Are Registration Forms Killing B2B Software Marketing?

The trend among B2B marketers seems to be a requirement that a person fill out a web form in order to download material, or watch a product demo online. The questions is why the requirement, and is this wise because of the drop off in collateral engagement?

A large part of what is driving B2B marketers to force forms is management’s requirement that marketing prove its worth. If you spent $30,000 on Google AdWords last month, in this economy, you’d better have something to show for it. If you force a form, the thinking is that you gather contact information for sales and marketing to close deals.

Today it seems most B2B firms require you to use your “real” company email address when filling out a form. I.e., you can’t use your Gmail or Hotmail address to get the white paper. This is another point of drop off in the process because so many of us don’t want someone nagging us for the next six months because we submitted a form.

How many times has a site asked you to fill out several forms during one session? Maybe I want to look at a video, and also read a paper – but do I want to fill out two forms? As a marketer, I may already have a decent size database of contacts – maybe I already know this person. But because you have disparate data stores, and no technology in place, you look sillyto your prospect and your sales team because you can’t automatically connect, leverage and deduplicate what you may already know.

There are Visitor / Download tracking technologies that can help B2B marketers deal with these issues. Without the person filling out a form, these work by tracking what a person downloads, how they arrived and many other aspects of visitor behavior. Yes, the person is anonymous, but if I am an effective marketer, at some point in the process, I will compel you to reveal a bit about yourself. At that point, these technologies connect all the dots and serve the sales team a highly qualified lead, complete with a full history of previous interaction (and future interaction).

Rhett Thompson
CoreMotives, LLC

This originally appeared as part of my thread response in the LinkedIn group “Technology Marketing Community”: http://bit.ly/bdKwbE & MarCom Ink: http://bit.ly/9lhqAW