Testing for your lead generation engine

education, lead generation, Marketing, single target market, Testing

One of the best assets for your long term business, is getting a person’s email id. Once you have that you can keep educating them, to someday come to test your products or services.

However as time has passed, people have become more and more reluctant to give away their email. So while sending emails is cheap, the costly part is that people have become “blind” to emails being thrown at them. In that manner, email marketing has become more expensive because it’s lost its ability to immediately get you attention.

Which means people have become resistant to the idea of giving away their emails. So until you have isolated your audience very clearly – the single target market – and created something which that specific audience desires, you won’t get people wanting it. And if people don’t want it, they won’t give their email ids.

So understanding the conversation which could go on in the mind of your prospect, due to which she may want to look at what you are talking about, becomes critical. And you can only get this by testing. While I have written so many blog posts on this topic, at the end of the day, until I test and see a response, I am not sure if what I have built will generate leads ( or get email ids) Sometimes what I think the customer may be looking at bombs completely. This is primarily because marketing is 50% psychology and you cannot always get the psychology of your audience right the first time.

Once something starts generating results, then you can go out and and invest your complete budget into the campaign, to get the emails, but till then, test with limited exposure and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Till next time then….keep testing.

Carpe Diem!!!

Simple steps to Creating continuous content for the B2B market

content, education, Marketing, messaging

One big question that I hear a lot of times, how do I create a regular messaging / content calendar; I don’t have enough content.

So this will be a very short post with a simple set of tactics to cover roughly half the year. If you don’t come across anything else during those 6 months which can be created into content, within the 6 months, then you can recycle this. Or I will give some other ideas also….read on.

I learnt this technique from Dean Jackson while taking one of his courses and listening to his podcast on ilovemarketing.com.

The assumption over here is that you know your market well, since you’re focusing on a Single Target Market at a time.

If you know your market well then you will know the typical questions that go on in the mind of the customer, their apprehensions and their aspirations. List down 20 of these questions. Make a response about what’s the best way to handle those questions as they relate to your offerings. Send out out one of these every week. You would then have a calendar decided for 20 weeks.

Then create 6 posts, where you analyse the 20 questions, customer feedbacks, comments etc. This way you would have created a calendar for the complete 6 months.

If after 6 months you don’t have content, then as I said earlier, you can recycle the same content or you could ask your some of your customers about what are the pet peeves that they have with your industry. If you have 10-12 customers and each of them has at least 2 unique issues with your industry , you have created roughly another 24-26 weeks of content, by taking their point of view and also giving suggestions to improve.

Your customers can give you all pointers to the content you will need , if you ask.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Practical and Theory

education, experiences, ideas, Learning

You can’t experience heaven without dying yourself….this is something which my father used to say, when emphasising the importance of actually “doing & practicing” versus “learning by reading/ listening to podcasts/ viewing videos”. Its like what Mike Tyson used to say – everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face…..when that happens, its what you have practiced practically that keeps you in the ring.

I am a big propagator of the idea of lifelong learning. I have been an avid reader of books, I listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of videos. Most of the people I read or follow have very interesting content. I used to find it very intellectually very stimulating. But it would all get lost in the daily humdrum.

But the items which I would practice would stay with me for a long time. As Joe Polish says there are three ways to learn – the first is to learn yourself, the second and better way is to Practice what you learn and the third and best way is to Teach from the experiences of what you practiced.

All the authors can write or talk about the ideas and challenges that they encountered. Consultants can give you ideas based on the interactions they have with multiple clients after synthesising them. Each has its value, because you can at least avoid the known “snakes in the grass”. But its only the practitioner who can give his/her experience with the “doing”.

As an example, some consultant or podcast may tell you, Facebook advertising is cheap and you can target on an amazing amount of niches because Facebook collects a lot of data of its users and preferences. But you want to say target, “start-up” entrepreneurs. When you actually go through all the filters, that Facebook provides for advertisers, you don’t find a way to target start-up entrepreneurs. This situation has actually happened with me a lot of times, when I have tried to implement some thing that I have read or heard.

Its not that the consultant is wrong, its just that they have not actually worked in your specific situation. Your learning comes out of applying the things you read and hear and then adapt it to your situation. Then the thing stays with you.

That’s why I keep prodding all of you who read my blog to give me feedback on how you applied what I shared in the posts and if it did help or where it didn’t help.

Look forward to hearing your feedback.

Carpe Diem!!!

Messaging – how much is excess

B2B, education, education, follow-up, Marketing, messaging

“Won’t my prospect get irritated with me and unsubscribe” – this is one of the most common statements I hear when I tell people, that they should have a regular communication with their prospects and customers.

All your prospects and customers are in a state of a “moving parade”. So things keep changing for people all the time. And you don’t know when they may need what you sell. But when they need you, they should remember you first.

Now there will be somethings which are impulse purchases like a bottle of wine. Or small value items like a can of an aerated drink. Since the volume of transactions can be very high because of the spread of the decision making, you want to message more often. That’s the reason you see a Coke getting advertised multiple times a day. In the consumer space, you travel- international , less often, so you see airlines advertising less often.

In case of B2B, which is generally high value and less impulsive, you don’t advertise/message multiple times a day. But having said that, you need to keep messaging frequently – I generally recommend once a week. If not, at least twice a month. Anything less than this and chances are that you will float into oblivion.

The key in B2B is more about providing value. Finding ways to inform the customer, something new about what you offer – a new application, a new industry, a faster method, training for their employees. If you have segmented your market well, then you would typically know the kind of challenges that could take place, so providing education, value would be simpler. There can be a plethora of ways you can orient messages and multiple ways to get them delivered. Sometimes email, sometimes post cards, sometimes webinars.

If you keep adding value, then customers / prospects generally don’t mind receiving your mails and in a lot of cases may look forward to them. If some do unsubscribe, even after you are providing value / education, then its a good sign – because that person anyway would not have done business with you.

So don’t think in terms of excess, think in terms of value.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!