At the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, Todd Davidson of Bulldog Solutions tackles the question on every B2B marketer’s mind:

How can I translate my marketing campaigns into qualified leads and, ultimately, sales?

He starts off by assessing why this can be so challenging for companies: The Disconnect.

1. Marketing initiatives developed in silos
2. No way to tell what’s working…and what’s not
3. Successes aren’t repeatable, failures aren’t used to educate
4. The customer’s needs are lost in the mix
5. Integrated marketing is very difficult in this environment

All of this is bad. Instead, marketers want to learn how to define strategy, engage prospects and convert leads. This starts with defining the overall goals of the pilot program. What are the marketing goals? What’s a win? What are other key performance indicators? Then, other important steps follow:

Audience Definition

* Who are the buyer types that are going affect the decision maker in your target market (economic, technical, influencer, executive)? What are their defining profile attributes (job title, function role, preferred contact)?

* What is their company profile?

* What are their behavioral cues? How can we speak directly to them? Pain points? Motivators? Validators?

* What are their media preferences? Know how your audience gets their news and where they get it from.

The goal: Create a clear buyer persona. You’re not creating marketing materials into a void–you’re creating for a definite audience. With this information you can create a Lead Score: Who do I think my ideal leads are? What are their behaviors? These should become more specific as you learn more, and lead scores more accurate.

The ultimate goal is to determine who is truly sales ready and who is only just beginning to learn. Don’t turn people off who aren’t ready to buy yet but might be in the future. This is about sales efficiency and helps creates marketing-sales trust.

Message Development

* Your goal is to create messages of high relevance that also align with your solutions, services and products. Don’t pitch topics that might be current or trendy but don’t have much, if anything, to do with what you sell.

* Exhaust all potential sources of information and research: media companies, analysts, blogs, websites, social network and communities. And don’t forget traditional media: talk to people, read offline.

* Hot Topic Generation: What is the relevance of our topic? And what is the urgency of the topic? Find the natural conversation starting point.

* Look for Themes: This allows you to develop a series of integrated marketing offerings, including webinars, white papers, and speaking engagements.

This lets you create a Message Matrix: Core messages/core personas/timeline

One of the challenges of message creation, however, is the Content Gap. Identify existing content that can be used and look for people within your company who can help develop content. You have information–figure out how to access it.

You can also generate content by leveraging the “friends” of your organization: executive and senior relationships, customers and clients, analysts, industry experts and bloggers and industry professionals.

Promotion Planning

* How do we create the audience? What are all the pieces (podcasts, email, physical events, white papers, newsletters, article, SEM, webinars, etc.) I can use to get people engaged and involved?

* Assess reach and value. A large email blast might reach many people, but they may not be of high value, whereas an executive round table is a limited audience, but they are influential decision makers

* Identify valued partners in business and media to help you do your job better.

Finally, all of the major initiatives need to be organized into a clear, actionable time line.

Conversion Planning

* Create a higher threshold for lead evaluation that takes into account a number of cues of engagement. This ensures that marketers are passing on more qualified leads to sales.

* What are the stages of the buying cycle? Learn to identify these in order to understand how to most effectively draw people in and have them continue along the sales pipeline.

The final Campaign Blueprint example?

Personas → Messaging → Message Testing → Media Promotion → Event → Follow up

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.  He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:[email protected].