Intelligent Lead Generation

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Intelligent Lead Generation

Todays marketing requires engaging

audiences who are strongly connected

in fundamentally new ways.

2009 HiveMind Marketing, Inc.


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Introduction ..................................................................3

1. Nurture Valuable B2B Leads .....................................5

2. Align Sales and Marketing ........................................7

3. Make Your Website Come Alive.................................9

4. Exploit Social Networking Opportunities ...............12

5. Measure Everything ................................................14

About HiveMind Marketing, Inc. ..................................18

Table of Contents

HiveMind Marketing, Inc. 1724 Alberta Avenue San Jose, CA 95125 T:408.266.3162 E:

[email protected]


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Introduction

The rapid proliferation of media for communicating with customers traditional media as well as the web, guerrilla marketing, email

marketing, social networking, podcasting, blogs, etc. has created

an abundance of marketing opportunities. But todays marketing

requires engaging audiences that are connected in fundamentally

new ways.

Audiences today read blogs. They use RSS feeds and Google Alerts to stay in contact with minimal

effort. They join social networks to afrm their bonds. They pass along information about themselves

and about others. They have conversations about your products and services, your company, your

services, your support, your pricing, and more.

This is a fundamentally different scenario where the audience has more control than ever before. And

that control is only going to increase. Marketers who remain on the outside spouting the same old sales

pitches will be ignored, abandoned, even ridiculed. And there is no fast, easy entry point to exploit.

You cant force your way into this audience, even using new techniques like blogs. In fact, Forrester

Research recently reported that only 16% of people surveyed said they trust corporate blogs. That

makes corporate blogs the lowest-rated source of reliable information among the 18 categories For-

rester rated lower even than personal blogs.

Understanding the Hivemind

To be successful requires shifting your perceptions about the nature of the audience youre trying to

reach. We call todays audience a hivemind. It is an intelligent, collective consciousness that acts

independently, connects with other like-minded individuals spontaneously, cant be controlled, and has

signicant impact on your companys brand and ultimate success in the marketplace.

Engaging the hivemind requires a dramatically different approach to all aspects of marketing. Market-

ing to the hivemind isnt something that can be done from the outside. You cant blast them with ads,

spam them with emails, ll their mailboxes with junk mail, disrupt their work with cold-calls, interrupt



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Todays hivemind audience

is an intelligent, collective

consciousness that acts

independently, connects with

other like-minded individuals

spontaneously, cant be

controlled, and has signicantimpact on your companys

brand and ultimate success in

the marketplace.


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their TV programs with commercials, or expect them to read the canned sales pitch on your static

website. It simply doesnt work.

You have to understand and relate to the hivemind as people, rather than prospects. You need to supply

information with the purpose of helping them, rather than selling them. You must engage them about

topical issues that matter to them. You have to put aside your sales, marketing and business agenda,

and trust that your transparency will engender sympathy trust and support.

The Fundamentals of Intelligent Lead Generation

Intelligent Lead Generation, based on engaging the hivemind, requires a fundamental rethinking and

rebuilding of traditional marketing strategies. This whitepaper looks at how this perspective affects

your day-to-day efforts to generate and nurture leads.


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1: Nurture Valuable B2B Leads

The major challenge in Intelligent Lead Generation is understanding

whats important to the hivemind. For most B2B products, services

and solutions, legitimate leads require serious conversation.

Names gathered from trade shows or free webinar registrations often amount to little. Breaking down

the barriers to serious conversation with the right audience is extremely difcult in an environment

where time is the most precious resource.

Gone are the days when you could saturate the entire market with advertising and direct mail. In B2B

marketing, scores of people are involved in the purchasing cycle: from manufacturing managers, IT

professionals, and purchasing agents to vice presidents and C-level ofcers. Team-buying initiatives

have created empowered armies of evaluators that put your product or service under a microscope.

Who are these decision makers? Who are the key inuencers? Where do they hang out?


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Information that Informs

Keeping in mind the nature of your audience, lead nurturing is more important than ever. Valuable

longer-term B2B leads must be nurtured at critical points in their decision-making process with

compelling, interactive, just-in-time messaging designed to help potential customers clarify their

thinking one step at a time. To get started, ask yourself:

How do we best deliver messages to the people who will inuence or make the nal buying

decisions?

How do we stay in touch with our audience as they move through their consideration and

buying processes?

How can we communicate in a way that addresses the audiences issues and reduces the

perceived risk of buying from our company?

What can we offer that will engage the audience when they are ready to move forward with

their buying processes?

Building a Sales-winning Relationship

To assist the education of your audience, create marketing programs that compel people to activelyseek your company out in search of further insight, ideas, and solutions.

For example, you might structure a series of ongoing communications by mail, email or phone

designed to keep pace with your audiences information needs. Multiple offers that appeal to

audience members at all stages of the buying process are essential. For example, if prospective

customers are early in the buying process, they are more receptive to offers for free information in

the form of how-to guides, white papers or email newsletters.

As your audience moves further along in the buying process, appropriate offers may include those

that require a higher level of interest or commitment, such as webinar invitations, demonstrations,

checklists and other decision-making tools.

Finally, as your audience approaches being ready to buy, they may be more receptive to longer, in-

depth seminars; needs assessments; or receiving a proposal or quotation.

To assist the education of your

audience, create marketing

programs that compel people

to actively seek your company

out in search of further insight,

ideas, and solutions.


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2: Align Sales and Marketing

Its a fact. Salespeople are paid for winning the race for short-term

sales, usually causing them to focus on the easy sales opportuni-

ties while ignoring the longer-term B2B leads. As a result, nearly

three-quarters of B2B leads that convert into sales are ignored.

To reverse this trend requires patience. Industry experts estimate that only one-quarter of those who

are going to buy do so in the rst six months. Roughly another quarter buy within a 7-to-12-month

period, another quarter within a 13-to-18-month period, and the nal quarter sometime after 18months. Fixing the basic processes within your organization enables you to:

Add accountability or measurability to marketing programs.

Coordinate marketing campaigns with sales efforts.

Break down barriers in the sales process or the hiveminds buying process.


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Develop messages or value propositions for multiple hivemind audiences.

Wrestle with long, complex sales cycles.

Operating without understanding the hivemind nature of your audience limits your organizations

chances for success. A mistimed marketing campaign could actually lengthen your audiences buy-

ing cycle by raising more questions than it answers. However, if the message and timing are right,

the cycle could be reduced dramatically. How do you know if this is a problem in your organization?

Ask yourself if your company exhibits any of the following behaviors:

Sales believes marketing produces low-quality leads. Often, the marketing team is accused of

generating useless leads at trade shows or through unfocused marketing initiatives. The sales

team may not understand the concept of lead nurturing and complain that the contacts being col-

lected are low-level non-decision makers.

Marketing believes that sales wastes good leads. If marketing is throwing leads over the fence to

the sales team, and sales pays no attention to the leads or only cherry-picks the hottest prospects,

the rest of the leads are wasted. There is no agreement as to which leads should be nurtured and

whos responsible for nurturing. What is the point in generating a large volume of high-quality leads

if the sales team cant close due to bandwidth, skill set, or product availability?

Sales and marketing have not dened and agreed on the sales process. There is huge value in

having the marketing team gain an understanding of the sales process. Working collaboratively, bar-

riers can be identied and removed by a joint marketing and sales understanding of the hivemind.

Sales and marketing have not jointly dened the hivemind audiences buying process. Hive-

mind audiences almost never buy according to the sales process you have internally designed for

them to follow. They have their own process, which may include web searches, requests for propos-

als, blog research, peer evaluation, internal sign-offs and other steps which may not be apparent.

Both sales and marketing need to understand and be aware of the hivemind buying process.

Marketing hasnt characterized the entire hivemind. If marketing has only been targeting

technical decision makers, but hasnt developed messaging or tools to address the needs of CEOs or

CFOs who are also part of a big-ticket IT product sale, sales cycles could be derailed prematurely.

Operating without

understanding the hivemind

nature of your audience limits

your organizations chances for

success. A mistimed marketing

campaign could actually

lengthen your audiences

buying cycle by raising more

questions than it answers.


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3: Make Your Web Site Come Alive

Is your web site driving leads and business to your company? Is itreducing the cost of your marketing transactions? Does it project

a global image? Almost every B2B web site we see is an under-

achiever; not fullling its huge potential to deliver leads, reduce

costs, and improve customer satisfaction.

Applying the audience-centric principles of Intelligent Lead Generation, you can transform your

website into a strategic competitive weapon, a living, breathing representative of your company.

Denition

Identifying what a website must do is more difcult than it seems. Thats why there are so many

brochure-ware sites on the Internet. Rather than simply presenting company and product infor-

mation, you need to start with a broader denition and vision that includes:


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Create ctional people

personas to represent your

hivemind audiences. Include:

A picture

Attributes/demographics

(age, sex etc)

Personality

Prole / bio

Needs as a customer

What answers do they

seek

Motivations

Stage in the buying cycle

Audience Identify who your website needs to attract and support. Good websites anticipate who

will be visiting and proactively plan for them.

Search Strategy How will visitors arrive at your site? What pages will they land on? What will they

be looking for? Where will they come from? Make sure that your search strategy focuses on what the

hivemind wants to learn.

Content What fresh content do you have to interest your audience? You not only have to plan for

the launch of the website but for the many months after. You need to generate new case studies,

whitepapers, research reports, press releases, blog entries, product updates, industry overviews,

comparison charts, and more.

Engaging Prospects

Another way to think of audiences is in terms of their needs. Youll have people arriving at your site

at varying stages of their buying cycle. And you need to address each of those stages with informa-

tion and offers appropriate to the questions being asked. You cannot simply cherry-pick C-level

executives and sales-ready leads. If lead generation is the primary goal of your website, you need to

broaden your denition of leads.

Different offers for business and technical decision makers makes obvious sense. But you should

also try to address the needs of information gatherers, inuencers, purchasers, and researchers.

These are all part of the hivemind.

You should also include multiple ways for prospective customers to request assistance or additional

information about your company, and its products or services. These may include providing company

or staff phone numbers, chat functionality, email addresses, landing pages, and downloads.

Personas

A third way to look at your audiences is through personas. You create a ctional person (a persona)

to represent each of your hivemind audiences. Now your marketing campaign can be developed from

a very personal point of view what would Phil think about that? with some real advantages:


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Developing the personas makes you really think about your hivemind audience and what

motivates them.

Seeing your web site from your intended audiences point of view is difcult, but seeing it

from Phils point of view is much easier to do.

It helps target parts of each campaign or website to specic interest groups.

When you can answer each question specically, you can translate those answers to stron -

ger navigation, content, usability, and functionality throughout your website.

Content

People in the hivemind visit websites not to hear your sales pitch but to obtain content, either in the

form of information or services. To keep people interested, your content must be:

Relevant Dont simply tell your story from your perspective. Create content that answers ques-

tions and satises the hivemind.

Fresh The Internet is a dynamic and interactive environment. Users expect up-to-date content.

Well-structured The content must be organized so that people can easily nd what they are

looking for.

Keyword-rich Dont optimize your website after the fact. Determine the keywords for your prod-

ucts, services and company and make certain every content contributor incorporates them into titles

and page headings, as well as articles, product descriptions, and other content.

Dont make the mistake of stufng your website with ller content that has been directly trans-

planted from print. The web is a different animal. Advertising copy seldom provides enough detail.

Brochure copy drags on, assuming the audience will follow a linear progression of information. While

public relations copy forgets to sell. In general, you should be succinct, writing scannable compelling

stories that communicate clear messages that the hivemind cares about.


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4. Exploit Social Networking Opportunities

Social media is all the buzz representing a new low-cost avenue

for engaging the hivemind at a much deeper level than is typically

achieved with traditional advertising and direct response media.

Social media markets are by denition small. This is a difcult concept for many business execu-

tives because marketing has historically focused on messaging to large groups of prospective

customers. For Intelligent Lead Generation, you need to think quality, not quantity.

Where do you begin? Build your framework for social media on the following six key considerations:

Audience Listen and understand your audience and how they communicate/interact on

the social web. What types of social networks, media sharing and assets do they engage?

Objectives Its important to consider both the goals of the company as well as the

audience youre trying to reach. Marketing on the social web is about giving to get. Knowing


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what your hivemind wants is key in reaching your own organizations goals because youre

going to give it to them.

Strategic Plan What approach will you take to meet the needs and interests of your

audience in order to meet your own? Will you engage inuencers, will you energize brand

advocates or will you create demand by offering non-branded resources?

Tactics What social media marketing tactics and corresponding technologies will you

use to implement the plan? There are many to consider, including blogging, microblogging,

social networks, video, forums, blogger relations and outreach.

Tools What specic tools will you use to efciently monitor, communicate, create andpromote social content? WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. While there are many

to consider, dont let the tools dictate the strategy.

Metrics How will you measure success according to the objectives youve identied?

What tools will you use? When will you take benchmark measurements and interval mea-

surements? Are there success metrics you can share with the hivemind?

Blogging

Blogging is a huge topic for B2B corporations. It represents one of the easiest entry points for

corporations and it has received some early press that it might have lead generation value. The

problem is that most corporate blogs are terrible. They are started without a clear understanding of

the objectives, the medium, and the metrics.

What corporations need to understand is that speaking directly to an audience doesnt do you any

good if youre simply mumbling the same old platitudes. Instead, you should be ready to engage with

the hivemind about topical issues that matter. However, its not for the timid. You must take a stand,go out on a limb a little bit, and say something interesting.

Corporate blogging needs to be more genuine and open. In an age where so much is hype, customers

respect and trust companies that provide unvarnished, fresh information. The few businesses that

have bared their souls have found that their transparency engenders sympathy, trust and support.

What specic tools will you

use to efciently monitor,

communicate, create and

promote social content?

WordPress, Facebook, Twitter,

YouTube, etc. While there are

many to consider, dont let the

tools dictate the strategy.


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5. Measure Everything.

You have a website. Its beautiful. Its alive. It offers content that

the hivemind craves. Its the landing area for leads from all your

marketing initiatives. But unless you can actively measure its

effectiveness, youre operating blindly. You cant respond appropri-

ately to changes, build on your success, learn from your mistakes,

uncover hidden motivations, or improve the experience.

Web analytics is a collection of data generated from your website trafc, transactions, server

performance, usability statistics and information collected from website visitors. As part of your

Intelligent Lead Generation program, you need to use web analytics to understand how people from

the hivemind are using your site and how you can enhance their experience.


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Understanding Behaviors

Human activity on websites can be powerful information. As a website owner, you can collect data

to make useful predictions and assumptions. Web analytics can tell you:

How many people are visiting?

Where did they come from?

Were they led there by search engines? If so, what keywords lead them to you?

Were they lead to you by links from other sites?

How often do they return? For what are they returning?

What are they doing? What are they not doing?

How deeply do they dig into your site? Did they visit one page of your site and leave or did

they look around for the information?

How much time are they spending on your site? Do you want them to come, nd what they

need and leave or do you want them to stick around for a while?

Understanding Your Website

Many people say lead generation is a numbers game. But Intelligent Lead Generation isnt depen-

dent on high numbers. Its relies on quality. Which referrals are sending the best trafc versus the

most trafc? Metrics help you understand your conversion ratio which referrals, search phrases,

and pages are bringing in business.

What are your top entry pages? Believe it or not the page that people see most when they enter

your site is not always your home page. Typically, something else pulls them in. Search engines may

direct them to a secondary page a bio, news item or article, for example. This is exactly what youwant!

Landing visitors on the home page is simply forcing them to click again to get to the information

they want. The next trick is to lead people who are not landing on your home page to other important

areas of your site.


isnt dependent on high

numbers. Its relies on quality.

Which referrals are sending

the best trafc versus the

most trafc? Metrics help you

understand your conversion

ratio which referrals, search

phrases, and pages are

bringing in business.


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How many visitors get to action pages and how many act upon them? Action pages represent the

beginning of the sales funnel. They could be download registration pages, check-out pages on an

ecommerce site, or simply contact us pages. Metrics can tell you what percent of people visit anaction page and leave before completing the action. Armed with this information, you can make

adjustments to your action pages. You can make them clearer. You can ask fewer questions. You can

restate the benets of lling out the information.

Usability Studies

Dont guess at how people are using your site actually watch and see how they nd information

and get direct feedback. You might also set up a survey on your site to determine what people like

and dont like. In most cases, a properly executed usability test will uncover two key things:

Areas of confusing navigation. There is no doubt that your web design team knows how

your site navigation functions. But does the new user know this? It is important to realize

that about an hour into designing your project, you have probably lost all perspective on

how the interface appears to others. You need to test and see.

Roadblocks in the ow or delivery of information. Not everyone in your target audience

may know that the e-mail address for the author is at the end of the text or that the pan-

oramic photograph moves when the arrows on either side are clicked. What seems normal

and natural to the designer is not always so with the user. If you discover that 3-out-of-5

people cant nd registration links, you can make a quick change to the site and easily

increase the conversion rate.

Using Web Analytics to Your Advantage

Most small companies install an analytics package and believe their job is done. But Intelligent LeadGeneration is all about continuous improvement. Your hivemind audience is not static. Its changing

all the time. To ensure that your website provides the best experience, you should do the following:

Establish baseline data. Most websites are built with the ability to track this basic

information including number of visits, page views, and referral sources. Basic web analyt-


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ics applications are typically included in your hosting agreement. You should also measure

transactional data, such as the number of orders, registrations, newsletter sign-ups, and

downloads. Measure your stats and then, in a day, week or month, measure again. Compare

your new data to your old data to identify trends.

Measure and change. One of the great things about websites is you can easily make

improvements. Once you have baselines established you can begin to experiment with

making changes and then observing whether the changes have affected user behavior

positive or negative.

Measure and change again. Keep on making changes. To continually improve your

website, you need to continue to measure and change again.


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About HiveMind Marketing, Inc.

Founded by Tom Lauck, a long-time Silicon Valley marketing practitioner, HiveMind Marketing, Inc. is a

different kind of marketing rm that specializes in digital lead generation, helping mid-size organization

manage prospects from cold inquiry through opportunity by integrating advanced lead generation and

social marketing activities into websites and outbound marketing activities.

HiveMind Marketing understands that marketing to the hivemind isnt something that can be done from

the outside. You cant blast them with ads, spam them with emails, ll their mailboxes with junk mail, o

interrupt their TV programs with commercials. It simply doesnt work. You have to engage them...and tha

means understanding their collective consciousness, their hivemind.

HiveMind Marketing strengthens a companys overall sales and marketing effort through a broad range

techniques which may include:

Aligning sales and marketing

Improving the company website

Fine-tuning landing pages

Enhancing search engine results

Automating lead nurturing processes

Building online communities

Strengthening outbound marketing activities

Measuring the results

HiveMind Marketings progressive lead generation methodologies, which increase critical pipeline captu

ow and conversion, are redening the way progressive organizations select business-critical lead-generation resources.

With ofces in San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, HiveMind Marketing, Inc. is primarily focused

on clients in the technology industries. For more information on HiveMind, please visit HiveMindinc.com or

contact us at [email protected].
http://www.hivemindinc.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.hivemindinc.com/

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