Material specific to marketing automation such as needs, best practices, lessons learned, and benefits of marketing automation.

Lead Liaison

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

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Putting Marketing Automation to WorkMarketing automation is not about automating your marketing efforts. That sounds like a funny and perhaps incorrect thing to say, but it’s the truth. Small businesses don’t get involved with marketing automation simply to automate the process, they do it to deepen their understanding of current processes and make better decisions about business. Despite this, many small businesses view marketing automation as the be-all, end-all to understanding deeper data. Small companies often institute expensive marketing automation platforms only to find they never actively work with interpreting the data they receive – everything’s just on autopilot.  While setting your marketing campaigns up and letting them fly with marketing automation can save time, businesses that do so are missing the point – the core value is in the information.

Marketing Automation – Who’s Watching the Data?

Rather than taking a set-it-and-forget-it attitude toward automated marketing campaigns, it’s important to have someone in your company interpreting the data you see in your dashboard. It’s great to have a product like the Lead Liaison Streamer on your desktop so you can see real-time data about visitors. However, Streamer is far less effective if you set it up on your desktop only to run around to meetings throughout the day. Making automation work can bring results into your company you never thought possible, but it’s important to have someone on your staff looking at the data as it comes in if it’s a habit you won’t keep. As the primary decision maker in your business, you already know data is power – now it’s time to have someone on your staff presenting the data to you so you can decide together how to move forward on your marketing campaigns.

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

The first step to making marketing automation work for your business is getting a dashboard set up that’s easy to read and functional across your business. The left hand should always know what the right is doing – visitor data should be ported across every area of your campaigns when you plan for the future. To accomplish this, you’ll need to work with a seasoned team who can install the dashboard for you and teach you how to use it. The training shouldn’t be too difficult, but does require a solid relationship with your marketing automation company. For this reason, it’s important to work with someone who will be happy to troubleshoot, stick around and give you the information to make you and your marketing people excel with your new dashboard. We’d love to help make marketing automation work for you! Talk to Lead Liaison today about putting marketing automation into practice.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and Choosing Smaller Development

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Marketing Automation and Choosing Smaller DevelopmentIt’s no secret that company owners and decision makers are excited about marketing automation – but will the excitement lead to bigger software companies watering down the concept or removing user friendliness from the equation?

Marketing automation is a fantastic solution, especially for small businesses that don’t have the money or the team to take charge of the marketing workflow process. With the ability to trigger marketing collateral that goes out automatically and sample the returning data in just a few clicks, marketing automation platforms give companies a solid way to track users, gather data and make marketing decisions they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

However, big companies are starting to get in on the game – and with major software companies developing their own marketing automation dashboards, how will the end user benefit?

Marketing Automation Dashboards and User Friendliness

If you’ve ever dealt with a major brand workflow or supply chain software, you’ll know user-friendliness isn’t the name of the game. Big software doesn’t care as much about the end user as they do retention of contracts. If they can provide a be-all end-all solution to small businesses, there’s no need to make products more user-friendly – and that happens for several reasons.

The first is cost. If business makers realize they don’t have to diversify software products by sticking with one company, this results in a big contract win for larger software providers.  Second, larger companies can charge more for training and additional management when they focus on the big picture rather than the smaller, end-user picture.

Shifting Their Thinking

Smaller businesses can’t necessarily afford larger software packages – so diversifying software that meets different marketing roles can be key to giving end users a good experience as well as ensuring software needs are met. This includes the choice of a marketing automation platform that is user friendly, cost efficient and ultimately provides value to the business.

Smaller businesses that diversity their software packages rather than hiring one big company to do everything are an example to larger businesses that diversifying can be key to shorter contracts, saved money and a better user experience. That’s why it’s a good idea to work with marketing automation companies with a smaller client base and a larger market opportunity. The training, ease of use and bugs are all taken care of while you don’t pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for the marketing automation services you need.

To find out more about how choosing a smaller company for your marketing automation needs can benefit your business, chat with a Lead Liaison rep today!

Lead Liaison

How to Maximize Marketing Automation ROI with High Quality Content

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How to Maximize Marketing Automation ROI with High Quality ContentHigh quality content is an essential element of modern marketing and one of the strongest factors in maximizing marketing automation ROI. Content is one of the primary ways that marketers generate, engage, and nurture leads. It is used to build brands, establish authority, attract new social media followers, and retain existing customers. All of these benefits can contribute to your marketing automation return on investment when they are effectively executed.

Here are a few tips on how to maximize your marketing automation ROI with high quality content:

Create Valuable Content

Every piece of content should provide prospective leads with real value. High-quality content will educate the reader and give them a reason to turn to your business whenever they require additional information. Basically it should be a subtle pitch that demonstrates your expertise while offering beneficial guidance. To consistently provide readers with significant value, the content must always be focused first on the concerns and needs of your typical consumers. Selling a product or service should also be the secondary focus.

Create Personalized Content

Marketing automation software generates detailed lead profiles based on a prospect’s online behavior and demographic characteristics. Utilizing the information in your lead profiles to personalize content will maximize ROI by creating a more meaningful connection with the prospect. It shows that someone is paying attention to their concerns, which will inspire loyalty and ultimately produce greater marketing automation ROI.

Create Newsworthy Content

Each article and email that is sent using marketing automation software must provide some unique and newsworthy insight. People that trust you with access to their email inbox do not want to read the same information over and over again. High-quality content that will maximize marketing automation ROI will offer original and worthwhile information that the reader doesn’t already know about your industry, product, or services.

Create Diverse Campaigns

Content includes more than just text. Every image and video can help to establish and strengthen a brand. Visual representations are more eye-catching and usually have a higher success rate than written copy on its own. You can add images to your emails and articles to grab a lead’s attention or create infographics and videos that use imagery to inform potential prospects. For additional information on creating effective video campaigns, please read How to make video marketing work for you.

Create Registration Forms

The content with the highest value should be hidden behind registration forms to obtain additional demographic information from potential leads. This will make it easier to further develop lead profiles and create more customize content. Content that is guarded by a registration form should offer a few trade secrets or particularly useful information that can’t be accessed elsewhere on your site. Individuals that fill out a registration form to access certain information will have higher expectations from the content they receive.
High quality content is a simple and proven method for maximizing marketing automation ROI. Make sure all of your content is valuable, personalized, newsworthy, and diverse. If it is particularly beneficial content, place it behind a brief registration form. All of these tips will help increase the return on your investment.

Lead Liaison

8 Tips for Marketing Automation Management – Part 2

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Tips for Marketing Automation ManagementYesterday we posted part 1 of Marketing Automation Management. Here’s part 2 with the final four tips. 

1)      Use Lead Profiles to Create Content

It is necessary to consider the characteristics of potential leads when you are creating new content or evaluating your current content. Understanding and making different types of content available can help you further profile prospects while creating a meaningful connection. Determine what content is getting the best response and how it relates to the lead profiles that have already been established.

2)       Minimize Alternate Links on Landing Pages

Landing pages are designed to generate a specific response from your target prospects. Using landing pages that include a standard menu and multiple links, or one that mimics your main website will distract potential leads from the ultimate purpose. Make sure to minimize links to only the bare essentials.

3)       Create Campaigns from Start to Finish

Since every piece of content should be designed to trigger a specific reaction. You will need to ensure that each subsequent piece will build towards the purpose of the campaign. It is beneficial to map out the objective for the entire campaign before you actually create a single piece of content.

4)       Redevelop, Revise, and Reuse

Once a process, program or resource has been developed, don’t forget to reuse it in future campaigns. Redeveloping quality content and proven concepts is an essential part of marketing automation management. Incorporating these elements into new campaigns is an effective way to leverage your content and keep leads engaged. Marketing automation management is a massive undertaking and it should be managed by a professional who understands how to effectively utilize the software, as well as these eight tips. If you need help getting the most from your marketing automation software, please ask the experts at Lead Liaison for assistance.

Lead Liaison

8 Tips for Marketing Automation Management – Part 1

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8 Tips for Marketing Automation ManagementMarketing automation management requires a fundamental understanding of marketing automation technology and a commitment to implementing and improving strategies as needed. Although the marketing automation software streamlines and automates most of the processes, it will still require a human touch to get the most from it.

Here are the top 8 tips for marketing automation management:

1)      Utilize the Complete Marketing Platform

Marketing automation software is not an email campaign tool. It’s a comprehensive marketing platform that can enhance processes for qualifying prospects, managing communications, and following up on inquiries. When implementing marketing automation software, focus first on developing the processes for your business and then use the software to further simplify the process. It will only work well if you start with complete processes.

2)      Use Campaigns to Define Segments

A beneficial approach to defining database segments is to begin at the top of the sales funnel and then develop campaigns to define and segment similar groups. Every new campaign is an opportunity to further segment your database until you have an inclusive profile that fulfills all of the qualification criteria. A market profiling campaign will lay the ground work for obtaining potential contacts, if you don’t currently have a strong database.

3)      Develop Lead Scoring System

Marketing automation management involves constantly reviewing user activity, especially when you first start out. This can become challenging, as the size of your database and number of campaigns increase. That is why it is necessary to develop a lead scoring system and segmentation process designed to prioritize leads. Lead scoring rates the various types of content you send out, by giving each one a value based on likelihood of conversion. Potential leads are then scored based on what content they choose to view.

4)      Utilize Progressive Profiling

Requesting information from prospects that can be obtained without their assistance is counterproductive to marketing automation management and a waste of a lead’s time. Progressive profiling and prepopulated forms allow you quickly profile prospects. By eliminating repetition, this will also streamline and enhance the user experience.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation & Reputation Management Go Hand In Hand

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Marketing Automation & Reputation Management Go Hand In HandIt’s never fun or easy talking about what will happen to your business if your products or services are panned on the web somewhere – i.e., if your reputation management is on high alert because of a bad review. Let’s take Yelp reviews, for instance. If you’re a fan of the popular US version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you know how resistant some business owners can be to change.

Ramsay’s latest airings show him confronting “stuck” business owners with negative Yelp ratings. Many owners, rather than taking their customers’ complaints seriously, would rather tell themselves that “not everyone likes the food” rather than changing things they know don’t work about their businesses.

Are You Watching?

Some of us watch programs like these and think, What morons! How can these people not see their own business failings! Truthfully, even a business that’s turning a profit has failings, and reputation management is often a stumbling block for many business owners.

If you’re not watching Google, social media outlets and the news, you might be missing customer complaints. Just one unresolved customer complaint can turn into a reputation management fiasco for a company.  So, given the complexity of your current marketing campaigns and what little time we all have in a day, how can you make sure your reputation is being managed properly?

How Marketing Automation Affects Reputation Management

To succeed in today’s competitive business place – particularly if you’re monitoring your reputation – your marketing message has to be socialized. This means that the core points that make your product compelling should be laid out as part of your social media strategy. This also means you need to be watching your customers.

When you use marketing automation to maintain your brand, you have the ability to pinpoint specific users who spend time on your website. If they’re coming from a bad Yelp review by the droves, you’ll be able to set up an alert that gives you this information immediately. Social signals translate to users spending time on your site. If a customer needs to be taken care of via Facebook or Twitter, you can use socialized marketing automation tools to stay on top of resolving your customers’ complaints.

Consumers are using social media to air their grievances with business. Good reputation management is all about using the tools available to you to connect with customers and solve difficulties – sometimes even before they happen. Marketing automation can help you keep track of specific customers and integrate your marketing efforts in a way that no other marketing concepts can.

To find out more about socialized marketing tools and how reputation management is informed by marketing automation, contact Lead Liaison for a free consultation today!

Lead Liaison

5 Marketing Automation Best Practices

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Best Practices for Marketing AutomationMarketing automation is here to stay. While we’re ecstatic that companies both large and small continue to adopt MA at a frenetic pace, we feel it is important to remember that effective marketing using an automation platform should follow some fundamental best practices. We’re delighted to present to you 5 marketing automation best practices.

1) Start small and build

Avoid deploying a huge campaign when you start out with MA. The temptation may be to run multiple campaigns as quickly as possible. But programmed marketing takes time to master – and you don’t want to risk alienating your markets. Develop a deployment strategy that includes all features but open with a few small campaigns and learn to master tactics before rolling out to a wider audience. You’ll minimize risk by starting small.

2) Create MA campaigns that build profiles and strengthen marketing practices

Effective automated marketing campaigns should qualify leads as they relate to a specific offer or opportunity, but deploying MA is also beneficial in discovering market behaviors through content consumption. The digital footprints your leads leave behind while engaged through marketing automation helps shape your customer persona. Use that data to develop stronger campaigns.

3) Don’t set to auto-pilot

It will be tempting to “set-it-and-forget-it” but campaign management is still required – especially early on. Though marketing automation creates efficiencies through automated functions, it’s important to stay on top of ongoing campaign results and tweak app settings, messaging, or other elements to maximize your results.

4) Create great content

Buyers are constantly getting targeted by content intended to attract and persuade. Having that content delivered routinely via MA is not going to instantly convert. Marketing automation, though an important and rapidly adopted technology, is but a tool. The key to effective MA campaigns is to provide content your markets want and need. A mix of formats is important. Deploy video, email, social posts, and other assets. Most importantly, project a consistent image across all your MA channels.

5) Test and test again

Not every MA campaign will achieve desired results. One of the strengths of MA is the ability to segment and target audiences. Prior to a general distribution, make sure messaging generates response for each market segment. Use A/B testing for each asset deployed through your MA platform to gauge click through, site time, conversion, and other KPIs. Marketing automation can reduce marketing costs and improve close rates but the effectiveness of the platform you use will depend on establishing best practices that work for your company. For more best practices, check out our other blog categories.

Lead Liaison

Why Marketing Automation is Essential for Lead Qualification

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Why Marketing Automation is Essential for Lead QualificationB2B lead qualification is a process of determining suitability for sales engagement, right? Actually, lead qual is just the opposite: it’s determining as quickly as possible if a lead is NOT interested in you at the moment and, furthermore, if you are NOT interested in that lead enough to devote sales resources to pursuing that lead. The way provide your sales team with the highest quality, most qualified leads is to manage leads through a marketing automation platform.

In ultra-competitive industries where 80% of leads are not worth pursuing at the first touch point, an effective lead qualification strategy manages leads in a way that delivers the hottest leads to sales first, nurtures others who may be interested in your solution until they are ready to buy, and ignores leads that appear unqualified to purchase. This allows your sales team to focus on the most likely candidates.

One of the strengths of deploying marketing automation is that the application segments and nurtures leads without directly engaging the sales team. The system can quickly indicate which leads are worth pursuing and which are just curious. Traditional practices have sales determining whether a lead is suitable to be a prospect, now marketing automation enables that process.

Marketing automation platforms, including our Lead Management Automation™ application, are designed to score leads as they engage with your brand. A lead threshold can be set that marks when a lead becomes marketing-qualified and ready to migrate to a CRM for sales engagement. The process puts the most likely buyers in front of sales. During the qualification process, leads accumulate scoring based upon demographic attributes and digital behavior. A good platform will manage leads as they become qualified at different paces.

B2B qualification these days is achieved more often by inbound marketing techniques. This allows prospects to qualify themselves. The key to merging inbound marketing and automated qualification is to translate initial interest into actionable data that sales agents can use when they engage with leads. Through MA the sales team is typically more efficient because reps aren’t chasing unqualified leads.

Inbound marketing allows you to let the prospect indicate how ready to purchase he may be. Inquiries such as ad clicks, website visits, email messages, and webinar registrations qualify leads by indicating their level of interest in your solution.

But there are two important questions that must be answered that marketing automation cannot provide. These questions must be answered during sales engagements.

  • Do they NEED your solution? People search online often with the desire to buy but may not have the need. It can often be more challenging to sales to convince a prospect of need when she realizes that a purchase fulifills only a desire to acquire your solution. Typically, these cases involve frequent and repeated objections.
  • If they need your solution, can they USE it? Does yoru prospect have the capability of implementing your solution or will implementation require investment in other areas? Often, a purchase makes sense in a standalone situation but if there are capital requirements beyond the purchase, a sale may actually move the customer to hold your brand in a negative view if money was wasted because a solution cannot be implemented without costly investment.

Lead qualification can take weeks or months. Without a marketing automation platform, lead qual will continue to be costly if handled by your sales team.

Lead Liaison

Why is SEO Necessary for a Marketing Automation Strategy?

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Why SEO is Necessary for a Marketing Automation StrategyI was reading this great article on What B2B SEO Professionals need to know about Marketing Automation and it got me thinking about how closely related search engine optimization (SEO) is to marketing automation. SEO is used to draw more leads to your website. Marketing automation software is used to capture, profile, nurture, and convert leads after they have landed on your site. On the other side of the coin, an effective marketing automation strategy will enhance your SEO efforts. An important aspect of marketing automation is developing personalized and informative lead nurturing content. Posting and promoting relevant content will help to boost your search engine ranking, which in turn will send even more qualified leads to your website.

Higher Ranking = More Traffic

It is estimated that over 15 billion people conduct product searches online each month and that 70% of the world starts their buying process by researching their options online. There has never been a larger audience gathered in one place; there has also never been so much competition in one place. A high search engine ranking is the only way to keep your company ahead of your competitors. Think about the last time you conducted an online search. Did you look at any websites on the second or third page of the results? Unless someone is doing extensive comparison shopping, they will only look at the first few websites on the list. It pays to be on the first page of the results.

SEO + Marketing Automation = Success

Companies need to focus on SEO before they employ marketing automation software. This will increase the number of leads the software is able to track. The software will then profile the leads and rank each one based on their likelihood for conversion. Leads that are showing signs of conversion will be immediately past onto the sales team. A marketing automation strategy should also involve nurturing any leads that are not ready to be passed onto sales. This could be done using customized email campaigns, newsletters, or helpful how-to articles. To continue the flow of new traffic, lead nurturing efforts must take SEO into consideration. Any content connected to your website is an opportunity to improve your search engine ranking using relevant and strategically placed keywords and meta-tags.

Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

In today’s competitive marketplace, businesses need to employ any and every marketing technique that will give them a competitive advantage online. Their marketing strategy should always include SEO, social media marketing, and a complete marketing automation strategy. All of these strategic components will complement each other and enhance one another’s campaign results. They can even double or triple a company’s existing sales when they are effectively combined. That is why SEO is so necessary to the success of your marketing automation strategy.

Lead Liaison

How Marketing Automation Redefines Deadlines

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How Marketing Automation Redefines DeadlinesMarketing automation is all about making the sales-to-closing and general advertising practices of your business easier while allowing you to put everything on a timetable or deadline. If you haven’t really explored the world of marketing automation and how it can change your business, now is a good time to take a look.

When you’re creating a new brand for your company (and it may well be time to do that) you might find a messy affair ahead. This is particularly true if you’re the principal in your business. Who has time to handle customers, work on your website and new graphics materials and keep the business running? With marketing automation, you do.

Marketing Automation Makes Rebranding Easier

Putting a new website in place gives users an opportunity to interact with you in an organic way. Users who previously visited your site have brand new materials to look at. Hopefully by the time your new site is up, you’ve made it more interactive with contact forms, a good trail of information that will allow users to spend more time to your site, and other methods to contact you like phone or email.

Marketing automation allows you to identify specific users who visit your site. Once you have this information, deadlines start to come together. Advertising campaigns can go out at a particular date based on the way you see visitors using your site. You also have the ability to tailor specific advertising campaigns to particular groups of users.

Advertising on a Deadline

Once you have this type of business intelligence information, it becomes much easier to set up more accurate sales funnels and campaign management using your site’s data. One action should trigger another very specific reaction – for instance, if a known user fills out a form and you know this customer likes to be called, your sales team should receive a prioritized note letting them know the customer should be called within a specific timeframe. Marketing automation then allows your sales team to create new deadlines to ensure that customer’s needs are serviced – and future sales will happen as a result.

You can also use marketing automation to determine when the best time to send out campaigns might be, then build deadlines based on those new campaign dates. If you find most of your customers open emails on a Tuesday – but certain customers buy more on a Thursday – you can change your marketing messaging to go out to different customers on different days as needed.

Analyzing the data to determine the best deadlines for marketing actions is advanced technology that traditional analytics methods just won’t give you. To learn more about how marketing automation can benefit your business, visit leadliaison.com.