Tips to Generate Better Lead Quality.

While website traffic has been the most common success metric for B2B marketers in the last several years, a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study conducted late last year suggests the most important content marketing metric these days is sales lead quality. Generating quality leads has always been a goal for B2B marketers and can be an extremely effective way to identify the relevancy of your messaging. But, the more we dig into this concept, the more it looks like lead generation may be the most valuable concept you can use to grow your business.

WHAT’S A LEAD?

Generally speaking, a lead is someone who is likely to value the products or services your company offers based on a set of predetermined characteristics. Some of the characteristics might include:

• Title: The person has a job title that indicates decision-making power in an area relevant to your product or service. In our case, someone with a job title of Director of Marketing might be a better lead than a graphic designer.

• Company size: The characteristics of a small business might fit your unique offerings better than those of an enterprise corporation, or vice versa.

• Industry: Perhaps your products or services are geared toward a specific industry or group of industries.

• Company revenue: You might find the most success working with organizations with a certain annual revenue.

A BETTER WAY TO NURTURE

Cold calling, once the workhorse of the sales process, is beginning to lose its luster. At best, according to sales and marketing expert Toby Marshall, the effectiveness of cold calling has been stagnant over the last five years. At worst, it’s seen a moderate decrease with no sign of making a strong comeback.

While cold calling is still an important part of many organizations’ process (it certainly is for ours), it’s becoming a less effective way to start the conversation.

Lead generation is a prospect-nurturing tactic that’s becoming more and more common, and for good reason. A finely tuned lead generation and qualification practice allows your marketing team, working in tandem with your sales team, to turn distant prospects into a more qualified lead through quality content. This means your sales team can use phone calls to have more meaningful conversations earlier in the sales process instead of trying to warm up cold leads.

WHAT’S A QUALIFIED LEAD?

A qualified lead is someone who has both a desirable profile based on the criteria above AND expressed interest in your organization’s products or services through measurable interaction with your sales and marketing content.

There are two steps to this process:

Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): An individual who meets the criteria above and has engaged with enough top-of-the-funnel content to be considered a prospect and passed to the lead development team.

Sales-qualified lead (SQL): A prospect who meets the criteria of an MQL and has had positive interactions with your lead development team and is ready to be passed along to a salesperson.

How you define an MQL will depend on your company, but for most organizations, it’s the product of measured content interaction. The more content your prospects engage with, the more interested they are in what you offer and the more likely they are to make a purchase down the road.

CONTENT’S ROLE IN LEAD GENERATION

So what does lead generation actually look like? It’s a relatively simple process by which prospects exchange information about themselves (name, title, email, etc.) for valuable content. And if you have an effective way to capture that information, your content really starts working for you.

Take this opportunity to find out what’s really valuable to the lead development and sales teams. They can help you create more relevant content and you can help make their jobs easier.

The reason lead generation and qualification is important is the same reason content marketing has garnered so much attention over the last few years: Providing your prospects with useful, valuable information is an extremely effective way to both establish credibility as a brand and build invaluable trust between you and your audience.

Coincidentally, content marketing is the clear winner when it comes to lead generation tactics. According to the same CMI/ MarketingProfs study, 85 percent of responding B2B marketers placed lead generation as their No. 1 goal for their content marketing practice.

The only place the survey found different priorities were enterprise marketers or “organizations that are taking the first steps of their content marketing program.” And even in those cases, lead generation was still a close second or third.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at five pieces of content and how to turn them into lead-capturing and lead-qualifying machines.

1. AUTOMATED EMAILS
Automated emails do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to lead generation, especially if you’re implementing a marketing automation program. It’s so powerful that 71 percent of B2B companies use email marketing for customer acquisition and 68 percent use it for customer retention, according to Act-On and Gleanster research.

Although it doesn’t take much to sign up for an email newsletter, it’s at least a small indicator someone is interested in your brand and your content. It’s also a good way to nurture your prospects and allows an easy way to communicate directly with your audience.

Automated emails also make the perfect delivery method for all your other content such as new blogs, e-books or even updated pricing pages. One of our very short seven-email drip campaigns features eight additional pieces of content, delivered right to our audience.

Integrate Email Automation with SharpSpring. 

2. E-BOOKS
E-books make an effective content type for lead generation for two reasons:
• You can pack it with useful, in-depth information
 • You can gate it

You can gate an e-book because it typically contains the kind of information a prospect would pay for. PricewaterhouseCoopers actually predicted e-book revenue will reach just over $8.5 billion in 2018.

That’s all well and good. But, for your organization, the most valuable currency for your content isn’t money. It’s info.

For an in-depth e-book, give your audience the option to download it in exchange for their name, email address and perhaps a couple other pieces of information you find useful such as the name of their company and their industry.

If that content is valuable enough, your prospect will happily share some information about themselves in order to access those insights and, in return, you’ll get valuable info about the people who are most interested in what your brand has to say.

3. CASE STUDIES
Case studies can be a real sweet spot for lead generation. They typically take less time to create than an e-book and can indicate an interest not only in what your organization does, but also the kind of results it has generated for others.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to case studies and lead generation. Some marketers say a case study is informative and relevant enough to gate it. Others say case studies play such an important role in building credibility that it’s silly to put a barrier between that content and your audience. Which one works best for you might depend on how many case studies you have and what other kinds of content assets you’re working with.

In any case, make sure you’re able to track who is interacting with those case studies (either in Google Analytics, your CRM or marketing automation platform) and try featuring at least two to three case studies for every product or service you offer. Knowing which one(s) in particular a prospect looked at can give you and your sales team a better understanding of where to start the conversation.

4. BLOGS
This is an often overlooked and undervalued lead generation tactic. It works sort of like an email in that it can serve as both a demand generation asset and a lead-generating and qualifying tool.

Demand generation differs from lead generation in that the desired outcome is less about qualifying individual leads for the sales team to pursue, but increasing brand awareness and general interest in what your company does. Blogs can do this really well.

It can also help you generate leads in a couple different ways.

First, you can tailor other relevant blogs and heavier pieces of content to include within the blog itself. This is a great way to both provide your readers with additional value and encourage them to interact with more content.

Another way to use your blog to generate and qualify leads is to build a subscribe button, allowing readers to sign up to receive your blogs via email.

This would take some additional planning, strategy, and IT resources. If you’re already using a marketing automation platform, setting this up could be a piece of cake. After it’s set up, this can be an easy way to make digesting your content even easier for an already captive audience.

5. LANDING PAGES
When you think about it, your entire website is one giant piece of content, serving to engage and inform your audience through images, video and copy.

While it may seem a little redundant, there are a few ways a landing page can serve as a lead generation tool. The most obvious way is to build a landing page that hosts your gated content forms. While an e-book is the food, your landing page is the plate that presents it. Make your gated content landing pages simple to read and navigate, and make your calls to action easy to find.

Another way to use landing pages as a lead generation tool is a pricing page or a “Contact Us” page. These pages must also be very well designed, easy to use and understand, and include clear CTAs.

MARKETING AUTOMATION’S GROWING ROLE

If lead generation is the ultimate goal, marketing automation is the ultimate method.

Marketing automation, while not an easy thing to master, can be an incredibly powerful tool. It’s becoming so popular that 83,000 companies are using just the 10 biggest platforms alone.

Marketing automation brings a new and exciting dynamic into the world of lead generation for three reasons:

1. You can automate your marketing messages: This is an obvious benefit, seeing as “automation” is in the title. But the ability to configure certain emails to send out after certain actions (like signing up for your blog or downloading an e-book) makes this an undeniably awesome feature.

2. You can automate (and simplify) your lead-scoring process: Organizations that have a lead-scoring strategy experience a 77 percent boost in lead-generation ROI. Assign different content types and different lead scores and watch them travel down the pipeline right into your sales team’s lap.

3. You can track it all: You can’t measure a return if you don’t have the proper way to track it. Marketing automation, with all its bells and whistles, also comes with the tools to capture all the right insights you need to make better decisions in the future.

Marketing automation is also helping organizations find better alignment between marketing and sales, making your lead generation strategy even more successful. Though it might be a bit of an undertaking, it’s turning out to be a lead generation juggernaut.

WHAT’S YOUR LEAD GEN STRATEGY?

Consumers are clamoring for a better experience, one where they’re not given the hard-sell. Whether you’re going to start creating a little more content or dive right into full-scale marketing automation implementation, lead generation and a robust content marketing practice is the ideal solution.

Using Dynamic Content

What Is Dynamic Content?
Simply put, dynamic content refers to elements of a website or email that change depending on a user’s information or past behavior. 

For instance, the hero image of a marketing email could change to display an image of a beautiful travel destination for a user who’s looking to book a vacation. An offer on a web page might change for a first-time visitor versus a visitor with a high lead score who is likely ready to buy. Another example would be a clothing retailer showing a banner ad for a pair of jeans similar to the pair that you bought from the site last week.

Ultimately, dynamic content creates a personalized experience for every individual user. So instead of everyone who lands on your site or receives your email seeing the same thing, leads may see something different depending on how they have interacted with your company before.

Dynamic Content
Examples

Now, let’s make everything a little clearer with some real-world examples of dynamic content. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy because virtually every major organization in the world uses dynamic content to some degree.

Amazon
Ah yes, Amazon. Love it or hate it, this retail giant pioneered the use of dynamic content in the retail space. You know those ads for suggested products that you see when you first go on the website or when you click on a product that you’re interested in? No, that’s not Amazon hiring an army of private detectives to uncover the interests of the site’s hundreds of millions of users. That’s dynamic content.

Netflix
It’s not just retail websites that utilize dynamic content. Netflix also tracks what you’ve watched and for how long to provide personalized recommendations of programs you might like. Their entire homepage is one huge piece of dynamic content. This means that when you log into your Netflix account, you’ll see something completely different compared to when your spouse or sibling logs into theirs.

Google
It would be surprising if the most-visited website in the world didn’t use dynamic content, wouldn’t it? Google actually uses dynamic content in a number of ways. One way that most people have probably experienced is searching for a “service or shop near me.” In this case, Google will deliver personalized content based on your location. So if a person in Chicago and a person in Seattle both search for “coffee near me,” they’ll see completely different results.

Other Prime Examples
Just about every industry leader makes good use of dynamic web content to personalize the buyer journey and create a better user experience. Using dynamic geo-location, Domino’s Pizza will give a user the closest store based on their location. Hilton Hotels will serve up different offers based upon a user’s indicated travel plans.

Past use or purchase history is another way dynamic content can be leveraged. Udemy, an online learning platform, will offer course recommendations based on a user’s purchase history, and YouTube has a constantly updated list of recommendations based on previous viewing history.

FitBit tracks your food, exercise, sleep and weight profile based on your goals upon signup. It then sends regular emails about your goals throughout the day.

How Does Dynamic Content Work?

Understanding how dynamic content works is actually relatively straightforward. Implementing it, on the other hand, can be much trickier – if you don’t have the right tools. Luckily, marketing automation platforms make providing personalized content for your users a lot easier. It can be as simple as an interface that lets you point and click to swap out options – all without having to touch any code.

The way dynamic content works is that once you’ve collected relevant data from your users (things like name, location, which web pages they visit, what they purchase, etc.), you can then use that data to swap out content on your landing pages or emails to target users on an individual basis.

In order to deliver dynamic content to a user, several elements are required:
A Central Marketing Database
First, data must be collected and stored in a marketing database. Every user will be assigned a unique ID, and every interaction with the website will be recorded in the database.

A Dynamic Content Generator
There must be a way for the data to be taken from the database and displayed on the page or in the email. A dynamic content generator will be able to display information in a number of different elements and automatically show or hide elements depending on the data available.

An Editable Landing Page
For the dynamic content generator to work, the web page must be built in a malleable way. Not only does this allow dynamic content code to be placed throughout the site as necessary, it also allows for greater personalization to be implemented in the future based on the data collected on users.

Integrated Email
Your email marketing system must be integrated with your database to allow for personalized campaigns.

For example, a customer visits an online retailer, looks at several products, decides to make a purchase, enters his details (name, address, etc.) into the order form and buys the product. His contact details, the purchase made and the other products he looked at are all data that is relevant to him and is stored in his lead record. The next time this same customer visits the retailer, the website will recognize him, access his stored data and serve up products similar to previous purchases.
 

7 Ways You Can Use
Dynamic Content

From the examples at the start of this guide, you can see that there are many ways you can integrate dynamic content into your marketing strategy. Below you will find seven examples. But there’s no need to limit yourself to these. Test and experiment different options yourself. The important thing to remember, however, is to always make sure that the content you are serving is relevant to the user.

1.  Landing Pages
Landing pages are a great way to convert users into customers. Consider the impact of delivering a personalized message to every user. The details will, 
of course, depend on the product. Start by integrating the lead’s name into the page design, and then reference products the lead has already used. Go one step further by personalizing the call to action. If a lead has already downloaded one of the opt-in rewards, for example, display another to ensure that she remains in the funnel.

2.  Email
Delivering dynamic content to users in email campaigns is a great way to increase open rates and conversions. Again, there’s much more to personalizing an email than including the user’s name. Content can be changed depending on the user’s location or browsing history in the same way it works on your landing pages.

3.  Forms
With dynamic content, a site can offer a better user experience by delivering personalized forms. When a visitor is identified as “known” versus “unknown,” the site can present variations on forms displayed or hide them altogether. For example, an unknown visitor might receive a form with a special offer whereas a known visitor might simply need to confirm his email address. Other website personalization can happen once someone is a known visitor. A known visitor might see a login page instead of a registration page.

4.  Redirects
Another way to convert users into customers is by using redirects. If a user has been seeking more information about Hawaii, for example, he could be redirected to a
page about Maui. Redirects can happen almost instantaneously, and the visitor may not even realize that they’ve been redirected.

5.  Pop-Ups
You don’t have to rely on past behavior to deliver dynamic content to users. By using real-time signals, such as the time spent on a page, length of inactivity, scroll activity or user clicks, you can deliver intelligent pop-ups to achieve a specific action. Usually, this will be to prevent a visitor from leaving the website without first entering into your sales funnel. Use this type of dynamic content to direct him to the best content based on his location.

6.  Personalized Recommendations
We’ve already talked about how major online companies use personalized recommendations. Both Amazon and Netflix use data-driven recommendations to encourage users to purchase more items (in the case of Amazon) or continue their subscription (in the case of Netflix). But recommendations don’t just have to be product-related. You could also recommend content from your blog based on the articles a user has previously read. In essence, this helps to “free” content from the “confines” of repeat purchases and to ensure users see as many of your products as possible.

7.  Dynamic Searches
On large websites with hundreds or thousands of pages, search bars can become user-unfriendly very quickly. Here, use individual user data as well as site-wide data to deliver a personalized, user-friendly experience. One method would be to suggest the most frequent search queries. Alternatively (or in addition), the site can deliver results based on a user’s previous preferences. For instance, a user might prefer a particular brand of clothing or only buy items in a particular pricing bracket.
 

If your business has refrained from implementing dynamic content so far, now is the time to set the record straight. Put personalization at the top of your strategic planning and start to deliver the user experience your customers are demanding with dynamic content. Your first step?

Data-Driven Marketing

Marketing Relevancy and Personalization

We live in an age where we can customize virtually every aspect of our lives. Increasingly, we demand products and services that satisfy our specific needs, and we’re quick to dismiss anything we consider even slightly irrelevant. From browsing for recipes to creating song playlists, we want exactly what we’re looking for, exactly when we’re looking for it.

So, why would people expect anything less when it comes to digital marketing?

While businesses have traditionally relied on a “spray and pray” approach to marketing – treating consumers as one mass audience and using generic messaging to promote their products and services – today’s growing demands have quickly rendered this method obsolete. Companies looking to remain competitive must now find ways to address consumers as unique individuals with highly specific, personal preferences.

This is the essence of data-driven marketing. By gathering rich, relevant data on consumer behavior and demographics, businesses can target their leads and customers on a far more personal level, optimizing their engagement rates while ensuring a positive brand experience.

But delivering on this data-driven expectation can present a number of challenges – particularly for digital agencies, whose clients are throwing unprecedented amounts of data in their direction.

In an effort to find out how agencies are overcoming some of these obstacles, SharpSpring partnered with Ascend2 to field the Data-Driven Marketing Trends Survey. This report draws on the results of the study to offer an in-depth view of the challenges involved in successful data-driven marketing as well as the many ways in which agencies are helping their clients stay ahead of the curve.

Defense for Marketing Data

Evidence to support the effectiveness of data-driven marketing abounds and more and more companies are beginning to catch on. According to Forbes Insights and Turn, industry leaders in data-driven marketing “are three times more likely than [their ‘laggard’ counterparts] to say they have achieved competitive advantage in customer engagement/loyalty… and almost three times more likely to have increased revenues.”

New Challenges, New Objectives

As consumers grow more demanding of information and services that satisfy their immediate needs, businesses are faced with a new, major challenge: making the customer experience as personalized and relevant as possible. When asked to rank their marketing objectives, 62% of those surveyed rated personalizing the customer experience as the most important. The runner-up objective was targeting individual market segments, according to 55% of those surveyed.

91% of those surveyed say data-driven marketing is somewhat or very successful in achieving important objectives.

Most Important Marketing Objectives
Personalizing the customer experience: 62%
Targeting individual market: 55%
Measuring data-driven marketing: 47%
Acquiring new customers: 45%
Integrating data across platforms: 26%
Improving data quality: 19%
Raising level of data skills: 11%
Growing the marketing database: 11%

Personalization

One of the key aspects of personalizing your marketing strategy is to treat your customers like you “know” them. The ability to address consumers by name, in particular, is one of the most important steps to gaining credibility as a marketer. People are far more likely to pay attention to an email that’s addressed to them personally than one with a generic greeting - or worse, one with the wrong name.

It’s therefore no surprise that over half of the agencies surveyed in this study ranked name and title as the most useful pieces of data - well above others like phone number and location/address.

Most Useful Contact Data Fields
First/Last Name: 59%
Role/Title: 51%
Company Name: 39%
Phone Number: 33%
Website URL: 24%
Industry Verticle: 22%
Location/Address: 21%
Company Size: 14%

Those surveyed ranked targeting individual market segments as their second-most important objective - yet another clear indicator of the recent shifts in consumer demands. As the expectation for relevancy continues to grow, it becomes important to identify the similarities and differences among your customers and to divide them up accordingly. Using strong data to segment your lists allows you to more effectively target the individual needs of your leads and customers.

Quality Data over Quantity Data

Quality is everything when it comes to data-driven marketing. We all know what it looks like when a company uses poor-quality data, or disregards consumer data entirely. Whether you’re 20 years old and receiving ads for assisted living options, or 65 years old and getting emails with discounts on college apartments, uninformed marketing is lousy marketing.

Only 16% of those surveyed consider the data they use for marketing purposes to be very good quality.

Data Hygiene Ritual

According to the study, 50% of those surveyed cleanse their data at least once a month to maximize data quality, with 21% updating their data in real time.

Cleansing your data is like clearing out a messy closet - once you get rid of all the useless clutter (like that sweater you haven’t worn in three years), you gain better visibility of what you’ve got that is actually of value.

Similarly, when you cleanse your data more often, you accumulate fewer old sweaters (i.e., leads/customers who haven’t engaged in months or years) and can focus on what’s happening among your active recipients. Such visibility will not only offer more reliable indicators of open/click-through rates, but will also give your engagement rates a natural boost.

Cleansing your lists regularly (which you can do using Microsoft Excel formulas or other data cleansing tools) is one of the most effective ways to keep your data authentic and up-to-date, so that you can focus your efforts and resources on leads and customers that are most likely to convert.

How Often Agencies Cleanse Their Data
Annually: 16%
Quarterly: 20%
Monthly: 14%
Weekly: 5%
Daily: 10%
In real time: 21%

Expanding Your Efforts

Many businesses have found that outsourcing their data quality improvement efforts is beneficial – particularly digital agencies, which are often responsible for cleansing and interpreting an overwhelming amount of data for an overwhelming number of clients.

Data-driven marketing, when used effectively, is a sure-fire way to increase revenue and minimize waste. So although outsourcing data quality improvement processes may incur higher initial costs, it’s a worthy investment given all of the benefits you’ll reap in the long run.

80% of those surveyed claim they outsource all or part of their data quality improvement efforts.

Sources of Data

In addition to regularly cleansing your data, it’s important to ensure you’re using reputable sources when working with third-party data. Although the majority of agencies surveyed in this study use data gathered and owned by their clients or by trusted marketing partners, there’s a variety a different sources from which they can acquire data to use in their marketing campaigns.

When companies gather information based on the behaviors of their own lead and customer bases, they will end up with data that is directly relevant to their marketing efforts. So when it comes to budget decisions, it’s safer to invest in growing your own database rather than dropping countless dollars on a third-party vendor who will return a long list of potentially useless, irrelevant data.

Most Common Sources of Data
Data Collected and Owned by your company: 81%
Data collected by trusted marketing partners: 58%
Data purchased from third-party list vendors: 39%
Data collected by channel partners, VARs, etc: 28%

Tying It All Together

The growing number of platforms through which businesses can now market their products and services offers many opportunities that were not available before. However, it also presents some major challenges, as companies struggle to sift through an unprecedented influx of data coming from multiple disparate channels.

One of the most powerful tools for addressing this issue is marketing automation, which allows you to easily integrate and interpret multiple data points (for example AdWords, social media stats, analytics, etc.). It offers detailed reports comparing the performance of your various campaigns – from initial touchpoints to a successful sale – so you can determine which channels are most effective for your campaign. If your billboard ads are bringing in a higher ROI than your radio ads, marketing automation will be the first to let you know.

55% of those surveyed claim that their most challenging obstacle is integrating data from disparate platforms.

The Future Of Data-Driven Marketing

Today’s businesses are under a lot of pressure to change the way they do marketing. They are spending more time and resources than ever before on growing and maintaining clean databases – so they have the information they need to meet growing consumer expectations.

There’s one thing, however, that is unlikely to change.

When it comes to budget decisions, business executives tend to prioritize departments with steady, trackable revenue streams. Traditionally, this has often resulted in a lack of funding for marketing, as compared with other departments that can more readily attribute revenue to their programs and campaigns.

Data-driven marketing has begun to even that playing field. It offers a whole range of options for tracking KPIs and revenue, so that when the time comes, marketing departments have the empirical evidence they need to back up all their hard efforts.

It’s no secret that good, clean data is key in the today’s marketing world. As a testament to the effectiveness and growing importance of data-driven marketing – not only in terms of competing for internal support and funding but also for keeping ahead of the competition.

71% of those surveyed said they plan to increase spending on data-driven marketing.

The overall effect of data-driven marketing is virtually priceless. Not only can it improve your ROI and give you unprecedented insight into the performance of your campaigns, but it can also optimize the relevance of your ads to individual consumers - providing them with an exceptional customer experience and helping you boost your brand’s reputation.

About the Research

Ascend2 benchmarks the performance of popular digital marketing strategies and practices using a standardized questionnaire, research methodology and three-minute survey format. Findings are examined in a quantitative context by experienced analysts and reported objectively. This survey was conducted online from a panel of more than 50,000 US and international marketing, sales and business professionals. The following is a breakout of the demographics represented in this report:

Role of Respondent:
Owner/Parter/ C-Level: 43%
Vice President/ Director/ Manager: 39%
Non-Management Professional: 18%

Number of Employees
More than 500: 20%
50 to 500: 21%
Fewer than 50: 58%