Introducing Seed Nurturing

One thing you'll notice about most lead nurturing campaigns is the fact that they usually take place after prospects land on your site and enter your database. However, what happens when qualified prospects visit your site or social media sites anonymously where you don't necessarily have their names or e-mails?

This is where seed nurturing comes into play. Seed nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information.

It comes down to this: prospects are educating themselves long before you actually identify them by landing on your corporate web site as anonymous visitors, and researching your products and services through third-party resources, word-of-mouth recommendations, and social media sites. Just because you can't identify these individuals doesn't mean they aren't qualified prospects — and because of this, you must nurture them just as you would the known contacts in your database.

If you succeed at this, you will stay top of mind with your prospects as they educate themselves and move through the early stages of their buying process. As a result, they will come to you when they are ready to engage with a sales rep, and you will create a steady flow of highly qualified inbound leads. If you ignore the requirement to build relationships with these very early stage prospects, you're yielding this opportunity to more agile competitors who will scoop these savvy prospects out from under you.

Seed nurturing best practices

Personalize interactions with anonymous visitors

When prospects visit your website anonymously, you can and should still take advantage of the visit to deepen the relationship with them with relevant and personalized content. You may not know their name and email address, but you certainly can know a great deal about their interests and behaviors. First time visitors can see different offers than repeat visitors. Visitors that use specific search terms can see different promotions that generic visitors. Visitors who visit specific pages and show specific interests can see even more specialized content and offers. Using these techniques, you can design “drip marketing” campaigns that help buyers educate themselves before they ever share their contact information with you. For more on this, see the on-demand webinar Supercharge your Demand Generation with Personalization (an oldie but a goodie).

Make valuable content freely available on your site and over social media.

By eliminating the need for registration in order to obtain your whitepapers, eBooks, and other valuable content, you are making the effort to build relationships with people before you have them in your database. You may be thinking to yourself, “If I do this, I'll be wasting valuable offers on people I'll never be able to identify.” On the contrary, you will strengthen your readership, and these dedicated yet anonymous leads will likely come to you as inbound leads once their levels of interest are high enough. Moreover, whether you like it or not, in most cases the information is already out there on social sites, so you may as well embrace the trend rather than fight it. David Merman Scott writes more on this topic in Say NO to squeezing your buyers.

Use social media to build a rock-solid reputation that builds credibility and trust with prospects.

One of the biggest obstacles in the B2B purchasing process is the feeling of risk that overcomes B2B buyers, causing them to behave irrationally during the decision-making process. Seed nurturing plays a key role in diminishing this risk by acting as a vehicle for you to build your reputation as a thought leader and gain the trust of early stage prospects. For example, you can use Twitter to inform people of your views on developments in your industry or show your ability to solve specific business pains by becoming an “Expert” on LinkedIn. B2B buyers trust thought leaders who can demonstrate they understand buyer problems and how to solve them. While a reputation of thought leadership will never be as “risk-reducing” as a personal referral, it is a great way to build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.

Conclusion

While these ideas represent a departure from what you may consider traditional lead generation techniques, they will help you plant the seeds for highly qualified prospects to reach out to you when they are ready, and once this happens, you can rest easy knowing that you've nurtured them appropriately and gained their trust as you would through a traditional drip marketing campaign.

How have you incorporating seed nurturing into your marketing mix?

This blog was reposted from Modern B2B Sales on http://blog.marketo.com/blog/, and originally posted by Patrick Donnelly

Make the Connection: Attend the Charlotte AMA's orientation and connection event February 3rd

Whether you've recently joined the Charlotte AMA, or have been a member for awhile and want to get the most out of your membership, please plan to join us at our February 3rd orientation and connection event. It’ll take place from 6 – 7:30 p. m., at the offices of Luquire George Andrews (4201 Congress Street, Charlotte, NC 28209).
Following the orientation, get to know other Charlotte AMA members by joining us downstairs at the Village Tavern Restaurant for some social networking time.
Take a moment now to RSVP: http://tinyurl.com/yak9ppn
Questions? Please contact Christine Eubanks and eubanks@lgaadv.com

Show Me the Money: Learn to Turn Tweets into Dollars at Social Media Marketing Event February 10

Proctor and Gamble’s Facebook experiment with its Tide product in 2008 proved that advertisers can compel internet users to “friend” them on social media sites. But how does a company turn a friend into a paying customer? Join the Charlotte AMA at their February event as attendes explore strategies companies can use to generate revenue via a presence on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Attendees will leave this event with a clear set of strategies of succeeding in a marketplace where users are much more interested in friends and socializing than they are in advertising. At this program, marketers will:

1. Hear case studies of companies who have earned revenue from a social media presence.
2. Learn how to convert friends into paying customers.
3. Learn strategies for safely associating your company’s brand with user-generated content.

The expert panelists at the event will include:

• Chris Harrington
  Technology Director
  Luquire George Andrews
• Look for additional panelists to be added soon.

The event will take place from 5:30 p.m. – 8 p.m. at the Dilworth Neighborhood Grille. Those attending in person will enjoy pre-meeting networking opportunities and food beginning at 5:30 p.m. Admissions costs are $20 for current CAMA members and students; and $35 for non-members and all walk-ins. Individuals may register online for the event now through February 8th by visiting http://www.charlotteama.com/register.html

Considering Joining Charlotte AMA, Read What Leslie Gillock Has to Say

I first became acquainted with the Charlotte AMA last Spring when I was asked to speak about Brand Positioning at one of the meetings. I met so many interesting and talented marketing professionals from a wide range of businesses that night, I decided then and there I would come back to better understand this organization - and to meet more people. After attending several more meetings,

I realized that I was becoming a regular, and I was getting value from the relationships I was developing with other members and the information I was receiving at the meetings. It was time to join.

Has it been worth it? Absolutely, for 3 reasons:

Professional Development: I am a firm believer in continuous learning. Every month CAMA provides the opportunity to learn from experts about everything from social media to innovation and to be inspired by seeing how other brands and companies - outside of my own - approach the positioning, targeting and marketing of their brands, and how they adapt to changing market conditions.

Networking: I am also a believer in getting out of my own "backyard". We all have strong networks within our own companies and industries in which we interact. The opportunity to interact with other marketing professionals from a diverse range of companies, backgrounds, disciplines and experience can be enlightening and thought provoking.

Information Access: In addition to the above, the minute you become a member you gain access to the Resource Library on MarketingPower.com: a source of publications, white papers, research, best practices and articles that I have found useful in my work time and time again.

And now it's your turn. I'm a newly recruited member of the CAMA Membership Committee - so join today and make me look good!

How to be a great client

As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.

Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to get shipped out the door. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

• Before engaging with the innovator, foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are.
• If you can't write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the innovator to figure it out?
• Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
• After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they've always been on the list.
• Hire the right person. Don't ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you're looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
• Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
• Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you're working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
• Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you'll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?
• Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don't care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn't mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
• Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it's there but someone in your office killed it.
• Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
• When you find a faux innovator, run. Don't stick with someone who doesn't deserve the hard work you're doing to clear a path.
• Celebrate the innovator. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you'll attract more innovators and do even better work next time if innovators understand how much they benefit from working with you.

This blog was reposted from Seth Godin's blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. Stay tuned for a CAMA podcast interview with Seth in 2010

Join the Charlotte AMA on December 9th for Branding in 2010: Your Company, Your Career and You

As 2009 draws to a close, individuals and companies are seeking more and better ways to differentiate and stand out both in the job market and in the marketplace.

Join the Charlotte AMA at Dilworth Neighborhood Grille on December 9th as we utilize the Charlotte AMA Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to analyze and discuss the concept of brand positioning from multiple facets. You’ll learn strategies for creating indelible brand impressions that make you (or your company) uniquely distinguishable from the competition.

During a series of four roundtable presentation sessions, you’ll investigate personal and corporate brand positioning from the perspectives of the following four SIGs:

• Branding SIG. Facilitated by Rebecka Nelli, CEO of TRREX Inc.
• Interactive SIG. Facilitated by Spencer Williams, National Account Manager for Westwood Radio Networks
• Market Research SIG. Facilitated by Bill McDowell, Senior Partner at Accelerant Research
• Cause Marketing SIG. Facilitated by Sheila Neisler, Principal of Catalyst Consulting
  

Be a part of this highly interactive meeting format, as you bounce your branding ideas off Charlotte’s best and brightest, and learn to see your brand challenges and solutions from a different light. This meeting is all about you. Bring your questions, curiosity and lots of business cards.

Register online through December 8th at: http://www.charlotteama.com

Eating at Your Competition’s Market Share: Join the Charlotte AMA November 11^th to Learn How the Bloom Grocery Chain Gets it Done

Successful marketing professionals know a recession offers many opportunities to both increase market share and leverage their company for even higher returns in the recovery. Join the Charlotte AMA at our November meeting as Angie Hunter, Marketing Director at Bloom, discusses the keys to the grocery store chain’s brand success, as well as Bloom’s plans to challenge Harris Teeter with the opening of their newest store in the heart of Dilworth.

At this program, marketers will:

• Comprehend the rationale and process behind Bloom’s “different kind of grocery store” branding strategy.
• Understand Bloom’s use of strategic planning and research in their concept development process.
• Walk away with tools and strategies for differentiating their brands in a crowded marketplace.

Individuals may register online for the event now through November 10th by visiting http://www.charlotteama.com/register.html