About Leads

A guest post by Dylan Mazeika from BuyerZone's Content Team

Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended SearchLove Boston, and experienced two days of great speakers, topics, and attendees. There were 19 presentations over 2 days and when I wasn't typing notes I was live-tweeting the event (#BZatSearchLove).

The SlideShares for the presentations can be found on Distilled's Slideshare account, but I'm going to cover a few of the talks that provided a lot of insight for B2B professionals.

The Future of Search - Bill Slawski

This is one that I wrote about in my last post and was looking forward to. Bill started off by referencing a Matt Cutts post on why we shouldn't look into patents when it comes to predicting changes in search when it comes to Google.

He disregarded this and looked at how new patents and technology will affect...

• New ways to crawl and new indexing approaches
• New ways to search
• New ways to rank

Bill made it clear that we should be focusing on the following things to prepare for what's coming down the road in search:

1. Understanding how data is being collected and indexed
2. Making pages about "things not strings" and understanding the relationships between them
3. Rankings will increasingly be about authority and quality

The patents discussed were really interesting and worth a read into but as a consumer of the internet, I'm excited to see search go in a direction that generates results people are actually looking for.

BuyerZone just got a bit more social. Today, we launched our brand new social media page: BuyerZone on Social Media. As you look around, you'll probably note that it's a pretty simple page.

Well, look again!

There are, in fact, two key aspects that I made sure went into this page as I designed it. Here's what they are and more importantly, why you should have a social media page for your business' networks:

1) Social Media Team Introduction

As I'm reading tweets from a few of my favorite business brands, I can't help but ask, "Who is the person behind the tweets?" Is it the social media intern? The marketing manager? Or just some random person they hired who works remotely?

It always boggles my mind.

Well, I didn't want you to get a headache, so I made sure to include a little blurb about me and my social media teammate, Dylan Mazeika. The number one reason I did this is because I don't want you to just read BuyerZone's tweets or our Facebook updates. I want you to ENGAGE with us too.

And you're more likely to do this if you feel like you know the people behind them. Well, now you do!

A guest post by Dylan Mazeika from BuyerZone's Content Team

Next week I'll be attending Distilled's SearchLove conference in Boston. I'm looking forward to bringing a lot of actionable marketing and B2B tips back to BuyerZone. While I'm looking forward to all of the speakers, I think the following presentation topics will offer the most takeaways for B2B marketers:

Improving content

Dr. Pete's talk is about DIY data-driven content. Lead generation companies gather a lot of data; so I'm looking forward to moving past typical infographics, and learning how to present this data in a more compelling way for users and readers.

Conversion rate optimization

Rand Fishkin will be speaking on behavioral psychology and inbound marketing, and how this relates to traffic, conversions, and how users behave on your site. This will be an especially interesting presentation from a lead generation perspective where conversions and UX are the bottom line.

As we close in on the end of another work week, here are some good reads that caught our eye:

• Email open rates averaged nearly 20% last year. Are you seeing that in your email activities? If not, here are some tips that could help.

• Are you considering buying leads from a lead generation company? Even if you don't work with BuyerZone, here's a comprehensive whitepaper on everything you need to consider when buying leads from our friends at LeadsCouncil.

• A flower delivery company analyzed their sales funnel and decided to invest in a dedicated lead generation team to supercharge their results. Read their story. 

Stumble upon anything that caught your eye this week? Share in the comments section below.

A guest post by Joy Gendusa

As new marketing technologies are created, businesses are given opportunities to make their marketing systems better. These technologies can help you build a complete marketing system that comprehensively covers all your marketing bases, such as lead generation and follow-up.

The following is just one of the ways you won't lose any of the leads you generate from your marketing campaigns. You'll generate more leads and convert more of those leads into customers, and the best part is forming this complete system takes only four easy steps.

Let's take a look at them...

Acquire New Leads with Postcard Marketing

Postcard marketing is a lead generation tool that is proven to get the job done. It can consistently produce new leads for your company's growth. It works on fundamental marketing principles, using benefits to build prospect interest, and using repetition to build trust and brand awareness.

The key to postcard marketing is the targeted mailing lists. You can create a list of prospects who are already looking for what your company offers - they just don't know you exist yet. When you mail them an intentionally designed marketing postcard, you give them a reason to choose your company over your competition.

Online marketing makes it super easy to track your results. From email to search to display ads, it's easy to ascertain open rate (for email), clicks, conversions and in many cases, revenue. But what about that phone number you have on your website or include in your paid search ad? If you're not tracking data around your inbound phone calls you could be missing out on a huge chunk of data. And though we're living in an online world, there are many people who still like to pick up the phone and talk to a real person. 

The good news is that using trackable phone numbers is quite easy and inexpensive. Using a trackable phone number (which can still route to your existing phone numbers) allows you to glean lots of valuable information and attribute inbound phone calls to their proper source, ensuring you're capturing all activity related to your lead generation (or customer service) efforts.

Implementing trackable phone numbers on your website and/or campaigns gets you all sorts of valuable information. Some common features can include:

• Number of phone calls
• Duration of calls
• Call timing and volume trends
• Campaign source, even to the keyword level
• Caller ID info
• Whisper tone (when someone picks up a call it can tell you where it's coming from)
• Call recording (often for additional charge)

All of this data can help you calculate your true campaign ROI. - which, after all, is what we're after.

So consider implementing trackable phone numbers for your business. It's an inexpensive way to truly maximize your lead gen efforts.

Every month BuyerZone's management team likes to give kudos to our colleagues who are celebrating their work anniversaries. Recently, our President gave a special shout out to Sarah Phoenix, BuyerZone's Senior Product Marketing Manager.

Sarah, who is celebrating her five-year anniversary at BuyerZone, is no stranger to About Leads. Last year, she schooled us all on how to have a proper conversion test strategy. In this post, however, she'll be dropping some knowledge on the B2B industry.

In recent years, the B2B industry has undergone some major changes. And one branch of the industry that has seen the most excitement is the product marketing side. Dylan Mazeika from our content team sat down with Sarah to pick her brain on these changes.

About Leads: What brought you to the field of Product Management?

Sarah Phoenix: I did an internship in college at a lead generation company and ended up accepting a full time job there once I graduated. I started in a client services type role, managing lead generation campaigns and client expectations.

Just over a year into my career I realized that I was more interested in the product side of the business and transitioned to a product management role, and here I am many years later!

I love social media. But the one social network I can't wrap my head around is YouTube.

First of all, I was always a little hesitant to call YouTube a "social" network. The way I've always seen it, people upload music videos, prank videos, and of course, Justin Bieber videos for viewers to enjoy.

End.of.Story.

But after watching HootSuite University's video, Building a Powerful Community on YouTube with Ryan Nugent, I realize that's just the beginning - and that I've been looking at it all wrong. Instead, it's what comes before and after publication that really makes YouTube a social tool, and ultimately, an engagement tool for your business.

Below, I would like to not only share two of Ryan's tips with you, but also add a few examples of how you can apply them to your lead gen efforts. Hopefully, like me, you'll have a social "awakening."

Creating YouTube Videos

Ryan explains that when you're creating videos, be sure to create:

• Content that encourages community
• Acknowledges the viewers
• Starts the conversation
• Calls to action
• Features the fans

This is easy enough to do if you're uploading music videos; it's a no brainer that people will "dislike" or "like" a music clip. They might even write a comment. But on a business video - people are more likely to send feedback via email or Twitter.