Brand and Capture

Using Inbound Marketing to Capture B2B Sales Leads

Inbound marketing has changed not only the way businesses interact with their customers but the way they interact with each other. If you pay attention to your marketing stats, you're likely to discover a dramatic drop in the cost-benefit ratio of the "old reliable" marketing techniques you've used for years. Old school marketing techniques (now called outbound marketing) such as tradeshows, cold-calls, print advertising and direct mail no longer produce the lead generation results they used to. In today's fast-paced business world of instant communication, those old reliables just aren't reliable any more. New inbound marketing techniques that make use of popular social medial marketing tools are where the action's at!

The Internet has changed business-to-business (B2B) communication and interaction. Today, more than 90% of B2B buyers begin the purchasing process online. Business buyers are turning to the Internet first to research companies and products and place their orders. Business sellers are responding by centering their marketing efforts on inbound marketing techniques such as well-designed websites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and interactive web info and order forms. 

Inbound marketing tools have the substantial benefit of speeding up the entire purchasing cycle from lead generation to final sale. And not only is the cycle spinning faster, increasing opportunities to boost sales, but inbound marketing is generating a higher volume of leads from more motivated potential customers. The ease and speed with which potential B2B customers can now request information about a product or service (via Twitter, for example) and receive a response is forcing businesses to embrace inbound marketing techniques.

B2B purchasers no longer rely on sellers for research information about a company or its products; they're doing their research online at their own convenience. Potential business purchasers are no longer content to wait for a catalog to arrive via snail mail; they want you to tweet them a link to the online catalog on your website. They don't want to spend hours on the phone responding to unsolicited cold calls; they want to access your website or Facebook page, request the specific information they want and place their order.

Today, the speed of inbound marketing communications is overwhelming comparatively slow and increasingly passe outbound marketing tools. Who wants to limp along with the snails when they can run with the cheetahs?

Are you ready to get with the B2B program?

Photo credit: paulamarttila

Call to Action, the Key to Lead Capture and Conversion

Call to action buttons are graphics are essential elements in an effective business website. A call to action is the graphic or copy that persuades website visitors to take a desired action, whether it's leaving their email address, subscribing to a newsletter or RSS feed or purchasing a product. It doesn't matter how great your offer is or how well-designed your landing page is if you don't convince people to click through. An effective call to action is goal driven and should measurably increase conversion of site traffic to leads and customers.

Steps to Create a Successful Call to Action

1. Clearly define your goal. Is your primary purpose to generate leads or increase product sales or improve brand recognition? Each call to action should have a single goal.
2. Determine what specific action website visitors must take to meet your goal. Your call-to-action should clearly indicate the precise action desired. Do you want visitors to click a link, download an ebook, input their email address? Design your landing page to further entice
3. To measure its success, your call-to-action must be quantifiable. Specifically, you need to know how many click throughs you get from each call to action and how many of those converted (signed up) on the target landing page. From there, you want to quantify how many of those leads ultimately converted into customers.

There are tricks to creating an effective call-to-action that will catch site visitors' attention and compel them to take the desired action. Try these best practices to create powerful calls to action to maximize results:

• Use easily understood graphics in combination with short, simple commands to tell the site visitor what to do. For example, a large button that says "download."
• Use images to capture and direct attention. For example, a bold arrow pointing to what you want the site visitor to do. Photos of people can also be used to direct attention. Make certain the person in the photograph is looking at what you want site visitors to do. Photos in which a person is looking directly at the visitor are less likely to encourage site visitors to act. 
• Use numbers; they're quickly understood and elicit specific actions. If there is a date for a specific event, make sure you include that. If an offer is free, make sure you highlight FREE. This is often the difference maker between a click and no-click.
• Make your call to action clickable to a landing page that is consistent with the call to action offer. For more tips on landing pages, you can review this blog.
• Reinforce your call to action by separating the call from the click. Tell site visitors what you want them to do, then provide a clickable button or link.
• Use bold, contrasting colors to draw the site visitor's eye to the action you want him to take.
• Position call to actions on the first viewable screen and above the fold for best performance. The sooner a visitor's eye encounters your call to action, the more likely they will click through.
• Test a variety of offers, calls to action, page positions and landing pages. Use a scientific approach, like A/B testing, where you try one variation versus another. Measure lead conversions and optimize your calls to action on the based on the most successful combination.

How well do your call to actions perform? Can you measure leads captured by them? We can help with HubSpot software and our call to action design service.

5 Tips for an Effective Landing Page Design

Companies spend considerable time and money generating leads. A wide variety of inbound marketing techniques -- blogs, Facebook, Twitter, white papers, ezines, enewsletters, press releases -- are used to attract potential customers to your website and engage their interest. But attracting leads is only half of the marketing equation. Capturing those leads and then converting them into sales is what puts money in your profit column.

An effective landing page has 5 critical elements:

1. Grabber headline. An attention-grabbing headline pulls in site visitors and entices them to scan your lead capture page. The goal is to engage visitors' emotions on a visceral level. Put your promise in the headline so visitors immediately understand what they'll gain by opting in to your offer and what they'll lose if they don't.
2. Strong offer. The stronger your offer the more likely visitors are to opt in and provide the lead capture information you seek. Tag your offer to the search parameters most likely to land visitors on your capture page. Consider offering a range of items requiring different levels of information sharing with the highest value offers requiring visitors to provide greater levels of contact information. For example, a name and email address might be required to receive your enewsletter; but a downloadable white paper might also require a home address and telephone number.
3. Video hook. Nothing hooks attention like a video. We live in a visual world. A video that starts playing as soon as your lead capture page opens instantly command's the visitor's attention, creating a more personal connection with site visitors.
4. Bullet lists. Lists are easy and fast to read and assimilate. Bullet points distill important information down to its quickly digested essentials. Focus bullets on the two most powerful human motivators: gaining pleasure and fear of loss.
5. Opt-in opportunity. Two types of people visit lead capture pages: rapid responders who want to take immediate action and careful cogitators who need to think it over first. Your lead capture page should provide both a highly visible fast action opt-in button near the top of the page, and a second opt-in opportunity farther down the page for those who need to read more information before providing their contact information. Your should also follow up with captured leads via lead nurturing campaigns - sending out follow up information and offers via e-mail at regular intervals. The idea is to keep people engaged, keep them coming back for more. Your chances of converting these leads to customers go up with each repeat visit.

How effective are your landing pages? We can help.

Photo credit: bulldog1

Tips for Turning Your Blog Into a Lead Capture Engine

Business blogging can be a dynamic way to generate sales leads and a powerful inbound marketing tool, but many companies are not making the most effective use of their blogs. Offering interesting, well-written content that's pertinent to potential customers and presenting that content in a pleasing manner are certainly important. However, if such altruistic externals are the only goals driving your blog; you're missing the key purpose of maintaining a business blog. Certainly, blogs have to attract site visitors and be interesting enough to ensure their return; but the core value of a business blog as an inbound marketing tool lies in its ability to capture sales leads. If your blog exhibits good site traffic but fails to convert that traffic into useful sales leads; you're wasting the time, money and effort that you're investing in your business blog.

How do you use your blog to generate sales leads? By taking a commercial view of your website, blog and other inbound marketing tools. Consider every item available through your website and associated social marketing platforms (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as something for sale in your virtual store. Assign each item a "price tag" based on its value to the consumer. Every time a potential customer "buys" an item, whether it's submitting a response to a blog post, downloading a white paper, viewing a podcast, printing out a coupon or signing up for your company newsletter, he "pays" for the information by providing his contact information. Obviously your "prices" will vary. For example, a visitor will be more apt to provide his mailing address, phone number and email address if he wants to download a buyer's guide or white paper from your website. To respond to a blog post or sign up for your newsletter, he may only be willing to provide his email address.

The point is to entice potential customers to move from a passive to an active relationship with your inbound marketing tools and, by extension, your business. You want your business blog posts to motivate readers to take an action -- click on a white paper link to your website, print a coupon, enter a contest, take a one-question survey -- and in the process divulge their contact information, providing you with useful customer leads.

Does Your Blog Generate Qualified Sales Leads? We can help!

Photo Credit: Kristina B

Blogging is a Key Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Your business blog is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy. Your blog should provide interesting insights into your business - not just what your company is doing, but what's happening in the industry. You can use your blog to establish your leadership in your industry by providing expert commentary and helpful solutions. Visitors will read and subscribe to your blog if they feel it is valuable and not too self-promotional. Remember, it's not a newsletter or a webcam showing your employees working. Nobody cares about that. Your blog is for reaching out to communicate with your market and for building a loyal following with consistently excellent content. Think of your blog as a spider web that helps you capture leads brought in from your social media venues and search engines. A well crafted blog post not only interests readers but also inspires them to post links in social media and sign up for offers on your landing pages.

Why do so many business blogs get sidetracked?

Blogging is hard work and can be quite time consuming. If you're doing it right, your blog is well written and optimized for seo with important keywords. Not every company has a designated person or team capable of writing about their business not only with authority but in an engaging voice. Fewer still have professional seo experts on staff. Even those who have a talent for writing can feel overburdened by the pressure to create blog entries on a regular basis. For blogs to work their marketing magic, new posts should be published at least three times a week, or about every other day. Many business people simply don't have the time or resources -- or continuous flow of ideas -- to maintain the level of commitment successful marketing blogging requires.

Naturally, there are solutions. Many firms are now turning to professional blog writers or inbound marketing agencies to design and manage a comprehensive blogging plan, to provide original content and to optimize each post for search engines. Contracting out inbound marketing, including blogging, allows them to tap into resources and professional expertise most businesses can't afford to employ. Agencies can arrange for professional writers to update and maintain a company's blog site. Ghost writers typically write as staff members and sometimes as the business principal. Contracting out your blogging services allows you to focus on your business while reaping the marketing benefits blogging can provide.

How's your blog performing as an inbound marketing magnet? We can help.

Photo Credit: Mrs Magic.

Is Your Website Design Above or Below the Fold?

One of our web designers brought an interesting blog post to my attention the other day. The article, "The Myth of the Page Fold...", addresses the rule of thumb in web design that if you want visitors to read your content, keep it above the fold. The fold refers to the bottom of your screen. If content is below the fold, you have to scroll down to read it. The authors suggest that their own eye tracking studies reveal that people are willing, even likely, to scroll down as long as there are visual cues above the fold.  In particular, if your website design is uncluttered and naturally flows downward (without horizontal interruptions like bars or solid lines), visitors will happily scroll down to read the rest of the page.

From a usability point of view, it seems that you can opt for fewer, longer web pages and still be in good shape. In fact, designing long-page websites is a hot new trend for 2010. Taken to the extreme, one-page websites are perhaps the hottest trend - here's an elegant example. People are comfortable with blogs and blog sites, and these almost always require you to scroll below the fold. Another point is avoiding interruption. If you require someone to click to get to the next page, you may lose them. If you think about accessibility via smart phones, it also makes sense to design pages that can be read via scrolling, as opposed to clicking a (barely visible) button to get to the next page of content. But the debate is far from over. Here are some pros and cons for below-the-fold website designs:

PROS

• More content on each page - easier to find your content
• More keyword-rich content on each page, possible impact on SEO
• Modern, trendy design
• Similar to blogs and blog sites, people are used to scrolling
• Better for smart phones, easier to find and navigate content
• Less interruption, keep visitor's attention
  

CONS

• Possibly too much content on a page - difficult to focus your visitor into landing pages for lead capture
• Reduced number of indexed pages, possible impact on SEO
• Design may appear to be cluttered or unbalanced
• Too much text can be a turn-off. Need to balance with images, videos and design elements.
• Some people really hate long pages because they remind them of endless sales-pitch landing pages.

What are your criteria for an effective website design?

Do you need a new website design? We have some great ideas for you.

Viral Video, The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Tool

If you missed yesterday's HubSpot classic video, "Foursquare Cops", you probably are alone. It went viral right away, and it's still creating lots of buzz as we speak. By way of a one line review, it's clever, funny and topical. It pushes all the right marketing buttons by making fun of Foursquare, one of the hottest new social media apps, and by showing off HubSpot's creative talent. Is it about inbound marketing? Not specifically, but who cares? The video rocks, and because of that, it spreads like wildfire on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else. But is this kind of viral video success story within reach for you and me? That is the question.

Creating a Viral Video Is Not Easy

Think about what draws you to a video and compells you to refer it to a friend (or millions of them). They're usually funny, original, well-produced and timely. Sometimes they're just lucky, in the sense that someone captured something amazing on video by being in the right place at the right time. More often, they require a great idea, planning, time, people and talent. Few businesses have all of these components in-house, so they hire professionals to get the job done right. The more steps involved, the less spontaneous the video becomes, and spontaneity seems to be a key factor in video popularity. Producing a video can also be expensive and time-consuming. Yes, you can come up with a great video on the cheap, but how many of these attract more fans than your immediate family and friends? As in any other kind of marketing, if the potential for generating new leads outweighs the cost, it's worth a shot.

What can you do to grab some of the viral spotlight for your company?

The best advice I can offer is to round up the most creative people you have and ask them for ideas. Ultimately, you want to foster a creative culture that attracts talent from within as well as from outside your company. Not easy to do. HubSpot is a great example. They look for people with ideas, then they turn them loose. It takes commitment as well. You can't just say, "OK staff, go out and make me a viral video". You have to assign resources and time, or it will never happen. Don't expect to go viral on the first or second try. Again, it's not easy to know what will catch fire and what will fizzle. You have to swing at a few pitches before you understand the pitcher.

What are your plans or experiences with viral video?

Is Your Lead Conversion Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

The biggest frustration many of our clients have is that their sales leads have dwindled within the past year. Their marketing efforts aren't producing enough good qualified leads, so why bother? Some are even doing inbound marketing with all that entails - blogging, social media, seo, landing pages, the works. Still, the leads aren't rolling in yet. What's the problem? In many cases the root cause is simple - there isn't any real incentive for a visitor to sign up and become a lead.

Why Isn't My Offer Attractive Enough to Convert Leads?

1. It's just a discount for something really expensive. If it's for a meal out on the town, sure, discounts work great. Do any of us buy cars because there's a $1500 cash back discount?
2. It requires me to talk to you. Doesn't work. Give me something useful to read about your widget and how it saves peoples lives or lifestyles. Show me great examples of how my neighbors are making money or having fun using it.
3. It's boring. Yeah, I know we all love spec sheets and sales brochures. Come on, you can do better than that. Show me something I haven't seen. Something creative. And don't just do a rap video about your product - that's been done.
4. I don't speak techno. The perfect wrong approach is to cram a ton of detailed info into a download with lots of techno jargon, abbreviations and buzzwords. Into the trash bucket.

OK Then What Does Work?

1. Something With Tangible Value. You might argue that free coffee mugs and T shirts are useless, but a lot of people would disagree with you. Creativity goes a long way here. If you're a computer company, give away a computer. If you're a restaurant, a free meal. Travel company... You get the idea.
2. Not Easy to Get Elsewhere. Give away your secrets to business success or recipes or travel tips. Find out what people want to know and give it to them in a well-crafted download. Don't make it a big advertisement, but it can still be branded.
   
3. Make it Timely - for example create a list of the best gifts guys like just before Christmas.
4. Make it Entertaining. No rap videos for products - I said that already! Do something personal and invite people into your business home. An example might be a walking tour through your business (if that's interesting), or interviews with your employees about how they perceive your industry and clients. Or do the same thing with your clients. The people who may well want to become your clients want to know about you in advance.

The Cornerstone of Your Lead Generation Strategy

Build your lead generation strategy around your offers, not your tools. You hear the word "compelling" used in many marketing blogs for good reason. Think about what compels you to fill out a form and click the submit button. Then create an offer that would work on you, people like you, and people you want as customers.

What offers work best for your lead generation strategy?
 

Lead Conversion and The Social Media Long Tail

I Was a Lead Converted to FreshBooks

Somewhere between The Drudge Report, Alexa, and Mashable, I was poking around on Chris Brogan's blog and found out about FreshBooks.

I happened to be doing some pre-reading as Chris was coming to Cleveland for a speech. I also was looking for a decent, and hopefully free, invoicing solution. I'm a niche sort of guy - I'll take the corner coffee shop over Starbucks (don't read that as me being anti-Starbucks, though), I'll take a Sherpa jacket over a NorthFace fleece and I can tell you I definitely prefer FreshBooks over larger, what I'll refer to as 'corporate,' invoicing software.

FreshBooks, as online invoicing software, has a lot to offer. What converted me into their customer, however, was not their powerful software, but rather the relationship building effort FreshBooks put forth once I registered with their site.

I Registered, and Then It Happened... 

Soon after I signed-up, I received quite an uncommon email from FreshBooks. I'm certainly used to receiving registration confirmations in a standard auto-generated format. Instead, what I received, was an email with the following subject line: "FreshBooks is run by real people."

This email, naturally, caused me pause. If there was a thought bubble caricatured above my head - it would've emphatically stated - "WOW!" Here is a real person emailing me and wanting to learn how he can help me, how he can learn more about what I do. I was impressed. I was hooked

And It Happened Again... 

Additionally, I received a follow up call from Jon Spenceley, Product Zen and Small Business Consultant at Freshbooks. Jon was the same, real, person who initially had sent me the email. Jon simply wanted to have a conversation with me. Very quickly, a need that I had for online invoicing became, from my perspective, a personal relationship with a company, that 1) valued me and 2) wanted to know what I was thinking.

When I Tweeted about Freshbook's multi-currency update - I soon found that Freshbooks was following me on Twitter. I understand this is likely the result of listening software, but coupled with emails and phone calls from real folks, it really supported my engagement with FreshBooks as a company.

This, in a nutshell, is the long tail of social media. It's the social media ecosystem if you will. How many other small businesses are reaching out to their niche markets, using a variety of tools like Twitter, email, and blogs to extend their reach and, more importantly, make their reach more impactful by generating more business?

Read About It, Try It, Become a Customer...Repeat 

It's the social media ecosystem - I read about invoicing software on a social media blog, I try it, and become a customer. Real people from the company reach out to me and want to learn about me and how I use their software. I'm so pleased with the software and the service that now I'm Tweeting and blogging about it. That's how it works - it's earned media. Although I'm a podunk, non-paying customer, the intent and hope is that my unconditional positive regard for FreshBooks, will in a very real sense, pay it forward for FreshBooks.

How many companies are engaged and aware of the social media's long tail and ecosystem like FreshBooks is? I'm not sure, but the power of a happy and engaged customer certainly has a multiplier effect (as does the power of an unhappy customer). All companies, large and small, should realize how powerful this multiplier effect can be.

What other companies are engaged in the social media ecosystem like FreshBooks is? What companies aren't?

Top Strategies for Landing Page Optimization

Landing pages are the turnstiles of your Internet presence. They don't necessarily collect money from your visitors, but they do something even more important. They collect commitments. When people sign up for your stuff, they commit themselves to your care, and they trust that you won't abuse the relationship. Like it or not, visitors now become leads, and it's up to you to nurture the relationship and help it grow into something more meaningful. Ideally, your visitors become loyal customers or at least loyal subscribers to your ideas and updates. That's a lot to ask from a single page. Here are my top tips for landing page optimization.

1. Offer your visitors something they want. Seems simple enough, but do you really know what they want? Try asking them. Best approach - get some of them together and buy them lunch. Ask them what you can do for them and what they would like to see offered on your website.
2. Keep it Simple and Social. Don't put Chapter 1 on the page, just tell them what your offer's about, why they will want it and how to get it. That's all.
3. No distractions. No menu items. No external links. Put one good graphic on the page that helps to explain the "what, why and how" of the offer.
4. Keep the form short. Name and e-mail is all you really need. You'll get the rest later. The more stuff you require, the faster they will bail out.
5. Keep it visible, i.e. above the fold in a typical web browser.
6. Don't assume it's perfect. Try different approaches, layouts, text and titles. Try different colors and graphics. Try publishing them in different places and at different times. Try different offers. Don't assume that people really want any of them. You'll find out. Make sure you track each landing page separately and analyze the results. Go with the approaches that work the best.
7. Build in some way to nurture leads when you get them. It could be as simple as responding via e-mail and asking to set up a call or an online chat. HubSpot has some nice built-in tools for lead nurturing. Here are some more lead nurturing tools available foir small businesses.
8. Celebrate your success! When you contact your leads thank them and let them know you appreciate their interest. Even if no business ever materializes, you now have a resource that can prove invaluable as you work your inbound marketing magic. 

What are your landing pages tips and success stories?