Forget Conventional Marketing - Embrace the Web!
by Lee Traupel
Tactical marketing processes are once again undergoing
fundamental shifts from conventional to web-based processes.
Many traditional marketing firms/agencies are still touting the
tried and true to their clients; i.e. Tradeshow attendance,
Print, Traditional PR, TV and Radio. However, these conventional
marketing processes work best for broad market awareness and/or
branding, especially for a Fortune 1K company with significant
resources to spend on demographic analysis, test marketing and
more test marketing. It's much more difficult for a smaller
company (startup to $50M per annum) to leverage the economies of
scale that are typically available for a larger company for the
media buy and operational efficiencies.
It's obvious that lifestyle and business processes are shifting
towards a much greater dependence on digital media - people are
traveling less due to cost issues and the ever-increasing speed
of business is underscoring the usage of the Internet for
information and research. If you're a small to medium sized
business the chances are that you've probably cut your marketing
budget significantly - by eliminating or scaling back tradeshow
attendance, trade magazine advertising and/or direct mail in
favor of response driven marketing on the web that can be
deployed faster and more cost-effectively than traditional
marketing methods.
Capturing leads from a web site generated by opt-in e-mail,
newsletter inserts, text link advertising and/or other forms
of pay per click marketing is still the absolute best way to
generate leads that are quantifiable as soon as they are
generated. You have the ability to easily track where the lead
came from and via what interactive advertising process; assuming
this has been setup for you by your interactive ad agency or with
the online publisher. And, there are typically no lead times like
more traditional marketing processes - we've created and deployed
campaigns (creative, media buy, testing, ROI analysis, etc.) for
our clients in 3-5 working days in some cases.
There are some pitfalls to web-based lead generation and follow
through that you need to be aware of as you deploy an interactive
campaign. Here are five of the most important "gotchas" that you
need to think about as you build an interactive lead generation
program around your web site:
1) Don't make it difficult for people to contact your company -
make sure your web site really communicates with your prospects
- by "communicating" I mean by providing telephone contacts,
e-mail address and/or a lead capture form that is short. Note:
this form has to be supported by a published Privacy Policy
("we won't divulge your info to a third party under any
circumstances") and it absolutely must be short; i.e. don't
request any more than baseline information, name, phone, e-mail
and address, augmented with a comment box.
2) Your marketing objectives have to be supported by your sales
team - the sales team has to be incentivized to respond to
inbound e-mails and requests for information via a contact form
in a timely manner, within 24 hours or sooner. If you have a
geographically dispersed sales team then make this clear on the
web site by providing specific contact points for states, regions
and countries.
3) Make sure you IT person/department attends your marketing
planning meetings with your sales team - your web site will need
some type of a lead capture setup that redistributes leads based
on function and/or geographical responsibility. Your IT staff
has to create a database solution that captures, stores and
distributes leads - this does not need to be done in-house.
Products like Act (the market leader in contact management
software) are now web-enabled. You can capture leads via a web
server and share leads with others via a browser and very
inexpensively.
4) We don't advocate popup advertising for most of our client's
advertising campaigns. But, we have "crossed over to the other
side" and we do (highly) recommend using popups on our clients'
web sites to present opportunities that in turn capture leads.
Studies have shown effective popup lead captures increase lead
generation by 40-85% depending on the market segment. Popups can
be set so they only launch on a frequency basis per session
(visit to a web site) or a number of times for a specific
visitor - they don't have to be setup so they are intrusive and
annoying.
5) Last but not least (drum roll) - make the customer's usability
experience the most important aspect of your web site. Create a
user interface ("experience") that is pleasant for your visitors;
i.e. use standard universal (top of page and local page left)
menus, utilize 2-3 sentence paragraphs with lots of white space,
don't overload your pages with graphics that slow down load times
and make sure your contact points (phone, e-mail) are readily
available from every page.
So, to summarize; advertising is shifting from traditional to
web-based or interactive if you will - so, to get on board this
tsunami build a web site that communicates with your
prospects/customers, provide contact points via telephone and
e-mail via the site, involve your IT and Sales staff with the
lead capture process so they are all stakeholders and utilize
popups to accelerate your lead capturing.
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Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience - he is
the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc.
http://www.intelective.com, a marketing services company which
provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively
to small to medium sized companies. Lee@intelective.com
Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications - this
article may be reprinted freely, provided this attribution box
remains intact. (c) 2001-2002 by Intelective Communications, Inc.
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