Your prospect has clicked on your search engine ad, organic link, banner ad or the call to action in your e-mail. So are you ready for what he does next?
In its 2009 white paper, Post-Click Marketing: Generate More Selling Opportunities from Your Web Traffic, Demandbase—a San Francisco-based B-to-B lead generation marketing company—asserts that most online B-to-B marketing dollars are spent on so-called "pre-click" marketing efforts. In fact, by 2011, companies are projected to spend $25.2 billion on search engine marketing, but very little on "post-click" marketing.
Since the average conversion rate for a B-to-B keyword marketing campaign is usually less than 5 percent—when a consumer became an actual lead by signing up for an event, downloading a white paper or pursuing some other call to action—that leaves 95 percent of your marketing campaign dollars unquantified. Demandbase says it's this vast majority of Web site visitors that B-to-B marketers potentially can capture with better post-click marketing efforts.
Here are three key parts to post-click marketing campaigns, which leading-edge companies are deploying by intertwining these concepts in lead management systems:
1. Dedicated landing pages
The less search, the better. So sending prospects to your homepage or general product page is not good enough, in which you may lose that sought-after click as a result. Prospects want to see what they were expecting, so you should have a specific landing page or microsite waiting for them.
2. Create a solid call to action
What do you want prospects to do once they click to your site? You need to have a clear, as well as unique, call to action for your campaign, because then visitors will be more likely to act than if you present them with either a generic or overloaded page. A specific, valued offer and a clear, concise call to action are fundamental to the campaign's success at this stage.
3. Strategic follow-up
This is the point where so many post-click marketing campaigns fall apart, says the Demandbase white paper. A follow-up request often gets routed to an automated CRM or marketing system, or sent to a telemarketer for follow-up at a future date. But this is not reliable for closing the deal, or even qualifying a lead.
In fact, recent research shows the odds of contacting a lead increase 100 times if outreach is attempted within five minutes of the prospect's action versus even waiting 30 minutes. Thus, a basic system for scoring all inbound leads—created in conjunction with the salespeople who will be making the outreach phone calls—can prompt quick and thorough follow-up on all the qualified leads. You must strike while the iron is hot.
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