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It’s Thursday! Back to it, the Zephr Coffee Club was open once again! On this occasion we had a focus on both lead and demand generation, with Lightning talks from both Brian Hersholt of Convertr.io and Jordan Adams of Martech Tracker!
First up was Brian Hersholt of Convertr.io who pointed out that there is a high percentage of invalid data sets in the media industry, which might be a challenge that many professionals in the media and publishing sector are underestimating . Compared to other sectors like telecommunications (10%) and automotive (11%), the invalidation rate in publishing is as high as 24%. This represents serious food for thought as invalid data sets fundamentally break the process of monetising your marketing efforts at a very early stage.
There are different factors on why leads fail, such as a CRM issue or, more commonly, invalid emails & phone numbers! Considering the current ongoing "cruising", there’s a new world coming post COVID-19, which has seen the mass cancellation and postponement of live events and a corresponding huge surge in digital events. Most likely you’ve been part of 1 or 2 (or way more) webinars over the past 2 weeks. These events present a great opportunity to collect data and start nurturing leads - especially in a B2B Publishing environment. It’s crucial that the process of capturing this data, inputting it in your CRM and - if you are B2B publishers who have their own sales team -and passing the resulting leads onto them is fully optimised and there are no mistakes in the chain.
This segued nicely into our second lightning talk from Jordan Adams of Martech Tracker. A mass misconception that Jordan has observed through his experience working with media companies is the mistake that brands don’t know the difference between demand generation and lead generation. Although they are 2 completely different things, many publishers treat them as if they are the same.
So what exactly is the difference? Well, demand generation is the process of getting people interested in what you have to sell (creating demand). Lead generation, on the other hand, is the task of turning that interest into names and contact details (leads) that sales teams can follow-up with. Many publishers assume that they are doing lead generation, but then when they sell these “leads” many are often bounced right back as being not good enough! Not great, right? The problem is, what they are actually engaging in is demand generation.
At the moment there is a feeling that demand generation is an opportunity that hasn't been fully realised. The process starts when publishers sell demand through their syndicated content - for example, in the form of reports. This is great, as generating demand is the first step in lead nurturing. It allows the customer, whom you are selling these “leads” to, score them, measure them and give feedback, indicating if this is the right type of interest. The biggest challenge however, is to understand the terminology and the expectation - are we selling demand (interest) or selling leads?
Once answer that question, clarifying and differentiating between the two, there is an opportunity to repurpose the existing content and get more value from the work you’ve already put out there. Being able to address the area between demand and lead (i.e. "Conflict Zone" or "Nurture Process") is where the gold can come from - moving from initial interest to quality leads - and therefore higher revenue - means happier partners and happier sales teams.
As always, we’re on the lookout for other talks and useful use cases for the weeks ahead. If you have something that you believe useful, drop us an email to get involved - info@zephr.com - we’d be delighted to have you join us!
