Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Optimizing B2B Leads, Deep Dive #2: Drive Them In
Here's my second "deep dive" into the high points covered in a recent ClickZ article by Bryan Eisenberg. Eisenberg takes the 10,000 foot view...but there is a lot more to be said, deeper down, about content.
The ClickZ article:
Optimizing B2B-Demand Generation
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625240
From these high points, we at The Content Factor can dive deeper into ways you can optimize your content to make lead generation work--and why the content part of the process is so important.
High Point: Drive them in.
Your driving points are your ads, inbound links, emails, and other sources of traffic. Make sure that the text and context of your driving points speaks to the audience--and create multiple driving points for multiple audiences.
Deep Dive: Drive them in by speaking their language.
All too often, businesses (especially B2Bs) get into a trap of speaking their own language to their audience (their potential customers)...when really they need to speak their audience's language. In the ads, inbound links, and emails that drive traffic to your web site, it is imperative that you speak directly to the audience's pain (see Part 1 of this series), in the audience's language.
Here's an example: I cringe when I see the audience for marketing copy described as a "market." Who cares if your technology is "designed to be the highest performing system in the accounting and compliance market?" Or even if it is "best-selling" or a "market leader"? Your potential customers don't think of themselves as your market--they think of themselves as competitors in their own market, with problems to solve.
So use the language of their industry to help them solve their problem: "designed to give accounting and compliance professionals prompt updates as R-1023 laws and local regulations change." (I'm inventing the details but you get the idea.)
The third deep dive is about "bait"--that content piece at the end of the trail that lets you reel them in.
The ClickZ article:
Optimizing B2B-Demand Generation
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625240
From these high points, we at The Content Factor can dive deeper into ways you can optimize your content to make lead generation work--and why the content part of the process is so important.
High Point: Drive them in.
Your driving points are your ads, inbound links, emails, and other sources of traffic. Make sure that the text and context of your driving points speaks to the audience--and create multiple driving points for multiple audiences.
Deep Dive: Drive them in by speaking their language.
All too often, businesses (especially B2Bs) get into a trap of speaking their own language to their audience (their potential customers)...when really they need to speak their audience's language. In the ads, inbound links, and emails that drive traffic to your web site, it is imperative that you speak directly to the audience's pain (see Part 1 of this series), in the audience's language.
Here's an example: I cringe when I see the audience for marketing copy described as a "market." Who cares if your technology is "designed to be the highest performing system in the accounting and compliance market?" Or even if it is "best-selling" or a "market leader"? Your potential customers don't think of themselves as your market--they think of themselves as competitors in their own market, with problems to solve.
So use the language of their industry to help them solve their problem: "designed to give accounting and compliance professionals prompt updates as R-1023 laws and local regulations change." (I'm inventing the details but you get the idea.)
The third deep dive is about "bait"--that content piece at the end of the trail that lets you reel them in.
Labels: business to business (B2B), lead generation
Monday, March 19, 2007
Optimizing B2B Leads: High Points, and a Deep Dive
Here's an article from Bryan Eisenberg, the Persuasion Marketing guru, covering the high points of generating business-to-business (B2B) leads on the web:
Optimizing B2B-Demand Generation
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625240
From these high points, we at The Content Factor can dive deeper into ways you can optimize your content to make lead generation work--and why the content part of the process is so important.
High Point: Know your audience.
Create personas--not just high-level demographics, but go in depth to "understand their personal and business motivations," as Eisenberg says.
Deep Dive: Discover the messages they will respond to.
For business audiences especially, it's helpful to know what keeps them awake at night, or what part of their jobs are they most worried about. What is the CEO going to pop-quiz them about during a staff meeting? If your business can solve this kind of pain, there's the key to some excellent content that you can deliver to either begin or enhance a sales cycle.
Talking to existing customers, and even looking at competitors' web sites and white papers, are great ways to discover these pain points. When reviewing competitors' materials, remember that if it is boring to you, it is probably even more boring to the intended audience--don't repeat your competitors' mistakes. Instead, look and listen for the most profound pain that you can solve--or ways that your competitors are trying to solve it that you can improve upon.
Your company's differentiators can also be great subjects for content, as long as they are framed to benefit the audience. "We are the premier provider of XYZ software" is a snoozer, but "No other solution is as scalable as ours, and here's why" will turn heads. Make any claims you can make that speak directly to solving pain.
I'll take some more "deep dives" from Eisenberg's article in my next two posts. (Here's #2 about driving traffic to your site.)
Optimizing B2B-Demand Generation
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625240
From these high points, we at The Content Factor can dive deeper into ways you can optimize your content to make lead generation work--and why the content part of the process is so important.
High Point: Know your audience.
Create personas--not just high-level demographics, but go in depth to "understand their personal and business motivations," as Eisenberg says.
Deep Dive: Discover the messages they will respond to.
For business audiences especially, it's helpful to know what keeps them awake at night, or what part of their jobs are they most worried about. What is the CEO going to pop-quiz them about during a staff meeting? If your business can solve this kind of pain, there's the key to some excellent content that you can deliver to either begin or enhance a sales cycle.
Talking to existing customers, and even looking at competitors' web sites and white papers, are great ways to discover these pain points. When reviewing competitors' materials, remember that if it is boring to you, it is probably even more boring to the intended audience--don't repeat your competitors' mistakes. Instead, look and listen for the most profound pain that you can solve--or ways that your competitors are trying to solve it that you can improve upon.
Your company's differentiators can also be great subjects for content, as long as they are framed to benefit the audience. "We are the premier provider of XYZ software" is a snoozer, but "No other solution is as scalable as ours, and here's why" will turn heads. Make any claims you can make that speak directly to solving pain.
I'll take some more "deep dives" from Eisenberg's article in my next two posts. (Here's #2 about driving traffic to your site.)
Labels: business to business (B2B), lead generation
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Our Blogletter
Got feedback? Ideas? Suggestions? Leave em here. Thanks
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Birth of the Blogletter
We are launching our blogletter—an email newsletter that is built on top of our blog. What a concept!
How does it work? Instead of putting long articles in our e-newsletter, or creating new web pages for the articles, we simply post the articles to our blog. They make great blog posts. Then, we send out our e-newsletter with brief, easy-to-read introductions to the articles, and links to the full versions in the blog posts.
Not only is the blogletter handy for communicating to our clients and friends, but it's also efficient:
We didn't invent the blogletter, but we will spread the word. Here are a couple of marketing blogs that put the term "blogletter" out there first:
How does it work? Instead of putting long articles in our e-newsletter, or creating new web pages for the articles, we simply post the articles to our blog. They make great blog posts. Then, we send out our e-newsletter with brief, easy-to-read introductions to the articles, and links to the full versions in the blog posts.
Not only is the blogletter handy for communicating to our clients and friends, but it's also efficient:
- Our content goes out through multiple channels, but we only have to author it and publish it once.
- The articles in the e-newsletter can act as search magnets, especially in blog searches, instead of being "trapped" in emails.
- Subscribers who prefer email to RSS will sign up to our e-newsletter list, so we only have one list of emails to manage (instead of separate subscriber lists for the blog emails and the e-newsletter).
- Articles, along with reader comments, are automatically archived in the blog.
We didn't invent the blogletter, but we will spread the word. Here are a couple of marketing blogs that put the term "blogletter" out there first:
- How and Why I Combined My E-Newsletter With a Blog, Debbie Weil's BlogWrite for CEOs
- Where Do Your Email Newsletters Go? Email Heaven? Anything Goes Marketing
Labels: blogging, blogletter, email marketing
