Lead Generation Strategies: A-Z

Lead Generation Strategies: A-Z

60 methods and strategies for building a sustainable demand generation ecosystem for your business.

The Leader in Web 2.0 Marketing

© 2008. The Pedowitz Group. www.pedowitzgroup.com Page 2 of 23


Table of Contents The Letter A ................................................................................................................................................... 6

Auto responders ....................................................................................................................................... 6

Adwords .................................................................................................................................................... 6

Analysts ..................................................................................................................................................... 6

Awards ...................................................................................................................................................... 6

Advertising ................................................................................................................................................ 7

The Letter B ................................................................................................................................................... 7

Blogging ..................................................................................................................................................... 7

Banner Ads ................................................................................................................................................ 7

Benchmarking Assessments ...................................................................................................................... 7

Breakfast Meetings ................................................................................................................................... 7

The Letter C ................................................................................................................................................... 8

Customers ................................................................................................................................................. 8

Content ..................................................................................................................................................... 8

Community ................................................................................................................................................ 8

Co-Registration ......................................................................................................................................... 8

Conferences .............................................................................................................................................. 9

Chat ........................................................................................................................................................... 9

The Letter D .................................................................................................................................................. 9

Direct Mail ................................................................................................................................................. 9

Deminar..................................................................................................................................................... 9

Database ................................................................................................................................................... 9

The Letter E ................................................................................................................................................. 10

Email ........................................................................................................................................................ 10

Executive Briefings .................................................................................................................................. 10

Executive-To-Executive Campaigns ........................................................................................................ 10

The Letter F ................................................................................................................................................. 11

Feed Management .................................................................................................................................. 11

Flywheel .................................................................................................................................................. 11



The Letter G ................................................................................................................................................ 11

Games ..................................................................................................................................................... 11

The Letter H ................................................................................................................................................ 12

Hosted Wikis ........................................................................................................................................... 12

The Letter I .................................................................................................................................................. 12

Incubation ............................................................................................................................................... 12

The Letter J .................................................................................................................................................. 13

Join Professional and Trade Associations ............................................................................................... 13

The Letter K ................................................................................................................................................. 13

Knowledge Center ................................................................................................................................... 13

The Letter L ................................................................................................................................................. 13

Lead Scoring ............................................................................................................................................ 13

Lead Nurturing ........................................................................................................................................ 14

Linking ..................................................................................................................................................... 14

List Acquisition ........................................................................................................................................ 14

The Letter M................................................................................................................................................ 15

Marketing Plan ........................................................................................................................................ 15

Measurement.......................................................................................................................................... 15

The Letter N ................................................................................................................................................ 15

Newsletter............................................................................................................................................... 15

Networking.............................................................................................................................................. 16

The Letter O ................................................................................................................................................ 16

Offers ...................................................................................................................................................... 16

Opportunity Marketing ........................................................................................................................... 16

Open Rate Resends ................................................................................................................................. 16

The Letter P ................................................................................................................................................. 16

Podcasts .................................................................................................................................................. 16

Personalization ........................................................................................................................................ 17

Public Relations ....................................................................................................................................... 17

Partners/Channels .................................................................................................................................. 17



Personas .................................................................................................................................................. 17

The Letter Q ................................................................................................................................................ 18

Questionnaire ......................................................................................................................................... 18

The Letter R ................................................................................................................................................. 18

RSS ........................................................................................................................................................... 18

Reference Program ................................................................................................................................. 18

Recency ................................................................................................................................................... 18

The Letter S ................................................................................................................................................. 19

Search Engine Optimization .................................................................................................................... 19

Speaking .................................................................................................................................................. 19

Seminars .................................................................................................................................................. 19

Subscription Management ...................................................................................................................... 19

The Letter T ................................................................................................................................................. 20

Text Messaging ....................................................................................................................................... 20

Telemarketing ......................................................................................................................................... 20

Trade Shows ............................................................................................................................................ 20

Testing ..................................................................................................................................................... 20

The Letter U ................................................................................................................................................ 20

User Groups ........................................................................................................................................ 20

The Letter V ................................................................................................................................................. 21

Viral Marketing ....................................................................................................................................... 21

Virtual Worlds ......................................................................................................................................... 21

Virtual Tradeshows ................................................................................................................................. 21

The Letter W ............................................................................................................................................... 21

Website ................................................................................................................................................... 21

Webinars ................................................................................................................................................. 22

White Papers ........................................................................................................................................... 22

The Letter X ................................................................................................................................................. 22

Xpert on Demand .................................................................................................................................... 22

The Letter Y ................................................................................................................................................. 22



YouTube .................................................................................................................................................. 22

The Letter Z ................................................................................................................................................. 23

Zero in on active prospects and customers ............................................................................................ 23



There are many different ways you can generate leads. The key to sustainable demand generation is to

develop an ecosystem, leveraging multiple lead generation methods. We are all probably doing some of

these, but can we do more? Which are the most cost effective? Which get the best results? Below is a

listing of 60 methods from A-Z you can start to employ in your organization.

The Letter A

Auto responders We all know what they are, but do we always use them? Typically, this is a text email that you

receive after you submit a form, but it can do so much more. This is a great chance to reinforce

your brand and use some of your better templates along with strong calls to action. Many

marketers view this as just a formality, but it is an excellent way to get another message across

to someone that just expressed interest in your product or service. The best part is it doesn’t

cost anything but the time to set it up initially and then you are set.

Adwords Given a choice, and please don’t kill me Google, I would rather see marketers focus their efforts

on search engine optimization first. Most of the heat map studies done by Marketing Sherpa

and others show that the attention is being paid to the top few listings returned from the query.

Seldom if ever do searchers go to page 2 or even view on the right. First, concentrate on getting

the top listing for keywords in several categories. Once you have that down, it does make sense

to invest in some highly targeted Adwords campaigns. Before you begin, ask your customers

what words they use to search for your products and services. You may be surprised to find out

they are quite different from the terms your marketing team uses.

Analysts As respected third party advisors, analysts can be very useful in writing about your firm and

getting you in the door with new prospects. One of the best ways to use them is to pay them for

co-sponsored webcasts, webinars, or even paid interviews that you can podcast. That way, you

can reuse the content repeatedly and make your website much more engaging.

Awards How many of you are sponsoring awards for the markets you serve? Everyone loves to receive

awards and sponsors will gladly pay premium dollars to be part of an event where their key

target market is. Consider developing your own industry focused awards and then invite people

to submit nominations for various categories. This is something that the press will pick up on as

well and help you contribute to your Thought Leadership position in the marketplace.



Advertising Targeted ads in key industry verticals, both online and offline, especially when they can support

a bi-line article or case study pack a good one-two punch. Instead of just putting the ad in, make

sure you put a targeted URL in the ad so you can track which people came to your site as a

result. For example, www.pedowitzgroup.com/wallstreetjournal [ed. note - this link won’t work]

is much better than www.pedowitzgroup.com

The Letter B

Blogging This has become a must-have for any serious B2B marketer. Once considered a fad, or

something too difficult to control, marketers now recognize the power in giving key

stakeholders a voice and leveraging the internet as a platform. Blogging helps you reinforce

your brand; develop your people as brands within your corporate structure and a useful

medium to deliver targeted messaging. When combined with RSS, podcasting, and other

Web 2.0 conventions, Blogging becomes a great way to generate demand. Makes sure every

post has a relevant link, like this: www.pedowitzgroup.com/blog/blogger.html so that you

can track how effective your blog is at driving traffic back towards your website.

Banner Ads Typically these deliver less than a 0.5% response rate, but depending upon the site and the

cost of the ad, they may be useful in reinforcing a targeted campaign. Again, make sure the

landing page URL is unique to support the ad. Don’t send the respondent to your home

page.

Benchmarking Assessments Everyone loves to be benchmarked and see how well they stack up against the competition.

When you can deliver a valuable assessment that rates a respondent in a critical business

area, you build trust and confidence as a thought leader and then you can use that data to

build a master database of highly relevant market data that you can repurpose. The people

that fill out the assessments also generally provide much more information than just a white

paper download, so you can feed this into your lead scoring program to determine how to

handle. Most of your competitors won’t do this type of service, so if you are looking to

distinguish yourself, this is a great area to do it.

Breakfast Meetings The power lunch has moved to the power breakfast. Most executives are too busy to take

long lunches, but getting an exclusive briefing first thing in the morning before the crazy day

starts is always a good play. When you can have an analyst or top name customer join you

http://www.pedowitzgroup.com/

http://www.pedowitzgroup.com/blog/blogger.html



for the breakfast, you should have no trouble attracting some of those executives you have

been coveting.

The Letter C

Customers We often concentrate so much on new logo acquisition that we forget about our most cherished

asset - our customers. Studies like Reicheld’s Net Promoter concept clearly show a direct

correlation between loyal customers and long term profitable growth. Most companies I talk to

do not have any formal ongoing marketing programs that deal specifically with their customers.

Instead, they are concentrating all of their money and attention on getting new customers. It is

so much easier to focus on your existing customer base as a channel. Turning your customers

into advocates will do a lot more for your net growth than any lead generation campaign.

Content As long as you continue to produce timely, relevant content that helps your prospects and

customers stay informed and make better business decisions, you will continue to generate new

leads. Where do you get good content? It is all around you. For starters, you can set up an

aggregation of all of the industry feeds right on your site. Everything that the analysts, industry

pundits and third parties write can be showcased on your site for convenient access. Instead of

always writing your content, consider a podcast series where you interview your customers,

executives, industry luminaries. A 10 minute interview that can be streamed via your website

will have lasting value. What about hiring college interns or developing a program with your

local university’s business or journalism department? They get real-world experience and you

get a slew of writers for no cost. There is also User Generated Content. Leverage the power of

communities and have users generate their own content in support of a broader message.

Community Some communities you may be very familiar with - eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook. Once just limited

to B2C and personal relationships, many B2B marketers are now creating vertical communities

that directly target their market and serve their customer base. Companies like Neighborhood

America have software and services that help you establish communities pretty quickly. This

strategy is rapidly gaining ground with many marketers who are trying to deliver relevant

content to the right people at the right time.

Co-Registration Easy and cost-effective, co-registration is the process of having people subscribe to your list

when they sign up for another list. You may have seen these checkboxes from time to time

when you have signed up on a particular form. They ask you if you would also like to register for

another newsletter or list. By developing 10-12 good co-registration partners, you can build your



list through the efforts of others that are going after the same market. Ideally, find partners that

complement your products or services. Of course, if you are really daring, you could partner

with your competitors and help each other share the burden in acquiring leads. This lowers the

cost of lead acquisition while helping to build a highly targeted and relevant list. I’m not sure of

how many people would go for this, but it is a thought.

Conferences Conferences can be a great way to network and develop new sources of leads. Instead of

sponsoring, see if you can get one of the speaker slots. If that is not an option, come up with a

highly impactful and relevant giveaway, like a wheel chart that you can distribute along with

your business cards. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Chat Many B2B marketers are starting to warm up to the idea of using chat or Instant Messaging on

their website. Not all people respond to email or phone. A chat window is another way to

interact with your visitors in real time while they are on your website and showing interest. You

can staff the function with your inside sales team, who in many cases would be qualifying the

leads anyway.

The Letter D

Direct Mail An oldie but a goodie, many marketers have moved away from direct mail since email has

become so cost effective. To make direct mail work for you in a Web 2.0 world, make sure that

you add a personalized URL to each DM piece that takes the respondent to their own

personalized microsite. Once there, you can tailor content based on title, industry, behavior and

other characteristics to create a more compelling experience. Most marketers I have worked

with see a 3-5X lift over their normal response metrics using this approach.

Deminar At the end of the day, we still need to sell and people will want to view your products at one

time or another. A deminar is a webinar that is exclusively focused on demoing your products

and services. Make sure your marketing communication clearly outlines this. Those that attend

will be a very targeted and segmented group. You can pre-record parts or all of this and then

take Q&A live at the end to aid in scalability.

Database What is 2.0 about your database? For starters, many of us are still at 1.0 with duplicate and stale

data that is not properly segmented. The average B2B list turns over at least 25% per year. First,

put a process in place that will continuously update and cleanse your database. Once that is



complete, you can use your database to develop key buying personas. Personas are

representations of your ideal buyers and are easier to build marketing strategies around. You

can then develop your website and supporting materials around those personas and track how

each segment performs.

The Letter E

Email I know, this is kind of like “duh”, but it is amazing to me how poorly email is used as a medium.

For starters, many marketers are still using either no permission or opt-out as the preferred

subscription management, as opposed to double opt-in, the gold standard for list quality and

performance. Marketers working with better permission and quality lists outperform their

counterparts by more than 4 to 1 in response rates. Hardly anyone is doing testing. No one says

you have to do something complicated like multivariate, but at least do an A/B split test with

subject lines and calls to action on every email campaign. It doesn’t take much longer and can

improve your performance by up to 400%. How about just good copywriting? With the ubiquity

of blackberries, most executives are reading their email on mobile devices. That pretty HTML

template with endless copy isn’t going to cut it anymore. The best thing you can do with email is

get the respondent to the website as quickly as possible where you can engage and lead them

through a more interactive experience. What about how you are using email? Are your auto

responders optimized to have additional calls to action and relevant messaging, or are they just

an afterthought? Are emails being used only for new prospect acquisition, or are you also

leveraging them for customer education, knowledge management, lead nurturing, or a host of

other options? Email is a very powerful medium, and when used to its fullest extent, can be a

very valuable part of your Web 2.0 marketing mix.

Executive Briefings Whether they are breakfast meetings, teleconferences, hosted summits, or a variety of other

approaches you can take, executives like to network with other executives and learn from their

peers. If you do not have some kind of high-level educational or thought leadership program

that is targeted at senior level executives, consider adding one today.

Executive-To-Executive Campaigns Put those Gatekeepers to work for you. Set up a quarterly research project where you interview

20-30 key executives in your industry about a relevant topic, letting them know that all the

information conveyed specifically about their company will not be shared. Compile the data and

ask for the opportunity to present the research exclusively with them before it is shared with

the broader market. Most executives love being interviewed. Their assistants will be more

than happy to facilitate vs. shutting you down because this is an interview, not a sales call. The



end result is great content that you can leverage for new campaigns, and high quality

relationships at an executive level.

The Letter F

Feed Management Today, it’s all about syndication. With so many people tuning in to get their information from

the Internet, you can’t afford not to distribute your content. Services like Feedburner, Attensa,

Blogbridge, and more can help you package your content and distribute it to multiple audiences.

The best part is most of these services don’t cost anything for you to leverage. The more people

that see your content and why you are different, the more people you will be able to attract to

your website. Good use of links within your content and feeds will also strengthen your position

in search engine rankings.

Flywheel In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes the flywheel effect, which is a metaphor for

how big companies were able to achieve momentous growth. The concept of a flywheel is that it

takes a while to get started, but once it gets rolling, it is almost unstoppable. Demand

generation is the same thing. There is no one magic bullet that will help you generate leads, but

if you build an ecosystem with multiple programs running that support an overriding objective,

you will be able to significantly outperform marketers over time, especially the ones that are

principally relying on email to accomplish their lead generation objectives.

The Letter G

Games We all love to play them and are captivated for hours while we try to win. Websites like Click

Software’s Service Tycoon can help reinforce the benefits of your value proposition while

holding the visitor captive.

Ideally, the game should be unique, relevant to your industry, and neither too simple nor too

difficult to play. A competent player should be able to finish a complete game in about 10-15

minutes, preferably less. You have probably seen themed variations of first-person shooter or

“whack-a-mole” games as they are fairly popular. If you do go this route, chances are your game

won’t be too popular since it won’t stand out. The challenge here as with most things is to come

up with something unique. Vodafone’s campaign is a good example of a unique twist.

An interesting variant of online video games is industry-related trivia games, with prospect-

qualifying questions mixed in. These are unlikely to get wide viral distribution, but more likely to

appeal to people within your target market. In addition, these have multiple uses; for example,



they can be used effectively at trade shows to attract booth traffic while also pre-qualifying your

show leads.

The Letter H

Hosted Wikis A wiki is a group-editable website. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling

fast and easy collaboration. It’s as easy to use as email. You might be familiar with

www.wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia. Wiki’s allow users to have socially relevant and

contextual conversations. How does this help you build demand for your products and services?

Hosting your own wiki around relevant industry information allows professionals within your

space to network and collaborate with each other around specific topics. When you host the

wiki, you have access to that network and are also viewed as a thought leader. People that end

up using your wiki will be much more highly qualified than someone that just fills out a form for

more information on your website. There are a number of free wiki tools out there like

www.pbwiki.com, www.wetpaint.com and www.wikispaces.com. They are easy to set up and

maintain and are also highly optimized by the search engines. Consider staring your own wiki

today.

The Letter I

Incubation

Incubation: also known as Lead Nurturing or Lead Harvesting. The challenge for most marketers

is what happens to the leads after the pass them off to sales. Many times, these leads fall into

the abyss, never to be heard from again. Worse is when the marketing team spends more

money and campaign resources to reacquire the same lead again and again.

Incubation takes leads that are not ready for sales and keeps them warm with a series of

marketing messages over a period of time. Then, when the lead exhibits signs of buying

behavior, marketing can move the lead back over to sales. Incubation can consist simply of a

series of emails or phone calls over a fixed period of time. More experienced marketers use

multiple channels such as direct mail and personalized landing pages to vary the pace and

content of the incubation period. You will need a marketing automation platform to accomplish

this on any type of scale. Companies such as Eloqua all have technology that can deliver the

goods to varying degree. Incubation ensures that all leads get followed up on and your

conversion rates will be higher down the line.



The Letter J

Join Professional and Trade Associations As part of your lead generation strategy, you should map out all trade groups and associations

that your target profile would be actively a part of. Look for niche organizations and other

associations that your competitors wouldn’t necessarily be a part of. As you expand your sales

and marketing teams, ensure that you have a local membership in every region that you have

field personnel. Rather than just joining, consider offering your services as a board member.

Many of these organizations are starving for people to help them out. A lot of times it is as

simple as asking to be on the Board or to run a committee. Once on the board, you will have

access to a much better network, and at events, attendees will seek you out rather than the

other way around. If you can’t find a suitable association that meets your needs, how about

starting your own? You get to call the shots and control the players and content. This is one of

the most powerful ways to network. Why sit in the back of the room and fight everyone else for

a valuable contact when you can stand up front and have people come to you?

The Letter K

Knowledge Center One of the best things you can do for your visitors and customers is to provide them with a

central place to acquire knowledge and make informed decisions. Over 70% of B2B Decision

Makers are now doing their primary research over the Internet. Why should they go to other

sites when you can provide them everything in one destination? You can use RSS Syndication to

bring in relevant content that is complimentary to your offerings and add them into the

Knowledge Center. Intersperse this with your own white papers, interviews, podcasts, analyst

briefings, tools, benchmarks, research and anything else relevant to help your buyers make a

more informed decision. Consider gating your content. For simply supplying their email address,

visitors can get access to good content that is valuable. For filling out a more detailed form that

better profiles their buying intentions, you give them access to even higher value content. This

will also signal to your sales team which prospects are showing much more serious buying

behavior and they can then prioritize their time.

The Letter L

Lead Scoring Not all leads are created equal. In many cases, inbound leads are being sent directly to the sales

team. Whether they are web to lead, or call to lead, sales teams are inundated with a large

quantity of requests. From marketing’s standpoint, this is typically considered good, but from

sales it isn’t because the majority of those requests are not sales-ready leads. Enter lead scoring.



Lead scoring is the process of automatically qualifying and screening inbound requests for the

purposes of determining which requests are really leads and which ones aren’t. The sales ready

leads are usually then sent either to the sales team or to an inside sales/telemarketing function

for further qualification. Leads that are not ready to buy are held back in an incubation or

nurturing program, until they exhibit signs of buying behavior. Lead scoring works by reducing

the overall number of opportunities, but increasing the conversion rate, shortening the sales

cycle, increasing average deal size and increasing overall revenue. The analogy is simple: give

salespeople high quality at-bats, and more often than not they will knock it out of the park. Lead

scoring works best when you marry both explicit data such as budget, authority, need and

timeline with implicit behavior such as website visits, downloads, and webinars attended.

Lead Nurturing Lead Nurturing, Lead Incubation, Lead Harvesting is the process of continuously marketing to

leads that are not sales ready. Many times after the sales team disqualifies a lead, it falls into a

black abyss. Or worse, marketing spends more money and time to reacquire the same lead over

and over again. With lead nurturing, you use marketing automation to leverage channels such as

email, direct mail, Microsites and telemarketing to send a continuous series of messaging to

your prospects. When the prospects display buying behavior, they are then routed to a

salesperson for follow-up.

Linking Linking is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and optimize your position in

search engine rankings. Identify complementary partners, associations, industry boards and

other websites where it would make sense to have a link pointing back to your site. You then

reciprocate. You have now turned the power of the web to your advantage by leveraging

everyone else’s position to amplify your own. This is easy to do and very cost-effective.

List Acquisition

Ideally, you want to grow your house list organically. But sometimes, it does make sense to

acquire a list if you are just starting out or entering a new market. There are a number of good

list brokers out there. Do your homework and try to use as much criteria as you can to build a

highly targeted and relevant list. Keep in mind that even the best lists will never be more than

80% accurate due to shifting patterns. Leverage off-shore calling centers for a few bucks per call

to validate the names on the list and obtain email permission (usually about 20% of the time), or

use Direct Mail with a good offer that gets people to respond and submit an updated profile.



The Letter M

Marketing Plan

Most marketers I talk to do not have a formal, written marketing plan or a demand generation

plan. They have a budget, but there is usually not an overall plan to follow. A good marketing

plan outlines the objectives and goals the team needs to follow that align with the corporate

strategic direction. Things will change throughout the year, but just because you change

direction doesn't mean you throw out the map. To drive sustainable revenue growth, your team

needs to develop an annual plan with objectives, goals and tactics and then develop key

performance indicators and controls to measure your performance. Your plan should be

reviewed on a monthly basis with your team. It is too easy to get caught up in the daily grind

and forget about all the other things you need to be doing. Sustainable revenue growth

companies operate consistently from a plan.

Measurement

How do you measure your marketing performance? Hint: It is not the creative awards, # of

impressions, or clicks you get. It is all in financial terms. Your CFO and board only want to know a

few things: 1) what is your Revenue per Marketing Spend? For every dollar they give you to

spend in marketing, how many dollars in revenue are you returning against that dollar? 2) Lead

to Customer Conversion Ratio - How many leads does it take to generate one customer 3)

Lifetime value of a customer - how much revenue and referral revenue will a customer produce

over its lifetime, and have you stratified these customers into tiers based upon that return? 4)

Lead Portfolio - what is the average rate of return per given lead and how much does it cost to

take one lead through to a sale. By concentrating on these financial drivers and looking at how

much revenue marketing is producing, not the number of leads, you will align your team much

better with sales and endear yourself to the Board.

The Letter N

Newsletter Everyone talks about it, but more often than not what starts off as an ambitious project often

ends up in the project file that no one has time for. Finding new content, editing and layout all

compete for precious time. How can you use Web 2.0 to make it easier to publish and make

your newsletter more compelling at the same time? Audio and Video feeds. It is much easier to

grab your CXO or customer and do a 5-10 minute interview than it is to ask someone to sit down

and write an article. In this way, you make your newsletter more interactive and you don't have

to spend as much time writing. A quick post to YouTube and setting up a podcast feed via

Feedburner and you now have a syndicated newsletter to start driving demand to your website.



Add a little creativity and you can turn your monthly video newsletter into a TV or radio show,

complete with themes and supporting story lines.

Networking Instead of going to shows and being part of the masses, join the boards. Many of these

organizations are starving for volunteers and would welcome your contribution. Have all of your

sales and marketing people join at least one association in their area and serve on the board.

Now at events, people will come up to you instead of the other way around. You will get much

better leads this way. If you can't find a suitable group to join, start your own and make all the

rules. How about running an online networking event? Social networking via community sites

accomplishes this very well.

The Letter O

Offers The right offer at the right place at the right time will more often than not compel someone to

action. Ensure that your offers and calls-to-action are relevant for your industry, products and

services. Don’t give away a trip when a free consulting session with one of your executives will

be much more valuable.

Opportunity Marketing Integrating your CRM system with your Marketing system will give you the closed-loop reporting

you have been looking for. It will also allow you to track opportunity step conversion and

support the team by marketing to deals that are stuck in a phase for too long, move forwards or

move backwards. You can now send relevant messaging that supports the prospect’s position in

the funnel.

Open Rate Resends Have you ever tried sending emails to non-opens within a day or two after the initial send?

Studies have shown that there is no adverse effect in terms of unsubscribes and you will pick up

additional conversions without doing more work other than changing the subject line.

The Letter P

Podcasts Podcasts are a great way to leverage the interactive medium of the Internet. There are many

different formats and approaches you can take to provide meaningful content and drive

demand for your business. Convert your newsletter series into interviews with your executives,

customers, and analysts. Use a service like BlogTalkRadio and host your own radio show over



the internet where you can take live calls. Organize a themed approach, like episodes for a TV

show and do a different podcast every week with actors. Convert all of your podcasts into

transcripts so that visitors have the option to read or listen. If podcasts aren’t part of your

demand generation arsenal, they should be.

Personalization In the age of mass media and message bombardment, personalization reigns supreme. Now

more than ever it is imperative that you are sending unique and relevant messages to

individuals. Email, direct mail, landing pages – all should have tailored content that speaks to

who people are and what they are interested in. You will see exponential improvement in your

conversion ratios if you take the time to personalize your content and segment your lists.

Public Relations PR has been around forever. Traditionally, all PR firms could do was tell you how many

impressions were generated. With website tracking, you can now add specific URLs in every

release and track how well each release performs. Get specific with codes so you can know

whether traditional print is outpulling online syndication. By tracking website hits and knowing

how website traffic affects your revenue, you will be able to gauge how well PR is doing to drive

demand. It is still one of the most cost-effective channels and yields 8X the results of print ads.

Optimize your PR by adding it to a variety of RSS feeds.

Partners/Channels Building a partner and channel ecosystem is a great way to scale your business and drive

revenue over the long term. There are many types of partners – resellers, OEM’s, consulting

partners, referral partners, technology partners – the mix and amount is different for every

business. Keep in mind that not every partner wants to aggressively sell for you or be held to a

quota. There can be good synergies with a variety of partners without expecting them to sell for

you – but they will help add value for you in the marketplace. If you are looking for your

partners to drive specific revenue numbers, focus on those that want to be resellers. Also, give

it 18-24 months. A successful channel program takes time to coalesce, and it will require

dedicated resources on your end. But it is a great way to grow revenue and scale your business

over time.

Personas Personas are representations of buyers and profiles their behavior. Just because two men are

50 years old, CIO’s at software companies and have 2 children and play golf, doesn’t mean that

they look at things the same way or buy the same way. Personas look at their behavior and

group people into predictive models. Developing 4-6 key buying personas for your business will

allow you to focus all of your marketing efforts, segment your lists and get better results.



The Letter Q

Questionnaire Questionnaires and survey are excellent tools to develop content, capture interest and drive

traffic to your website. Organize your questionnaires around a theme. Ideally they can rate a

company’s proficiency in a given area that is relevant to your industry. You can then share the

results of the survey and show how companies compare against each other. You can also use

questionnaires to survey what people want for product and service improvements or what their

business concerns are. Whatever theme you go with, ensure that you push out the

questionnaires on a regular and consistent basis so that people will look for them.

The Letter R

RSS RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a means by which users can control what content they want

to receive. As the publisher, you can leverage your content and use a feeder to make it

available to a wide audience. Subscribers can anonymously add your feed to their favorite

content. This is different than email, where you know who is getting your content. RSS is the

fastest growing medium on the Internet, outpacing Blogs and growing faster than the early days

of email adoption. Because it is such a fast-growing channel, it is imperative that you develop

several feeds and syndicate your content to reach a larger audience and drive traffic back to

your website.

You can also publish other people’s content by posting their feeds on your website. This gives

you fresh content every day, optimizes your site for search engines, and increases traffic and

lead flow.

Reference Program Reference programs tap into your best lead source – your customers. A good reference

program is proactive. Shoot videos of your customers and break them down into video

segments by question. Post the segments on your website and then track which questions are

drawing the biggest response. Sales can now drive prospects seeking references to the website

instead of endless phone calls to your biggest reference accounts. This moves the reference

process to the beginning of the sales cycle instead of the end, shortening the overall cycle.

Recency Following up with leads any more than 24 hours after it is received will result in a very poor

demand generation program. People are way too busy today to even remember where or what

they were doing yesterday let alone last week. If you have not done so, implement processes

today that will ensure all leads are followed upon within 2 hours. Simple things such as an



autoresponder and auto-voicemail will improve the service level. Use lead scoring to determine

which leads should be forwarded to sales, and work with the sales team so that they follow

upon all leads that they receive from marketing. For leads that will go into your lead nurturing

program, send a follow-up email that is more personalized than the autoresponder (this can be

automated as well). Don’t let leads you spent good money on fall into the cracks.

The Letter S

Search Engine Optimization With more and more buyers turning to the Internet to start their research, it is imperative that

you have an ongoing SEO program in place. Both natural and paid search have their place, but

natural listings should dominate the majority of your effort and budget. A combination of in-

house and consulting resources can work well to ensure you have a good mix of best practice

expertise and company/industry specific knowledge. Most B2B marketers spend a considerable

portion of their budget on this tactic.

Speaking Speaking at events is an excellent way to build your Thought Leadership in the marketplace. In

addition to having your executives speak, consider using sales and marketing personnel at local

and regional events. Your marketing team can prepare 3-4 standard presentations, and then

have your team that is virtually located speak on them cost-effectively. Turn your organization

into a team of speakers and Thought Leaders and reap the returns.

Seminars Running live seminars is another way to build Thought Leadership. Focus on education and

teaching and down play the product pitch. If you do a good job of providing content and

transferring knowledge, the sales will take care of themselves – especially if you mix your

customers and prospects at the same event!

Subscription Management Instead of ‘spray and pray’, give your subscribers the option to choose what content they want

to receive and when they want to receive it. You can start by categorizing your content into

simple groups such as events, product and service updates, newsletter, etc. Over time, you can

get more sophisticated as you gauge how subscribers respond. You will see a much better

response from your lists by taking this approach.



The Letter T

Text Messaging More and more B2B marketers are turning to this medium. The younger generation is entering

the workforce, and Text ranks #1 as the preferred communication choice ahead of Instant

Messaging and Email. Texting provides a real-time and interactive experience. The more

conservative marketers have subscribers texting in a code to get a promotional offer or be

redirected to a landing page. Other marketers are gaining opt-in permission and adding texting

to a rich, multi-channel approach to campaigning. Texting should be tested as part of your

marketing plans this year.

Telemarketing Many B2B marketers are using Telemarketing and/or Inside Sales as a viable lead generation

function. Other uses include organizational mapping - calling into a company and determining

all key contacts for your product and service; data validation, opt-in for mailing lists, and

surveys. Savvy marketers who track their website visitors, pass on unknown visitors in real-time

to a telemarketer who then uses a reverse DNS lookup of the visitor to call into the target

company and gain contact and lead information.

Trade Shows Many tradeshows don't give the same return as they once did, which is why so many marketers

opt to not do them or go to very few. Instead of paying money for a booth, consider being a

panelist or speaker at the event, hosting your own cocktail party, or doing a guerilla 'on-floor'

promotion, passing out coupons and using SMS with contest codes to draw attendees. Any of

these approaches will yield a much better return on investment .

Testing Taking just a few extra minutes on every campaign to test will yield a much better response rate.

Simple A/B split testing, comparing subject lines, calls to action, or content headers can help you

optimize every campaign. Start with 10% of your list and perform the test. After a few hours

(with email or phone) you will have enough of a gauge to determine which version you should

send the other 90% to. Doing this within the campaign, as opposed to waiting until the next one

will produce a much better outcome.

The Letter U

User Groups User groups are another effective way to generate more demand for your products and services.

You can have different groups for executives, who want to discuss strategy, resourcing, process

– and practitioners, who want to discuss product roadmap, how-to, hear case studies, etc.



Providing valuable content and giving your user community the opportunity to interact on a

regular basis strengthens support for your brand and gives you a chance to highlight other

services and products your users may not be aware of.

The Letter V

Viral Marketing Viral marketing can be a simple video, story, or podcast. It can also be a game, or an immersive

experience. Backup Trauma (www.backuptrauma.com) by LiveVault is an excellent example of

how to build a compelling experience that takes a humorous approach, while highlighting the

strengths of the company. This particular version generated millions of downloads for LiveVault.

The key to a successful viral campaign is to tap into the emotional element – make it funny,

controversial – something people just have to watch and pass on. A good viral approach can

drive more demand than almost anything else on this list.

Virtual Worlds Virtual worlds haven’t been really embraced by B2B marketers yet. They involve using Avatars

(representations of you in a character form), having an online experience in an alternative , 3-D

virtual world. The most common approach has been game form, where Advertisers design

games and experiences that take the visitor through different scenarios while highlighting their

brand. Second Life is the best know vendor in this space. If you really have a creative bent and

some time on your hands, this is another approach that really leverages the interactive nature of

the Internet.

Virtual Tradeshows Growing in popularity, virtual tradeshows offer visitors the experience of going to a tradeshow

without leaving the comfort of their office. They typically support an actual live event. While

online, you can check in for sessions, viewing them in webcast form, post questions, visit ‘virtual

tradeshow booths’ and network with other online visitors. This is an inexpensive way to reach

many people – typically they cost $5000-$20,000 to promote. Consider adding one of these to

your arsenal this year.

The Letter W

Website What better way to drive leads then by leveraging the power of your website? This is your most

important asset, bar none. Your site should be fully optimized, highly interactive, and post fresh

content on a regular basis. Knowledge Centers, games, podcast series, online testimonials,

video and audio – all should be elements incorporated into your site. Ensure that every page

http://www.backuptrauma.com/



has a strong call to action and that your forms link directly to a marketing automation system

and can notify sales reps in real-time when online valuable behavior is occurring. Top off your

website with good chat functionality and reach your visitors in more ways than ever before.

Webinars Webinars are still a preferred method of B2B marketers for driving demand. Interview formats

and guest speakers are two of the better ways to showcase good content and drive visitors.

Make your webinars more effective by automating the pre-event marketing and post-event

follow-up. This will allow you to scale and host more events on a go forward basis.

White Papers Especially useful for early stages of the buy cycle, white papers can explore relevant industry

topics in-depth. White Papers help position your company as Thought Leaders. Make sure that

the paper is really a good examination of a business problem, not an extended brochure that

promotes your specific product or service. Scheduling a new white paper for every quarter will

keep your company’s image fresh and ensure you are taking a Thought Leadership position in

the marketplace.

The Letter X

Xpert on Demand If you are really well known for expertise within your marketplace, why not have an ‘Xpert on

Demand’ function on your website. Rotate several people throughout the week and allow

visitors to call or chat in real-time with an Industry Expert to have their questions asked. Then,

archive the questions, post them to a F.A.Q. section on your website, and add this content to a

RSS feed. Now your expertise will be heard around the world!

The Letter Y

YouTube Taking the planet by storm, YouTube has become the ultimate way for users to express

themselves and for creative marketers to reach a broader audience. Simple humorous videos or

stories under 5 minutes in length work well. Strike the right chord and you can reach hundreds

of thousands of people very quickly. Finish the video with a simple URL that directs people back

to a dedicated landing page. If you are short on resources, consider working with a local college

or university drama department. They will get a real-world experience and do the job for free

and your company gains the benefit.



The Letter Z

Zero in on active prospects and customers Leverage the power of cookies and page tagging to monitor the individual patterns of visitors on

your website. Develop profiles based on activity levels, navigation patterns, and content

downloads. This will allow you to segment your list better and offer more personalized relevant

content that will convert your leads at a higher rate.

Documents

Lead Generation Strategies: A-Z