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GearyPMG Whitepaper: Lead Generation and Lead Management Strategies

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

GearyPMG just released a whitepaper about proper lead generation and management strategies. The whitepaper investigates:

How marketers are mismanaging their lead generation campaigns
Criteria for evaluating a lead management technology solution
Strategies and tactics to increase the efficiency of lead management programs

The following in an excerpt from a newly released whitepaper from GearyPMG. To download the whitepaper in its entirety, click the download link at the bottom of this post.

Lead generation is a common marketing goal. Most strategies and a majority of marketing programs are created with the goal of producing leads. While this goal keeps marketing and sales departments progressing forward, lead generation is only the means to the end goal of driving revenue. If leads do not convert into business, are they serving their intended purpose? This whitepaper will investigate how marketers might be losing leads through fragmented management tactics and present tips and tricks about how marketing departments can manage earned leads efficiently—so not one lead is wasted.

Lead generation is a sizeable marketing investment with $1.7 billion projected to be spent on lead generation in 2011. Digital lead management is still transitioning into the digital space as 65 percent of marketers note that they are increasing spending on lead generation-based website design and 47 percent are investing in online data quality and management (CSO Insights). While efforts and budgets are being allocated to digital lead generation, most marketers note it as one of their top three challenges—behind lack of budget and lack of time for efficient program execution (MarketingProfs). This means that generating leads is a top marketing priority that will get resource support, but there is still a gap between generating leads and generating business.

Download here–

GearyPMG Whitepaper_Lead Management Generation Strategies

Posted in Best Practices, Enrollment Marketing, Lead Management, Whitepaper | No Comments »

Another Ad Blunder

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

ESPN.com Ad Blunder

Once again how important are details? Or better stated, how important is it to pay attention to details? When trying to optimize digital marketing campaigns, I like to look at the whole funnel. Two points of interest are where traffic comes from and where it converts; it’s not just the lead for that matters when optimizing a conversion funnel.

The image to the right is an example of what happens when marketers do not pay attention to detail. The advertisement is promoting an outdated event. I am not trying to cast blame on one party (as both the marketer and ad network could be at fault), but still, this is a waste of valuable ad space that drives me nuts.

Remember with all of your media campaigns to focus on the entire conversion process. Pay attention to where the user ENTERS your funnel (like the display ad seen here). Monitor users as they MOVE through the process, and then optimize the end RESULT. Do this, and you can be sure that you’re always maximizing your media and supporting a holistic conversion funnel.

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Best Practices, Conversion | No Comments »

Method, Madness, Execution, Conversions, Shaq?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I was watching Blue Chips the other day, the movie with Nick Nolte and Shaquille O’Neill. As an aside, he never should have signed on with the Celtics. Back to the film, it contains one of the most clichéd sports analogies. To paraphrase, it went something like:

“I’ll give them the play book. They can know our offense, they can know our defense, all that matters is how we execute.”

This quote can be applied into many aspects of our professional and personal lives.

By way of example, I’m applying it to conversion rate optimization since it’s what a performance analyst does best.

Typical questions around conversion rate optimization are: “What are your top tips for improving a site,” “Do I need to change my button colors,” “Should I put different images on my website,” or “What font is best?”

What people fail to understand is that it’s not just one thing, it’s about the overall execution. It’s an over simplifaction to think that one can make random tweaks to a site, and have it magically improve conversion rates. There is a method to the madness, and an execution of the method. When I’m working on a client’s conversion rate optimization, I go through the following steps:

1. Make sure tracking is set up, as this is the crux of your data. Without it, you can’t make any educated recommendations on which changes to test.

2. Remember and focus on the user. What brings them to your website? What needs or problems do they want solutions for?

3. Analyze the data and how people found your site. What are the hot keywords that attracted the most visits?

4. Work off of a check list of what you should consider testing on the site. This can include content, calls to action and value props. Then run the tests, and analyze the data before making a test recommendation.

Each conversion professional has his or her own process. This is just my way of channeling my own conversion rate madness into a methodology that delivers the results my clients expect.

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG

Posted in Best Practices, Conversion, SEM | No Comments »

The Campaign Your Campaign Could Smell Like

Friday, July 16th, 2010

The social media scene is abuzz regarding the success Wieden + Kennedy is having as a result of a remarkable viral campaign for the Old Spice brand. Earlier this year, W + K launched a clever campaign spotlighting Isaiah Mustafa as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”

Posted in Best Practices | No Comments »

Best Practices for World-Class Affiliate Marketing

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Affiliate marketing can be daunting for education marketers. There are various levels of strategy across career college marketing. World-class education marketers have robust affiliate marketing programs that guarantee lead quality, accountability and integration with affiliate partners. They qualify leads, vet duplications and set priorities based on conversion forecasting models.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Best Practices, Enrollment Marketing | No Comments »

New York Knicks Landing Page Blunder

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Just how important are details? VERY. Just ask the New York Knicks. In a lobbying effort, the Knicks have been running ads on Bing (and possibly other search engines) that advertise some of the hottest free agents in the NBA. The ad campaign linked visitors to a page where you could by season tickets. Great idea, right? The problem is we’re about to enter the 2010/2011 season and the page was advertising 2009/2010 season tickets. OOPS! Some speculate that the ads may have been running since as early as February. For the full article that was reported by ClickZ click here. Hopefully this goes down as a lesson learned by who ever does the marketing.

Now I can only imagine how much money was wasted. But I wonder if any one ever looked at the conversion rates and asked “Hmm, why aren’t we converting?” I wonder how many people build campaigns and forget about them?

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG.

Posted in Best Practices, Conversion | No Comments »

A Lesson Learned in Data

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

At the beginning of each week, I build a report to track the conversion rates of all our websites. I do this to ensure that each and every one of our sites and campaigns perform at the highest possible level. It also helps me to see where I need to focus more of my attention.

This Monday, I noticed in my data that two sites had drastically dropped off on lead volume. I began to investigate, and what I found has caused me to go back and look further into sites and the analytics that are in use. I will say it was a little startling; a couple sites had inconsistent link names. As an example my goal funnel would look for school_name-step-1 but at times would appear as school_name_-step-1.