In the growing spirit of austerity, i thought I would re-start SalesFUSION's blog with a new post that is a follow up to a recent webinar created and presented by SalesFUSION and leading B2B Agency, Renaissance Direct. The theme of the webinar was "re-purposing your existing marketing collateral to generate new leads". Without beating the hackneyed drum of "how to generate leads in down economy", this post will explore practical advice and usable tactics for making the most out of what you already have.
The realities of the current marketing environment dictate that we take a more rigorous approach to tracking and managing the opportunity value generated from the campaigns and corresponding spend. We as professional b2b marketers are being asked to generate the same or more leads with less budget, personnel and resources. We can however, leverage new tactics for old materials. Chances are your company has a veritable treasure trove of collateral that has been collecting dust or sitting static on your website. Or worse yet, your marketing collateral and sales collateral sits idly on a C: drive somewhere and is only accessed by sales reps engaged in a sales cycle.
While marketers grasp with these challenges and attempt to achieve their goals with less, they often overlook the obvious. Let's start with the website. Many innovative companies now employ an online resource center as a standard page in the corporate website. The resource center is meant to be a public facing document repository that is updated frequently with new content and promoted to the masses. A typical online resource center will contain categorized links to White Papers, product data sheets, case studies, press, videos (testimonials is the hot one), screenshots (for software companies) and sales presentations. Whats important to note is that the majority of what would make for a good resource center for most companies is material that already exists. Once you buy in to the notion of creating an online repository of materials, a few key elements must be put into place. Firstly, you have to make the decision to put some or all of the materials behind lead capture pages. The lead capture page should be treated like a landing page for pay per click. It should be user friendly and capture enough information to start a digital conversation with the lead. Solutions like SalesFUSION's eDialogs provide a variety lead capture page types and configurations to accommodate all websites.
Once you have the content and mechanism for capturing those who access the content in place, it's now time to promote the materials on the resource center. There are several no-brainers when it comes to this. If you have an existing house-file of leads/contacts, you can start with regular email blasts out to these lists. It's important to provide regular updates to the resource center as it gives you a reason to send email updates out at some interval. When sending out your emails for the resource center, don't get fancy. Keep the emails simple and to the point. Provide only one external link in the email; for the resource center.
Beyond email, we'll explore some other ways to promote this great new sales and lead generation tool on the cheap. Social media outlets provide the next logical medium to promote our materials. Any social media outlet with categorized groups is prime real estate for publishing good content. LinkedIn is a perfect example and lends itself well to these types of posts. Proceed cautiously however because how you post is as important as what you post. Many social media group-type sites frown on over sales messages. When posting your web content in social media sites, be sure to post educational content first and inform the reader in the post that the materials require a form to fill out to access the materials. This up front notice actually increases the form completion rates.
Other ways to leverage social media are allowing sales team members and other members of the company to post content in their respective twitter and facebook accounts. There are a couple of caveats to consider before proceeding. Firstly, HR should establish a policy for posting corporate content in social sites. Personal Facebook pages and twitter pages may contain material that is inappropriate for business use. It must me made very clear that content cannot be posted alongside personal photos that may be too risque for the legal team. Another consideration is how to track inbound clicks from social sites. SalesFUSION just released a series of add-on social media posting tools for its dialog products. These tools convert the landing page or dialog URL's so that they are track able to the person posting and fit within sites that have character restrictions such as Twitter.
An extension of social media, business social publishing sites have emerged as very good outlets for a variety of materials from a variety of industries. Customer Think is a great example of these emerging user-driven publishing sites. Members can join these sites for free, create an online profile and then post educational content and materials. This is a wonderful outlet for your existing white papers, press releases and more. Depending on the specific rules of any site, you can even post product-centric information. Another social publishing site that has emerged is FOCUS. Focus is tied to a popular LinkedIn group and like Customer Think, allows its members to drive the content. What's interesting about Focus is that it rewards its regular posting members with different Status'. This encourages users to strive for the elevated status by posting good content on a regular basis, thus enhancing the information quality on the site.
Don't forget to dust off those power point presentations! Other outlets, which are more product centric but can be linked into social media profiles are SlideShare and Box.net. These are more file-sharing in nature but allow users to post content that eventually becomes indexed by Google. Grab all of those old power points that have been created. Turn them into presentation for Slideshare and box.net in your LinkedIn profile. Encourage your reps and other employees to do the same.
What's important about the social outlets is that you can direct social traffic back to your online resource center. You can also spread your name through the web via social business publishing sites...both of which carry no cost. In the end the more you post into the social and business sites, with PDF's that havce active links back you your site, the better your SEO will ultimately perform.
I summary, it's important that marketers look to their internal collateral as a valid means of increasing your exposure through multiple channels. You don't expensive agencies or consultants to create campaigns around this content. Just get it out there. Make sure it has LOTS of links back in to your site and work towards creating a regularly-updated online resource center and you will dramatically improve your industry footprint.
In SalesFUSION we use a suite of tools known as eDialogs. These are sort of like landing pages, sort of like social publishing tools, and many things in between. Ultimately the goal of pushing content through eDialogs is to make the inbound traffic track-able. All marketers need to strive towards tracking inbound leads right through to the CRM. SalesFUSION, as a marketing automation platform, is built specifically with this process in mind.
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