The GET RANKED TODAY COMPANY Leads Group has years of experience

working in complex selling environments and has cultivated the people,

process and technologies needed to give you measurable results and ROI.

Leads Group
The GET RANKED TODAY COMPANY Leads Group can help you drive ROI for your lead
generation efforts through a scientific approach based on our research into how customers buy

Most engagements begin with leveraging our institutional knowledge and analytic tools,
including the world's largest marketing case study database, benchmark data, best practices
and analyses from our collection of thought leaders, in part gained through our acquisition of
InTouch, to deliver actionable insights that ensure you achieve maximum ROI for every
dollar you invest. Through iterative testing, your sales and marketing efforts can be
continuously honed, adjusted, refined and improved. Through this process, we transfer
capacity to your team, so they can use these tools and knowledge to continue to improve lead
management at your organization.

What is a complex sale?

Businesses that are engaged in longterm sales processes require prolonged education and
nurturing of the prospect, frequently over a six- to 36-month sales cycle. Many businesses with
a complex sale provide solutions to their clients that tend to be sophisticated, designed to solve
crucial business issues and managed deliberately and with precision.
The complex sale presents a set of unique sales and marketing problems that benefits by a
shift away from traditional lead generation mindset to a new way of thinking centered on
these basic tenets:

More ROI is reaped from the patient tending of potential customers over time.

Lead generation is a conversation, not a series of disjointed campaigns.

Focus on building relationships with the right people, regardless of their timing to
buy.

How to engage people as early in their buying process as possible so you can create and
influence their vision.

The first impression matters. So does the second. So does every single impression after
that. Consistency is the watchword.

Sales and Marketing must work together as one team. See each other as internal
customers.

A multi-modal and multi-touch lead generation portfolio will always outperform

marketing tactics that stand alone.

Sales and Marketing should have a unified understanding and consensus on what the
definition of a sales lead is.

Always have a clear set of relevant metrics that can help you measure return on your
lead generation investment.

Buy-in from sales and marketing teams as well as executive leadership is critical to the
success of any lead generation program.

Be willing and prepared to close the loop with every opportunity that is identified.

The purpose of marketing is to help the sales team sell.

Trusted advisors win more sales than slick brands.

Companies don't buy people do.

People often buy on emotion and backfill with logic.

Tactic #1. Lead nurturing and drip email campaigns are retargeting
Lead nurturing campaigns combining content marketing with email, or drip email campaigns
based on specific trigger events, may not be discussed in these terms all the time, but both are
retargeting tactics.

Phelan explained, "Drip programs are probably the best retargeting that you can have because
they are all based upon the person's expressed interest in a product or service."
He added marketers should want to push relevant information into the hands of prospects, but
the challenge is receiving information from that prospect to be able to reach them.
One way retargeting emails can help is with lead generation forms. Marketers are sometimes
caught between two opposing forces. Sales wants a lot of information to consider a lead sales
ready, from phone numbers to budget data, yet prospects loathe filling out long forms early in
their relationship with your company.
Phelan said, "Do you ask for a lot of information, or do you ask for a little?"
He continued, "People may not want to pick up the phone, so asking for a phone number may
be encouraging an abandonment of the [lead generation] form."
Phelan also likened form abandonment to an e-commerce problem cart abandonment. If a
marketer can at least receive an email address, that prospect can become part of a drip
campaign to receive further information later in the process.
Phelan cited 2011 research from The Radicati Group, Inc., finding corporate workers received
up to 105 emails a day (20% spam) and sent 41 e-mail messages per day.
"Based on that kind of volume in a business account, for somebody to give you an email
address, that is like a conversion," Phelan explained.
He added a data point based on a previous employer where a marketing group was seeing
300% to 500% higher rates of conversion on retargeting drip campaigns over promotional
emails sent.

Tactic #2. Generate "soft" leads through retargeting

In tactic #1 above, the retargeted prospect has already raised their hand enough to provide an
email address. For tactic #2, retargeting is used to reach out to potential prospects who havent
even provided an email address or other contact information.
Barrera said, "Retargeting provides a whole different layer when you are not able to get into
their email inbox, or get that form information."

This tactic involves placing a tracking cookie or tag on particular webpages used to retarget
those visitors with banner ads on other websites or paid search. Barrera said possibly even
going so far as removing form requirements for an incentive, such as a free offer.
"Maybe you are able to eliminate some of those required elements because you are just trying
to do a soft entry on them onto your marketing list," he said.
Barrera explained the retargeting ads provide extra emphasis on brand awareness and can
introduce the as-yet unknown prospect to lead generation efforts. This is a valuable tactic
during the very early stages of the buying cycle when the prospect is actively doing research.
He said, "Retargeting is definitely going to keep the company in front of [prospective
customers] when they are evaluating the competition."
That's going to help improve your brand awareness, and also simply help you drive more
leads," Barrera said.

Tactic #3. Tie your retargeting program to the sales funnel

Vanning described SEOmoz's conversion funnel as "pretty simple." He added the primary
conversion the company is looking for is someone coming to the website and signing up for a
free trial of SEOmoz's pro software.
That conversion path looks like this:

Home page

Features page (a product resource)

Plans and pricing page

Cart/Billing page

On that final part of the path, there is a 30-day free trial option, but it does require a credit card.

Vanning said the credit card requirement was to reduce fraud and create a higher barrier for
entry to receive the free trial.
"We know that people are serious about trying the software by having to put that credit card
in," he said.
For retargeting, Vanning said there is a focus on behaviors and segmenting prospects.
He explained, "For me, it is really focusing on where [prospects] are in that conversion funnel. If
somebody hits the homepage, they haven't really shown us any intent. They come to our site,
they are familiar with, probably, our company name, our logo and maybe our mascot."
The banner ads leading visitors to different pages in the conversion funnel have messaging tied
to how far down the sales cycle that prospect might be.
"The types of assets I show to someone who hits the homepage versus somebody who makes it
all the way to the cart page and abandons are very different," Vanning explained.
He provided two examples:

"The 'homepage people,' I typically will show branded ads our mascot, the logo. Ads
that are just trying to remind them that they came to our site, try to get them back and
maybe place them at the features page to get them one step further in the conversion
process."

"Somebody hits the cart page, we know that they obviously had some intent. They made
it through some portion of the product tour and decided to click on one of our CTA
buttons to take a free trial."
"For those people, ads are focused on the value prop of our software, [and that] is a norisk free trial."

The strategy of showing different banner retargeting ads based on where that person is within
the SEOmoz conversion funnel is, obviously, to entice clicks.
"One of the most important things Ive learned over the years of doing retargeting is you blow
through a lot of impressions and get your ads seen by people who have been in your site,"
Vanning said. "But, if you are not showing them the right ad, you are just going to have people
who are like, 'All right, SEOmoz is following me around all the time,' and never clicking on [the
ads]."

Tactic #4. Tie retargeting ads and email to specific actions

Very similar to tying retargeting ads to where that person hits your website sales funnel, this
tactic refers to retargeting website visitors based on the specific actions they take on the site.
Ellis explained, "Say, if somebody visited a specific website three times, or ten times, or one
time, we can even create remarketing [ad] campaigns around that around people actually
coming a certain number of times, or [if] they viewed a video twice."
She continued, "We could say, 'OK, this person is really serious, so let's make sure that we get
them included in this particular campaign with this messaging.'"
Barrera agreed retargeting based on website actions was a powerful tactic. He mentioned one
idea is if someone downloads a 30-day demo, when that demo is about to end such as five
days before the 30 are up retarget them with email to highlight features in the demo and a
make a pitch for purchase.
He provided an example of a client with a cloud-based software solution.
The marketing goals were to persuade prospects to sign up for a 30-day free trial, and convince
them to make the purchase.
"We focused on those five days before that 30-day free trial is up to be able to reinforce brand
messaging, talk about product features, but then also take a customer service approach
'Having tried our tools, click here to find out more.'"
He added the retargeting message could also include links to instructional videos highlighting
the full capabilities of the product.

Tactic #5. Organize your ad retargeting campaigns with a spreadsheet

Ellis said ad retargeting has become a complex endeavor.
"The concepts are not as simple as they used to be," she said.
Ellis offered a list of different retargeting elements to track:

Goals

Landing pages

Messaging

Exclusions that will be part of the program

Tags you need to exclude

Duration of the campaign

Sales cycle

Frequency

She explained, "How many times should I be showing this ad or this sequence of ads specifically
[created] for this particular audience?"
To keep track of all of these various elements, Ellis suggested creating a spreadsheet. One
danger in retargeting ad campaigns is your prospect will be seeing your ads on multiple
websites they are visiting, and the last thing you want is for that person to feel "stalked" by your
ads.
A spreadsheet can coordinate all the elements of the campaign, and that can be particularly
important for B2B marketers with a longer sales cycle.
"How long are we going to show these ads to these people?" Ellis asked. "If the sales cycle is 30
days, that is the default [duration] in Google."
She continued, "If you have a 90-day sales cycle, then maybe you need to have a remarketing

strategy where you show them ads for the first 30 days, another set of ads the next 60 days and
then another set that lasts 30 days."