Best practices on lead generation

Lead Liaison

You’ve Got Visitor Tracking Going – Now What?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Visitor Tracking - Now What?So you’ve been using marketing automation tools to engage in visitor tracking for your business and you have all the data you could ever hope for. What’s next?

Visitor tracking isn’t something all businesses are doing, but they should be. The in-depth information provided by the knowledge of who is visiting your site, how long they stick around and what they’re clicking on can provide advanced intelligence data you never thought possible. We’ve already established how great it is to have this info – but what do you do once the data starts coming in? How can you make the right decisions for your business based on the data you’re seeing?

All the Articles

When users engage with business websites, many of them determine the service value of the company they’re researching based on what kind of content or information the business provides. You may look at visitor tracking data and find that users are clicking on or paying attention to certain blogs as opposed to other areas of content. Maybe more visitors are finding your blog entries or other content via entry from Google. What does this tell us about the way you can use this information in future marketing efforts?

First, if users tend to engage with certain content and you don’t have a sign up box somewhere on your page, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to get users into your information funnel. Promising similar content to the kind that’s really engaging users is a great way to grab email addresses and get your customers that much closer to a sale.

You can also use this as an opportunity to get users further engaged with your website. Info blocks that promise similar content if a user clicks on a story can be really helpful in getting users to spend a fair amount of time on your website, therefore seeing you as a trusted content source. 

What About Advanced Visitor Tracking?

When you’re able to log individual users based on identifying information such as an IP address, you can use this information to tailor your content to what that user wants to see – or to have an agent chat with them in a way that can better capture a sale. There’s no shame in preventing your value proposition in a way that gets you closer to a sale, specifically if you know which individual user your sales staff is talking to.

Lead Liaison offers advanced visitor tracking via its marketing automation services. Talk to us today and discover which marketing automation opportunities will best serve your business!

Get Awesome Visitor Tracking

 

Lead Liaison

Is Conversion Tracking Enough?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Is Conversion Tracking Enough?Conversion tracking is at the heart of any effective marketing campaign. Without the ability to understand where sales are coming from, any company’s overall marketing campaign suffers.

Conversions should be tracked from the time a lead lands on your pages through to the sale. Fortunately, most modern PPC and other marketing services allow businesses to see how users are converting down to the keyword. But is it really that easy? Is there additional information a business can gather to determine how users are finding them, buying and interacting with various marketing materials?

Advanced Tech is the Key

Nowadays, conversion tracking is a given in most marketing services – but it’ll only go so far. Google has great tracking and remarketing tools, but at the end of the day you can’t personalize a lead down to an IP address, name or business due to Google’s privacy policies. When half your Analytics data comes up as “not set”, it’s not always easy to use free tools to figure out how your marketing is working.

Marketing Automation for Conversion Tracking

When you’re working with marketing automation tools, you never have to worry about getting a metric or data back that will tell you “information unavailable” or “not set”. This is why so many businesses have come to rely on marketing automation to take conversion tracking a step further.

Personalization is a big reason for this. Analytics and similar sites don’t function as a CRM that will also manage your leads for you while you’re personalizing them.   Marketing automation does this automatically and flawlessly – letting you know who’s looking, what they want to see and giving you hints on how best to advertise to them in the future.

Once you get the hang of it, personalizing leads via marketing automation is ten times easier than relying on many free tools. You can see the individual pathways a user takes through your site, whether or not each individual IP can be connected to a returning user as well as what content engages the user most.

For many small businesses, conversion tracking isn’t enough – that extra level of data that separates a truly qualified customer from someone who is just passing through can be so critical to success. Additionally, the ability to segment lists based on information personalization can ensure quicker conversions in the future.

Lead Liaison offers the opportunity to take conversion tracking one step further with our marketing automation. We’d love to tell you more! Talk to us about how we can increase leads through your pipeline today.

Lead Liaison

Boost Demand Generation through Sales and Marketing Alignment

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Boost Demand Generation through Sales and Marketing AlignmentWe know successful deals aren’t created and closed by the sales team alone; there’s significant homage due to the marketing team in their demand generation efforts and kick-starting the funnel. To maximize outcome, the secret is to enable your business to boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment. Don’t get us wrong—this doesn’t mean cutting the marketing team altogether and asking sales to take over (check out this case study); rather, have the two teams work harmoniously to achieve the best results.

Manage the Data

Between the two departments, data should be gathered and analyzed and best practices defined. When determining which strategies have proven most successful, keep in mind the four primary phases of demand generation: awareness, interest, preference, and commitment.

The goals here are to drive awareness and interest through successful inbound and outbound marketing that will enhance the sales cycle. In order to boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment, both teams must be focused on determining the buyer persona. The marketing team gains awareness of and attention from potential prospects (suspects) through understanding who they are and what they want. This knowledge comes through the eyes of the sales team. By having a comprehensive profile of the current buyer persona, marketers can more directly target the audience and create more personalized campaigns, such as email marketing, which in turn drive higher return rates. Gather, analyze, and share the knowledge.

Guide Validation

Once the marketing team has generated demands, the next step is to convince the suspects that your solution is best through generating the leads. The marketing team has a plethora of ammunition to accomplish this: whitepapers, videos, blogs, reviews, direct mail, etc. Re-analyze and reuse the data collected from automated marketing solutions to further personalize each point of contact with the prospect to determine scoring and qualification, and pass only the qualified ones over to sales.

Nurturing the leads to the point of qualification comes when you boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment. If the demand generation is low, activity in the pipeline is low, close rates are low. It’s key to have a solid grasp of the initial steps in order to maximize flow in the funnel to the closing steps. Implementing marketing programs that work together with a structured sales process will help to build awareness about your solution, remind prospects why your solution is better than others, and convert prospects into customers.

Lead Liaison

How to Keep Tabs on Your Leads

/0 Comments/in , , /by

How to Keep Tabs on PeopleSo you’ve got your marketing automation software in place, but are you utilizing it to optimize lead scoring? Once a lead is qualified by marketing to hop into the sales ring, it is important for the marketing team to transfer all pertinent lead details to sales so that each lead’s score reflects their conversion readiness. Lead scoring is not all equal, and different actions by the lead call for different scores. Make use of social media marketing together with sales and marketing alignment to ensure your sales reps are as ready as can be. Learn how to keep tabs on your leads. 

Know Who’s Coming to Your Site

Identify your leads. Understand who the visitors to your site are by asking a few (not too many) questions when they take certain actions. Find a balance between requiring too much information and not enough—if you allow prospects to browse your online content and even download a white paper without filling in some identifying details, you’re letting the leads slip right out of your hands. On the other hand, prospects can tell when you’re being too nosey, asking for more information than necessary, sometimes even pushing them to click the “x” in the corner and close your page all together. There’s a balance in there somewhere, try implementing some A/B testing to find it.

To capitalize on multi-channel marketing and social media marketing, provide your lead the option for a social media login. It’s not only convenient for the user to simply click once without having to create a new password, but it also allows the opportunity to gather more information from the user via their social media profile and better tailor their experience with your brand. They’ve filled in their preferences and “likes” for the world to see on social media, why not use that information to better understand them?

Let your Leads Know you Appreciate Them

While you keep tabs on your leads make sure to offer special coupons, badges, and other rewards to your leads that take the next step or requested action in the conversion process. Giving them an incentive to provide more information (and potentially even share it with their own network) is an opportunity for your brand to reach new prospects without additional effort on your part. Freebies and other forms of recognition help to build trust and encourage more conversions. Ask your leads to share the love.

Maintain Sales and Marketing Alignment

Use lead scoring to bridge marketing and sales teams. Your marketing team can utilize all of this information—preferences from social media logins, incentives/badges leads have earned, how each visitor interacts with the site—to score each lead, input this information to the CRM, and provide a detailed summary of each lead’s buying readiness. Many features in marketing automation software make it easy to transition a lead from marketing to sales, and even drastically improve conversion because of the transfer of knowledge per lead and the ability to personalize each touchpoint.

Make the Most of Lead Scoring

Finally, be sure to use certain parameters when implementing your lead scoring system. When using the incentive method, let your leads know there’s a deadline or an expiration date on their “points.” Often, you’ll see this will push them to take an action sooner or make a decision about something they were previously on the fence about. Use your marketing automation software to help you keep track of lead scoring as well as the amount of time the lead has been in your system to avoid inflating the lead’s score. This will help authenticate each lead’s score and provide more accurate transferral of information.

Lead Liaison

Increase Lead Engagement through Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Increase Lead Engagement through Multi-Channel Marketing CampaignsEngaging leads takes time. To get your lead truly engaged and ready to take action, it usually takes a few touches through a few different channels before you gain their trust. Engaging your leads and keeping up with their preferences doesn’t have to be a confusing, timely chore. Having a marketing automation plan in terms of implementing multi-channel marketing campaigns simplifies the process of contacting leads and increasing lead engagement. It also ensures your leads are receiving your messages in the most convenient way possible. In the long run, this means the chances of gaining your leads’ trust increases, which places you closer to closing the sale.

Manage Multi-Channel Marketing Automatically

Using marketing automation to track, score and nurture prospects makes it a walk in the park to understand your leads’ needs. No more manually entering information into your CRM, no more room for human error when in comes to following-up and researching. The brilliant thing about automating your marketing practices is that you can add additional channels and manage all of them in the same place. Text messaging allows for direct and convenient communication and, according to recent polls, most texts are opened by the recipient within minutes. Lead Liaison has just announced the Multi-Channel Marketing capabilities that allow you to engage leads in brand new ways and cover all the bases.

Using SMS

The engagement rates of SMS marketing blow the others out of the water when compared with email marketing and social media posts. The reasons for this jump in recipient activity may be for several different reasons, the first being convenience of reception. Your smartphone is either in your hands, on your desk, in your pocket, or in your purse—never too far from reach. You’ll probably even get an instant notification of the new message with a preview of the text, which is a foot in the door, especially if the message is a discounted offer or deal that you’re offering in exchange for immediate action.

Direct Mail

Despite recent research and polls, SMS isn’t for everybody. That’s why it’s important to utilize multi-channel campaigns and engage your leads when and where they’re ready to receive your messages. On the other end of the spectrum, Lead Liaison has also introduced the direct mail channel. While SMS channels lead in engagement rates, direct mail campaigns are champion when it comes to new customer acquisition (read: multi-channel marketing = success).

At less than $1 per card, you have complete control over what’s sent to your leads. To emphasize all the channels of communication and marketing available, you even have the ability to add a QR code to the card that sends your lead straight to a landing page and right to your next call-to-action. Direct mail plus website visits brings you closer to the goal.

Every lead behaves differently, and that’s where your lead nurturing and tracking practices come in handy. Increasing lead engagement starts with understanding your leads’ needs and how they like to receive their information. The next step—personalizing not only the method of communication, but the message you’re sending as well.

Lead Liaison

Direct Mail with Marketing Automation

/4 Comments/in , , , , /by

Front of Direct Mail PostcardWe recently added the ability to send direct mail with marketing automation using Lead Liaison. We’re genuinely excited about this new marketing channel that our customer base can take advantage of. Designing our first direct mail campaign was easy. In this post we’ll talk about how simple it was to put together a direct mail campaign using Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software.

Background on Direct Mail

B2B marketing typically requires 5 to 7 touches before a prospect buys from a provider. Why? They want to build trust, build the relationship and know you’re not a fly-by-night vendor blasting out communications hoping you’ll respond to the first thing they see. Using all of those 5 to 7 touches on phone calls or emails could get old, really fast. Enter direct mail.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, typical response rates are 4.4% for direct mail (overall)

While response rates are high, so are conversions for new customers.

The CMO Council reports direct mail has the highest rate of success in new customer acquisition at 34% compared with other marketing channels.

It’s time we start thinking about integrating direct mail with marketing automation.

How We Did It

Back of Direct Mail Campaign

Adding direct mail to our marketing automation campaign was easy. Here are the steps we took to launch our campaign.

  1. Created a template in Photoshop. This took us about an hour to do. Alternatively, you could use pre-made templates from our partner, Direct Mail Manager. They’ve got 100s of pre-made cards to choose from.
  2. We put a QR code on the back of the postcard that linked to a landing page we built in Lead Liaison. When the recipient gets the card they scan it with their smart phone which loads the landing page along with an attractive offer.
  3. We deposited $1.04 into our account at Direct Mail Manager. Yes, only about a buck! Each card cost $.52 and we sent one to our Product Manager and one to an Account Manager. You can deposit as little as $.52 into your Direct Mail Manager Account.
  4. We created a Webhook in Lead Liaison.
  5. We added the Webhook as an action in our marketing campaign workflow.
  6. Boom! Within three (3) days the postcard showed up in the mail.

Let us help you get your direct mail campaign off the ground!

Start Direct Mail Today!
Lead Liaison

Lead Strategy Creation 101

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Lead Strategy Creation 101

Lead Strategy

Lead strategy is, in part, about segmentation – ensuring that the proper messages are sent to your audience in a way that will make them convert. Many businesses find it hard to start identifying sales funnels and developing a lead strategy – in part because the term “conversion” or “conversion point” doesn’t make any sense.

A conversion is what happens when your customer buys, becomes a lead or otherwise engages with you in a way that meets your advertising goals. The term ‘conversion’ refers to the fact that the customer has converted to your brand messaging – meaning they find use for your products and find you trustworthy enough to leave their information or buy.

Identifying Your Conversion Point

For many businesses, there is no email collection form, phone number or other conversion point on the site – product sales will be the only way your business converts users. Having multiple conversion points gives you the opportunity to stay in touch with your audience and ensure future conversions. For instance, if you’re only selling products and never capturing a customer’s email, you may be missing out on valuable data that will lead to a conversion later. Your first step in creating a lead strategy is to identify your conversion points, and establish multiple points for conversion if you don’t have them already.

Lead Strategy: Identifying CPA

Your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) reflects how many marketing dollars you must spend to get a sale. Obviously you want your CPA to decrease over time so that your marketing dollars result in a profit. You’d be surprised how many businesses haven’t identified a CPA. When creating a lead strategy, it’s important to take into account how much money you’re spending and your overall return. Lead strategy often requires investment, so it’s critical to know where your money is going.

Creating a Lead Strategy

Now it’s time to build funnels. Ask yourself these questions: How do clients find your site? What actions do they take when they get there? What does your buying process look like? Use these questions to imagine actual sales funnels that relate to your business offerings and selling points. Factor in whether or not your different sales points require different messaging to sell your clients faster – for instance, should clients who previously purchased products from you receive the same marketing messaging as new clients? These questions are important to answer.

Finally, get some help when it comes to lead strategy. Marketing automation might be the best bang for your buck – talk to us at Lead Liaison today to find out how marketing automation could change your marketing messaging and increase sales!

Lead Liaison

How To Do Inbound Marketing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

How to Do Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing – Half the Battle

We’ve encountered a handful of companies over the past few months that have told us they need to make investments in SEO and “inbound marketing” before adopting our technology. When we hear that – we believe there’s a misunderstanding. We feel entitled to help companies understand how to do inbound marketing the right way. Inbound marketing is great, but it’s only half of the solution. Lead Liaison provides a very strong solution for companies looking to strengthen inbound marketing. And inbound marketing is not complete without the other end, what you do with those visitors once they get to your site. Not doing anything is like throwing a party and when people come to the door and ring your door bell you don’t let them in.

We help companies with their inbound marketing efforts in two ways. First, we drive more traffic to a companies website. Second, we make sure the company has deep visibility into their visitors behavior once they get to your site (visitor tracking on steroids) and convert those visitors once they get there – perhaps the most important thing. In other words, we make sure companies get the most out of their investment to drive traffic to their site. Here’s a summary of each area:

Drive More Traffic to Your Site:

  1. Our software will help you become content kings (or queens). A necessary activity for search engines and any inbound strategy. Your company can complement their marketing content strategy by outsourcing blog posts, Tweets, Facebook Posts, white papers and more and automatically publish the content.
  2. We can help you build beautiful looking landing pages in minutes, casting a bigger web.
  3. Easily engage in social media by posting to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts on behalf of all your employees.

Better Visibility and Conversion Rates – The Other End of Inbound Marketing

  1. Unlike basic visitor tracking solutions that track page visits, we’ll track a much more comprehensive set of behaviors such as document downloads, video watches, emails clicked, pages viewed, forms submitted, etc. What’s awesome is that this entire profile will be stored in Salesforce.com. Your sales team will have more insight to close the deal.
  2. We’ll convert more visitors with web forms, gates in front of content/video, email, and 1-to-1 emails.
  3. We’ll automatically nurture your prospects
  4. We’ll automatically qualify them and when they’re hot – we’ll alert sales
One prospect we spoke to said they sent out weekly newsletters to their prospects using a separate system. That’s great, but they’re doing this to drive inbound traffic, right? With their current solution, they’re using a separate email system that’s not connected to the rest of their sales and marketing tools. We offered them a professional-grade email marketing engine that’s built into our platform. Right now, they’ve got to dig through results to find opens and click throughs. When one of their prospects clicks a link in an email we’re going to show them that information on a visitor report, alert sales, and save that information along with all the prospects other behavior into Salesforce.com – in a single view.
We hope you enjoyed our tips on how to do inbound marketing the right way.
We can help your inbound marketing efforts. Give us a shot.
Lead Liaison

Alternatives to LeadLander®

/0 Comments/in , /by

Are you looking for alternatives to LeadLander®? We can help. LeadLander® has been an excellent choice for many businesses over the past few years; however, companies are usually left wanting more. Alternatives to LeadLander®, such as Lead Liaison, exist to deliver companies the solutions they need to start with visitor tracking and scale upward as their business grows.

Companies that begin with Visitor Tracking, such as LeadLander®, typically end up buying a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), such as Marketo, Eloqua, or Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation (LMA), or replace their Visitor Tracking solution as a whole with a Marketing Automation Platform. Although, most Marketing Automation Platforms do not offer the ability to get started with visitor tracking only. Marketing Automation Platforms include a very rudimentary version of visitor tracking but expect their prospects to dive “all in” and buy the entire platform (upwards of $35,000) instead of being able to dip their toes in the water. Note, Lead Liaison’s LMA is an exceptional to this rule and costs a fraction of other MAPs.

Lead Liaison has worked with a number of companies seeking alternatives to LeadLander® to help them get started with what we would call, a LeadLander®+ package, that includes desktop tools and real-time sales alerts – typically for less money than what they’d spend with LeadLander®.

We describe our lead tracking solutions much different from other lead tracking vendors out there, such as LeadLander® or Lead Forensics®. These types of solutions will help you set your fishing pole with some bait while you wade in the river. On the other hand, Lead Liaison will help you cast a wide net deep into the ocean. There’s limited opportunity with basic tracking services.

When clients need more we deliver a full suite of sales and marketing automation tools ranging from lead distribution, lead nurturing, lead qualification, analytics and more. We’re proud to offer the industry’s most flexible packaging and business model.

Come on board and see what it’s all about.

Disclaimers:

  • (1) Lead Liaison is not affiliated in any way with LeadLander®, does not provide LeadLander®’s services, and does not own the LeadLander® Service Mark. Lead Liaison provides its own unique visitor tracking solution as shown here.
  • (2) For comparative purposes in this blog post, LeadLander® is referred to as Visitor Tracking instead of a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) as LeadLander®’s Visitor Tracking does not offer features provided in Lead Liaison’s MAP, known as LMA. 
  • (3) Any pricing mentioned in this blog post is merely for comparison of Visitor Tracking vs. MAPs. 
  • Reference our Blog Disclaimer.
Lead Liaison

5 Lead Generation Techniques That Work

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Lead Generation Techniques That WorkDoes your digital marketing strategy work well for you? Are you able to generate leads for your product or service? If your answer to those two questions is no, then you are not doing it right. Read on and you shall learn five important lead generation techniques that will definitely produce a positive impact on your marketing strategy.

1.     E-Books

This is a great lead generation tool. E-books are helpful in the sense that they have plenty of detailed information about a certain service or product and they can be easily downloaded. So you can write an e-book for your business and distribute it to your intended audience. As a plus, you can decide to have the e-book available only to those who provide an email address. Consequently, you create an even wider lead.

2.     Email marketing

With the entry of webinars, blogs, eBooks and videos, most people think that email marketing is history. Contrary to this belief, it still is considered to be the most common channel for promoting business. The effectiveness of email marketing is going to increase now that consumers can access their email through their tablets and smartphones.

3.     Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This basically entails enhancing your website for different search engines with an aim to have your website listed in the highest search rankings, according to the keywords your potential customers use when looking for services or products. You can do this by seeking professional help from experienced SEO agencies whose work is to keep websites at the top ranks of search engines thus increasing traffic to your website.

 

4.     Company Blog

Blogging has developed from being a channel through which people communicate their day-to-day experiences to a channel through which businesses create brand awareness and manage to establish a close connection with their target market. Studies carried out have shown that companies that have a blog manage to drive more traffic to their websites more than those that don’t use blogging. The kind of content you should include in your company blog is mainly content that provides solutions to the problems of your target audience. There is no doubt that blogs are a good way of generating leads.

5.     Online Video Marketing

This is one strategy that businesses have not taken full advantage of. Produce short videos about your brand and post them on sites such as YouTube. It is an easy thing to do. Video marketing is turning out to be a very economical lead generation technique due to the huge numbers of people who use the social networks to get information. Remember when posting your video to sites like YouTube give it an appropriate description by using certain keywords that will also raise your ranks in search engines.

If you put these five lead generation techniques into practical use you will definitely experience an effective digital marketing strategy. As a company your brand awareness will increase, you will create more leads and eventually generate more sales for your service or product.