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Tips
for your success
Tactical
marketing processes are once again undergoing fundamental
shifts from conventional to web-based processes. Many traditional
marketing firms/agencies are still touting the tried and true
to their clients; i.e. Tradeshow attendance, Print, Traditional
PR, TV and Radio. However, these conventional marketing processes
work best for broad market awareness and/or branding, especially
for a Fortune 1K company with significant resources to spend
on demographic analysis, test marketing and more test marketing.
It's much more difficult for a smaller company to leverage
the economies of scale that are typically available for a
larger company for the media buy and operational efficiencies.
It's
obvious that lifestyle and business processes are shifting
towards a much greater dependence on digital media - people
are traveling less due to cost issues and the ever-increasing
speed of business is underscoring the usage of the Internet
for information and research. If you're a small to medium
sized business the chances are that you've probably cut your
marketing budget significantly - by eliminating or scaling
back tradeshow attendance, trade magazine advertising and/or
direct mail in favor of response driven marketing on the web
that can be deployed faster and more cost-effectively than
traditional marketing methods.
Capturing
leads from a web site generated by opt-in e-mail, newsletter
inserts, text link advertising and/or other forms of pay per
click marketing is still the absolute best way to generate
leads that are quantifiable as soon as they are generated.
You have the ability to easily track where the lead came from
and via what interactive advertising process; assuming this
has been setup for you by your interactive ad agency or with
the online publisher. And, there are typically no lead times
like more traditional marketing processes - we've created
and deployed campaigns (creative, media buy, testing, ROI
analysis, etc.) for our clients in 3-5 working days in some
cases.
There
are some pitfalls to web-based lead generation and follow
through that you need to be aware of as you deploy an interactive
campaign. Here are five of the most important "gotchas"
that you need to think about as you build an interactive lead
generation program around your web site:
1) Don't
make it difficult for people to contact your company - make
sure your web site really communicates with your prospects
- by "communicating" I mean by providing telephone
contacts, e-mail address and/or a lead capture form that is
short. Note: this form has to be supported by a published
Privacy Policy ("we won't divulge your info to a third
party under any circumstances") and it absolutely must
be short; i.e. don't request any more than baseline information,
name, phone, e-mail and address, augmented with a comment
box.
2)
Your marketing objectives have to be supported by your sales
team - the sales team has to be incentivized to respond to
inbound e-mails and requests for information via a contact
form in a timely manner, within 24 hours or sooner. If you
have a geographically dispersed sales team then make this
clear on the web site by providing specific contact points
for states, regions and countries.
3)
Make sure you IT person/department attends your marketing
planning meetings with your sales team - your web site will
need some type of a lead capture setup that redistributes
leads based on function and/or geographical responsibility.
Your IT staff has to create a database solution that captures,
stores and distributes leads - this does not need to be done
in-house. Products like Act (the market leader in contact
management software) are now web-enabled. You can capture
leads via a web server and share leads with others via a browser
and very inexpensively.
4) We
don't advocate popup advertising for most of our client's
advertising campaigns. But, we have "crossed over to
the other side" and we do (highly) recommend using popups
on our clients' web sites to present opportunities that in
turn capture leads. Studies have shown effective popup lead
captures increase lead generation by 40-85% depending on the
market segment. Popups can be set so they only launch on a
frequency basis per session (visit to a web site) or a number
of times for a specific visitor - they don't have to be setup
so they are intrusive and annoying.
5) Last
but not least (drum roll) - make the customer's usability
experience the most important aspect of your web site. Create
a user interface ("experience") that is pleasant
for your visitors; i.e. use standard universal (top of page
and local page left) menus, utilize 2-3 sentence paragraphs
with lots of white space, don't overload your pages with graphics
that slow down load times and make sure your contact points
(phone, e-mail) are readily available from every page.
So, to
summarize; advertising is shifting from traditional to web-based
or interactive if you will - so, to get on board this tsunami
build a web site that communicates with your prospects/customers,
provide contact points via telephone and e-mail via the site,
involve your IT and Sales staff with the lead capture process
so they are all stakeholders and utilize popups to accelerate
your lead capturing.
About The Author
Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience - he
is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., a marketing
services company which provides strategic and tactical marketing
services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. Lee@intelective.com
Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications
- this article may be reprinted freely, provided this attribution
box remains intact. (c) 2001-2002 by Intelective Communications,
Inc.
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