Make Multichannel Lead Gen a Reality

Grab the attention of your dream customer before your competitors do by managing leads effectively in today’s multichannel world.

Lead generation has always been hard work. In today’s digital world lead generation has become a maze of uncertainty with the dawn of the multi-device, multichan-nel customer. In fact, according to Retention Science, 95% of leads aren’t qualified today. Yet, savvy marketers find a way to excel in de-mand gen with carefully planned lead management techniques.

Capturing prospective customers’ attention is the first step to suc-cessful lead generation—no easy feat in today’s clamorous market-place. This compilation eBook high-lights ways in which marketers can refine the definition of a lead, ma-neuver through labyrinthine data, and decipher ways to grab pros-pects’ attention before the compe-tition does. Plus, lead gen experts predict what to expect for the fu-ture of demand gen and debunk marketing’s most common myths.

—Heather Freitag

TABLE OF CONTENTSPage 2: Introduction

Page 4: Lead Generation in 2015

Page 5: Northwest Tech Skis Past the Lead-Gen Competition

Page 7: 4 List-Building Myths Debunked

Page 8: Revving Up Marketing Automation for Lead Gen

Page 9: 8 Ways to Increase Qualified Leads Through Email

Page 11: 24 Hour Fitness Is Bulking Up Their Lead-Gen Regimen

Page 13: Quality Versus Quantity in Lead Generation

Page 14: 4 Strategies for Lead Generation

Page 15: The Ins and Outs of Inbound Marketing

Page 16: Lead Spotting

Page 18: Marketers Agree That Data’s Role Is Blooming [Infographic]

Page 19: Voices From the Twittersphere

Lead Generation in 2015Strategy, content, and customers. Marketing pundits say those will be the three prongs of a successful lead-gen strategy in the coming year. By Natasha Smith

Already, marketers are looking to or have started developing lead-generation strat-egies for 2015. The team at Blue Fountain Media, a Web design and online marketing firm, weighed in on how to craft the most effective lead-gen plans for next year—and beyond. In particular, the speakers homed in on three areas: strategy, content, and of course, potential customers. Here are a few of the more poignant, pithy bits of advice from the summit, held at the Gansevoort Park Avenue hotel in New York.

STRATEGY: HAVING THE RIGHT PLAN“Part of a good conversion strategy is to respect that those at the top of the fun-nel might not want to be contacted or engaged [by marketers] right away. Let them browse before you contact them.” —Christina Shaw, CMO

“[Customer] wants, usability, viewability, engagement, and authority. That’s the formula for great SEO.” —John Marcinuk, director of SEO

CONTENT: CRAFTING THE RIGHT STORY“Marketers [and consumers] are moving toward engaging content with rich media. Use sight, sound, and mo-tion.” —Ashley Kemper, senior marketing strategist

“Most people think of marketing automation as an assembly line. But it’s the ability to have a one-to-one conversation with customers at scale. Marketing automation is really marketing personalization.” —Joe Di-Nardo, director of paid & social media

“Personalization allows marketers to show context that’s relevant at the right time—and that changes con-tent in real time.” —DiNardo

CUSTOMERS: CHOOSING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE“Marketers need to layer their information—demographics, behaviors, and [popular] content. That’s when you find your customers.” —Jon-Michael Durkin, agency development manager, Google

“To identify your best potential customers, go beyond demographics. Use pain points, influencers, touchpoints, and even potential barriers.” —Shaw

“[Potential customers] use social as a sort-of midpoint in the funnel. They use it to gather more information or gain awareness before deciding whether to buy. It’s an important mid-step.” —Kemper

Northwest Tech Speeds Down the B2B Lead-Gen Slope With Email The premium skiing outfitter adds B2B targeting to its formerly B2C-only busi-ness model, and relies on lifecycle marketing to convert leads. By Elyse Dupré

Marketing to B2C customers is tough enough, but tacking a whole new B2B business model onto an existing B2C business can present a mountain of challenges. Skiing and snowboard-ing premium outfitter Northwest Tech (NWT3K) discovered this firsthand when it began targeting teams, clubs, and com-panies in addition to its direct-to-consumer base. But through education, email, and lifecycle marketing, NWT3K is now able to guide prospects down the path-to-purchase.

A BUSINESS ON THE BUNNY SLOPENick Marvik started his business the way many startups do: in his basement. An avid skier, he started creating customized jackets and built a website in college. After he graduated in 2012 he received the ultimate training by working for Amazon on one of the startup’s e-commerce products; however, he still man-aged to build NWT3K at night.

“I was getting to learn from one of the leaders in e-commerce and then do something really fun and innovative by night,” says Marvik, NWT3K founder and CEO.

While working at Amazon, Marvik partnered with a software engineer to build a direct-to-consumer customized e-com-merce platform. He then left his job after roughly a year to fully dedicate his time to selling premium outerwear to members of

the skiing and snowboarding communities.As consumer demand grew, Marvik wondered if he could ex-

pand the business and start selling jackets in volume to teams, clubs, or companies. And the market’s desire for customized ski jackets suggested that he could. “The market validated this concept of B2B and volume demand before we could support it or even really initially thought of it,” Marvik says. “We turned away [orders] for roughly two seasons because we couldn’t handle [the volume].”

Because its B2C manufacturing facility was already getting so many orders, Marvik decided to connect with a second fac-tory this past spring and began targeting B2B customers this past September.

AN UPHILL CLIMBOf course, launching an entirely different business model is no easy feat. Having a background in SEO, Marvik built a highly targeted landing page on NWT3K’s website to attract teams, clubs, and organizations organically. The landing page includes a button that takes prospects to a page where they can de-sign their custom jackets, fill out an information form (asking for their name, role, email address, phone number, and order size), and request a quote. The site began showing up in search

rankings and driving traffic organically, Marvik says, and it be-came difficult for his two-person team to manage all of the in-coming quotes and contacts.

To help solve this dilemma, NWT3K implemented Insightly, a CRM software for small businesses, about one month later.

AN AVALANCHE OF DATAInsightly is essentially the hub that holds all of NWT3K’s data. Any time a site visitor fills out the lead form on NWT3K’s website, his information goes into Insightly and the visitor is dropped into NWT3K’s B2B funnel as an opportunity, Marvik explains. He and his team can define the different statuses of that opportunity, such as an “interested” or “hot lead,” he says, and then track that prospect’s actions to determine where he is in the buying cycle. For instance, if a lead clicks on a link in-dicating that he’s interested in ordering, a reminder from the Insightly tool will alert NWT3K to follow up with that lead. Like-wise, NWT3K can track which color combinations and designs visitors are selecting the most to help shape its inventory.

Another insight Marvik took action on relates to the appar-el’s hefty price tag—B2B orders can range from about $5,000 to $75,000. And after seeing a lot of inquiries, but not a lot of conversion, Marvik determined that he had to educate pro-spective customers on his products and their value. “It’s a large purchase,” he acknowledges. “It’s not one that you’re probably going to make the day that you submitted your quote.”

As a result, he mapped out the different buying cycle phases based on what he as a skier would want to know about the start-up and used email to educate leads and get them to convert.

A DEFINED TRAIL The buying cycle begins after a visitor requests a quote and immediately receives an acknowledgment email. If the visitor doesn’t show intent to buy by clicking on a “next steps” link, NWT3K sends that visitor a follow-up email approximate-ly 48 hours later. If the visitor still doesn’t convert, he enters NWT3K’s product educational phase and receives a message describing the product and its features five business days later. Next, about two weeks after the initial request, the company

sends the lead a product comparison email that showcases how NWT3K outshines its competitors. If the visitor still hasn’t converted, the premium outfitter will send him a survey to learn what prevented the purchase.

If at any point during the buying cycle the prospect indicates that he does want to make a purchase (again, by clicking on a designated link), the Insightly tool will automatically send that person a sizing template email. The lead then moves into the closing and negotiating phase, which Marvik explains is less automated and more manual. All other emails are sent via NWT3K’s email client Mandrill from MailChimp.

Besides engaging with customers via email, NWT3K connects with its B2B customers via social media—mainly through in-centivized offers. For example, the startup will post a picture of some of its less expensive items—like a T-shirt or a gift card—and give those items away to followers who tag two business-es in the comments section of the photo. Although the NWT3K team posts pictures on both Facebook and Instagram, Instagram drives higher engagement. “Facebook is basically pay-to-play in my eyes right now,” Marvik says. “It’s hard to get good metrics with your content unless you’re promoting it.”

SHOVELING OUT THE RESULTSSince launching the B2B side of the business, NWT3K has gen-erated more than $300,000 in leads and has closed a “handful” of them, Marvik says. He adds that the company is aiming to expand from being a fairly seasonal business in North America to more of a global company that drives business all year round.

However, there are still a few bumps in NWT3K’s strategy. For one, although it asks site visitors to list their role, such as coach or athlete, on the lead form, it’s currently unable to deliver tar-geted content to each audience. Marvik says that he plans to add that ability eventually. What’s more, because this is a new busi-ness model for NWT3K, it doesn’t have a lot of creative assets, like images of teams wearing the jackets, to use in its emails. But Marvik aims to gain more testimonials in the future.

The skier in Marvik is undeterred by the large marketing mountain he has in front of him. As he puts it, “We kind of think big and start small.”

4 List-Building Myths DebunkedMarketers agree that email is the optimal channel for lead gen, but not necessar-ily on how to best leverage the channel for this purpose. By Perry Simpson

For years marketers have debated the best way to generate leads, with any number of previous or current “best practices” driving the rhetoric. It’s time for some consistency in the lead generation discussion, but before this can happen marketers must understand the realities behind the most pervasive myths in the lead-generation discussion; the first of which is to under-stand the variable nature of a lead.

“The biggest misconception about lead generation is that it means the same thing to everyone,” says Greg Grdodian, CEO at Reach Marketing. “Before you can assess how successful your lead gen strategy is, you first have to define it.”

With a clear definition of a lead often comes the pressure and responsibility to grow a company’s email list. Tread carefully marketers, for this is actually the most prevalent and misleading lead generation myth.

LIST BUYING IS THE BEST WAY TO GROW EMAIL LISTS“The days of list buys are behind us,” says Quinn Jalli, SVP of dig-ital marketing services at Epsilon. “Questions around lead qual-ity, legal compliance, and the value derived from list buys have led the smart marketer to move away from them.”

In some cases this may be for the best. People have grown accustomed to news of monolithic corporations brought to their knees by cyber attacks, often endangering customers’ personal information. The rampant hackings, as well as the open wounds left in the wake of the NSA data scandal, have left many con-sumers confused and paranoid about their digital fingerprint. In the past marketers simply ran the risk of annoying users and ending up in the spam folder. Now, a user might see an unfamiliar email address and assume her account has been breached. “Un-less a marketer can understand what representations are made, the quality of the consumer subscription, and the clarity regard-ing which company the consumer is subscribing to, it is impossi-ble for a responsible marketer to continue buying lists,” Jalli says.

LIST BUYING IS DEADThe truth of a topic is often gradient, nuanced. List buying is no dif-ferent. List buys of questionable sourcing and quality are coming to an end. However, responsible marketers can still grow their list by purchasing data from affiliates and via other non-organic methods.

“Marketers are generating valuable leads [by] partnering with reputable companies that possess obvious synergies,” Jalli notes. He points to the example of a company that sells comput-er games partnering with a company that makes gaming PCs. These types of partnerships allow marketers to expand their reach and potentially grow their email list without encroaching on consumer privacy.

Marketers should still exercise caution here. “Expressly [state] that they are opting in to your list, not your partners’,” ad-vises Ellen Valentine, marketing evangelist at Silverpop. “Once you have that permission from new subscribers, you can email them and not be considered a spammer.”

ORGANICALLY BUILDING A LIST IS SLOWOrganically building lists was difficult in the past largely because of a lack of options and resources on the marketer’s part. Now, in the age of the increasingly vocal customer—and social me-dia—taking a more organic approach to building lists is a perfect-ly viable option.

“Building a list is not slow, it takes intention,” says Christo-pher Lester, VP of sales at Emma. “It’s about building a powerful list. Integration of all of your marketing channels, and focusing on ways to market your email channel so people want to be on it, is an opportunity to build a list quickly—and [this] list is going to outperform a list stuffed full of emails.”

A LARGE LIST IS MORE POWERFULMarketers, and the departments they answer to, have demon-strated an unhealthy obsession with large lists. Email service providers have grown increasingly intolerant of spam tactics, many of which revolve around reaching as many inboxes as possible. Ethics issues aside, the data and technology that has flooded the marketing space has made maintaining large lists more trouble than the effort is worth.

“There’s diminishing returns on large lists,” Lester says. “With all of these automation and segmentation tools, a large list can be crippling. People expect brands to craft messages personal-ized for them, but it’s hard to have enough information about all of the people in a large list.”

“There is no magic bullet to getting skinny, there’s no mag-ic bullet to getting rich, and there’s no magic bullet to having a super-great email list,” Lester continues. As they say, quantity rarely trumps quality.

Revving Up Marketing Automation for Lead Gen When it comes to marketing automation and lead generation, Forrester Principal Analyst Lori Wizdo knows her stuff. By Al Urbanski

If marketing automation systems were cars, then Lori Wiz-do would be the editor of Motor Trend magazine. Wizdo not only studies how marketers are progressing in automating their lead generation and revenue marketing operations, she also puts the leading marketing automation systems through their paces and rates them in Forrester Wave reviews.

We asked her for an update on the functionalities of these advanced marketing machines, and the skills of their drivers.

WHAT’S BEHIND THE SURGE TO-WARD INBOUND MARKETING?Over the past two to four years all of the marketing automation companies have been integrat-ing more techniques to drive in-bound. Simple things like social sharing. Can I make it easier for someone to share within their social networks? How much can I optimize my campaign ar-tifacts so they’re findable and searchable—like my landing pages or blogs or whitepapers or my content? Can I find peo-ple engaging in relevant con-versations and engage with them socially?

HOW FAR ADVANCED IS THE TECHNOLOGY?The use of technologies is still somewhat fragmented. Basical-ly, all of these marketing auto-mation systems are designed to capture behaviors—social being one, email being another, Web being another. You can then use these behaviors in a rule-based manner in two ways: to trig-ger communications or change a lead score. For instance, if someone is expressing an interest in one of seven compet-itive products, you have a sales rep call or send an email, or you can change a lead score.

ARE BOTH SALES AND MARKETING TUNED INTO USING THE TECHNOLOGY TO THEIR UTMOST ADVANTAGES?A common problem is that marketing has a tendency to give leads to sales as soon as they’re reasonably well-identified,

because sales has a desire for these leads. Marketers are of-ten hesitant to stand their ground versus sales until they’ve gathered enough signals to say this is a late-stage lead. The appropriate time to send a lead to sales varies depending on what the product is. If it’s a product cycle that needs to close this quarter, those leads should be qualified to a higher stan-dard. But if it’s a longer cycle, more early-stage leads can be sent to sales. It does require marketing and sales to come to

some agreement on that.

AREN’T B2B BUYERS AS RETICENT TO PROVIDE DE-TAILED INFORMATION ABOUT THEMSELVES ON THE INTER-NET AS CONSUMERS ARE?You no longer have to ask some-one to fill out 15 required fields to download a whitepaper. There are a number of other ways now to get that information. You can use a prefill option or progres-sive profiling in which you ask for a few pieces of information the first time a prospect arrives and as they return you obtain more and more. In that way, you can use rules to take more intelligent digital actions.

YOUR REPORT STATED THAT ONLY 50% OF MARKETING ORGANIZATIONS HAVE AUTO-MATION SYSTEMS IN PLACE. HOW FAR ALONG ARE THOSE COMPANIES IN EXPLOITING THEIR CAPABILITIES?They have a lot of capabilities that marketers have not yet

begun to implement as common practice. Any company’s first-generation use of this technology is to position the customer in one place to manage emails and then move to nurturing. This technology doesn’t necessarily break down the walls between sales and marketing. There needs to be a lot of process change to make it work. Companies doing the best job with it are the ones realizing that this is a cus-tomer engagement process that can help move customers through the sales cycle. When it works, it’s like synchro-nized swimming between sales and marketing.

8 Ways to Increase Quali-fied Leads Through EmailAttracting and nurturing leads is tough in today’s distracting digital environ-ment. Here’s how marketers can use email to grab and hold the attention of the prospects who matter most. By Perry Simpson

Email has long been a lead-generation mainstay. But as the definition of a lead itself changes, mar-keters’ approach to using email to attract and nur-ture highly qualified prospects must evolve, as well. “The Ice Bucket Challenge has been a fantastic driv-er of leads for The ALS Association, but things like that are really hard to replicate through email,” notes Gudmundur “G.B.” Heidarsson, CEO at email intelli-gence company eDataSource.

The issue here isn’t that email is less effective at generating quality leads, but rather that the term lead has acquired additional meaning over the past few years as e-commerce and social media contin-ue to evolve and disrupt both marketing and sales. “In the not-too-distant [digital] past a lead was someone who downloaded an asset as a result of an email campaign,” says Mark Coleman, VP of dig-ital marketing services at marketing agency LSC Digital. These days the definition is much broader. Going back to Heidarsson’s Ice Bucket Challenge example, how many of the millions of people who made videos qualify as leads at all, let alone quali-ty leads? Some people just wanted to participate in the viral hype. Others donated instead of taking the challenge and may not be likely to become long-term supporters.

“Some ‘leads’ may not be interested in convert-ing in the first place; I’d say 95 percent of leads aren’t qualified [today],” says Jerry Jao, CEO and cofounder of retention marketing company Retention Science. “Leads are people who have shown interest. That aspect of a lead hasn’t changed much, but there are so many companies trying to get in front of you that most people are distracted. A lot of the time people are just doing research.”

This broader, more nebulous definition of a lead brings with it ambiguity, but it also brings opportu-nity to uncover the leads that matter most. Here are eight ways to use email to harness that potential.

KEEP THE FIRST CONTACT LIGHTThe first impression is as crucial as it is delicate, whether in person or online. And, like dating, coming on too strong can turn off a prospect. Marketers need to resist the temptation to request too much data or rush prospects down the funnel. Getting people

to share their email is difficult enough; pushing for too much personal information when requesting an email address—or too soon after—is likely the sur-est way to stifle any chance of building a relationship with a qualified lead. A better approach is to ask a few questions essential to determining or ensuring lead quality, and building on that information over time as prospects interact with a company’s emails, website, and content.

“Asking for 10 fields of data when collecting an email address will kill your form conversion num-bers. Marketers have to take the onus of creating continuous value if we want to build deep custom-er knowledge over time,” says Dave Walters, digital marketing evangelist at Silverpop.

SEGMENT AS EARLY AS POSSIBLEAccording to Silverpop’s “2014 Email Marketing Benchmarks” study, personalized email messages achieved an open rate nearly 15% higher and a click-through rate nearly 79% higher than other emails. Marketers who want to reap the benefits of these targeted emails must start by segmenting their lists not just by demographic information, but also by behavioral data. For example, prospects with char-acteristics or interests similar to top customers may be a segment to prioritize in terms of targeting.

“Identify ways to segment [prospects] as early in the process as possible so that nurturing commu-nications are relevant to the interests and intentions of the leads,” says LSC Digital’s Coleman. “If a lead opened an email and clicked a link, then the fol-low-up communications focus on that. If not, they would flow through a different series of communi-cations. Targeting based on behavior is the key to all marketing communications.”

LEVERAGE DORMANT LISTSMarketers often focus heavily on acquiring new prospects. While this may be essential to business growth, it doesn’t mean that prioritizing new lists over existing ones is the optimal strategy. “I’m see-ing marketers going back and really working the dormant part of their lists,” eDataSource’s Heidars-son says. He cites Macy’s as an example. “Macy’s has been very active in getting dormant people to

engage,” he says. “[The retailer] is seeing more than a 20 percent open rate on the emails to non-paying subscribers, which is a higher open rate than their general emails.”

Consumer-facing brands, especially in the retail sector, have an advantage in that they can more readily send pro-motional offers to prospects who have opted in to communi-cations but haven’t yet made a purchase. But any marketer reaching out to dormant leads must do so cautiously to avoid the spam button. Personalization can be valu-able here. For example, remind prospects of previous communications or their initial opt-in: “Because you attended our webcast on conference management strategies last year, we thought you’d be interested in download-ing our whitepaper that delves further into the topic.”

MAINTAIN A KILLER CONTENT STRATEGYFew tactics are as effective as content mar-keting when using email to move the right prospects through the funnel. But not just any content will do. Personalization by virtue of sending appropriate content is as important, and potentially as effective, as personalization of other elements of the email delivering or linking to it. “Content needs to match my inter-ests,” Coleman says. “If I’ve identified that I’m interested in study-abroad programs, please don’t communicate with me on local education opportunities.”

KNOW HOW DEEP PROSPECTS ARE IN THE FUNNELAn essential aspect of optimizing email communications today is in realizing that by the time marketers reach out to potential-ly qualified leads those prospects are much further along the path to purchase than they were in the past—when purchasers often started their buyer’s journey by con-tacting a salesperson or visiting a site such as a store or dealership. Indeed, this can mean that a lead coming in deeper in the funnel is more qualified than those coming in earlier.

“The highest performing marketing teams I work with understand that the customer normally shows up very late in the consideration cycle, and is almost ready to buy,” Sil-verpop’s Walters notes. “Much of the social proof and Web research that precedes the purchase event has already hap-pened, and it’s difficult to undo someone’s perception that your competitor’s product is better than yours with just a last-minute email or a coupon. This is the simple reality of

today’s buyer, and marketers who ignore this are absolutely underperforming on the revenue side.”

BE FRESH…Marketers must ensure that their emails are engaging and creative. While this may seem obvious, too many marketers miss the opportunity to engage best prospects by weaving their unique brand attributes into their email communica-

tions to illustrate such attributes as creativity, relevance, and attention to detail. Marketers often lean on industry best practices in this area, which can lead to dullness in marketing emails. This is especially true in B2B.

“I think B2B is losing out because they are trying too hard to be B2B. Every B2B email I get has something to do with a whitepaper or a webinar or a download and it’s all very bland and doesn’t grab my attention,” eDataSource’s Heidarsson says. “Anyone that has an event in Vegas says something about, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.’ I think B2B marketers might want to look at their private inboxes to see the creativity of their B2C counterparts.”

…YET CONCISEProspective customers are inundated with emails from preferred and prospective brands alike—especially as they move through the purchase funnel and their lead quality in-creases. Concise copy that gets right to the point will go a long way toward currying the favor of today’s time-starved, over-stimu-lated customer, and this brevity should start with the subject line.

“The subject line is the ice breaker. You have one chance and only a few dozen char-acters,” Heidarsson says. “Subject lines need to be urgent and create interest, but you have to follow up on that in the copy. The subject line and copy have to work in tandem.”

KEEP THE FAITHThe rate of change in digital communication is staggering, but many of the most disruptive technologies rely on email to stay connected to customers and prospects. Email is a direct and personal form of communication that is effective and en-gaging all along the purchase cycle—as long as it’s relevant. “Email is still the best way to qualify and nurture a lead,” Re-tention Science’s Jao says. “Focus on how you can provide meaningful and valuable resources to consumers. The most effective messaging is when it’s relevant and the communi-cation is thoughtful.”

Social Is a Key Part of 24 Hour Fitness’ Lead-Gen Regimen Peer-to-peer referrals produce healthy conversion rates. By Elyse Dupré

Getting customers to refer brands can be a real work out for marketers. But as the old saying goes: No pain, no gain.

Marketers acquire more customers for their brands by en-abling current patrons to brag about them in their preferred channels. Health club chain 24 Hour Fitness learned this lesson by implementing Gigya’s consumer identity manage-ment platform for its social sharing referral program.

Like many gyms, 24 Hour Fitness had a traditional offline referral program, says Joe Beruta, head of marketing and communications for the health club chain. Staff would dis-tribute printed three-day trial passes to existing gym mem-bers in hopes that they would share the offer with family and friends. However, relying on printed materials proved difficult, not to mention costly, and limited the brand’s reach.

“As you’re leaving the gym, you probably don’t even have your wallet with you,” Beruta says. “Those print materials could get misplaced, lost, [or] forgotten about.”

As a result, 24 Hour Fitness decided to roll out Gigya’s consumer identity management platform in March 2013. The platform would enable gym members to share trial passes via email or their social networks. But 24 Hour Fit-ness wanted to do more than just make it easier to share.

The brand had three key goals, Beruta says: leverage the exponential power of social, drive efficiencies while cutting back on costs, and collect data from social platforms to pro-duce more relevant communications.

Here’s how it works: Existing gym members can share tri-al offers by visiting 24 Hour Fitness’ online or in-club kiosk referral system and logging in directly through their social networks, such as Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter. The trial offer is then posted on the existing member’s page, as well as on the pages of the connections with whom the deal is shared, Beruta explains.

“You get much more exposure and impressions right out of the gate than you normally would any other way,” Beruta says. “And you do that at very reduced costs. So the efficien-cy is positive for our business.”

Not only do social log-ins expand the brand’s reach, but they also provide 24 Hour Fitness with new sources of data. For instance, when members access their account via social log-in, the health club is granted access to that member’s public profile information—such as name and email—says Victor White, director of marketing communications at Gi-gya. 24 Hour Fitness can also ask for permission to access additional data beyond public profile information. Gigya then takes this data and stores it in its identity storage data base, White says, so that it can append additional data when fur-ther activities take place, such as a customer commenting on a post. 24 Hour Fitness can also take this information and add it to data stored in its central database to deepen its under-standing of a prospect or member.

In the case of a prospect, when a person interested in join-ing the fitness center walks in, 24 Hour Fitness asks them to fill out a form and provide their name, address, reason for vis-it, fitness interests, and desired amenities. Even if that person decides not to join the gym but is part of the social sharing program, 24 Hour Fitness can take the information from the prospect’s visit and add it to her social sharing record to send more targeted communications.

As for members who prefer to share the trial offer via email, 24 Hour Fitness can check the email addresses of the recipients against its database to determine how many re-deemed the pass. This allows the fitness center to send tar-geted pricing emails and promotional information based on where prospects are in the purchase cycle.

“The digital side of this [and] the social side of this really help us get in front of potential prospects or intenders that

are looking to join a gym where we normally wouldn’t have access to these people without doing heavy digital advertising campaigns with banners and the like,” Beru-ta says.

Within the first three months of launch-ing its program, 24 Hour Fitness accumulated more than 331,500 direct contact referrals via the program—or about $3 million in online media value. In addition, the brand obtained more than 8,400 direct program referrals in January 2014—which resulted in more than $600,000 from new member units and life-time value revenue.

Furthermore, 24 Hour Fitness was able to identify which social networks existing mem-bers were choosing to share their passes. Within nine months, the health club deter-mined that its Facebook shares had decreased from 77.4 to 58.9% while its Pinterest shares rose from almost nonexistent to 11.2%.

“This also is a positive for us,” Beruta says, “because from a digital advertising strategy, we want to go where the people go and where people are interested to help [them] find fit-ness and wellness.”

Although 24 Hour Fitness’ program has remained fairly similar to its original debut, the company intends to experiment with gamification to play off the

competitive nature of a gym, Beruta says. He adds that the fitness club leveraged Gigya’s influencer reporting capabilities to identify which customers referred their

friends and family the most and reward them for doing so, with perks such as free merchandise.

“Generally speaking, not all users are created equal,” White says. “Some are more responsive [and] some are more influen-tial than others. It’s important to be able to identify which ones are creating the most value for your business and simply say thank you to them.”

However, Beruta says that it’s important for marketers to be transparent about their use of social data to prevent their pasts from deterring marketers’ futures.

“There is a consumer base across the country that has skepticism about their data,” Beruta says. “From a marketing per-spective there’s a lot of opportunity to do this in the right way, permission-based, that can benefit the company and not com-promise consumers’ information. [Market-ers] have some work to do because there’s been a variety of challenges in the market-

place with a variety of different brands that have made that more challenging today than it used to be.”

“There is a consumer base across the coun-try that has skepticism about their data.”

Joe Beruta24 Hour Fitness

Marketers Debate Quality Versus Quantity in Lead Generation Lead generation is rarely a simple conversation, especially when it comes to the number of leads generated versus the value of them. By Perry Simpson

Most marketers agree that lead generation has never been easy. But it’s been further complicated by the disjointed pur-chase habits of today’s multi-device, multichannel custom-er. In the past the main priority in terms of lead generation for marketers has been to generate as many leads as pos-sible; but that’s proving to be much harder when businesses struggle to classify leads as, well, leads.

“The definition of a lead has definitely changed, simply because marketing is now on the hook to deliver specific types of leads with prospects at certain stages…,” says Scott Vaughan, CMO at marketing software provider Integrate. “Definitions vary considerably, and it’s important to agree on a clear definition [of a lead] between marketing and sales—and between you as a marketer and the source you are con-tracting with for lead generation.” So, is the idea that more leads are always better still valid? Often, no.

“A lead now needs to have some sort of marketing qualifi-cation done to it before it gets to sales; I think marketers need to be more and more careful about what they’re sending to sales, and marketing needs to be very cognizant of where their prospects are [in the funnel],” says Shelby Britton, se-nior product manager at Adobe. “If marketing is sending over better quality leads, they’ll increase the trust with sales and have a better relationship with sales.” Generally, a single, qualified lead can trump 10 unqualified leads. Of course, the relationship between quality of leads and quantity of leads

isn’t as conflicting as one might assume. There are a number of factors that determine whether a business should priori-tize quality over quantity or vice versa. Some examples in-clude company size or campaign scale.

“Some companies or campaigns may need a large volume [of leads] that meets basic criteria, and then use the tools and techniques to nurture [by] using marketing automation, retargeting, etcetera. Other companies may need precise leads with specific titles or people in specific companies, otherwise known as a named account lead-gen strategy,” Vaughan explains.

“There’s a place in the funnel where you bring in as many people as possible, and that’s called contact acquisition; and all the volume needs to happen there. Then, start nurturing those folks,” Britton says. In some situations, this section of the funnel becomes the priority, tipping the optimal strategy toward quantity and away from quality.

“Even for the most sophisticated and precise organiza-tions, qualified leads will always be a percentage of total leads generated,” notes John Reese, SVP of marketing at CRM software provider Velocify. “Because of that relationship, if your desire is to produce more qualified leads, in most cases more total leads must be generated.” Reese cites specific sit-uations, such as entering new markets, which might warrant the pursuit of large amount of leads. However, Reese says, even that situation doesn’t warrant devaluing high-quality leads. “I believe quality should always be a consideration,” Reese says, “even when quantities are a priority.”

Of course, email still reigns in lead nurturing, but some experts say marketers would do well to add some spice to their email messages. “If [people] aren’t opening your emails then you can’t start the conversation, but there’s a lack of creativity that makes people delete or not open emails,” explains Gundmundur “G.B.” Heidarsson, CEO at email intel-ligence company eDataSource. “Every fifth email I get is sav-ing me money, or improving my marketing, or inviting me to their webinar. There’s not a lot of intrigue there; nothing that keeps it interesting.”

Heidarsson says that an overly stringent adherence to best practices is a likely culprit for the dearth of exciting and engaging email content. “Try new things,” Heidarsson contin-ues. “Things won’t backfire that badly as long as you stay in ethical and legal boundaries. Think about your approach, not what others are doing because its best practices.”

Four Strategies for Lead Generation Marketers from Publishers Clearing House and Dormeo discuss the importance of a rethinking cost per lead, and why multichannel is a must. By Natasha Smith

Stimulating and capturing interest of a customer is paramount to lead generation. As chief marketers, Deborah Holland and Dany Sfeir know this well. Holland, EVP of Publishers Clearing House, and Sfeir, CMO of North America for mattress brand Dormeo Octaspring, weighed in with four strategies for new lead generation at the Direct Marketing Club of New York’s “New Lead Generation” seminar. They are:

THE CALL-TO-ACTIONHolland: [Marketers] must have a call-to-action. People are basically people. They tend to do what you ask them. ‘Call now. Tweet now. Save now.’ It’s very effective. Just asking for it elicits a response and can generate leads.

Sfeir: Delivery of your message—and your call-to-action—is crafted by the channel. The mediums definitely matter; what you offer is key. Understand who your audience on each channel is, and each medium will determine how you communicate with your customer. In effect, it’ll optimize your ROI.

THE COSTHolland: Every company isn’t at the same stage. Remember that as you examine cost per lead. If you’re in a building scale mode, your team might want to set the target to break even—or even at investment. If you want to maintain and grow your leads, then you may want to focus on the ROI.

Sfeir: It’s great to have Facebook likes, and retweets on Twit-ter, comments on Pinterest. But, companies are in business

to make money. So as marketers determine their plans, con-sider cost per lead. What’s the biggest reach, the cost of that lead, then ROI. Respond accordingly. Thinking outside the box is pretty key. Test different platforms and times. It makes a great difference.

A MULTICHANNEL APPROACHHolland: Companies and marketers need to be where the au-dience is. Traditional marketers should be online and go digital. For example, since its founding in 1953, Publishers Clearing House has had a traditional approach through our direct mail marketing. But we’ve expanded to have prize-based games, search, and lotto websites. Most brands are online or digital because they are trying to appeal to a different audience.

Sfeir: It’s important to be exposed to various channels—tra-ditional and digital. Most customers will respond to just one channel, so it’s crucial to have a diversified, multichannel ap-proach to generate leads.

ATTRIBUTIONSfeir: We tend to attribute the sale to the first touchpoint. So, make sure to look at the original channel the customer came in contact with. They may come in contact with your com-pany at many different stages before buying, so marketers should be able to track the original touchpoint.

Holland: Attach intelligence to the user. Track what touch-points helped to support the customer and encouraged him or her to buy.

The Ins and Outs of Inbound MarketingImproving lead quality is marketers’ most important objective for inbound marketing in 2015. By Andrew Corselli

Inbound marketing may be old hand to the B2B world, but some marketers still aren’t sold on it. The idea is simple—create con-tent specifically designed to appeal to your dream customer. The practice—building a strategy, crafting content, and integrat-ing tactics—can take more time and effort than traditional mar-keting efforts and can lead to frustration.

To get a better grip on inbound marketing and how industry in-siders view the channel, data management services provider Net-Prospex, in partnership with Ascend2, surveyed 270 marketing and sales professionals to ascertain how they’re currently using inbound marketing and their plans for more effectively leveraging it in 2015.

The results of the “Inbound Marketing B2B” survey show that there’s an abundance of room for improvement for the channel. Consider, for example, the fact that only 27% of marketers re-sponded “very successful” when asked about inbound mar-keting’s ability to achieve important objectives highlights. Es-tablishing a meaningful, two-way conversation requires insight into who your buyers are, what characteristics define them, and what actions they take in response to your offers. This can work wonders when compared to the generic, broad-brush messag-es the average marketer sends, the survey said.

Easier said than done, however. Here, some challenges to in-bound marketing:

Creating inbound marketing content is not only one of the most effective tactics used, it’s also the most difficult to exe-cute. Here, the most effective and the most difficult inbound tactics to execute are juxtaposed:

The most important objective for inbound marketing in 2015, marketers said, is improving lead quality (50%). Increasing sales revenue (48%), increasing conversion rates (48%), and increasing lead quality (45%) are all imperative too, say marketers surveyed.

Running a tight inbound marketing ship takes time and ef-fort—both of which are not always available to the average marketing team. One way to avoid this obstacle is to outsource tactics to inbound experts; they can break down an audience into segments to determine the most profitable targets, advo-cates, and key influencers. More than half of marketers (55%) outsource some or all of their inbound campaigns, according to the survey, while 41% use in-house resources only and 4% out-source to an agency or consultancy.

Lead Spotting Getting inbound and outbound lead gen on the same track. By Al Urbanski

Marketing often thinks that content is the best way to deliver qualified leads. Sales favors contact. Will marketing automation systems be the glue that binds them together?

In a review of lead-to-revenue management systems re-leased earlier this year, Forrester Research found that just over 50% of marketing organizations had adopted automation sys-tems. The ones that did contributed 44% of the sales pipeline, while non-automated departments accounted for only 34%. But in the realm of lead generation, where business dynamics range from quick-decision commodity sales to high-value deals with long sales cycles, the depth of a marketing organization’s involvement in the sales funnel can be a matter for debate.

“Not long ago I asked the sales VP at one of our clients how many leads he had gotten from marketing in the last year, and he said none. We asked the head of marketing and she said 9,000,” says Dan McDade, president and CEO of PointClear, a lead-gen firm. “Turns out only 1.2% of them were qualified.”

McDade is not a detractor of marketing automation. In fact, he uses the technology in managing leads for his own compa-ny. He simply thinks that marketers lean too heavily on freshly purchased automation systems to establish themselves as rev-enue producers in B2B companies. As a result, he fears they’ll

eschew proven outbound lead-generation methods like emails and phone calls in favor of inbound marketing campaigns rely-ing on content. “Companies are not yet doing a good job of cal-ibrating lead-scoring with marketing automation,” he says. “If you picture the market simplistically as 30% large customers with strategic deals and then 70% with smaller deals, then 30% should never be put into marketing automation. Too many things can go wrong.”

Mike Volpe, too, thinks that marketing automation is often misused in lead generation, but that it has nothing to do with marketers’ infatuation with inbound marketing. “Inbound gener-ates a large volume of leads at a very low cost, but then you need a way to filter them. In our business, we end up passing only about a third of the leads, but the close rate is triple that of outbound leads,” says the CMO of HubSpot, a provider of inbound mar-keting platforms. “Traditionally, marketing automation systems have been about managing the middle of the funnel, but in re-ality they can be about scoring and nurturing from inbound or outbound sources. We just think the outbound route is getting harder and harder because cold calls [and some] email blasts operate without permission.”

McDade’s irked by the number of marketers who’ve become dismissive of outbound lead generation. “I see many of them going full-force with inbound and thinking that outbound is the past,” he says. “But most successful companies have an ag-gressive outbound effort.” McDade thinks it should be common sense that outbound and inbound efforts both have a role in generating quality leads and, more important, closing business. “All-bound marketing,” he calls it.

NOT THEIR NATURE TO NURTUREThe interplay of inbound and outbound lead-generation tech-niques is essential to the goal of establishing one-on-one re-lationships with prospects and customers, notes Tom Kahana, senior director of marketing operations at Limelight, a content delivery network. “We look at lead generation in two ways: mar-keting-initiated and influence-initiated,” he says. “A salesperson can come across an unqualified lead on a cold call or a plane ride and put it in the database. That’s outbound, but once in the data-base it’s marketing’s job to push the lead through.”

This is the crucial point where many marketing departments are reputed to drop the lead-gen baton, qualifying leads without using all the inbound and outbound techniques at their dispos-al to nurture them. “It’s easy to get caught up in getting what appears to be a qualified lead and passing it on,” Kahana says. “What we do [with our prospects] is start a relationship-building process right from the beginning.”

Crucial to this process at Limelight is the account develop-ment team that handles all inquiries with a mind toward set-ting appointments for the company’s sales account executives.

Whether it’s probing a lead on the phone or using progressive profiling on the Web, team members ask qualifying questions agreed upon in a collaborative effort between the marketing and sales organizations.

“We [in marketing operations] sit at the touchpoint between the two groups. We’re the people responsible for seeing that everyone in sales and marketing is happy. We have to be available to them,” Kahana says. “We do things like regular meetings with product groups and the VPs of sales in different regions. If we as marketers aren’t passing over leads they’re con-fident with, we aren’t doing our job.”

Kahana’s group at Limelight is performing a role that remains unfilled at most companies, according to Debbie Qaqish, author of Rise of the Revenue Marketer. As chief strategy officer of The Pedowitz Group, Qaqish visits scores of companies each year and still finds walls firmly in place between sales and marketing organiza-tions despite the enhanced capabilities for ac-cessing leads presented by technology.

“Marketing is working as an island unto itself. Marketers still haven’t figured out that sales and marketing have to connect as one funnel,” Qaqish says. “This is hard. It’s not about getting a piece of technology, but getting it turned on [through better marketing-sales facilitation].”

Qaqish is a firm believer that both inbound and outbound efforts are crucial to effective lead generation for the age-old reason that it’s what customers demand. “One decision-maker gets buying inspiration from an ad in the industry pub-lication on his desk, [another] may use Google to do product research, others may require more of a disruption on the part of a seller,” Qaqish says. “You have to consider who you’re selling to, where they are on their buyer journey, and then be where they need you to be.”

Like Kahana, Qaqish believes that sales and marketing must sit down together, define what they consider to be qualified leads, and then set out a plan using the proper combination of in-bound and outbound tactics to produce them: “B2B marketers preferring inbound methods remain too distant from customers. Salespeople preferring outbound methods have to learn to develop a digital body language. But first, sales needs to say, ‘Here are the kinds of leads I need,’ and marketing has to say, ‘Here are the leads we can deliver.’”

ENGINEERING LEADSEngineer-turned-marketer Ilya Mirman isn’t so sure that marketers are eager to embrace the lower funnel that customer demands and a deeper partnership with sales necessitate. It’s

not their fault, he says; it’s a function of the orga-nizational structures they’re forced to deal with. “Most of the money and effort in marketing is still focused on outbound because [a company may] have 100 people in marketing around the world, and a couple of trade show people, and a couple of PR people, and nobody’s going to change that overnight,” he says.

The MIT-educated engineer is currently VP, marketing of Onshape, a CAD-CAM software for product designers. Mirman says the right way to build a modern lead-generation program is to start with inbound methods and then have the discipline to continue to augment it with both human and non-human aspects. “By knowing what people are doing on your website, by look-ing at what they reveal about themselves, by augmenting that with third-party data, you can provide value,” he says. “The modern marketing machine makes customers more productive and in turn makes your company more successful.”

Inbound marketing techniques are sure to play a more influential role in B2B lead genera-tion going forward. How could it not when a pur-chasing agent picks up a smartphone not to call a sales rep, but to search that rep’s corporate website? “All marketing now is inbound market-ing in the respect that good outbound marketing is informed by inbound and content,” says Eric Holmen, CMO of Invoca, a platform for inbound calls marketing.

But just as marketing departments will not drive sales organizations out of existence, nei-ther will tried-and-true outbound marketing techniques fade from use as inbound strategies become increasingly pervasive. Marketers in-stead will be challenged to monitor and adjust the levels of these two key factors in their rev-enue-generation formulas depending on the business challenges and the technological capa-bilities before them.

“There’s just a ton of new tech coming out all the time,” Limelight’s Kahana says. “We’re con-stantly adjusting, doing 30- to 60-day sprints to add something new and get to a place where we feel comfortable. We were in a situation where we had two marketing automation tools operat-ing at the same time and it was a disaster. So we stripped everything down. We added Demand-base to our lead nurturing system and saw a 30% increase in conversions. We integrated with Marketo and saw a 101% pipeline contribution from webinars.”

Kahana pauses and admits to geeking out on all the technological wonders at his disposal. “It’s an amazing time for us marketers,” he says. “There’s literally something new every month, and I’m excited for what’s coming next.”

Marketers Agree That Data’s Role Is

BLOOMING

76%

Data’s influence on content and decision making continues to grow in 2015

Marketing executives who say that digital

performance data has had more or much more of an impact

on decision making in the last 12 months.

90%Digital marketers who

agree that interdepartmental support is important or very important to brands’ digital

marketing success

Respondents who say researching customers’

needs before creating content is very important:

Agency marketing executives

B2B marketingexecutives

B2C marketing executives

85%76%63%

When it comes to producing content for segmented

audiences, marketing executives are:

Currently positioning their products differently

Planning on doing so in the next six months

72%

19%

When it comes to the upcoming year’s marketing

technology spend, marketing executives intend to:

Increase their spend

Spend the same amount

65%26%

SOURCE: Conductor

Mike Damphousse@damphoux

Only 2.8% of B2B Execs Believe Demand Gen Campaigns Achieve Their Goals http://ow.ly/KFSTc from @B2Community - Good thoughts...

Sonia Dorais@SoniaDorais

25% of marketers using lead management report that Sales contacts leads w/in 1 day. More stats: http://ow.ly/GHurM

Michelle ManireFowle@mmanire

21% of B2B mrkts says social media has the biggest impact on their lead gen goals. http://bit.ly/1swkVpM

Career Development@SHSAGENTS

Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months - http://bit.ly/1wS8jgH @Velocify

Geri Rockstein@GeriRockstein

Email is the most common lead gen tactic, used by 81% of marketers. (MarketingSherpa) http://po.st/MtWORU via @po_st

Cameron Johnson@Cam_Johnson95

On average, B2B Marketers using Twitter generate twice as many leads as those who don’t. http://www.socialbro.com/blog/50-tweetable-twitter-tips-tricks-facts … #leadgeneration #salestips

Clark Schafer@ClarkSchafer

74% of Marketing pros believe FB necessity for lead gen & other stats http://ow.ly/sNr8s

InboundID@InboundID60% of B2B marketers identify lead generation as their

top online marketing challenge http://bit.ly/1BrpBnR

Jeremy Heap@JeremyHeap

“45% of the paper printed in offices ends up trashed by the end of the day” - Is this story working for lead-gen? http://buff.ly/1uUaW0x

Erik Johnson@erikj

Great data! RT @Cassincoppell 61% of marketers use social media to increase lead gen. B2B mktg facts http://ow.ly/fFluF #b2b #socialmedia