Anything related to marketing tips, strategies, best practices and more will go here.

Lead Liaison

How to Develop an Effective Marketing Automation Strategy

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How to Develop an Effective Marketing Automation StrategyAn effective marketing automation strategy has the ability to quickly generate new customers and increased revenue. It gathers potential leads that are actively searching for information online, profile’s each lead’s interests, nurtures leads with helpful and relevant content, and then scores them to assess their potential for conversion. The process is efficient and automated, but a truly effective marketing automation strategy will also require a human touch.

It is All about the Customer

The first and most important focus must always be on satisfying the customer’s needs and concerns. This can be achieved by understanding the critical attributes of existing customers and then using those factors to create a lead scoring model.

What is the lead researching online?

What is their buying history?

What are their interests?

An effective marketing automation strategy is based on finding out as much information as possible on every potential lead. Clever marketers will use registration forms to block particularly valuable content, requiring leads to volunteer pertinent information prior to access. Marketing automation also uses online newsletter registries as a method for gaining greater insight into a lead’s characteristics.

Lead Profile & Ranking

Once this information is obtained, marketing automation software compares and ranks it using a profile of an ideal prospect. For an effective marketing automation strategy, the profile it is ranked against should as closely represent a typical buyer as possible. A good plan is to create the lead scoring using a collaboration of both the sales and marketing team’s experiences with current clientele.

Marketers know what landing pages and tutorials are bringing in business and the sale’s team understands what their customers need and want. Any marketing automation strategy will need both perspectives to effectively capture an accurate and complete lead profile.

Segment Leads into Groups

Using the information gathered for the profile, each lead will be segment in groups based on similar needs and wants. Marketing automation cannot effectively target every lead individually due to the massive volume of leads it generates. However, personalized campaigns make a huge difference in the eyes of the customer. Since the customer is the first priority of marketing automation, lead nurturing campaigns are created to target specific lead segments.

Content that Provides Value

The last fundamental aspect of marketing automation is creating relevant and informative lead nurturing content. The content that is being provided to lead must offer them real value. This is a business’ chance to brand themselves as experts in their field and earn the customer’s loyalty.  All lead nurturing content must be focused on building relationships and trust.

An effective marketing automation strategy begins by profiling, ranking, and segmenting each lead. Once leads are grouped together and their needs are understood, quality content can be customized to satisfy their concerns. All of this is designed to produced more qualified leads and build stronger and longer-lasting customer relationships.

Lead Liaison

Three Ways to Plug a Leaky Sales Funnel

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Three Ways to Plug a Leaky Sales FunnelDo you have B2B leads that aren’t converting to sales because they are falling through the cracks of a poorly managed sales funnel? If your company’s lead management system isn’t preserving your marketing leads, you’re not alone. According to B2B experts, 80% of leads aren’t converted because of poor lead management. The good news is there are ways to keep your sales funnel from leaking.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation (MA) software packages provide a programmed method of maintaining a connection with leads while they are being nurtured towards sales-readiness. An MA program helps prevent funnel leakage through a reporting structure which exhibits the status for each marketing lead.

If you’re running a lean sales team, agents are likely balancing the management of existing accounts and new account acquisition. Agents can quickly lose focus on a lead. An effective MA program engages your leads until they are contacted by a sales representative.

MA also allows your sales team to determine a contact strategy for building new accounts; it helps manage leads through a process of qualification, interest building, and preparation for sales engagement. When a sales agent contacts a lead, she is aware of the marketing activities that lead has been exposed to.

Lead Scoring

Developing a lead scoring system helps to prioritize and cultivate leads – and keeps leads from dropping off the face of your B2B world. A good lead scoring model identifies worthwhile leads and classifies leads as they advance through the sales funnel. Once a lead achieves a score that warrants a sales contact, an MA program can alert the appropriate sales team member.

Not only does a lead scoring system reduce the likelihood of a lead being improperly dropped from the sales funnel, it also increases the efficiency of your sales team by allowing it to focus on the hottest leads, which are indicated by the highest scores. Meanwhile, cold leads can be removed systematically. For example, leads can be eliminated from consideration when they drop below a lead scoring threshold.

CRM Integration

By blending your marketing software program with your customer relationship management software, your sales team becomes more effective at managing its sales funnel. If a lead enters the CRM because of a high lead score, but it’s discovered by a sales agent that circumstances have changed, such as a change in budget or timing, a sales member can return the lead to the marketing pipeline for further nurturing.

The B2B sales cycle is long, and sales engagements can be mistimed. Through a CRM integration with a marketing automation platform, the risk of losing a sales lead when it is reclassified as a marketing lead is reduced.

Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software platform provides marketing automation, lead scoring and CRM integration among other capabilities as three corner stones of preventing  a leaky sales funnel.

Lead Liaison

Progressive SEO Tactics Which Define Inbound Marketing

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Progressive SEO Tactics Which Define Inbound Marketing You’ve probably studied numerous search engine optimization tactics which assist your business in saving money normally spent on marketing efforts.  The general consensus states you’ve probably read how inbound marketing tactics will grow your business by producing enticing content which organically ranks.  Combining both SEO tactics and inbound marketing efforts into one sweet package, however, is an area we’ll implore your astute business sense in today, providing specific steps on how progressive SEO tactics which define inbound marketing can redefine your business presence online.  Content is great, keywords are necessary and meta data definitely needs accuracy.  We’ll stretch well beyond those ideologies today, however, and bring your link efforts to light by introducing better content strategies.

Solving The Keyword Puzzle

It may seem trivial to many businesses; however, when businesses begin their online explorations they need to clearly define keywords before opening their doors, yet you’d be surprised how inaccurately this is done.  Many people use the Google Keyword Research Tool to find their highly relevant and widely searched keywords, hoping to vault immediately ahead of competition.  Sure, it works to a point.  What would be even better is employing keyword co-occurrence, otherwise called semantic connectivity.  Since recent updates to algorithmic patterns mean content is under fire, choosing words which naturally have similar meaning or belong with each other will make your keyword selection seem less forceful.  For example, let’s say you operate a music website; here is the old way and new way.

  • Older way to choose keywords: music, musical, a music, music a, music store
  • Newer way to choose keywords: audio, melodies, tunes, sounds, beats, songs

As you can see, we’re using synonyms of these keywords as our main website meta data.  We’ll then write content which blends these terms into something which naturally looks like it belongs.  Why is this relevant to inbound marketing? The more natural your content is written without forcing keywords, the greater relevance Google will find in your content which organically raises your position in search results.

Buddy Up With Blogs

Next phase of inbound SEO is how Google will adjudicate relationships you’ve formed with similar niche sites.  To increase your site’s worth, the evolution of guest blogging has now become hotter than ever, and for perfect reasons.  Instead of comment spamming to get relevant links, we’ll need to locate blogs related to your business and write for them with only one relevant deep site link in either your author bio or within content (depending on site rules).  How do we find guest blogs?  Here are some specific ways we can do this:

  • Use My Blog Guest to find blog or site owners looking for relevant content.  Write the content to their specifications with specific reference to a blog post within your own blog.  Sign your guest post with author biography dictating what your business or blog is about.
  • Search Google cold-turkey by using the following search query – blog: “submit guest post”.  You could specify “powered by WordPress” or even throw a specific keyword in your search query.  Alternatively, you could simply search for ‘top places to submit guest post’ and sift through thousands of blogs all day to find your niche.  Not exactly effective time management, however, to take this route when better search strings are available to use.

Once you’ve found relevant blogs where your content can reside, and upon approval of your post, you can write another post on your site with the title of your recently approved guest post as a themed link. This gives you both juice and makes people want to follow your other stories.

Why is this relevant to inbound marketing? Simply put, Google wants your content to contain inbound and outbound links to content which is similar to your own instead of boring contextual links parked in your link section.  The more you guest post and share your ideas with others, the more others will be drawn back to your content.

Making Internal Connections

Equally important to inbound marketing is tactically linking content together within your website to tell Google that everything you’re writing about or selling is relevant to each other, and keywords which you’ve chosen to target.  This is great for not only getting better page ranks, but also perfect for targeting search traffic to generate customer traffic specifically targeted to your businesses.  Making sure to link each keyword to specific keywords which belong together between content will greatly improve your inbound marketing efforts.

Ideas To Increase Content Readability

Since the greatest inbound marketing tactic which professional SEO companies will not tell you is organic rankings are golden, your efforts all begin with providing readable content your readers can relate to.  These readers will naturally find you if your content doesn’t appear to be repetitious, and avoiding repetition means coming up with well-discovered content from your own expertise and not copied from other sources.  Let’s look at several ways that naturally relevant content can create organic SEO opportunities which directly feed into the definition of inbound marketing.

  • Solve problems. You can write how-to’s, funny literature and content which seems to be heart-felt yet people have issues, and your business needs to address consumer woes and solve them. When writing your content, keep in mind prevalent worldwide issues.  Address the issues, what problems these issues are causing, and how you plan on defeating these problematic areas.  Constantly telling people how to do something will rob your business of customers as you’ll simply teach consumers how not to use your product or service.
  • Answer questions. If your website or blog receives lots of inquiries, perhaps spend your time writing content which collectively answers these questions.  When people feel suppressed by your solvency, they’ll be more apt to purchase from you or at least follow your content closer.
  • Debrief customers. People always wonder how things work in boiler rooms, office meetings or in datacenters.  Deliver a sense of demystification by describing what really goes on behind closed doors so people feel more ‘in the loop’ with you.  Making people feel completely in control opens more doors, and brings better meaning to word of mouth advertising.
  • Provide visualizations. Google loves videos, great content and website interaction.  You can easily combine the three to propel your inbound marketing efforts to the next stratosphere by making videos of your content, and even providing afterthoughts under the video.  When people have visual verification you exist, the walls come down and more business will come your way.

The Main Inbound Marketing SEO Tactic Is Content

If you list every possible search engine optimization method known to man, many relate to outbound marketing.  Link building, social sharing, PPC and other major forms of generating mass traffic are all relevant to shouting at customers instead of letting them find you.  Content creation, both through guest blogging and self-published works, is the best and only effective mannerism which inbound marketing truly comes to form.  Content may not be ‘king’ in the books of many SEO professionals, yet Google is proving through recent changes that more brownie points are given to websites which have useful, well-researched and deeply linked content as opposed to those who have millions of irrelevant links or multitudes of social media followings.

Lead Liaison

Most Undervalued Inbound Marketing Strategies Around

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Most Undervalued Inbound Marketing Strategies AroundConsistently high ranking websites will often profess hard-core search engine optimization, gleaming content creation and white hat link building techniques will not only assist in perfecting search positioning, it will make your overall internet marketing strategies increase significantly.  There are even more sustainable inbound marketing strategies and tactics, however, that are often overlooked, unused and simply scoffed at when marketing professionals begin their mass campaigning – tactics that can increase other vital areas while obtaining worthwhile targeted leads.   Some of the most undervalued, overlooked and most use-able internet marketing tactics we’ve found to still work wonders are highlighted below.

Facebook Advertisements

Sure, you may not have interests in Zoosk, care about free cellphones or have the desire to play Pawn Stars using numerous Facebook applications.  The Facebook ad system is, by and large, one of the best platforms to get your word out to the masses on a targeted level.  Instead of slapping up your advertisement to the entire Facebook world (terrible for click-thru rates, by the way), you can target your advertisement to those who have verified they like your particular niche.  You can target specific areas, age ranges and even cities.  Having this platform for internet marketing purposes is a gift; hopefully when Facebook’s stock takes off the platform will be left alone since it makes the company literally millions a month.  This platform is perfect for B2B lead generation, too, and for obvious reasons.

Since geo-targeting advertisements means plenty of repetitious ads will be shown, rotating advertisements to refresh your ‘pitch’ or angle will prevent user disinterest while harvesting the traffic you seek.  Selecting mobile B2B users as well as regular computer users will get people on the go.

Emailing Isn’t Dead

Many fear their domain-based emails will soon be moot to the overall marketing scene considering millions of social media users have @Facebook or other social media email addresses to save time while fighting spam.  Fear not, my friends: there will always be millions of old-school internet practices while include emailing friends since attachments haven’t been perfected in other social platforms.  Also, when speaking of email addresses, consider these thoughts:

  1. New TLD’s will soon be added, making .com, .net and .org the most prized possession around.
  2. Hosting companies will always offer, and improve, emailing standards and techniques to accompany domain purchases.
  3. Emails are as valuable as phone numbers; once you have aged contacts who never change their email addresses, you have addresses with value.  Not that you would sell them, right?
  4. Email lists are easier to cross-implement into social media campaigns as you’ll already have contacts to invite, friend or network with.
  5. Email marketing efforts are being recreated, perfected and still show positive numbers even to this day. Although a future filled with virtual everything is imminent, emailing will still jump on board  even if the platform changes to audio emails.  Spend your email marketing dollars wisely, build long-term lists and keep everyone on your list engaged in activities your website promulgates while your list continues to grow.

Video InStream Marketing

After loading your chosen video, you may see an annoying advertisement for something irrelevant to the new Nickelback video.  That annoying advertisement, however, is video marketing gold for those who use InStream services.  Considering over 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, and millions of more videos are added to other sites, in-video marketing definitely takes the cake as back-burner goldmines for savvy internet marketing professionals.   Advertising using keywords via YouTube is effective, although the CPC rates are higher; using InStream video marketing ads, you could experience roughly 66% lower CPC rates while still reaching the masses.

Since you’ll only pay for legitimate views to your video, and often times the ads can be set to popup several times throughout the snippet, you’ll potentially have higher website visitor-ship resulting from these in-video ads. And, much like any other paid advertising platform, your ads will only appear to targeted areas, people and ages you specify.

LinkedIn Ads And Mailings

Serious internet marketing professionals appreciate the value of LinkedIn’s professional network since they can display feature-rich advertisements to those who would most likely view them.  Since professional networks such as this are slightly higher for advertising costs, you will definitely have much better luck marketing your services throughout the million-plus different networks.

Internet marketing pros that have LinkedIn accounts can network with individuals who, in turn, give you permission to trade insights, email your offerings and also gather close contacts with their permission.  You can extract their contact information and send them periodic newsletters that fall within their interest category or simply keep in touch and grow a close business relationship with them.

Conclusion

Stepping outside the norm to give other platforms such as emailing, InStream marketing, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn the chance to work for you will prove equally beneficial to that of your SEO, content marketing, video campaigns and even landing page pushes.  Never count out what isn’t popular because that particular internet marketing strategy is making someone money, and that someone could be you.

Lead Liaison

Convergence of PRM and Marketing Automation Facilitates Superior Marketing Alignment

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Partner Relationship Management and Marketing AutomationOne in every five B2B organizations use a marketing automation platform (MAP), and the present trend indicates that it will grow to 40% by 2016, according to B2B research and advisory agency SiriusDecisions. Organizations are increasingly integrating marketing automation with their CRM databases and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) strategy to facilitate efficient lead nurturing and achieve the most favorable sales potential. This three-way alignment optimizes stand-alone solutions and multiplies sales capabilities of the organizations, creating marketing alignment.

The Case for Marketing Automation Platform-CRM-PRM Integration for Superior Marketing Alignment

The prospect of efficient business processes and enhanced benefits has made marketing automation a key attraction for businesses. Organizations operate in a complex ecosystem that demands attention to a variety of factors. It has become increasingly difficult to track and report marketing progress and sales opportunities across partner networks while managing campaigns and opportunities. Many fall upon PRM solutions to maintain and boost partner-vendor relationship and ensure superior coordination among different channel players.

The PRM is aligned with the CRM, holding customer database and marketing automation tools for better visibility and tracking of performance of partners, co-ops, and other assets. While the former focuses on customer lifecycle management, PRM solutions take care of reporting and analytics suitable for partner lifecycle management. Marketing automation integrated with the two enables businesses to integrate records and track and monitor typical sales opportunities created in a partner network and specific interested customers.

Vendors and manufacturers can also set up on-demand services through marketing automation using social media, telemarketing, and email. By integrating PRM and CRM with marketing automation platforms, businesses can offer instant portal access and training courses in their chosen language and medium. A big plus is that partner branding can be aligned with marketing resources and increased ability to monitor and manage leads and campaigns.

There is no need to employ multichannel strategies, tools, and resources for deal registration and management of opportunities. Often channel managers run helter-skelter as they work with manual systems and spreadsheets to deal with partners and customers. Marketing automation facilitates use of same system by brand owners and partners, reducing time and gap in interaction. With vendors rolling out campaigns and leads in no time to partners using the vertical-sharing system, both can work side by side, enhancing coordination and cooperation.

PRM-Marketing Integration: Summary of Benefits

Integration of PRM with marketing automation offers three important benefits.

1. It helps in automatic lead distribution to partners without any coordination issue.

2. It helps bridge the gap between a business and its partners. All solutions are immediately available to partners. They can interact, learn, receive training, and lead sales efforts without overburdening the business.

3. It is easy to monitor and manage a campaign and activity on leads and holistically measure direct and indirect sales benefits to partners using the marketing automation platform.

With increased availability of SaaS solutions, there is no major technical obstacle that impedes PRM-marketing automation integration. Many consider budget and disconnect issues caused by failure of the system as key hindrances. However, the benefits of aligning the two outweigh the concerns. No doubt PRM can be a stand-alone solution, but when integrated with marketing automation, its compatibilities multiply, assuring better lead development and campaign execution.

Lead Liaison

5 Tips on How to Get the Most Out of Your Marketing

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5 Tips on How to Get the Most Out of Your MarketingThe methods that successful companies use to market their products are constantly changing.  New technology, increased opportunities for exposure and the popularity of social media sites has forever altered traditional marketing. Here are five great modern tips to get the most out of your marketing.

1.      Use free social media sites to increase your exposure

There are so many great free sites like Facebook and Twitter that are quickly gaining in popularity.  It is important that every business has an effective presence on all of them regardless of their target demographic.  People of all ages and all walks of life use some form of social media platform to stay in touch with the world.  In order to market a business using social media, a company should host a contest, promotion or create a catchy post that is intriguing enough to draw visit to its page.  A business can then use their social media page to direct the potential new business to a predetermined landing page that will best represent the consumer’s interest.

2.      Prove that your company is an expert in its field

Building a company’s credibility is essential to converting new leads into new customers.  By providing free, relevant and informative blogs or articles in your field of expertise, it will establish your business as a reputable source.  A company can also re-post and comment on articles from 3rd parties to make sure there is a consistent flow of useful information.

3.      Take advantage of marketing automation

Fortunately, there are now online businesses that specialize in marketing automation.  These companies understand exactly how a business can get more out of their campaigns than they would have if they used traditional marketing methods.  By using marketing automation, these professional marketers can provide lead generation, lead scoring and lead nurturing that is automated and unbiased.  Marketing automation software defines criteria specifically for your company that is designed to determine which leads will have the highest chance for conversion, so it is easier to identify which leads are worth nurturing.

4.      Use referrals and testimonials to convince new clientele

A happy customer’s testimonial or referral is one of the easiest ways to obtain new business.  By posting and promoting positive comments from past clients, you are allowing an unbiased objective opinion to speak on your behalf.  It is important to solicit or even offer discounts to customers who are willing to sell your services.  Another beneficial idea is offering existing clients meaningful incentives for referring new clients.

5.      Personalize each message as much as possible

By using marketing automation to better understand the online history and personalities of potential leads, a company can cater each message to appeal to a specific segment of their target market.  Automated programs gather, summarize and categorize information on potential leads and utilizes it for a personal touch to each a lead nurturing campaign.

An effective marketing campaign takes precise planning in order for it to be directed at the right people at the right time in the right manner.  Following these five steps will make it easier to understand potential customers, appeal to their interests and convince them of your company’s value.  Once a business obtains a lead’s attention, the marketing efforts have to be relevant and compelling in order to secure the deal.

Lead Liaison

How Your Sales Department Drives Marketing Strategy

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How Your Sales Department Drives Marketing Strategy

Learn how your sales department drives marketing strategy. Marketing and sales departments provide essential functions for company success. Marketing creates awareness and sales creates revenue. Each department has a distinct role, but in order to maximize effectiveness the two must operate in tandem.

So how can your sales force support your marketing people?

Through feedback from customers and prospects.

Certainly the marketing department can obtain feedback through focus groups, A/B testing, and other market research techniques. However, the feedback received by your sales force is invaluable, and should be used to shape your marketing strategy.

The marketing strategy primes the sales pump through the delivery of value-based messaging to your markets. The sales department operates under the umbrella of that messaging, but has a closer relationship with your customers and prospects, and has access to the real-world application of your products.

A reciprocal relationship exists that shouldn’t be overlooked. The reciprocal nature of the relationship provides opportunities for the sales department to support the marketing department. After all, without sales there is no product to market.

Your sales group can provide evidence of the success or failure of those messages. But what feedback provided by your sales staff can help the marketing department develop effective campaigns? There are five critical questions for marketing to ask sales that will help build a successful marketing campaign:

5 Questions Marketers Can Ask Sales

1. Is exposure adequate within each territory? – Ideally, the selected channels should reach targets frequently through effective channels in order to support the sales effort. “How did you hear about our company or product?” sheds light on whether the appropriate channels are being used effectively.

2. Do the markets understand the product clearly? – Messaging should express benefits, image, offer, and value. “Which features or benefits of our product are important to you?” can allow your marketers to understand if the messaging is clear.

3. What are the obstacles to closing sales? – Sales people receive valuable feedback from prospects about buying decisions during sales calls. “What can I do to make your buying decision easier?” often exposes overlooked objections that can be categorized for analysis by the marketing department.

4. How is the competition being received by your markets? – Your sales staff has the ability to determine how effective your competitors’ marketing activities have been. “Who else has a product like ours?” provides feedback about the competitive environment your company is working in. The marketing department can use this information to develop messaging that positions your product within the marketplace.

5. Are customers receiving the benefits they’ve been promised? – By checking customer satisfaction, your sales people can share with marketing whether the messaging is appropriate. “Is our product providing the solutions you need?” reveals how the product is being received in the marketplace. Sharing responses with marketing provides real-world feedback that will support or contradict your messaging.

By training your sales staff to generate feedback that will improve marketing, your company can develop messaging that is responsive, timely, and effective.

Lead Liaison

Target Marketing Strategy

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Target Marketing StrategyDoes your target market strategy involve selling to a finite set of accounts? Is your Total Available Market (TAM) a small list of companies you can list on one or two pages of a word document? Does your company avoid buying marketing lists and limit outbound marketing to the masses? If the answer is yes to any of these questions then Revenue Generation Software™, driven by marketing automation technology under the hood, will boost your business to the next level and drive your target market strategy.

Here are six ways you can make the most out of your well-defined target market:

Relationship Marketing

Competitors are chasing the same target market as you are. It’s vital to differentiate your company from your competitors. One way to do that is to invest in building relationships. Use Revenue Generation Software™ to automatically and intelligently interact with prospects to create meaningful conversations that keep prospects thinking about you, not your competitor, first. Pre-configure relationship nurturing tracks that enable sales people to instantly drop strategic contacts into a nurturing program. Consistent, company-generated messaging will permeate your target account better than disparate, sales-generated messaging. Make sure to leverage technology to build relationships as part of your target marketing strategy.

Prospect Tracking

Sales people have a challenging job breaking into strategic accounts; it is not easy navigating an organization from the outside in. Many calls and emails can be sent with zero visibility as to the effectiveness of a sales person’s outreach. Use desktop software that streams business to business website visitor traffic in real-time to get feedback on sales outreach. Sales people will know when a strategic account responds to a call or clicks a link in an email with software that alerts the sales representative when the strategic account visits your company’s website.

Account Profiling

Unless they know an insider, sales people have a tough time finding whom to call without an organization chart. Use Revenue Generation Software™ to build a list of employees and their roles and map out an organization. Find a contact you need to call then instantly import the contact into your CRM, such as Salesforce.com, saving time on data entry. Also, business intelligence information such as description, revenue, headquarter location, financials, executives, jobs and more are available to help profile companies.

Competitive Landscaping

Once your company identifies an ideal target identify their competitors. Use Revenue Generation Software™ to augment sales prospecting by quickly viewing competitors of a target account. Then start relationship marketing efforts with your strategic account’s competitor.

Marketing Engagement

Relationship marketing helps businesses and sales people stay in touch with their target market. It’s also important to engage your target market. Use surveys to stimulate interaction and engage your audience. Make sure to process the results and respond. Shield competitors from your finite account base by showing prospects your company is inquisitive and ready to listen.

Personalized Selling

Generic, company-to-company or company-to-person communication might be effective for businesses blasting out emails to massive marketing lists. However, if you know your target market and never buy lists there’s a good chance each of your target accounts, leads and contacts have been assigned a lead owner by your company. Use Revenue Generation Software™ to send closed-loop email messages from the lead owner and make communications personalized and intimate, vital for building relationships.

We encourage you to learn more about how Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software™ can amp up your target market strategy and help your company break into strategic accounts. Even if your company only sells to a finite set of target accounts our technology can deliver immediate value and help your company increase revenue.

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Lead Liaison

12 Ways to Repurpose Content

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Repurpose ContentLooking for ways to repurpose content? Many companies struggle creating content. Marketing content is important, but pervasiveness of that content is even more important. Much like a spider casts a web far and wide; marketers must cast their content in a similar manner. However, instead of getting worn down trying to create new content for each marketing channel (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.) repurpose content for each marketing channel.

To start improving inbound marketing create one piece of content. We recommend writing a blog article as your starting point. Keep blogs short and rich with insightful information. Think about who your audience is. Ask yourself, who will read this content and why would they read it? Once your blog article is created repurpose your content on the internet to allow potential buyers to easily find your company. We came across Brody Dorland’s post, A Lesson in Content Repurposing, Infographic Style. Brody provides a very useful infographic with some print instructions to hang the graphic in your office. The graphic outlines 12 things marketers can do to repurpose content and improve inbound marketing. We’ve also pinned it to the side of this post for your convenience. Click on the image to see a larger view.

Finally, close the loop and measure ROI of your content. We suggest using lead tracking technology such as ours to help you automatically scan inbound leads, qualify, distribute and nurture them. Follow these steps to repurpose content and measure content ROI. Your sales team will be chanting your name! Ping us using the short form on this page to learn more about how our technology can help you get the highest return on your content creation dollars.

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Lead Liaison

The Two Fundamentals of Strategic Marketing

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Fundamentals of Strategic MarketingWhat are the fundamentals of strategic marketing? Chocolate and milk, salt and pepper, popsicles and hot weather – it’s easy to find two items that complement each other. Strategic marketing requires two items that also go well together. In an era driven by the internet, marketing has become a different animal. Marketing is no longer about creating fancy, high-gloss fliers or spending thousands of dollars at the next tradeshow. It’s about the digital age and adapting to new buying behaviors shaped by the internet. The digital age has fostered the creation of two fundamental and complementary items that should be the core of every Strategic Marketer’s toolbox, a website and a database. As more and more applications leverage the internet as the backbone for communication companies have greater dependency on their website and database as their most valuable asset.

The first fundamental of strategic marketing is a company’s website. A company’s website should be easy to navigate and look professional; after all, prospects will judge a company based on the appearance of its website. Also, a website is the primary landing page for prospects. It’s critical that a company’s website be laced with targeted and brief (no more than four form fields) landing pages to convert unknown visitors into known leads. Finally, prospects may find your company on Facebook, LinkedIn, partner sites, press releases, blogs and more; however, they’ll eventually come to your company’s website in the final stop of their journey. It’s imperative strategic marketers use B2B visitor tracking technology and proper lead management automation to capture the 96% of all unknown website visitor traffic that goes undetected (never fills out a form). Make sure to capitalize on marketing expenditures by capturing, tracking and managing leads using technology from companies like Lead Liaison.

The second fundamental of strategic marketing is a company’s database. Much too often strategic marketers let a company’s database go “stale” – leads rot, become out of date, incomplete and untouched. In fact, 73% of all companies have no process for revisiting leads. Moreover, with only 3-5% of inbound leads being classified as “sales-ready”, most leads get touched initially then never again. Shockingly, 70-80% of the other inquiries (leads that are not “sales-ready”) are latent demand that will buy within two years, but are typically lost, ignored or discarded by companies.

Better lead management is a necessary fundamental of strategic marketing and starts by profiling a database (using lead scoring), segmenting a database and nurturing a database. Strategic marketers must make sure to think of their database as the most valuable resource the company has and think of their database as their baby. Keep it clean, bring it in for checkups and make sure to nurture it over time. Don’t ignore your baby! Take care of it, give it structure, don’t forget about it and it will continue to give back to you and your company.

To explore how your company can have better lead management please ping us and we’ll tell you how.

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