Lead nurturing before it had a name

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Jeanette Mifsud
lead nurturing

It's always smart to pay attention to the leads you already have

Look at any Blog or site in the B2B marketing space and you’ll find a lot of discussion and buzz about lead nurturing and the marketing automation packages that facilitate it.

When I first heard the term lead nurturing it got me thinking back to my days at Avaya in the direct response team.  We were using a really great tool called Annuncio to send email campaigns, create custom landing pages and generate auto-responder emails.  We not only used this tool to create campaign landing pages for third party emails and direct mail pieces, but also for creating follow-up campaigns to what we called our “recent responders” (people that had come into our prospect database, but had not yet converted to a customer).   Tom Reid, then at Avaya, was the genius behind devising a strategy to nurture the company’s prospects.  He also worked with Annuncio to integrate the tool with our existing databases.  He created the “e-demand” initiative and the team to support it.  It struck me a few years back that we were doing lead nurturing and aspects of marketing automation before it had those name tags.

Our results were amazing—both in terms of the conversion rates of our prospects and the results we saw in cross-selling or up-selling our customer base. The Annuncio tool had some really cool features, and was very easy to use.   The company was acquired by PeopleSoft (now Oracle) in 2002, so I’m not sure where the technology ended up.  It was great to be a part of something in its early stages of development, and to see firsthand how it makes sense to spend effort marketing to those leads you’ve already spent time and money to acquire.

There are a lot of great resources out there to learn more about lead nurturing, like Marketo’s “Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.”

We’d like to hear about your experiences with marketing automation or lead nurturing!

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Doh! Internet Explorer’s 31 CSS file limit

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Mark Eissler

I’m definitely not the first to report this but it bears repeating: Internet Explorer has a limit. A strange limit. The browser refuses to load more than 31 style sheets. Yup, it’s true…

as posted here, and here, and here… Heck, let me just Google this for you!

Now some keen developer might ask something like: “Why are you loading more than 31 style sheets?” To which I respond: “When you’re developing for a platform like Drupal, with lot of modules loaded, each loading their own special style sheets, you kind of want all of those style sheets to be loaded separately to aid with debugging.” Later, you can just switch on compression which will automagically distill all (or most) of those CSS files into one big optimized style sheet.

Now I’ve got to say that this whole situation makes no sense. So much no sense that it’s hard to believe it’s true. In fact, while debugging I had noticed that by turning off certain stylesheets things started looking good again, and started (just started) to think that maybe, just maybe, there was some bizarre maximum file limitation imposed by IE. BAH! What kind of a crazed coder would do such a thing?? Like any smart person, I shrugged the crazies off and investigated parsing errors instead. I diligently ran every file through the W3C CSS validator and commented out all of the “problem” blocks–a process that in itself is silly just because we continue to have to add crazy amounts of vendor-specific (aka “non standards compliant”) css just to accomplish anything neat (yup, thanks again Microsoft).

Eventually (like 4 hours later) I decided to finally look into the file limit idea. And that’s when I found it: confirmation that IE9 is still a crappy Web development tool. And that’s why the Number One Web development browser at Mixtur continues to remain Mozilla Firefox with Firebug. I’m convinced that Modern Web development would most certainly grind to a halt without this suite. Yup, even Google Chrome has can’t match that combination.

So to any other developers out there: try to file this little tidbit away because one day you are going to stumble across this very problem. Better yet, add it to your ever-growing list of “Stupid browser bugs” document in Evernote.

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4 best practices for landing pages that convert

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Jeanette Mifsud
best practices

4 tips to help your landing pages convert

I came across a Hubspot article, where they chose five landing pages to illustrate some best practices.  Here’s a summary of what they found:

Be consistent – Linking the subject of page headlines, form headlines and call to action buttons really helps drive home what you want the visitor to do.

Remove distractions – Have one clear call to action (E.g. download a content piece, sign up for a free trial), and remove navigation or other links that distract from the goal of the page.

Use relevant images – Don’t just use random stock photography to fill a gap, make sure the images you choose support the conversion action you’re asking for.  If you’re promoting a content piece, include an image of it, or if the offer is a software free trial, include a screen shot of the software.

Establish credibility – Great ways of doing this are including quotes from customer or trusted third parties, like journalists or analysts.  You can also use logos from credible trade associations or organizations such VeriSign or the BBB.

For more tips on designing landing pages that convert, see my colleague Kaitlin’s post on “8 Ways to Make Your Landing Pages Convert.”

Please share any examples of great landing pages with us!

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Joined at the hip – keywords and content marketing

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Jeanette Mifsud

We’ve written a few Blog posts lately about both the subjects of keyword research and content marketing—two important topics for today’s marketing professional.   What I wanted to emphasize today was how your keywords and your content should be closely connected.

content marketing and keywords

Make sure your content and keywords are joined at the hip

It all starts with that magic keyword list—those keywords that are highly relevant, have good volume and are not highly competitive (check out this keyword research Blog post).

Next you develop your content marketing plan.  As you begin to create your content, have your keyword list by your side.  I usually do a first draft of a content piece, and then go back and see how my keywords can fit naturally with the flow.  First and foremost your piece should follow the content marketing rules of being useful, relevant and well written.  So don’t be tempted to create a piece with the sole goal of stuffing it full of keywords to maximize your chances of getting good SEO ranking.  Rather look to use your keywords in places that make sense.  Think of creative ways to place your keywords like captions for images, or in quotes.

Once you’ve completed your piece, and you’re ready to post it to third party sharing sites, remember to include your keywords in the metadata for that document—items like tags, document descriptions, and abstracts.

When you make sure your keywords and content marketing initiatives are joined at the hip, you’ll have the best chance of your content getting found and doing the job it was intended for–whether that job is education, lead generation or moving prospects through the sales cycle.

Contact us for your copy of “The five steps to content marketing success – a practical guide for B2B marketers.”

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Is ‘transmedia’ cross-dressing for your content?

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Jeanette Mifsud

I had a little chuckle when Annie forwarded me this article from SlideShare that used the term ‘transmedia.’

I had just finished writing the solutions paper “the five steps to content marketing success – a practical guide for B2B marketers.” In the piece, I discussed how you should ‘give legs’ to the content you create by repurposing the core content into different media. I guess that’s what transmedia is all about. For example you may develop a thought leadership piece that was originally a downloadable PDF. Well transmedia means taking that piece and using the content to create presentations, Webinar content, podcasts, Infographics etc.

Why do this? Well there are two main reasons. Firstly you want to produce the content in the way your target audience prefers to consume it, and secondly you can promote it on the various different sharing platforms – think SlideShare, Prezi, YouTube, Flickr etc.

So next time you produce a piece of content, consider ‘giving it legs’ or if you prefer go ‘transmedia’ with it.

Contact us to get your copy of “the five steps to content marketing success – a practical guide for B2B marketers”.

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