The New Rules of Lead Generation

Proven Strategies to Maximize Marketing ROI

David Scott

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780814432624
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

From amidst the clutter of lead generation tactics, this strategic guide teaches marketers how to make the many available lead generation tactics work together to produce the maximum number of quality leads.

Marketing expert David T. Scott identifies the seven most successful tactics--including email, direct mail, and search engine marketing; banner and social media advertising; cold calling; and trade shows--and reveals:

• when to use which tactics,
• how to use them cost-effectively,
• how each tactic has changed in recent years,
• and how lead generation tactics will continue to evolve in the future.

Most importantly, he shares how marketers can achieve the best results--actionable leads for their products and services--and help their companies succeed.

Featuring valuable tools for tracking costs and measuring results and indispensable advice that’s been thus-far absent from this emerging and in-demand field, The New Rules of Lead Generation takes a critical look at the most popular lead-generation strategies and shows marketers everywhere how to test new approaches on a limited budget, how to combine multiple tactics for a more powerful, integrated campaign, and how to capture the leads they need.

PART ONE
The Basic Tools of
Lead-Generation Marketing

1

What Is Lead-
Generation Marketing?

TO BEGIN, we need to answer two basic questions: What exactly is lead-generation marketing? And what exactly is a lead?

Lead-generation marketing is getting people to “raise their hands” and say they are interested in buying, or learning more about, your product or service. By “raise their hands,” I mean they show interest in a very palpable way.

Leads are people who have identified themselves as candidates who can potentially be turned into sales. Depending on where they are in the buying cycle, they may be “thinking about buying” or “shopping around” or “considering alternatives” or “ready to buy.” Whatever their stage, they have a genuine interest in your products or services, and are considering you as a viable option to meet their needs.

Lead-generation marketing is a way to generate what I call marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). An MQL is a lead that is legitimate, honest, and actionable. Legitimate and honest mean your prospective customers have a true intent to buy. They have the money and the authority to buy, and are serious about evaluating your product or service for possible purchase. Actionable means your sales engine can act on the lead.

A sales engine is whatever mechanism you use to engage the sale of your goods and services. It used to be that “sales engine” referred almost exclusively to a company’s sales department, but a shift in practices is taking place. In the 21st century, lead-generation marketing is changing not only how companies handle marketing but, in some cases, how they handle sales as well.

A Paradigm Shift

We live in an interesting time for lead-generation marketing. It is (and always will be) a sales support function. Its traditional goal in corporate marketing is to provide warm, actionable leads to the company’s sales force, enabling salespeople to close more deals and generate more revenue. A sales force used to be an essential requirement for any business, and lead-generation marketing provided support for the sales. Previously, only a few specialty companies, such as L.L.Bean, were able to get by without a sales force, relying exclusively on print catalogs to drive sales.

But the role of lead-generation marketing is evolving, as more companies adopt e-commerce and mobile technologies as sales vehicles. With the evolution of online catalog marketing and self-service sales, some e-commerce companies don’t even need a sales force. They just need highly effective lead-generation marketing.

This is one of the most exciting transformations that has occurred in the world of business over the last decade. With the development of e-commerce, some organizations have been able to take the sales force entirely out of the equation. This development puts greater influence on the marketing discipline, to the point where, in some organizations, lead-generation marketing could effectively serve as both sales and marketing for the company. It’s a very powerful paradigm shift.

This shift first played out in the travel industry. Companies like Expedia introduced self-service travel concepts that essentially put travel agencies out of business. You no longer have to hire a travel agent to purchase an airline ticket or to book hotel or rental car reservations. Now you can make your own reservations online.

This paradigm shift is extending to the real estate field. Companies like Redfin and Zillow now provide real estate search engines and databases that allow Web users to offer or search for homes for sale online. As a home buyer, you can check the location, property values, and other information about the house, get a home price estimate, compare mortgage options with different lenders, and ask advice from a community of real estate experts. As a home seller, you can offer your home for sale and post information about it. You may not even need a real estate agent to buy or sell a home.

The car buyer’s market is also being affected by this paradigm shift. Auto industry marketers are now providing car buyers with information that was formerly provided by salespeople in the dealer’s showroom. These days, 80% of the car-buying experience is done online. People research car models, read consumer reports and reviews, check out the 360°-view on the car maker’s website, download a list of the car’s features, and get an estimate of the price. When the buyer walks into the dealership, marketing has already done most of the work for the sales force. You may never be able to buy a car without a salesperson to sell it to you, but it’s a definite power shift.

What’s driving this shift in business practices that gives lead-generation marketing more influence and importance in e-commerce businesses? Consumers want more control over the buying experience. They want to do their own research on products and understand their options before making a purchase. The Internet provides a means for consumers to find product information quickly and easily and, in many cases, to make purchases more conveniently.

As companies seek to fulfill the consumer’s need for more buying information and control, they are relying more on lead-generation marketing. This reflects a dramatic shift in the importance of marketing in relation to sales.

To further understand this shift, let’s look at where lead-generation marketing falls in the world of marketing, and how it relates to its “brother”—brand awareness marketing.

Brand Awareness vs. Lead Generation

In general, the world of marketing is dominated by two disciplines: brand awareness marketing and lead-generation marketing. These two disciplines are the “big brothers of marketing,” and they have a kind of yin/yang relationship with each other. (There are other equally important forms of marketing, of course, such as product marketing. But these other forms have only a casual relationship to lead-generation marketing, so I won’t focus on them in this book.)

Brand awareness marketing (commonly known as brand marketing) is all about making people aware of your product and/or your company. It’s about creating an impression of what your brand stands for in people’s minds, and repeating that impression until they have an explicit or implicit awareness of your brand. Coca-Cola spends billions of dollars a year for just this purpose. They plaster their brand and pictures of their soft drink across billboards, posters, print ads, TV commercials, online ads, and many other places so that, when you’re thirsty and looking for something to drink, you automatically think of Coke. Or if a Coca-Cola bottle is sitting next to a Pepsi bottle, you’ve already formed your opinion of Coca-Cola’s product in your mind, and you can make your choice.

For decades, brand awareness marketing has been considered the sexy part of marketing. The hit TV show Mad Men is built around the lives of advertisers in a top New York ad agency in the 1960s. During this time, ad marketers were perfecting the concepts of art and copywriting, and the concepts of advertising aimed at building awareness of a brand (Chevrolet Oldsmobiles, Lucky Strike cigarettes, etc.) in the public mind, and then invoking an implicit desire to buy the product.

Lead-generation marketing has long been considered the underbelly of marketing. Lead-generation marketers ask this question: Once you have established an awareness of your brand and/or product in the marketplace, how do you get the customer to move from considering your product to actually buying it? It’s one thing to make your customers aware that you offer the newest, most innovative smartphone; it’s another thing to convince them to spend $479.99 to buy it. That is the art of lead-generation marketing.

Who Uses Lead-Generation Marketing?

It’s difficult to measure the exact percentage of companies that use lead-generation marketing. But here’s an interesting statistic: A McKinsey Global Survey found that 83% of companies worldwide use some kind of online lead-generation tactic (e-mail marketing, search engine ads, etc.). ¹ If we include the few companies that use only traditional lead-generation tactics (trade shows, direct mail, and cold calling) without using online tactics, we might estimate that roughly 85 to 90% of all companies worldwide use some form of lead-generation marketing.

The companies that have the most use for lead-generation marketing are those that acquire sales through a website or sales staff. Any company that has a direct sales process and/or a direct sales force—either an internal sales force or a field sales force—will receive significant benefits from using lead-generation marketing tactics.

The ways that companies employ the two major marketing disciplines—brand awareness and lead generation—fall across a range of three categories. Figure 1.1 shows the breakdown of how companies fall into each category.

Lead generation–dependent ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Trademarked Terms
• Introduction: Who Should Read This Book?
• Before We Begin: How to Read This Book
• Part One: The Basic Tools of Lead-Generation Marketing
• Part Two: Lead-Generation Marketing Tactics
• Notes
• Index