Smart marketing with Ryan Caligiuri

Why do you feel it’s the job of a marketer to pull in leads? I always considered that to be the sales teams job not the marketers. The marketers job is to support the sales team and develop communications that will help provide information that someone can use to answer questions they may have. I obviously disagree with the 73% of CEO’s. I think it’s about expectations and their expectations are over exaggerated.

If our role is to support the sales team and only that, it's no wonder that 73% of CEOs doubt the ability of the marketer in today's business arena...

I think it's important that as professionals we take a more active step in helping our company achieve a level of growth that only a marketer can do.

Hi Sandra! Thank you for your question today. SEO and social media can be used for lead generation, absolutely, but they both take a great deal of time to get ramped up...

But by itself is not a lead generator, it's a communicator of your lead gen program. You need to develop the webinar series first, set up your live event and develop those landing pages first and then use social media to connect interested parties with your offers...

As for SEO, I have worked with SEO specialists who generate leads for businesses that focus on B2C (Business to Consumer) and it works great! They also have business to business (B2B) clients but I've seen huge success stories with B2C. SEO is a great lead generator but again, to achieve these success stories it took them about one to two years...

Often when there is a need to generate leads, we need to work a lot faster and produce a result a lot earlier so that's why I didn't include SEO in the column either. There are a lot of other great strategies to use to generate leads but I only chose 5 for the column :)