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!!!

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!!!

A spectrum of people to be targeted

lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Once you have chosen a Single Target Market to focus on, you need to find ways of addressing that market.

In any market there will be a spectrum of customers- At one end you will have people who are reactive, they are in pain and they need a solution now. At the other end of the spectrum you will have people who are progressive and proactive and want to take measures before a problem occurs. And in between are people at various degrees between getting into pain and getting to become progressive after observing something.

Generally its a good idea to target the people who are in pain first, because they can give an order immediately. Immediately is a relative term – depending on the sales cycle of what you are selling. If you were caught in a hurricane or cyclone and your roof has blown away, then you need to get the roof fixed immediately as in yesterday. On the other hand if you are in B2B , immediately could mean a roll out in 3 months.

But how do you identify someone who is in pain in your market. Most people who want an instantaneous answer would always search on Google. So if you can advertise on Google with the exact same terms that the customer would think when in pain, then they could come on top of Google search and get business.

As I had in my post yesterday however, you have got someone to raise their hand by clicking on the link but if you don’t capture their email address, that advertisement will go waste the person visits your website without giving their email. You need to figure out a way to address this.

Similarly for the other end of the spectrum – the progressive or proactive folks. They will also go on Google or in case of B2B, they will ask their subordinates to find out things. Those subordinates will also first go to Google. So what will they those folks think when they have to do some thing proactive in their category. Again put out the paid advertisements with respect to that.

But first focus on the people in pain, because you can get business faster. Once you delight the customer, then you can do even more business with referrals and other things.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!