Generating Leads - Your Monkey
One of the key leadership techniques the military teaches its officers is how to get the monkey off your back.
The Lead Generation MQL Monkey - Is he on Your Back?
What is an MQL monkey on your back?
In the marketing world, it is the constant need to generate marketing qualified leads which will be accepted by sales and moved further down the sales funnel.
This need to generate leads is, indeed, a persistent monkey on your marketing back.
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Generating Marketing Qualified Leads
While working as a SAP Industry Principal, wherein I was tasked with generating marketing qualified leads for a variety of industries, including Retail, Logistics, Professional Services, Aviation, Engineering, Construction & Operations (EC&O), Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO), and Banking, I noticed that, as did my marketing director, that many traditional methods of marketing and lead generation were either completely dead or far less effective than they had been.
Trade Show Results Declining
That is why it was surprising to learn that the 2013 prediction for spending on trade shows for marketing departments over 50 people in size was actually up 17%!
I don't think their monkey will be happy.
You see, lead generation through trade shows is actually down, and has been falling for years.
High Cost Low Return Effort
My personal experience is that they cost a lot for the number of leads delivered, and moreover, very little reuse actually happens. Most importantly, you don't always reach your target audience at these events!
In short, they are not the best way to get the monkey off your back as a marketer.
But just what does it mean to get the monkey off your back anyway. Why should you want to get the monkey off your back, after all, seems like a fairly friendly fellow.
The problem is that he is someone else's problem, and they managed to put it on your shoulders, and you didn't put it back where it belongs.
Now you own it, you must feed it, care for it, and hope it doesn't multiply.
So here is the plan for getting it off your back:
It starts with working with sales to understand your 'buyer persona'.
If they don't know, you will need to return the monkey to them (for a short visit only, I promise), where they can help you define their buyer's persona. Keep in mind, sales will think in terms of ideal customer profile instead of a target audience, while marketing will speak of buyer's persona.
Must Bring These Two Concepts Together
Your sales team, whether a field sales team or a retail sales team, can help you discover just what your buyers are looking for, what sort of questions they are looking for help getting answers to, and how they typically progress through the sales cycle.
Once that is clear, you will next need to allow the monkey back on your shoulders for a while, but now you need to develop content.
Find All the Content in the Company
But this monkey, the content monkey, needs to be on everybody's shoulder in the company, as you will find content everywhere you look in the company, and even or most especially, among your customers.
The warehouse dock chief will know what gets returned and why, the customer service reps will know what sort of questions customers are asking and the executives will have an idea of what the customers are saying to them.
In short, this monkey gets shared. Why all this content, anyway?
Well, as they say, a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush and this case, content you have on-hand is much more useful than content you 'might' develop in the future!
Marketing Content In-Hand is Always Better!
Unfortunately, your monkey is persistent.
You see, the lead generation monkey, the one who wants marketing qualified leads for sales, never sleeps.
That is why your marketing platform works 24X7X365, and why you will use workflow automation to deliver those MQLs to the sales team, who will be glad to babysit your monkey-as long as those MQLs keep on coming.
Search Engine Optimization
All that content has to get found by potential clients in order for marketing to turn them into hot prospects. That's where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes into play. Every piece of content, whether existing content or content that must be developed, has to map to a stage of your marketing and sales funnel.
Content Drives Organic Traffic
Aside from the obvious benefit of generating leads, all of that content, landing pages and blogging effort will, eventually, start to drive organic traffic to your website. More pages, if SEO'd properly, is what Google wants to see.
Develop a Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Strategy
With thorough knowledge of your buyer's persona, sales' ideal customer profile, and a content strategy which includes mapping all your content to the different stages of your marketing funnel, you almost have all the components required to put together winning marketing strategy.
Content Creation and Distribution Plan
In all likelihood, all of the content you found as part of your content audit won't quite be ready to share with the world. In addition, all of the content you identified as needing created, will need to be budgeted for, and produced. If you want to be successful at content marketing, a subset of the larger concept of Inbound Marketing, you'll need to fix this.
Inbound Marketing Triangle
In addition to having the content you need to support your marketing plan, you will also need to develop landing pages, upon which you'll place forms. Behind these forms, you will place the content you are going to be convincing people to download via your copywriting skills.
Blogging Plan - Key Inbound Marketing Execution Skill
Landing pages, by themselves, can attract some traffic, but the Inbound Marketing way generally includes writing comprehensive blogs, whose purpose, aside from informing, educating or entertaining, ultimately is to drive traffic to those landing pages.
Social Media Marketing
While each social media platform is unique, they each can serve as a foundational leg of your Inbound Marketing efforts. With a platform like Hubspot Marketing Hub, you publish your blogs as well as Landing Pages, to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, simultaneously.
Monitor and Analyze Social Media Results
Smart marketers know that monitoring and analyzing your results from every digital channel, including all your social media channels, is a key part of improving your outcomes. Hubspot helps you not only monitor and analyze your social media channels, it also tells you, at the page level, which leads came in from which social media channel. This saves hours of time.
Behavioral Driven SMS Marketing
Using Hubspot's native workflow capabilities and integration into leading SMS providers, you can go from being a mass SMS bombardment specialist to a ninja level SMS guru who sends text messages that people find valuable and most importantly, which generate clicks and leads. Using signals from prospect interactions with your SMS messages, Hubspot allows you to send customized SMS messages based on user behavior. When you are using SMS messaging on a mass scale, with a natively integrated SMS message service provider like Twilio, this is a critical capability unmatched in the market.
Send Contextually Relevant Emails
Hubspot allows you to send highly customized to emails based on context, to each individual recipient as part of an intelligent email marketing approach. That means you can tie your content strategy tightly together with your email strategy.
Google Ads Account
While Inbound Marketers focus on generating organic traffic, they all, according to Hubspot also rely on paid advertising. By far, the largest paid media expenditures go to Google Ads. As it happens, the better your site ranks organically, the better you can get organically ranking landing pages to convert at higher rates using not just Google Ads, but Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Keep Up on the Latest Marketing Trends
Want to know what else marketing is up to this year and some of the tools, techniques and technologies you can use to keep the MQL monkey off your back?
Don't miss our "2013 Marketing Trends and Predictions E-Book".
Of course, we have only covered a couple of the steps required to get the MQL Monkey off your back, in future blogs, we will walk you all the way through the process, and show you how to achieve breakthrough marketing success using the emerging technology of Inbound Marketing.
Thanks
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Attract, Convert, Close, Delight: The Superior Inbound Marketing Strategy
