Podcast Description
Savvy marketers step into The Marketing Spotlight to tell their stories of successful interactive marketing campaigns.
This week in The Marketing Spotlight:
Matthew Gonnering, CEO, Widen Enterprises
Nurturing business leads into sales-ready opportunities to increase new customer acquisition.
Time: 10:24
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Podcast Transcript
From Right On Interactive, this is The Marketing Spotlight – a look at how marketing leaders are producing meaningful business results through innovative marketing communications.
Matthew Gonnering: You have these leads coming in and if you don’t keep these leads engaged, they will go away.
Narrator: Today, we’re talking about nurturing marketing leads into sales-ready opportunities.
MG: So you pay a lot of money to bring these people in the door. You’re spending in SEO, you’re spending in paid search, you’re spending in PR, and you’re throwing a lot of money out there to draw attention. And if you ignore these people once they get into you, they will go and buy somewhere else.
Narrator: This week in The Marketing Spotlight.
MG: My name is Matthew Gonnering. I’m the CEO at Widen Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin, and I’m responsible for the organization’s overall performance.
Narrator: When marketing and creative groups need to manage brand consistency, they turn to digital asset management software provider Widen Enterprises.
MG: Widen Enterprises creates, manages, and distributes primarily images and video files, although we’re dealing with a lot of other branded content, like presentations and brochures, and other things that propagate the organization’s brand, managing those items and allowing external people to gain access to those things fairly quickly and easily.
Narrator: Widen’s roots began 62 years ago in pre-press, so they have an intimate understanding of digital assets, not just how to manage and distribute them. Like other industries where technology is important and side-by-side feature comparisons play out on the competitive battlefield, Widen differentiates itself through its services.
MG: When it comes to the service, when it comes to where the users are going to go when they have a question, or where the administrators are going to go when they have a question, and who’s going to do the training, and who’s going to do the implementation, and who’s going to run the help desk. All those things are done by Widen. So, it’s a part of our SaaS, or software-as-a-service offering to make sure that these deployments are successful and that the user experience is top-of-mind whenever we’re dealing with a digital asset customer.
Narrator: Nurturing new marketing leads is a critical success factor for Widen.
MG: The ability to nurture leads into opportunities is the most critical component of growing our business. We need to make sure that the market is educated on what our services are. We need to make sure that their expectations are managed. We need to make sure those things are in place before they are ready to speak with our team internally so that when they do engage, they are engaging already pre-qualified and a good fit for our sales team to begin escorting them through certain product demonstrations, taking them through the rest of the cycle to bring them on as a customer.
Narrator: The strategy at Widen is to provide potential customers with everything they need to make their job easy. This includes resources such as customer testimonials, case studies, ROI calculations, and presentations that prospects can give to their internal teams.
MG: We try to empower the champion as much as we possibly can, and if we can do that, then we can help them get to a point where they’re ready to take the next step and convert to a Widen customer.
Narrator: And when it comes to measuring the success in achieving this goal of nurturing leads into sales-ready opportunities?
MG: We’re watching a lot of conversion rates; conversion rates from a certain priority to a certain qualification rank to a certain opportunity created. And then when the opportunity is created, we’re watching it progress within our watch list, and we’ve got various watch lists that tell us how quickly some of these customers are going to buy.
Narrator: Widen deploys a number of marketing communications campaigns to nurture leads. They implemented the customer lifecycle marketing automation software from Right On Interactive. When a customer hits a specific form at widen.com that to Widen is expressing a level of interest, they receive the appropriate communications in a staged way.
MG: So, one of the campaigns that we’ve done is a “Watch Recorded Demos” campaign. At Widen.com you can watch a recorded demo of our application in action and these people that are participating in these demos are submitting their information to us. Now, those people aren’t ready to buy yet. They’re curious, they’re trying to understand what, one, digital asset management is, and/or two, what Widen’s deliverable is when it comes to digital asset management. Those people aren’t ready yet to make a buy, and they don’t necessarily want to talk to us. We want to make sure, though, that we’re giving them all the information they need to progress them along their timeline.
We staged in communications they way we think the buying process is working, and the communications that are running to them include return on investment calculations, include presentations they can give to their internal teams. It includes guest passes to online demonstrations; it includes access to whitepapers that have additional information to help educate them. Those are all the things that are being run in a campaign for people that are watching the recorded demos that we’ve got online.
Narrator: People come to widen.com. They complete the form to view a demo, and that triggers a staged series of communications to empower the buying champion. To measure the success of the campaign, Widen monitors the quantity of people that are coming in via that form, but…
MG: Ultimately, it’s how many of those can we convert into opportunities. If you take a deeper dive into it, we want to continue to watch what type of opportunity they’re converting to. Are they in a ready-to-buy stage? Are they a little bit further out than that? So, within our watch list that we’ve created after an opportunity gets created, we want to see how close we can convert those all the way to a buying decision.
Narrator: But not all leads are created equal. One person may be in the investigate stage and another is in the product evaluation stage. A single message stream isn’t appropriate for both.
MG: But at the same time we also recognize some of those opportunities are done with that education mode and they’re already to the point where they’re in front of their boss requesting dollars. And that’s a different kind of information stream than the people that are not in front of their boss requesting dollars, they’re in front of their boss just telling them about what their problems are internally with respect to managing images and videos. Those two people at different phases of the process need different content. We’re able to deliver this unique content that helps them at the stage that we believe they’re at.
Narrator: Automating these staged communications frees up personnel for higher value-add activities. Rather than spreading themselves too thinly across people who are not yet ready to buy, these valuable resources can spend time closing business with those who are further along in the buying process. The solutions from ROI help Widen focus their efforts.
MG: What the program does for Widen is it allows us to keep constant flows of information to our leads so that we make sure we’re not wasting the money that we spent to bring that lead to us and focus our internal people on the ones that are ready to buy. And then let the technology make sure that it’s keeping the customers aware that Widen should be entertained once they move to a buying decision.
Narrator: As successful as these campaigns are, there are always ways to improve the process. Sometimes marketers make assumptions about where people are in the buying process. Depending on their internal pace and priority, the quantity and timing of the information sent can affect the outcome.
MG: The lessons learned here are not giving them too much information too soon, and staging it in, walking them into the buying process. As quick as you want to close them, they’re not going to close any faster because you send ten emails with ten whitepapers and 50 videos. That doesn’t make a difference. It’s the pace that they want to work at. You have to accommodate to that pace.
Narrator: So, what about longer term. Looking three to five years into the future, how will today’s strategic marketing initiatives shape Widen Enterprises?
MG: The marketing initiatives that we’re implementing today have great long-term effects for Widen in terms of acquisition of new customers. We’ve stepped up our efforts to acquire new customers. We’ve succeeded with those efforts. We’ve also penetrated our own market more deeply by earning more business, increasing our own market share, and thus increasing our revenue stream while maintaining customer satisfaction levels at an extremely, extremely high level. What we’re looking at essentially is new customers, market share increases, and revenue increases as a result of the marketing initiatives that we’re doing today.
Narrator: The Marketing Spotlight is a production of Right On Interactive. Information about our customer lifecycle marketing automation products, as well as our latest whitepapers, podcasts, and other resources are available at rightoninteractive.com.
About Right On Interactive
Right On Interactive (ROI) is a customer lifecycle marketing automation software provider that transforms the way marketers nurture business relationships – from initial contact to brand advocacy. The ROI “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) solution helps companies win and retain more customers, optimize marketing effectiveness, and maximize the lifetime value of customers. ROI serves more than 300 customers, including Carrier, Marsh Supermarkets, Wild Birds Unlimited, Compendium, TeaLeaf Technology, and LightBound. For more information, visit http://www.rightoninteractive.com/.
Audio production and voice-over services provided by Rich Cunningham Voiceover