There’s no question that B2B marketers are using social media, but too few are treating social media as a source of feedback, and not just an outlet through which to distribute their message. Additionally, many marketers use social media to target potential prospects, and are leaving another very important resource untapped: their customers. Your current clients are also out there in the social media world, and conversations with these clients can spur ideas for worthwhile content.

The key is to treat social media marketing as a dialogue, not a monologue. You are not just trying to force your message out to a wide array of audiences, you are trying to engage with these audiences and establish a sense of community. So don’t just tweet, ask questions. Start conversations with customers, find out what they’d like you elaborate on in a blog post and watch for trends. This creates a mutually beneficial relationship: your customers know that you value their opinion and you receive valuable feedback.

There are several reasons why the opinions of your current customers are of such great value to you. Your customers are the experts on your product: they know what their needs are, and chances are, they’ll be more than happy to share them with you. Furthermore, they know the challenges they faced when buying your product. So building content around feedback from these customers can both help you to retain current customers and make your product more attractive to future prospects.

In this content-crazy marketing world, constantly cranking out content won’t always be enough to set you apart – but engaging with your customers through social media and producing content in accordance with their feedback can give your content a valuable edge.

The reason for a lack of “original and quality content” is that most marketers are creating content based on the other content they’ve seen or what they think leads are interested in. Generally, marketers communicate by pushing out content and rarely interact with leads and customers. This lack of interaction leaves marketers in the dark on what content could produce the best results. Fortunately, ideas for valuable content can be found within your organization:

• Speak with Sales - If anyone out there is promoting and pushing your content, it’s your sales team. And, chances are, they’re also getting some great insight into what would make valuable content. Take the time to sit down with members of your sales team and find out common issues that arise during sales calls that currently aren’t being addressed. For example, you may come to learn that many prospects are hesitant to implement your product/service because they are about to redesign their website. If your product/service can benefit the website redesign process at all, this would be a great opportunity to create some content.
• Chat with Services/Support - Day in and day out, you have co-workers answering questions, troubleshooting problems, and explaining features to your clients. These are the people that know where your current content is lacking. Taking suggestions from your services/support teams will not only help you produce content for your clients, but also improve your thought-leadership. It’s very likely that there may be knowledge gaps across your entire industry. You may walk away from the conversation with a great idea for a series of blog posts based on your expertise.

Enter this fabulous resource from the Content Marketing Institute: 10 Must Have Templates for Content Marketers. You’ll find some excellent questions to help light the way on your content journey, including helpful guides for creating an editorial calendar, content planning tips and guidelines for social media content. One of the best things about these guides is that they all encourage marketers to think about content in terms of your business goals. This makes it easy for you to stay on track as you build a diverse content library. Oh, did I mention all of these guides are free? Check them out and get inspired!

What’s dynamic content? It’s a page that’s regularly updated but maintains the same link. Good examples of this are your blog (the main page, not a specific blog post), your social media pages like Twitter and Facebook, your company news page or a page where you announce new features.

Below is an example of a very basic nurturing email with dynamic content.

Linking to this dynamic content means your nurturing campaigns stay fresh over time. You can craft simple templates with messaging pointing the reader to check out your latest blog posts and no matter when they visit, the content will be current (assuming you update your blog, of course).

Directing prospects to a page that showcases your new features is especially helpful when nurturing lost leads. If you lost a deal to a competitor, it may have been because of a certain feature your product didn’t offer. Drawing attention to product innovations can be an effective way to put yourself back in the game when it’s time for a lost customer to renew their contract with their current vendor.

As you develop your lead nurturing strategy, think about how to make your campaigns low maintenance. This will ensure they that they are effective time savers for your marketing team.

Promote your event and send reminders.
Using the email tools in a marketing automation system, you can schedule emails for future dates. This is handy if you want to promote ticket sales for an event set up a series of reminder messages for those who have already purchased tickets.

Use forms for contests and lead capture.
Some marketing automation vendors offer cookie-less forms, which are different than traditional online form. Most online forms track visitor activity after they fill out the form, but by using cookie-less forms, you can collect an infinite amount of data using a single form without any messy tracking results. This is ideal for capturing people’s information at a trade show booth and also works well for running a state-of-the-art sweepstakes. One of the best parts about using a form to collect information is that you can instantly send out auto-responders and even begin a drip nurturing campaign to try to drive future brand engagement.

Track ROI
By simply tagging prospects with the correct campaign in your marketing automation system, you can easily track the ROI on your event investment. Prospects can be tagged with multiple campaigns so that even if you’ve interacted with them over a long period of time, you can still see that your event had an impact during the buying cycle.

Paid Search and Visitor Insight

Paid search programs can provide a certain amount of basic insight into your campaign success, allowing you to see which paid ads brought in visitors. With this information, you can figure out what sorts of things people are searching for when your website catches their eye, and you can tweak your marketing efforts based on this. However, systems fall short of automating continued, targeted messaging to your paid search visitors and often can’t link ads viewed through the sales cycle to closed opportunities.

Marketing Automation Enhances Visitor Insight

From the start, marketing automation makes paid search easier. You can quickly and easily create a number of branded landing pages that are very specific to each of your paid search ads. Having landing pages that are closely related to your paid search terms improves your Google quality score and helps you gain better positioning at a lower cost.

Once you’ve converted some prospects with your killer offer, they are entered in your marketing automation system and you can begin nurturing them until they are sales ready. Segmenting prospects based on which ad they responded to will result in tailored communication that helps move prospects forward in the sales cycle. Segmentation may be based on their product of interest or perhaps a pain point that was addressed in your ad.

Once a qualified prospect has begins working with a sales rep, connecting your paid search data and your CRM data in the marketing automation system give you the ability to keep track of a prospect through all stages of the sales cycle. Ultimately this results in you being able to see your cost-per-opportunity rather than just your cost-per-click, leading to more effective future spending.

Some example characteristics of your ideal customer profile include: the location of the potential lead, the size of the company they are affiliated with, their industry, their department and job title. Having this information will allow you to accurately target those leads which are most likely to buy a particular product.

Two of the most important profile criteria items for most companies are industry and job title. Industry is helpful in ensuring they are the right kind of customer for you, since most companies with a complex sales cycle are targeting a specific group of buyers. Job title is incredibly important, too. In most cases, managers, VP’s and directors are the decision makers; getting to them, or to a reputable associate, is the only way to make in-roads. Reaching the right person on the first try ensures sales reps are making the most of their time.

By building a thorough customer profile, a salesperson can quickly achieve the results they are after without sacrificing any more time than is absolutely necessary. While many software programs make it easy to collect data, marketing automation collects the data and grades it, allowing the savvy salesperson to prioritze.

How To Tell a Story With Lead Nuturing

The main quality of a story is that it flows nicely. It has a beginning, it goes through a logical, natural shift during the middle, and it culminates in an end – ideally, the decision made by the lead to purchase the product. Most people don’t just make snap decisions to buy items. They read about something online in the initial touch with your company, remember it, mull it over and eventually come to make the decision on their own.

The trick to lead nurturing via storytelling is making sure that your lead nurturing program of sending multiple emails nudges potential customers toward the right decision over time. This can be accomplished by segmenting your prospects according to various factors (for example, lead score or stage in the buying cycle). You may want to begin your nurturing program with a welcoming email, then send some marketing materials, then provide an email explaining a new feature or product that may align with their business strategy. Including marketing content (case studies, white papers) that would be most relevant to the prospect, keeping in mind their role at the company and the specific challenges they may face.

Be Mindful Of Your Prospect’s Progression

At any given moment, you may have dozens of leads that are slightly interested in buying your product. Gradually as they start to feel a greater need for what you have to offer, they will become more interested in purchasing your product or service. You will want the timing of your story to adjust throughout the nurturing cycle. You can do this by planning key activity triggers in your nurturing program like removing a prospect once they engage with a sales representative or transferring them to an accelerated track if they request a certain piece of content. Prospects that do not show specific buying signals can be left of the default drip track through completion.

When it comes to telling a story with lead nurturing, the goal is to build a series of emails and marketing materials that help the lead understand the benefits of your product for their specific situation.

“In the days when salespeople acted as gatekeepers of company information, providing [informational sales collateral] gave them direct access to, and multiple opportunities to build relationships with, their prospects. Nowadays, prospects gather their own information independently, so the traditional influence of salespeople has declined significantly.”

Today’s buyer is no longer reliant on the salesperson to receive information about the company or product. In fact, according to this white paper, up to 70 percent of a customer’s buying decision is based on information found online before a salesperson gets involved. So, how many leads have you lost and didn’t even know about?

Fortunately, the technology that caused this problem can also provide a solution for it. Creating the right digital content and making it available will help you reach and educate consumers about your product independently of a salesperson. Publishing press releases, case studies, white papers, articles, and other such content online ensures there’s plenty of information to be discovered. Allow users to access this content on and off your website to increase accessibility of your information.

When it comes to creating your content, make sure to focus on the different stages that a buyer could be at. For instance, an early stage buyer may benefit greater from a Double Your Web Marketing Value white paper than a later stage buyer who is interested in a video demo of your product. This allows you educate your potential leads with relevant information at all times. Transparency is the key – don’t force them to contact a salesperson to find out basic product information.

And make sure to take full advantage of these content opportunities by using tracking links, landing pages, and forms. You can start capturing lead information early on to build up a prospect profile and engage the lead at just the right time.

In his latest article, Carlos Hidalgo included a section titled “Buyers Don’t Care What Their Lead Score Is.” He goes on to say that,

At the risk of being facetious, let me tell you, a buyer is not worried if they took the right number of actions on your site, or if they fit an exact profile you have developed.  They don’t need a scorecard to help them chart their buying journey. When their ready to buy, they’ll let you know. They won’t rely on their assigned score.

So, a lead may visit your website and download every white paper available only to be surprised that you interpreted this as a buying signal (it happens). But, why shouldn’t you? That lead just racked up 300 points in your system and has a high lead score. Because, that lead score does a poor job of reflecting the prospect’s interest and intent.

To benefit from automated lead scoring, you need to take an active approach to qualifying each lead:

• Customize your lead scoring system – With the right rules in place, you can keep a lead from running up its score just by downloading every white paper, ebook, etc. Place more emphasis on the actions that fit an ideal lead – for example, searching for pricing or requesting a demo. You can also have automatic triggers for events that have a high correlation to sales-readiness, like assigning a high score value to a “Product Test Drive” and automatically alerting a sales rep when someone requests this asset.
• View the actions taken - Your marketing automation system should not only list the lead’s score, but also how that score was achieved. Two leads with similar scores may have completely different levels of interest in your product or service. Assign the prospect that has shown high levels of intent.

Comparing two lead records that show intent (left) vs. interest (right)

There’s no generally accepted “good lead score” because lead scoring is unique to the company and the lead. Many companies won’t find success in marketing automation by assigning every lead that has reached a score threshold, but they will find that lead scoring provides great insight into the quality of the lead and results in better engagement.