You may or may not have a marketing automation tool, but likely you do have a number of leads that are falling out of the sales and marketing funnel because of a lack of quality interaction. Scenario: a prospect shows interests, marketing passes them to sales, sales reaches out and sets up a free trial. Free trial eventually ends. What happens if the prospect decides not to purchase? Maybe they weren’t sure about price or maybe they just need more time?

 In our webinar this Thursday at 2:00ET, we’ll speak to the above questions and then some. I sat down w/ our speaker, Kelly Hall, Business Impact Director at 90Octane, and asked her to give us a sneak peek into what she’ll be presenting. Ultimately – when it comes to lead nurturing, where do we start, what are the best channels to use, and why does it even matter in the first place?

Nurturing = Prospect and Customer Relationship Management

What does it really mean to “nurture” a lead, and where does it fit in your marketing mix? The term “lead nurturing” has been front and center in the marketing world for some time now, but there are varying definitions as to what it means, when it makes sense to undertake and what, exactly, you need to create a successful lead nurturing program.

What is lead nurturing?

The easiest way to conceptualize lead nurturing is to think of personal relationships. We don’t leap immediately from dating to marriage, but rather through developing and nurturing the lifecycle of the relationship. Your personal and business relationships are a conglomerate of communication touch points, from face-to-face interaction to phone calls and more. This is also the case for lead nurturing. We would be remiss to define lead nurturing as exclusively an online activity. Conversations with sales or customer service representatives, attendance at tradeshows, and participation in events all factor into nurturing a prospect or customer relationship.

Where (and when) should you nurture?

Lead nurturing is the natural evolution from pure-play demand generation. Regardless of whether you are operating as B2B or B2C lead nurturing can, and should, be utilized. At its most fundamental, lead nurturing is the management of the relationship. Leads aren’t just leads, they are people who need communication before, during and after making purchase decisions.

How should you approach it?

Strategy is the single most important thing you need to undertake lead nurturing. That means you must answer these questions:

• Why am I asking them to engage with me?
• What do I have to offer?
• What is the best way to communicate with the prospects?
• How often should I communicate with these prospects?

Unfortunately, there’s a misconception that lead nurturing is equal to marketing automation, or that the only way to nurture is through a tool. And, while the help of a marketing automation tool may be great (and frankly, sometimes mandatory), often you can undertake lead nurturing strategies sans the tool. In fact, we recommend for those new to lead nurture strategy that you undertake the strategic side of things, and then use your findings to inform whether you need a marketing automation tool, and if so, what the best tool given your business requirements is.

Once you have established your strategic goals and defined when and where you need to nurture, you’ll be well on your way to determining how lead nurturing can work for you.

Be sure to register for the webinar and if you are seeking additional information, check out our sneak peek interview with Kelly on what you can expect to learn and who should be attending. Hope you can join us!

Webinars are hip, right? Everyone is doing them now. The ROI of webinar is often better than other marketing activities—less costly than a tradeshow, prospects self-select based on the topic, valuable opportunities to capture prospect information. Although maybe still considered a new(er) tactic, the strategy behind a webinar program is constantly evolving. If the plan is stagnant, you’ll never produce better results. If you are still approaching your events the same way you did even just a few years back, you could be missing out some of your most promising opportunities.

This week, I had the chance to chat with our upcoming Webinar Series speaker, Wayne Turmal, CEO of GreatWebMeetings.com to discuss how changes in the webinar arena could be, and are, affecting the way many marketers approach their event strategy:

1. What do you think will be the most challenging change for most people that are running these types of marketing programs or series of webinars?
   The biggest challenge with webinars is understanding that they don’t magically happen. Most of my clients don’t understand that these need to be treated like any other marketing project. To be successful they need to be carefully planned executed.
2. Do these changes require a big shift in budget?
   Well, webinars are incredibly cost-effective but they aren’t free. It’s not so much the money for the webinar platform, but there is a lot of time and work involved to market, plan, design and pull off a quality webinar. They require human resources as much as anything else. The problem for most companies is that nobody “owns” them, whoever is in charge is doing the webinar in addition to everything else they do. That’s why our coaching system is 6 Weeks – long enough to get a little done each day, time to practice and perfect the webcast, and not distract from the hundred other things people are doing each day.
3. In the description of the webinar, you mention tools to think about – can you give us a high level view of what you’re going to touch on?
   There is the presentation platform (tools like Ready Talk) of course, but even with that, most people use the bare minimum of features so they often lack interactivity. I hope to demonstrate some of the features. You can also use outside registration services like Constant Contact or EventBrite to handle your registration and some will even handle the payments if you offer for-pay webinars. It’s a very different world than it was just 24 months ago. My big focus is not so much technology as how companies are using webinars for lead generation of course, but also channel education, brand enhancement and even low-cost, high-value website content. That’s what’s really exciting. I hope people will really take the time to examine their webinar strategy when we’re done.
4. Can you suggest any books or other resources to supplement effective webinar skills & presentations?
   Well, the two I’ve written, 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar (which is also available on Kindle) and 10 Steps to Successful Virtual Presentations would be a good start. Webinars with Wow Factor is also pretty good.

If you’re interested in learning more on how webinars have changed in the last three years – what’s working and what’s not – be sure to sign up for the webinar on Tuesday, February 28 at 2:00EST/11:00PT. You may be challenged to do a system check and grease your gears. Jump start your strategy and start moving forward again!

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.

Not only is ReadyTalk an audio and web conferencing provider but also an event organizer. Many of the best practices we suggest to you, we put into play in our own monthly webinar series. This particular post is on getting the most out of writing an effective and concise webinar abstract. Let’s face it – the abstract is the “face” of your event. It’s like trying to make a good impression and you can’t even flash your pearly whites. You’ve got about eight seconds to capture someone’s attention enough to convince them that this is the event they want to attend. So, here are a few of the rules I’ve found useful when creating an event description:

Define a pain point that your prospective audience will respond to:

Seems simple enough right? However, many presenters try covering too many items in one abstract and target the wrong crowd. Narrow it down. Be clear. Break it out into another event if need be. And lastly, avoid the jargon (even you get sick of hearing it, admit it). Make them realize they are facing the issue you’ll be addressing in your webinar. You are judged on the value & validity of your content. Don’t offer something you can’t or don’t intend to deliver.

Test it out:

You’ve probably written a hundred abstracts in your day, but have you come up with a template that really seems to resonate? Go back through your past webinar inventory and see what events produced the most registrants. Sure – this will vary by topic but what got their attention initially was the description you wrote. Find a common thread among similar topics that seems to work and repeat it! Maybe you’ll find it’s time to take that topic to the next level, beef it up. Target that same audience with a more in-depth look at the original presentation.

Create urgency:

Paint a mental image of the benefits of attending your webinar. Often times this can be summarized in the title of your event. Your prospects may not even make it to the body of the message, so get your point across immediately.  Capture their attention, pique their interest, and push them towards the desired action (i.e. signing up for your event). You have to make them focus and you have to do it fast. Using an active voice and bullet points is great way to do this.

Offer them free stuff:

Everyone likes “free”, even if at times it requires them giving you their email address. Offer your prospects some sort of tangible bonus – a whitepaper, a book excerpt, a template or checklist – something they can take away and put into practice beyond just listening to you speak for an hour.

EDIT, EDIT, EDIT:

You know you’ve cringed at misspellings and improper grammar before, so don’t get caught making the same mistake. Get a second or even third set of eyes to review your work. It reflects on your professionalism even if it has nothing to do with your event.

What have you found to be successful in composing webinar abstracts? Add your suggestions to our list!

Part two of this three part blog series is a review some of the key takeaways from our webinar, “Movin’ on Down: The Funnel,” and a deeper look at some additional best practices for optimizing your sales and marketing funnel.

Image source: LeadFormix http://bit.ly/q6TjzB

It can take a fair amount of planning to avoid confusion between sales and marketing teams after an event has taken place, whether it be a webinar or tradeshow. When you have taken the time to assess (and re-assess) your  marketing funnel after each of your campaigns, you will begin to notice a much smoother transition  from moving marketing-generated leads over to the sales team to further qualify and hopefully turn into new revenue.

One of the main takeaways of the joint webinar with MarketingSherpa and Eloqua was the importance of automation and integrated marketing campaigns. Without the power of automation, timely lead follow-up and precise campaign tracking is virtually impossible. Having numerous marketing campaigns funneling to the same call to action (new product demo, free trail, service discounts, etc.), makes it easier for the marketing team focus on putting out the most applicable content if leads are pushed toward one desired outcome. You don’t want to create distractions for your prospects by giving them a hundred different options. Push them to your desired outcome. You may capture their attention through different means – landing pages, banner ads, website copy, webinars, tradeshows, direct mail, PPC and SEO campaigns – that’s the point of integrated campaigns, but you don’t want to deter them from your main call to action. Each of these sources points to the same offer; you’re just ahead of the game because you know you are likely to capture your target audience in a number of different places.

So, we understand the integrated campaigns, but let’s chat a little more about the automation piece. How can we make all these great campaigns work more efficiently? As marketers we wear a hundred different hats. So how do we make efficient use of our time when it comes to managing all of these moving parts? We get something that manages it for us – marketing automation. This tool can help us to understand who these leads are that are continuously coming into the funnel from the various campaigns.  It helps hone in on the quality of the quantity that is being generated. Automation can help with:

Lead nurturing – that consistent dialog with a prospect as they move toward (or even away) from a purchasing decision.

Lead Scoring – qualifying prospects based on both implicit and behavioral criteria. Implicit being the right demographic (company size, title, role, etc.) and behavioral being the actions they have taken to show their level of interest (whitepaper download, attended and/or registered for a webinar, page visits on your website, etc.)

Generating Revenue – obviously the more leads being dumped in the funnel, the better chance there is for revenue. However, the right leads are the ones that matter. Quality trumps volume. But when you are able to capture the correct information with your integrated campaigns and begin to both nurture and score those leads, you will ultimately end up with your target prospect looking for your product at the right time. And that equals revenue.

All this talk about automation brings me to my last point for this post – integration. This is a crucial piece of the pie. You may have all your platforms in place to generate, track, score and nurture leads but if they can’t communicate with one another, you’re almost back at square one. Sure, there are workarounds, but not without having to implement lengthy manual processes which can ultimately hurt the overall success of your campaign due to the lack of timely follow-up.

ReadyTalk recently launched both CRM and marketing automation integrations designed to increase the accuracy of your campaign data, specifically those leads coming in through your webinar platform. This helps move leads through the sales pipeline faster and eliminate those time-consuming manual tasks. These integrations were designed to help marketers skip the tedious spreadsheet work and streamline the process, increasing data accuracy and speeding sales follow-up. If you’d like to learn more about our CRM integration specifically, check out the upcoming webinar on September 27 at 2:00ET featuring three progressive companies that have automated their webinar process by integrating their conferencing platform with their CRM. And stay tuned for the third and final part of our “Funnel” blog series!

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.

Last week, a few people from our marketing team attended the Eloqua Success Tour. The basic function of these events is to interact with like-minded peers who are utilizing the Eloqua platform and share best practices, unique use cases, and helpful tips to avoid pitfalls. Eloqua’s regional success managers also share new functionality and present the upcoming product roadmap for discussion. It’s a great way to network and simply learn how others are utilizing marketing automation within their organization.

There were some great presentations this year including one particular SaaS company that has created progressive profiling with the Eloqua platform to continually capture and aggregate information from prospects that are visiting their site and filling out forms, hitting key pages, etc. The speaker made a great point: personalization is really the future of marketing. The idea can be attributed to all of the social networks that are embedded in nearly everything we do. Work related or not – this is how to catch someone’s attention. Call them by name, offer them what they’ve been looking for on the right day at the right time, and you  just landed yourself a deal.

When someone feels a sense of individuality, not just like another fish that’s going to get hooked, they’re more likely to foster a relationship with your brand. Today, consumers have almost come to expect a one-on-one dialogue with marketers.  The challenge to us as the marketers is to use the important data we’re capturing to strike that personal chord with our prospects.  Knowledge of past behavior is a valuable tool for predicting future purchases and crafting relevant messages that will increase sales. The key takeaway is to build plan to follow the customer – not making them follow you.

Is personalization part of your strategy and marketing automation program? Is it working?

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.