For Starfleet Media, compliance largely means making sure that our landing pages for Smart Decision Guides, commissioned eBooks, benchmark reports, etc., adhere to the new rules. The good news is that our white label landing page service provider, Unbounce, has invested heavily in the necessary changes to be GDPR compliant as a conversion platform. By collecting lead information with Unbounce, Starfleet Media serves as the data controller while Unbounce serves as our data processor. We have partnered exclusively with Unbounce for the past five years. Unbounce ensures us that the company has already made the necessary changes to create a GDPR compliant platform with privacy and security safeguards throughout its platform.

While this is a big part of the compliancy puzzle in the case of a marketing services provider like Starfleet Media, there are still a few things we need to do to ensure that we capture and distribute qualified leads on behalf of our clients in a compliant way. These include the following requirements:

• Obtaining consent from our visitors (lawful basis of processing)
• Linking our privacy policy (informing visitors of our data protection policies)
• Deleting personal data if requested (right to erasure)
• Encrypting lead data at transit and in rest (using SSL)
• Signing a data processing addendum (DPA)

We gather consent via opt-in to collect, use, or store someone’s data. When building our landing pages in Unbounce, we include an opt-in field to our forms. Visitors must actively check that opt-in box to give consent. Last year Unbounce launched sticky bars (a discreet, mobile-friendly way to get more conversions), but they do double duty as a cookie bar, notifying your visitors about cookies. When we publish a cookie bar using Unbounce’s built-in template, we will be required to embed the code across all of your landing pages using script manager, then publish to every landing page we build in Unbounce.

With the new GDPR, we are also required to inform visitors to our landing pages of our data protection policies. This means providing easy access to our privacy and data protection policies. We have always believed that sharing our privacy and data protection policies are an important way to earn the trust and confidence of our readers. We have always strived to make it very clear to prospects how their data will be shared and used. We will now update our policies to explain how we are complying with the new regulations that go into affect next month.

With the new GDPR, a prospect whose data has been collected can request that we erase any of their personal data without “undue delay”. Our support team has established a protocol, in partnership with Unbounce, to ensure that all information for a specific lead or a group of leads are deleted from all databases. As of today, we are committed to fulfilling deletion requests within the time limit enforced by the GDPR. We are also working to ensure that we adhere to the GDPR requirement to process all data securely by forcing visitors to the secure HTTPS version of our landing pages.

At Starfleet Media, we have always viewed data privacy and security as cornerstones of our content marketing and lead generation services.  We understand that nobody wants their personal data falling into the wrong hands or being used in an intrusive way. We are happy to assure both our readers (industry practioners who may be in the market for making a technology purchase decision) and our clents (which include some of the world’s largest and most preeminent technology solutions providers) that we take privacy and data security seriously.

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Executives and others who are charged with researching, evaluating and, often, selecting a technology solution on behalf of their company are usually happy to make their information available to relevant solution providers. Because they are in the market to make a purchase decision (typically, coming to our landing pages via keyword searches), they likely want to learn about the leading solutions and ask questions of experts in the field. In fact, they may well be in the process of identifying and contacting these experts themselves.

Our landing pages explicitly state that they should expect to be contacted: “By accessing this Smart Decision Guide, you are agreeing to be contacted by one or more company underwriters who made complimentary access to this content possible and who may be able to provide additional guidance.” People who mark “none of the above” are likely not in the market or simply don’t wish to be contacted. Their names are automatically excluded from our leads validation and distribution process.

Capturing purchase intention is critical. Basic demographic and firmographic information (name, title, contact info, etc,) tells the marketing and sales teams absolutely nothing about whether – and when – a decision maker or influencer plans to purchase the type of technology solution they offer. Without purchase intention info, there is no way for these teams to assess the quality of a new lead. Purchase intention info gives them a good sense for a prospect’s receptiveness to their message and readiness to convert. It helps them prioritize the opportunity. It helps them know where to place it in the sales pipeline and which internal resources should be assigned to pursue it.

Ultimately, having intention context is what separates qualified leads (prospects who are in the market to buy) from compiled contacts (people who downloaded the content asset but may not be in the market to buy or want to be contacted). For solution providers, that can make all the difference in the world between wasted sales resources and adding a new company to the customer roster. 

The post Capturing Purchase Intention: The “If”s and “When”s of B2B Lead Gen appeared first on Starfleet Media.

Allocating marketing resources and dollars toward channels and properties with a high concentration of target prospects is insufficient. B2B companies sometimes think that running a marketing campaign that directly targets the membership base of an industry trade association, for example, or a relevant LinkedIn Group is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Remember: Nobody wants to be shot at. That explains the rapidly declining effectiveness of cold calls and email blasts, which nowadays tend to do more harm than good, especially within the realm of B2B. Today’s decision makers want to conduct their own online research, which means searching for relevant content, and they want to agree to being contacted by vendors.

Generally speaking, decision makers will provide their names and contact information, and even tell about their purchase intentions, to download content they deem valuable. Consider: Last month, we conducted an online survey with readers of our Smart Decision Guides, which are gated. 92% rated the content as either “valuable” or “extremely valuable.” 74% even said they shared it with a colleague in their organization. And 72% said that the follow-up calls they received from one or more vendors were “helpful” or “extremely helpful.”

The right kind of “bait” (yes, the metaphor is flawed) may be an eBook, a research report, a white paper or another type of content asset. The important point is that B2B companies need to refrain from marketing to everyone under the sun that happens to meet their target prospect criteria. Instead, they need to utilize high-value content, along with inbound marketing tactics, to make sure they “get found” by those decision makers who may actually be interested in becoming new customers.

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