What is lead nurturing?
 
Lead nurturing means keeping in touch with prospects over time and offering them new information as they have new questions or move closer to a purchase. This is especially important for prospects who aren’t ready to make a purchase the first time they contact you, but will make a purchase eventually – either from you, or from a competitor.

Why would I want to use readership tracking to nurture leads?
 
To reduce the cost of generating leads; to generate higher-quality leads more quickly and to better prepare your sales force to call on those leads. Readership tracking automatically scores leads based on criteria you set, meaning you pass on only the best leads to your sales force.

Isn’t this an invasion of the prospect’s privacy?
 
No, because we begin each campaign by asking the prospect if they would like to receive information from us, and allowing them to opt out at any time. We also do not know the identity of any prospect until they choose to provide it to us in a registration form. Until that time, each prospect is anonymous.

How does all this work?
 
The creative staff at Bob Scheier Associates works with you to understand what kind of leads you need to generate, and develops stories designed to generate those leads or to answer questions about the needs of specific prospects. We then distribute that content and analyze its readership through marketing campaigns built using Marketo Lead Management, a leading marketing automation tool.

How is this different from Web analytics?
 
Most Web analytic tools, as the name implies, only track activity on a Web site, and cannot track activity across blogs or other marketing channels. Marketo Lead Management tracks activity across multiple marketing channels. Web analytic tools are often not able to easily share information with leading customer relationship management tools. Marketo is tightly integrated with Salesforce.com, making it easier to integrate your marketing and sales programs.

Do you have any reference customers?

Idology, which sells on-line identify verification to companies including AOL and Symantec, has seen a 500 percent improvement in its conversion rate and a doubling of marketing efficiency since it began using Marketo. Its sales department is now able to identity prospects who are clicking on specific emails or who requested specific white papers . Using Marketo, “sales knows how to prioritize and whom to go after,” says Marketing Director Jodi Florence. Vocalocity, which sells hosted PBX services to small businesses, uses Marketo to prioritize leads and to keep in touch with prospects who weren’t ready to buy the first time they contacted the firm. Vocalocity has revived a number of cold leads and improved its opportunity to close’ rate using Marketo. See more Marketo success stories...

Bob Scheier Associates is led by Bob Scheier, a veteran IT trade editor who for more than eight years have been providing clear, compelling marketing collateral for leading IT vendors including Microsoft, EMC, AT&T as well as emerging companies in the security, storage, wireless and virtualization markets.