If sale is king, lead is queen

The way we do outbound marketing and generate leads online in the future will change yet again - just when you thought you'd joined the cool kids for good. At least the one thing the cool kids will stick to when it comes to communicating with these leads and converting them to happy customers is the medium they use. A medium which has stayed the same for the last decade - email marketing. Of course, during the past few years email marketing certainly has added some bells and whistles - but more about this later.

SEO ranking, meaningless?

The new search will be broad, personalised and based on social activity. Actually, it has started already, with Google now also displaying social media status updates in search results. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube are the new search engines. Data gathered from these networks will influence rankings on traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Mike Volpe, VP marketing of HubSpot, even goes as far as stating that "SEO rank is now a meaningless metric".

Why? Well, because more and more it will be about who is searching, where they search and what is happening at the time of their search (current content gets more preference, and content related to you, as per your activities on social networks, will appear on the first page). Search results will also be based on your location. In short - the search algorithms will change. Search results will look different for different people, even if they search for the same keyword (phrase) on the same search engine.

To give you an example: While both Oli and Pete look for "email marketing" online, GraphicMail for instance will be displayed for Oli as search result #1 on SERP, simply because he has five friends on Facebook who are fans of GraphicMail, and because some of his LinkedIn friends are members of the GraphicMail email marketing group. Pete however, who does not use social media at all, will have a company such as ConstantContact come up first - simply because they have more followers on Twitter and more re-tweets than GraphicMail.

Search results, user-defined

Let's take a quick step back in search history. Until about the year 2000, context (webpages) was king. Then, for the next 10 years, it was context and authority. As from 2010, it will be not only context and authority, but also personalisation. Some of you might remember the good old Alta Vista days, when getting a first page ranking was easy using SEO. All you had to do was to add the right meta tags and then repeat your keyword on the web page. When Google appeared on the scene in 1999/2000, Alta Vista quickly lost its prime position and getting a number one became more difficult.

The Google god demanded links as sacrifices - you had to start trying to receive a lot of good inbound links which increased your authority on the web. Then Google Adsense appeared, and brought out many SEO "Black Hats" (customarily defined as the practice of using unethical techniques to make your search rankings go up) who created many web pages, got those pages found, placed Google Adsense in the code and then banked the money.

Tony Roocroft mentions in one of his newsletters that "this relatively small number of people however were so capable of dominating chosen sectors that 'real websites' never had a chance of ranking well". The top "Black Hat" performers were always in the fields of porn, travel and insurance (to name a few). The next big attempt to influence SERPs was the wholesale buying and selling of links. And now, it will be more and more difficult to influence your ranking since the search results will be user-defined - but there are a few things you can do to prepare yourself for the big change.

Online presence

What should you be doing in order to catch up with the new trend in search? Well, make sure you have an online presence on the bigger social microsites and networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare; that you have a company blog and send press releases; also, add How to videos to YouTube and photos to Flickr, and share presentations on Slideshare or a similar programme. All of this will attract more attention, since it creates more pages on the web for you. What really spreads fast on the web are of course top notch blogs, funny videos and new data that all provide links to your site.

So, if you apply a healthy mix of optimisation, pay-per-click campaigns and social search practices, you are likely to get a lot more differentiated, quality leads. But of course it can't end there - if a lead is queen, a sale is king. But now, how do you keep that personalised touch, that individualised approach to doing online marketing in your sales and communications strategies? And how do you use your newly gained information on lead data smartly?

Email marketing, the steadfast horse

I think the best way to do this is via email marketing. Yes, that steadfast workhorse from the last 10 years, that has proven to be the most high-yield, affordable marketing tool around to date. Especially since email marketing hasn't been asleep either in the last few years. The leading email marketing service providers have realised where the future of search is going and now offer tools to share newsletters online. One way of doing that is to add social widgets to the footer of outgoing email newsletters that allow subscribers to share the newsletters / articles with their own social network, in one click. As should be standard with any email marketing platform that you choose, social sharing is also measurable - through a report that generates how often, to which networks and by whom the newsletter was shared.

Another way for email marketers to link up email and social marketing is to publish their newsletters straight to their own social networks from within their email marketing account - the newsletter ID string gets pasted into their status line on Facebook or Twitter for instance, as a shortened URL. But now, this still means you're fishing for new leads and branding yourself online. The holy grail of email marketing (on the backdrop of social search) is to use customer segmentation and automation tools that allow you to send the right message to the right client at the right time. This is a sure-fire way of increasing your chances of closing a deal - or at least keeping the subscriber loyal for when he is ready to buy at a future time.

While these segmentation tools allow you to group your subscribers into mailing lists according to their behaviour and preferences, automation tools allow you to send newsletter campaigns at scheduled times and in a series of triggers. So, by using these email marketing tools, you'll create a direct response to the happenings on the web: personalisation and timing!