Had a lengthy counseling session recently with a company struggling with their demand generation program. We know them well and worked closely with their CEO over the past year as he’s managed the company through a sales transition.
Progress Made.
In just one year they have reinvented themselves into a Sales 2.0 model. They refined their market segmentation, defined specific target sectors and researched named acquisition accounts. They completely rewrote their messaging to be about customer value, not themselves. Then they replaced their website with one built on a blogging platform for improved content management and better SEO – and made sure it had all the necessary social media plug-ins. The executive team updated their social media profiles and created new ones where they were missing. Finally, they implemented marketing automation technology, applied their segmentation model to their lead lists, launched newsletters and drip campaigns and began lead scoring.
Now What?
After all this progress however, frustration is unfortunately setting in because they are not producing the qualified lead flow they expected. ”What’s missing,” they asked us.
Mechanically speaking nothing is missing; they have the process, technology and marketing infrastructure engine finely tuned. What is killing them is fuel. Content fuel! And they have precious little of the right kind.
It feels to them like they are doing the right things. They publish a couple blog posts a month, hosted a webinar last fall and wrote a few white papers. But it’s not being maintained on a steady, frequent, coordinated schedule. And in some cases is not quite dialed in; it’s either too salesy or not relevant enough.
What they need is to consistently produce original content that contributes thought leadership to their industry, educates their prospects, and helps their leads move themselves along the buying process – on their own pace. They need this content both to feed their outbound marketing efforts and to scatter across the social networks to establish inbound paths to their site.
Two Takeaways.
Remember, your prospects start looking for information, options and even help once those trigger events occur in their organizations. When they start searching, companies with lots of relevant, valuable and visible content are the ones they will find.
- Make sure you create plenty of strong content that is easy for your prospects to locate, read and share.
- Make sure you have the technology and processes in place to nurture those leads until they are sales ready.