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How to Choose Your Carrot:
Effective Lead Generation Offers
for High-Technology Marketers
A Connect Direct White PaperHow to Choose Your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
Why Offer Matters
One of the oldest rules in direct marketing dictates the relative importance of key elements inany campaign as follows (in order):
1. List2. Offer3. Creative
Clearly, for any demand generation campaign to be successful, you first need to be targetingthe right audience. A campaign can feature award-winning creative and a compelling offer,but if you're broadcasting your message to the wrong group of people, your campaign willfail. This much is common sense and easily understood by most marketers.
Strangely, the fact that offer is the second most important component of any demandgeneration campaign appears to be news to many companies, particularly in the high-techsector. Judging from most of the campaigns, online and offline, in circulation today, creativestill rules the roost. However, whereas copy and design are important, they don't haveanywhere near the impact on a campaign of a good (or bad) offer.
What do you mean by "Offer"?
An offer is a reason to respond - the "carrot" that gets the reader to take action. Pricediscounts and "Buy 1, Get 1 Free" are types of offers, but so are white papers, brochures,seminars, podcasts, free trials and any other specific, tangible incentive given for the reader torespond to your campaign.
Price discounts are sometimes termed "hard offers" or "purchase offers" because they require apurchase decision. White papers, seminars and the like are described as "soft offers" or"information offers" because they don't require a purchase decision (or anything close to it),but instead are designed to elicit interest in a particular product, service or technology.
For the purpose of this white paper, we'll be discussing primarily soft or information offers.
Sell the Offer, not the Product
Assuming your campaign objective is to generate leads and not to drive immediate sales, thefocus of your campaign should be the offer, not the product.
No matter how enticing your product or service sounds, you won't generate leads unlesspeople want what you're offering to send them. An effective offer accomplishes two things:
1. It causes the prospect to respond; and2. It tells you something about that prospect, ideally that he/she has a need foryour product or service
Perhaps the No. 1 lead generation mistake that high-tech marketers make is rattling on abouthow wonderful their product or service is, and then treating the offer as an afterthought.
©2008 Connect Direct Inc. All rights reserved. 2How to Choose Your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
Inboxes worldwide are bombarded every day with campaigns that preach the virtues of theadvertiser's product ad nauseam, but bury the offer in a corner somewhere.
Remember: Unless your intent is to have someone buy your product on the spot, using yourcampaign to convince the reader why he or she needs it now is a waste of space. Instead, sellthe benefits of your product in the context of the offer. For example, if your offer is aWebinar, you might say:
"In a free Web seminar, you'll learn how to cut corporate travel expenses by as much as 40percent ..."
Now, enabling companies to save up to 40 percent on their travel expenses might be exactlywhat your product does, but we're not selling your product. We're selling the offer. If youattract prospects that are interested in cutting their travel expenses, regardless of whether theyfeel they're expressing an explicit interest in your product, then you're learning a key piece ofinformation about each and every one: namely, that they have the very business problem thatyour product solves. And if that's not a good lead, what is?
Choosing the Right Offer
Choosing the right offer for your campaign is a matter of deciding what the primary objectiveis for your program, and the types of leads you're looking to generate. For example, yourobjective may be:
. Generating highly qualified prospects actively engaged in evaluating yourkind of product; or. Generating prospects who meet your target demographic and who, atminimum, ... [download for more]
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