Marketing Like a Jihadist

Opportunities beget deals.

Deals beget revenue.

No leads, no deals, no revenue, no company.

So guess what, lead generation is key.

At Message Blocks we have a great event planning, management, and ticketing system that nobody can find, so we want to get the word out to bring in highly qualified leads.

Our march toward monster lead generation starts with building the three pillars of lead generation:

• Pull Marketing,
• Targeted Marketing, and
• Sales Hunting

Sitting on top of our pillars is metrics. We plan on measuring each and every step so we can lean in when we are winning and pivot when we aren’t.

PULL MARKETING

Pull marketing is the art of getting the right people to find your offering and getting engaged with your content. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is how it happens. At Message Blocks, our starting steps to getting those right people finding our site is selecting the top 40 key words we KNOW that event planners are looking for when they are looking for an event planning or event management software, platform, or system.

What do we do with those key words?

We build our content around them, ensuring that each page, while containing relevant information that helps tell our story, contains as many keywords as possible. Concomitantly, we make sure those key words pop up in the plural, past tense etc…just to cover all the bases.

Now that we have a website that tells our story, with the terms that the event planners understand and are looking for, we move on to our second pillar.

TARGETED MARKETING

Where are the event planners looking for advice, sharing knowledge, and what keywords are they using? Message Blocks wants to be front and center whenever a meeting planner is looking for event planning, event management, or event ticketing options.

As described above, our targeted marketing pillar is in fact a dual pillar of pay per click (PPC) ad word buys and PPC advertising.

Building off our website keywords and SEO we are starting to use those same keywords we’ve identified as critical to event coordinators and are aggressively bidding on them. As well, we have some nice targets that we are are testing on the edge. Why test these edge niche cases? Because while being a niche player does not create an explosive growth company, owning a niche can fuel that growth.

Wherever event planners look for new software or systems go for advice and information we want to be front and center to gain credibility by association and compete for traffic. Concurrently we want to see which sites rank best for the PPC keywords and phrases we believe our target demographic going after.

Why? We’ll compete for PPC space there, too.

Heck, if one of our competitors offers PPC space on their page, we’ll take it.

Now that we know their language, where they are, and what they look for we can move to our third and final pillar.

SALES HUNTING

Sales hunting is the most direct and fastest lead generation method; however, without proper preparation and setup, sales hunting could be a fruitless endeavor.

Sales hunting requires detailed profiling.

We’ve meticulously gone through our database of customers and filled out all their demographic information, such as geolocation, industry, event or conference size, planning team member titles, etc., and have come up with several profiles we believe are great candidates for our sales team.

Armed with those profiles, user stories around those profiles, and cultivated list pruned from reliable sources, each sales rep has over 200 leads to pursue over the next month.

So what do you think of our three pronged lead generation approach?

I’ll try to post an update, with the associated metrics, to be accountable to the public.