In today’s online marketing world, assessing lead value has become a highly complex effort. Empowered by the Internet, buyers have assumed control of the purchasing process. They research product/service options on your Web site, validate their choices in social media, and probably place their orders online. In this Web-enabled environment, determining a prospect’s interest can be a daunting task. So how do you appraise potential lead generation programs to determine lead quality? Today, you must understand the “where, what, and why” behind the lead.

First, “where” did the lead come from? In what context did the prospect find your link? Was it a Google ad, a banner ad on a publication’s Web site, or a text link in an e-newsletter? Context is important because it leads you toward a fundamental tenet of successful B2B lead generation – relevance.

The “what” entails putting yourself in the prospect’s shoes and understanding the motivation behind the contact. Did they fill out a form on your Web site? Did they browse on a third-party site, provide their name and e-mail address, and then the site’s owner filled in the remainder of their personal information from a database and sent it to you? (This happens more than you think!) Or was the prospect’s name presented as a lead after they indicated an interest in a category of products or services? In fact, some Web media will send you a list of so-called “leads” because they recently requested information from your competitor.

The “why” involves evaluating the value proposition that motivated the prospect to click on your link and convert to a lead. Did this action occur because you offered a free trip to Cancun or because they wanted your new white paper on DNA sequencing?

Research tells us that the most qualified leads come from inbound marketing tactics such as organic and paid search, social media, links on news sites and blogs, etc. In these cases, prospects have a need and are actively searching for your types of products and services. In addition, certain outbound tactics – online advertising and e-mail campaigns combined with high-value content incentives, can deliver the same level of quality as inbound marketing leads.

Before you invest in a lead generation program, use this simple “where, what, and why” framework for determining lead quality. In today’s jungle of digital marketing and pay-per-lead programs, all leads are not created equal.

Marketing Sherpa recently released a study of more than 1,000 B2B marketers that analyzed the time span between lead generation and sales conversion. The results illustrated how this buying cycle can range from weeks to over one year. 44% said their sales conversion process took more than 6 months while only 17% said sales required one month or less to close (see figure 1).

In addition, the survey asked about the likelihood a lead would move from one stage of the pipeline to the next. The study found that on average, about four out of 10 leads moved from initial inquiry to being sales ready, and the same ratio of prospects advanced from sales-ready to fully qualified. From this point, only three of ten prospects converted to a sale. That means for every 100 leads that initially enter your pipeline, an average of only 5 will become customers.

The extreme length and complexity of the B2B sales process, coupled with dramatic pipeline erosion, highlight why lead nurturing has become an essential strategy for best-practice B2B marketing departments. Nurturing leads by offering highly relevant content satisfies early-cycle prospects’ information needs, plus helps accelerate their migration through the pipeline to conversion.

B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey 2009
© 2009 Marketing Sherpa

It’s a new world defined by technology and consumer control

• Consumers have complex relationships with the media
• Consumers trust other consumers more than brands
• WOM reigns again
• 3.5 million brand conversations happen every day, all of them in public

B2B purchasing has moved from a seller- to a buyer-controlled process. Search and social media have created much more complex relationships with customers and clients.

Consumers hate most advertising

• Only 5% agree with claims
• 50% say brands don’t live up to advertising promises
• 67% say there is too much advertising

B2B buyers are relying upon peers and opinion leaders to influence and validate their decisions as skepticism grows around product performance.

Adaptive marketing is the new model

• Everything is powered by digital
• Real-time response, as in political advertising, is the future of marketing
• It’s all about pull, not push
• Addressability is here (versioning customization, options)
• Intelligence and analytics will drive everything

Database marketing enables message customization for highly relevant, personalized customer interaction. Web-based technologies permit real-time response for those desiring product/service content. Web-based analytics offer immediate measurement and intelligence gathering.

Media needs to combine paid, owned, and earned

• Paid: for scale, speed, and reach
• Owned: for content, relationships, listening, and co-creation
• Earned:  social, WOM, PR, bloggers, influencers, thought leaders

The B2B media mix is becoming much more complex. Inbound media (i.e. search, blogs, social) is becoming just as important to attract B2B buyers as outbound media (i.e. advertising, e-mail)

Successful marketers will move well beyond campaigns

• Build campaigns, plus platforms
• Stop thinking in terms of audience and think about communities of participants
• Undo unbundling
• Embrace and master new technologies quickly

B2B marketers must begin thinking about strategies, marketing processes, and communities of interest as well as traditional tactics and audiences.

Marketers will look for three things

• Ideas
• Interaction
• Intelligence (analytics)

The B2B agencies of tomorrow must understand and integrate the new marketing technologies and platforms that will drive brand relationships, demand creation, and sales conversion. The application and interpretation of analytics will be critical to ensure business success.

Klein said that performance marketing is the definition of getting measurable return on investment for marketing dollars. “Whichever performance marketing method one chooses to use, whether affiliate marketing, e-mail, search engine marketing, social media, banner advertising, or co-registration, all can be tested with controlled spends in approved environments. That allows campaigns to be optimized in real-time and, as a result, to be scaled profitably with the assurance of ROI,” he said.

Klein also made the following points:

• Getting the campaign started is easy. Typically, the network will provide detailed instructions as to what is needed.
• Good performance networks should also provide the consultative services of an agency whereby they educate advertisers on every facet of online marketing.
• Campaigns should be monitored daily at the beginning. But while a campaign should never be regarded as set-it-and-forget-it, it also shouldn’t need to consume the time of a CMO.

Klein said the demonstrable ROI of performance marketing can be a “scary new world” for marketing executives accustomed to traditional budget planning and justification processes. “Basically, a CMO can buy $10 bills for $5 by getting a guaranteed return that can then be used to scale a campaign even further. If it’s done right, there is a huge payoff - an immediate and easily measurable return on investment for the marketing spend.”

Download the full mThink article.

For CMOs considering performance-based campaigns, TW Networks, a division of Tiziani Whitmyre, Inc., is the first full-service performance network focused solely on the needs of B2B marketers. Its affiliates represent leading online publishers across a broad range of B2B, technology, and life science markets.

• Inbound marketing
• Social media
• Lead nurturing and scoring
• Marketing scorecards
• Budgeting for results

During the coming year, we believe resourceful B2B marketers will embrace these trends in greater numbers as the recovering economy places a new emphasis on growth.

To download the paper, click here.

Tiziani Whitmyre’s B2B clients also have had success using LinkedIn profiles and groups to build brand awareness and peer-to-peer validation. These companies are creating social media teams comprised of thought leaders that post high-value content to their LinkedIn networks as well as to followers on Twitter. It’s clear that social media is here to stay as a brand building resource, and B2B companies should develop plans that integrate these channels with their marketing programs.

For your reference, Website Magazine’s top 10 list of most-visited social media resources for the fourth quarter of 2009 were as follows:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. MySpace
4. Twitter
5. Flickr
6. Photobucket
7. LinkedIn
8. Digg
9. Ning
10. Yelp

• Lead acquisition
• Lead nurturing
• Measurement
• Optimization

B2B companies are demanding easy-to-implement marketing strategies that employ today’s powerful Internet-driven technologies to boost lead generation and accelerate sales conversion in highly measurable ways. The paper explains how best-practice companies have used the process to achieve dramatic results in capturing new prospects and building sales across a wide range of B2B markets. We’ve included two case studies to illustrate the process.

To download the paper, click here.

Inbound marketing is an exciting set of tactics that attracts prospects to your brand and company. This strategy includes Web site search engine optimization, Google Adwords, blogging, social media and networking (LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook) word of mouth (buzz), referrals, and interactive public relations. We call them inbound tactics because they do not target specific audiences with outbound stimuli or offers to generate responses. Prospects tend to find our messages as they search the Web, chat with colleagues, or network online. Brand recognition and acceptance are essential to successful inbound marketing, since the prospect is not directly incented to respond. With inbound marketing, we are joining a conversation, hoping our messaging will be discovered by the broad audience we want to influence. Inserting high-quality content into this discussion can prove highly effective in gaining attention and nurturing those that shape opinions.

Outbound marketing represents the power drill in the B2B tool kit. It includes the advertising (print and online), trade show, e-mail, direct response and traditional PR tactics that typically absorb most of the marketing budget. These vehicles incorporate brand/product messages and offers to heighten awareness and stimulate response. Outbound marketing campaigns are more easily focused on specific audiences and ensure exposure to large numbers of prospects. But this efficiency comes at much higher cost. With an outbound strategy, marketers are buying their way into the dialog, crashing the party with attention-getting messages to generate leads and build brand.

The Benefits
Inbound or outbound marketing? Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The leads generated from inbound marketing tend to be more highly qualified and convert to sales opportunities at dramatically greater rates (10% to 30%) than those from outbound tactics. They also come at lower cost. But outbound campaigns produce larger lead quantities, more consistent response rates, and far more brand impressions — albeit at higher cost.

Both strategies are essential elements of a winning marketing program. The engaging nature of inbound tactics is highly complementary to outbound marketing’s throw weight and firepower. We recommend clients spend from 20% to 30% of their budgets on inbound tactics to leverage the B2B buyers’ new proclivity for search, networking, and dialog.

Forrester’s Global CMO Recession Online Survey echoed this sentiment, revealing that marketing executives are enduring overall budget cuts of over 20% in 2009. The Forrester survey reports that marketing leaders are cutting back on traditional tactics and investing in digital channels such as Web sites, social media, and outbound e-mail campaigns.

But B2B publishers are beginning to take notice. “Penton will never again be overwhelmingly dependent on print advertising as it is unlikely to return to its historical highs,” said Sharon Rowlands, CEO of Penton Media. “Advertisers have so many more choices for their marketing campaigns today, ranging from live to online events, a variety of electronic products, sophisticated direct marketing, etc. Offering the full array of such media will be what will distinguish the B2B winners from the losers in the future.”

One bright spot is in the performance marketing category, where marketers only pay when a desired action is delivered. The Vertical Search Report 2009, published by Econsultancy and Convera, predicts that 78% of advertisers are planning to increase their spending on cost-per-action/acquisition programs this year. Two-thirds said they would increase budgets for cost-per-lead campaigns. Interest in these Internet-based programs is growing rapidly, since they offer little waste and deliver greater efficiency than traditional marketing campaigns.

• The wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions that has swept through the industry has created extreme branding challenges. (My observation is this is true in other B2B markets as well.)
• The deep global recession has forced marketers to search for new cost-effective and measurable forms of lead generation and demand creation
• The rapid introduction of new interactive technologies has overwhelmed many practitioners who are struggling with integrating these new tools into a strategic marketing process

The audience showed particular interest in several elements of our presentation that addressed these issues. Semaphore used an online performance-based advertising strategy to acquire leads in real time at highly cost-effective rates. In addition, they incorporated high-value content to stimulate prospect response. Our experience has shown that combining these two strategies has resulted in the acquisition of qualified leads in greater numbers and at cost-per-lead rates significantly lower than traditional marketing tactics.

Semaphore also embraced a disciplined brand development process that created a new global name and corporate identity. The brand was economically applied and implemented on a global basis and across all marketing initiatives. By coupling today’s highly efficient digital technologies and some unorthodox strategic thinking, launching a B2B brand on $250 per day now becomes a reality.

To request a copy of the Semaphore presentation, click here.