Presentation I gave at a B2B Marketing Magazine seminar in November 2009 together with Stan from http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/ and the subject of content marketing in lead generation

1. Winning and nurturing leads in a web 2.0 environment; ShipServ and why content is still king John Watton, CMO, ShipServ

2. We will cover… A bit about ShipServ What we did Why we did it How we did it 6 Lessons Learned

3. A bit about ShipServ E-marketplace. $1bn in GMV per annum Connect buyers & sellers of commercial ship supplies Flexible monetisation model Some Freemium elements Buyer Subscriptions Seller listings and advertisements Go-to-market approach Regional direct sales (10+) Philippines-based telesales team (30+)

4. What we did Marketing automation Email design E-mailing Landing pages Capture forms/progressive profiling Lead scoring Automated “high scoring” “Interesting moments” Weekly lead reports Lead nurturing Drip campaigns Social Media

7. How we did it #2: Process, process, process Strong working relationship with sales Defined process Concept of a Marketing Qualified Prospect (MQP) Establishes criteria for “handshake” between marketing & sales Generate & recycle

8. Pipeline management

9. How we did it #3: Creating the right content Has to pass a higher bar than ever before What passes that test? Information that buyer believes will Save a fortune Make a fortune Keep him in his job Keep him out of jail

10. Content marketing defined Content marketing is turning your insight and advice into campaigns that change people’s minds and incite action

11. As B2B marketers, we tend not to do this well But you are the ‘gods’ of your market More deployments Singular focus Know the whole market landscape The real experts work for you Your own passion and point of view

12. The 10 principles of content marketing It’s not about you Pick a hot issue Find clear water Be independent Support your story with data Use customers (and third parties) Share negatives Humanity and empathy Confidence sells Credibility matters

13. ShipServ campaign 2008/09 Content and micro-content around six calendared themes Promote and distribute the content through low cost online media – especially social media like LinkedIn and feeding the Twitter account with blog posts, social releases, etc. SEO keyword planning and site and landing page optimization Creating a LinkedIn Group as a community hub and encouraging membership and Exploitation of five other maritime groups on LinkedIn (who together have over 11,000 members) The production of a viral video to lighten the conversation Implementing Marketo lead nurturing and lead scoring to track visitor behaviour and create sales-ready leads

14. The results Number of web visitors up 59% (quantity up); Page views up 70%; and average time on site up 25% (quality up). LinkedIn and Twitter went from zero to being in our top 20 site referrers. The number of sales-ready leads passed to sales went up 400%

15. From

16. To

17. 6 Lessons Learned

18. 1. Don’t be afraid to experiment

19. 2. Work collaboratively with sales

20. 3. Engage with social media – it’s the future!

21. 4. Leave your (digital) fingerprints everywhere

22. 5. Re-pimp your content

23. 6. You can achieve a lot with a little

24. Thank You jwatton@shipserv.com / @jwatton