve probably heard the term GDPR by now.



    But what is GDPR? 



    What’s CCPA? 



    And how do they impact you and your digital marketing team?



    Digital compliance is something that often gets overlooked. But it shouldn’t.



    Fines and penalties, while rare, could put you out of business if regulators decide to make an example out of you.



    To help you understand your GDPR and CCPA compliance requirements, I got together with Robert Freund, an experienced advertising attorney. 



    It’s his job to help you avoid business mishaps. And he shared some helpful insights about which data privacy laws apply to you, how to update your marketing, and when this all went into effect.



    What is GDPR? 



    GDPR was created by the EU to protect consumer privacy rights. 



    It is intended to help consumers understand:



    What personal information businesses are collectingHow their information is usedHow to opt-out of data collection



    If you have your own website, in order to be compliant, you may need to update your privacy policy. And if you have a separate social media policy, you may need to update that as well.



    “It’s about updating your privacy policy...putting information about how you are using data and what you are collecting in front of the consumer,” said Robert.



    This includes creating a cookie pop-up to let consumers opt-out of data collection if they choose.  Google ended cookie support recently.



    But, why does this matter to US companies? 



    If you are a US business with EU customers -- or it’s even remotely possible that someone from Europe may find their way to your website -- you should be following GDPR rules when it comes to data privacy and disclosure.



    “Even if you aren’t physically in Europe, the way the rule is written, it still applies to you,” said Robert. 



    What is CCPA?



    The California Consumer Privacy Act is California’s version of the GDPR, which went into effect on January 1st, 2020. 



    You will be subject to the CCPA if you collect data from California residents and:



    Exceed $25 million in gross annual revenue...



    OR



    ...obtain personal information from 50,000 or more California residents per year...



    OR 



    ...50% or more of your annual revenue comes from selling the personal information of California residents. 



    “If you’re a small business that’s not located in California, you still have to figure out if California residents are visiting your website,” Robert clarified.



    If so, you are subject to the law and should be doing everything in your power to meet CCPA compliance requirements.



    6 best practices for complying with CCPA privacy laws



    Remember, you should be consulting with a professional attorney in your jurisdiction to ensure you are doing the following things correctly. This is not legal advice. But getting compliant may include these steps:



    Updating your privacy policyUpdating your website policyAuditing what data you are collecting (and how)Having a plan in case of a data breachGiving consumers a very clear opt-out optionHaving disclosure guidelines in your social media agreements



    “If somebody connected or employed by your brand is going to be talking about it online,
    52 min
  • How to Improve the Customer Experience: CX Tips from Amazon’s Darren Krape
    Are you losing potential customers because of bad user experience?You can have the greatest product ever, but if the user experience is poor, you’ll lose out on sales. 



    To help you know how to improve the customer experience on your site, I interviewed an expert on the matter, Darren Krape, Senior UX Designer at Amazon.



    I meet Darren when I led a seminar on Digital Diplomacy at the Dept. of State and he was a guest speaker. He had played a critical role in assisting the US Embassy in Cairo with digital communications and is an expert on social media and the Arab Spring.



    Darren Krape presenting to senior Foreign Service Officers in my 2-Day Digital Diplomacy Seminar at the Foreign Service Institute just outside DC.



    But now, he works on user experience design at Amazon. 



    In a world where there’s no data like more data, Amazon is an e-commerce gold standard, having optimized their user experience against terabytes of data about how people use their site.



    Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash



    At Amazon, the CX team certainly knows that, in order to pull in more sales, you need not only good marketing, but a rock-solid user interface, and ease-of-use.



    As you dig more into your conversion funnel, it becomes clear that UX is the customer journey. It is where branding, design, usability, and function come together or collide.



    So, before you launch a product, test. Test different versions of the same page and see which one converts better. Swap out calls to action text, buttons colors, images, and headlines. 



    “If you have a user test with 5 or 6 people and 3 of them struggle with it, it’s pretty clear evidence that that particular thing needs to be fixed,” said Darren.



    Narrow down what is or is not an issue. It's as important for Amazon as it for those building a B2B customer journey. 



    There are many reasons people will choose one product over another. But if your potential customers are consistently going to the competition, it may be time to learn how to improve the customer experience by decreasing any friction in the buyer journey.



    How to improve your customer experience



    Creating the least amount of friction as possible at each stage of the marketing funnel is the secret to a seamless customer journey. It’s about breaking the process down into a bunch of micro conversions.



    “For example, the less information you collect during the sign-on or purchase process, the better. Any additional bit of information is additional friction to the user,” Darren pointed out.



    When trying to get sign-ups, make it easy. All they really need is an email address.If you’re offering a free demo or trial, don’t ask for credit card information upfront. Nothing kills a freemium model quicker than requiring a credit card to sign up. You don’t need a credit card to try Zoom or Slack. B2B growth marketing is about getting customer trials. 







    “The incredible power of free is a valuable tool for distribution and virality,” writes Reid Hoffman in his book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies.



    Once they’re in your system, you can nurture them through email cadences and work to onboard them. 



    In the early stages of Amazon, one friction point was shipping times. 



    “I don’t want to have to wait 7 days for my thing when I can just go down to the local store and get it in 20 minutes,” said Darren.



    After they realized it was a key purchase considerati...
    45 min
  • How to Generate Leads in B2B Marketing with Cision’s David Cardiel
    B2B lead generation can feel like a difficult code to unlock. 



    Fortunately, you’re about to get some ideas on how to generate qualified leads with your B2B content marketing efforts. Here are just a few of the insights I got about B2B growth marketing during a recent chat with David Cardiel, Head of Growth at Cision.



    What is lead generation?



    David Cardiel



    In short, content marketing is how you attract and convert customers who have shown interest in your service. 



    Lead generation is not about buying email lists and spamming people, although a lot of people think it is.



    And it used to be about how well you leveraged paid media to generate interest in your products or services. But technology has really changed the process today. 



    Today, we’re all about AI and data.



    “We can tell you exactly what they’re doing on your website and can help increase the quality and the volume. We can help influence what you want people to be doing there.” 



    5 solutions for lead qualification and successful B2B marketing



    There are more gems in the interview, but these are the tips that really resonated with me. If you’re looking to simplify your lead qualification process, start here:



    1. Categorize your leads



    This doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as easy as:




    Tier 1: Qualified leads: These people are shopping on the website and asking for demos.



    Tier 2: Everyone else: People that come in from events, webinars, chats, etc. 




    2. Take weight off the sales team



    Set your sales team up for success by creating a team of marketing reps who know how to generate leads for B2B companies and who can qualify those inbound leads.



    Set up a 5-minute Service Level Agreement (SLA) for outreach with a scoring model that helps the team see who has the highest propensity to convert.



    3. Personalize your marketing



    “How are we going to speak the language of nonprofits, high-tech...travel and tourism?” David asks. 



    You can do it, but you probably shouldn’t try to cover all the bases at the same time. 



    Structure your one-to-many campaign down to a one-to-few or one-to-one approach. Take the time to create a different tactic for each sector and you’ll find yourself generating more - and more qualified leads.



    4. Timing is everything



    Know the seasonality of things. B2B brands probably have a longer runway, but, in retail, there is a small window for marketing: 



    “We know we’ve got to kick off our retail campaigning in late May/early June…really after September, you’re not gonna get a hold of them. They’re too busy in the retail industry.”



    It’s important to time your marketing based on the busy seasons for each sector. 



    5. Monitor your social media 



    Look at who is sharing or re-tweeting your content. 



    “Are they coming back to your site through the links that you put out there? Can you track them appropriately?” 



    They should be treated like a potential buyer. Make sure you have a system in place to tag, monitor and segment this activity. 



    Wrapping up my thoughts on how to generate leads



    With a dedicated marketing rep team, you can gather information on qualified leads to take your business to the next level. 



    53 min

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