Lead Generation: How-To

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1 Lead Generation: How-To There is a constant battle between Sales and Marketing. Many feel they are one in the same thing, while others understand the difference between them. So, what is the difference, you ask? The sole purpose of marketing is to bring leads into the sales funnel. The goal of sales is to take those leads and close them or convert them to a sale or purchase. Seems simple enough, however many people still do not understand the relationship between sales and marketing. Yes, they work hand in hand, but have very different functions. This whitepaper focuses on how marketing provides leads to sales. I am going to outline the different types of lead generation to help you understand the full range of marketing you and your MSP can be doing. The following list is outlined from Marketo and can be found here. Inbound Marketing These are truly your modern day meat and potatoes marketing efforts. This is the TV and billboard marketing of the 21 st century. Inbound marketing is essentially letting people know all about your company before they know they need you. This means brand awareness, getting your name out there and establishing yourself as an industry expert. Now, Inbound has been around forever, but the modern twist is that most of this brand awareness is created online. From websites to social media, we are utilizing the free power of the internet to push brand awareness. Content Marketing and SEO Who says SEO is dead? No matter what side of the debate you are on, SEO is still an important factor of your website and search engine results. SEO (search engine optimization) is very critical to getting your website found. If you re a technology company who repairs Macs, you d better mention that on your website. If not, when someone searches for local Mac repair, you re not going to show up! Pretty simple right? Well, SEO actually gets much more complicated than I d like to get into on this whitepaper, so just understand this is critical for Google, Bing, and Yahoo searches. In terms of content, be sure you re original, fresh, and not a carbon copy of your competition. If your content sounds the same as all of your competition, why would anyone be inclined to select you over them? Be creative and make sure your content captures your brand, mission, and overall goal. To assist in the discovery process of your company, add proper keywords for SEO, and you have a solid start on your marketing! Website Everyone, and I repeat, EVERYONE should have a website. Now let s take this a step further, is your website easy to navigate? Do visitors get to something that is visually appealing or do they have to read an essay full of content? Make it simple and clean up your homepage. Give them a taste of what you do in the first layer of the website. Next, break down the overview into individual products and services this is the second layer. Finally, if they want more information, have an information sheet or testimonial from a client your third layer. Remember, putting content up on your website is essentially free, so this should be a staple in your marketing strategy. Also, valuable information is great, but calls to action are better! Download this whitepaper about x, signup for this and get a discount on y. Be sure to have proper forms

2 to collect information and have a service like Visitor ID or Google Analytics so you can see who viewed your site but didn t fill anything out. Blog One of the most valuable digital tools out there today is the blog! I personally read dozens of blogs for great info, education, and all around entertainment. If you re not blogging, you really need to start! When blogging, you are engaging with value, which gives you an opportunity to show off just how much you know! No, this is NOT the place for selling, you can however add a call to action at the end. Keep readers engaged and looking forward to your next post. Invite other industry or community experts to guest blog on your blog. This will help build credibility and help overall awareness. Be sure to share your posts on every business and personal social site you have. The more you share, the more people know about it. The goal is to get them hooked on the value of the blog so they check out the rest of your site. Social Media How many of your clients and prospects are on social media? The better question is how many of your clients or prospects are not on social media? Most people are on social media for entertainment, keeping in touch with friends and family, and reading and keeping up with current events. Most brands, large and small are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and a multitude of other social media sites. How are you utilizing these platforms for maximum exposure? Use social media to spread the word and share your content, blogs, highlight employees or clients, or just post something funny! Utilize social media to push traffic to your website. You can utilize social media for PR and for recruiting purposes, as well. Outbound Marketing Our General Interest Track is a perfect example of a primary outbound marketing campaign, including a scheduled set of s, calls, and other touch points (i.e. postcards or promo items). We use calls to action about products with witty and clever messaging, so we don t sound too pushy. These are sent to a specific group of people (as loosely targeted as an event attendee list or tightly targeted like a handful of business cards from prospects you talked to at the trade show). With a mix of great art, content, and a good call to action you have a great outbound marketing strategy. Marketing marketing is an inexpensive way to push out everything from notifications to promotions. Be sure to use a 3 rd party software or an add-on in your PSA, so you are able to track the effectiveness of your s. For example, we found that viewers had a much higher click rate on videos when we had a thumbnail as the video and it took them to a YouTube page as opposed to just a link. We also found that if we wanted them to click on something important we would turn the link into a button and have it off to the side of the text. For example, little things like this helped when sending notifications for office closures and registration for events. This has been proven as one of the most effective ways of communicating with clients and prospects alike.

3 Display Ads Place these on websites with maximum exposure to your clients and prospects. For our MSP, ARRC Technology, we place them on our most popular local news station s website. We then use website tracking to see the effectiveness of the campaign or have a promo code offer that they can use in-house for a discount to track our ROI from the ad. If we make money or build large volumes of site traffic, it may be worthwhile to do the ad again. Tracking carefully allows you to narrow your focus to sites that your clients frequent. Pay Per Click Ads If SEO and organic search are not working for you, it may be time to look into pay-per-click ads. Essentially, you can pay your way to the top of a search. You place a bid and you are promising to pay (say Google) $4 per click for Bakersfield Mac Repair. Each time someone clicks on it, Google will charge you. This is great to use if you are trying to get your name out there among stiff competition. Also, depending on your marketing, will determine price and frequency on the ads. We use a special phone number and call tracking, so if someone does call and click from the ad, we can track that they came from Google. Content Syndication Have you heard of guest blogging? How about writing articles for your local chamber? Well, you need to be doing both of these things! This is a great way to help other organizations come up with content for themselves, while showcasing your work and getting more awareness and recognition. This is also a great way to gather referral links to your website. Finally, it can boost content on your newsletter, blog, etc. Exchanging articles or guest blogs every few months is a great way to get some fresh content and a break from writing. No need to reinvent the wheel. Direct Mail Postcards, promo items, and invitations direct mail is still a key marketing initiative for us. In the Bakersfield market, traditional marketing is still alive and thriving, so direct mail works well. Even for CharTec, direct mail works great for touching bases with people from an event or for sending some cool swag. Think about it, how cool is it to get something awesome in the mail now-a-days? With powerful messaging, direct mail can make its way throughout an office no matter what you re selling. Imagery, copy, and a solid call to action is critical for a good direct mail piece. Use the postcard to send them back to your website for an even better way of tracking your campaign! Events Events are king for our marketing efforts. For both ARRC and CharTec, we utilize events for new products, training, lead gathering, and community exposure. The best events for our MSP are the internal events. We hold our own lunch and learns called Tech Bites. We invite clients and the local community to our facility and train them on everything from Microsoft Office to social media. We charge them a small fee and provide them lunch. More great events are community events (these are best used for community exposure and free press) and event partnerships. For the event partnerships we partner with our local chamber or another organization. Share the cost, share the work; so we are able to put on larger events and reach a larger number of people. We also work with these groups for promotional purposes. We make sure to

4 work with them when sending out an to their database. This is where you really get more bang for your buck. For booth type events like expos or trade shows, always be sure to have something cool to see or to giveaway. We have had a variety of technology baskets we have given out in exchange for business cards and have had some great luck showcasing some of our best products from the Lenovo Yoga to the MondoPad. Hands on demos work well too. Once we had people play tic-tac-tow on our Mondopad. Not only did this drive traffic to our booth like crazy, but it also got us some serious leads for video conferencing. These are some examples of how marketing drives leads and the different ways we put leads into the sales funnel so the sales team can convert. Utilize these and you ll be filling the sales funnel in no time! Now remember, some of these will work better than others depending on your market and you re vertical. Try different things, hone your skills and see what messaging works best for your market. Once you figure this out, it s smooth sailing from there!

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