The 3 W's of the Lead Gen World: White Papers-Webinars-Workshops

If you've ever worked for an enterprise, I'm sure you would've come across these 3 W's. They are the staple diet of an enterprise marketer's lead gen meal plan. The trick is to understand how your customers respond to these 3 key lead gen tools and identify the optimum conversion path.

When in doubt, always relate to your own experience in consuming information. If you are evaluating something, you would require more information. So as a starting point you might research for more information and maybe download some content. Then when you want to understand it a bit more and maybe listen to an expert, you might look for an online tutorial. And finally if you're really keen on implementing this or buying this, then you would like to meet someone in person and find out the answers to your questions f2f.

That's exactly how the 3W's should be used.

1) Use white papers to educate your potential buyers

2) Use webinars to get that initial 1 to 1 experience with your brand

3) Use workshops to give them that personal experience and win them over

In an ideal world, a consumer would straightaway buy what you are selling. But in a more realistic world, they will need to warm up to your brand and when the need comes, they might consider you.

White papers and webinars are great lead warmers and workshops are great lead converters. You may not necessarily need all 3 to win someone over. The key is to understand your customer's needs and use the above 3 to address them. You can use all the data modelling in the world to understand buyer behaviour, but if you have an online business, google analytics (GA) can really help you understand this.

All you have to do is set up your products/services as 'goals' on GA and then monitor conversions. GA can tell you who is converting, when are they converting, how are they converting and if you dig a bit deeper, it can even give you a multi-channel view of your conversions.

Once you capture these leads, you should have a clear lead nurturing plan. GA can help you figure out a general conversion path and based on this you can implement a kick ass nurturing plan. For e.g. if you know that a majority of your customers like to read one white paper, listen to 3 webinars and attend a workshop before buying something from you, then you should create an email programme that helps create this conversion path for customers. By doing this, you will not only help customers find what they need but also shorten that conversion cycle!

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