A lead is a person who has in some way, shape, or form indicated interest in your company’s product or service. According to Marketo, in our own revenue cycle, a lead is “a qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behavior”. Leads are categories according to degrees of qualification and probability of conversion. Most often they are grouped together the two main categories of lead stages: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) : These prospects are considered viable marketing leads, taking implicit scoring criteria, explicit scoring criteria, and (if available) BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline) into considerations. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) : These leads are sales-ready, which often must be determined through direct contact with sales. Once sales has tested to determine the qualifications of an SQL, marketing can use that data to improve MQL quality.

What is TOFU, MOFU & BOFU?

Mapping buyer intent and campaigns should be mapped to different stages of the customer journey or buying cycle. Often divided up into three parts: Top-of-Funnel, Middle-of-Funnel, and Bottom-of-Funnel. Top-of-Funnel (TOFU) : A person in this buying phase is at the beginning of your sales and marketing funnel, and is aware of your product or service but is not ready to buy. Individuals in the TOFU stage should be primarily offered educational materials. Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU) : This buying phase occurs in the middle of your sales and marketing funnel. A person arrives here after he or she has displayed buying behavior, engaged with your content, and is potentially a sales lead. Your offers for MOFU leads are still educational, but they will be more geared towards your product or service—in Marketo’s case, buying guides or ROI calculators. Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU) : This buying phase occurs at the bottom of your funnel, and indicates that your lead is close to becoming a customer. Your offers for BOFU leads are very specific to your product or service—think datasheets and pricing guides

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process of building and managing relationships with leads that are not necessarily ready to purchase. The purpose is to win their business when they are ready to buy. A lead nurturing workflow includes automatically following up with leads, guiding them through the buyer’s journey, and finally, converting the leads into customers. Lead nurturing, sometimes known as drip marketing, is part of an ongoing qualification process that involves a series of communications intended to build trust and awareness, and keep a relationship going until the prospect is ready to buy. Most discussions about lead nurturing center on using email. There’s no question that this is a primary tool for communicating with prospects, but today a more holistic perspective is needed. Companies increasingly communicate through social media and by other means. All channels should be coordinated to avoid repetition, overload and so forth. Effective nurturing requires an intimate understanding of a customer purchase cycle for your target audience. Not all are thinking of buying something, but many are. It’s therefore important to understand where prospects are in the purchase cycle and how to align nurturing streams and content with the customer journey and buying cycle.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a process of evaluating the sales-worthiness of a lead by consolidating points assigned to a variety of objective and behavioral factors. A lead score, expressed as a numeric value, can tell you how interested a prospect is in your product. Leads are scored based on their implicit buying signals i.e. actions, behaviors, engagement level over time, profile, demographics and more. In other words, you need a formula for determining how to treat each lead based on the lead’s characteristics and activities. Each action or behavior has an assigned point value designated by the owner of the lead management system.hese point values automatically accrue as the contact progresses through the buyer’s journey (progressive profiling). For marketers, a lead score means that you can quickly see the leads you have generated, prioritize them based on score, and assign those that are most likely to become opportunities to sales for follow-up. For your sales reps, a lead score provides a concrete indication of lead engagement before they ever pick up the phone, so your reps can feel conﬁdent that reaching out will be well worth their time. Scoring establishes a concrete, objective system for lead qualiﬁcation for both marketing and sales.

What is Account-based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused approach to B2B marketing in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. ABM concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account. ABM products and services provide innovative and predictive insights into customer behavior across channels and the buying cycle through the application of a unique collaborative approach aimed at identifying and securing profitable customers, keeping them longer, and growing their lifetime value.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy marketers use to pull potential customers into a company’s marketing funnel. It uses social media, SEO, content marketing, events, blogs, events and more to create brand awareness and attract new business. Typically, inbound marketing includes the use of a marketing automation platform to carry out these initiatives.

Attribution modelling is the process of understanding the buying behavior of your customers and to determine the most effective marketing channels for investment. Attribution maps business value and performance to each marketing touchpoint that contributed to a customer. There are multiple types of attribution models, but the two most common types of attribution models are single-touch and multi-touch attribution. Multi-touch attribution looks at journeys of individual users, and analyzes the path-to-conversion across multiple touchpoints. Account-specific, near-real-time data is converted into insights about how digital and non-digital marketing campaigns are performing at each level, from vendors to channels to creative. This helps measure the impact that each individual digital touchpoint has on conversion.

What is Content Marketing?

A content marketing includes, the ecosystems of writers and freelancers, editorial calendars and content strategies, content delivery tactics, and content creation processes to create and distribute the content they need to support their company’s go-to-market strategy. Content marketing practices enables companies to create high-impact modular content that engages, entertains and inspires action towards a purchase decision. Content optimization enables companies to dynamically repackaged, repurposed redistributed, and reconfiguring narratives for optimal impact across the channels and communities that will have the highest yield. Content Distribution enables companies to identify and target their most profitable prospects with the right content at the right time and stage of the buying cycle.

What is a Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey, Buying Cycle or Closed-looped Lifecycle is the process of developing a deeper understanding of how customers make decisions and what tools and techniques succeed in driving customers cost-effectively through the Buying Cycle. Most central idea in the Buying Cycle concept is incrementalism i.e. moving customers from one stage of the buying cycle to the next requires an intimate understanding of customer behavior and triggers in each stage. Insight-driven organizations build detailed customer decision journeys maps for their most valuable segments to track cross-channel behavior and identify, target and action those moments where companies can influence the journey. Key to customer-centric marketing is mapping the customer’s journey across all touchpoint engagement, channels, segmentation and targeting

A/B testing, or split testing, compares the conversion rates of two assets (such as landing pages, emails, or website pages) by splitting the traffic or email send between both, and then comparing results. You can also perform A/B/C tests and A/B/C/D tests. A/B testing your lead generation assets and campaigns is inherently simple, as you’re only testing a single variable at a time. This makes it easier to form actionable conclusions. A/B testing is also the ideal choice for smaller companies with less traffic or smaller databases—smaller amounts of traffic or leads can’t handle a more complex test.

Lead Generation Strategies & Services

Lead Generation

increase Top-of-Funnel (TOFU) pipeline and conversions with highly-qualified prospects through customer acquisition lead generation and inbound marketing programs.

Lead Nurturing

Maximize pipeline conversions and velocity through automated campaigns that personalize and reconfiguring experiences across channels, communities, and buying journeys.

Customer Expansion

Maximum existing customer profitability and lifetime value through upsell and cross-sell campaigns that demonstrate incremental value and loyal customers rewards.

Account-based Marketing

Acquire key customers through highly orchestrated campaigns that leverage advanced segmentation and analytics to deliver personalized content and experiences.