Lead Generation « Skyron Blog

Looking for inspiration for your B2B interactive demo? Learnings from Microsoft’s PC Scout

by Yannis

|March 26th, 2011

In the world of B2B communications a well executed interactive demo can be a powerful marketing tool. A number of our clients depend on demos to turn leads into customers (and sometimes to generate leads). But a good demo can be pricey as it requires a strategy, complicated production that can include video, audio, animation and copywriting, as well as a tactical plan and execution to put it in front of the relevant audiences.

So when we come across a demo with a bit of investment behind it we scrutinise it and then apply any gained insights to the work we do for our clients. Yesterday, I played with the PC Scout demo/microsite from Microsoft, which I found very interesting.

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Corporate sales presentations: CXOs love the iPad and put a spanner in the works

by Yannis

|March 13th, 2011

When it comes to sales presentations this is the story so far: whether in media and publishing, professional services, or technology, our clients have been facing similar frustrations: long stacks of slides, uninspiring content, unclear messages and lack of impact. We have been responding to such frustrations by planning, writing, designing and building sales presentations in PowerPoint, or Flash that grab the audience by the lapel and give them something to think about.

In the past 6 months the iPad has entered the board room and is becoming the gadget of choice for CXOs. The knock-on effect is that our clients, partially responding to pressure from above, have been making noise about adding iPads to their sales presentation kit, which of course raises the question of how on earth do you get sales presentations to play on iPads. If you are a one man/woman outfit and want to switch your presentation hardware to iPads, you can get yourself the Keynote iPad app for £5.99 and you are sorted. At an enterprise level though the situation is complicated and unfortunately at the moment there is no simple solution.

It is worth reviewing afresh the main presentation creation tools, what they are best suited for, and their iPad compatibility.

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Finally! LinkedIn adds more functionality to Company pages

by Yannis

|November 11th, 2010

LinkedIn Products & Services form

Company pages have been the weakest LinkedIn feature, until now. LinkedIn has finally added more functionality to the Company pages making them a far more powerful feature. The brand new Products & Services section allows every company to add a very detailed and comprehensive portfolio of their offering onto their LinkedIn Company profile. This is a fantastic opportunity for a number of reasons:

It is a fantastic showcase tool
It is a great opportunity for every company to fine-tune the description and details of their offering
Allows YouTube video imports and linking
The Company page can finally add real value and become a landing page (emails, business cards, etc.)
Allows promotion of the product/service on LinkedIn
Hopefully the products/services listed will be searchable, to bring buyers and sellers closer than ever

The only drawback is that companies have one more thing to keep up-to-date.

We are now working to update our LinkedIn Company pages.

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Our B2B portfolio is now live on Flickr

by Yannis

|October 11th, 2010

Our B2B portfolio is now available on Flickr. Categories include:

Corporate Website Design & Development
Lead Generation Campaigns
Presentations
Branding
Umbraco CMS
Email Communications
Intranets/Extranets

Please visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyron/

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News International B2B campaign converts over 75%

by Yannis

|August 19th, 2010

News International Commercial launched a week-long campaign to boost brand awareness of The Sun amongst planners and buyers from London’s top media agencies.

The strategy was for 5 days to immerse the audience into The Sun brand, to engage them with daily entertainment and to present them with cold, hard success facts about the newspaper. The campaign was extremely targeted and included product sampling, daily quizzes, prize draws and plenty of factual information. Skyron created, hosted and supported all the digital assets including 5 quizzes, registration, winner selection facility and a series of email announcements and reminders starting a few days before the campaign kicked off and ending a few days after.

The B2B campaign was extremely well received with over 75% of people visiting the microsite registering for the daily prize draws.

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iPad advertising will create amazing opportunities for B2B brands

by Yannis

|August 12th, 2010

We have been commissioned to create some engaging interactive advertising for a global B2B brand that will run on a publisher’s iPad application. Having spent some time reviewing the best and most adventurous advertising on iPad apps it feels like we are back in the late 90s when a few pixelated GIF banners went on to profoundly transform the advertising industry. At the moment most iPad app ads are simply print ads that magically rearrange themselves when the iPad changes orientation. Some brands have started experimenting with more interactive formats but so far they are the exception.

The opportunity for B2B brands is enormous

Demos of solutions or products are very often a critical part of the B2B marketing and sales process of many organisations. But what does it take to stick a prospect in front of the product/solution demo you spent days creating? If you go through your usual sales process it might take months of hard work to set up the demo meeting; if you advertise on your industry’s portal, you’d be lucky if more than 0.3% of users click to see your online demo; if you try to gather a crowd for a Webinar, the reach is extremely limited.

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“mailto” links are bad for B2B business

by Yannis

|July 12th, 2010

We have banned the use of “mailto” links at Skyron. “mailto” links are costing you leads and there is absolutely no reason for their existence on your B2B website. “mailto” links give you no control:

No control over the user experience. Your prospect arrives to your well designed, carefully written and lovingly maintained webpage and she decides to get in touch. Great! But then she clicks on your “mailto” link and suddenly it’s all gone; gone are the branding, the messages, the effort and the consistent feel. Outlook (or whatever) comes up and she is off on a new journey dictated by Microsoft (or whoever).
No control over data collection. So the prospect managed to send an email via Outlook. Do you remember who the listed recipient is? Sales? Support? Recruitment? What was the topic? Was it a lead or was it an existing customer expressing a concern? Will it be entered into your CRM system? Will the recipient act? If you care about such information, “mailto” links can make your life very miserable.
No control over quality. “mailto” links are easy to use and as a result the quality and relevance of the email enquiries is likely to be low.

Stay in top form

Replace all “mailto” links with forms; well structured, written and designed and featuring a strong call to action. You will fully own the user experience (even the confirmation page can be an opportunity for further engagement), all form data will be saved in whatever way is meaningful and useful to you and the enquiries will be of much higher quality and relevance. You can have a large single form with a dropdown menu of subject options such as Recruitment, Customer Service, Media, Sales, etc. Alternatively, you can have multiple shorter forms peppered across the website, where they are most relevant.

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Posted in Email|Lead Generation

Skyron launch B2B lead generation microsite for The Sun Classifieds

by Yannis

|June 29th, 2010

The Sun Classifieds team are targeting the recruitment sector with a new message and a lead generation campaign. At the heart of the campaign is the microsite designed and built by Skyron.

The purpose of the microsite is to communicate the wide and diverse readership of The Sun, to share insights about reach and engagement and to encourage new business enquiries. The microsite’s rich interactive content has been composed to resonate with and appeal to professionals in the recruitment industry.

Visit: www.themisconception.co.uk

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Mind your (body) language in meetings

by Yannis

|May 30th, 2010

Crossing arms has never been the same since I read Persuasion (James Borg, 2007, Pearson Education). I strongly recommend the book for its great insights into body language, memory control and conversational dexterity.

This great infographic is another reminder of how important both mastering and interpreting non-verbal communication is and also how many times we come across people in meetings who get it so wrong. Showing some renewed interest in the topic, I also dug up this recent and fascinating BBC documentary on persuasion – remember S.P.I.C.E.!

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Posted in Lead Generation|Sales|Uncategorized

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