A new "paradigm" for marketing & demand creation

A marketing campaign needs to be holistic in its approach and scope.

Traditionally, companies have been indulging in marketing campaigns that involve an inside sales team cold calling potential leads by using lists or names/numbers collected at road shows or events in which they participate. Some also use outsourced sales teams to do the cold calls and after some qualification setup appointments from a potential list.

Research shows that the conversion rates by these methods are probably 1:50 or 1:60 per conversion to prospect. The odds are more scattered in the case of technology based services businesses where they have no core product or technology to sell. Yes, technology partnerships help but the odds are trending against it in the current economic climate.

Amidst such a trend, a new marketing philosophy is emerging especially among technology and services intensive companies.This trend involves leveraging ones website, content, social media and other marketing tools like email, webinars, blogs etc.

The idea is to develop a holistic marketing methodology which encompasses three components -

Get found, Convert, Analyze and then pursue prospects in a way that maximizes the conversion of prospect to a paid (one time) project or retainer.

Getting found

This component would involve creating an Internet based market presence through:

• Creation of website with content using keywords (SEO optimized) relevant to the service/technology being pitched.

• Creation of landing pages with offers and calls to action

• Creation of SEO program & associated PPC Campaign management (if needed)

• Creation of blogging infrastructure by key players detailing company's accomplishments (completed projects), technology trends and industry specific pain-points that have been solved

• Provisioning the blog content to be either peer commented, shared (via social media) or tweeted (via twitter)

Convert

This component would involve creating a lead nurturing program based on:

• Putting together tools to capture potential leads information from phase 1
• Developing a robust lead segmentation strategy and
• Implementing a call to action program via email campaign or targeted marketing of how you add value to engage & qualify the lead further
  

Analyze

This component would include setting up a lead management & monitoring program:

• Implement tools/metrics to analyze the leads developed through phase 2 (convert)
• Analyze the specific leads and develop a targeted campaign for each qualified lead to conversion.
• Setup and use market analytic s to study customer conversion trends and further fine tune targeting/messaging as per target vertical.
• Creation of various dashboards/reports targeted for specific audience (at various levels) within the organization

This three phased approach if implemented correctly will lead to a significant justification of the marketing ROI and impact on current revenue of the company.

Based on my observation, some specific revenue impacting activities that can be done immediately in your case would be the following:

1. Developing landing pages for the services offered in the various verticals you operate
2. Developing some content & blogs that use the above keywords so they come up in the search more often and highlight capabilities of the company - Content should consist of case studies with customer pain-points (you solved), solutions and technologies used in developing these solutions
3. Make your website more active by consistent blogging by the project leads/lead architects on the various current projects.
4. Design the blog site with the effective usage of sidebars, post (article area) and comments/responses - Ex. This would enable company effectively engage the curious as well as the informed customer.
5. Develop whitepapers, solution briefs that can be used as "give-away" as part of the offers.
6. Put some real customer testimonials be it text or videos (like things partners & customers want to say about us)
7. Place a link for customer information collecting page or sidebar with offer
8. Place an insert of some customer logos (in a ticker tape format), similar to business affiliates
   

Some of these activities will directly enable you to build the basics for developing component 1 further and enable components 2 and 3 to follow as we implement various parts of a "demand creation" solution.