“Anyone who has attended a trade show recently knows exactly how much online has taken over from traditional lead generation methods,” says Malcolm Duckett, VP operations at digital marketing company Magiq. “Although telemarketing may be used to progress a discussion, online has in the last two years become the way to source opportunities.”
In early 2007 online lead generation was still in its infancy, but the speed of its growth since then has been dizzying. Most observers agree that it has been greatly accelerated by the recession, but that it was always going to be popular anyway. This is for two reasons.
Firstly, the Internet is increasingly where business buyers go to research their purchases, and so it can produce an impressive return on investment for marketers. As Carl Robertson, chief marketing officer at telecommunications provider COLT, says, “We have been forced to achieve more with smaller marketing budgets. Our investment in digital marketing has already reduced our acquisition cost per lead from E250 to E33.”
Secondly, those signing off marketing spend are demanding to see evidence of results, and performance is more measurable online. Stan Woods, MD of online lead generation agency Velocity, says, “With the dawn of online lead generation, marketers can know within seconds whether or not a campaign is working. This allows them to optimise campaigns, to score leads for the sales team and to report results accurately.”
He does add, however, that only a small percentage of B2B companies have embraced online lead generation as fully as they could. He puts this down to the fact that it requires a radically new way of working. Some are leading the way, and reaping the benefits. Others need to get to grips with the techniques involved. Over the next decade ignoring online lead generation will not be an option.
OLG: The big six techniques
There are hundreds of ways to generate leads online. However, these are the big six to consider:
1. Natural search
Few serious B2B marketers now fail to optimise their websites for search engines. Stephen Alexander, MD of digital marketing agency First Internet says, “Search engine optimisation (SEO) is appealing because you don’t have to pay for each visit to your site as you do with pay-per-click (PPC).
“However, SEO can be time consuming and achieving first page ranking can be costly due to the professional time it requires. The key to success is focusing on optimising your website for a couple of well-researched key terms rather than diluting the effort by attempting to optimise it for an overly ambitious number of terms.”
2. Paid search
The next step for most B2B marketers is to look into PPC advertising. Alexander continues, “PPC advertising can propel your company to the top of Google’s paid-for listings within minutes. Statistics packages will reveal which key words are working, allowing you to delete redundant key words. It’s possible to set a daily budget and work within its parameters. There are tricks to making PPC provide optimum return on investment. For example, making full use of negative key words helps by filtering out unhelpful and irrelevant traffic to your site which you would have to pay for.”
3. Online advertising
Bryony Thomas, chief clear thinker at Clear Thought Consulting says, “Buying advertising on another website allows you to directly target your audience. You can also get your ads to work much harder for you these days using techniques like video-tagging. This is where you tag parts of the video, so when viewers see something they like they click on it and are redirected straight to further information on that product or service. You can also make sure that your ad links to a highly relevant landing page. However, you have to endure reasonably heavy upfront costs in copy and creative, as well as a high number of eyes on your ads that will go wasted.”
4. Article or content marketing
“Article marketing can be a very powerful technique,” says Thomas. “It involves writing pieces and submitting them to free article websites. As well as demonstrating thought leadership and raising awareness, it also helps to expand your digital footprint, pushing your site up the search engine rankings. Furthermore it can give you content for blogs, which gives you a reason to email people, and provides a library of comment available for press releases, speeches, and even proposals.”
Search, online advertising and article marketing are all useful ways of generating leads online, but without doubt all the buzz at the moment is around social media. “This is the big one in my opinion,” says Thomas. “For one of our clients, Fraudscreen, we recently ran a webinar and white paper campaign, in which 70 per cent of the response was generated through social media. Overall, the campaign was 20 per cent over target for awareness, as measured by suspect data capture. The campaign was able to bring leads in at 24 per cent less than the targeted £-per lead.”
6. Broadcast email
Finally there is email. For much of the past decade this has been the primary online lead generation technique, but there are signs it may be fading in importance. Ed Weatherall, MD of email marketing company Concep admits that response rates for email broadcasts are falling. He reports seeing discounts of up to 30 per cent from list brokers, indicating that the days of mass-mailing lists of email addresses may well be past.
“People mis-used email,” says Weatherall. “They blasted 20,000 addresses to generate three leads. I know people who use their BlackBerries on the way into work to delete the emails they don’t want to see when they get into the office. This is forcing marketers to become more inventive, by for instance piggybacking on someone else’s communications, and so sharing their contacts and reputation.”
Indeed, email is far from finished as a lead generation technique. Creative Direction recently ran a campaign for headset manufacturer Plantronics which generated 1470 SME leads against a target of 1000 for the £86,500 budget and consequently scooped the B2B Marketing Award for best lead generation campaign.
It used pre-opted in ebulletins, online broadcasts, web TV, online display ads, and Google search. The best performing method was the pre-opted in ebulletins, delivering almost half of all leads generated.
