Testing for your lead generation engine – 4

B2B, campaign, Marketing, media, medium, single target market

In the last post couple of days back, I had shared how I had created advertising for YouTube for the video production company that I aim advising. Today I worked on adding one more medium- Linkedin.

Since we are B2B focused in this business, Linkedin is a good medium to directly target the kind of businesses we want. The segregation and segmentation possibilities are also good. The challenge that I have observed with Linkedin is that unlike Google, YouTube, they charge a considerably high price even for putting the impressions in front of your audience.

On the other hand, since you have the ability to tightly control the market to whom your advertisement is shown, you can manage the costs involved.

I would also like to put a caveat here. You should not look at the cost of a lead as the primary cost. This can be very misleading. You may get a lot of clicks at very low cost to come to your website. But if they didn’t stay on your page and give you their email id, then they are of no use. Getting this low cost traffic has no significance. On the other hand, getting more expensive traffic, which is closest to your single target market can help because they may resonate with your content and share their email id. This is what you are looking for. Once you have someone’s email id, you can nurture the leads over a period of time.

If you have the capability, you should go one step further and monitor from which source, which email id was obtained and then when you get an order you can track back to the medium which was used. This will actually showcase which is the most effective medium for you.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing for your lead generation engine -3

campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media, Testing

In this sequence of blog posts, I am actually taking you step by step through a real life campaign showing the testing I am doing, the failures and successes , as they happen.

In life in general and in marketing in particular “one” is a dangerous term. Some of you who follow my blog regularly will point at the contradiction. I am also the one who says focus. So to all those people who got this thought in your mind, I will still say FOCUS on one thing at a time, but never be too dependent on any one thing.

Having only one sales person, only one medium, only one partner are all situations which can lead to disaster.

So today I started working on creating the lead magnet using a different medium. Since I focus on B2B, my typical mediums are Google, LinkedIn and YouTube for posting advertisements. I have not yet understood the Facebook mechanism, so I don’t experiment with it when I am advising someone.

So today I have helped create the advertisement to be put on YouTube. We will test it against the revised ads we had put on Google yesterday to see which medium is performing better. Will keep you posted on this as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing for your lead generation engine – 2

campaign, constraints, lead generation, Marketing, single target market, Testing

Yesterday I wrote about why testing is important for me, inspite of having worked on this for so many years. One is the theoretical part and I shared that yesterday. Next is the practical part and why I insist on testing.

I was advising someone, who does video production, for how their Google Adwords should look, the kind of phrases they should have etc. I had also advised them on the audience they need to cater to and the kind of headlines and lead magnet they need to look at.

After launching the advertisement, there were no clicks, no one was clicking on their ads and giving their emails. As usual, my first target to deduce was the market, so I got them to check for the market they were targeting, checked if they had the single target market defined clearly. Then added a couple of geographies, just in case the market we initially identified was too small, still no response.

Then we changed the keyword phrases of when the advertisement should show up. Still no response.

Till now I was giving them ideas from a distance and they were executing. I understand I can make errors, but not getting any response is extremely low for my ego. So today I actually sat down with them to understand when the advertisement gets shown, how does it look. That’s when I started seeing a horror movie.

The way the ads were getting shown because of the limits on the headlines and content lines, the whole advertisement was gibberish. It was not making sense. No wonder, no one was responding. The medium has its constraints and you have to live with it. But if you know the constraints, then you can always find ways to solve.

Luckily we were playing at a low scale to test for the lead generation and hence the impact was not very high. Testing at a small scale to figure out the “gotchas” is a God send. Even with the best of intentions and capabilities, its absolutely critical in marketing to test every element of your campaign.

Now we are getting a new set of ads getting launched. I will keep you posted on how the new things progress and the impact the changes had on the campaign.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

A day of marketing challenges

campaign, Marketing, single target market

Today was a very dense day in terms of doing some massive amount of brainwork. Generally my day is full of a lot of transactions which eat up my brain power. Today however was majorly about thinking through a couple of market related problems.

In one situation we had to sit down and physically analyse the database, because there was no response from the database to a campaign we sent. In any campaign, if there’s a problem with the response, then the first thing I like to look at is the database. So after testing multiple messaging when we didn’t get a response, we had to sit down to figure out the challenges with the database. So we went down the list of companies with a comb to figure out what could be the challenge. This was pretty time consuming as well as mentally exhausting.

In the second case, it is still work in progress, I had to analyse on figuring out a single target market for one of the service areas that we deal in. Figuring out a single target market is time consuming because you have to start with the whole market and then keep stripping down. However in this process, you don’t want to miss out on any portion of the market to analyse. So you try to analyse the market from the attributes perspective first, then usage perspective, to ensure that you are not missing out on a lucrative market.

After that you have to see if the market has a decent size for you to operate in. While you have niched down to such a specific market that has only say 100 participants, then the chance of you being able to convert a substantial number is limited. Having said that, this quantity is a relative thing. If you are selling airplanes like a Boeing or Airbus, in any country you may not have more than a handful of airlines. But because the ticket size is so huge that even those handful is a big market.

I shared how in a typical day we analyse the marketing issues. I will look forward to your comments on how you analyse marketing related problems.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!