Michael Moore and Online Lead Generation

If you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story”,   the basic premise is he addresses – wait Michael doesn’t address, he scorches Wall Street and capitalism for basically ruining the auto industry and the Middle Class. He makes a witty and over the top case that the concentration of wealth at the top has directly taken away from the Middle Class and it has seriously shrunken.

What does this have to do with online lead generation? I believe a Middle class of leads is critical, in the same way it is critical as an economic paradigm for successful economic systems that encourage and support initiative and accomplishment for a larger number of people. The Middle Class of leads is that group that isn’t red hot, but that is far more interested in your offering than the old and cold ‘suspects’, and that can be surprisingly significant.

What is different today is this group of Middle Class is actually one which should be growing for you, but for many, it is still ‘missing’. Rather than being squeezed, it should be expanding. Why?

Essentially, advances in website content management based on built-in analytics integrated with marketing automation technology (aka trickle marketing), provide the cost effective touch from marketing.  This is something the sales team doesn’t have the tools or time for, but are eager to benefit from.

Coming out of the cold and into the Middle Class.

Smart marketing organizations launch numerous online initiatives including webinars, white papers, tradeshows and email campaigns that generate volumes of early stage leads. On a daily basis, people are being encouraged to websites through investments in Google Adwords and display ads. While harder to measure, social media plays a huge part in awareness and website traffic through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other forums.

The result is there is a wide range of visitors right now on your website.  They have different personas, performing different tasks on different days, as they cycle through their experience with your organization. If they fill out a form then they become part of your CRM, but otherwise, they are effectively invisible. And we all know that the vast majority don’t register, at least not initially. Your marketing dollars go unrecognized, whether on specific campaigns or investments in awareness or social media and PR.

In addition to the invisible prospects on your website, there are the many informational ones which may have been previously imported into the CRM, but forgotten because they were not ready to take action. Suddenly, they are interested and all over your website - unknown to you. 

If you don’t have ways to hear their digital footprints or respond to them right when and how they need it, effectively they are part of an invisible group.  This is what I call the missing Middle Class. And they represent a huge opportunity.

 Turning the lights on

How can we find those digital clues and indicators and serve the missing Middle Class of leads?   How can you address that group that is between hot and cold -- the interested visitors searching the site looking for answers, watching videos, and downloading info but not necessarily making a final connection and being fulfilled? We had tried various initiatives with Google Analytics and Optimizer to tackle this problem, but I found myself sorting through piles of meaningless statistics and enlisting a lot of technical people in interminable meetings to set up what I thought were simple requests. For my requirements having the  web analytics tool external and separate from my Web content management system added more complexity,  and didn’t offer the integrated answers  and quick timing my marketing and sales team was  seeking.

 Like so many marketers, I needed improved web analytics for tracking leads on the website and a way to present personalized content to bump conversion rates. I needed to find and understand the Middle Class of leads at the right time just as they are ready to transition to hot lead status. And it needed to be easy.

Fortunately now there is integrated software which includes web analytics, marketing automation and web content management (WCM). This is available for small to large organizations, so the customer engagement and personalization that someone like Amazon has done so well is now available to many other organizations. In our case we started the process in January of this year and started getting exciting and surprising insight within weeks.

Sales Intelligence starts with GeoIP

A first important step is to have  GeoIP abilities built in, identifying the country, city, registered company and more about visitors, even if they didn’t fill out a form. We previously had this available with a stand-alone service, but having it built into the website makes it much richer. This provides sales and marketing instant alerts to visitors on the site, who they are and where they are from, and most importantly, what they are interested in. Sales will be excited to have visibility to an entire group of visitors they never previously could not see. One very large deal was closed in part because our sales team could identify the various visitors from an interested company but from different groups, see the timing and content of what they downloaded and searched for. They stepped in to help complete the education and familiarization process across departments and win the business.

 Rating our Content

Having the content editors in control of segmentation parameters such as visitor personas and content profiles means content gets created and targeted much more effectively.  Essentially, content editors now know what content is of more interest to each audience. The marketing team can track and identify profiles and their experiences on the website, and present appropriate offers just in time.  Plus, our inbound traffic from blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter, press releases and other forms of communicating is now something we can measure and compare.  We had our share of surprises about relative rank of content, and some ‘sacred cows’ are no longer honored.

Context  insight for Campaign Management

To understand our numerous campaigns, the team was able to quickly track where visitors came from, what they searched for before and while on our site, and what goals they accomplished.  We found that certain online properties where we are advertising were really more valuable than we thought, and others a disaster. One publication had a lower click through rate, yet we could see their visitors spent much more time on the site, downloaded more content and eventually would register to get our premium content. Using global cookie retention, even if the visits are weeks or months apart, they can be automatically tied together. That let us understand campaigns that were really working, and others that just had a lot of clicks but not the right target audience. The context makes a huge difference. We ended up shifting our ad dollars accordingly.

Get rid of the Robots

Being able to identify traffic types right away is now possible. We realized that over 95% of the overall traffic on our website was from robots, which is surprising but not unusual. This can easily skew statistics, so you’ll want a system that easily ‘tunes them out’ so you get clean results. Additionally, other simple check box filters eliminate our internal company traffic, and easily distinguish between first time and returning visitors. All of these various forms of noise were really skewing what we thought visitors were doing on the site. Since it is easy to adjust, our content editors can see the differences between various visitors and their popular content. They can set up some personalization rules so different content shows up for different profiles, such as technical  white papers ,business videos or vertical industry cases studies.

Long live the Middle Class

In today’s economy, running the right ad campaigns, generating the most effective buzz, and creating the optimal content is critical.   While your prospects and customers have so many more connection points in their decision-making processes,  new website content management technology can bring out  that ‘lost middle class’ to the upper hot category.  Of course, all the relevant information should be readily imported into your CRM system, so sales can manage the pipeline with a much sharper radar and marketing can track the ROI.

Tapping into a valuable group of web prospects that you may have been missing previously will pay off handsomely. An easy to use website system for your marketing and sales teams  makes  a tremendous difference in discovering new important ways to identify and assist  web visitors, and in overall team effectiveness.

If Michael Moore were a high tech capitalist, he’d approve!

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Paul Markun has more than 20 years of experience in marketing for software and networking companies, and leads Sitecore’s marketing initiatives in Communications, Lead generation, Channel and Public  Relations. He can be reached at pm@sitecore.net