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Awareness Building and Lead Generation, Marketing's
Dynamic Duo: Part 2

Bob PattersonThis is the second article in a two-part series. Last month, you’ll recall we talked about the role that awareness building plays in a coordinated marketing communications program. In this issue, we focus on the topic of sales lead generation.
First, a word about strategy: The best tactical marketing communications plan should be based on a well thought-out strategic plan that represents your business goals, articulates your vision, and contains a synergistic mix of programs to help you succeed at establishing relationships with prospective customers at multiple levels.
As we mentioned last time, awareness-building programs can shorten your sales cycle by helping your sales prospects understand that your product or service meets their needs. In addition, building awareness decreases your prospects’ perception of risk in purchasing from you. The other half of our marketing dynamic duo – lead generation programs – can reduce the amount of time your salespeople spend making cold calls and qualifying likely sales prospects, ultimately helping to populate your sales funnel.
Lead Generation
The goal of an effective lead generation program is to compel prospective customers to identify and qualify themselves to you. You use lead generation programs to prioritize and then mature a list of prospects (qualified sales leads) from a larger universe of suspects, who might or might not be interested in buying from you. Following up on a qualified sales lead is much more cost- and time-effective for your sales staff than making cold calls from loosely defined lists within your target market. Time and money spent getting the best prospects to identify themselves can save a tremendous amount of money in the long run.
As with awareness building, there are three key considerations in planning a direct marketing campaign:
  1. Audience – Targeting your audience is of utmost importance. You need to select a list that includes the right people – those who can help your salespeople expedite the sales process once they are moved to contact you. They may be actual decision makers, or decision influencers. Many of our clients have complex sales cycles involving both groups. In selecting the list, keep in mind how decisions are made to purchase your product or service.
  2. Medium – You need to communicate in a manner that will get your message read. For direct mail campaigns, we often recommend dimensional mailers (three-dimensional items mailed in packets or boxes) over postcards or brochures because packages containing 3-D items are significantly more likely to be opened and read, and – done right – the message that they convey is often more memorable.
  3. Message and offer – The third key ingredient of a successful direct marketing lead generation campaign is the message you deliver and your call to action. The message must be relevant to your target audience, relating to their situation and their pain points. It often takes research and experience to validate that your messaging will resonate with your prospect, but the payoff is tangible. Remind yourself that good selling is not about you, it’s about the customer. What do you have to say that the customer will care about? Once your message gets through, you want qualified prospects to identify themselves by contacting you. Therefore, the offer that you convey in your package must compel them to do this. The offer you make – whether a whitepaper download, an e-newsletter subscription, or perhaps a contest with an intriguing prize – must be perceived as having high value to your prospect. Equally importantly, it must reflect positively on your brand.
Often the most effective direct marketing programs start with a print mailer (flat or dimensional). Although producing and mailing such pieces is expensive, well qualified prospect mailing lists are much easier to obtain than similar lists for email, and do not carry the restrictions imposed by the Can-Spam Act of 2003. Such print mailings can then lead respondents to a landing page (essentially a one-page website) to fulfill the offer. On the landing page, the respondent fills in his or her contact and profile information, thus transitioning the relationship online, gaining you an opted-in lead that can easily be communicated with, matured and sometimes even closed online.
What type of print mailer should you do? That depends on several factors, not the least being how broad is your audience (i.e., how large is your list and how homogeneous are the list members). If your list is small and the audience well profiled, a dimensional mailer, as mentioned above, can be tailored to make a much more compelling impression on the audience.
For example, we did a lead generation program for Tektronix that was targeted at reaching the chief technical officers of a small number of customers (about 50) in a particular market segment. Based on our audience profile, we determined that the target recipients tended to enjoy woodworking as a hobby and would therefore be likely to respond to mailings that included engraved woodworking tools. Following a series of mailings of these tools, we tallied the results and found that approximately 50% of the target list had responded to the program (typical rates for simple postcard-type mailings are in the ballpark of 2-4%).
If your list is large and the amount of money you can spend on each mailer is limited, then the success of your program will depend on the strength of the offer that the mailer communicates. Again, understanding what your target audience will view as valuable is key to ensuring this.
Internet marketing programs can also be very effective vehicles for lead generation. Optimizing your website and running well-targeted pay-per-click campaigns can educate prospects that you have a solution for their needs and can compel them to contact you. By selecting keywords and phrases effectively, and using links to drive prospects to product pages within your website or landing pages that offer specific items of value, you can get qualified sales leads to identify themselves.
Awareness and lead generation programs combine for maximum effectiveness.
Well-rounded marketing plans combine both awareness building and lead generation programs. Awareness-building programs can shorten your sales cycle by educating prospective customers that your products or services can meet their needs and by decreasing your prospects’ perception of risk in selecting you as a vendor. Lead generation programs make your salespeople more effective by reducing the amount of time they spend interfacing with candidates that are not good sales prospects, and by building your sales funnel.