Use marketing leads to create demand and revenue

Gone are the days when marketing leads could be thrown over the wall to sales in the vain hope that they’d be converted to real business. The trick is to generate the best leads from the most cost-effective channels to start with, and then nurture and educate them so you can monitor buyer interest in your products and services throughout their entire journey.

Remember, there is nothing wrong with generating leads. In fact, it is a necessary step in the process. This discussion explores four simple steps to move them forward with the most effective investments and relevant communications, based on your audience response, to accelerate sales.

1. Know the costs
Lead data and lead channels. You are investing in both of them today and may not be aware of the costs. Sure, you know what you spend on online advertising, social media and email or other marketing channels. But do you know the cost of the data that gets entered into your marketing database, or the cost of what’s already there? According to SiriusDecisions, the cost to cleanse a contact record before it enters your marketing database is less than £1; the cost to update it with targeted demographics at the same time is about another £1. Yet, after the contact record enters the database, the cost to update it jumps to nearly £10. Further still, the cost to do nothing to the record over time increases ten-fold to £100. At a time when marketers are held more accountable than ever for their marketing budgets and how they contribute to the bottom line, it is worth the investment of time to truly understand the costs and value of your marketing data. Add to that the hard costs of the channels, creative and production to gain a complete picture of your marketing investments.

2. Before you start something new, evaluate what works best for you today
To reiterate the importance of measurement, and before you begin an entirely new programme that carries its own set of time, resource and technology investments, it is critical to review what you are doing today to see what’s working and what’s not. For example, take a closer look at your top two or three lead driving channels and consider their sources, whether events, industry or topic-specific websites, email campaigns, search or social media. From each of those channels, which sources generate the greatest number of leads? Of those, how many leads from each of those channels convert to sales opportunities? And finally, how many of those opportunities convert to revenue? Based on what you learn from that determines which lead channels should be the input into your nurturing programmes for the leads that do not convert as quickly as others. Likewise, if you learn that either the quantity or quality of a particular channel does not meet your sales goals, invest that portion of your budget elsewhere.

3. Take a holistic approach to demand generation
Consider all of the stakeholders throughout the buyer journey. In the world of B2B, across the majority of markets, the sales cycle is longer and the number of decision makers involved in a purchase is far greater than with most consumer purchases. To address this in a demand generation programme, it is often necessary to develop unique multi-touch communication steps for each segment of the audience. Case in point, a recent client project taught us that C-level executives typically prefer case studies and references in their final decision making stages, whereas IT directors preferred online searching and email communications to support their decisions. Therefore, the demand generation programme content and steps were tailored to each audience so that all decision makers involved received what they needed to move closer to a purchasing decision.

4. Make sure to close the loop and continuously measure results
The best thing about automation and online programmes is that you can quickly see, sometimes even in real-time, what’s working and what needs to be amended. When a channel proves that it can deliver the volume and quality of leads that can be closed by sales, maintain or increase your investment in that channel. However, when a lead source, even if it produces a high volume of leads, does not show acceptance or conversion throughout the nurture process, you can quickly adapt the process to find a new lead source and route the non-performing leads to a different type of nurture programme. The metrics that matter most in closing the demand generation loop include the number of qualified leads that sales accepts and the revenue that they generate for the business.

Join the conversation and share where you are in the demand creation process. What works best for your business? Where do you see the greatest challenges?

 

Related content

Access full article

Propolis logo white

B2B strategies. B2B skills.
B2B growth.

Propolis helps B2B marketers confidently build the right strategies and skills to drive growth and prove their impact.