| Tactical marketing processes
are once again undergoing fundamental shifts from traditional
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 (startup to $50M per annum)
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 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 yourweb 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.
|
Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience.
He is the co-founder of a Northern California and Brussels
Belgium based, privately held, Marketing Services and
Software Company, Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com.
Intelective focuses exclusively on providing services
to small-to-medium-sized companies that need strategic
and tactical marketing services. He can be reached at
Lee@intelective.com.
Please click here to Contact us or call toll free 530.432.8764
|
:: More
Articles :: |
::
Back To Top :: |
| |
| Please click here to Contact us or call toll free 530.432.8764 |
|
