online marketing

If you’ve been following my series on creating a successful lead strategy, you might remember that last time I talked about knowing when, and how often, to call potential customers. Today, we’ll look at a long-term strategy to help you map out the best way to stay in touch with leads after you’ve had a few first touches with them:

Deciding when, and how often, to contact leads can be enough to turn a marketer’s hair gray. All too often, deciding on a strategy can seem random. You ask: When should I call?  Will I ever actually reach a real person?  How often should I try?  This type of calling strategy is usually deployed when a conversation needs to take place to articulate the value proposition and close the sale (obviously – as opposed to ecommerce).

As I’ve talked about in recent posts, a successful lead nurturing strategy improves the number and quality of the leads you can generate — for a significant increase in revenue.

A couple of days ago at the Mediapost OMMA Behavioral Insider event, I presented to the audience about what should be the best friend of behavioral targeting networks: site optimization and site targeting.

So far in my nascent Online Ad Business 101 series, I've covered the overall advertising value chain, and looked at a superficial level at how an ad 'call' is actually handled. This installment brings together themes from those two first posts, by taking a look at ad networks.

In my last post I talked about lead nurturing strategies, and how to put one into place for your company. I outline five key elements.  Communications should be:

• personalized
• relevant
• well-timed
• thorough
• automated

Automated emails are one of the first, and one of the easiest, areas of communication to implement.

A recent conversation with a friend I have had since second grade, Joel who now lives in Minneapolis, illuminated the fact that segmenting and targeting on web sites is not the sole domain of big business.   The idea that you must be a big company with many product lines for targeting to be applicable and valuable is simply not accurate, and it came out clearly in our conversations about his business.

As Marketers, we often get busy with the mechanics of marketing and forget some of the fundamentals of keyword bidding.  Here’s a quick checklist to make sure your bids are optimized.

•    Search Engine Suggestions

Search engines offer suggestions on where to set your bids, based on the landscape
and historical search traffic.  They will tell you to set your bid at “X” to get “Y” results.  Going with those suggestions is a good starting place.

•    Relative Position Targeting

By learning to successfully nurture interested prospects that haven’t yet committed to buy, both B2B and B2C companies can increase campaign response rates, maximize lead conversion rates and increase the number of closed sales for a significant improvement in revenue.

I’ve been on the road quite a bit over the past two months speaking at NetFinance, eMetrics Summit, and the ExactTarget “Route 1 to 1” seminar series.  And one thing I’ve noticed is the difference in conversations surrounding the topic of On-site targeting, compared to a year ago.