Stop me if this sounds familiar. You log in to your analytics program and poke around. The data is interesting. The charts are multicolored. And yet, at the end of looking around, you still don’t know how to improve your marketing as a result.

Been there? If you’re stuck with “data, data everywhere” and not a drop to act upon, it might be because your analytics program doesn’t fit well with your business model. It’s not that there’s a right or a wrong type of analytics, but every company is different. And customer behavior changes from product to product. To figure out what type of analytics you need, it’s best to go back to the start and think about what makes your company unique, then find an analytics Tool that matches those needs.

I’ve listed out a few questions below to get you started, as well as some questions you may want to ask any analytics provider (including HubSpot!) before making a purchase.

How long is your sales cycle?

The longer your sales cycle, the more complex the relationship with your leads becomes. If your leads are doing the majority of their research online over multiple weeks or even months, it’s important to have an analytics program that can give you a complete history of those customer interactions. You should focus on a solution that is strong in customer-centric and multi-channel data — customer-centric analytics ties activity data to the individual visitor who took that action, rather than aggregating data in an anonymous way. If your purchase process is more immediate, however, such qualities aren’t as critical.

Questions to ask a potential provider:

• Does your analytics Tool take a customer-centric or an aggregative data approach?
• Am I able to see the activities of individual leads, like with this customer-centric view?

What’s a higher priority — a solution that’s robust, or easy to use?

Before investing in an analytics solution, assess your internal skills and resources. If you have a staff member with a background in analytics, you might do well with a robust enterprise-level Tool that gives him or her the ability to create customizable reporting. If not, it’s best to prioritize something that is easy to use. Most analytics solutions fall somewhere in the middle of the ‘easy’ and ‘powerful’ spectrum. And with analytics, the Goldilocks rule applies — too little data and too much data can both be bad. The best fit will give you the level of data sophistication you need without being impossible to use and interpret.

Questions to ask a potential provider:

• Would you advise we have someone on staff whose main responsibility is to manage this Tool?
• How long does it take to implement this analytics Tool?
• How much customization do users typically do?

How sophisticated is your marketing mix?

Every channel you add to your marketing mix increases the sophistication of your strategy and adds an additional layer of complexity to your analytics. Think about your own marketing mix for a moment: Is your marketing centralized in one or two channels, or does it spread across social, email, mobile, advertising and search? Does each channel have its own isolated campaign, or do your campaigns run across multiple channels? List all of the channels and platforms that you use most. Take note of ones that frequently overlap (email and social, for example). If your marketing mix leans toward the complex side, then multichannel marketing analytics should be of high importance to you.

Questions to ask a potential provider:

• Would I be able to see a single view of my leads interactions with my company regardless of which marketing channel it happened on?
• Would I be able to see how each of my channels relate to each other?
• How is mobile traffic tracked?

What kind of ongoing relationship do you have with customers?

Considering the sales cycle is one step to getting the most out of your analytics, but you should also consider your customer relationship after the point of sale. Do you run the type of business that benefits from repeat purchases or upgrades? Or do you target one-time purchasers? Is customer retention a concern? If ongoing customer engagement and churn are a factor in your business, make sure that your analytics Tool enables you to analyze customer activity in addition to prospect and lead activity. Look for an analytics solution that can integrate with your help-desk, CRM, and other post-purchase channels.

Questions to ask a potential provider:

• Does your analytics Tool integrate with CRM systems? What does that integration look like?
• Can I track help-desk requests and other post-purchase interactions with this Tool?
• How do I analyze existing customer behavior?

How important is demonstrating a return on investment?

I know, I know, this is one of those “well, duh” questions. Most marketers want to know if the dollars they are putting into marketing campaigns are resulting in customers. I’m including it because it’s important to think about where ROI data fits into your priorities. Not every analytics solution can integrate with CRM systems where purchase history is stored. If ROI data is essential to bettering your marketing, it’s worth spending more to get a solution that can provide you with that outcome data. HubSpot and other analytics providers call this closed-loop-marketing. It’s the data that bridges the gap between marketing campaigns and the moment when sales converts a lead into a customer.

Questions to ask a potential provider:

• Can I see how many customers a campaign generated?
• What CRM integrations do you have?

Analytics exist to answer those nagging marketing questions: Is my marketing working? What’s important to my potential customers? How do I know I’m investing in the right things? Prioritize the questions that have become the biggest barriers to advancing your business and you’ll have a good foundation for figuring out what type of an analytics you need.

What questions do you ask when researching an analytics solution?

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This means that, in order to be a truly effective inbound marketer, you’ll need to continue talking to, sharing content with, and engaging those leads who may be stuck in the middle of your funnel — caught between their first conversion and a sales call. The good news is, this is where lead nurturing can play a vital role, enabling marketers to continue to educate, inform, and build a solid relationship with those lost leads to push them closer toward the bottom of the funnel and transform them into a much more qualified sale that’s way easier to close. Let’s face it: those middle child leads deserve some attention, too!

If you’re not sure whether lead nurturing should hold a place in your inbound marketing strategy, some of these thought-provoking lead nurturing stats just might make you rethink your stance.

Stats to Set the Stage for Lead Nurturing

1) 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research) Tweet This Stat

2) Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales. (Source: Gleanster Research) Tweet This Stat

3) 47% of B2B marketers say they either close fewer than 4% of all marketing-generated leads, or they don’t even know this metric. (Source: Forrester Research) Tweet This Stat

4) Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (Source: InsideSales.com) Tweet This Stat

5) 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

6) 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

7) Just 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to Sales. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

A whopping 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

9) 57% of B2B organizations identify ‘converting qualified leads into paying customers’ as a top funnel priority. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

BUT…

10) 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

AND…

11) 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

Lead Nurturing-Driven Results

12) 34% of B2B organizations touch leads with lead nurturing on a monthly basis. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

13) 22% of B2B organizations touch leads with lead nurturing on a weekly basis. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

14) 15% of B2B organizations touch leads with lead nurturing on a quarterly basis. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

15) 9% of B2B organizations touch leads with lead nurturing on a daily basis. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

16) 2% of B2B organizations touch leads with lead nurturing on an annual basis. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet This Stat

17) Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester Research) Tweet This Stat

18) Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group) Tweet This Stat

19) Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. (Source: Gartner Research) Tweet This Stat

20) 46% of marketers with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads. (Source: Forrester Research) Tweet This Stat

21) 25% of marketers who adopt mature lead management processes report that sales teams contact prospects within one day. Only 10% of marketers report the same follow-up time without mature lead management processes. (Source: Forrester Research) Tweet This Stat

22) Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate. (Source: CSO Insights) Tweet This Stat

23) Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. (Source: Jupiter Research) Tweet This Stat

24) Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%. (Source: Aberdeen Group) Tweet This Stat

25) Event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget. (Source: Gartner Research) Tweet This Stat

26) Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report) Tweet This Stat

27) Lead nurturing emails generate an 8% CTR compared to general email sends, which generate just a 3% CTR. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet This Stat

28) Lead nurturing emails have a slightly higher unsubscribe rate (1%) than individual email sends (0.5%), indicating their effectiveness in removing unqualified leads from the sales funnel. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet This Stat

29) Companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quota. (Source: CSO Insights) Tweet This Stat

30) Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report) Tweet This Stat

Were you surprised by any of these statistics? Are you convinced that your business could benefit from lead nurturing? Learn how to get started in our free lead nurturing guide.

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One of the biggest trends in business organization for 2012 will be how businesses can better align their sales and marketing organizations. Businesses with mature sales and marketing organizations are seeking ways to improve their efficiency and generate more leads and customers without having to blow up the size of their teams. This is where the idea of revenue disruption can enter a business’ goals. Revenue disruption describes how changes to the way businesses organize their marketing and sales efforts can help them become dramatically more successful. One way that companies will do this is through a “SMarketing” effort, making sure that their sales and marketing teams are well aligned and communicating with each other.

By reinventing their businesses and lead management processes, companies who implement a revenue disruption strategy seek to provide better guidance for marketing on what types of leads to try and generate, and by extension deliver better-qualified leads to their sales team. These organizations will also try to use new technologies for lead management to capture better intelligence and personalize their communications with them.

New Technology For Sharing Data

One way that new technology is joining the revenue disruption game is by providing smarter listening Tools for social media. New lead management platforms can automatically find the social media accounts for your leads, or you can supply that information if you have it. The Tool can then watch what your leads are writing about on social media and trigger actions based on that behavior.

For example, watching for a lead to share a link back to your own website or a competitor’s website can give you information about what other products they are researching before you even have to ask. Salespeople can then pre-emptively position themselves against potential competitors and make sure that products and services are presented with the best angle. Merging what was previously thought of as a marketing product with functionality that better enable sales is helping to drive this change to a SMarketing-fueled world.

Closed-Loop Marketing Is Necessary For Success

Greater than any technological changes will be the drive for better communication between sales and marketing. Closed-loop marketing is one “SMarketing” idea that has already made a big splash. “Closing the loop” just means that sales teams report to marketing on what happened to the leads that they received, which helps marketing understand their best and worst lead sources. Marketers are then able to plan more strategically for the future by focusing on their best lead sources — those with the best conversion rate to customer. This isn’t a technological change; it’s a cultural shift from having separated marketing and sales teams that don’t directly communicate with each other, to having a united marketing and sales group that works closely together to deliver and work leads coming into the business.

Besides better communication and reinforcement for marketing, there is another great reason to start implementing closed-loop marketing. Once you begin to measure your close rates by lead type, you can establish the profitability of different marketing and sales activities in terms of actual dollar values. There is no better statistic for executive or year-end summaries than being able to put a precise monetary ROI on your activities.

This doesn’t replace measurement by quota, lead volume or other statistics; it adds a new set of easily tracked statistics around the cost of your marketing campaigns for leads and customers. This number can be surprising, too. You may find that one of your marketing campaigns is very expensive on a per-lead basis, but that your sales team is able to close those leads very quickly and effectively, thus the marketing cost per customer is actually quite low. If that’s true, you know that pouring more marketing dollars into that channel is actually a great investment for the company. Without closed-loop marketing, that important piece of information would have escaped your team.

Start “SMarketing” For Better Communication

Organizations that want to establish this kind of collaboration between teams should also look at ways to organize a regular meeting for the members of each team. Great teamwork is more than just the free passing of data between teams and systems, but also involves combining attitudes, problem-solving efforts, and familiarity.

Depending on organization size and where employees are based, in-person team meetings may not be practical, but web-based collaboration or video chats can be useful to help people get to know each other and share resources. It is too common that marketers and salespeople have no coworking relationships, and it’s a major impediment to revenue disruption success. It’s impossible for a team to really understand the problems and frustrations of the rest of the organization if they haven’t heard it explained by the people who face it every day.

Many vendors will begin discussing concepts and different methodologies for revenue disruption this year as the market leaders and sales professionals pick up steam. Does your business have integrated sales and marketing organizations yet? How does the communication work between members of each team? Tell us your story in the comments.

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There’s just one problem. Writing blog content on a regular basis requires time that you just don’t have. To get the time, you’ll have to lobby your boss for more resources, and that means convincing your boss that blogging is actually worth your time, your effort, and his money. So how do you go about doing that? This blog post (how meta is that?) will give you the facts, research, and know-how to explain the benefits of business blogging to a tentative boss and debunk many of the common myths inbound marketing professionals are frequently faced with during these difficult conversations.

Is blogging really effective? What results will we see?

Nothing like some cold, hard data to prove a point. How does this sound?

• The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. (Tweet This Stat!)
• HubSpot’s 2011 ROI Study shows that 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging. (Tweet This Stat!)
• 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog. (Tweet This Stat!)
• The Nielsen Company shows that US internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than in email. (Tweet This Stat!)
• Inbound marketing, of which blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing. (Tweet This Stat!)

Bet you got your boss’ attention now, eh? You can find more statistics to impress your boss and make your point in this compilation of 100 interesting inbound marketing data points.

But won’t blogging open us up for negative comments?

Whenever you put anything out on the internet, you open yourself up to negative comments. You can’t let that stop you from creating a meaningful internet presence. That being said, blog comments are not only far less frequent than they were even just a few years ago, but the importance with which they are regarded has also decreased. If you’re operating your business on the up and up and your content is honest and genuine, you have little to fear in terms of commenter backlash.

And just as with any reputation management issue you’re confronted with in business, if you face it head on and operate as a compassionate human being instead of a faceless corporation, you have the opportunity to turn those naysayers into your biggest fans.

This sounds like a huge time investment. Who is going to write it all?

To determine how much time you’ll need to dedicate to your blog, you have to take a look at the competition. Are your organic competitors blogging twice a week? Multiple times a day? Not at all? To outperform them with your inbound marketing, you need to also outperform them with blogging.

Once you’ve determined the frequency, you’ll know how much support you need. Can you handle this yourself? Or do you need a new hire dedicated exclusively to blogging? Many organizations, including HubSpot, require specific employees to contribute a minimum number of blog posts a month. This solution helps feed your blog with quality content, provides more than one voice for a valuable mix of perspectives, and doesn’t put undue burden on any one member of your organization.

Does anyone here even know how to blog?

Blogging doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but the barrier to entry is very low. Think of it this way. If you’re in sales, you can answer questions about your products and services, right? If you’re in marketing, you can write copy that positions your company correctly, right? If you’re a C-level exec, you sure didn’t get to that position without knowing a thing or two about your industry, right? You have the knowledge you need to blog, you just need to learn the best practices that make up a great blog post. Luckily, those best practices are not only simple, but we’ve already written them all down for you.

The best blogs aren’t long, complex, and full of stuffy language and industry jargon. They’re succinct, specific, and engaging. As long as your topic is helpful, you can write just like you talk — and your prospects will love it. Oh, we also came up with 100 content ideas to make it even easier for you to get started.

Will this help with our SEO and social media presence?

Yes, yes, yes. Not only is blogging one of the most important means of achieving SEO greatness, it will be extremely difficult to see consistent and meaningful SEO improvements without blogging. One of the most important ways a search engine knows to return your website in search results is based on the quality of your content and the frequency at which you publish it. Blogging is a simple, low-cost solution to this. Blogging also makes it far more likely that your content will be shared on social media networks and receive inbound links from other websites, two more crucial aspects that boost your SEO street cred.

Speaking of social media, you can (and should) add social media share and follow buttons to every blog post you write. If you don’t know how to create these buttons, here’s a cheat sheet that will tell you everything you need to know. Your blog content will not only help you get more followers on your social media networks, but your social media networks will help you get more blog readers. Blogging and social media are two peas in a pod; as your reach expands on one, so it does on the other.

What questions have you faced when trying to explain blogging ROI? What answers helped you convince your boss or clients?

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Every month I get countless emails asking me “How do I build an email list?”

Everyone wants me to tell them one (or more) methods I use so  they can use them too – but- it doesn’t work that way.  On the Internet, you can’t know from one day to the next what will work.

I post to Discussion Boards; run countless Free Ads; buy thousands of dollars worth of ezine and solo ads; make deals with other publishers to offer one (or more) of my freebies to their list.  I test, Test, TEST … then, test some  more.

One free ad produces from 5 to 15 names and email addresses per week. Another produces 20 to 30.  Yet another paid ad regularly produces from 50 to  100. — I track all of my posting.  If they  produce nothing,  I change  my posting.  If that doesn’t produce any new email address,  I drop  them.

I’ll take 5 to 10 new email address from one posting any time I can get it. — I’ll even be happy with 1 or 2 … especially if they are, or become,  buyers.

That’s the way I built my list from day one and continue to build my list today.

ALL of the list building methods work – but …

The problem is most beginners try a few things, get only a small response, and give up. They want BIG numbers … not just 5 to 10 new email addresses.

Jim

P.S. — Remember the  Tortoise and the Hare?  Slow and steady wins the race.

–

Don’t just try to “survive” during the current Financial Crises, turn it into an opportunity to make your personal fortune.

Get My Personal Help Making Tons of Money during the current Financial Crises, Recession & coming Depression. ==>Businesslyceum by J.F. (Jim) Straw

==>Viral Prospector by Michael Price

Let someone else teach you how to just “survive” … if that’s all you want.

This is a guest post written by

Social media is a great inbound marketing Tool that allows businesses and marketing teams to interact with prospects, cater to customers, promote their content, and yes, generate leads. When a business uses social media right, prospective customers have the opportunity to access great content and information via a platform they already populate and actually want to gather said content and information.

Additionally, when prospects do “bite,” many of them are willing to provide their contact information, click to obtain more valuable content, and then come back for more, illustrating the concept of effective use of social media for lead generation beautifully. And a good chunk of B2B marketers are on top of this: According to BtoB Magazine, 48.9% of B2B marketers who use social media say use it for lead generation, making lead generation one of the top applications for the use of social media. Unfortunately for some brands, they don’t always realize there are true tactics in order to use social media effectively for lead gen, and they approach their social media presence blindly.

To make sure you’re business is appropriately using social media to boost its lead gen efforts, check out the following list to ensure you’re not making any of these rookie mistakes.

7 Ineffective Ways to Generate Leads From Social Media

1. Not being where your target customers are. It’s not important to maintain a presence on just any social media network in order to engage with potential and current consumers; you have to be where they actually are. If you are posting content and updates blindly to Twitter, but members of your target market aren’t present there, what’s the point? The first step in effective use of social media for lead generation is to research and determine which social media sites your target audience is active on a regular basis. That way when you do share content and information, you can know you’re working to build awareness for your blog, product, service, and other types of content you offer on a regular basis. Awareness is a key preliminary stepping stone for lead generation, since prospects likely go through a period of learning more about your business and deciding whether or not they should research your company further.

2. Not providing valuable content. If you’re just pushing out content about your product and why it’s so “awesome,” more than likely, people will not want to share or engage with it. If someone is following your brand on Facebook, it’s probably to see what valuable content and offers you can offer them. Rather than product-focused content, focus on content rich with tips and tricks which can help to relieve your target customers’ pain points. When you target the content you’re offering to the different marketing personas you have defined for your business, then your prospects will be much more likely to engage with your brand and therefore, more likely to complete a lead-capture form for a piece of your content. In short, providing targeted, useful content will help you generate more qualified leads who may genuinely be interested in what you have to offer.

3. Not using calls-to-action or sharing targeted links to landing pages. I could have sworn the most effective use of social media for lead gen is the ability to share links to your content, blog, and cool offers? Don’t just say you have a great blog or that your fans should check out your awesome new ebook, link to it, and use an enticing call-to-action to do so. You’d be surprised how commonly businesses neglect to do this. Furthermore, share targeted links. Don’t talk about how your followers should register for your upcoming webinar and link to your website’s homepage that has no mention of the webinar. Instead, link to a targeted landing page where visitors to register. Even better, target specific content to different platforms. Create special offers for Twitter followers that are different from your offers to your Facebook fans.

4. Not leveraging social media real estate. When people visit your pages on social sites, they probably want to learn more about your brand and its offerings. On Facebook, you can provide as many links as you would like in the Info section. On Twitter, you can use the short bio to share a link that is integral to your service. Same with LinkedIn, Google+, and other platforms you may be a part of. Use that real estate wisely; it’s there for a reason. While social media is a great platform to help you generate leads, you still want to create a connection between the educational content your prospects are downloading and the recognition that your business does more than give out Free Stuff. Make sure you’re effectively leveraging the real estate of your social media accounts to create that brand and product awareness, too.

5. Not integrating email and social media. Email marketing and social media are great friends, not enemies. They work together well, help each other out to promote content, and share one another’s information on a regular and consistent basis. You should promote your presence on social media sites through buttons on each email as well as share links to email opt-in forms for social followers to sign up to be a part of your email database. When you combine the power of your lead generation Tools, you’ll create a more strategic effort and a better chance of reaching and nurturing your potential customers through multiple fronts, allowing them to choose how they engage with you, consume information, and decide if they would like to move further down the sales cycle.

6. Not displaying highly visible social share and follow buttons. So you have your website and blog and all this great content, but can people easily share it? Be sure to place easy-to-see and -use share and follow buttons on all your content in order to increase its reach. The more your fans share your content with their networks, the more potential new leads will see it!

7. Not analyzing the effectiveness of your social media efforts. You may be on the latest and great social platforms, sharing awesome content, listening and engaging with your potential audience, and collecting that valuable lead information, but how do you determine if it’s working as well as you want it to? You should be regularly analyzing how much traffic and leads you’re generating from each social platform you’re participating in as well as how valuable it is. This will allow your team to evaluate its efforts and make adjustments if needed. For instance, you may want to spend more time engaging the community that tends to convert into more qualified leads. Or perhaps you’ve discovered that Facebook fans prefer different types of offers than Twitter followers. Use this data to perfect your future lead gen efforts in social media to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

How effectively are you using social media for lead generation?

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Andrea Scafidi

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