Content in the Nucleus of Your Demand Gen Strategy
If you are a marketing professional in the business technology category, there is no doubt in my mind that you have been forced to learn the best practices for capturing leads to fill your sales channel. And if you have not, well, then I would recommend you start doctoring up your resume for a new gig and post it, because odds are the demands of your profession are passing you by, and you’ll probably get canned. But I digress, the point of this blog is to lay down some of the thinking that is in fact working to capture high quality leads—the trick, my friends, is having powerful content.
As you start to build your marketing communications plans to drive leads, you have to start with what the user/your customer is really looking for. Reality is, they really do not want a sales pitch, canned marketing presentation or a white paper that sounds like it was written by a vp of sales (lord knows, there are a lot of those). What they do want is (drum roll please) something that helps them make a decision that will (a) achieve a business need, (b) transform a business process to drive more revenue or most important (c) not get them fired for making the wrong choice. Now these reasons can change or shift a bit based on exactly what the user/your customer is looking for, but generally these are the primary things they are thinking about when they ‘register’ for specific content that will turn them into a lead for your company.
So what can you do about it—well, the first thing is to truly understand your customer and what drives them. If you are a security vendor, your customer is ruled by the concept of risk management and mitigation, so how can you help them build a trusted business by protecting their most critical assets? First, you need to think about what they are accountable for—it goes well beyond your technology solution, and encompasses all aspects of the network, application layer, web presence, mobile strategy and more. Therefore, it cannot be about your solution, instead it should be about the architecture of what it takes to build a trusted business—how all of these things come together into a holistic approach making sure the good guys get what they need (access) and the bad guys stay out (protection).
Often this has to happen by aligning your messaging alongside a third party piece of content that takes a neutral look at this issue, then complementing said content with your own assets that take the user centric approach I mentioned above (instead of a sales pitch). You NEED to make sure your organization understands this, otherwise the pressure they are putting on you to deliver leads is BS. In fact, that is when people turn to cheap trickery to drive leads into a funnel–like giving away a T-shirt, or other lame stuff—which never yields the “right” type of lead, just a name that goes into someone’s CRM system and becomes useless. That is not to say that some cool gadgets do not work for capturing leads, like an iPod—cause it can—but it should not be at the heart of your lead gen strategy, or the program will fail.
The thing is, before you start, really dive into what your potential customer wants to garner from registering for content—I used the example of security above, but this relates to anything in the space: apps, voip, networking, rich Internet apps, etc. Think about the role they play in the bigger picture, and help your potential customer understand what they need to know to make an informed decision, and they will thank you for it by buying your products (oh yeah, as long as they are good :-).
I would be happy to go deep with you on some strategies and approaches to doing this for your business—I have worked with some of the largest vendors in the market, and with some of the smallest start ups to create programs that put killer content in the nucleus of their lead/demand gen activities.
Content Examples:
- Securing VMware: The Road From Perdition
- ITIL Knowledge Accelerator
- State of Business Process Outsourcing: Saving Costs, Adding Value
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