Who doesn’t?

I haven’t met a sales or marketing person that doesn’t want more leads to ultimately close more deals. Because of this constant demand for more leads, most channel marketing and sales professionals believe that their efforts should start with demand generation. However, I question whether demand generation is really your best starting point.

Is Pushing Leads Straight into the Funnel Really a Great Idea?

Remember our recent post about Putting an End to Leaky Pipe Syndrome? Pushing a bunch of leads into the funnel may seem like a great idea. However, without a supporting framework and key elements like nurturing campaigns and established marketing and sales qualification strategies, the vast majority of your leads will never convert to sales.

There’s Got to Be a Better Way (Psssst – There is!)

What Zift has learned during the past decade of working with many of the most successful channel organizations around the world is that there is a better way. First and foremost, don’t start with demand generation campaigns for partners. Instead, follow these steps to build a solid foundation that helps partners support and nurture leads before they hit the pipeline:

1. Marketing & Sales Qualification: Start by defining tele-qualification roles and providing scripts to improve the effectiveness of outreach efforts.

2. Online Presence Enhancement: Use syndicated content to improve your partners’ online presence while ensuring brand consistency and strengthening data and insight about site visitors with analytics. Not providing this means you run the risk of your partners being disqualified early on in the sales process. Social media syndication can also enhance your partners’ social media efforts and expand your reach.

3. Lead Distribution with Closed Loop Analytics: Your marketing efforts are already generating leads that you share with your partners. Now you can automate lead distribution to deliver them faster, with much less hassle, and increase visibility into what is actually happening to the leads you pass on to partners. Conversely, gaining your partners’ confidence in sharing leads and opportunities with you opens the door to capturing pipeline on their generated leads.

4. Nurturing Programs: Direct partner efforts for leads that are not ready to buy with both content and technology to help them nurture leads and stay top of mind across the life of a sale. Keep in mind that, according to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.

5. Demand Generation: Offer demand generation elements such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online advertising and email marketing to drive additional leads for partners. But, keep the best practices outlined here in mind and don’t kick off demand gen until tele-qualification, web presence and nurturing efforts have been put into place.

The next time your team screams about wanting more leads, think about whether you have established the proper foundation to drive sales. Then consider which pieces are missing to ensure your partner efforts and marketing investments will have the most success.

The post Not So Fast! Build a Foundation Before Leads Hit the Funnel appeared first on Zift Solutions.

Dynamic Content Syndication Delivers Customized Content That’s Good for SEO

Far from “search spam,” which is intentionally duplicated content that appears within the same website and is designed to manipulate search results and gain more traffic, dynamic content syndication provides customized content that is good for SEO. Keep in mind a comprehensive marketing strategy centered on high-caliber content remains one of the best ways to organically grow your search ranking.

Staying Out In Front of Evolving SEO Technology

Zift is always on top of advancements and changes to SEO technology and we’ve been watching Google’s latest algorithm update, known as Panda 4.0, closely. The aim of Panda 4.0 is to sniff out websites with too much duplicate or poor quality content with little value to users, particularly content that is meant to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

Legitimate Syndication Translates to More High-Quality Content

Panda 4.0 has some worried about the potentially negative impact of content syndication on search engine rankings and website traffic. Sites that aggressively aggregate and post irrelevant or repetitive content will likely see traffic loss due to Panda 4.0. However, legitimate content syndication translates to more high-quality content on your website and it will not negatively affect your Google® rankings.

The Zift experts are actively keeping an eye on Panda 4.0 (just as we have and will with all Google and Search Engine updates). Since its May release, we have seen no negative impacts to sites that utilize Zift’s dynamic content syndication. Rest assured that we’ll continue to stay out in front of evolving SEO technology developments and keep you up-to-date with best practices to optimize your content, site rankings and results.

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An Ineffective Commonality

The importance of a strong channel marketing strategy is undisputed.  However, even channel communities executing strong communication and automation practices, can fall victim to an ineffective channel marketing approach. Channel marketing organizations are implementing a top-down approach to their channel which often results in a lack of partner adoption of the marketing materials that the supplier is providing.

Problem with Top-Down Approach

The problem with a top-down approach to channel marketing is the resources that the suppliers provide to their partner communities fail to address the pain points of their target audience.  These resources don’t promote the partner’s value proposition and they subject the partner’s brand to the corporate brand.

Partner Focused Solution

At Zift Solutions we recommend a bottom up approach to channel marketing. This starts by collaborating with your partners to better understand their needs and goals. In implementing a bottom up approach suppliers develop more effective marketing materials that are capable of addressing their partner’s audience’s pain points, promoting the suppliers brand as well as the partner’s brand, and endorsing the partner’s value proposition. This approach builds loyalty and drives adoption across your partner community.

To learn how the bottom up approach works watch this brief video:

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