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too many marketing projects, too little time and no qualified leads!

by b20000
6 replies
We are a 2 person company selling a physical product online for the professional market. Our product has historically been bought by a variety of professional users for different reasons, and we've created different landing pages for each of these potential users. Each landing page can stand on its own and has a lead capture form on it. The pages are pretty well designed with nice photos and lots of info, and video.

We don't list pricing but simply state that to receive more info and to get pricing and shipping info and personal advice you have to enter your email address. This has been working well over time.

The problem is that we currently get few good quality leads. When we get leads the prospects either find the product too expensive or don't want to buy it now, but might buy it in a few months. We do ask as much info as we can to learn who the prospect is, what he needs to do, how he found us, ...

Our issue is that there is many different kinds of marketing we an do, and we don't know where to invest our time first practically each week we work on our business. We could do:

1) write articles for our blog (how to use our product ... )
2) make videos featuring our product (demos)
3) go on twitter and follow/unfollow and DM one by one
4) have conversations on facebook
5) find leads on linkedin and email and follow up ...
6) link building ...

It jus seems like each of these avenues is a full time job on its own and given the fact we're only 2 people we really have to find out what is worth our time and what not. We could try to measure everything but this is not easy ...

We've seen that video does get circulated easier than written howto style content about our product.

Some people have told us to write articles that are more general and address problems and are not so much about our product itself but might mention our product. Of course this is difficult to do on a company blog... so we'd have to start a seperate blog?

I'd love to hear what other people who are very small teams have been doing and how they create a weekly marketing/sales schedule that works.

thanks for helping!
B
#leads #marketing #projects #qualified #time
  • Profile picture of the author CDarklock
    Originally Posted by b20000 View Post

    It jus seems like each of these avenues is a full time job on its own and given the fact we're only 2 people we really have to find out what is worth our time and what not.
    If you cannot make a decision, you need more information.

    Remove all the obviously wrong choices, and go get more information.

    Repeat until you have only one choice, or cannot get more information.

    All remaining choices are equally good and you may select one arbitrarily.

    Your choices:

    1) write articles
    2) make videos
    3) go on twitter
    4) go on facebook
    5) find leads on linkedin and email
    6) link building
    Which of these are obviously wrong?

    3, 4, and 5.

    None of these necessarily generate a persistent asset or any measurable statistics. They may consume vast quantities of time and leave you with nothing at all. That is stupid and you should not risk it. So remove those.

    This leaves 1, 2, and 6:

    1) write articles
    2) make videos
    6) link building

    Which of these are obviously wrong?

    6.

    Link building does not generate a persistent asset under your control. Wherever your links might be, they are almost certainly on sites that belongs to other people, who may remove them without warning or justification.

    Articles and videos, on the other hand, belong to you and can be used over and over.

    You have two people. One should write articles and the other should make videos. Problem solved.
    Signature
    "The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." - Lord Dunsany, The Messengers
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    • Profile picture of the author b20000
      thanks for your advice. I see what you're saying and it is what my intuition tells me.
      however, how do you get your content circulated? you can write the most amazing content, there are no guarantees people will circulate it or will find it even.

      i've noticed that some content is more easily circulated by the press than other content. for example, video seems easier than getting your in depth 800 word howto article circulated which tells people how to do X or Y using your product.

      do you have any recommendations on the type of content we should produce, and how to make sure it gets actually circulated and people know about it?
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      • Profile picture of the author CDarklock
        Originally Posted by b20000 View Post

        however, how do you get your content circulated? you can write the most amazing content, there are no guarantees people will circulate it or will find it even.
        It doesn't matter. You own it. It's yours. You get to circulate and distribute and advertise and promote it forever. You can try anything you like, and if it doesn't work - you've still got the content, so you can try something else.

        i've noticed that some content is more easily circulated by the press than other content.
        The single biggest mistake people make when trying to get press coverage is that they basically try to get the press to run free ads for them.

        Your press release titled "My company did cool stuff because of me!" is simply not as interesting as a press release titled "Cool stuff creates new jobs in depressed area." You are not writing an ad. You are writing a news story. It has to look and feel and sound like something you would read in the newspaper.

        do you have any recommendations on the type of content we should produce, and how to make sure it gets actually circulated and people know about it?
        Produce content about what your customers want, not about what you want them to have. People get far too bound up in "me, me, me" when they produce content, and nobody cares.

        Do you read articles about how awesome somebody else is? Hell no. You read articles about how you can be more awesome, or what awesome things you can get and do (because you're so awesome). You don't give a crap how awesome other people are.

        Neither do your customers. And to your customers, you are "other people." They don't care. Talk about them.
        Signature
        "The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." - Lord Dunsany, The Messengers
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        • Profile picture of the author b20000
          Originally Posted by CDarklock View Post

          It doesn't matter. You own it. It's yours. You get to circulate and distribute and advertise and promote it forever. You can try anything you like, and if it doesn't work - you've still got the content, so you can try something else.
          OK, but you still have to distribute and promote it, and how do you do that in an efficient way? Should this be done manually by link building then, or should we try to use automatic methods such as posting it to the blog and having the blog post it automatically to facebook, twitter... and then hope it gets picked up?

          We have content, we just don't know how to efficiently distribute it and get it circulated. Or if that is not the idea and the content should just magically do that itself, than we should fix our content or engineer it for spreading automatically.. just not sure how to do that.

          Your press release titled "My company did cool stuff because of me!" is simply not as interesting as a press release titled "Cool stuff creates new jobs in depressed area." You are not writing an ad. You are writing a news story. It has to look and feel and sound like something you would read in the newspaper.
          OK ... point taken. Do you mean the articles should be much more general? Should we just provide the idea for the article to the press contact or actually write the story for them?

          Produce content about what your customers want, not about what you want them to have. People get far too bound up in "me, me, me" when they produce content, and nobody cares.
          You mean we just ask our customers what they want to read about and then produce articles/videos around that topic? Not easy, because lots of people don't know yet what they want. So it's more like we create something and then they say yes/no, in our experience ...

          Do you read articles about how awesome somebody else is? Hell no. You read articles about how you can be more awesome, or what awesome things you can get and do (because you're so awesome). You don't give a crap how awesome other people are.

          Neither do your customers. And to your customers, you are "other people." They don't care. Talk about them.
          How do you do that if they don't have your product yet and they don't use it yet? Just interview them and discuss their questions on your blog ?

          Sorry for asking these n00b questions. Help is greatly appreciated.
          B
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  • Profile picture of the author Hentie
    Ok I think CDarklock gave some very sound advice here. Just my 2 pence worth. You say you are selling a physical product. Video is very well suited to demonstate features of physical products and may be an excellent start since videos on youtube is relatively easy to rank. Just make sure you do proper keyword research as to what your potential clients will search for and to some extent the competition but you probably have very little video competition.
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    • Profile picture of the author b20000
      Originally Posted by Hentie View Post

      Ok I think CDarklock gave some very sound advice here. Just my 2 pence worth. You say you are selling a physical product. Video is very well suited to demonstate features of physical products and may be an excellent start since videos on youtube is relatively easy to rank. Just make sure you do proper keyword research as to what your potential clients will search for and to some extent the competition but you probably have very little video competition.
      thanks for the suggestion - We've tried doing KW research in the past but the google keyword tool won't show volume for phrases that are highly relevant but have moderate volume ... they seem to show only short phrases which everyone wants to compete on (which is probably what they want ... )
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