Empower your Life Sciences business with lead generation conversion for Life Sciences

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[Music] so hopefully by this point everyone's quite excited about inbound everyone sort of sees where it can be used and the opportunity behind it what this presentation is going to do is show you how to manage and run your own inbound campaigns in its essence at its core inbound helps you raise awareness creates demand and generates leads and as Chris mentioned it's ultimately about generating leads but also nurturing those leads until they become customers and until they actually buy from you so if you want to get started of inbound this is what you need to do and then its simplest form it's a free step process inbound sounds complicated it sounds like there's a lot of things going on but actually it it's very cool it's a free step process three steps or its foes discover define deliver so like any good marketing campaign like any good marketing strategy you've got a strategy first if you don't know what you want to achieve if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing and if you don't know who you want to do it on behalf of you're going to struggle to succeed we always talk about the why we always talk about what you're actually going to be doing and the results that are associated with that step two is about taking that strategy and creating a tactical plan around there about saying these are the actions that I'm gonna have to undertake to enable me to deliver against my strategy the final step the deliver stage is all about execution you know what you want to achieve you know how you're going to achieve it you actually need to do something in order to get from point A to point B so what I'm going to do now I'm going to start with a very quick pulp someone familiar with the concept of buyer personas by personas are essentially semi fictional representations of your ideal customer there are people that you think make up your marketplace with that in mind how many people in the room now by show of hands have done any sort of by persona development or client development or audience personas they're sometimes called in the past twelve months a lot of good hands there there's even four from Melanie there's a lot of hands that's a lot of personas that have been done that's brilliant to see because guess what step one of building your strategy is about identifying who you are targeting without knowing who you're gonna be targeting how could you possibly understand how you're going to communicate with them and what they're gonna be interested in Chris talked a lot about your content existing organically and people are going to be drawn to your content through typing into search engines problems that they may be having if you don't know who your customer is you don't know what their problems are you don't know what they're going to be searching for we do persona development in a similar form to this outline template here this is a buyer persona creation template we've developed this is going to be available to all of you if you like just catch me after the presentation or email me at a more convenient time and this is going to be the foundations for building your first buyer personas a lot of you may already do this kind of thing there was a lot of hands that went up when I asked you're probably going to be doing it in a similar form to what we're doing now and what you want to do with these personas is hone in on some key information that key information is where do they want to be in life what do they want to achieve is the whole point of their professional career to advance are they trying to save themselves time or money are they trying to look good in front of their boss once you know that information you can start thinking of stories that you could tell them in order to help them advance you need to know what channels these people engage with if you're targeting an a group of Millennials perhaps Millennials aren't a big fan of phone interactions another big fan of incredibly long-form content generally speaking of course so it may be worth exploring more Digital driven methods to attract that kind of audience likewise if you're targeting an audience who may be not engaged with the latest social media channels they prefer to engage with your events you need to understand that your success is going to come from attending events instead of pushing a lot of information out through social media finally you need to really identify what are their challenges what are their resistance is to companies like yours have they been burned in the past by similar products is it that they don't believe in your service often and all of those pieces of information they're gonna relay believes in a position of trust and also a position where you can help them overcome whatever challenges they may be having step one is complete of building our strategy we have created well-defined buyer personas we know our audience and we know how we're gonna approach communicating with them let's have a look at step two what comes next another slight poll how many of you by show of hands could tell me the core unique selling points of your company and all your positioning statement yeah a couple of hands there this is funnily enough going to teach us what is really important in the second step of your strategy define your company's positioning you now know who your buyers are you know what they're interested in you know what challenges they face and you know what they really care about but you don't actually know who you are you don't know why you're unique you don't know in what ways you can help those sona's overcome their challenges we have another template it's called the brand platform the brand platform is essentially a cheat sheet for your entire organization which quickly summarizes who you are what you stand for what makes you unique and your personality as well are you very collaborative in nature are you four leaders in your field whatever it may be this information is really really important to compile without it you're gonna struggle because you're gonna be pushing out different messages to different people no one's really gonna understand what makes your company truly unique and you'll struggle to create that exceptional content that people want to engage with because you don't know who you are congratulations step 2 done you have well-defined buyer personas and you have well-defined positioning no poll for the last one because the last one is a relatively easy missing piece of the puzzle you've got personas you've defined your positioning you now need to make sure these are reflected in your marketing there's nothing worse than a disconnect in your communication strategy if you're pushing out different messages across different channels different people you're going to create a haze fusion likewise if you speak to somebody at an event and you have a brilliant conversation and they pick up your latest brochure one of the first things they're gonna do when they return to their workplace is Google you or visit your website and your website may be five years old it may be a really ASCII heavy text website there's gonna be an immediate disconnect in the quality of the touch point that that person's had with you and the quality of the touch point they've had when you're not present this disconnect is very very bad especially for inbound inbound is about generating a lead and nurturing that lead through a constant stream of quality communication and if a disconnect ever happens at any point during that nurturing program you're gonna have not a great deal of success in ultimately selling to that person at the end of their journey so after you've completed your personas positioning you probably going to look at doing some form of content audit and that content audit is gonna look at every single thing that you've got out there every customer facing piece of information and you've got to make sure it's aligned it's aligned with your positioning as a company it's aligned with your personality there's a company and if you want to get really strategic you start to think about aligning that against your individual buyer personas is by persona a gonna be interested in piece of content be potentially and I'll come on to that in the second section which is the tactical plan so congratulations you've completed step one you have built your strategy to run an inbound campaign step two define building the tactical plan this is one of the hardest parts of running an effective inbound campaign it's hard because strategy is really really important and a lot of people have a lot of opinions regarding strategy and ultimately in come to a close decision on that when you actually look at mapping that strategy out and when you think about all the steps that it's gonna take in order to deliver this and you asked a brilliant question about you don't have the resource to develop reams and reams of content you actually when you think about it when you plot it out it becomes a lot more manageable than you may think the best way to start building this tactical plan is to build a marketing and content calendar or a Content matrix as it's often known where you lists down all of your buyer personas you have your brand platform two hands you know how you wish to communicate with your buyer personas and you start thinking about ideas of content that you could generate and content generation is scalable inbound is scalable the more content you produce the better results you receive that's not to say that if you only produce one blog every month you're not going to get results any sort of content creation will bring about results second of all you need to build a lead nurturing plan and Chris covered that very nicely and his portion of the talk that is about you've gained the lead you've gained their contact details how do you ensure they stay connected and ultimately convert into a customer you then need to look at updating and repurposing your existing content you don't need to create brand new material once you've got your buyer persona once you've got your positioning defined you could look back across all of your marketing materials over the year the case studies that you produced the brochures the event details the sales aids all of this information is still key information it's about positioning it in order to get the most value from it and knowing when and where to use it finally there are gonna be instances where you need to create brand new material you're not going to have everything but you will have quite a lot all of this information we like to place inside our own content planning matrix the content planning matrix is a bit of an old term to describe a list of material you wish to create what makes it unique and what makes it incredibly valuable is that we create one of these for each of our buyer personas that's not to say we're gonna create 500 brand new pieces of content it's just good to have a plan for how you're going to attract these personas that you've developed so step one you'll put your persona up there you then look at because you know what they care about you know what their challenges are so you can start listing subjects that they really really care about you know your positioning so that's gonna further help you develop those content ideas where can you be seen as an expert where can your company be seen as insightful and for leaders to really help educate your persona once you've got those subject matters once you know the type of information that you want to talk to people about it's about identifying content types and I can't stress this enough a good inbound strategy utilizes skills from blogs it includes webinars ebooks white papers social media articles PR events every single thing in the fully integrated marketing mix should be addressed here and it's good to have a varied content strategy as well the final part of the content matrix is about making your content searchable and locatable online again as chris mentioned organic is king you're gonna get a lot of your visits from cold leads who have never even heard of your company before from Yahoo Google Bing Baidu from searching for problems online so once you've defined your content subject matter you've decided it's going to be a blog you now need to think about keywords because keywords are what is gonna drive that organic presence keywords are gonna be related to your buyer persona because your buyer persona is gonna be doing long tail searches you know how do I do this how can I be better at this you need to know what they are because that's going to be the subject title of your content they also need to appeal to your positioning and your company's wider branding because you're gonna have a wider SEO or keyword strategy in place as well so they all need to be aligned within your content as I mentioned not always a need to spend resource on creating brand-new material during phase one we sort of said you need to align your positioning against your current marketing materials to ensure there's no disconnect and whilst you're doing that you'll be noticing ways to improve efficiency you'll be noticing pieces that you created a couple of years ago that are still possible to deliver value Chris mentioned that HubSpot some of our highest performing blogs are seven years old now and they're still driving lead seven years down the line so content lives forever and if it's got the right positioning and it's well targeted by persona brilliant so this is a bit of a diagram we know the buyers journey the buyers journey is awareness consideration decision at the awareness stage they've never had a touch point or they may have had a touch point but they may not be overtly familiar with who you are and what you offer this is your opportunity to draw them in to your website and hopefully convert them into a lead some content forms are better than others at doing that you're not going to be overtly salesy in your approach at this stage because these people don't necessarily want to be sold to they don't want a hard sell when they're just identifying their problem and they're researching online how to solve that problem and in our sector the life science sector as I'm sure you're all very aware of scientists are incredibly reticent to that hard sell at an early stage they like to do the research they like to think that they are the ones who are in the position of power and they are because they're conducting research online so don't get too salesy you move into concideration stage and all of a sudden people have had a single touch point with your brand and they may have downloaded an e-book they may have read some of your blogs at this stage we can start positioning ourselves as the potential solution to any problems that they may be having so at this stage it's important to nurture those early leads take them through their buyers journey take them from the awareness stage to consideration stage and there's a number of different content forms which can help with this ebooks again really good white papers really good webinars that kind of thing it's about securing that touch point this ultimately leads us to the decision stage decision is the bottom of the funnel of that prospects buying journey they're now ready to make a decision they're ready to buy and you want to make sure that they're gonna buy from you so this is where you talk to them about your case studies about material which is really really gonna help you convince them that you are the right solution and that they should buy from you a lot of clients that we work with a lot of new companies that we work with they often find that they have a great selection of this decision stage content they have lots of case studies they have lots of brochures they have lots of buying guides the issue I guess is that the awareness stage is very little to draw people in but once people are in they can be sorting because that content already exists so even with all of your content we mentioned you may require some new pieces of high-value content and buy high-value content we mean something that is positioned that somebody would be happy to hand over their contact details in order to access you're not really gonna expect to collect somebody's contact details from them reading a blog because it's 300 words it provides educational merits but is it worth handing over your contact details for probably not and the way do we do this is we position the high-value content at the very top of the funnel at the awareness stage because if you can get people engaging with you because they really want to read an e-book that you've developed brilliant you're gonna increase your lead generation and Jim who's gonna talk just after me is is gonna talk about how when actuate started to implement more content on their website their numbers went on congratulations we have completed two stages of the free step process we're nearly at the end unfortunately your job isn't quite over yet you developed an exceptional strategy you know exactly what you want to achieve you've started to build your tactical plan you know the steps that are gonna be taken in order to achieve that success you actually need to do it now you need to execute the campaign deliver deliver can be split into a five-step plan create your content publish your content promote your content monitor the performance of your campaign and your content and then use that collected data to improve the performance of the campaign let's start the top end how do you create that really engaging effective content I have a four step process you start by identifying your audience and a subject that I care about congratulations you've already fought about that you've done your buyer persona development work you've also done your positioning so ensure the subject they care about is aligned with your product or service offering you know that you know what you're really good at you know what your company excels at and you know what you want to tell those buyers about in relation to your brand third step you need to identify what stage of the buyers journey you want to target where do you have an issue do you have an issue that not enough people are visiting your website so you're not generating enough leads do you have an issue that actually you're getting a lot of visits but none of them are converting on your website you've probably got an issue at the consideration stage do you have an issue actually once you've converted leads to closing that lead you've got a problem at the decision stage so when you're thinking of content to develop identify where your problems are it may be that you've got a problem with the whole thing and you've run an entire inbound campaign so in that instance you would do it awareness consideration decision and you would build out the workflow like that but not everyone's the same so we create our content the next step is to publish your content and it's really important when I say the word publish I mean publish it on your own website probably not good enough at this stage just to stick a blog on your website and expect the world to be aware that you've got a new blog you need to develop a solution that people are gonna be made aware of this new content in your publishing how do you be a great content publisher you follow the four-step plan like you do for being a great content developer first of all you need to ensure your website is technically optimized for organic search I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty today about what makes a technically optimized website but we talked about having good keyword density we talked about having good subject matters that your audience is gonna be finding online so just make sure that your website can accommodate those things the second step is make sure your website is easy to navigate there's nothing worse than somebody who finds your blog online or finds an article or find something they want to engage with further they land on your website and they get lost because it's an absolute mess so make sure that your content is well partitioned on your website vertical gate high-value content gating is the process of putting something behind a lead capture form so people are only allowed to access that material if they hand over their email address their phone number whatever you may wish to collect don't gate everything though there's certain pieces of content which you may feel you want to collect someone's contact information for they're just not going to be valuable enough so gate content but get the right kind of content finally you want to build really good landing pages landing pages are going to be the key to success they're going to be what drives those high conversion the conversion rates that Chris was talking about if you don't have a well optimized area for somebody to engage with your content you're not gonna get the same results as you should think so look at some good landing pages shall we what do we like about this landing page maybe it's a bit bias because it's one of Jim's are having pages you know we don't like to play favorites here what would you say is a good feature of this landing page anyone nice layout exactly exactly you don't want to have a cluttered landing page there's nothing worse and you've all seen them in your time landing pages with ten call to actions download this this this or this where are you supposed to be attracted to another thing that I quite like is we're only capturing a couple of details here we're not asking people to fill out every single step of their life there's nothing worse nothing that's gonna affect your conversion rates more than asking too many questions people want a simple process and sales teams you don't need to collect as much information as you need in order to effectively sell to these prospects so look at maybe not-so-great landing page SAP big big company I'm sure you're all very familiar with their works they're not great at landing pages they this is to actually download a single white paper and that white paper is featured at the top in this sort of 1999 Google search engine results page link how they did the CSS styling on this is beyond me like I would love to speak to their web development team it really is something special loads and loads of different links where are you supposed to click a single paragraph that apparently demonstrates value about the content often they're about to receive but actually demonstrates no value and then a blanket statement revolutionized marketing for a new breed of customer what what does that even mean I work in marketing and I don't know what that means so bad times the other thing that's missing glaringly is an effective content form or contact form it just says contact us no thanks I'm really not interested some quick tips on building a great landing page it's really nice to include an image of what the person is going to receive if they give you their contact details so we do a lot of ebooks we do a lot of nicely designed material show them that one of the great things about after its landing page is there's a nice picture of the e-book that they're about to receive it makes it feel tangible it makes it feel like there's some high value worth and engaging with this you need some good punchy copy that tells people what they're gonna get and the benefits of giving you their contact information it's especially important if you're linking this landing page through social media places where you may not be able to demonstrate the full worth the landing page needs to do that it needs to say if you download this content offer you are gonna be the best X don't ask for too many personal details now there is something that we use called progressive profiling progressive profiling is the process of asking somebody for the bare minimum asking somebody for a name an email address and maybe a company name the first touch point that they have the second touch point that I have you can create automated systems which will pre-populate that data and we can start asking for more information what's your website URL you know how big is your company what is your job title you're never asking for people for more than three pieces of information at any given time the final point try and reduce main navigation don't add additional call to actions the job of a landing page is to convert somebody it's to say to somebody you're here for this reason here's what I'm going to give to you the second you introduced secondary navigation or additional call to actions you're gonna be in trouble because people are gonna get confused people are going to disconnect next we come to promotion without good promotion how will anyone ever find you an inbound is all about being discovered organic is brilliant but there are certain ways to add value to that discovery process use social media depends on your buyer persona I think we can all agree that the majority of people that we sell to in the year 2017 have some sort of connection with social media LinkedIn groups are a great way to segment this even further so if you find highly targeted groups for people once you're conducting your by persona research you can start marketing to those channels that people engaged with blog blogging is really important blogging is a cost-effective high-return way to increase visits and promote content that you're going to be using for lead capture purposes send emails they could be to your database to people in your database that may have been disengaged over a long period of time no one's followed up with them it could be actually acquiring third party lists so you're going to generate an influx of brand new people that Europe you're attracting with your your awareness stage offer finally there are some good offline efforts I know it's weird talking about inbound a digital method but think about creating a piece of high-value content and using it to connect people events that you're attending a lot of our clients will produce great books for them and they'll actually print them out bind them and have these sort of nice book like engagement tools that they can give the prospects in exchange for good conversations or events it works really really well so just to show you how this could sort of work here's some data from bio strata we promote quite a lot through social media and you can see that since the start of this year January 2017 if we didn't use social media as a promotional platform we'd be missing out on 432 web visits which have actually led to 21 leads and those 21 leads have arrived within five months only through social media we always use social media as a springboard to direct people to a landing page sometimes we direct people to a blog and then the blog will be the springboard to access the landing page it's all about getting people to make contact it's always good to look at benchmarks as well you're gonna be doing a lot of this sort of activity so what benchmarks can you expect 30% of your total traffic should be coming from organic in the ideal world you don't want to be paying a lot and driving visits to your website your landing page conversion rate should be 20 to 25% you're not going to convert a hundred percent of people that arrive on your landing page but twenty twenty-five percent is a good medium for that visits the contacts Chris touched upon this but really should be 1.5 to 3 percent email open rates around 20 percent Paul at the very start of this this discussion talked about email open rates are on the decline unfortunately but email still has an important place part to play in marketing and that 20% is a good benchmark to Miami for click-through rate three to seven percent becoming very difficult these days again email click-through rate is down but if you've got a truly compelling content offer well targeted at your persona unsubscribe rates you don't want a lot of people on subscribing bounce rates to show that your database isn't well updated spam complaints again you don't want to be annoying people that don't want to hear from you CTA round two to three percent per page this is on your good content people are accessing the final step the final part that's going to bring my presentation to a close is about the need to monitor performance we use HubSpot there's no surprises there and we use HubSpot to basically optimize continually optimize our marketing efforts so this is data from our HubSpot dashboard and this is data since we started working with HubSpot two years ago you can see a very nice steady increase in traffic and also leads and as Chris mentioned we're still generating leads from old pieces of content from two years ago when we first started this process what's important is I'm sure all of you guys who don't use HubSpot some of you may use HubSpot you're already collecting this data through Google Analytics for a number of other third-party tools you could probably tell me the average number of visits you receive per month and the average number of leads you're receiving per month but I want to drill down deeper because that doesn't tell me anything visits and leads doesn't tell me to know so let's have a look at where these people are coming from again real data based on those numbers I just showed you and you can see the organic is our primary source of traffic brilliant some good referral numbers social media always been a strong performance for piyah strata email marketing we don't do a huge amount of email marketing and we get quite a lot of people direct visiting as you can expect we're a relatively well-known company again this isn't good enough this doesn't tell me what I need to know in order to prove my campaigns so let's have a look at what people do when they're actually on our website let's have a look at how that's performing so most people will arrive on our home page we know that we understand that that is where the majority of traffic it's fill would free people then look at our team they they may want to prequalify us make sure we've got the expertise a lot of people look at our careers a lot of people would work for us sectors and then people will usually contact us it's a very outline user flow and you can get this data from Google Analytics again it's nothing new but it's important because you need to understand the people that are engaging with your website and what they care about so guess what it's still not good enough I've just learned the organic search is the top referrer of traffic to my website and what HubSpot is brilliant at and it's a really cool tool is the keyword track at all so we do a lot of work in building brilliant keyword and SEO strategies and you can see some of the phrases that we are currently ranking number one for on Google that shows me that our organic inbound campaigns are working because we blog about stuff and have life-science marketing as a subject matter life-science marketing embedded in text and that's what enables us to top Google and that's what enables us to get all of those visits and contacts people find us organically people engage with us congratulations you've saved the universe you know what's going on you've set your strategy you've put a tactical plan together and you've executed it wonderful you