The new Lead Generation Content Strategy

If you are responsible for sales or lead generation then you will no doubt be familiar with the classic sales funnel.

Traffic or Leads are basically thrown in at the top of the funnel and due your magnificent sales and marketing nurturing you pass these leads through the different levels of your particular sales funnel all the time attempting to create a customer at the end of the process.

It’s a classic image used in business today and it works well ….. up to a point!

You see what this model doesn't adequately explain is that THIS process is a process that converts traffic or leads that have shown an active interest in your product or service.

But there are many, many more individuals or businesses that are not yet interested in you, but you can still get them into this funnel, they might not buy yet, but they will be aware of you when they are ready to purchase and by changing the way you talk to your market will help you to become “front of mind” in their future purchase decisions.

To change this mind-set within your market all you need to do is talk about something closely related to what you sell; so for example if you sell computers, then create guides to help people use them or understand common problems and how to resolve them.

This would mean that you are then likely to attract people who (whilst not ready to purchase) use computers, and your great use of associated content means that there is now a chance that when they are ready to buy you will be “front of mind”.

This is a fundamental shift on how businesses look at content and their content strategy, but this simple tweak to make content available that is closely related (and helpful) to your core business offering can bring in more prospects.

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What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:

• Have the core demographic changed?
• Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc) 
• Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
• Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources? 
• Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
• Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent? 
• Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

• Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
• Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
• Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
• Attract new customers and partners
• Brand advocates

The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.

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Eight Hour Marketing Plan™

Develop a basic Marketing Plan in only 8 hours with the 8 Hour Marketing Plan™
I first published my eight hour marketing plan in 2000 when I worked with a number of online businesses to try to get them to understand how easy it was to develop a simple plan.  This is a little out of date now and I will get around to updating it at some time; but I thought it was worth publishing anyway.

Hour 1 - Information gathering about your business

Get yourself a large box. Gather as much information as you can in one hour. This may not seem like long, but believe me after one hour you will be glad to stop ... and surprised at how much information you have gathered!.
Do not stop to read any of it ... this is the gathering phase. You may enlist others to help you in this or any other phase, but keep them within the same one hour restriction.

Your gathering should include all of your past advertising and marketing materials. Include items such as letterheads, envelopes, business cards, direct-mail pieces, magazine ads, Yellow Pages ads, invoices, statements, counter cards, sales samples, packaging materials, press releases, PR stories, promo items, print outs of web pages and anything else used to market your company.

Next, add sales statistical information available about your company. Place sales reports from the past three years in the box. Look for breakout information such as sales by year, month, product line, customer and geographical area. Place any target information or sales rep information in the box. When your time is up, stop. If you happen to run across something else, drop it in the box, but don't spend any more time on this. The secret is to keep to the time limit.

Hour 2 - Information gathering about your customers and competitors

Use a second box to gather information about your customers and your competitors, but again, do so within a one-hour time frame. Put in the box copies of your customer/client lists, details about your top customers, mailing lists, etc. If you have time, talk to your best customers and ask them why they do business with you.

Competitor information can be easily gleaned from several sources (web sites, in-house material etc).
Find copies of their magazine ads. Focus on the information that is readily available.

Hour 3 - Preparation

This third block should be used to compile the documents you have gathered into meaningful information. Again, give yourself one hours of uninterrupted time and, this time, you may want to consider getting away from your office or normal place of work.
Spread out all of the contents of your first box onto a table. With a note pad handy, start by looking at the sales numbers. Take a few moments to jot down the answers to these questions, as well as others you may have:

• Who are your biggest clients?
• What do they buy from you?
• What months are the most successful for you?
• What is your best product line?
• What are your sales trends?

Next, look at all of your marketing materials. Spread them out on the table. Think about each piece, as well as the entire collection. Obviously, you could spend a whole day critiquing your sales numbers and your marketing items. But by keeping the exercise to just one hour (remember you can build on this work later), you will better focus your attention. Here are some questions for this part of the exercise:

• What do your marketing pieces say about you?
• Is there a consistency to your approach?
• To whom are you speaking?
• Do the pieces tell the message you want told?
• How do your message increase sales?
• What relationship does your marketing team have with your sales team?

As you're making these notes, take one sheet of paper and designate it the "ideas page". As an idea comes into your mind ... no matter how crazy ... write it down.

Hour 4 - More Preparation

Now, put the sales numbers and the marketing materials aside.

Take the information and materials about your clients and your competitors and place them on the table. Select your three strongest competitors and your 10 best customers.

Spend a few minutes (3-4) thinking about each of them. Then ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do your best 10 customers choose you instead of your competitors?
• Do your competitors spend all their money with you or some with your competitors too?
• Do you offer your customers anything unique?
• Why are these competitors good? (if they are!)

This is the critical step in this process. An hours sounds like a long time on this, but it isn't!.
Once you have finished, put everything back in the boxes and stop (remember the time limit).

Congratulations ... you are halfway through the process.

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Get your notes (for this part you can refer to specific items in the boxes if needed).
Unlike the other sections, you need two hours of uninterrupted time to complete this next stage. Beginning with your notes, build a brief outline of where you are. To help in the process, I've put together the following questions; most questions should have between three and five answers:

• What were your sales in the past three years?
• What do you want your sales to be next year?
• Why do your best customers do business with you?
• Who are your main competitors?
• Why do our customers do business with someone else?
• If you lost 2% of your average sized customers, what revenues would you lose ?
• How many customers are you losing each year?
• What does your current marketing materials say about you?
• What is the single best thing you do to market your business?

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Remember you have two hours to complete this Outline stage, if you are asking the right type of questions, and really thinking about the answers, honest, truthful answers .. you need the two-hours.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

This is another two-hours stage.

Use your notes and the items you have in the boxes to help with this final stage. You are now going to prepare the first draft of your marketing plan.

The idea is that you now have enough information and ideas to put together your marketing plan.  Don't worry if you find you cannot complete yours as shown here, just do what you can with the information you have, use your plan as a start of your activities and go from there.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

Remember that this is another two-hours stage.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Continue working on the plan on a day by day basis, NEVER let it gather dust, you really need to revise the plan at least every quarter to get the most from it, and next year, it may only take you one hour to completely revise for the new sales year!

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Convert website visitors to customers in 5 easy steps

We all want to attract visitors to our website, but more important that getting those visitors is the simple fact that once on your pages, you need to be able to convert them into customers, here are some very simple steps you can take to help in that goal.

Design to Delight - OK, I know, this one is obvious right!  Right, but you would be surprised how many website owners forget this one simple rule.  

Sites needs to be well laid out, wish simple, clear navigation (key navigation buttons should be either across the top or down the left hand side).  Use colours that are easy on the eyes and keep fonts simple, the words on the page should be easy to read.  Use images ONLY when they add to what you want to convey.  One or two column content layouts are fine, but always try to put the main content in a slightly wider column to help attract the eye.

Split Test – Google's Website Optimizer is now Google Content Experiments and brings with it the power of split testing to anyone with a website.  Essentially, this and similar tools allow you to test two possible website elements (this could be image, test or buttons etc), and will help you to see which version your visitors engage with the best.

So for example if you have two headlines and you didn't know which one to use then this simple A/B split testing would help you decide which your visitors thought was best.

Usability Testing - This covers a range of options from getting friends, family or colleagues to look at your website to recruiting a specialist agency to do it for you.

You can let them navigate your site freely noting problems and issues that they have with it or provide a list of actions that you want them to perform; tests done yourself are usually best when you can watch your subjects browsing as you can see all the small problems that they have that they might not later comment on.

Titillate your Titles - Did you see what I did there!  Titles on webpages, articles, news and blog posts provide you with a great opportunity to really grab your visitors attention.  If it's suitable for your brand then use a little humour in main titles; break down your content into chunks and start each section with a sub heading, this helps draw in visitors and also makes the piece easier for reading.

Lead them into that all important call to action.

Chat - Consider introducing a live chat feature on your site so if visitors get stuck or need to ask you a question then you are only one click away from an answer; the key is to keep them on your site at all times.

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What could a business learn from a beggar!

I was recently reading an article on Huffington Post about a beggar in Oklahoma that makes $60,000 (approx £37,000) a year on the streets.

Now, two things shocked me with this news item:

1. It’s the 21st Century and we still have beggars on the streets in one of the most affluent countries on the planet 
2. He earns more money (tax free) than some small businesses I know! 

This got me thinking two things really; firstly, this guy won’t be the only person that is begging and making an awful lot of cash from the process and secondly, what is this guy doing that we can learn from?

I always remember one very important tip from my early sales management days; at the time it was the most amazing thing ever heard and I knew that it was something that EVERY salesperson MUST DO to bring in the money. furthermore, I know for a fact that many of the so-called ‘experts’ in today’s sales community don’t do it!

Just ask for the sale. 

In the terms of our beggar in Oklahoma City he has one simple direct message where he asks for money (it's that simple) and people give him some, it's that easy.

How many sales people do you know who beat around the bush playing out some sort of sales ritual with their prospects in a never ending loop of 'will they/won't they buy it' (maybe you do it yourself!). The sales people that constantly contact me never fail to tell me how great their company is, or how fantastic their product is, they might mention how much cheaper or faster or simply better they or their product is than their nearest competitor, they leave the literature, direct me to the online demo, but they rarely ask for my business?

Based on experience I would suggest that far less than 10 percent of sales people actually ask for the sale, imagine the money they are leaving on the table, imagine how much extra revenue could be made if they just asked for that sale!
If our beggar in Oklahoma City can do it, I'm sure the average, educated sales person could do it too. Makes you think doesn't it!

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