Soft leads can be a strategy call

?The new financial year is around the corner for many of us in the B2B tech space. The eagerness to head off into the holidays combined with the need to wrap up the marketing planning is like ensuring all the food you are cooking for the party is ready and tasting good before the guests arrive! Now don’t ask me ‘who cooks these days when we can order in?’ It still is great fun to cook food as a host, no?

Anyway, there’s the element of nervousness. What if the entrée doesn’t appear sufficient? Making more is going to take the same amount of time. What if the dessert is extra sweet? Similarly, marketers fret endlessly over, ‘do I have all the inputs from all stakeholders?’, ‘where is the industry alignment?’, and invariably ‘the budget we are promised is good, what if I don’t utilize it?’ OR ‘this budget is paltry, and my key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t in line with it’. Yes, these are legit concerns, especially when the idea is to hit the ground running at the start of the New Year. Our anxiety to influence the sales pipeline as early as possible is understandable, given the relatively slower sales cycles in our lines of business, and of course our own KPIs. But is it really an ‘either/or’ situation here?

I need to go to market!

Sample this. You have realized that banking and financial services is a major industry in your market, and you are eager to tap this appetite and get your top target accounts together for an executive connect. You know that open banking and/or anti-money laundering/’Reg Tech’ are good solution areas, but not sure if you have experts in your market to lead the conversation and get some 'hard leads'. Is it a lost opportunity then? Not really. How about creating some good thought leadership content around the topic and sending them out to your target universe? It may not necessarily be a bottom of the funnel, pipeline-influencing tactic, but a good tool to get some ‘soft leads’ into the system, at a relatively lower cost. Or better, create a set of content pieces and devise an integrated campaign, including direct email, social media and a webcast? Right, this appears to be a time-consuming effort, unless you are working for a start-up or a relatively smaller size organization that can create content on-the-fly. But this is how these soft leads speak to the larger demand generation strategy in an organization. Leads that come in this way are more valuable, and can also help trigger retargeting or nurture.

Here’s some content while we talk

It is but a truism that content is the key marketing ammo in the B2B tech industry. Every single campaign I have worked on has been based on the kind of marketing assets we have developed. E-Books, whitepapers, case studies, customer testimonial videos, report wrappers, podcasts form the bulk of the kind of marketing assets we’d typically push to the market. As field marketers, if we interlock closely with the product/service marketing and messaging teams, we can get access to all the content that’s out there around a topic, and from a markets perspective, decide on how to deploy the material. For instance, in my company, sustainability is a huge priority, as would be the case with many leading tech consulting organizations. The topic today, in all honesty is like the proverbial elephant as seen by six blind men. Especially when one tries to align it to a specific customer or industry. However, what has been helping us is creating a dedicated messaging and narrative around our sustainability offerings, developing a unique perspective, and refashioning some of the existing content to match the latest messaging.?Such an asset library would be good enough for the field marketers to make a gentle push and net some contacts (downloads, sign-ups) that we can continue nurturing during the course of the year.

As we plan

So, while we make those marketing plans and campaign calendars, it probably would be a great idea to devote the big dollars to a select few programs that speak to accounts considering purchase, and on mature offerings with customer success stories. For the rest, a more ‘always-on’, content-driven strategy that can give us a more expansive set of ‘soft leads’ could be an idea worth considering.