Lead Generation Archives

January 13, 2023January 2, 2018 by John Woods

Sharp Ahead Highlights of 2017

By John Woods | January 2, 2018

I’m writing this in that quiet time between Christmas and New Year. It’s a great time for reflection. It has been a busy year for us at Sharp Ahead with some significant achievements of which I’m really proud.

Here are some of my personal highlights for this year.

Digital marketing driving expansion at the Fareham Innovation Centre

The launch of the Fareham Innovation Centre was one of our first lead generation projects in the commercial property sector. Using a mix of paid media and conversion-optimised landing pages we helped the new centre build its community of local entrepreneurs and growing businesses in specialist sectors such as advanced engineering, marine technology and aerospace. As a result the building was fully subscribed within a year of opening – two years ahead of schedule.

In 2017 we learned that the spectacular success of the launch has led to a second phase of investment. Construction is now well under way to double the size of the centre, and the new space will be opening in Spring 2018.

The results of B2B marketing are often intangible, so it’s really satisfying to see the real-world impact of our work in the form of a brand-new building!

Ultra-modern lead generation for a long-established business

CLEAN Linen Services can trace its history to a single family-run laundry established in 1886. Today it is a market leader in textile and workwear laundry services, serving over 5,500 customers across the UK. CLEAN has invested in modern technology to deliver its services, including RFID tagging for inventory control and highly efficient new laundry facilities to reduce environmental impacts.

So perhaps it is not surprising that this highly innovative “traditional” business has also been willing to invest in the latest digital marketing techniques. Our work with CLEAN has seen its online lead generation accelerate by 50%.

It’s great to be part of a project that proves how even businesses in “traditional” industries can benefit enormously from modern digital marketing techniques if – like CLEAN – they have the confidence and vision to embrace new approaches.

New market segments for YPO

Another Sharp Ahead client with a somewhat “traditional” history is YPO, a procurement specialist providing over 30,000 products to schools, local authorities and other customers – mostly in the public sector.

Our work with YPO has focussed on cost-effective strategies for new client acquisition. The results have been excellent in their traditional market segments, with in excess of £1M incremental profit attributable to the campaigns. A particular highlight for me is that our work has allowed YPO to identify new market segments (such as childrens’ centres and prisons) that offer opportunities for strategic growth outside their traditional core sectors.

Other highlights in brief

Many of our projects are confidential, so some of our most exciting projects have to stay under wraps. Amongst the highlights I can’t describe in detail: this year we’ve helped a major global manufacturer enter the UK market with a new B2B ecommerce product; we’ve worked on a massively successful long-term lead generation for one of the UK’s fastest-growing professional services companies; and we’ve developed a super-efficient tactical lead generation campaign for a niche B2B consultancy company that uses some of the most precise targeting for digital marketing that I’ve ever seen.

It has been a great year where our clients’ successes have really shown the value of the work we do as an agency.

Are you thinking about how to drive increased B2B business success in 2018? If so, get in touch to explore how Sharp Ahead could help you.

January 13, 2023September 7, 2017 by Jennifer Esty

Oxford Business Breakfast September 20

By Jennifer Esty | September 7, 2017

Sharp Ahead director, Dr John Woods, will be presenting What Success Looks Like in Digital Marketing on September 20 at 07:30 at the De Vere Oxford Thames Hotel.

John will present a case study demonstrating how to generate sales ready leads using digital marketing. The session will be full of practical advice to help you understand the best practices of digital marketing in order to drive growth in your own business.

What will you gain?

Learn why Google is your new home page, and why you MUST reflect this in your digital strategy
Understand why a new website won’t fix your digital problems
See a detailed end-to-end example of modern digital marketing done well

Where can you find out more?

For more information on the session, why not download this useful flyer?

Alternatively if you’d like to register now or need directions for travel, please visit the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce site.

Members and non-members alike are invited to intend!

What are the Oxford Business Breakfasts?

The Oxford Business Breakfasts are designed to give you insights and informed opinions on topics that can impact your business, as well as great opportunities for networking with other local organisations. These events will provide you with a closer look at ’bigger-picture’ subjects, as well as giving the SME sector regular skills and knowledge updates from a range of speakers, generously prepared to share their experience with us. The breakfasts will also be a focus for our regular local and sector campaign activity throughout 2017.

January 12, 2023September 7, 2017 by Jennifer Esty

Join Us at Leeds Business Week October 10

By Jennifer Esty |

Leeds Business Week is a week long programme of over 100 events dedicated to the business and wider community across the city. Attracting delegates and contributors from across the Leeds City Region and beyond, Leeds Business Week promises to be a brilliant experience for everyone.

Driving Sales Growth with Digital Marketing

Sharp Ahead will show you how to improve your digital marketing and drive sales growth. You will also hear directly from YPO, the UK’s largest public sector buying organisation, about how they generated 200 new sales leads in 3 months on a limited budget.

To find out more about the event, or Leeds Business Week in general, visit the Leeds Business Week website.

Spaces are going fast, so please save your seat soon — register now!

Already registered?

Excellent, we can’t wait to meet you there.

For information on the venue, including parking and travel tips, please check out Aspire in Leeds.

January 12, 2023August 8, 2017 by Jennifer Esty

5 Inbound Call Handling Basics to Improve your Lead Generation Campaigns

By Jennifer Esty | August 8, 2017

Too many lead generation campaigns fail to achieve their full potential due to poor inbound call handling. Maximise your marketing investment by getting these five basics right.

Answer the phone

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, but many companies really do falter at the first hurtle. A successful company properly focused on inbound sales enquiries will answer every single call, no matter what time of the day or day of the week.

Calls should never go unanswered because someone is on holiday, or at lunch, or in a meeting. And there are plenty of excellent call answering services that provide a high quality experience to prospects and customers outside of business hours. Use one.

Answer in their language

A similarly painful observation but equally important: B2B prospects considering high end products or services expect and deserve a local phone number answered by a native speaker who is well versed in the company’s products and services.

Again, for B2B companies looking to expand into international markets (or from international markets into the UK) who might not yet have a local office, it’s still worth in investing in a local number and consider outsourcing to a local company specialising in inbound enquiries.

It’s not just for rookies

Many organisations use their inbound phone team as a training ground for new employees looking to skill up to be ‘proper’ sales people. And while it makes sense for sales rookies to cut their teeth on less qualified prospects before putting them in front of the big fish, make sure they are surrounded by skilled peers and are given the proper training to do their job well.

Equally it’s important to remember that the skills that make a successful inbound sales operator are not necessarily the same as the ones that make for a successful sales person. Sales people are taught to keep talking and to ask the right questions. Inbound operators need to listen first and talk second.

Take nothing for granted

Organisations who outsource their inbound sales will no doubt have regular reviews with their agency, covering KPIs, listening to calls (live or recorded), checking up on staff training and generally ensuring high quality delivery. And if they’re not, they’re with the wrong agency.

Organisations who use internal resource, however, are less likely to have these sorts of quality checks in place and just assume their employees are doing a good job. Nothing could be further than the truth. Our experience doing mystery shopping for clients shows that not only do calls go unanswered (see first point) but many are answered by unskilled staff who see inbound calls as a disruption to their ‘real’ job.

Ensure your inbound team know what their KPIs are and put in place processes for monitoring quality.

No one likes surprises

Nothing makes an inbound operator’s job harder than not having the right information to help a prospect. Make sure your inbound team are familiar with your marketing campaigns, before they happen.

They will need to see ad copy, landing pages, be trained on any promotions or demos that have been offered, and be aware of any qualifying (or disqualifying) criteria.

Sharing your marketing campaigns with the inbound team before the campaign starts has the added bonus of getting feedback from the front lines before you waste time or resource on campaigns that are likely to miss the mark.

January 12, 2023July 28, 2017 by John Woods

Groups of people dotted across a map representing demographics

Introducing LinkedIn Website Demographics

By John Woods | July 28, 2017

The meme “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” dates back almost 25 years.

The anonymous nature of most internet use is great for dogs, and for others who want to keep a low profile, but it’s frustrating for marketers who want to understand their audience. And it is particularly frustrating for B2B marketers, who often need to reach very specialist audiences.

Why B2B marketers need to profile website audiences

It’s impossible to judge the success of a niche B2B campaign by just counting anonymous page views. My blog post might reach ten thousand readers, but unless some of those readers are in my target demographic, it could still be a failure as a piece of B2B content marketing.

Conversely if my paid media campaign reaches just a hundred people, but half of those are prospective buyers of my high-end B2B service, then it could be a huge success.

So it is really valuable for B2B marketers to have a way of profiling website visitors, to learn about the characteristics of their audience.

Existing audience profiling tools are limited

There are already a few ways of building website audience profiles. For example Google Analytics provides geographic (country/city) and technographic (device type/browser version) information. And if you enable the Display Advertising features in Google Analytics you will also get information about Google’s affinity categories and in-market segments, some of which are relevant for B2B.

There are also many paid subscription tools that use reverse IP lookups to determine organisation names of anonymous visitors. They provide a few useful hints about your audience, but they are only a few pieces of a complex jigsaw.

New profiling capabilities from LinkedIn

LinkedIn has unique access to professional information about its 500 million users. Now it is promising to share some of that information to shine more light on the characteristics of website audiences that matter most for B2B marketers.

LinkedIn Website Demographics is a free tool that promises to profile your website audience based on information that LinkedIn knows about your visitors. The dimensions include:

• Job title

• Industry

• Job seniority

• Job function

• Company

• Company size

• Location

• Country

Some of these overlap with existing profiling tools – in particular, location and country are already quite well covered by Google Analytics.

But dimensions like “industry” and “seniority” will add valuable detail that is difficult or impossible to obtain from other sources.

Get ready to use LinkedIn Website Demographics

LinkedIn Website Demographics has not yet been released so we don’t have final details on how to use it.

But first impressions are that it will be driven by the existing LinkedIn Insight Tag and by the LinkedIn remarketing audiences which are controlled using that tag.

Like most remarketing-type technologies it will not be retrospective – it will take time for the audiences to build up – and it’s likely to be subject to a minimum audience size (for privacy reasons).

So if you want to be ready for LinkedIn Website Demographics, there is some “plumbing” you should put in place now so that your audiences have time to build up to a workable size:

1. Sign up for a LinkedIn Ads account, if you don’t already have one, and grab the customized LinkedIn Insight Tag code from the Tools/Conversion Tracking menu.

2. Make sure your LinkedIn Insight Tag code is deployed across your website and anywhere else that you want to track (such as campaign landing pages). Google Tag Manager will simplify this job.

3. Set up some audiences in the “Matched Audiences” part of LinkedIn Ads. At a minimum, you’ll want an audience for “all visitors”. You will probably want to create some more specialised audiences as well, for example to cover specific campaign landing pages or particular areas of your site that are intended for different marketing purposes.

And then…wait for LinkedIn to enable this exciting new feature!

More details when we have them…