1. Define the “qualified” lead. Marketing and sales must discuss what constitutes a qualified lead and define its characteristics together. This becomes the foundation for a lead scoring system through which marketing can winnow more qualified, sales-ready leads from all those captured. Once lead characteristics are established, lead scoring also allows marketing to determine the key triggers that identify the ready buyer, so those prospects can be delivered to the right salespeople in real time, decreasing the time to conversion through rapid response.

2. Formulate an integrated marketing plan. It’s easier said than done. Keeping track of email campaigns, drip campaigns, traditional media outreach and coverage, content to bloggers, tradeshows, SEO marketing, social media campaigns and more calls for a lot of juggling – not to mention funneling, segmenting and filtering the leads you’ll generate through all these activities. A good automated marketing platform is the best way to manage and track an interrelated set of campaigns and programs and the resulting leads. The usual process is to begin with email and lead scoring, and then to scale to additional capabilities as your programs become more sophisticated. As you scale, make sure that the leads and data you get from each program are not silo’d. Ideally, every interaction with a prospect should be tracked in a single location, usually a profile in a sales or marketing database. On the content side, aim for consistency in messaging and offers. Create, manage and coordinate your messages across all channels for a consistent customer experience, and update all channels when messaging changes.

3. Segment your lists. By segmenting your lists, you can deliver more focused campaigns by targeting promotions to specific audiences, providing the right content and making the right offer at the right time. The concept of message matching is based on the idea that people pay attention only to what matches their own needs, which in turn helps build more targeted lists and boosts overall response rates. List segmentation comes in infinite forms – by demographic factors, title, industry, offer, behavior, interactivity, preferences, company size, to name just a few. Start simply, and let testing and sales results guide you to more sophisticated list parsing.

4. Create compelling landing pages. When your prospect clicks on a search result or an online ad, the resulting landing page should be exactly what the prospect was looking for and should provide a compelling offer (webinar, trial, whitepaper, demo, etc.). The value of the offer increases with an accurate, concise description of what the prospect will receive. A relevant landing page delivering content that addresses the visitor’s problem induces the reader to not only consider the offer, but often to pursue it. And a strong call to action that clearly shows how they can “act now” provides the incentive for lead capture, in turn allowing your company to continue the dialogue and nurture that new lead toward conversion.

5. Refine your surveys and registration forms. Develop and implement productive online surveys that capture relevant prospect data and furnish quality leads. Review each of your lead generation forms, and make sure they work together to gain more information as the prospect continues to engage. Keep the initial form short and sweet; aim for capturing simple, basic information. You can ask for more information as the dialogue progresses.

6. Measure, measure, measure. “Metrics” has to do with measurements, such as tracking numbers of web visitors. “Analytics” has to do with teasing those numbers apart so you can distinguish categories (e.g., how many visitors visited your pricing page). To gather precise information about campaign effectiveness, you need to tap into the full spectrum of metrics available from all your programs. Analysis will guide you in determining which leads are ready to go to sales, which leads need more nurturing, and which offers are or are not working. All such information helps you focus on where you are most likely going to generate qualified leads that are likely to convert.

7. Test, test, test. Testing tells you what works and what doesn’t, so you can focus your budget and efforts on what does. Remember, less is more. What you choose to test depends on your industry, your target audience and your campaigns. You can test lists, ads, landing pages, keywords, email campaign content, sending strategy and more. Commonly tested list elements include titles, actions and industries. Commonly tested content and campaign elements include headlines, body copy, calls to action, offers, contact forms, days of the week, time of the day, page design, graphics, and so on. Begin with a simple plan and let your results and changing conditions guide you to continuing, expanding or redirecting your testing efforts. Continued testing will allow you to understand how to optimize and improve your communication with your target audience, which leads to better leads, more conversions and closed sales.

8. Automate, automate, automate. Automate as much of the process as you can. You will save time and labor — you’ll also increase consistency, efficiency, awareness, actionable intelligence and measurability. A good marketing automation platform reduces complexity, makes workflow more efficient, and enables and enhances well-timed communications as contacts, leads, prospects and sales professionals interact. It also gives you real-time visibility into every aspect of the sales cycle, from lead generation to close, documenting the data and circumstances that make success repeatable. And finally, automation delivers the sales and marketing reports that provide data for analysis and planning, proves marketing’s contribution to sales, and illustrates return on investment.

ADOTAS

Because advertisers pay a premium for audience targeting, it’s important to examine the return on investment as it relates to all aspects of a campaign. As online marketers are beginning to understand, it’s rare that any one dimension of a media campaign is responsible for success. Furthermore, they’re finding out that each dimension delivers different results depending on a number of variables.

Whether you’re trying to determine the best creative, the highest performing website, the right audience demographic or all of the above, the ability to simultaneously analyze these variables is key to determining the optimal mix of online ad campaign attributes.

Taking a holistic look at the ways audience analytics combines with other online marketing factors is essential to knowing how, when and where to invest in audience targeting. This is no easy task. A brand may be looking at targeting 10 different audience segments across multiple ad networks, making it difficult to determine the right combinations of creative, placement, timing and other campaign considerations that work best.

However, here are a few essential steps an online marketer can take to make sure they’re making the right choices when it comes to audience targeting.

1) Verify the Desired Audience: One of the first steps to figuring out the impact of audience targeting is to verify that the ad network or publisher partner has delivered the audience they promised. One way is to combine campaign data with detailed demographic data from one or more of the leading providers, such as Nielsen or TARGUSinfo. By linking demographic data to your campaign, you can quickly confirm whether or not you actually reached your target demographic.

2) Align Data with Campaign Goals: After verifying that campaigns are reaching the right audience, brands need to align the same demographic data to campaign goals, such as a purchase on a site, a click, or however a brand measures success for a particular campaign. Once the campaign goals can be compared with conversion data, a brand has a more complete view of its audience and how well those segments are performing.

3) Tap Attribution to Measure Audience Targeting Performance: With audience verification in place and aligned with specific key performance indicators, brands are now able to understand the value and ROI of audience targeting. Using attribution analysis, brands can analyze the lift they’re getting from a particular audience target and the associated costs to determine ROI. Audience analytics is becoming increasingly complex in the cross-channel online advertising world. However, with proper planning and the right tools, brands can evaluate how audience targeting positively impacts their campaigns.

His insights about the state of online advertising were inspiring, yet at the end I found myself frustrated. It’s exciting to see that the online advertising marketplace has grown tremendously and that there remains much more room for innovation; yet I am frustrated by the fact that in the online world we are own worst enemy. We have gotten so good at using terms like “clicks” and “impressions” that we have found a way to alienate those that are looking for marketing efforts that are not direct response driven.

Song shared the sobering facts that currently online marketing has a 30% share of a $68 Billion market for direct response, and only a 5% share of the $118 Billion Brand advertising spend.

To quote Song, “It’s not so good.” I agree – 5% of a $118 Billion Dollar budget? That is ‘not so good’ – especially when the online marketplace does have solutions that do drive brand awareness and PR. We just haven’t been very good at utilizing them.

First step I suggest to get us moving in the right direction is to recognize some of the existing tools that already exist and can be used for brand advertising.

For example, retargeting is one of the most valuable marketing tools for the Direct Marketer, but did you know that it can also serve as a tool for the company looking to build it’s brand and market awareness? Here are some examples we’ve seen some companies employ that are looking to build their brand in either a B2B or B2C capacity through retargeting:

- Site extension: When you really think about what retargeting is and how it works, it can be viewed as an extension of your website. The display ads you show via retargeting are like your site, but in miniature form. This allows you to keep in communication with individuals who have visited you in the past. What do you currently communicate via your site? How can retargeting enhance and strengthen this message? No better way to stay top of mind and create brand awareness.

- PR in a Banner: Who has visited your site in the past? It is more than just clients. It could be reporters, industry related companies, board members, and yes, even competitors. Use retargeted ads as a way to get your latest press release back in front of them.. If you have something you want to crow about, who better to do it to then all the people who have visited your site before? It doesn’t get more targeted than that. It’s an inexpensive and highly effective PR release vehicle.

- A recruiting tool: I’m always on the lookout for good talent for my company, and I’m sure your HR dept is too. Most likely you have a careers page or maybe a job board on your Web site. Use retargeting to show those who have visited career information on your site details about new job openings or the perks to working for you.

- Culture extension: An important part of your company is your culture, which is exhibited in your various communication tools. What better way to highlight a latest blog release? Blogs are an excellent way to allow people into your company and your culture. But if people aren’t aware of a new release (and they’re not regularly coming back to your site to check them out) you can use retargeting to get your culture out there.

- Give us a call: Using click to call tools in a display ad are an excellent way to create a conversation. Allow your clients to type their phone number into the ad and receive an inbound call or initiate a chat session when they click ‘submit’. Sometimes all it takes is a friendly reminder that you are still there and that you’re ready and willing to help them with anything they need.

- Giant Killer: You have a great product, a great site, and even a great staff – the only thing you have that isn’t ‘great’ is the size of your marketing budget. It doesn’t matter how big your company is. You can be a fortune 500 company and still have a budget that’s a fraction of your largest competitor. How can a company stay competitive, and stay within budget? Retargeting is one of the best ways to appear a big fish in an impossibly big pond. Retargeting is one of the cheapest ways to make your small budget seem huge – your ads will seem to everywhere that your customers go! Something your competitors may not be able to do.

Retargeting is just one example of how we can leverage existing technologies to increase our share in Brand Advertising spend. I’m sure there are others – what other suggestions do you have?

EMarketer notes that budgets were more likely to be cut than increased for traditional media such as TV, radio and direct mail, but more respondents said they would up their investments in e-mail marketing, search and interactive than said spending would be reduced.

E-mail marketing was the channel most likely to see an increase in spending in 2009, and print was the biggest loser

According to Marketing Sherpa, if you’re planning autumn events or need ideas for quick, year-end promotions, a lesson to look at would be how the Durham Bulls used text email first (to attract BlackBerry and mobile users) and then HTML to get a 262.3% lift over their average email campaign. Plus, how they landed a corporate sponsor in less than 48 hours.

The results from: Email #1. Text-only email to mobile users;Email #2. HTML reminder on the day of event; and Email #3. Corporate pitch with special offer

Two emails sold 262.3% more single-game tickets than their average 2007 email campaign. Even better, 56.9% of consumers who visited the landing page bought a ticket. According to Marketing Sherpa, it’s not shocking to see that 88.5% of the ticket sales came from the first text-only message since most consumers would buy the first time they saw the email or not at all. The HTML follow-up email on the day of the game managed to sell 11.5% of the tickets. The email to potential corporate sponsors garnered three serious inquiries, and a deal was signed less than 48 hours later after the email was sent.

So to attract prospective purchasers, you need serious, high-quality content that satisfies the reader’s need for information. Like all strong publishing content, it should:

Satisfy a niche. Websites don’t have to satisfy all aspects of a subject to be useful. In fact, the more completely you cover a subset of a topic, the more value it will be to those interested in your subject area.

Be original. This is the golden rule. Nothing draws and holds site visitors like fresh, useful material. Newsfeeds and syndicated copy are valuable content sources, but they won’t score traffic.

Get to the point. Obviously your content must contain critical keywords, but it needs to focus on the subject matter. It’s remarkable how many publishers fail this test with long home page introductions or bait-and-switch text.

Contain no flowery language. To hold your visitor’s attention, avoid needless adjectives, polysyllabic mumbo-jumbo and self-important technical jargon (unless, of course, keywords are in play). And if you can say something in five words instead of ten, do it.

Be updated regularly. Active websites score higher in searches. While you don’t have to rework your entire site every week, make sure you’re adding content regularly.

It’s possible to save by writing the content yourself, as long as you have expertise in the subject matter. But don’t be afraid to hire a professional writer—freelancers are affordable.

Don’t forget that original videos, site-specific applets, graphics and animation all count as fresh content. What’s more, free online services such as DM-2 enable you to easily organize your content using attractive page templates, and even host your site at no cost.

Strong, unique content is your key to success as an affiliate site. Chances are your core audience will return frequently, bookmark you, even refer you to others. Best of all, you’ll find your efforts to be as valuable to your marketing partners as it is to your readers.

Emarketer noted a MailChimp study on marketing e-mails sent through its distribution service that showed open rates varied from a low of just over 20% for e-mail sent to AOL users to a high over nearly 31% among Gmail users. The click rate on e-mails sent to Gmail accounts was more than 7.4%, compared with rates between 4% and 5% for Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail users.

According to comScore, Gmail is the third-most-popular e-mail property among US Internet users, though it posted the highest growth rate between July 2008 and July 2009. Unique visitors to the service rose 46% to nearly 37 million.

eMarketer noted that impression-based media buys are giving way, in some cases, to cost-per-lead advertising. According to the “Cost-per-Lead Advertising Data Report” from Pontiflex, marketers in North America were most likely to engage those leads via brand or community sites (51%). E-newsletters (31%) and free trial offers (9%) were also popular engagement vehicles.

“As is true for landing pages deployed in banner and search campaigns, collecting more information increases drop-off and reduces lead volume,” according to the report. For that reason, cost-per-lead advertising best practices recommend “capturing basic information during the first contact with the end consumer, and capturing additional information over time as the brand builds a relationship with the consumer.”

And according to Marketing Sherpa, it’s because some marketers take their time to do their research, and go beyond the recommendations of colleagues to arrive at their ‘short list’ of vendors. They also read and research relevant best practices, and wait to launch until they’re confident in their approach and just as important, have a plan for how names/leads, etc. from these sources will be identified, coded and, if applicable, treated differently than those from other sources.

And most important, the marketers of these successful campaigns, test vendors and lists prior to full engagements…testing registration forms and landing pages…testing programs to onboard leads from secondary sources.

A striking departure from classic ad campaigns measured via clicks and impressions, performance ad campaigns rely on metrics that really matter to retail advertisers, namely conversions and revenue. To boost those metrics, today’s retailers are applying recommendation and targeting technology to display ads. With the in-market relevance of search and the reach of display, this type of performance display advertising is quickly becoming the preferred way to spend ad dollars — and new ‘performance metrics’ the only way to truly measure ROI.

There have been several ADOTAS articles recently that brushed the subject of performance advertising (articles by Zephrin Lasker and Chris Neuner come to mind) but it’s time to go a little deeper into what actually makes this type of display ad perform better, how best to measure its effectiveness and why advertisers need to welcome new attribution models. The holiday shopping season is nearly upon us – there is no better time than the present to get up-to-speed and start testing to find what works for you.

Contrary to what some might say, better display ads are not all about size, better placement and clever campaigns. Grabbing attention is only half the battle. The other half – the half that drives sales—is taking those creative display ads and making them relevant to each consumer who views them. What good is a perfectly branded, perfectly placed, creative ad if it’s for a product the consumer doesn’t need or want?

Regardless of the negative attention on behavioral targeting, research shows that consumers do want personalized recommendations to help them with their purchase decisions. The best performance solutions on the market today are the ones that merge personalization technology with display ads. These solutions rely on actual shopping data from advertisers to create ads with immediate, in-market relevance for each individual shopper. As more shoppers go online to look for deals and to research their purchases, e-retailers (Overstock, Zappos) and multichannel retailers (JC Penney’s, Staples) will look to this breed of technology to drive conversions and boost their sales both online and off-line.

The case for performance ad technology is clear, but it’s not only about finding the right performance solution. There are two other key factors that advertisers need to embrace in order to truly make an impact on ROAS:

Advertisers must make better use of shopping data to learn from every interaction with consumers. To capitalize on performance technology, you need to really understand each shopper’s tastes and preferences by analyzing all of the behavioral and shopping data you have available. That includes purchase data (both online and in-store), loyalty card transactions, online click and browsing behavior, etc. You’re missing a huge opportunity if you’re not learning from every engagement a customer has on your site, in your store and with your brand. It’s that precious data that enables personalization and creates unique occasions to purchase for each shopper.

Advertisers must use more robust performance metrics and models of attribution. Advertisers that focus solely on traditional metrics like clicks and viewthroughs are missing the big part of the revenue picture. Those metrics do impact ROI; but there are also other, less direct, metrics that are just as important. While every campaign should stand on its own in terms of direct performance metrics, understanding the indirect impact of display advertising is critical to making the best investment decisions when allocating dollars.

Quantifying metrics such as an ad’s impact on search engine traffic, social media buzz and message boards are all important in valuing ads correctly. For example, according to a recent study by Forrester Research, almost as many Internet users respond to online display advertising by performing a search on a search engine (27%) as by clicking on the ad itself (31%). This finding speaks to the symbiotic relationship between the two channels, and the power of display advertising to boost search engine traffic. If marketers are going to invest in online display, they should consider the broader impact of their campaigns to help them track their full value.

Unfortunately, this type of comprehensive attribution tracking is not the norm for online display advertising. These metrics can be hard to measure, but they’re not impossible. Online advertisers need to understand the value of measuring immediate, ad-specific actions (e.g., clickthroughs) as well as in-direct behaviors (e.g., performing an ad-related search on a search engine or message board). This will help advertisers come up with a system that provides correct attribution to their web marketing initiatives across the board.

There have been a lot of changes this year in the industry – it’s great to see performance-based advertising help advertisers go beyond the click and start paying attention to what actually drives results. The next steps are to ensure that we use all the data available to us to put the right products in front of the right shoppers and to fine-tune revenue attribution so that it provides a more comprehensive view of the impact of display ads. Once we do that, we’ll all be seeing display advertising in a whole new light.