Recently, I’ve seen much more talk about lead follow-up than lead generation. Where have y’all been??? For years I’ve been shocked at the fact that marketers have concerned themselves with generating leads yet couldn’t care less about where the leads go. What a waste of money and time! Most marketers admit that once the lead is generated, it goes into the black hole called their CRM system, never to be seen again.

Now I am aware of the centuries old feud between sales and marketing. The ol’ blame game. This doesn’t have to be. There can be peace and in fact, the relationship can improve immensely with just one small shift. Marketers, care about your leads and stop blaming the sales team. You worked hard to get those prospects interested in the product or service you provide. Why would you just throw them away?

Let’s take the webinar. You planned the topic, found a presenter, created the message, collaborated on the deck. You may have rented one list or more, partnered with an analyst or a publication (or both), advertised, contacted your in-house database, etc. You’ve received a phenomenal response rate knowing that 50% or so will attend. This has taken weeks if not months. The day arrives, you get a great turnout and several interested parties. Then you do the final step in the process, you dump the leads into your CRM system. Shhh… can you hear it? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. A bottomless pit.

There are several actions that are critical to your business that you must take once you have delivered a webinar, or all of your lead generation efforts are for naught. Remember, the attendees to your webinar have already expressed interest in your product or service. Not only have they opened your email or responded to a banner/text ad, but they have clicked through, signed up, AND attended. I’ve outlined 3 critical actions that must be taken in order to achieve a successful campaign, justify your ROI and ensure that you will get budget next year, quarter or the next round of reviews.

1)      For those who attended the webinar and asked questions, deliver these names directly to your sales force with the questions asked and the answers provided if any. These prospects should be responded to immediately, the same day, while the information is top of mind. Send an email and copy the sales team ASAP.

2)      For those who attended, a thank you email should be sent out immediately with a link to the archived recording AND a PDF of the slide deck so that they can forward this and/or use it to speak about your solution to others, perhaps the decision makers who have asked them to research your product or service. This prospect should also be contacted within 24 hours by your sales team as this prospect is ‘hot’.

3)      For those prospects who registered and didn’t attend: Send them a thank you email immediately following the webinar with a link to the archived event. You should also add these names to your ‘house list’ and use them for further marketing efforts as they were interested enough to register yet for some reason couldn’t attend. I recommend that your sales team follow up with these folks within 72 hours and remind them that the event is archived and invite them to view it. Don’t just take my word for it, check out this report that by the Artemis Group and Knowledgestorm (now TechTarget), The Fine Art of Lead Management and Follow-Up: What Research Shows About Lead Qualification and Nurturing, where they discuss why immediate personal contact is critical to closing leads.

Imagine this: You are selling a car. You meet the prospect on the lot and talk to them for an hour about all of the features of the car, and even take them for a test drive. They love the car and are ready to talk to you about the terms and write you a check. Then you walk away and leave them standing in the lot while you go and talk to someone else who has just arrived on the lot. Would you do this? No you wouldn’t. It’s crazy, isn’t it? But you are doing this if you don’t follow up on your leads. Now you might say, “But I’m not a salesperson. This is not my responsibility.” Websters Dictionary defines marketing as:

1)      the act of buying or selling in a market

2)      the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling

It IS your responsibility. If you are spending the money, building the strategy, and staging the execution of these programs…it is your responsibility. You are selling the product, as a marketer it is your job. Follow up with your prospects. Work closely with the sales team, folks, it is critical for your business. Not only with you see sales improve but your marketing ROI will increase and you will guarantee that budget for another round! Whew!

Ok, so you want to start selling advertising on your site or you have dabbled into the networks like Rightmedia, Adsence and Advertising.com, but that is not enough as you are seeing your competitors displaying dynamic creative and known advertisers. And you are thinking, “What do they have that we don’t to attract the big advertisers with cool creatives?”, but you do not know where to start. Well, this is the time where you can either turn your site into money maker or just a branding tool which shows limited redirected advertisements. Relax, it is not as hard as you might believe, as this process is best started with a Media Kit. A Media Kit is a tool that is used by advertisers and agencies to learn about your site, what is can offer in the way of ad types, sizes, limitations and possible cost tables. By this, the Media Planner (ad buyer) can easily view your site like a preverbal Menu with everything laid out for them to decide if they want to pitch you to their advertiser or their boss (usually a Media Director). With a Media Kit, you can briefly and cleanly put your site out there to the world that it is not only a great site, but a vital one if an advertiser want to get at the users who frequent your site. Media Kits usually come in two versions or a hybrid of both which are a Downloadable or a web based Media Kit :

Downloadable Media Kit: The downloadable media kit is usually in a word or PDF format and is a time tested tool which is usually emailed or placed online through a link. The Downloadable Media Kit contains information about the site, related brands and successes, but more importantly, it provides case studies. By providing case studies it gives the Media Planner the tools to help sell and explain why they want to advertise on the site. As with all case studies, they can be in just about any format, but the sleeker and prettier the better as you have to remember they have to be written to the least common denominator. I am not saying Media Planners are a little “slow”, but as with web content, build it as if the reader is from another planet. Remember, you have no idea who will be reading this so provide lots of pretty pics and supported numbers as with most buys the document will be selling your site, not you. Here are a few examples of downloadable media kits: Naylor Networks, USA Today.

Website Media Kit: With any website, research is started on the site in question or on a search engine and what better way to get at the Media planner than through the site they are researching. By placing your media kit online you can not only sell to Planners, but it can also help with your SEO as it is crawlable, but more on that in another blog. Online Media Kits ensure that Media Planners can not only provide them with the same website data as with a Downloadable Media Kit, but you can also include live examples of past campaigns, dynamic placements and colorful success stories. Some sites, provide Ad Galleries, Awards, Videos and even live chat areas with whom the Media Planner can speak to a “live” salesperson. All this is cool, but what is also cool is to make sure all the pages are tracked with your ad server as you can then see what and where people are seeing your Media get not only your latest requirements and specs of what your site will and will not accept. Here is an example of one of my favorite web Media Kits:Cnet with both a trackable and dynamic web kit with creative examples and even a gallery: CNET Networks. The Nation is a bit simple, but it is quite clean and brief.

Here is my take on the Pros and Cons for both types of Media Kits:

Downloadable Media Kit
Pros: Easily printable, easy to read for non-web savvy advertisers, customizable for effective visualization, one place to update, one document to rule them all
Cons: Not dynamic, not search able for searchers, difficult to update, pages trackable, limited success examples

Website Media Kits
Pros: Search engine searchable, one place update, multiple versions depending on the searchers location and language, dynamic, live ad examples
Cons: Hard to update, not printable, can get easily lost

Bottom line: When thinking about getting media planners, be it at an agency or a direct advertiser, it is wise to provide both versions, but focus on the web version as it is both dynamic and easy for them to digest. Since Planners usually do not make the decision to place advertisements, they have to sell them to their boss and the advertiser, so the use of the stats, images and creative examples is what help them sell you.

Media Kit: Cost and pricing index:Ok, you got what is “should” be in the Media Kit in both a downloadable and website version, but now you have to start asking about pricing. Yes, I know it is hard to quantify just what is your site’s real estate worth to an advertiser, but I’ll leave that for yet another blog.

Microsoft Adcenter has just released a beta version of a new plug in for excel 2007 to help you research new keywords in your ever expanding PPC and search marketing campaigns. Attendees of the webinar today got a taste of what this application is capable of.

MSN add-in offers some features that are just too valuable and way granular to pass up and I’m personally excited to make the switch over to Excel 2007 as soon as possible as MSN is still working on transposing the plug in across all excel product lifelines–which in my hyper-consumerist mindset can feel like eons.

Some of the bells and whistles for this plug in include:

-Confidence ranking - gives percentage of relevance between suggested keyword vs. website/relevant keywords

-Customized pivot tables for easy data sort of suggested keywords and confidence scores

-Automatically crawls website for all possible keywords

-Generate top keywords by verticals

- Demographic data delineated by months

- Historical data pulled from Adcenter, live search, MSN Passport users and 3rd party partnerships (all data is anonymous).

-Geo-targeting data from top states, countries and cities

In regards to first impressions this looks like a big step towards filling a void in what has been the bane of existence for all search marketers–obtaining accurate forecasting data to make appropriate keyword strategy decisions. Used in conjunction with other keyword tools you’ll just be a terror on the search marketing front.

We had the pleasure to recently review and evaluate the new product (still in Beta) from BuzzLogic called BuzzLogic AdTargeting. Wow, what a great product.

If you are a company like many of our clients that wants to advertise on blogs, yet have no idea about the results, don’t want to risk, don’t have the time to research which blogs to advertise on, search no more.

BuzzLogic’s ad targeting product allows you to run a search on the top influential bloggers for your industry (Say you are TravelPod (an old client of ours) your top 50-100 influencer blogs/social media sites could include About.com’s Europe section , ReadWriteWeb, Kattie Fehrenbacher from GigaOm, Emily Chang’s eHub - all of whom have written about travel and travel start ups ). From there, you can select the sites (that offer Google Ads now, but I am sure they will add ad networks such as Blog Ads, Text Ad Link, Ad Brite, etc. more later) on which you want to place a Text Ad or Visual Ad. You create the ad. Then you launch.

Now not only this takes the work out of figuring out which blogs to place your ads on since the tool identifies for you, the influential bloggers that have covered your product/service (or competitors’ product), but it also brings forward two strong things in BuzzLogic’s favor:
- Through the development work they have done with Google, they are able to allow us agencies and advertisers to do site targeting on sites that usually you can not target through Google’s content network (I am not talking about site targeting here, we are talking about being able to target sites in the “content network” of Google)
- Because you are placing ads on blogs that have covered your product or service (or competitors), your ads on such sites are VERY relevant, and therefore will perform that much better because your ads are going to be VERY relevant to your target audiences.

We are launching a few test campaigns and am sure we will see great results.

Congrats to BuzzLogic for being innovative.