How to Generate More Leads in a Buyer Centric World

Corey: So, Michael let me ask you. How do you generate more qualified leads in a buyer centric world? Michael: Well, first and foremost you have to publish—not sell. And what that means is that you’ve got to think of what you’re producing as information much like a magazine editor. And that’s the other part of this as you need to think like an editor not as a salesman. You’re not pitching anymore, you’re educating you’re providing valuable information to establish a relationship with the perspective buyer. The whole mission here is to build a position as a thought earlier. Now, there are a number of people out there that have talked about thought relationship and they really have it to figure it out—David Meerman Scott, Joe Pulizzi—these gentlemen are really experts in this area. So publishing and not selling, thinking like an editor a really important. Then you need to create compelling content. And again, as I mentioned before compelling content consists of three things, you need to answer the questions that buyers want answered. You need to help them solve problems they want to solve and you need to show them how to do the things they want to get done. Those are the reasons that they will come to your website. Those are the reasons that they will come to you. Those are the reasons why will continue to follow you and ultimately those are the reasons why they will choose to buy you versus anyone else. Then you need to use multiple formats and multiple formats are e-books, videos, audios, podcasts, webcasts, webinars, blog posts, everything you can think of to provide the viewer of your perspective buyer with the right format that’s optimum for them. Clearly, the majority of the individuals behaviorally prefer to see things visually, but there’s a large percentage that actually you want to hear it versus see it. And then there’s another percentage that actually you want to read it versus see it visually or see it audibly, so you need to provide all of those formats to really engage the buyer. Then you need to publish where buyers go to get information. Again, this is very important and it’s not just online. So, it’s not just internet marketing. We’re not about just promoting internet marketing, it’s also offline. Many times buyers get most of their information from referrals or from peer groups and this take place at trade shows, conferences, and meetings. And so any opportunity that you have to influence or be visible at those places can be very valuable. Now, it’s true the traditional media—print, television and radio are eroding and there’s two reasons for that I think. One is the effectiveness of that medium or the concept of advertising as it interruptive mechanism, is a failure and it will continue to fail. Pop-up ads for example, it’s already shown scientifically and also the analytics that banner ads and pop-up ads are just getting very, very poor readership. Because they are not—they’re functioning just like television. The real important thing and the people that are doing television effectively are focusing on answering questions. Instead of pitching, we’re going to provide you with information. Those ads are valuable and people will stop and they will watch them. So getting back to it, you need to publish where the buyers go to get information. Now, what might that be? That might be blogs, that might be YouTube, it might be Facebook, it might be you know an aggregator website like Technorati or drug report or any of these kinds of places where your buyers congregate. Another place that they go is trade association websites. Many of them in the B space have enormous expertise within the trade organization. So, they become a ‘go to’ source for buyers. They have a regular visit to their trade website to get more information, there might be continuing education, there might be white papers and things like that. So, being visible there helps get in front of the right buyers. So finally, now, that you got them to your website, they found the content that they’re looking for and they’ve said, “Hey, you know I’d like to get more of those.” You need to nurture them. Now, what does that mean? Call it lead nurturing or lead management. It’s the process of delivering personalized content to the interested buyers to help move them towards to purchase and here’s the facts. I think Marquito said 25% of all leads are ready to buy. The other 75% aren’t but it doesn’t mean they won’t buy. It means most likely they will buy at some point the next three months. Those 75% need to be nurtured and the way you do that is with highly personalized content, so it’s all about content and it’s about nurturing leads. So you develop leads by creating compelling content and then you nurture those leads to the point where they are ready to buy and that’s what we mean by qualified lead.