Category Archives: Lead generation

What’s your most effective lead generation tool?

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email marketing petrac marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective lead generation tools

This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s just a question. What’s your most effective lead generation tool?

Of the many functions that we as marketers are involved with I personally believe that lead generation is the single most important activity.

This is the first stage in the sales process and allows us to help the sales team to build the pipeline that will lead to future sales.

So how do we know which is the best tool when there are so many available to us?

The cost of generating the lead is obviously a very important factor in assessing whether it represents good value. However, the cost of acquiring the lead isn’t the only factor to consider. It is also essential that we understand the potential for that lead to convert to a sale. It’s only when we understand both of these factors that we are able to make a proper judgement on whether our lead generation activity represents good value for money.

For the purposes of this post I want to focus on email marketing and explain why I believe it represents one of the best value tools on your kit bag when it comes to trying to generate new leads.

It starts with your list

Your list building activity should be focused on developing a subscriber base that you know has an interest in your products or services. By doing this you are maximising the opportunity for a high conversion rate from your email marketing campaigns.

Another key element in a subscriber list that will add value (sales) is to remember a phrase critical to email marketing success – permission marketing.

Your list is only a valuable resource if your subscribers have opted to receive information on the products and services you are offering.

List building is easy if your focus is on the wrong thing. If your focus is solely to build your list to 10,20,50 thousand subscribers then I can’t imagine your email marketing campaigns will deliver any significant value.

If on the other hand your metrics involve not only the size of your list but also monitor open rates and click through rates then you are building your list with quality subscribers – all of which combines to deliver higher conversion rates.

Understanding specific customer needs

If you’re selling a range of products or services then it’s unlikely that everyone on your list wants to receive the same content.

It’s going to offer a far better return if you send your email marketing campaigns to smaller groups with a specific interest.

All of this information is easy to obtain at the subscription stage – whether that is through a web sign up form, leads from an exhibition or registrations for an event you are hosting.

By focusing on product, service or market specific campaigns you are further increasing the potential for your lead gen activity to convert to a sale.

The delivery mechanism

Loads of great tools out there – Mailchimp, Constant Contact. Dotmailer are just three that spring to mind.

These packages have such a broad range of functionality that it’s difficult to imagine why you would try any other option. They will all manage your lists – new subscriptions and unsubscribes – produce easily digestable reports outlining your key metrics and most importantly help you to optimise your campaigns to ensure maximum open rates and click through rates are achieved.

As well as all this boring (but critical) mechanical stuff they also offer a superb range of email templates from which you can choose. If you have your own design team – that’s no problem either as you can create your own email marketing templates quickly as easily.

In summary..

Email works

This may surprise you given the volume of the stuff that we all seem to receive on a daily basis but if you get your list building strategy right then you will have a very good chance of generating leads and converting sales from your targeted email marketing campaigns.

As trade magazines (eventually) move into the digital arena they are offering expensive email blast campaigns to their large distribution lists. In my experience you can generate the same number, if not more leads at a fraction of the cost if your email marketing activities are organised in the right way.

If you would like some help developing your email marketing strategy – list building, campaign design and delivery – then get in touch:

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How to Diagnose Your Funnel to Create Predictable Growth

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Why wouldn’t you click on a headline that includes the words ‘predictable growth’?

It’s what we’re aiming for every day – a way of optimising the sales funnel so that we are able to confidently predict what our sales numbers will look like in the future.

The article linked below is one of the best I have read on this subject and after reading it you’ll wonder how you didn’t already know this?

Not only does it break the sales funnel down into 3 easily understandable sections – top for traffic, middle for lead conversion and bottom for sales – but it identifies every possible scenario that will help you to identify where the inefficiencies lie within your sales funnel.

Then it only goes and tells you exactly what you should be doing to combat the inefficiencies you have identified.

If you have been baffled by trying to analyse your sales funnel and confused by the thought of how you go about working out where the problem is then I suggest that you read this article. Things will appear a lot more clear afterwards.

How to Diagnose Your Funnel to Create Predictable Growth | Marketing Automations.

Thanks to HubSpot for the original post.

Urgency as the key ingredient in successful marketing strategy execution

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I love targets. They help to define what success looks like but I think there’s a much more valuable function that they perform.

Put simply, the create clarity amongst the noise that our everyday marketing work creates.

We all have so much going on – the event you’re planning, the last minute requests for ad copy from your print and digital media campaigns, the case study you have to write, the product launch piece you need to sign off, the photo shoot for your latest project.

Having a set of clearly defined targets helps to create order from this chaos and allows you to take a look back over your activity and see what impact it is having – how it is contributing to your journey towards delivering on all your key metrics.

But it’s not simply the value of targets that I want to talk about. What I’d like to look at is how we use these targets to drive better performance. While defining the key metrics is a crucial part of this it’s only the first stage in a successful process.

It’s my experience that unless appropriate attention is given to what the evaluation and reporting process looks like the time spent setting targets is wasted time.

Strategy execution sales and marketing by petrac marketing

Urgency is the key ingredient in your sales and marketing strategy

Simply setting your targets is not a job in itself. It is merely an exercise that ensures you will be able to deliver value from your sales & marketing strategy.

In setting up your evaluation and review process there are a variety of issues that need to be addressed and questions that need to be asked.

How often do you review progress against your targets?

The answer to this will be inextricably linked to the sector that you are in. If you’re involved in the fast moving consumer goods sector then it’s not inconceivable that there are daily targets to be reviewed. In the B2B market this review process will usually not be as frequent.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the high value capital equipment market – focusing on the quarrying and mining equipment market. In this, and other high value capex project markets the gestation period for new sales can be very long. As a result, businesses are typically set up for quarterly reporting.

This cascades down to the sales and marketing teams charged with delivering the new sales.

We recently did a bit of analysis of new sales won by month rather than by quarter and the results were very interesting.

In each of the last 3 years the best four months sales figures were in the final month in the quarter. Even more interestingly this remained the case even when the business changed its reporting period with HMRC.

What this suggests is that the pressure to perform, the pressure to deliver the sales target created an urgency across the business. This urgency was seeming to create the environment where our sales team were able to remove all the barriers to purchase that had been in place for the previous 2 months.

So what did we do about this?

The conversations centred around how we could ensure that the sense of urgency from the last month in the quarter was present every month.

If we could do this we would smooth out the dreaded lumps in our new order ledger. This would improve cash flow across the business and ensure that investment planning decisions could be made more comfortably.

What we did was not only extremely effective – but frighteningly simple.

We moved from a quarterly reporting system to a monthly system. The sales and marketing teams had their targets redrawn to show 12 individual monthly targets. This was linked to new commission plans and bonus schemes.

The annual target was no longer one large number but twelve smaller numbers. This helped to create a new environment where a sense of urgency was present every day across every member of the sales team.

Supporting departments providing technical specifications, preparing customer proposals, finalising payment terms were all incentivised the same way to ensure that everyone was working together to deliver the common goal – the new sales at the right margin that would deliver further growth and provide the financial basis on which future growth plans were founded.

The urgency is created by the fact that the maximum amount of time left for you to deliver your next target is 30 days. This led to a considerable development in expertise within the sales and marketing team. Sales and marketing craft developed at breakneck speed because there was now a requirement to understand the customer, understand the obstacles to the deal being done, understand the competition better than they understand themselves.

What were the results?

It won’t come as a surprise that the new strategy and reporting / reward scheme took a large amount of internal selling before it was introduced.

It won’t come as a surprise that it took a while before it started delivering the intended results – but only a short while. After a slow first three months by month 4 the intended results started coming through.

Another important factor is company culture. This system creates a pressure environment. Your people need to thrive in this environment.

This system also requires that sales and marketing does not operate in a silo but that the organisation as a whole recognises the importance of new sales and works in partnership with them to help bring the new sales in.

For me it’s the perfect example of the science of selling and how an understanding of what drives people to succeed will help your business to deliver better results.

If you would like some help with any aspect of your strategy setting or review process then get in touch.

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Dealing with the Digital Skills Gap

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Digital Marketing Strategy Petrac Marketing

Digital marketing is an essential part of the modern marketing mix

With the amount of technology now available and the pace of change it’s never been as challenging for anyone working in marketing to understand all of the channels that are available when trying to get your product or service to market.

This has led to the creation of new Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing roles  – but I can’t help feeling that this is just an abdication of responsibility by those in charge.

Digital is simply a delivery mechanism for all your marketing efforts. There is no digital marketing – it’s just modern marketing.

In an increasing number of organisations there is a recognition that there is a skills gap in relation to digital marketing. However, it’s the response to this problem that I think is focused in the wrong place.

For too many companies and organisations this skills gap is addressed by the creation of a new role within the marketing team – Digital Marketing Executive, Social Media Marketing Executive being two such positions.

I don’t think anyone would argue that digital marketing represents a huge part of the modern marketing mix – so surely there is a requirement that every member of your marketing team is a digital marketer?

When creating the person specifications for all members of your marketing team surely some sort of digital capability must be included in the ‘essential skills’ box?

You wouldn’t employ a software engineer without the relevant qualifications. You wouldn’t employ a engineer without knowing that they had training in the relevant engineering discipline. You wouldn’t employ an accountant who hadn’t had the appropriate training.

The same should apply with your marketing team. Creating separate digital marketing roles is simply abdicating responsibility for digital to a single person in order to avoid having to learn about it yourself.

Digital marketing is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for anyone working in marketing. It’s essential that you have these skills or you will end up being surplus to requirements.

The other side of the same coin is that by skilling yourself up in all things digital you are giving yourself a serious competitive advantage over a lot of other people.

There’s simply no excuse any more – there are shed loads of formal digital qualifications out there and as much online content as you can cope with.

As with anything though the only way to really get it and understand how you can use it to improve your business results is to get involved.

So stop passing the responsibility on to others and embrace the challenge and the opportunity that digital marketing presents.

Get started now – Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing from the Digital Marketing Institute (Ireland and UK)

If you would like some help working out how you can take advantage of digital within your marketing strategy then get in touch.

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Build Your Content Calendar: 3 Easy Steps

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As we enter a New Year I’m sure you’re all thinking about your content marketing calendar for 2015.

There is a great article on the Content Marketing Institute website from October 2013 that offers some great advice. (The article was originally published by Shanna Mallon).

The success of the article for me lies in how simple the process actually is. There are only 3 things that you need to do in order to get you started:

Understand your sales cycle – if there are seasonal variations in your business then set your distribution plan accordingly. Understand when your customers are likely to be looking for your products and make sure you have set a plan in place to distribute relevant information at the right time.

Brainstorm topics and align them to categories – what are the questions that your customers want answered? what problems are your customers having that they would like help solving? what content can you offer that proves that you will be the right choice to do this?

Set your content calendar – Now it’s just about putting the plan in place for what content you produce and when you produce it. The plan should also take account of how your customers like to consume information – technical articles, project case studies, videos, white papers, videos etc. A good content marketing plan will include a mix of all of these (and more) which is tailored to the specific requirements of your customers.

It’s that simple. So stop putting it off and just get started.

You can read the original article from Shanna Mallon at the link below:

Build Your Content Calendar: 3 Easy Steps.

If you would like some help building your content marketing plan or producing your targeted content then get in touch:

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6 web development misconceptions of CEO’s

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Your website project needs careful consideration

An recent article on the Entrepreneur website outlined 6 common misconceptions that CEO’s have about web development.

The article was written by Zach Ferres and while I agree with some of the points he makes there are some others that I think merit a little more discussion.

I think the article starts off on the right note:

Remember the last website project you were involved with – the one that went over budget and missed all the project deadlines that were agreed at the outset – was most likely your fault (by using the term ‘your’ I’m assuming that you were part of the marketing department that was in charge of leading the project within your organisation).

There is no doubt that most website projects are a lot more painful than they need to be. It really is very simple – and with some forward planning and a better understanding of what it is that you are trying to deliver you can avoid all of this pain.

One of the best lines I’ve ever read about web development projects came from a guy at a company called Fathom in Belfast – he said ‘It’s entirely possible for a website to be pretty and pretty awful at the same time.’

Why does this happen? Because too many web development projects are built around what we (the organisation) want to talk about rather than what our customers are actually looking for. I’ve written another post on this very subject called ‘Your website – for you or your customers?’

Anyway, back to the 6 misconceptions that CEO’s have about web development:

1 – Website development is easy

I agree with Zach Ferres here – those not directly involved in the project have very little appreciation for how long the ‘under the bonnet’ development work actually takes. Our role as project leaders for the web development project is to try and build this understanding – break down the project plan into the relevant phases that your development company has given you and highlight the time devoted to the development work.

This is difficult because most CEO’s, other board members and other people in your organisation are just dying to see the big reveal of your new home page design. They care very little about the journey planning element of the website architecture which is essential if the website is going to perform to maximum potential.

My advice – involve them in this stage. Get them involved in understanding who it is that is visiting the site and what they are trying to achieve when they get there. This will help to build an evidence based argument about what content should be on the site and where it should live.

2 – Everyone should be involved

In the original post Zach Ferres believes that the project should only be left to the people doing the work – I’m afraid I disagree. I’ve seen too many website projects fail because the project didn’t have the buy in of people across the organisation.

I believe it’s wrong to assume that only marketing will know what people are looking for when they visit your website – this is not a marketing project.

Your website is a project that should involve as broad a cross-section of people and opinions as you can muster. All of this work should be done at the outset and once all of the intelligence has been gathered then the build process will come together a lot more quickly than without these essential steps.

You will also find the because buy-in now exists across the organisation the final website will be much better received internally when your launch date arrives. This is because the decisions about how to categorise information, how to present information, what calls to action to include were all taken by your development group and were based on evidence.

This avoids subjective opinions on colours, button sizes and the location of information being used as the basis on which people judge your website. The only judging criteria worth considering is the user experience on your website and ultimately the results that it delivers for your business.

3 – Websites are a commodity

I am fully behind Zach on this one – if you want to use free website build templates for your website project you’ve got to accept their limitations. The more customisation you want to be able to introduce to your website, the more likely it is that a custom build is the route you are going to have to take.

4 – Once a site is built it’s done

Your website project doesn’t have a completion date – the end of the development project is marked by your ‘go live’ date. This is only the beginning of the journey to turn your website into a pipeline stuffing machine (or whatever your stated objective is from the website).

5 – Anyone can create a great user experience

While Zach Ferres disagrees with this statement in the original post I’m actually inclined to support the view that anyone can create a great user experience on their website.

The problem is that most people don’t.

But the reason why they don’t is (in my humble opinion) a result of the process that is followed during the web development project.

Too many projects jump straight into defining the various menu options and then deciding what information to house in these silos. Then the marketing department starts writing copy (largely with the aim of hitting all the required keywords).

And all of this is done with no consideration for who will be visiting the site.

Before a line of code is written, a menu option decided on or a word of copy written you need to go right back to the start.

  • Who is it that visits your website?
  • What are they looking for when they get there?
  • How did they get there in the first place?
  • What other sites have they been on before they got to yours?
  • Is this the first time they’ve been to your site or are they a repeat visitor?

Doing an internal workshop with the people in your organisation who interact with customers most regularly will give you some great insights into what content you actually need to look at for your new website.

You can then validate this information by asking some of your customers whether your assumptions are right. This is extremely powerful – it takes the guesswork out of the exercise and gives you confidence, even during the build process that you are building something that will deliver better results for your business.

This is a very simple process – anyone who knows about your business can contribute whether they’ve built a website before or not.

6 – It’s your website so you dictate the design

I’m back to agreeing with Zach again on this one – there are web designers with much better knowledge of what works in relation to web design than you. They will make sure your site follows best practice guidelines which will maximise the potential for your website to deliver for your business.

Once again, ask yourself the question – is your website for you or your customers?

No project should be signed off until it has been tested with real users and feedback taken and acted upon to improve the site experience.

Thanks to Zach Ferres for the original post. I hope you find these observations useful.

If you’re working on a website development project and you’d like some help then get in touch.

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Web Sites – Seven Tips for Creating Credibility for a Marketable Website

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If you’re thinking of embarking on a new website project then a recent article on the Marketing Profs website is worth a read.

There are 7 very simple tips from the author, Daniel Cochran on how to make sure your website is credible.

The 7 tips he gives are summarised below with a link to the full article at the bottom of this post:

1 – Choose a design scheme that says it’s a modern website

2 – Analytics: Make sure you monitor progress by keeping an eye on the figures. Visitors and enquiries are the 2 most important ones (in most cases) but Google analytics is free and will provide you with a wealth of information

3 – No matter how good it looks any car still needs an engine: You won’t see it but the back end stuff is vital to the success of your website. Make sure it’s easy to update with a simple content management system.

4 – The move to mobile: There are such a huge range of access options for people – mobile phones with a whole variety of screen sizes, tablets of all sizes and desktop PC’s and laptops. Responsive design is a must – this will adjust the appearance of your site to take account of the size of the screen on which the user is looking at your website.

5 – Useful, informative an engaging content: Know who you are trying to attract to your website and what you want them to do when they get there. Walk in the shoes of your visitors and understand what questions they want answered. Then build your content to deliver this.

6 – Social media is your friend: Google will take a while to index your site so make sure you share your content with your social media network to ensure your message is spread as widely as possible.

7 – Conversions are important but not the entire game: The real measure of success comes from the enquiries you generate that you then convert into new business. But this will take a while to happen so make sure you know what success looks like until this happens – more social followers, better search engine results, getting great feedback on how your can improve your site.

Here’s the original article on the Marketing Profs website – it’s worth subscribing for regular updates across the whole range of marketing activity.

Web Sites – Seven Tips for Creating Credibility for a Marketable Website : MarketingProfs Article.

If you’re embarking on a website project get in touch and we can talk about how I can help you with all of these tips.

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