Search Results for: marketing strategy

15+ Demand Generation Statistics that Every Business Should Know

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Demand generation is important for every business. When you start, your target buyer does not know you exist and you need to work on generating awareness for your product/services. Demand generations are these set of strategies that help you spread awareness about your brand and drive demand for your product/service. See Also: 3 Demand Generation Trends Lets analyze 15 demand generation statistics that every demand marketer should know.   1. Marketers who document strategy are 538% more likely to report success than those who don’t and Marketers who document process are 466% more likely to report success than those who don’t. (Coschedule) Key takeaway: It is important that you have a documented demand generation plan which fits into the bigger realm of your marketing plan. This helps in understanding what part of the strategy is resulting into a roadblock or deviation from prescribed goals. Bringing sales and marketing team together to draw a strategy that aligns with your sales funnel, nurturing strategy and customer journey is quintessential.   2. Successful marketers are 242% more likely to report conducting audience research at least once per quarter and 56% of our studys most elite marketers conduct research once or more per month. (Coschedule) Key takeaway: You should conduct customer research at regular intervals and update buyer persona to maximize ROI by staying relevant to your audience in all your campaigns. What does your target audience want to read? What are their pain points? etc are important questions that are answered by research.   3. 75% of small business owners see internet marketing as an effective or very effective tool to attract new customers. (Business2community) Key takeaway: Internet marketing includes a bunch of tactics including email marketing, social media, content marketing etc. You need to research on your audience (the point above) to see what works best for them. Having the right mix of these tactics will help you achieve the best results.   4. Email marketing has an average return rate of $38 for every $1 spent (EmailMonday) Source: ironpaper Key takeaway: Emails remain the most favorite tool to generate B2B leads for your product/services and staying on top of your audience’s mind.   5. More than 79% of the leads dont convert into sales. The absence of lead nurturing is the leading cause of that. (MarketingSherpa via HubSpot) Key takeaway: Demand Generation marketers should aim to create content that not only aligns with business goals (like, brand visibility and lead generation) but also nurtures the buyers. Businesses that can provide useful content along the buyer’s journey will always have an edge over others who cannot.   6. Recipients are about 14% more likely to open an email if its a part of a segmented campaign vs. traditional email. (Mailchimp) 7. About 49% of marketers are learning to drive content to align with the buyers journey. (LookBookHQ) Source: NeilPatel Key takeaway: It is important that content created is strategic (keeping in mind what your target audience wants to read) and fits into a lead nurturing scheme to convert maximum qualified leads into customers. According to Neil Patel, If brands can develop an effective strategy for creating content based on proper understanding of their target audience, theyll not only drive leads but will also increase sales.   8. 74% of companies that werent exceeding revenue goals did not know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities. (Hubspot) Key takeaway: For effective demand generation, you need to get the basics right and have relevant metrics, lead scoring systems or KPIs which define leads and success at every step (MQL, SQL, SAL).   9. Converting leads to customers is the top marketing priority for 70 percent of organizations in 2017 (HubSpot, State of Inbound) Key takeaway: Success for demand marketers is no longer defined in terms of quantity of quality leads but in terms of conversion of leads into customers. Marketers should take the responsibility to augment buyers journey through alignment with sales and customer support/success teams.   10. Improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact was a top demand generation priority for 61% of organizations in 2017 (Demand Gen Report) Key takeaway: Any strategy without a performance review program will not fetch the desired results.  Demand generation strategies should include smarter technology, KPIs and metrics which align with business goals. This will help you analyze the results and make necessary amends to the strategy   11. According to Dragon Search Marketing, “61% of consumers are influenced by custom content. Source: Ironpaper 12. 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Hubspot) 13. Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Aberdeen) Key takeaway: Content is the king. You need to make content marketing a part of your demand generation strategy to achieve maximum ROI. Just like The Truckers Report, a forum for professional truck drivers. With great content, they were able to increase landing page conversions by 79.3%, leading to over 1,000,000 visits per month and over 4.5 million page views. Similarly content syndication can drive desired results as well. Neil Patel, when talking about content syndication, says – when we started republishing content from the Kissmetrics blog on sites like Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal, we saw the referral traffic pick up (we got almost 9,492 visitors a month).   14. Video will make up 80% of consumer online traffic by 2020 (Animoto) 15. 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference (Alist daily) 16. 48% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2017  (Linqua) Quality demand generation which effectively merges with the B2B lead generation goals remains a challenge for B2B marketers at every stage. These demand generation statistics give us an overview of the market and help us focus on areas that require our attention. Let us know if we have missed any important demand generation statistics. Comment below and lets talk about it.    

How to make your Demand Generation Plan Fool-proof

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Creating a demand generation plan which is successful is not be easy. But then again, if it were that easy, every marketer of a B2B company would be driving full-funnel results remarkably. The top B2B marketing players are cutting down the complexities of demand generation strategies that covers different marketing targets, channels and lead sources. Not only are marketing programs challenged to scale their efforts, but they also need to achieve balance in the same. If any one of the aspect of your demand generation plan doesn’t work accordingly, you will not be able to see the result that you need even if the rest of it is perfect. Do you think you can drive more deals that are attributed with marketing without good content? If you are using incorrect lead sources, will you be able to hit your metrics? We don’t think so. Read More: Top 6 Demand Generation Strategies Which Works. We have interacted with a lot of B2B marketers who struggle to transit to drive results. These interactions have made us aware about the most common pitfalls that troubles every B2B marketer virtually who is creating a demand generation plan. Even your competitors fall into these pitfalls. When you avoid these common problems you can run a fool-proof demand generation campaign. 5 Common Demand Generation Plan Problems to Avoid Problem #1: Deficient Messaging Map If your content isn’t able to attract the right quality leads or unable to nurture your marketing qualified leads (Marketing qualified or Sales qualified) effectively in your pipeline opportunities, chances are that you are facing from one of the most common pitfall of deficient messaging map.You may have program objectives, buyer persona profiles as well as content strategy but you have nothing to link them together.It might also be possible that you have many content assets at the top of your marketing funnel, but the middle or the bottom of the funnel might be weak. You may have, in this case, never taken out the time to connect your resources and your key messages at each stage of your buyer journey.If you are facing this problem, you need a messaging map, that is, a document that can connect your content and key messages to all your relevant personas, accounts and buying stages. This should address consideration, awareness and decision phases, in the leas, as well as the buyers problems and priorities at every stage of the journey. With an efficient messaging map, B2B marketers can: Create accurate content to fill in the missing gaps and assets. Determine the strengths and weaknesses in the content as well as your campaigns. Fine-tune and repurpose the assets that are already existing to meet the needs of customers and prospects. Problem #2: Limited Marketing Channels A lot of demand generation marketers are using a combination of paid and owned efforts on both digital and non-digital channels for generating and nurturing their leads. It is very uncommon that we stumble upon a program that does not use the combination of inbound marketing, social media, third-party lead generation, digital, live events and more. This is where your demand generation can mostly go wrong: the lack of oversight done by B2B marketers at the top of their marketing funnel. There isn’t a shortage of lead sources but marketers are unable to check where their results are derived from. B2B marketers may also not be able to compare marketing channels effectively, without time-consuming data. In this digital era, you cannot get away with just one marketing channel. Even the organizations that are present in the narrow verticals are unable to fill their sales pipeline with only inbound marketing leads. If this is the case, chances are that you need to depend on live events, emails, and co-sponsored webinars and so on. However, if you want to maximize the performance of your campaigns, you need to have a solution that can provide you with automation and visibility at the top of the marketing funnel. This allows you to manage the number of growing channels for B2B lead generation. This is the only way to avoid this most common problem. Problem #3: Neglect Top Funnel Strategy When you are pinned down by the inefficiencies at the very top of the funnel, it is hard to scale your demand generation plan. Demand generation marketers are marketing throughout the sales and customer lifecycle. There are not limited to marketing at the top of the funnel anymore. Very often, the programs recognize the need to spend some time on the middle as well as the bottom of the funnel. Best class marketers, however, use technology to create top funnel automation. The right software automates the management of campaign, integrates top-of-funnel efforts with middle and bottom of funnel activities and centralize your data sources. Must Read: 9 demand generation books every marketer must need to know Problem #4: Lead Quality Ignorance Imagine the number of hours that is wasted for just trying to manually standardize, validate, de-duplicate and upload the bad leads. You cannot simply dismiss the third party sources of the leads that occasionally provide you with bad leads. Demand marketers manage to dodge this problem safely and usually turn to technology to solve this same problem. The best organizations adopt software solutions that automates the review of lead quality and route new leads to the right sales representative or nurture tracks. Problem #5: Inadequate Performance Measurement If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it. Demand generation is a data-informed approach for the B2B marketing. Metrics are the medicine for improvement and effective alignment between sales, marketing and customer success teams. Marketers know the real value of KPIs for demand generation, like average deal size, funnel conversion rates and cost per lead. Eliminating All Barriers of Demand Generation Plan Success The B2B marketers who are most effective aren’t superheroes, no matter what you think about them. In many cases, they just think smartly about the ways and places to spend their time. Creating automation

What is The Best Way to Generate Leads

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Let us all agree to the fact that the best way to generate leads and acquiring customers for your products or services is to get them to know about you first. You will not be able to send your product or service if nobody knows about it, no matter how good it is. In this article, we will help your B2B Company sell your product/service by putting them in front of people. We will discuss strategies that guarantee to be the best way to generate quality leads. You need to, first and foremost, realize that you do not have to have the best product and you need not be the cheapest provider in the market. All you need to be is the best seller if you want to succeed in generating sales leads. For effective sales, you are required to know the best way to generate B2B leads that can be converted to customers, the leads that your salesperson can move through the funnel and complete the sales cycle. You can make this process fully automatic but you still need to generate. Must Read: The Ultimate Lead Generation Content Syndication Strategy Best Way to Generate Leads and Revenue If you are able to increase the value of your leads by 10% while the average of your lead quality does not decrease, you can make 10% increased income. Simple as well as effective. Each phone number, email address, name of the company or the address that you generate is always worth something. They will, however, have different values on an average. It might so happen that the email addresses that you have acquired through people subscribing on your blog post are of more value as compared to the email addresses you acquire through competition. This is the reason why it is crucial to take lead generation very seriously. Lead generation is one of the most essential processes of your business which you should constantly evaluate for maintaining the effectiveness of your tactics. As much as 85% of the marketers consider lead generation as their #1 challenge. Let us look at 7 best way to generate leads that you can use to improve your lead quality for B2B companies. Must Read: Sales Success Secrets: The Critical Role of Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Converse as often as possible Do not rely heavily on one-directional communications like blog-posts, websites, and videos. Try and establish a real conversation with your leads as and when possible. Suppose your lead asks about a particular feature of your product in a chat, do not offer a link that will guide him, instead offer them a call option where you can walk him through the product features. If you are drafting an email to your customer, offer him a video call. Offer them to meet if you are already in a video call. Every time you interact with the prospects, try to get closer to them. Must Read: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads Use Twitter Since Twitter is so big, it works for every business. The main challenge in Twitter is, however, finding the right people. Further ahead in the list of challenges is engaging these people. Engaging people can be simply following them or conversing with them at the most. You can use the search option on Twitter for finding people using relevant keywords or hashtags or you can use one of the many specialist tools like Crowd Fire. The best way to generate leads using Twitter requires a good amount of time but if done religiously, you can reap huge benefits. Must Read: High-Performance Inbound Marketing Techniques for Successful Lead Generation Campaigns Lead Generation via Website Tracking the users who visit your website on an account level is a significant tactic that suits nicely with any and every lead generation strategy. You can fill your sales pipeline with leads by identifying, automatically, the anonymous visitors on your website that you never knew you had. Must Read: How the lead generation strategies in USA market differ from the rest of the world Use Databases You need to step on this with caution. When you are using someone else’s database that they have built, you will not be able to predict its quality. If your business is new or you need a huge lead volume, various lead databases can provide you with the extra source of leads. LinkedIn is an endless source of professionals from different fields. You can even consider LinkedIn as a database in this sense. Most definitely some of them would be interested in your products and hence they will go searching. Must Read: What Is Data Cleansing, Why Is It Important, And How Can You Do It? Marketing Automation If you are not already collecting email addresses, you have a problem that you need to fix right away. When you have a new source that provides you with more email addresses, you can use the marketing automation technique to nurture them and get more data on your lead. Once they have moved ahead in their purchase cycle with the help of your marketing automation, a sales rep can pick them up. Use the data for segmenting your customers to send relevant messages to them. Do not send similar messages to both the news as well as old customers. Must Read: 7 Top Marketing Automation Tools for SMBs Answer on Q&A Services Quora can be a great source for generating new sales leads. Your customers will already be present on Quora, asking questions. All you have to do is answer their questions, provide them with solutions in the form of your products. You are likely to generate leads if you are out there helping leads solving their problems. Use Emails to the Fullest A well-structured email works as a lead generation tool. The best way to generate leads is to have a good email signature consisting of links to all your social media profiles to help your leads to find your products easily. You

The Biggest Mistake Demand Generation Marketers Make

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Let’s get straight to the point. The biggest mistake demand generation marketers make is to either think they don’t follow any attribution model (in which case they end up using last touch model) or follow one model to take all the decisions (and most of them ending up selecting last touch model). But, before we go onto discuss why is this the biggest mistake demand generation marketers make, we need to understand what is attribution.   It simply refers to attributing which marketing campaign, tool or channels helped transformed a visitor into a customer.   Now, that we understand what attribution in, let’s answer the much awaited question – why is this the biggest mistake demand generation marketers make?   It is because last touch attribution does not give the correct picture required to take major decisions. There are similar problems with other attribution models as well (discussed below).   According to Johnny butler in an article on Adgo, No one modeL is correct (or incorrect), as no single one will paint a full picture of your marketing performance. The key is to understand which models tell you what information and when you should be using each one.   Fergal Glynn, in an article on SalesForce blog, says that it often takes several touches for a consumer to make the choice to request information, and even more for marketing to gather the information needed to determine if a lead is ready to be passed to sales. The point being – we need to understand that an average online purchase is preceded by as many as 5 to 10 interactions and sometimes more. It is important to understand which marketing channels are effective and which are not in order to focus on developing the right demand generation strategy.   Lets understand the types of attribution models. Must Read: How to make your Demand Generation Plan Fool-proof 1. Last-Touch Attribution model   This model gives the credit to the last channel that the visitor used before they converted. Last click model is the best to understand which tactics are helpful in closing the deals or pushing the quality leads towards it.   But, it has limitations. Lets say you have deployed 4-5 tactics in your demand generation efforts. By the time the lead reaches a stage of buying, he has interacted with you on multiple levels.   However, when you implement last touch model, you are giving credit for your conversions to the final channel a customer used.  You are ignoring all other media or marketing channels that would have played an important role in lead nurturing throughout the buyer’s journey.    How is this the biggest mistake demand generation marketers make?  because you end up ignoring the role played by the top of the funnel and mid of the funnel channels. This will end up in misallocated budgets and time, bad choices and increase in cost per lead over time (instead of decreasing)   Look at the example below. Source: Adgo The marketer will end up concentrating on SEO and other tactics to improve organic results instead of having a budget and planning for facebook ads. 2. First-Touch Model The first touch as the name suggests, gives credit to the first source that the visitor used in their journey to a conversion. It helps in understanding the most effective top of the funnel brand awareness and demand generation tools. Must Read: Demand Generation Etiquettes 3. Linear Model or Multi-touch attribution   This is the simplest form of multi-touch attribution and evenly applies the credit to every single touch in the buyer’s journey. It – Provides detailed insights and information on how all the marketing channels work and contribute to a buyers journey. For example, you can decide which marketing channel is the least effective and remove it.  Help channelize budget, time and efforts in the right direction   According to Bizible, the negative is that it doesnt take into account the potential for varying impact of marketing touches. For example, if a prospect spends two days at one of your user conferences and then goes home and visits your site 19 times via Direct and then converts, your user conference will get 5% of the credit, even though it likely did most of the heavy lifting. Direct, on the other hand, will get 95% of the credit.   Source: Marketo 4. Time Decay Model This model attributes credit to every marketing channel that a buyer touches on the journey to conversion. However, it places more emphasis on the channels that push visitors towards conversion. So, what do we learn?  Each attribution model provides you a certain part of data but does not give you the complete picture.   For example, first touch model may show you how a PPC campaign resulted in $1 mn revenue and is the best strategy to generate B2B leads but the last touch model tells you that a webinar is the best way to push these leads towards closing and resulted into $ 9mn revenue. Therefore, following one model to develop a strategy and analyze the effectiveness of marketing efforts is the biggest mistake demand generation marketers make.   So, what should we do to avoid this mistake? First, understand that marketing in any form needs to generate revenue and you need marketing attribution to track that.   Second, understand what you should be known to increase the effectiveness of demand generation efforts and then select a relevant model. Most of the times, you will need to understand more than one set of data to be effective in your strategies. In such cases, you should implement 1-2 models   Third, do not merge reports. Read all the reports separately and thoroughly to understand what is really going on.   Fourth (and for beginners) – if you are starting out, the safest option is to start by implementing a multi-touch attribution model.   If you follow this 4-step-strategy, you can avoid the biggest mistake demand generation marketers make.   Final words Attribution is the best way to gain insights on the marketing impact and get the 360 view of your customer. With attribution analysis, you will understand all the touch points of your customer thoroughly. It is only when you encompass all this information and understand buyer’s journey can help you strategize effectively.   Understand why we

Lead vs Prospect Explained in Simple Terms

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

What is lead and what is a prospect? this question has eaten many peoples head. If you have been blindly using these terms until now with not much of difference, thats okay! We all get confused with these 2 terms but let’s see what they exactly mean. Lets take below example You use Lead generation and someone fills the form on your landing page – that is a lead. There are different sources which might direct traffic to your website such as social media, email marketing, blog posts, cold calling, direct mail, etc. No matter what the source the actions such as, filling the form online or responding to CTA on your landing page shows that the person is interested in you. Any person who gives their contact information and is interested in you can be called a lead. Source: https://aeroleads.com/blog/ Just as the name indicates a prospect is a person who can develop an interest in your product if they fit into your buyers persona. Lets put it this way, If you are a business who offers female beauty products to the customers. You use social media network like Facebook, Linkedin very well for your e-commerce and you also have a number of existing customers joined to your Facebook business page. While doing marketing campaigns on Facebook, you will use a very useful tool such as lookalike audience, where you can attract a similar group of people as your customers to your product. Lookalike audiences are people who could be interested in your products if they come to know about your products. You can use demand generation strategies to target these people and create your brand awareness. As you sell female products, basically any female who you think could buy your product can be called your prospect. People usually decide their target audience based on different criteria such as demographic info, their career info, etc. It is advised that we create buyers persona and tailor our marketing services to their needs. As said by Ann Handley, a content marketer and the author of the book everybody writes, you should write with one person in mind. This is the person who would define your ideal buyers attributes. Once you have set this in mind, it becomes easy to target people that fit into your buyers persona. There is a lot of difference though in a lead and a prospect? How so? Lets see below lead vs prospect difference. What can you tell from the following statistics taken from Jumplead Read More: 7 Lead Management Strategy Best Practices Above statistics give us an idea that not many leads that you get fit into your buyers persona. Though giving contact information, signing up for the newsletter is a major indication of someone’s interest in your brand, it isn’t true in more than 50% of cases. Did you get it? Leads are just someone who signed up for the newsletter but doesn’t mean they are likely to buy. That is why many apply BANTs criteria to qualify the leads further. The leads when qualified (Marketing qualified or Sales qualified) can be called as prospects as they are your ideal buyers who have shown continued interest which cannot be mistaken. As defined prospect is a potential customer as they come under your target market, want to buy and have the budget and authority too. Prospects are at first leads, or in different words, another opportunity to turn someone into a potential customer. If you are selling software solutions to small businesses, the small business managers are your prospects but if they are not in charge of making a decision for this then they are not your prospects. However, if you haven’t qualified any contact as a prospect, it is to be called lead. This is how a general sales process carries on. Source: https://www.zoho.com/crm/help/img/sales-funnel.jpg 1. Prospecting:  Here you gather as many leads as possible. 2. Qualifying leads into prospects:  This doesn’t have to a lengthy process but only a few questions such as below would help you identify if they are prospects. 3. Selling Phase:  Once the prospects are qualified because of further interest they show, the selling cycle begins. The selling phase can be short or long depending on your products. I hope above all points helped you understand the difference between a lead and a prospect. If it gets any hard with the terms with similar meaning like, you can feel free to ask us through email. We are ready to solve your questions like  What is the difference between Demand Generation and lead generation? Is Data cleaning and data scrubbing the same?  Read more about it in our blog posts. Thank you  🙂

Why You Should Be Using Social Media Customer Service

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Social media is a platform where customer service is very important.   Jay Baer knows all about this, as the mastermind behind Convince & Convert. This digital marketing agency provides services to organizations like Allstate, Cisco, and even The United Nations. His book, Hug Your Haters, functions like a modernized manual on customer service. This work has helped companies increase feedback and decrease complaints. He is a New York Times and Amazon best-selling author. Baers blog is rated as the best global content marketing blog by The Content Marketing Institute. He recently spoke with us about how companies can use social media customer service.   Understanding How Customer Service Has Changed There was a time when customer service was a much more personal matter. A customers grievance would only be known by a small group of people. With social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), a complaint from a customer can generate significant attention. Social media, alongside customer reviews, can work to the detriment of even the largest and most successful company. Without a proper way to handle complaints and provide customer service, companies can suffer from a damaged reputation and loss of revenue.   Taking the Main Step in Improving Customer Service Baer extensively researched the different aspects of customer service online. While he originally guessed speed was the most important factor customers looked for, this isn’t the case. The most important thing for companies is to respond to all complaints and concerns. With a third of complaints going unanswered, customers are ending their relationship with a company on a negative note. No response at all is the worst response a customer can receive. Even if a company cant answer a customers question, a two-way conversation is still a good idea.   Must Read: Why You Should Be Using Social Media Customer Service Benefits of Responding to Customers The customer feels more appreciated. The company shows it cares about a customers happiness. Companies get the information they can learn from. Finding the Value in Customers with Complaints It may seem counterintuitive, but customers who have had issues with a company in the past may be the most financially valuable. Retaining customers is a cost-efficient move, and a customer who gets their questions answered is more likely to make another purchase. Discover Card is a great example of a company that answers every customer within 20 minutes, 24/7. By doing so, they retain their customer base and add to it.   Why Businesses Should Do a Customer Service Audit A regular audit helps companies find out how many inquiries they receive and from which sources. It can also reveal how long it takes for customers to get responses and how things may be improved. But the question remains: How do companies address complaints?   Baer says offstage complainers usually respond by phone or email. Onstage complainers have no issue voicing their problems in a public forum. Responding to them can surprise them, and in some cases win their loyalty.   Baer notes that the best action a company can take is to develop strategies for each type of complainer and take a serious approach to customer service.     Must Read: Best Social Media to generate B2B Leads Facebook vs Twitter vs LinkedIn This article is contributed by Dave Reimherr who is the founder @ Magnificent Marketing LLC. Magnificent is a full-service digital marketing agency with a specialization in content marketing and social media marketing and advertising. David has 20 years of experience in sales, marketing, strategy & branding.

How To Justify Demand Generation Budget For 2019

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

We are dangerously close to the budgeting season – this is the time when marketers are busy working on a new budget and finding ways to justify it.   Finding ways?   Yes. Every year, marketers across the industries, get push back on their budgets from the C suite because they analyze every component of the demand generation budget based on ROI and past results.   According to Hubspot, 27% of marketers say securing enough budget is their top marketing challenge.   Marketers have to justify every dollar that they plan to spend and that is DIFFICULT (because many marketing efforts take time to see results).   But, if it is the marketer’s job to present the budget in a manner which answers the concerns of the c-suite. In this post, we will talk about 5 ways in which you can just demand generation budget for 2019.   By the way, did you know that   In 2018, 70% of marketers say their demand gen budgets will increase and 34% say their spending will grow by more than 20% . Must Read: B2B Content Ideas to Boost Demand Generation 1. Establish your Marketing Budget Ratio Marketing Budget Ratio (MBR) is a good start to justify demand generation budget for 2019. It not only helps connect marketing investments to revenue but lets you benchmark budget levels to other companies.  According to emedia, to get the Marketing Budget Ratio to divide your total marketing spend by revenue. The resulting quotient is presented as a % of gross sales. When we say, it helps you benchmark your budget against companies, we look for similar companies in terms of stage of growth. The best picks are your competitors.   But, do not get swept away with the percentages as no two businesses are the same. Apple invested 7% of its revenue on marketing in 2014; while Salesforce put 53% of its revenue into marketing in the same year. You see at the difference?   So, analyze the average MBR (which gives you the idea of the market) and look into your business objectives, revenue, etc to make the decision on the percentage you want to invest back in.   2. Know your objectives and how you will achieve it You are not going anywhere if you draw a budget without knowing the objectives of the organization.   So, obtain all the required information (for example, new business goals, objectives and expectations from a new launch, product or campaign etc). Without knowing these details, you cannot show how marketing budget aligns with organizational goals.   And, if you did, you just lost your credibility as a marketer.   Once you have obtained the information and worked on a preliminary draft, get your sales partner for feedback – ask them whatever input they can provide on the budget plan. Sales team know a lot about your audience and how everything blends in – so their feedback is of utmost value.   Plus, sales agreement is a great thing when presenting the demand generation budget to the CMO. Must Read: Demand Generation Strategies Which Work! 3. Show past results, ROI and talk about challenges  It is mandatory to talk about the past results you have driven and the return on investment with demand generation strategies or efforts. So, assess everything and showcase what worked and what did not.  You are looking at Cost per acquisition Customer lifetime value Close rate per channel Campaign specific reporting etc.   Relevant reads – Talking about past results, ROI and challenges will reinforce the fact that you are result driven. For future analysis, define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with business goals.   Based on this information, you can justify changes in the budget (where there is an increase or cuts).   Must Read: Account Based Marketing – An Important Aspect Of Demand Generation Channel Marketers that calculate ROI are 1.6 times more likely to receive higher budgets. (HubSpot, 2016) 4. Remove unsuccessful means and tools from last year Once you have given an overview of what works and what does not, it is important that you leave out any demand generation tool which did not give an impressive ROI.   If you keep everything from last year without justifying, it is easy to believe that you are just trying to land grab for more budget allocation. So, cut down items that were unsuccessful, highlight them and explain why. If you have a replacement strategy, mention it there.   It will help you justify demand generation budget and showcase yourself as a rationale marketer. 5. Talk about the forecasted results So, you have made changes and put forth the idea of hiring new staff or investing in a new martech tool. Don’t leave it there – highlight what you plan to achieve with it. Let’s say, you forecast that your blog should create x amount of SALs. By investing in a new writer, you can generate x amount of content which will generate x new leads. Meaning, x% of revenue increment.   Always analyze the alternatives you have.   Should I do this in-house or outsource? Do I need to invest in this tool or can I do without it? Should I just hire a freelancer to handle this? Etc. Ask questions and include the most feasible options in your budget. Remember, your aim is to justify budget (not get as much as money as you can!). Focus on maximum returns, with minimum investment.   Last but not the least, don’t hard sell. Be ready to take feedback, suggestions and rework on the budget. You have a much better chance of getting the budget approved if you are open to change and hearing everyone, rather than being closed off to new ideas.   Over to you –   What are you planning to do for getting approval on the demand generation budget? We would love to hear about it.   Must Read: Demand Generation Books Every Marketing Expert Should Read

7 Amazing ToFU Hacks To Try Right Now

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

ToFU! As we all know can be read as Top of the funnel and describes initial efforts put in order to grow sales. When we talk about sales, why do we always consider the sales funnel and its different stages?  A very simple thought can help us understand and that is where did the word Funnel come from in Sales? What is the idea behind it? Can you think of Sales Funnel as an ordinary funnel? What is the job of the ordinary funnel?   Isn’t it to make things easier and cleaner? You, of course, don’t want to spill all the oil so, you use a funnel to make sure that most of the oil goes into the engine. Sales funnel is also meant for the same purpose and that is to decrease the probability of spilling(losing) potential customers.   Every activity in the sales funnel can be divided into different stages:   ToFu – Top of the Funnel MoFu- Middle of the Funnel BoFu – Bottom of the Funnel In every stage buyers needs have to be addressed but doing so can be at times challenging. Thus, to begin we are discussing here the 7 amazing ToFu hacks to try right now. Made easy? We know!   1. Have Lead magnet in a place on your website – pop-up ToFu is also called as attention or awareness phase where instead of just waiting for people to come and Read information or call you to find out about your products and services, you take initiative to inform them about these things. One of the techniques for this is to make a website pop-up.   Landing pages lead to more sign-ups and it is best to include lead magnets or a pop-up on your website. The Lead magnets can be made to educate prospects in order to make them ready for entering into your sales funnel. Examples of such content can be condensed Ebooks, checklists made as a summary of your blog posts, or short video courses.   And I tell you just one lead magnet or pop-up would be enough.   2. Attract more visitors to your website using compelling content Do we see the need as to why our content should be compelling enough to attract the visitors to the website? Your content helps buyers to connect the dots from the problems to how they may be able to solve them. This is why you need to create educational content which will address buyers needs in the initial stage of a buyer’s journey.   Whether it is blog content or email content, high quality has to be maintained. What content can increase your email open rate? Or how is it that you keep your visitors engaged in regularly reading your blogs. It has to be a combinational effort of both email marketing and SEO optimized content & website collectively.   A to-do list for with regards to content   Create a podcast and share on social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) Write guest posts Create an infographic or SlideShare presentation   A lot of other points can be added to this and finally, when your content is ready it has to be syndicated. Must Read: How to Build an Email List Fast? 3. Submit your website to directories As we have been discussing for long, how would someone come to know if you have not told hem about yourself first? My point is how would Google or any other search engine come to know that your website, more precisely your products exist unless you have them? Or how would people recommend you unless the other ones have seen your potential? It is this important to submit your website to different directories related to your niche so that you are shown in the results when buyers search for products like yours on the internet on these directories.   Submitting your website to the directories is one way making an impression that you are recommended by people or whatsoever. Have you ever been inclined to download an application that is listed as Editors choice? I have, a lot of times! Well, that’s impact directories are going to have for you.   4. Optimize your email strategy for maximum clicks If how to increase email open rate is your question I am going to restate pretty much the same things you might have been hearing all the time. It is those simple things that make your job great. Thinking of basketball, what is the good practice? Wouldn’t you say – Dribble! Dribble! Dribble? It takes nothing extraordinary to make anything ordinary sound perfect!   What is simple Dribble formula for optimizing your email strategy for maximum clicks? I have listed below –   Create an engaging subject line & preview text for your Email Use email personalization Avoid spam filters 5. Make research reports to grab the attention of customers Numbers speak a lot! If that is true how can numbers do the work for you? There are different ways in which research reports and all the statistics in it can help you. Doing a market research as the beginning and making a report on it can give you valuable information about your competitors, economic shifts, demographics, the current market trends, etc and this information can be used to grab the attention of your prospects.   6. Add a value to your website by creating a video Could I have done better use of GIFs available than I did? If you your answer is yes, you know the impact the videos can have on the human mind. Humor, laughter, and video are long remembered than anything else, in this case, information! Exactly the point!   Videos have made our job easy. The information that photos can not provide can be conveyed easily using moving pictures and that’s why WebdesignerDepot encourages to show and not tell.   To make your video drive more traffic for you, write a full transcript of the video and add it on the

How Web Analytics Can Help Generate More Leads

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

Almost every business, small or big, has a website today.   And, we all, know that good design, structure, and content helps generate more leads. However, many businesses are unaware (or struggling) of how to use web analytics to their advantage.   One thing is clear, website analytics is the key but it can be intimidating at first. They are indeed difficult to make sense of in the beginning.   In this post, we will go over 8 ways web analytics can help generate more quality leads for you. Analyse your search words You want to aim for organic traffic. So, look up the keywords that your potential leads are putting in the search engine to find you.   Are they typing in your business name? Are they typing in your product name? What are the phrases generally used? However, most leads, will not find you by business name. They tend to put in words that relate your product or services and that is why it is utmost important to rank for the right keywords and search terms. Must Read: Best Way to Generate Leads Focus on bounce rate If your bounce rate is higher than 50%, you need to work on engaging your leads. Bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors that exit your blog without visiting another page. So, it is important to test with different designs and strategies. To reduce bounce rate, you can Put navigation bar on every page for easy searchability Insert videos so they stay on the page for a longer time and engage with your content Pay attention to interlinking content at the right places  Must Read: How the lead generation in USA market differ from the rest of the world Optimize popular landing pages Every 3-4 months, go to your web analytics, see which are the popular pages and optimize them.   You can Put a strong call to actions Insert your lead generation strategy content Ask them to sign up for your newsletter   Besides this, you can also understand the conversion rate of each landing page. Lets take a look at this report on Google Analytics   Source: Vertical Measures You can see that the 5th  landing page has a conversion rate of 4.5% even though it received 463 sessions. However, the 7th landing page received 2004 sessions with a conversion rate of 1%.   With this data, you know that it is better to drive traffic to the 5th landing page and work on optimizing the 7th landing page for better conversion.   If you work on data (like the example above), you will generate more leads in no time.   Must Read: Sales Success Secrets: The Critical Role of Lead Generation and Appointment Setting A device used to view your website Mobile devices are projected to reach 79% of global internet use by the end of 2018  And, hence, it is utmost important to know what devices are used to reach your website. In case, most of your visitors are using mobile, you need to ensure that your entire website is responsive   Did you know that   57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile. Must Read: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads Understand your traffic As a business, we tend to use as many strategies for building traffic. But, at the same time, it is important that we know which ones are working the best. Is it Facebook, Pinterest, retargeting, content syndication, email marketing etc?   Once you know which ones are driving the maximum traffic, you can divert funds and time towards that. For example, if Facebook is getting you 40% of your traffic, you want to spend more on advertising your product and services on that platform. If email marketing has a higher ROI, you want to expand your campaign reach.   Similarly, you will be informed about referral traffic sources. If you see certain websites sending referral traffic your way, you want to reach out to them and discuss potential partnership or advertising options.   Must Read: High-Performance Inbound Marketing Techniques for Successful Lead Generation Campaigns Find out which call to actions drive maximum conversion In order to generate more leads for your business, concentrate on in-page analytics to understand which call to actions is driving maximum conversion.   For example, Google Analytics, lets you see which links on a page are clicked the most. This not only helps you understand where exactly does your visitor leave your page, but it also helps in understand optimized placement for CTAs as well as content for CTAs that work (or don’t)   You can further hone your message, convince your visitors to take an action and generate more leads.   Must Read: Best Practices and Examples for Call to Action in Cold Emails Use demographics to understand your audience While this is one of the most obvious uses of web analytics data to generate B2B leads, we often tend to ignore it. It gives you information about age, gender, technology, geography and segments that are engaged with your business. Based on this data, you can optimize your paid advertising channels for better targeting   Considering you also know where most of your visitors are located, you can also focus on location-specific advertising campaigns   Funnel conversion rate This web analytics is grossly underutilized by businesses.   A funnel is a process that takes the visitor through the conversion cycle. The conversion rate is realized by dividing the number of visitors to the page and visitors that have successfully converted.   Based on this data, you can understand what works on the page. If the conversion rate for single step funnel (ones where there is only step involved, for example, contact page to thank you page) is too low, you can reduce no. of exits on the page, redesign the page, decrease no. of fields on the form etc.   There you go.   When taking any marketing decision, analytics is your best friend. It allows you to take steps to generate more leads for your business.   Remember, this is an ongoing process. You will have to constantly use web analytics to improve your website and user experience. The more informed decision you make, the better it is for your business.   Over to

How To Syndicate Content That Drives 7x Results

Posted on By Vikas Bhatt

In the last few months, we have discussed many ways to syndicate content and how it can drive huge results for your business.   For those of you who are still unaware of this strategy, content syndication is a process of re-publishing content (this is termed as a process to syndicate content) on third party websites that have a reach higher than yours. So, you are basically aiming at websites like TechCrunch, TNW, Huffington Post etc but in your niche.    One question we almost always get after explaining this is – why would you give away your best content to someone else?   Well, in short –   There are endless benefits to syndicating content, like, extensive reach, increased targeting of leads at all levels of the buyer’s cycle, and higher return on investment.      Relevant reads: Why is content syndication called the new SEO, How to find places to syndicate content And, yes, there is absolutely no doubt that we are fans of this marketing tactic. We have driven impressive and tangible results for our clients. But, how do we syndicate content so as to get 7X results? In this post, we will discuss exactly what – things to keep in mind before you start to syndicate content for your business or brand.    After all, knowing to syndicate content and being aware of its benefits is only half the battle won.   Without further ado, lets start   1. Know your target audience Just like every (literally!) other marketing strategies, if you are looking to syndicate content, you have to target the right audience.    You cannot be a B2B SaaS business trying to syndicate content on a relationship or dating website or the other way round. It wont yield the desired results. In simpler terms, your audience will not be able to find you. So, before you jump into the race to syndicate content, employing effective B2B content syndication strategies is crucial. These strategies involve identifying the websites and publications frequented by your target audience within your industry. This ensures your content reaches the right people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. a. Build a buyer profile Good news is that you dont have to work without data or guess anymore. Analytics software, like Google Analytics and the like, offers you information on demographics, the technology they use, gender, countries etc.    Besides this, you can gather a lot of relevant information from marketing, sales and customer support teams of your business. They interact with potential buyers at different levels and know exactly who your ideal customer is. So you will know   Put all the information together and create an avatar, i.e., the person you will be targeting when you begin to syndicate content. This will also help you in knowing where your audience hangs out and selecting the best platforms to syndicate content accordingly. Additionally, there are various content syndication tools available that can help you identify relevant websites and platforms based on your target audience demographics and interests. These tools can save you time and effort in the research process. Must Read: 14 Expert Tips to Boost Your Blog Traffic with Content Syndication  b. Align it with buyers journey Once you have built an ideal customer profile, you can brainstorm content ideas that your avatar would like to read.   Align these with buyer journey. Read more about it here.    Most of the times, if you are republishing content on third party websites, it will be to secure the top of the funnel qualified leads (Sales qualified or Marketing qualified). So, think about topics that highlight the problem your product/service solves. For example, if you have a learning app, write about how gamification of learning is beneficial or how technology and games are being merged together to develop the interest in students etc.  Consider creating video content as well, as it can be a powerful tool for top-of-the-funnel lead generation. Video content syndication can be highly effective on platforms like YouTube and social media, allowing you to reach a wider audience and engage them in a more interactive way. 2. Build credibility Before you start to syndicate content, you need to remember the bigger goal you are trying to achieve. Focus on –    a. Established places Decide places to syndicate content carefully. Focus on established places that can actually drive results and provide you a positive ROI.    b. Invest in paid CS If you are looking to achieve results at a faster pace, you should invest in paid content syndication. You ca get in touch with us (Only B2B).  All things kept aside, you need to understand the pain points of your buyer and demonstrate how your solution can alleviate those problems. It is worth noting that the best content is well researched, actionable, and provokes innovative thinking.    Relevant reads: Beginners guide to free content syndication 3. Right partner to syndicate content It is difficult to handle content syndication by yourself. So, it is best to outsource the work to an agency. Not only does it save you time, it also saves you money and resources.    The best agency is always on the top of content marketing and content syndication trends. They also know how to get your content in front of your relevant audience and get maximum ROI.   When hiring a partner, these questions can help you   4. Measure and track progress Look, there is no cookie cutter approach to content syndication. If it were, all businesses would have seen equal amounts of ROI.  But, the process to syndicate content evolves. You need to put in trial and error to understand what works for your business (and, what doesnt) Because of this, it is imperative to measure the effectiveness at regular intervals. Measure traffic from these sources, MQL to SQL and SQL to SAL ratio, % of revenue in pipeline etc. This article lists out metrics that you can use to measure the efforts.    A/B testing is another effective tactic to measure success. Keep testing different types of content styles, topics, websites and see what resonates with your audience.   By implementing a

Fast-track your revenue generation with Pay-for-Performance marketing campaigns.