Lead Management and Nurturing

Hello and welcome to\nI am...\nTwitter...\n\nWe spend a tone of time talking about how to build a site that attracts, informs, and engages, primarily through the use of a robust content strategy. Today I want to talk about what comes next--what do you do when your site actually starts working? \n

This webinar will consist of...\n\n..will take about 25 minutes or so, and will be followed by Q&A\n\n

Overused term, used to describe anyone from the lady that&#x2019;s about to hire you to the guy who has no idea you exist but might someday be a customer. \n\nA lead is a person who is aware of, has a need for, and is interested in your services. \n\nLeads aren&#x2019;t the only people we care about as marketers, though. We need to be aware of and cater to four different types of potential customers\n

\nprospects: people who may one day hire you but aren&#x2019;t currently aware of you or considering working with your firm\ncontacts: people who are aware of you and who we are actively marketing to, but who have not yet expressed interest in working with you\nleads:A lead is a person who is aware of, has a need for, and is interested in your services. \nopportunities: clearly defined projects, with assigned scope and schedule, which will be closing in the immediate future\n

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say you might, at any given time have two opportunities\nopportunities are clearly defined projects, with assigned scope and schedule, which will be closing in the immediate future. \n\nin order to have those....\n

we might need 10 leads\nA lead is a person who is aware of, has a need for, and is interested in your services. \n\nin order to have 10\n

1,000 contacts\n\npeople who are aware of us and who we are actively marketing to, but who have not yet expressed interest in working with us\n

if you&#x2019;re well positioned, you might have as many as 10,000 prospects, or, people who may one day hire you but aren&#x2019;t currently aware of you or considering working with your firm. \n\nNow that we&#x2019;ve looked at the different lead stages, let&#x2019;s check out\n\n

Now that we&#x2019;ve defined the different stages of a lead, let&#x2019;s look at the... \ndoing this.\n

First, you need to be well-positioned. If you&#x2019;re not , you&#x2019;ll be saying the same thing as everyone else and you won&#x2019;t have much luck with marketing of any sort, let alone this kind of marketing. Recourses.\n

Once you have something to say, you&#x2019;ll need a platform on which to say it. The second ingredient is to have a website that serves as the foundation of your marketing program. This site needs to excel at bringing in the right prospects through search engines, documenting your firm&#x2019;s expertise through a thorough content strategy and graduating prospects to contacts through clear, concise, and compelling calls to action. The site has a lot to do. \n\n

You&#x2019;ll of course need a CMS powering your site which will allow you to easily add and edit content, frame it properly for SEO, and track what your converted visitors are doing on the site.\n

Once you&#x2019;re writing about your focused expertise in detail on your site, you&#x2019;ll want to make sure you&#x2019;re properly optimizing the content for search engines. \n\n

After people convert on your site, you&#x2019;ll need a tool like campaign monitor to send out email blasts to them. \n\n

If you&#x2019;re going to make webinars part of your content strategy, you&#x2019;ll need gotowebinar to host and manage them.\n

You&#x2019;ll want to be sure that your site is integrated with a CRM, like SalesForce, so that when prospects do convert on your site, their history is logged in the CRM so that you can review it once they do become a lead. The CRM will also allow you to carefully track their lead status and your activity as you transition them from a lead to a client.\n

Speaking of transitioning, you&#x2019;ll need to have a system for closing viable leads once they do surface. Blair Enns WWP is the best method we know of for doing this.\n

Now, let&#x2019;s follow a person, Michael Ryan, through his journey from being wholly unaware prospect to being a client. Michael Ryan may or may not be a real person, and his name may or may not sound much like someone else&#x2019;s name you know. \n

The begging of our journey finds Mr. Ryan adrift in the world, knowing he needs web development help for his agency, but having no idea that a company, like Newfangled, exists....until, one day...he goes to Google\n

and searches for...\n

at which point he finds many results. as we all do, he starts clicking\n

While paying $500 to be #1 in every search sounds tempting, Michael somehow feels this might be too good to be true, and as we all do when we click a link from google that doesn&#x2019;t immediately engage us, he goes back to the SERP\n

at which point he finds \n

newfangled\n\ntimeline--key moment\n

from the home page he clicks the callout to a newsletter\n

and then uses the related content widget in the sidebar to find a realted blog post that sounds interesting\n

and then, as so many of our visitors do, he checks out the bio page\n

pricing page\n

a case study\n

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and then heads back to our latest newsletter. Finally, after checking out a number of pages, he realizes that the content on our site really could help him learn more about his original search term &#x201C;conversion-focused websites,&#x201D; so he decides to take the 3 seconds necessary to fill out one of the clear, concise, and compelling calls to action we have on every single page of our site. \n

At which point, Michael graduates himself from a miscellaneous prospect to a bona-fide\n

contact. Michael is now in our system. As soon as he submitted that form he set off a number of events:\n\n

\nSF\nCM\nEmail\nCMS\n\nThe difference between being an anonymous prospect and a contact is huge. It is the biggest change Michael will go through, until he actually becomes a customer. Now, we&#x2019;re in the driver&#x2019;s seat. Michael has told us who he is, and asked us to market to him through our educational content strategy. This is just where we want him. If he is a viable prospect, the chances of him hiring us one day have just dramatically increased.\n

So now, Michael gets our monthly Newsletters, and also gets our quarterly webinar announcements, as all of our contacts do. at this point he has received a few newsletter announcements from us, but has not yet been back to our site since he registered a few months ago. This webinar looks intriguing to him, though...he can&#x2019;t resist\n

he checks out the details\n

he registers!!!!! ...and he looks forward to the webinar that&#x2019;s coming up in a few days\n

but, as it turns out, he wasn&#x2019;t looking forward to it as much as the baseball game he recorded on his DVR the night before. Alas, he misses the webinar. but all is not lost!\ntell the story....\n

and, as it turns out, Michael was already planning on attending the event at which we were speaking later that month. he attends our session, and since the material is in line with the quality of material on our site, it further bolsters his opinion of us.\n

a few months after the event, Michael realizes he&#x2019;s got a need to hire a web development firm. He&#x2019;s been marketed to by tons of them over the past 10 years, but we&#x2019;re top of mind because he&#x2019;s been subscribing to our newsletter for the past four months, he registered for that webinar he thought sounded interesting even though he didn&#x2019;t attend it, and he saw us speak at a conference. We&#x2019;re in the drivers seat even though, at this point, we have never once spoken with Michael. So, heads back to our site, for the third time in the past 4 months\n

and fills out one of our contact forms, at which point, finally, Michael becomes\n

an actual lead.....\n

at which point he is of course all but closed as a client.\nThere are few reasons for this...one, he has already recognized us as industry experts, this has been validated through Google who originally referred him to us, it has been validated through our site which demonstrates our expertise in great detail through our content strategy, and it has been validated through other industry moguls he respects because he saw us speak at their event.\nwe also know he can afford us, because he&#x2019;s well aware of our pricing having been to that page a few times over the past few months.\nfinally, he is defenseless because we employ Blair Enns&#x2019; Win Without Pitching methodology. \n\nSo now, I want to move away from the slides and actually take you through exactly what happens on my side of the contact form. We&#x2019;re going to look at how I receive the form, and what steps I take \n

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Lead Management and Nurturing

Mark O'Brien

Lead Management and Nurturing