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The very top of the lead gen funnel is a dangerous place. Potential leads at this stage haven't given you any information yet, so you don't get a second chance to win them back. And they're just beginning to interact with your brand, through your content or a social channel, so chances are they're also looking at your competitors and other alternatives.


They're fragile, easily distracted, and busy: it doesn't take much to lose them. Here 5 keys to improving performance at the beginning of the lead generation cycle.

1. Send good trust signals
Before they even digest a word of your content, potential leads are evaluating how trustworthy your company is. Things like having a professional-looking design, making real-world contact information like phone numbers very visible, and including recently-updated information all contribute to their initial impression of your business.

Even things like having text that's free of typos and other mistakes contributes to your trustworthiness. Although it's not usually a conscious decision, prospects can be turned off by landing pages or lead capture forms that seem amateurish or flimsy. Here's a little more about sending good trust signals.

I've got a guest post up at the LeadsCouncil web site: Five Landing Page Mistakes We All Make. I say "we" in the headline specifically because BuyerZone has made all of those mistakes at different points over the years, and while we've learned the lessons, we're still not perfect.

As a result of #3 -- constantly testing new designs and other changes -- we're regularly creating new versions of our landing pages. The trick is making sure we're not letting old mistakes creep back in as we're testing new improvements.

(If you're not familiar with it, LeadsCouncil is a great resource for lead buyers and sellers. It's an independent organization that aims to build trust and promote best practices, with the overall goal of helping increase the size of the lead gen market. BuyerZone is a founding member of LeadsCouncil and we're glad to be working with them on our State of B2B Lead Generation Survey.)

Affiliate Marketing is essentially an online referral program where a referring website, often called an affiliate or a publisher, receives a bounty for successfully driving a sale or conversion. This bounty system is used by businesses across the web, and sometimes even facilitated by a third party. The affiliate will drive traffic to your website, and if it results in a sale or conversion, they get an agreed upon bounty. Affiliates benefit from this model because they can make money from their website traffic. And you benefit because it can increase sales or lead volume with minimal risk - which can be ideal for many businesses.

How does it work exactly? Well, if your company needs to drive additional sales or leads, setting up an affiliate marketing program can help get additional sales and leads through the door at a low cost compared to other online marketing channels. Commissions or payments are set in a contract (in advance) based on volume of sales, visits, or leads provided by the affiliate. They can either be a percentage of the sale or a flat fee. It's a performance based system - you only pay if you get results.

How does the affiliate drive traffic? The same way that you market your own site, the affiliate markets their site - then they funnel the leads over to you. They might use SEO, banner ads, PPC, social media, email or other traditional marketing channels to send leads to their site and then over to you. However, an affiliate that invests substantial time and money into their marketing efforts would be wise to pay close attention to ROI. On the other hand, if their site already has a good deal of traffic, it is a great way to monetize it with minimal investment.

Back from another successful show in Las Vegas last week, I thought I'd share some brief notes and themes that I took away:

• In his keynote address, Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, talked at length about the concept of labor illusion - meaning it's important to be transparent with what is happening after you ask a potential customer to do something. The classic example is the lame progress bar, which while telling you the percentage completed (or something similar), offers zero value in terms of communicating what's happening behind the scenes. Instead of offering very little, Norton suggests that showing the customer what's actually happening is a powerful way to demonstrate the labor you're performing - thus inherently making that person more vested in the outcome. One example of a successful application is a flight search engine that shows what's happening after you enter in your criteria, but before a flight matrix is displayed. Why not tell the user the list of airlines being checked, flight combinations, class of service requested, etc?
  
• In the annual state of the industry chat, the CEO's of Quinstreet and Bankrate spoke about where they see the future of lead generation going. Content will continue to be king as well as a key differentiator for those without it, regulations (especially in education) will be a disruption, social media as a lead generation tool remains unproven in the B2B space, and the growth of mobile continues. Our thoughts echo many of these observations, as BuyerZone too is focused on producing more great content, cracking the social media code and mobilizing our sites for, well, mobile.
• Lead quality and the ever present balance of quantity with quality remains a key focus. Those lead generators who work with lead buyers directly understand the importance of quality, while lead aggregators, resellers and affiliates are often to blame for unseemly practices which, at times, give the industry a bad name. 
• Tim Ash, CEO of Site Tuners, spoke of 5 tips for great landing pages, most of which are fairly standard, but one -- keep your promises -- stuck with me. Throughout the entire lead generation process, marketers need to make sure what we state we'll do actually happens.
• In the click-to-call space, we know that timely follow-up is critical, but one stat really shocked me: re-contract rate drops to less than 1% after 30 minutes. That is mind-boggling to me, and just underscores how sales processes need to be not only relevant, but super timely.

Overall, another great show. Did you attend? Add your key takeaways in the comments section below.

So, you've got your PPC campaigns up and running after checking out our previous post on PPC basics, right? But what do you do next? How can you make sure that your campaigns are making as much money as possible?

First off, you need to know why you are driving traffic - your goal. Why do you want to generate traffic (hint, it's usually to convert leads and make money) and what incentive for the user is there to convert through your form? Is it a whitepaper download, event registration, product purchase, or inquiry? You need to have an appropriate call to action to pull in the right type of lead. Even if you are just using your PPC campaigns to gauge general visibility or interest in a new product, you want to make sure that you are setting the stage appropriately. And that starts with keywords and adcopy.

Search engine marketing, as the name suggests, is marketing via search engines - like Yahoo, Google, and Bing. Under that umbrella, PPC ads are the paid ads located on the right hand column and top of the search results, and they are based on the keyword terms that the user searches for. This is different from the main column of results - impacted by SEO which are "natural" or unpaid. The main PPC objective for companies is to convert as many of these paid ads as possible - and, as a result, reduce costs and increase profit. However, this also means that you have to actively make adjustments to your keywords and copy - rather than the "set and forget" methodology.

Here are some tips to get you going:

Be proactive! There are always improvements to be made, so constantly monitor results and make adjustments. Also, keep an eye on your competitors to see what they are doing.

Think ROI. Sometimes you have to spend more to get more. The rates for certain keywords or positions are high, but if they are producing the best leads, it is worth the price. Just be sure to collect enough data to be able to draw logical conclusions - including the lifetime value of a customer.

However you look at online lead generation, one of the key components is the actual form you use to capture leads. There is a tendency (mostly by sales) to gather as much information as possible to help in the follow-up process. The problem with that approach - to most marketers, anyways - is the more information you ask for, the less likely a prospective lead will complete the form. The lesson, in most cases, is less is more.

Marketing Experiments published a recent case study on marketing automation company Marketo, about how they've experienced success with shorter forms. It's worth a read.

Want to slice the fat out of your forms? Review some tips from a post on this very topic that we wrote last year.

At small companies like BuyerZone, you pitch in where help is needed, and over the past few months, I've been helping our Quality Assurance team test a wave of new features and improvements to our RFQ platform.

It's been an eye-opening experience, to say the least. Just when we think we've tested every possible combination of both inbound and outbound leads, we find another potential situation that requires testing. And of course, it's never the straightforward, everyday situations that cause the bugs -- it's the edge cases, the unusual combinations that reveal a bug or a design problem.

This QA time made me realize how marketing and sales organizations could apply broader testing strategies to their efforts. Sure, most companies will test a new landing page, or measure the return they get from a new marketing program. But there are opportunities for testing up and down the sales channel. Here is just a sampling:

• Test the offer: the most basic type of testing you can do. Which is more attractive - a 30 day free trial, or 5% off your first order? Should you push the 10-user license, or unlimited license with the subscription fee? Should you offer a "free estimate," a "consultation," or an "audit?" Try different offers in identical lead gathering settings to see what grabs the most attention.
  
• Test landing pages: this is probably one of the most commonly tested parts of a lead generation campaign, and for good reason: they make a huge difference. When you test landing pages, don't get too bogged down in details: test large changes in design and copy first, then refine the winners. 
• Test forms: it doesn't matter if it's a one-field newsletter signup form, a full-fledged sales cart, or anything in between: the design and functionality of your information-gathering form can make a huge difference in a campaign's performance.
  
• Test performance of different channels: do leads that come from your own web site behave differently than those you purchase from a lead aggregator? Your marketing channels may require individual testing and customized messaging or approaches.
  
• Test salespeople: you should look beyond, 'are they following up as they should'? are one rep's tactics more effective than another?
• Test follow up schedules: how many calls and emails should you place, and when?
• Test messaging: every email or call script is fair game for testing.
  
• Test nurturing materials: measure response rates as well as eventual sales from drip marketing campaigns. 

Of course, most of this is comparative testing: which one of two (or more) approaches is better. Don't forget to do some basic functional testing as well: how does your web site perform during peak busy times? Do all the phone numbers you use actually ring at the right desk? Is all the information you're gathering correctly making it into your CRM?

Your turn -- what kinds of testing have you found the most valuable? Do you stick with the basics, or do you test end-to-end? 

A few weeks ago, I covered lead forms and offered some simple advice on how to make them friendlier with the goal to increase conversion rates.  Now, I'd like to take it one step further and offer some quick tips on building conversion-friendly landing pages which are pages that appear after someone clicks on an advertisement such as an email or pay-per-click ad.

We all spend time designing good looking emails or optimizing ad copy for paid search campaigns. While that's important  - don't forget about the landing page you're sending that traffic to!

Here are a few quick things to keep in mind when creating landing pages:

Maintain design continuity - make sure your design (including images, fonts, colors, etc.) is consistent from the ad to the landing page (and to all subsequent pages). You want your users - your potential leads - to be comfortable and to feel like they're in the right place.

Ensure consistent messaging - the messaging/copy you use in the initial advertisement should be reused in places on your landing pages. For example, if you're advertising low health insurance coverage options, you're landing page should - naturally - talk about how to get low health insurance rates. Doing anything else would confuse the user and distract from your goal.

Be helpful - you want to ensure that the user knows where they are and where they can turn for help. Clearly display your company logo and make it easy for them to pick up the phone or email you if they want to reach you by prominently showing a phone number and/or email address.

Give direction - You're likely not building a landing page for someone to peruse for hours. Rather, this is a conversion page where you want the user to quickly get acclimated and then take an action. Make it abundantly clear what that action is - don't bury your offer or your desired next step!

Keep it simple - Sure, you have more room to showcase your jazzy marketing copy than you would in an email, but don't get carried away (and don't be too sales oriented and pushy). Definitely share what's needed to whet the appetite, but remember: the core purpose of a landing page is to drive leads or sales for your business.

Test - I know this sounds basic, but you should always be trying new things on landing pages. You never know which slight tweak can make all the different in the world. Experiment again and again.

What landing page tips have worked for you? Share yours in the comment section below.

Further reading on this topic:

• 30 principles to a better landing page design
• Increase landing page conversions
• 10 tips for lead generation landing pages
• Ultimate guide to A/B testing
• 5 ways to improve your SEO landing pages

Contact forms are a great source of new leads. But they can also be a total conversion killer if they're not properly thought through.

If you're trying to get people to register for a webinar or encouraging people to download your latest whitepaper - chances are you're asking people to provide some information that you can pass along to your sales team. And, of course, your website is littered with ways to contact you - including a contact form.

Have you ever taken a moment to step back and assess how good your forms are? If you haven't, you should. And if you have, it never hurts to re-assess.

Make sure to keep these key factors in mind when you do: