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Improving Lead Quality in B2B Search Marketing
Improving Lead Quality in B2B Search Marketing E
"These new leads are worthless!" D
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Ever hear that one from your sales team? Or, worse yet, does your sales team simply ignore the leads you send to them? Are you left feeling like the boy who cried U
wolf: "No, seriously, I know some of the search marketing leads haven't been great, but this batch is excellent. Please follow-up on them! Please, I beg you!"? G
No one likes to waste time on the job, and the battle over lead quality is often the largest single source of wasted time and ill will between Marketing and Sales. As N
marketers, we hate to have our work denigrated or ignored. And our sales teams hate to spend their time following-up on leads that won't close quickly or result in small dollar deals. O
I Let's get out of that mess, shall we? T
Overview U
Search marketing has the potential to significantly increase the volume of leads for L
your company virtually overnight. With that power, comes great responsibility - a huge influx of low quality leads can sour sales on all Marketing department efforts for months, while a huge influx of quality leads can make you a hero and change the O
trajectory of your business. S
"B2B businesses need to be very concise in messaging and advertising to ensure targeted traffic and corresponding leads. The volume of accidental or non-targeted [search marketing] traffic can be very large and eat away budgets and ROI. Qualifying with keywords, ad text or site demographics will help eliminate wasteful spending." Kevin Heun, WSI This whitepaper covers the key steps you need to take to with your B2B search marketing program to drive more high quality leads to your sales team. It's organized into three sections: . Reasons Behind Poor B2B Search Marketing Lead Quality . Quick Fixes - What You Can Do Today to Improve Lead Quality . Longer Term Projects on the Road to Continuous Lead Quality Improvement You can improve the quality of leads from your B2B search marketing efforts overnight, and this guide will show you how.
© 2008 Business.com, Inc. Business.com is the "must buy" for targeting business buyers online. All Rights Reserved. To learn more, visit www.business.com/advertise. 1 Improving Lead Quality in B2B Search Marketing
Reasons Behind Poor B2B Search Marketing Lead Quality E
Lead quality is a serious issue that has a major impact on Marketing's reputation within your organization. Your fellow employees may not know what impact a big D
I branding campaign had or whether a trade show paid off, but your sales team will judge in an instant - typically after a short call - whether the leads you sent them are good or bad. They may judge based on just a few calls, or what they hear from U
others, but they're definitely going to form a strong opinion, and fast. G
Many marketers consider this fast feedback their worst enemy when it's really their best friend. As a marketer, you cannot improve lead quality by telling your sales team to try harder. They're either motivated to sell and help prospects find solutions or N
they're not. That's out of your hands. What you can control, however, is what leads you give them and how you showcase the resulting success stories. O
Take a look at the top reasons behind B2B search marketing lead quality issues: I
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Not clearly defining what Sales considers a "quality" lead. It's hard to hit a target if you don't know what the target looks like. Marketing and Sales must agree on a common definition of a sales-ready lead, and this must be a joint effort. Brian Carroll U
describes this challenge exceptionally well in his book "Lead Generation for the L
Complex Sale". Focus on traffic volume or cost over quality. In research we've done, B2B search O
marketers consistently state that their goal is to drive a high volume of quality traffic to their site at a reasonable cost. Makes sense, but lead quality suffers when this S
equation gets out of balance. It is easy to use search marketing to drive a lot of traffic to your web site, and driving visits is the #1 B2B search marketing goal according to a recent study by MarketingProfs. But a focus on high traffic volume and low CPC will almost inevitably lead you away from hi... [download for more]
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