Archive for September, 2009

Crafting educational offers that drive high response rates

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Educational offers allow us to build the top of our lead funnel with prospects situated at the very beginning stages of their buy cycle.

These prospects are seeking to learn what potential categories of solutions exist to solve their business problem.

So content that will appeal to these types of prospects typically tackles one of three topics:

  1. Explaining  trends and developments in your prospects’ industries
  2. Outlining potential problems or issues your prospects might face in the future
  3. Teaching strategies and techniques for success

I cannot stress this enough. Educational offers cannot and should not sell or they will not pull a high response rate.

Prospects at the beginning of the buy cycle are just not ready to be sold on your particular solution. Offering them a product brochure, case study or spec sheet is rushing the sale. And worse, offering a free trial or other conversion incentive to these prospects is a recipe for total failure.

In a DM News article several years back, I identified the following criteria for developing educational offers and content that generates a strong response and high ROI:

  • It must answer a compelling question for the target prospect
  • It must provide information or a viewpoint unavailable elsewhere
  • It must show thought leadership through the topic and content
  • It should leverage the topic to “subtly” reinforce your company’s value proposition
  • It should have a narrow focus that acts to “self-qualify” prospects

No, crafting this kind of content is not easy. You will have to dedicate time and resources to the effort. You may even need to bring in an outside writer who specializes in content development. But there is good news.

First, if you really take the time to understand your value proposition, you will find the areas where you have information or viewpoints that the market will find useful.

And second, I can guarantee that almost none of your competitors are creating strong educational offers as almost no marketers can resist the siren song of “selling.”

Prospects early in the buy cycle are starved for good information. Provide it to them and you’ll get far more at bats for your sales team over time.

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Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Direct Response Offer Strategy | 1 Comment »

Educational offers and your lead pipeline

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Last week, I outlined the four categories of direct response offers and content available to the B2B marketer. Today, let’s zero in on my personal favorite: educational offers.

To review, an educational offer is some kind of content that teaches a prospect about his or her industry. Examples of educational offers include white papers, Webinars, eBooks, etc.

The key idea here is that an educational offer should provide perceived value to your prospect regardless of whether they are considering buying from you.

Properly conceived and deployed, educational offers play a critical and specific role in your B2B direct marketing campaigns, allowing you to:

Identify and score early-stage prospects
Educational offers help you build business-to-business lead pipelines at the very top of your funnel.

In any B2B buy cycle, prospects begin by trying to understand what potential categories of solutions exist to solve their problems and only then do they zero in on the best provider within their chosen solution category.

By providing quality, relevant content to those prospects just beginning their search for the right category of solution, you can begin a dialog (and thus begin lead scoring) in a way not possible if all you are offering is a rationale for why your solution is better for a prospect.

So educational offers are especially powerful for your inbound marketing and SEO efforts.

Enter new markets or overcome poor awareness
Any sales rep will tell you that it is challenging to get onto a buyer’s short list when your company or solution is new or has poor market awareness.

A lead generation program with strong educational offers can help your sales team overcome this by reaching prospects far earlier in the buy cycle. Furthermore,  the content not only can establish your company as a thought leader but can also frame for the prospect exactly what they should consider the key areas to consider as they search for solutions.

Next week, I’ll explore how you can create strong educational offers for your campaigns.

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The 4 categories of DM offers and online content

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

The first step to learning to create strong business-to-business direct marketing offers (or online content) is to fully understand the four categories at your disposal and how they fit within a buy cycle:

Educational. This is a B2B offer or piece of online content that teaches a prospect about his or her industry. Examples include white papers, Webinars, eBooks, etc.

The key idea to keep in mind here is that an educational offer must not be a hard sell: it is designed to attract leads early in the buy cycle and establish thought leadership.

Informational. This is an B2B offer or piece of online content that teaches a prospect about your product or service. Examples include free consultations, product or service collateral, online pricing tools or calculators, online product demos, etc.

So unlike the Educational category, Informational offers and content can and should absolutely sell. They are designed for prospects in the middle of the buy cycle who, by definition, are actively considering your product or service during information gathering.

Promotional. This is solely an offer category that provides some kind of personal reward in exchange for filling out a lead form or making a purchase. Examples include sweepstakes, various tchotchke, contests, etc.

Even in B2B, Promotional offers can be used to great effect throughout the buy cycle when faced with specific challenges (e.g., need to capture lead scoring data quickly, need to build funnel fast, complete lack of market awareness, etc.).

Incentive. This is also solely an offer category and the one most marketers think of when they hear the word “offer.”

An incentive offer is one that lowers price, increases value, speeds delivery or improves service. Examples include discounts, bundled products, free shipping, free trials, one year tech support, guarantees, etc. Obviously, the only role of a B2B incentive offer is at the end of the buy cycle.

In future posts, I’ll tackle each of these categories one by one to show in more detail when they are most appropriate and how they fit into your marketing mix.

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Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Direct Response Offer Strategy, B2B Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Defining modern marketing by analogy

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

I was recently asked by Kent Huffman to provide my personal definition of marketing for his blog Systemic Marketing. The point of the exercise was to compile definitions from Kent’s uber-helpful list of top marketing professors on Twitter.

A scary challenge, figuring out how to define marketing in a fresh and relevant way while knowing your answer will be published alongside some of the smartest marketers on the planet.

After much thought, my answer came to me by way of analogy: the marketer as diplomat.

In a modern organization, in the purest form of the craft, the marketing function and thus the marketer serves as an ambassador.

By this, I mean that the successful marketer must live among customers and prospects (physically and, more and more often, virtually):

He or she must strive to faithfully understand their cultures, desires, hopes, and fears;

He or she must endeavor to bring their unfiltered voices back into the organization and then participate at the highest levels internally to implement that feedback loop into every aspect of the operation;

He or she must honestly and sensitively communicate back to the customers what the organization is doing, can, and will do to meet their needs;

He or she must oversee the creation of efficient opportunities for customers and employees to interact directly;

And finally, he or she must do all of this through ongoing (i.e., not episodic) efforts that are highly strategic, carefully measured, regularly analyzed, and consistently optimized.

Ok, not a tight definition (hey, this is for academia). But one that I think is at once aspirational and achievable.

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