by Lori Berson | Feb 20, 2024 | Digital marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Marketing Strategy
According to the study by Integrate Pipeline360 and Demand Metric, B2B marketers are increasingly relying on paid social media and email marketing to generate leads, reflecting a strategic shift towards digital channels that offer measurable results and targeted outreach. This focus is driven by the dual objectives of improving lead quality and increasing lead volume, challenges that are top of mind for marketers aiming to enhance their sales pipeline and drive business growth.
However, the quest for more leads doesn’t always end with choosing the right channels. It extends into optimizing these channels to ensure that the leads generated are not only numerous but also of high quality. This is where the complexity of digital marketing becomes evident, as marketers must navigate the nuances of content creation, audience targeting, and data analysis to achieve their lead generation goals effectively.
For companies looking to navigate the complexities of lead generation in this digital age, BersonDeanStevens, Inc. (BDS) offers expertise in crafting and executing lead generation strategies that are tailored to the unique needs of B2B marketers. With a deep understanding of digital marketing trends and the challenges faced by marketers today, BDS is positioned to help businesses enhance their lead generation efforts, ensuring a steady flow of high-quality leads. For those looking to elevate their lead generation strategies and drive meaningful business results, contact BDS for expert guidance and support.
About the Data: The results are based on a November 2023 survey of 437 marketers in the US (50% share) and UK (46%) working at companies targeting B2B (58%) or B2B and B2C (42%) channels.
For help with your lead generation, schedule a call or email Lori Berson at lberson@BersonDeanStevens.com.
BersonDeanStevens has been a recognized brand strategy and marketing leader for over 25 years. We work in partnership with you to differentiate your brand and achieve your business goals. Client list.
by bersondev | Jun 7, 2022 | Marketing, marketing automation, marketing technology
Marketing automation empowers marketers to focus on the strategic initiatives rather than get bogged down with the tactical implementation, and it aligns sales and marketing towards accomplishing common goals. This all adds up to decreased costs and increased revenue.
Marketing Automation Features
Campaign and Email Management
Create and track highly targeted marketing campaigns. Manage end-to-end email campaigns, including database management, target list creation and segmentation, email personalization, and SPAM-compliant auto unsubscribe capabilities.
Website Search Engine Optimization
Connect with your customers early in the buying cycle with search engine-friendly pages.
Landing Page and Forms
Create dynamic landing pages and forms. Build reusable templates to create a consistent look and feel. Instantly create leads in your CRM system for immediate sales follow-up on all form submissions.
Lead Reporting and Analytics
Get comprehensive insight into your marketing programs by program type, lead source, and promotions — in real-time. Seamlessly track lead-to-revenue to measure the ROI of your lead generation programs.
“91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is ‘very important’ to the overall success of their marketing across channels.” —Ascend2
Marketing Automation Benefits
Effective Multi-Channel Campaign Management
Streamlines the execution of complex marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including websites, email, events, and social media with a centralized marketing platform.
Improves Sales Collaboration
Aligns marketing and sales goals to improve collaboration and convert leads into customers.
Shortens Your Sales Cycle
Delivers highly relevant dynamic content to prospects at the right time, right place and right channel, guiding them through the buying cycle.
Quantifies and Prioritizes Leads
Captures, identifies, scores and nurtures leads based on profile, behavior, interests, and conversion readiness to deliver sales-ready leads.
Real-Time Visibility
Provides insight into campaign performance and return on investment (ROI) with robust analytics.
To learn how to best use Marketing Automation to increase ROI, check out this article.
As a recognized Marketing Automation leader for the past decade, we work with firms to help them utilize their marketing technology to increase revenue. To see how we can help you, schedule a free consultation or email Lori Berson at lberson@BersonDeanStevens.com.
BersonDeanStevens has been a recognized brand strategy and marketing leader for over 25 years, including over a decade in Marketing Automation. We work in partnership with you to differentiate your brand and achieve your business goals. Client list.
by bersondev | Mar 5, 2022 | marketing automation, marketing technology
The proliferation of digital channels and devices has made it challenging for marketers to accurately target prospects with the right messages, on the right devices, at the right times. Prospects are managing more of the buying process themselves, creating decision shortlists by researching brand websites and social channels without ever speaking to a sales rep. As such, to be effective, marketers must be creative, targeted and aligned with sales goals, and they must also have greater visibility into buyer attributes and behaviors.
Faced with these challenging market dynamics and increasing ROI (Return on Investment) pressure, marketers at companies of all sizes are turning to Marketing Automation as a solution to:
Increase marketing efficiency.
Marketing Automation enables marketers to automate the time-consuming manual tasks around content creation, management, and personalization, campaign scheduling and execution, data hygiene (i.e. fix duplicate or inconsistent data in separate silos), communication with sales, and lead nurturing. Marketing Automation saves time and improves productivity.
“Best in class marketers are 67% more likely to use a Marketing Automation platform and see 14% overall growth in marketing revenue.” – Aberdeen
Enhance the ability to generate more and better-qualified leads.
With Marketing Automation, marketers combine multiple criteria including demographic, firmographic (firm demographics) and behavioral data (pages visited, downloads, completed forms) with a lead-scoring system to generate and identify sales-qualified leads.
A multichannel view of prospect behavior.
Marketing Automation platforms integrate multiple channels to create more comprehensive prospect profiles and more holistic views of prospect behavior.
Better alignment of sales and marketing goals.
Marketing Automation software helps to align sales and marketing efforts ensuring sales reps are working with sales-ready leads. Working cooperatively to set scoring parameters and define qualified leads, sales and marketing become one team. Marketing works on building relationships with early-stage leads to enable the sales team to focus their efforts on the most highly qualified prospects.
Improve lead conversion and ROI.
According to Forrester Research, B2B marketers who implement Marketing Automation experience a 10 percent increase in their sales pipeline contribution.
To learn how to best use Marketing Automation to increase ROI, check out this article.
As a recognized Marketing Automation leader for the past decade, we work with firms to help them utilize their marketing technology to increase revenue. To see how we can help you, schedule a free consultation or email Lori Berson at lberson@BersonDeanStevens.com.
BersonDeanStevens has been a recognized brand strategy and marketing leader for over 25 years, including over a decade in Marketing Automation. We work in partnership with you to differentiate your brand and achieve your business goals. Client list.
by bersondev | Mar 1, 2022 | Lead Generation, Marketing, marketing automation, marketing technology
Marketing automation success requires more than just software. It takes strategy, creative, and the right team. Whether you are new to marketing automation or have a platform in place, here are sample questions and a worksheet for organizations that have marketing bottlenecks.
Lead Scoring Questionnaire
- Which channels contribute to your current customer acquisitions?
- What content contributes to your current customer acquisitions?
- What are the general steps your current customers took to become customers?
- Based on the earlier assessment of your marketing processes, how would you change your lead scoring model to improve these processes?
Lead Scoring Worksheets
To ensure you provide your Sales team with right leads at the right time, Marketing and Sales should develop the lead scoring model together.
To start, audit your sales-ready prospects and customers who have recently closed to learn their activities and behaviors. (Example: did 70% of your customers come from one lead campaign or lead magnet? Did they schedule a call with your sales team?)
As you clarify the type of leads that Sales prefers, you’ll be able to assign points to lead characteristics like attributes, activity, and engagement. Like campaigns, lead scoring is not a set it and forget it effort. After the initial set up, you’ll need to continue to evaluate your model and adjust it accordingly. Remember, Sales always prefers better qualified leads versus a higher quantity of leads.
PROFILE SCORE
This category helps you determine which contacts are a good fit for your Sales team. The Profile Score rules apply only once. (Example: when your contact enters a specific list based on their form submission, their score will be assigned.)
Make sure each contact has the attributes you’re looking for: job title, company size, industry. You can set up the rules to add points for attributes you prefer and subtract points for attributes that don’t work for your business.
BEHAVIOR SCORE
The Behavior Score shows you the contact’s activity. You’ll be able to identify implicit activity by your contact. (Example: the contact browses certain web pages.)
Depending on your scoring model, Sales might want to reach out to a contact based on their behavior. (Example: if a contact visits a pricing page on your website.) Behavior Scores are applied for every action taken so they can be applied multiple times.
ENGAGEMENT SCORE
This Score helps you identify explicit actions taken by your contacts and are potentially more valuable than implicit actions. A highly-engaged contact is expressing interest in your content. (Example: a form submit, clicking a link in an email.) Engagement Scores apply every time an action takes place.
All three categories: Profile, Behavior, and Engagement Scores give you an understanding of how well a contact fits your ideal customer profile, how active they are on your website, and how engaged they are with your content and business. You can have automated alerts sent to your Sales reps to reach out to contacts based upon your scoring rules.
Aligning customer marketing and Marketing Automation strategies can be challenging and time consuming. The right Marketing Automation platform and experienced external resource will streamline and simplify the process, ensuring that your Marketing Automation strategy is on-point, on-budget, implemented properly, and optimized for success.
To learn how to best use Marketing Automation to increase ROI, check out this article.
As a recognized Marketing Automation leader for the past decade, we work with firms to help them utilize their marketing technology to increase revenue. To see how we can help you, schedule a free consultation or email Lori Berson at lberson@BersonDeanStevens.com.
BersonDeanStevens has been a recognized brand strategy and marketing leader for over 25 years, including over a decade in Marketing Automation. We work in partnership with you to differentiate your brand and achieve your business goals. Client list.
by bersondev | Feb 27, 2022 | Lead Generation, Marketing, marketing automation, marketing technology
Marketing automation success requires more than just software. It takes strategy, creative, and the right team. Whether you are new to marketing automation or have a platform in place, here are sample questions and a worksheet for organizations that have marketing bottlenecks.
Sales and Marketing Questionnaire
- Is the ideal customer the same for Sales and Marketing? If not, what’s different?
- How effective is the hand-off of leads from Marketing to Sales? Are the requirements clearly defined?
- Would your Sales team agree on Marketing’s assessment of the effectiveness? Why (not)? Would Management agree with Marketing’s assessment?
- Are there any other departments (Support, Operations) you’d like to involve in this implementation? What would you need to ask them?
Aligning customer marketing and Marketing Automation strategies can be challenging and time consuming. The right Marketing Automation platform and experienced external resource will streamline and simplify the process, ensuring that your Marketing Automation strategy is on-point, on-budget, implemented properly and optimized for success. Check back for Part 5.
To learn how to best use Marketing Automation to increase ROI, check out this article.
As a recognized Marketing Automation leader for the past decade, we work with firms to help them utilize their marketing technology to increase revenue. To see how we can help you, schedule a free consultation or email Lori Berson at lberson@BersonDeanStevens.com.
BersonDeanStevens has been a recognized brand strategy and marketing leader for over 25 years, including over a decade in Marketing Automation. We work in partnership with you to differentiate your brand and achieve your business goals. Client list.
by bersondev | Feb 22, 2020 | Lead Generation, Marketing, marketing automation, marketing technology
Marketing automation success requires more than just software. It takes strategy, creative, and the right team. Whether you are new to marketing automation or have a platform in place, here are sample questions and a worksheet for organizations that have marketing bottlenecks.
Customer Journey Questionnaire
- Who is your ideal customer? (Demographics, firmographics, psychographics, etc.) And what are they looking for?
- How would your products/services solve their problems?
- How did they come to your company? How do they interact with your company?
- Identify the most common objections your persona(s) will raise during the sales process.
- What education needs to take place to get someone from awareness to acquisition? From acquisition to advocacy?
- What kind of information does your ideal customer need after purchase? What communication do you have with them after they buy?
- What marketing campaigns, workflows, offers, resources, funnels do you currently have in place?
Customer Journey Worksheet
Marketing Automation is the engine of your lead generation strategy, and great content is the fuel. The best way to create great content is by knowing your prospects and customers, and mapping your content to their journeys.
Each stage of the customer journey represents a prospect’s state of mind. The Customer Journey Worksheet will walk you through the stages of the Customer Journey allowing you to see things through the eyes of the customer. To win business, make sure your content addresses the customers’ needs and mindset.
Aligning customer marketing and Marketing Automation strategies can be challenging and time consuming. The right Marketing Automation platform and experienced external resource will streamline and simplify the process, ensuring that your Marketing Automation strategy is on-point, on-budget, implemented properly and optimized for success. Check back for Parts 4 and 5.
To learn how to best use Marketing Automation to increase ROI, check out this article.
As a recognized Marketing Automation leader for the past decade, we work with firms to help them utilize their marketing technology to increase revenue. To see how we can help you, schedule a free consultation or email Lori Berson at lberson@BersonDeanStevens.com.
BersonDeanStevens has been a recognized brand strategy and marketing leader for over 25 years, including over a decade in Marketing Automation. We work in partnership with you to differentiate your brand and achieve your business goals. Client list.
