Learn how to build highly effective lead generation campaigns

Unlike consumer sales, where purchases are often made on impulse, most B2B sales are considered purchases with longer sales cycles, multiple buying influences, and larger investments at stake. Reaching these types of prospects in order to create interest around a company’s products or services is what demand generation is all about. Movéo believes in order for demand generation to be effective, three drivers of growth must be operating synergistically: Branding, lead generation and sales enablement. This eBook exclusively covers the second of these drivers.

Lead generation is a demand generation strategy that involves using content or other marketing efforts to collect names and contact information in order to turn them into prospects and buyers.

It’s about “feeding” the sales team, and doing it successfully requires significant expertise across a number of areas.

Movéo: Lead Generation Experts

For most of our B2B clients, Movéo is responsible for identifying strategies and tactics designed to drive, capture, and cultivate new business leads. Our experience and knowledge of lead generation best practices maximizes the amount of qualified leads generated, while also keeping our clients top-of-mind with their prospects at key points along the sales cycle.

We believe that the key to success for any lead generation effort is to provide the prospect with a compelling reason to exchange their contact information, and to that end, we work with our clients to produce campaigns that leverage offers and incentives that are relevant to their target buyers. This is done through a content strategy that identifies and prioritizes educational content such as video tutorials, webinars, white papers, case studies and testimonials, and eZines. We also understand the content that works well  in establishing and nurturing relationships — with both prospects and current customers.

What sets Movéo apart from other B2B agencies is not only our ability to produce and execute lead generation campaigns across a mix of media (email, search, social, display, etc.) — it’s our holistic approach to response-driven marketing. We have the experience and capabilities to produce and deploy virtually all lead generation tactics in-house, including:

• Prospect engagement solutions: white papers, eZines, videos, etc.
• Organic and paid search marketing
• Online display banners, rich media and video
• Landing page development and conversion rate optimization
• Cost-per-lead programs
• Web form lead capture and database development
• Lead cultivation solutions: Lead capture and scoring based on user-defined data and user actions
• Automated lead routing, CRM integration and nurture marketing campaign deployment
• 3rd party list acquisition (email and direct mail)
• House/opt-in list management and email delivery solutions including support for
  dynamic and personalized content and automated list hygiene
• HTML email design, copywriting, and programming
• Telemarketing/appointment setting solutions

Each step in the lead generation process has its own set of marketing and sales activities designed to move potential buyers through the sales funnel.

According to eMarketer, 36% of marketing professionals say lack of an effective lead generation strategy is their biggest obstacle. Oftentimes the problem is there is no process in place for generating and managing leads from first conversion through sales closing. Through Movéo’s 7-step process, we are able to design, implement, and execute lead generation programs that deliver a quantifiable ROI.

1. Establish Definitions for a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)It is imperative that the sales organization be involved in defining what a high quality lead looks like. This definition will include explicit characteristics such as industry type, location and size of company, annual revenues, etc., but it also needs to include implicit behaviors that better indicate their need or purchase intent.In the end, an MQL should answer “yes” to as many of the following questions as possible: (1) are we interested in doing business with this company (2) does this prospect have the authority to make or influence a purchase decision, and (3) does this prospect appear to have accelerating interest in our product/solution?
2. Establish Lead Qualification ProtocolsSuccessful lead nurturing requires the following dependencies:A Clear Data Process and Strategy
   What fields are required to segment the database for ongoing lead nurturing and how will we go about securing this information reliably?A Standardized Scoring Process
   What numerical values should be assigned to the various activities a prospect might perform along the buyer journey? How heavily should we weigh each demographic/firmographic criteria?A Defined Lead Routing Process
   Once a qualified lead has been identified, who will be alerted on the sales team, and how will they be held responsible for this lead? Will we allow sales the ability to pass leads back for future nurturing?
   
3. Identify the Marketing Automation SolutionVirtually every marketing automation platform provides three core capabilities: email marketing, website visitor tracking, and a central marketing database. From there, vendors begin to differentiate by providing additional tools — that may be included in the base price or premium priced — that offer advanced functionality. The best-fit solution in each case depends on the sophistication level required based on the steps above.Movéo has experience working with a number of marketing automation vendors, but the majority of our clients currently use Eloqua, Pardot, or Act-on.
4. Identifying the Right Content for Engaging BuyersContent mapping is required so that we can effectively automate the promotion and discovery of selling materials based on the prospect’s buying stage. Strategies we might leverage in this step include mining customer data, asking customers their opinion, or talking with sales.
   
5. Architect the User Experience and Nurture FlowsAccording to Gartner, by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human. Once we’ve gotten a prospect to raise his hand and opt-in for information, the “nurture marketing” process will need to begin — through database-driven communication. The nurture marketing process — which can take weeks or months and eventually involves a sales contact or personal consultation — is intended to turn the prospect into a customer. What are the triggers that we can use to accelerate cadence of communications when a prospect is “warming up?”
   
6. Develop the CampaignOur lead generation program would need to be very direct, comprising three fundamental elements: (1) the Offer, (2) the Campaign Promotion, and (3) the Lead Capture Process.The Offer:
   While lead generation programs can help build brand awareness — they are fundamentally about compelling prospective customers to take action. In our experience, the offer can represent the most important variable in the success (or lack thereof) of a lead generation program. We create assets (white papers, infographics, videos, etc.) that exhibit an understanding of the prospects’ challenges and offers solutions. As a result, prospects willingly exchange their contact information for them. As a first step, we identify the offer that will be most effective at convincing prospective customers to register online.Campaign Promotion:
   We maximize reach through integrated communications, while delivering immediate calls to action. Our plans balance the overall quantity of leads with lead quality.

   We control lead quality through the lead capture process, but also through careful tool selection. Our final recommendations may include CPL (cost-per-lead) vendors, display publishing networks, PPC (pay-perclick), social channels, email, direct mail, and pre- or post-tradeshow marketing. They are based on a thorough process of research and planning aimed at determining the most appropriate overall mix — both in terms of the tools selected and the frequency of their deployment.

   Lead Capture:
   We create a permission-based and highly targeted way to interact with qualified prospects. In determining the most efficient method for converting a visitor into a lead, the first question we ask is: “What is the best environment to facilitate lead capture activity?” Should we modify the existing website to accommodate a lead generation campaign, or is it better to develop a campaign-specific landing page, built entirely around the offer?

7. Deploy, Measure, and OptimizeIn addition to leveraging best practices in strategy, content, creative, media and technical deployment, Movéo is very focused on metrics and optimization. We measure everything through to sales conversion and use data to optimize our efforts and improve ROI. We believe that a successful lead generation campaign is one that spends the appropriate amount of time planning up front, but benefits most from ongoing (post-launch) campaign optimization. Movéo has experience working with a number of analytics vendors, but the majority of our clients are using Google Analytics. Additionally, we’ve seen that one of the challenges with getting data to actually mean something to business stakeholders is in its visual complexity. For this reason, in some instances (and depending on the client), we might also use a visualization tool such as Tableau to help tell the analytics story.

Sparton is an industry leader in designing, developing, and manufacturing some of the world’s most complex electronics and electromechanical devices. It serves medical, military/aerospace, and industrial markets.

The company engaged Movéo to develop a lead generation program from scratch. Movéo created a series of content assets around the theme Conquering Complexity™ and promoted them through a targeted lead generation program. In the first nine months, we were able to drive 3,381 qualified leads — and Sparton never looked back.

To date, Movéo has generated $152,200,885 in CRMqualified pipeline opportunities from its lead generation efforts for the company. A recent study shows that for 85% of B2B marketers, lead generation is the most important KPI for their organization.*

With results like Sparton’s, it’s easy to see why.

Movéo has generated $152,200,885 in CRMqualified pipeline opportunities.

Measuring ROI

Difficulty measuring the success of lead generation is surprisingly widespread. Although campaign delivery metrics (e.g., impressions) and response metrics (e.g., click-through rate) are important in understanding the penetration of a message, the real value of analytics is that they allow the management of a campaign at a much deeper level. Movéo’s optimization efforts for a lead generation campaign focus on efficiency metrics, such as cost-per-contact and cost-per-MQL, as well as the ratio of MQL-to-SAL (sales-accepted lead). For example, certain efforts might be highly effective at generating contacts for the marketing database, but we might find they become less effective when you look at how these contacts actually turn into selling opportunities. We look not only at the quantity of the leads being generated, but also at the quality of those leads, and we fine-tune our media mix and message based on efficiency metrics in order to maximize the impact of our efforts. We understand that there’s far more value in driving 100 highly qualified leads than 1,000 unqualified leads — especially given the bandwidth limitations of most B2B sales teams.

Ultimately what our clients care about is the cost of investment versus revenue generated. That said, at times we find that the true ROI can be influenced by factors that are outside of marketing’s efforts. For that reason, Movéo works with its clients to establish a realistic expectation for any lead generation campaign in terms of ROI. We take historical conversion (e.g., lead-toclose data) and revenue data (e.g., average deal size) to develop a model for how a campaign should perform. In this way, we can identify if any aspects of the campaign did not perform as expected, and we can make recommendations for course correction if necessary.