A Download is Not a Lead
A form completed to receive a white paper is a positive signal from a potential prospect. But it’s not a lead. A lead is not a name. A lead is a person with a need that has the potential to be met by you, specifically your B2B product or service. This person has been engaged, qualified, and nurtured through a series of personalized communications—live calls, voicemails, non-automated emails. Until that’s happened, all you have is a name—hopefully targeted, but just a name nonetheless.
Recently I was pointed to a blog I wrote some time ago commenting on a book by marketing interactions expert Ardath Albee. Digital Relevance: Developing Marketing Content and Strategies that Drive Results is as accurate and valuable today as when it was written several years ago.
The following is excerpted from my blog:
“In the book, Ardath explains that one of the main reasons she wrote Digital Relevance was for marketers and corporate communication professionals facing the challenges of today’s “shrinking attention spans and the increasing noise and velocity of content publishing.”
She points out that “downloading content does not mean the prospect is ready to buy.” Here are some bullet points to whet your appetite for the meaty content in this comprehensive 256-page book:
Value is not about what you do but what the customer gets.
Campaigns fail. Fragmented digital experiences don’t work. There should be no start or stop—marketing should create a continuum experience. A never-ending story.
There is far too little reinvention or repurposing of content. Some common mistakes: using the same piece over and over; saying the same thing that everyone else is saying; using self-serving calls to action such as, “Schedule a demo today!”; under-utilizing social media by multiple uses of a link and title without value and/or context.
Engagement is curiosity driven by content—there must be a shift from irrelevant communication to radically relevant conversation.
Years later and the same mistakes are being made daily. I get calls and emails every hour that are a total waste of time—I am not buying what they are selling, and a quick scan of my LinkedIn page would tell them that. Yet, the madness continues.
Strategies That Drive Results
Early in the book Ardath notes that while she sees “decent” content out there, often there’s no strategic plan for orchestrating engagement with prospects and customers. She goes on to say that with revenue accountability increasing every day, marketers are “unsure they can prove what they do matters. Yet it does matter.” Here’s a summary of strategies that drive results, as Ardath notes:
Shift from one-off communication to a continuum approach. Look beyond the campaign and unrelated transactions with potential buyers and move to an approach that builds a story positioning your company as the perfect expert that buyers need to achieve their goals.
Depending on the level of attention prospects give to digital dialogue, marketers can gauge where prospects are in the buying process. Cursory attention indicates curiosity but no interest. Misleading attention shows that a prospect is interested, but not ready to buy. In voluntary attention, prospects subscribe to nearly everything you publish but stop short in the buying process. Finally, there’s intentional attention. At this level, prospects “are intent on learning what they need to know to make a purchase decision.”
Unfortunately, marketers respond by offering a one-size fits all solution that leads to big mistakes. What prospects end up with are no relevant calls to action, too much perceived effort to respond, and gaps in the story. Instead of owning an “expertise position,” these marketers sound like every one of their competitors. Their message is often “too high” because they don’t target specific audiences by persona and attention hierarchy.
Buyers can be visual, auditory, and/or kinesthetic. As such, you (as a marketer) must provide content that offers the buyer information in a form that is comfortable for them to absorb.
It is important to get in early. Keep the competition from “anchoring the buyer’s thinking.”
Finally, when content and the strategy are completed, provide sales with “Cliffs Notes.” Sales people don’t have time to absorb extensive detail about the marketing plans, but they must be provided with a high-level view to keep them in the loop.
When I reached out to Ardath to ask for her current thinking on her book’s subject matter, she responded:
“Hi Dan, it’s kind of scary to read that post from so long ago. Feels like it could be today. I just wrapped up a 3-month series of workshops for a client's global marketing team teaching the same things in the book. A few things have evolved but not many.
And I just got a message from one of the students who shared several AHA moments she had like the points in your blog post.
It's gratifying and frustrating that marketers are still stuck on this stuff. Said as I'm outlining my next book. Ha!
Even worse that as buyers become more self-reliant, the things in the book become that much more important if we're going to connect with them and add value.
The problem is that companies are driven by campaigns that are not in alignment with the buyers’ tempo and timing. There is a great example in the book about an inside sales rep pushing content that is not relevant to the buyer—simply because the campaign says so. The buyer gets lost and goes somewhere else.”
Ardath also makes the point that “buyers are looking for an emotional connection with a vendor”—one that makes them say, “They just seem to get us.” The vendor that makes them feel most comfortable and seems to understand the buyer wins the business.
Except for the sale of transactional, commodity products or services, there is no place for using tactics such as the oxymoron personalization at scale, retargeting, surge and intent data and/or IP based ads.