The Funnelholic

Believe it or not, some INTERESTING stats on white papers.

I found this great blog that I read ALL the time, Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers. As you can imagine, the premise of the blog is about the art of creating and marketing whitepapers which he calls the Educational Marketing Revolution. He is really smart and writes some great stuff. People ask me what I recommend all the time, and I for one still recommend whitepaper syndication. (By the way as part of a marketing mix along with webinars, etc).

One thing about whitepaper marketing is that it is actual a bit ‘old school”, its been around for awhile and whitepapers certainly continue to face new lead generation types such as webinar, video, etc. Nonetheless, marketing spend continues to support whitepapers. Stelzner’s blog excerpted a quote from Don Hawk of TechTarget: “The number of orders for white paper-related programs increased by over 60% in Q1 ‘08 versus the first quarter of last year. “

Does this surprise you? When I was in lead development and inside sales management, I HATED Bitpipe and Knowledgestorm whitepapers leads. Those were the old days. If you or your sales people are still complaining about whitepaper leads, it is likely because you are processing them wrong and/or under the wrong expectations for these types of leads. What you need to know is that the best technology companies in the world ALL spend millions annually on whitepapers for lead generation and awareness, and that nurture marketing programs and lead qualification processes have given these companies the confidence to invest in whitepaper programs heavily. If your sales guys complain about whitepaper leads it is because you are actually sending them straight to them instead of nurturing them - and that my friends, is the bottom line.

I grabbed some cool statistics off his site about whitepapers:

A study by KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa found that users and marketing folks rank whitepapers as content they would register for. In fact, 79% of users said they will register for a white paper. That’s number #1 in the marketing mix according to the study.

Here is the breakdown. Nearly 2400 readers ranked their willingness to register for items as follows:

• White paper (79%)
• Case study (62%)
• Analyst report (56%)
• Product literature(45%)
• Demo (38%)

Interesting but not surprising, 72% of users said they were lured by a detailed pre-reg summary of the paper. Only 25% of the marketing professionals agreed. (Hello disconnect. By the way, Mr. Marketer, that statistic better be equal next survey or that proves that whatever one thinks about you, you live in La-la land)

What does this mean? Whitepapers still work as a form of lead generation. So when you say a “program didn’t work for us”, I hope it is measured after having gone through the proper lead qualification/nurture processes.

This Sunday, I got my usual email from Technology Evaluation Centers. That’s right, on a Sunday. These guys are really creative when it comes to email marketing. And I like it.

First of all, I think they emailed me on Christmas Eve. BTW, it was the only email I received that day, so I opened it. Secondly, these dudes hit me on Saturdays and Sundays, and I read them. So much for conventional wisdom.

The Internet has given marketers “best practices” – which essentially means everyone is doing the same thing. I have blogged on this before. Given what we know, breaking best practices may mean that you will stand out. And how do you know what will work or not work? YOU DON’T. Thus the bottom-line best practice is TEST, TEST, TEST.

Clearly TEC has figured out that emails can convert on weekends. They certainly do not rely on best practice data. Most says to avoid the weekends. This eROI report says that the order of preference for email delivery is Wednesday, Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Saturday. So, everyone gets this report, herd mentality sets in, and your inbox is barraged during the week. How about the weekend when I got that one email I actually opened?

The moral of the story is best practices data is a way to create a baseline, but to put your marketing program over the top, think outside the box.

Sunday “hit” from TEC:

Warning: If you have been giving the task of generating leads and have been given a limited budget, then you should quit. Depending on how limited it is, you will probably fail. That typically means that the organization you are working for doesn’t understand lead generation. We can talk more about this in depth in future posts, but lead generation takes time and money.

The Pilot’s License: One of the great situations for marketers today is that a number of lead generation vendors will allow you to test their programs. The wave has caught on as the outsourced appointment-setting service organizations and telemarketing firms are on board too. Not long ago, we had to make major commitments to vendors to get going. These were big bets that got people fired. Take advantage of this situation and try everything you can. Some will fail but at least you know. By the way, these pilots are not FREE and should not be either, the lead generation vendor has to do work so you should expect to get anything for. If you are a c Expect to pay for this, but expect to not have to make any long term or higher dollar commitment YET.

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I just spent some time with one of my favorite customers who will remain nameless. Our contact there, who is a 25 year old wunderkind, has set up a rock solid lead development process and organization. Let me just give you a number of the elements:

1. Hyper aggressive, focused lead development team. This is a team of Sales Development Reps whose job it is to get every lead on the phone and pass the qualified ones directly to the field. Now, every industry is different, but this is an SMB focused on-demand product. Their SDRS pass 20 QUALIFIED LEADS a day

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