By Nettie Hartsock
For this edition, we tapped into the highly regarded, longtime marketing expertise of Anne Holland, founder and CEO of MarketingSherpa. Anne is widely considered one of the foremost experts in the marketing and online advertising field.
MarketingSherpa is a media company focused on publishing case studies, results data and best practices for marketing, advertising, and public relations professionals. More than 173,000 marketing professionals and their agencies read MarketingSherpa every week, and the site has an active traffic base as well (see http://www.marketingsherpa.com).
During our interview, Anne discussed surprising results from her new IT Marketing Benchmark Survey, thoughts on the blogging debate and comments on lead generation and the importance of differentiating quality leads.
WhitePaperSource: Hi Anne, thank you so much for doing this interview. Can you share with our readers some of the highlights of the new data results from your IT Marketing Benchmark Survey? What surprised you most about the results?
Holland: We surveyed actual IT pros for the study and discovered fewer than 10% of IT personnel read blogs on any sort of regular basis, but 38.5% of IT pros say they’ll be very likely to respond to a white paper offer. So white papers may seem dull to marketers but the marketplace still is interested in them. On the other hand, we also surveyed marketers targeting IT pros, and discovered they are in love with webinars and road shows right now as lead generation and branding campaigns.
WhitePaperSource: Can you talk a bit about the blog aspect of the research, as there is such a debate whether blogging is good “marketing”?
Holland: Blogging can be a good PR tactic because 53% of surveyed journalists say they skim them regularly looking for story and interview ideas. So a blog might interest a journalist in your company or in interviewing a tech person at your company, while it might not appeal to techies directly. So there’s a lot of influence.
WhitePaperSource: Tell us how MarketingSherpa helps white paper marketers be more effective.
Holland: We interview marketers for new B2B (business-to-business) case studies every week and often learn clever and inspirational tactics they’ve used to either come up with great new content for white papers or smart ways they distributed the white paper to get loads of leads and readers. You can see those B2B case studies at our site.
WhitePaperSource: You’re widely considered an expert on lead generation and marketing. Why is lead generation so important to today’s businesses?
Holland: You have to feed the hungry maw of the sales department. The key these days is feeding them only the most qualified leads, and holding onto the other leads for your own nurturing campaigns until those leads in turn are ready to be fed to sales. This means you have to quickly sort your leads, reply to them, qualify them, hand off the best, and keep working the rest. Your life in marketing should be 50% generation and then 50% back-end lead management and nurturing. Unfortunately, hardly anyone manages that now.
WhitePaperSource: How important are white papers for generating leads and why?
Holland: You establish thought leadership and trust. Plus, of course, your white paper may be viral - passed along within an organization - which is critical now that more often committees make technology decisions instead of solitary leaders.
WhitePaperSource: What are some effective methods for using white papers as lead generation tools?
Holland: Most effective - niche them out. Create a series of white papers with an angle for each member of the committee (CFO, CTO, CMO, etc.) and/or for each vertical market you serve. Generic white papers get generic response. Also watch Biz360 stats to see what the hot topics are so you can catch the wave and not publish a “me-too” paper when a wave of interest is ending.
WhitePaperSource: If you had to pick three weak areas that companies have in marketing their white papers online, what would they be and how can companies address them?
Holland: Most landing pages are awful. Out of 100 typical clicks you get to your white paper offer, 96 will leave that page without registering for the paper. Consider making some papers “no registration required,” just so you get more downloads and pass along to your best collateral. If they’re impressed and truly qualified leads, they’ll contact you afterwards of their own accord and your sales team will thank you.
DISCUSSION: Discuss this topic at the WhitePaperSource forum.
