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Mathew Sweezey

Web3 Advisor

Future of Marketing Blog

It’s A New Day, and I’m Feeling Good

July 26, 2014 By Mathew Sweezey

An Essay on The Tie Between Business and Publishing and the Effects Social Media Has on Their Relationship

Written by: Mathew Sweezey
Edited by: Alberta Deacon

 In our world of limitless information, it is hard to imagine that 100 years ago there were no newspapers with more than 8 pages. In the past 100 years of publishing, we have seen the invention of the Linotype, color printing, digital publishing, and social media. Each of these innovations changed the way publishing was produced and consumed by the public and used by business.

Marketers and publishers have always been in lockstep. The revenue generated by publishers was due to businesses seeing the value in mass marketing. This turned names like Conde Nast, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp household names. Now names like Dorsey and Zuckerberg have replaced these former titans and taken the throne as the new kings of publishing. Understanding where this new social publishing revolution was spawned, why it is so revolutionary, and seeing where it will take us will help you understand the new relationship between publishers and business, and the new worlds which social media opens.

HOW IT BEGAN/

 In 1865 (post civil war), there were only 700 magazines in the United States. This number ballooned to over 3300 by 1885 due to the invention of the Linotype. Publications covered every topic from homemaking to political humor, with everything in between. These publications were usually sizable investments in content creation, production, and distribution. Despite the physical hurdles to creating a publication, the number of magazines grew to 20,000 by 2008. In the U.S., newspapers peaked at 1800 in circulation in 1940. Despite their limited number, every Sunday, the biggest publication day, they were able to reach over a combined 50 million people (40% of the U.S. population at the time.)

Fun fact: National Geographic published the first color magazine edition in 1910.

At the height of print publishing, advertising accounted for 80% of their revenues and allowed them to put writers all over the world to cover events as they happened. This revenue solved the dilemma of gathering content, allowed for larger editing staff, paid for massive fixed costs of printing equipment, and allowed for the creation of distribution channels. The quality of the publication and advertising revenue are always tied to each other. The better the content, the larger the audience, and the targeted nature of the audience meant more could be charged for the advertising. The size of reach and targeted nature of these publications solved a major problem for business, too. In 1960, there were only five marketing channels. With the lack of marketing channels which could be targeted by interest, print publishing offered a way to combine targeted demographics with relevant ads to a very large audience, hence it was profitable for publishers and effective marketing for businesses.

Fun fact: In 1993, the Wall Street Journal was the most read newspaper in print at 1.9 million readers per day

As time progressed and the number of publications grew, so did other technologies, mainly the Internet. The Internet started off as a way to connect computers and in the process connected people, ideas, and communities in a way never before possible. The Internet also allowed for instant publishing, removing the cost of actually printing anything, removed the cost of shipping physical products, and opened the doors for anyone to become a publisher with zero start up costs. This lead to an increase in online publications, especially blogs. In 2013, there were over 152 million blogs across the globe.

In addition to the Internet and blogs, social media came about while this was going on. Most people consider social media as a way to keep up with friends, but it should be considered simple micro-publishing instead. The content which is created and shared via social media is now replacing many people’s need for traditional content from publications. It is faster, cheaper, quicker, and many times more accurate as Twitter proved during the Arab Spring of 2013. News published and consumed in this social micro-blogging format was the first to break the news to the world. Just as every other traditional print medium did before, Twitter has already lent a hand in toppling dictatorships and facilitated many uprisings in other countries due to the ease of getting a message out to people quickly and at no cost. What used to be underground print shops for political resistances are now people with cell phones and Twitter handles. There are no more barriers to publishing.

Now the traditional media channels – print, radio, television, direct mail – are no longer kings of information or the best way for businesses to reach consumers. Just last week the BBC announced it was laying off another 500 employees, after a 650 person lay off just two years prior. These were field agents, journalist, and reporters who got the ax. The very people they were paying to find the great stories to make their publication more relevant. However, now they don’t need these people to find great stories. The new crown is being worn by social media mavericks. These new media forms are also finding better ways to monetize their channels by combining teachings from some of the early greats in marketing with brand new technology.

PERSUASION CHANGED THE GAME/

Edward Bernays (1891-1995), is a name you might not be familiar with, but hopefully you are with his uncle, Sigmund Freud. Bernays is singlehandedly responsible for changing the way the publications industry was used by business, and in the process, created the Public Relations industry. PR is his creation which he used to change the way businesses and governments reached consumers through media. In his book, Propaganda, he poignantly stated: “Who are the men who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe…Such a list would comprise several thousands persons. But it is well know that many of these leaders are themselves led, sometimes by persons whose names are know to few.” His theory was, control the source of ideas, and you can control the ideas which are spread.

The Public Relations industry created a new economy of specialized marketers able to help those with ideas get them in front of people. Even in the early days of print, people responded better to the messages in articles than they did to advertisements in publications. The trade off for PR vs paid advertising was the time to execution. For PR it might take months to get a piece into a publication, while an ad buy can be done overnight and published the next day. This has always been the major stumbling block for executing the PR strategy. The second stumbling block is, simply, great content. The “good content” issue is not a factor of the technique, but the practitioner, and should not be considered when evaluating a technique.

Since the number of publications also limited PR, the sprawl of the Internet gave this technique a new life as well. Consider at the height of printed media there were only 2,000 newspapers, and 20,000 magazines. Now consider there are over 152 million blogs in existence. Then consider ad networks, programmatic buying, and real time bidding which allow companies to market on all of those publications easily and cost effectively.

Facebook began in 2004 with a few college friends. Other notable new media channels are Twitter, which began in 2006, and LinkedIn in 2002. These three online sites account for more than 340 million unique users each day. That is seven times the size of the Sunday newspaper at its largest circulation of all time without having to print a single page! The reach of online publications is exponentially larger than print has ever been and will only continue to grow. Consider that currently more people have access to cell phones, have electricity, or clean drinking water, and all of this digital social content is accessible on those devices. This is a new revolution for published media because of low barriers of digital publishing, and the largest possible distribution ever before known on earth. This is where things begin to get interesting with businesses and social publications.

TECHNOLOGY CHANGED THE POSSIBILITIES/

 Currently we have the ability to produce publications with none of the physical barriers of previous generations. We have free ways to create content, produce it, distribute it, access it, and a readership of epic proportions. The only problem facing social publications from taking over as the primary marketing channel was their inability to figure out how to make these channels valuable to businesses. The two traditional ways publishers would provide value to businesses were eyeballs and paid placement. The .com tech crash taught us that neither one of these is a great option for sustaining a publication or proving tractable value to a business. These social media platforms had to find a better way, and they saw an example to learn from.

Google does not receive any money from consumers, instead provides businesses with access to these highly targeted consumers. This is the standard publication and business relationship. They make their money from being the place to effectively target advertising to consumers. But Google did something different. They turned their ad inventory into a marketplace with bidding. This only provided a sizable value to businesses when consumers consistently used Google as their search engine. The addition of search words to the targeting of advertising was also a breakthrough. From this they made over $40 billion last year on digital advertising alone. The difference with Google vs a publication selling advertising, is that Google is selling advertising on content which they do not create, nor manage but simply help people find easier. This is now how social media platforms hope to find a better alternative for revenue and provide businesses with a more valuable relationship.

PR as Bernay’s theorized is a way of allowing consumers to self-discover predetermined messages thought their normal channels but under the pretext of authorship. We understood that core concept, and were able to use viral reach from fans and followers up to a point when Facebook seriously slimmed down the ability for you to influence your fans and followers for free. They realized that at scale they had also created a market place which is data rich for marketers and will provide even more value to businesses than traditional publishing marketing ever could.

To complete the perfect storm for social media, a break-though in advertising buying happened at the same time. It is the concept of Real Time Bidding market places. An RTB is the ability for a company to buy one ad, for one person, in real time. The market place allows you to contract across networks all with a single bid. So rather than pay $50k for a static ad in a magazine, you can buy one ad, for one person, in real time, and do it at scale. You can even take it as far as having the ad be smart and change based on a persons past behaviors. The break-though of RTB was the missing piece for social media’s true value.

Fun fact: Paid Social Promotion (social in-feed advertising) is already driving 20% of total lead volume to some of the largest B2B brands.

 

To help illustrate the value of a social media in-feed ad served up by an RTB system we’ll compare it to traditional side bar advertising, using programmatic buying. The side bar ads using RTB will place your message in front of how ever many targeted people you can afford, but a recent stat shows you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad, so it is not driving engagement. You may then say, but people will remember seeing it. So it has branding value, but a recent study shows a person will not remember that ad 10 seconds after they’ve left the page. So the argument of visual repetition as a value is false. Now compare this side bar ad to a marketing option which combines an RTB systems and Big Data sets and to provides consumers with the all important self-discover element of content. This would be a dynamic in-feed advertisement. to show the perfect message, at the right time, to the correct person via in-feed (social feed) real time marketing. This is the ultimate value for a business. As Gary Vaynerchuck said, “I’ll pay $945 for a lead if it’s worth $946,” and this is why companies like Facebook and Twitter have such high valuations currently. Their ability to create a market place of this type of advertising is infinitely more valuable than print publishing ever was to a company.

Businesses and publishers have now found a perfect mix of innovation that will forever change the way companies market in the future, and the way content providers monetize their readership. The businesses who understand this includes those modern marketers who think with The Publisher Mindset and realize that with this power you can help or hurt your brand just as fast. These new innovations do not neglect the basics of marketing or the need for solid content. They only make it easier for the best ideas to rise and put a larger importance on the CMO as a key driver of a business goals. It’s a fast-paced world, and it takes a lot to keep up, but for a marketer, nothing could be more exciting than this new collision of media, technology, and consumer behavior. To quote Nina Simone, “It’s a new dawn, a new day, It’s a new life, and I’m feeling good.”

Filed Under: Future of Marketing Blog

Systematically Rising Above the Noise: A Case For Holistic Design

May 19, 2014 By Mathew Sweezey

(As published in ReThink Magazine Jan 2014)

If my email inbox wasn’t a resting place for other people’s poorly designed marketing, it might not be such a chore to manage. Even though we clearly think of both marketing and emails when we think of design, our ultra connected world has a new use for design, and understanding this new design will be the only sustainable way to cut though the noise in the future. As marketers we’ve historically been taught visual design is what catches, grabs, and drives our brand. Holistic design is a new design philosophy, which first takes into account consumer’s saturation with marketing messages, combined with their unlimited access to information to suggest a life cycle of experiences are the real business drivers in our modern society, not images. The few companies who understand the differences between historical design and holistic design will create sustainable businesses at lower costs, maintain greater customer loyalty, and be able to systematically cut through the noise.

The Problems with Historical Design

Design can mean many things to many people. To a dressmaker, it can mean the seam on a dress; to an engineer, a program running smoothly; and to an artist, the emotion their piece expresses. In business, we hire designers who create HTML, produce images, create animations, and design demand generation campaigns. We expect their creative designs to get us heard while increasing bottom line. However, the underlying driver for many of these ideas was conceived in a pre-internet world. Now, with the connected nature of our current world, design is no longer just a function of images, but of experiences. Understanding why we relegate design to just images will help us see how we can expand our ideas of design into experiences, helping us create stronger brands in the future.

Consider that in 2013, the average person spent about 12 hours per day in front of a screen, 294 billion emails were sent on a daily basis, over 400 million tweets went out each day, and more humans had access to mobile phones than electricity or clean drinking water. The connectivity that now exists allows consumers to instantly engage and share their experiences, and research a brand like never before. Historical design principles were created in a time of very limited connectivity and limited knowledge. This historical approach applied in our modern world has already caused consumers to ignore the sides of their computer screens where banner ads appear, drive direct mail engagement rates to below 1%, and has led to the rise of services like TiVO. Oversaturating consumers with marketing messages is not helping us break through; instead, it’s creating negative experiences for consumers.

Let’s take a very popular recent marketing campaign: Kmart’s “Ship My Pants” campaign. It has been cited as very creative, won numerous awards, and was considered by many to be of “good design.” It got a ton of press, and well over 20 million views on YouTube. However, the ad just drove people to the same old Kmart store — an outdated department store just trying to use fancy ads to increase sales, with little attention paid to customer experience. The consumer entering their store was faced with a negative experience directly opposite of the positive one they were just promised in the advertisement.

Historical design also neglects the connected society where every experience is transferable and remembered. Experiences are remembered in our own minds and digitally transferred to numerous places in the form of review sites, posts, and updates — all of which help people make decisions in both the B2B and B2C worlds. You have reviews on traditional sites like Yelp, and constant conversations taking place on social media channels. These sites allow individuals to share their experiences. Keep in mind that if you are creating a bad experience, the word will spread much faster than it ever did in the past. Also consider the opportunity costs of engagement. Word of mouth is powerful, but is forgotten with time. Digital information on the Internet lives forever.

This historical view created by mass marketing also has us thinking that marketing operates under the rules of economies of scale. Many business minds think that we can sell more products just by exposing more people to our ads. This scaling effect not only creates noise, it also increases the costs of driving engagements. To see this play out in our world, look at search marketing giant Google’s revenues from paid search, which increased by 86% over the past four years and now makes up $14 billion dollars of Google’s bottom line. This is one of the world’s largest companies, growing at twice the rate of any other company their size, and they’re doing it because of the increase in companies who need to get heard. Google isn’t the only one seeing the increase in online spending either — the paid search market as a whole was up 70% during that same time. As you can see, focusing simply on impressions creates a cycle of more and more noise, forcing companies to spend more to rise above it.

Some CEO’s might think this just means we aren’t trying hard enough, and we can solve this with more creative advertisements. Campaigns designed in this way are having a large negative effect on our profession as well. Gallop does a poll every year to see which professions are the most distrusted in America. Every year, at the bottom of the list are Lobbyists, Used-Car Salesmen, and Congressmen. From this poll, it’s clear that people don’t like professionals who talk with a “golden tongue”. Marketers may not speak — but we do write, and many of our “creative” campaigns are written with a “golden pen”. In the same Gallop poll, “Advertising Practitioners” are listed fourth from the bottom. Consumers already distrust marketing messages, and can see right through our thinly-veiled sales pitches.

Design can mean many things to many people, but for us to understand how to cut through the noise, we must understand why we created the noise in the first place. Once we can understand what got us here, then we can begin to see the lining of a the new world and we can start to see the reason design needs to change to put a larger focus on consumer experience — instead of singular impressions.

The Case for Holistic Design

 Holistic design, on the other hand, understands that we belong to a connected society, with no barriers to information, and that every interaction with a consumer drives either a positive, negative, or null response. The goal of holistic design is to communicate a consistent and managed message, which builds net positive goodwill from every interaction between your business and the outside world.

Holistic design seems like a simple idea and one that you might dismiss as something you already have. To prove the need for holistic design, conduct this short experiment in your office: Pull 10 people, each from different departments in your company, and ask them the following three questions.

  • What do we value in a customer?
  • What do we value in an employee?
  • What do we consider success?

If your employees can’t answer basic questions about your business in the same way, how can you expect their interactions with consumers to be the same? It is up to you to shape perceptions of your business in your consumers’ eyes. If the employees who interact with consumers on a daily basis via marketing messages, customer emails, phone calls, and support tickets can’t answer three basic questions the same way, how can you expect to shape a consistently positive experience with your consumer?

If you were to map these customer interactions on a graph, and look at each set of interactions over time, you would notice a line. The longer your relationship with customers, the longer the line would be. Regardless of your marketing design, your line will go up and down over time due to positive and negative experiences. We’ll call this variation “volatility,” just like the stock market. The stock market can rise and fall over time, but it also does so generally as a collective. The few companies that can rise above this collective are the true stars of the market. In the stock market, we call these companies “successes;” in marketing, we say they are able to “rise above the noise,” or in other mathematical terms, “rise above the volatility”.

If you’re planning to break out of the noise, the only way to do it is to rise above it — which means you have to consistently build net positive goodwill with each interaction that you have. If not, your brand will never have a net positive gain on a consumer larger than any other brand, causing you to constantly spend more money, time, and energy to be heard. This is very akin to a band-aid style approach to advertising. You fix one problem, only to have to fix it again later because you are ignoring the underlying issue. Holistic design acts more like a vitamin, where it is taken in advance and works its way into your system to prevent the core underlying issues.

Many of our perceptions of design have been shaped by years of others’ thoughts and executions of their ideas. The band-aid approach is responsible for creating most of the “noise” in the first place. Understanding that the only way to break through the noise is to remove volatility in your customer experience is the first step to holistic design. Once you get this basic premise of driving demand in the modern world, you can begin to take the next steps toward implementing holistic design at your company.

How to incorporate holistic design into your business

A house built on sand with fall with the winds and the rains, but a house built on a solid foundation will last the test of time.

So how do you build holistic design? It’s a process, and can be implemented into a company regardless of where the business is in its lifecycle. There are many different ways to create a holistic design foundation as well — some very minimalistic ways, very structured ways, and some techniques that fall in the middle. Here are a few ideas for you:

Historical Design needs direction

If you’ve read any of my other writing, you’ll know I’m a very large fan of David Ogilvy and give him a lot of credit for my lines of thinking. The greatest thing he left with me was a legacy of design, and its importance to success. He understood holistic design, yet never promoted it as such. Rather, he just promoted it as good marketing. He used a very specific tool to ensure that all designs were consistent and based on a holistic idea. He used lists.

His lists are very detailed and cover just about every situation you can think of, and there were lists for every department in his company. His list ensured consistent, holistic design from every person, all the time. They were not relegated to a medium, but were instead holistic in their construction, which allowed them to be used on any other medium as well. If you are looking to incorporate holistic design into an existing business, this technique might be a very good way to go. It will allow for a hardcopy plan that everyone can read, understand, and follow. To learn more about his lists, I’d suggest reading Confessions of an Advertising Man, first published in 1962.

Holistic Must Be in Your DNA

As an early employee in a recent startup success story, I’m lucky to have learned this lesson firsthand. Pardot was a bootstrapped startup with no venture capital funding, competing with companies backed by over 500 million dollars in VC funding, and was recently a part of a $2.5 billion acquisition. Understanding how holistic design gave us an edge can give your company the same advantage.

Pardot’s secret to success lies in our holistic marketing approach: we only hired those who always created a positive experience for our consumers. Our CEO identified the three core characteristics an employee needed to have in order to complete his vision: being positive, self-starting, and supportive. This was the measuring stick used against every hire, and it was never compromised. This allowed us to spend 1/20 of the marketing budget of our competition and to become one of the clear leaders in our space. It wasn’t because we had better messaging, but our consumers had consistently better experiences.

Note Design Studio is another great example of a company that uses holistic design throughout the hiring process. As a recent success story in the design world, Note Design Studio was awarded “Break out of the Year, 2012” by Swedish design magazine, Residence. This single accolade launched their design firm into international fame. You can find their designed objects around the world at retail stores, and their influence is beginning to reach all areas of design, not just product and interiors. I was fortunate enough to meet with them in Stockholm, and to get their take on design for this article. What I found surprised me, as it was uncannily similar to Pardot’s own approach to design.

I was able to sit down with the full team to discuss their design process and what inspires it, and I turned the conversation towards some aspects the design process which I know plague many companies. I asked about their process for gaining consensus on designs and how they deal with issues that arise from this — to which Alexis Holmqvist, head of creative, immediately replied, “We haven’t had that problem.” Holmqvist continued, “If we hire people who think like us, and who get what we are doing, we don’t have this issue.” Holistic design through hiring is a very novel concept for today’s business leaders; however, it’s proven to be a huge success for two very innovative and highly successful companies in two very different industries.

Holistic is Personal

One of Canada’s largest Internet retail companies conducted a study on the effects of personal emotion versus digital emotion with the goal of designing a better follow-up campaign. They took a segment of customers who had received errors in their shipping orders, and apologized in two different ways.

They first digitally apologized for their mistake by sending a note and a $50 dollar gift card to one segment of the shoppers. They then compared this segment with another group of shoppers, who they personally called and apologized to. The second group did not receive a gift card, just a personal phone call. They followed up each segment via survey, to see who was more likely to buy from them in the future. The segment that was personally communicated with won out by a double-digit margin.

Holistic Design is Lasting Design

Holistic design also takes into account the full lifecycle of a buyer. This means understanding the Life Time Value (LTV) of a customer is the greatest measure of success — not the conversion rate of a campaign. Your business must understand that shortsighted “golden pen” campaigns will have a larger negative impact on your business than positive. Finally, you must look at campaigns as pieces of a puzzle, which are all directed by your internal DNA, not just immediate business goals.

Consider the magazine “COLORS.” It’s a publication backed by the clothing company United Colors of Benetton, yet it never mentions its benefactor. It has been in print for over twenty years, and is not about clothing or fashion. In fact, it’s 100% dedicated to issues unrelated to fashion, from the environment, to arts and culture, to world issues, and everything in between.

You might be saying, “Mathew, if this is such a great campaign, why don’t I know about it? Isn’t that the opposite of effective marketing?” But consider the following statement, which is posted on the BennetonGroup.com site under ‘company strategy.’

Benetton Group has always been committed to combining economic growth and social commitment, competitiveness and concern for the environment, and business and ethics. People – their moral values, daily work capacity and desire to look to the future and improve themselves – are at the center of every program and activity.

The magazine, and the school FABRICA, which they also sponsor, are direct reflections of their concern for people, social issues, the future, and the environment. Both the magazine and the school help people with their daily work, and their desire to improve themselves. This is true holistic marketing, driven by company culture and executed through a series of holistic campaigns — which, in this case, have lasted over two decades.

Closing

The few companies who understand the differences between historical design and holistic design will create sustainable businesses at lower costs, maintain greater customer loyalty, and systematically cut through the noise. As I’ve shown, the ultra-connectivity of the world has changed what the word “design” means for marketers, and has broadened it’s meaning to include the full lifecycle of experiences, not just visual impressions. The world is no longer what it used to be, and the way we design our marketing campaigns must change with it. We’ve proven to ourselves more marketing, does not equal more sales, yet better marketing can. To get better in the future we must remove the concept impressions and understand we need to put a greater emphasis on the consumer’s life cycle of experiences. This is the only way to consistently, cost effectively, and systematically rise above the noise.

 

Filed Under: Future of Marketing Blog

The Perfect Time for Lead Nurturing

April 8, 2014 By Mathew Sweezey

Lead Nurturing is a hot topic, and for good reason. Annuitas group cites that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. With nurturing being so impactful to companies it is a topic I enjoy speaking on. Regardless of location, when I speak on the topic I usually receive the same question on lead nurturing:  what is the perfect timing for lead-nurturing emails? If you’ve ever wondered the answer to this question, listen up.

Lead nurturing is a technique of automatically engaging with leads over a period of time. Nurturing can be used to automatically stay in front of non-sales ready leads, find hidden leads in cold databases, help mitigate churn rates, and enable sales to stay in touch over a long sales cycle. The number one factor in determining the timing of emails in a nurturing campaign is the use of the campaign. Let’s look at the three most common uses for lead nurturing, their goals, and the best practices for timing email communication in each.

Net New Lead Nurturing Program:

Goal: Take new leads from a conversion point to a sales ready lead.

Example: Person downloads a white paper; they are then nurtured with a drip until they reach the sales ready state.

Suggested Timing: For Net New Lead Nurturing programs you first need to consider the length of your selling process. The longer your sales process, the longer you should wait in between emails, and the shorter your sales cycle, the shorter your pause should be. I suggest a minimum of a 6-day pause between emails and a maximum of a 45-day pause. Six days means that you will not run the risk of emailing someone twice in one week and 45 days gives you a touch once every month and a half. If you have a sales cycle shorter than 6 days it is okay to break this rule.

Sales Nurturing Program:

Goal: Help sales stay in front of prospects over a long period of time.

Example: Sales adds a prospect to a program, which sends emails to the prospect that appear to come from the sales rep. The emails are spaced out over a long period of time and remove the manual nurturing process for the sales rep.

Suggested Timing: For Sales Nurturing Programs you need to work with your sales team to determine your timing. I suggest speaking with your top sales rep and finding out how often they reach out to their prospects currently. Your top sales rep will have figured out what is needed and what works best. Their input will be extremely valuable for helping to create this nurturing program. Mimic their manual follow cadence. When I was selling, my cadence was 2-2-12-30-17-2-2-12-30 with follow-ups. This means you would have a 2-day pause and send an email, then pause 2 days and send an email, followed by a pause for 12 days and so forth. The idea here is to appear natural.

Cold Lead Nurturing Program:

Goal: To find leads that go cold and bring them back to life

Example: The nurturing program can automatically find “cold” leads in your database in real time, and automatically re-engage with that prospect. Creating a safety net for you so that no more leads fall through the cracks.

Suggested Timing: The best way to approach these leads is to assume they know who you are, but that they’re not ready to engage for a multitude of reasons. While you may never know all of the reasons, you can stay in front of them so that when their condition changes you are there waiting in the wings. A natural cadence is best in these scenarios.  Try mixing up times between 6 and 45 days. Having a few pauses followed by a longer time pause is a good strategy here.

As you can see, the timing of your lead nurturing programs can and should vary based on your goals. Always start with your end goal first and move forward from there. I hope this helps and good luck with your nurturing campaigns!

Best,

Mathew Sweezey

 

Filed Under: Future of Marketing Blog

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