In our last post we talked about developing buyer personas, and offered a template to help guide you through that process. If you’ve taken a look at our examples—Gary the mortgage broker, and Maria the loan processor—you’ve begun to understand the kind of very useful information that you can gain from the buyer persona. Now [...]
Building a buyer persona for marketing is much like developing a character for a novel or a movie—the difference is that you’re not really making anything up from scratch! Your buyers already exist. You’re just defining the specifics as a single, “average” person. When you first sit down to work on persona development, it can [...]
When my husband answers the phone at home, I can often tell who’s calling just by the way he speaks to the caller. Like most people, he speaks differently to different categories of people: a friend, a colleague, our dog’s vet, and so on. Even within categories his tone and choice of words can differ; [...]
I looked into my crystal ball this morning and saw snow falling on a cute little village. Okay, well, it’s a snowglobe, which means I can make some controversial predictions for 2012 and blame it on the tool if I’m wrong.
As marketers who are already fans of marketing automation, you’re unlikely to need convincing that lead nurturing is a good idea. But you ARE likely to have colleagues and management that aren’t as aware as you are of the impact lead nurturing can have on the buying cycle and ultimately revenue. For those folks in [...]
When you’re considering buying a product or service, you go through a process of decision-making (take another look at the buying decision flowchart from our December 7 post). During this buying process, you look at different kinds of information to help with your decision: At first, you’re typically interested in general information: how do I [...]
A well-designed lead nurture should be implemented as a conversation between you and your prospect. After working on hundreds of nurtures, I’ve come up with the basic recipe for a successful nurture program, and a “Nurture Brief” for putting the requirements together before I build the flow. A defined objective Entry and exit criteria Touchpoints/key [...]
To kick off our discussion of lead nurturing, let’s start with defining the term. DemandGen’s Definition of Lead Nurturing The process of engaging prospects by providing the information and dialogue they need at each stage of their buying process to position your company as the best choice to help them achieve their objectives. Let’s look [...]
If there is one thing that is common to marketing managers everywhere, it’s having to continually justify your spending to the executive team. The benefits of marketing are notoriously hard to measure. The good news is that lead scoring is one of the easiest marketing programs to justify! Lead scoring presents you with two key [...]
Recently we talked about the essential steps in building your lead scoring model, starting with last week’s checklist to help ensure that you’re ready to initiate a lead scoring project. Let’s look briefly at the remaining steps in building your model. The Demand Gen Taskforce Pull together the key stakeholders in Sales and Marketing and [...]
