The Importance of Lead Generation and Nurturing

Why is Lead Generation and Nurturing so Important?

Focus on Your Sales Funnel

One of the most challenging and most commonly misunderstood components of successful business-to-business marketing is Lead Generation and Nurturing (or ‘demand generation and management’).

Starting with how you generate inquiries through the challenging hand-off and follow-up by your sales force, and most importantly how you measure the results, this ”discipline” sees more wasted money, more missed opportunities, and more downright mistakes than any other area in business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales.

Now that some of the traditional direct mail disciplines (Multivariate testing, A/B splits) are being used on the Internet (web design, email marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, landing page optimization, social media, web 2.0), it has made Lead Generation and Nurturing (or Demand generation and Management)  process more complex to set up, but at the same time easier to manage than ever. 

Why Lead Generation and Nurturing is so important

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Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0

What’s Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0, exactly?

The time is now.

Why is everyone talking about Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0? Who cares about the “Real-time Web?”

Several years ago when Google modified its Pagerank Algorithm, and started factoring in how other influential websites link to yours,  few people really could imagine the explosion of social media engines like Linked-in, Facebook, and Twitter. Your search engine visibility is determined not only by the quality of the content on your website, but by who is linking to you.

Just recently, Google has launched the real-time web. Now more than ever there is an extraordinary opportunity for small businesses to carve out a niche in their social media marketplaces — effectively creating their own channel to communicate with their customers and prospects.

In an article in Huffpost by Manish Mehta, the Vice President, Social Media and Community at Dell Inc. (who can attribute $7 million in sales to Twitter for doing nothing at all!),  Mehta affirms “Social media isn’t a means to further a corporation’s strategy, it’s a means to help determine it.”

Sometimes pictures (or mindmaps) are better than words, so I’ve created a Mindmap that illustrates a general Inbound Marketing/Social Media Strategy.

Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0 Strategy for Small Businesses

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