Latest from the Intellegentia Blog

For the Financial Services sector, the inbound methodology provides a really interesting way of thinking about marketing. It’s about educating and informing. It’s about retention. It is not about overt selling. All of which fits entirely with the ethics, rules and regulations governing the financial services industry.

How does marketing automation help financial services marketing ?

The industry is made up of quite different organisations – for example membership-based networks, client facing advisers and intermediaries. Each have their own marketing needs and ways of going to market.

Whether you are a client-facing financial adviser marketing yourself in a defined geography, targeting particular types of consumer or business, or a network looking to recruit and retain members across the country, your marketing needs can be similar:

Lead Nurturing is a fundamental must-have for successful inbound marketing. Statistics show that only 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to Sales. (MarketingSherpa)

In the sales and marketing world, there are few issues that get more attention than at what point a lead becomes 'sales ready' and therefore be passed on to sales and when a lead should stay with marketing and be nurtured.

Gleanster Research estimates that 50% of leads who are qualified to buy are not ready to purchase immediately. If you call these leads up to try and hurry them along the buying process you will most likely lose them.  So what to do with those that are not ready to purchase immediately?  

Lead nurturing is all about understanding the nuances of your leads’ needs and providing them with relevant content at the right time. Getting these details right and being more scientific with your lead nurturing will help you to align your sales and marketing teams, make your sales teams happier as they receive better quality leads and improve ROI from your marketing efforts.

Take a look at some common lead nurturing mistakes to avoid:

Why companies employing an Inbound strategy should look to compliment that with an outbound program or in some cases an Account Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy.

For those companies deploying an inbound marketing strategy, there’s a time horizon, often 3-6 months before seeing meaningful results – so it’s important to find ways to reduce the impact of lower lead flows during on boarding and the roll out of inbound marketing (the so called ‘valley of death’).

Companies need to plan out a program of lead generation activities that will keep the sales pipeline filled, which may not be as cost effective as inbound but is necessary in the short term.

There is no denying that social media plays a critical part in the marketing mix but are you using it for lead generation?

Many marketers do struggle with measuring ROI on social and some businesses still view social media simply as a tool for customer engagement and brand promotion, but it really is much more than that.

Social media can easily be leveraged by B2B marketers for a steady source of leads.  Here are some essential tips to get you started with lead generation for social media: