Baits – your gateway to more qualified leads

Lead generation is critical to the survival of any B2B company, keeping the sales funnel full with qualified leads is something few companies can dare to ignore.

Companies spend huge amounts of money on marketing to promote their offerings and to get people to view their website ‘for more information’. Of these many visitors who come to the site, some are people who will eventually buy their products if dealt with in the right manner. These are the so called potential leads.

But a website visitor only becomes a qualified Lead when there is enough information available on a visitor’s identity and his intentions. And such information can be found by adopting any of these two methods -

1. By adopting, one of the various marketing automation solutions available in the market which help B2B companies identify a visitor to their site as lead based on the activities performed by the visitor on the website or
2. By ensuring that the company use enough baits or hooks for the different phases of its marketing programs – in a way that they push an interested visitor to take action and give away his intent through his actions.

It is the second method which I wish to discuss in this post.

Baits – like the word suggests are things that entice people towards them and get them hooked. In the world of online marketing too, there are different type of baits which help companies and their websites to entice visitors to take some action in lure of some more interesting information, that promises to satisfy the curiosity generated by the initial introduction leading to the bait.

Baits can be broadly divided into three types:

1. Click Baits : As the name suggests these are assets placed strategically in campaigns to attract the attention of the visitor to the website or reader of an email. The baits are designed to attract the attention of the visitor / reader and make them curious to click and find out more. The baits are inherently designed to have a higher chance of being clicked by the visitor. Hence the click baits can be placed in

• emails to direct the email reader to a landing page which will provide him further details.
• Banners : to direct the visitor to the specific product / service page advertised in the banner.
• Landing Pages: redirecting the landing page visitors to appropriate pages.
• Website: Directing the website visitors to the appropriate product / service page.
• Microsite: redirect the microsite visitors to the main website.

2. Lead Baits : These are assets which have an ‘offer‘ and an associated ‘call to action‘ which triggers a ‘form fill‘. A form fill is a technique to identify the visitor and post confirmation of the visitor’s identity follow up activities can be taken up. ‘Form fill‘ is just one of the ways of capturing the visitor identity other techniques may be used to capture the visitor information. These baits after having captured the attention of the visitor by luring exciting offers make the visitor provide their information to be used for planned follow-up activities. The visitor information capture process should be as convenient as possible for the visitor so that he does not forgo the offer due to the cumbersome technique of providing his information.

3. Nurture Baits : Nurture baits are assets which encourage the visitors to take actions without any form fills. The objective of the bait is to confirm the interest of the visitor in a specific product, service, solution or domain. The assets on the website which can used as Nurture baits are

• Published Material like Whitepapers, Case studies, Articles and research findings
• Audio Visual Material like videos, demonstration tools, podcasts, webinars etc…

The associated action expected from the visitor could be to download the material or view the material. Generally Nurture Baits are strong incentive when the visitor is in the ‘Research intent Phase’ of his buying cycle. Baits should be an integral part of any B2B marketing and Lead generation program. Baits not only help companies in knowing their potential leads from regular visitors, but they can also help in putting together a more effective and action oriented Lead nurturing program – where a lead is bound to disclose to the company his level of interest in the company’s product.