Best practices for lead generation, marketing automation and revenue generation topics.

Lead Liaison

How to Use Social Selling and Marketing Automation

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How to Use Social Selling and Marketing AutomationIn a modern landscape of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, social selling is a vital skill to integrate into any marketing strategy. However, concurrently managing different social networks and sticking to a consistent message can be daunting. Marketing automation tools such as Lead Liaison have many different functions that can help your marketing team keep everything organized. Read on to learn how your company can use social selling and marketing automation to maximize exposure of your promotional materials and convert leads into customers.

Obstacles to Social Selling

There are a couple important obstacles that can limit your marketing team’s social selling efforts. One of the most basic is that while nearly everyone in the modern business world interacts with social networking, the way that your consumers interact with these platforms is constantly changing. Different leads use different social networking platforms, individual platforms are used in different ways, and different consumers use different devices to interact with those networks. Even if you’ve crafted an effective social selling strategy, a large part of your potential leads or new leads may not respond to your content – simply because they aren’t noticing it.

How can your marketing team cover all of the different social networks, constantly updating and double checking and interacting with customers, all while developing and implementing a coherent and compelling marketing strategy? Do you need to hire a whole new social media department?

Not if you take advantage of marketing automation software. Below are some of the ways you can use social selling and marketing automation to streamline and improve your company’s social media presence.

Scheduling

One of the biggest advantages that software automation technology can deliver to your marketing team and your company is the ability to schedule social media posts. This means that you can plan and implement a long-term social media campaign that will be unveiled over several weeks or even months across multiple platforms. This takes a lot of the day-to-day pressure off your marketing team, who no longer have to babysit every tweet, and is an invaluable tool to help make sure that your message stays consistent across all social media platforms. You can even help improve your company’s social media profile by clustering relevant posts around industry events such as a trade show, giving you maximum exposure at the perfect time.

Social Intelligence

Another great feature that can help you use social selling and marketing automation together is the social intelligence function built into Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools. Social intelligence can help you gather demographic data about your leads by analyzing social media profiles. This can help you further refine your social media campaigns, open up exciting opportunities for targeted marketing, and help your marketing analyze the effectiveness of current campaigns with A/B testing.

Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog to learn more about how you can use social selling and marketing automation to improve your marketing campaigns and many more great marketing automation strategies.

Lead Liaison

Common Mistakes with Email Marketing Campaigns and How to Fix Them

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Common Mistakes with Email Marketing and How to Fix ThemOne of the best ways to utilize your marketing automation software is to engage leads directly through automated email marketing campaigns, tailored to gradually entice the lead through specific lead nurturing programs. Of course, the modern consumer receives an enormous amount of email every day, so you need to make sure that emails your marketing team sends out get noticed. Here are some common mistakes with email marketing campaigns, and some good ways to fix those problems.

Bad or Misdirected Content

If you have placed a lead in a lead nurturing campaign, then one of your most important struggles isn’t getting them to open the first email – it’s to get them to open all the ones that will follow that first one. It may seem obvious, but you need to ensure that all of the content you send to your leads is strong, readable and engaging, or else your leads may lose interest with your company before they reach a point where they are ready to buy.

A related problem is sending content that isn’t appropriate to the person receiving it. If your marketing automation has scored your lead as not yet interested in your product, don’t try to over pitch them. Your content should be informative, helpful and there to remind your leads that you’re out there, ready to assist them. However, if your lead looks like they might be ready to purchase your services, then make sure you’re ready with well written, compelling content that will convince them to buy!

Some marketing automation software, such as Lead Liaison, can even help you craft email marketing campaigns that target extremely specific demographics. Lead Liaison’s software can look through social media profiles to find information about your leads interests, which would let you, for example, send out a deal that was tied to a baseball event and specifically sent to baseball fans.

Email That Is Not Optimized For Mobile

Another common mistake in email marketing campaigns is failing to optimize for mobile devices. Mobile devices are quickly becoming one of the most common ways that consumers read their email, and if your emails are not optimized for mobile devices, it makes them that much more likely to be ignored. Make sure that any images you’ve included will scale appropriately, that your text displays in a readable size and font, and you’ll find your email marketing campaign will bring you much more success.

Ineffective Call To Action

The last common mistake in email marketing campaigns that you should keep track of is a sloppy or ineffective call to action. If your marketing automation software indicates that your emails are being read but you are seeing poor conversion rates, then the problem could lie with your call to action. Using strong action words, such as buy, click, or register and making sure any images you use have bright colors with high contrast can help make your call to action more effective.

Learn about more ways to make your email marketing campaign, and other marketing automation strategies, more effective at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

Optimize your Marketing Automation Content with an Effective Call to Action

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Optimize Your Marketing Automation Content With An Effective Call To ActionLooking for ways to optimize your marketing automation content with an effective call to action? A call to action is one of the oldest and most important elements of web design, because it is what ultimately seals the deal and engages the customer to make an online sale or enter deeper into conversation with your company. A call to action is most traditionally thought of as a button on a web page that gets a customer to do something – such as a buy or download button. However, these days a call to action can be embedded in many different types of content and can come in many different forms – a well written sales pitch in an email can be thought of as a call to action, if it engages the lead to interact further with marketing material.

When Is It Appropriate To Include A Call To Action?

While a call to action is a valuable tool for many different types of content, it is important to know when a call to action can be misleading. As we’ve discussed before, if your content is directed towards a low-end lead, and is designed to simply remind customers of your existence and ability to be helpful, then attempting to sell to them can drive them away. Your marketing team needs to use good judgement when they try to sell your products, and should always take advantage of the tools your marketing automation software has to test different strategies against one another.

None of that is to say that you shouldn’t be trying to sell – just that you need to know when. With that out of the way, here are some of the essential elements of an effective call to action.

Simplicity

Whether the call to action contained in your content is an image or an invitation in the copy, it should always be straightforward and impossible to misunderstand. You should never miss a sale due to an unclear image or cluttered language.

Clarity

Utilizing strong action words can make or break an effective call to action. Words such as register, click, download or buy will provide clear direction to your viewers. If these words are built into an image or a button then use sharp contrast to make those words really stand out.

Visibility

Don’t bury your call to action. A great strategy is to place your call to action in a highly visible area, such as the middle center or in the top right corner relative to where the bulk of your content is displayed. Try to avoid making the user scroll, make it impossible to miss.

Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is another important factor in a call to action that yields higher conversion rates. If there are a limited amount of items left or a limited time to get them, communicate that. Getting a potential customer to act now rather than later is important. That said, however, never attempt to mislead someone – breaking trust with them will hurt your company much more in the long run.

These are some of the most important steps in designing an effective call to action for your marketing automation content, but you can learn about even more ways to engage your leads at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

Lead Liaison

How Marketing Automation Increases Lead Conversion

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How Marketing Automation Increases Lead ConversionLead conversion is a vital statistic for any successful marketing and sales team. It can also be a difficult statistic to influence in a competitive world, one where failing to contact a lead at the perfect time can result in a competitor taking the sale. However, according to the Aberdeen Group’s Marketing Lead Management Report,

“Companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates from initial response-to-MQ.”

Read on to learn how some of the essential practices of marketing automation can increase lead conversion.

Lead Scoring

Marketing automation tools, by their very nature, gather a large amount of raw data. From web clicks and form submissions to social media demographic data, your marketing automation software is constantly gathering and analyzing a lot of data about every lead in your database. This data is used to then create an individual profile for each lead – one that is continually being updated. This profile is then evaluated by the metrics that your sales and marketing teams deem most important, and is assigned a lead score. This lead score indicates how likely an individual is to be converted to a client.

Once a lead has been assigned this score, it can go to one of two places. If the lead is warm, it will be sent straight to your sales team, who can try to convert the lead as quickly as they can. If the lead is not warm, it will be sent to your marketing automation software’s lead nurturing tools.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is a marketing automation process of contacting individual leads with promotional and educational material in order to make them more likely to purchase your company’s product or service. Lead nurturing also takes advantage of the large amounts of data that has been collected about each lead so that each lead can be placed on the most appropriate lead nurturing program. Once a lead has been placed on a lead nurturing track, your marketing automation program will continue to gather data on the lead, recording things such as email click through and giving you an even fuller picture of your leads.

If your lead exhibits positive behavior that may lead to a sale, then their lead score will increase, and when the time is optimal, will be handed over to your sales department.

Lead Conversion

When a lead is presented to your sales team, either by exhibiting positive buy signs when assessed initially as a lead or as a result of a successful lead nurturing program, your sales team will have all the information they need to convert the lead. With access to a leads entire history of interaction with your website and promotional emails, you can make sure the right person will know the right thing to say to make the sale.

These are just a few of the ways that marketing automation increases lead conversion. If you want to learn more about the benefits that marketing automation can have for your business, you should check out Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

4 Ways Integrating CRM and Marketing Automation Can Help Sales

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Integrating CRM and Marketing AutomationCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are nothing new. Developed in the 80s, CRMs have become an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. However, since some of those systems are based on technology and business practices that have been around for decades, not everyone is using them to their best potential by integrating them into their marketing automation strategies. Read on to learn about 4 ways that integrating CRM and marketing automation can help your sales team close deals.

1. Unparalleled insight into how your marketing tactics are performing

With a well integrated CRM and marketing automation system in place, you’ll know exactly how well any marketing strategies are performing, because you will have a total picture of how your customers are interacting with your marketing materials. Your marketing team will be able to track forms customers have submitted, pages they’ve viewed and emails they’ve opened, among many other things. This will give you total transparency and enable your marketing team to see what is helping your company make sales and generate leads – and what isn’t.

2. Your sales team can focus on only the best leads, making them much more efficient

Once your marketing team has finished successfully integrating CRM and Marketing Automation, your sales team will be able to operate at peak efficiency. Your sales team will be able to track any and all online interactions that any given lead has had with your company. These interactions can be used in conjunction with any demographic information your company has available about a lead, and all of that information is evaluated to create a lead score.

This lead score will indicate how likely a lead is to buy, and can be quickly and accurately assessed by your sales team. This means that your sales team can spend their time contacting only the most likely to convert leads, without spending valuable time following up with leads unlikely to ever make a sale.

3. Increase your sales opportunities with lead nurturing

According to Emailmonday,

“B2B marketers see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads after successfully deploying a lead nurturing program.”

By integrating CRM and marketing automation tools you can set your colder leads on highly targeted lead nurturing tracks. A lead that has been nurtured will ultimately be much better educated about the services your company can provide. And a better educated lead, if your marketing material has been effective, will be much more likely to buy.

4. Make your sales cycle faster by streamlining the process

Integrating CRM and marketing automation can make your entire sales cycle faster by reducing the time it takes to qualify a lead. It accomplishes this by helping you identify the best time to contact a lead in a lead nurturing program. By taking all of the data available and involving your sales team in the development of nurturing campaigns, you can ensure that your leads get the most appropriate content at the right times to cut down the time it takes for a lead to be ready to convert.

Integrating your CRM and marketing automation tools is an important part of a successful marketing program, and there are many more ways in which your company can benefit from this process. By carefully managing your existing processes with marketing automation, you can transform your marketing and sales departments.

Lead Liaison

Use Marketing Automation to Expand Your Online Presence

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Use Marketing Automation to Expand Your Online PresenceTry to use marketing automation to expand your online presence. No matter what field you are in, your company’s internet presence is a valuable part of how you interact with your customers. Not only are the constantly expanding social media networks a wonderful way to grow your company’s profile and develop new leads, but the internet is hands down the fastest way for anyone, anywhere, to find out about your business. On top of that, by utilizing marketing automation tools built into Lead Liaison, your company’s website can become an invaluable tool to gather essential data about how your customers interact with your site and marketing materials. Read on to learn about how marketing automation can expand your online presence.

Marketing Automation and Social Media

Lead Liaison has intuitive and effective social media marketing automation tools built into its software. Lead Liaison’s social media marketing automation tools allow your marketing team to develop a comprehensive social media strategy, and then schedule posts to major social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to ensure that your social media profiles remain relevant and up to date.

Be sure your social media strategies are not static, however. Make sure you make an effort to interact with your community of customers and your industry at large. Tweeting about an ongoing trade show or other industry event will introduce you to new potential leads and is an integral way in which marketing automation can expand your online presence.

Data Tracking and Lead Nurturing

One of the more complex ways that Lead Liaison’s tools can help you expand your online presence is by using data tracking software included in our suite of programs. Lead Liaison’s data tracking tools analyze which elements of your website are being clicked on and which are not, letting you know what parts of your marketing campaign are working. The data tracking software also communicates with Lead Liaison’s lead database, collecting data about individual leads based on their interaction with your marketing material and helping your sales staff know how warm any given lead might be.

The data collected from your website is also essential to establishing successful lead nurturing programs. By organizing email campaigns for a lead nurturing program based on specific lead qualifiers and demographics, you can send content to your leads that will be most appropriate to their demonstrated interest in your company and products.

This process can also be tied into the social media tools available from Lead Liaison. Our marketing automation tools include a feature called social intelligence, which can scan a variety of different social media sites to develop a further picture of a lead by collecting information on things such as age, gender and interests. This process allows you to send extremely targeted content to interested leads.

These are just some of the ways you can use marketing automation to grow your online presence. Visit our marketing automation resource blog to learn about more of the ways that Lead Liaison’s tools can help your company.

Lead Liaison

Evaluate and Focus your Lead Nurturing Strategies using Lead Liaison

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Evaluate and Focus your Lead Nurturing Strategies using Lead LiaisonHaving a diverse and complete lead nurturing strategy in place is a very important part of any overall marketing automation strategy. We’re excited to share some ideas on how you can focus your lead nurturing strategies. Lead Liaison’s built in lead nurturing tools can be extremely helpful in implementing a successful lead nurturing strategy; however, you need to be sure you are implementing the most complete and effective plan for regularly contacting your leads. Take some time to evaluate your current lead nurturing system by thinking about some of these common mistakes. Make sure you’re up to speed by reading over these best lead nurturing practices.

Common Lead Nurturing Mistakes

There are some very basic mistakes that, even though they are easy to fix, can derail any lead nurturing strategy. The most basic one is ignoring your leads. Focus your lead nurturing strategies by making sure unqualified leads are entered into a lead nurturing program to ensure every potential lead is contacted and engaged. On the other side of this is the issue of spamming leads. Excessive emails and social messaging contact is sure to eventually annoy and deter a lead, driving them to a competitor. Make sure that all the content that makes up your lead nurturing program is well put together and engaging – people notice when content is sloppy or off topic.

Another common mistake is not engaging in split testing your lead nurturing programs. Obviously, you should have different lead nurturing paths for different demographics of leads, but you shouldn’t be afraid to try different things within different groups. Different approaches yield different results, and you’ll quickly be able to see which approach gives you better results.

Best Practices for Lead Nurturing

One great way to focus your lead nurturing strategies is to engage a lead with your lead nurturing program’s content is by educating the customer. Inform the customer how your product can solve their various problems, or simply deliver informative content that is relevant to your business or industry. Add a personal touch, and be careful not to skew all of the information you deliver into a pitch for your product, if content is too biased it can turn a customer off. Do your best to add a personal touch to as much of your content as possible to help your lead nurturing communication connect with a lead.

Remember to integrate all of the various data that Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools can deliver to your marketing team, and use that data to place the lead into the most effective lead nurturing program. On a higher level, make sure your sales team and your marketing team are communicating with one another and are generally in sync – both departments will be able to interpret different things about different leads and lead behavior.

Learn more about Lead Liaison’s other great marketing automation tools by visiting our website. Check out our marketing automation resource blog to learn more about how marketing automation can streamline your business.

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Creating and Maintaining A Healthy Balance Between Lead Profiling and Lead Nurturing

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Creating and Maintaining A Healthy Balance Between Lead Profiling And Lead NurturingWhile every lead is worth pursuing, the fact of the matter is that not every lead is ready to buy quite yet. It’s the very nature of marketing automation that the strategies being employed generate a large number of leads that are not ready to be converted into customers. But just because they aren’t going to purchase right now, or even in the near future, doesn’t mean you should ignore them. In order to keep in contact with these leads and be ready to convert them to customers at the opportune moment, you must employ successful lead nurturing – and the ability to do this effectively requires that you begin with careful lead profiling.

Learn More About Your Leads With Lead Profiling Software

Lead nurturing and lead profiling are two functions that are at the core of Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software. Lead profiling begins by collecting as much data about potential leads as possible, and Lead Liaison has many different methods of doing this. Our software tracks things such as email opens and site click-throughs, in addition to monitoring buy signals that indicate how likely a customer is ready to purchase your product. Lead Liaison also uses social intelligence software to gather data about things such as a customer’s age, gender and interests to create a detailed portrait of your leads.

All of this data is processed by Lead Liaison’s lead grading tools, and the leads that are likely to buy are passed on directly to the sales team so they can make the sales that they need to. However, the leads that are not ready to be converted are sent to Lead Liaison’s lead nurturing tools, and this is where a successful lead profiling strategy can really pay off for your sales team.

Lead Nurturing Helps You Get The Most Out Of Every Lead, Every Time

Lead Liaison’s automated lead nurturing tools ensure that no lead is ever left behind by contacting colder leads on a schedule that your marketing team dictates or in reaction to certain actions taken by the lead, such as following a link in an email. This noninvasive contact helps ensure that your leads never feel spammed or irritated, but will keep your company in mind for when they will require your products or services.

Combing automated lead profiling and lead nurturing can lead to many different and effective strategies. Using Lead Liaison’s automated nurture tracks, you can arrange for customers with different levels of interest to be contacted with different frequencies and content. By taking advantage of the data collected can be used to engage in very specific targeted marketing. For example, your sales team could set up an email campaign that would be directed only to male baseball fans aged 30-40 during the World Series.

To learn more about the fantastic opportunities Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software can create for your business, visit us online and check out our marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

How can you integrate trade shows and other industry events into your automated marketing?

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Marketing Automation Trade ShowsRegardless of the industry you are in, trade shows are a great opportunity to gain new leads and meet potential new clients. Regardless of whether you plan to have a representative at the event or not, trade shows represent a gathering of individuals interested in the type of services that you provide, and interacting with them is always a positive experience. And since it is nearly impossible for most businesses to have a real presence at every relevant show, using some of the marketing automation tools provided by Lead Liaison can greatly increase your company’s visibility to attendees and the industry in general.

Social Media and Marketing Automation

One of the most straightforward ways to utilize Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools to interact with trade show attendees and other individuals who are interested in what the show has to offer is to utilize the automated social media tools in Lead Liaison.

With a little bit of planning, your marketing team can quickly schedule LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook posts to automatically post as the event approaches. With strategic use of hashtags and other markers, your company will become a part of the online community interested in the event, introducing you and your services to new clients naturally.

Social media automation doesn’t stop there either. During the event, posts about significant events can help attract attention to your company’s social media feeds, but even more effective are interactive posts that prompt community discussion. Social media posts that quiz attendees about favorite products and questions directed at attendees can all be scheduled in advance, generating create feedback and exposure.

Make New Connections and Keep Them Interested With Lead Liaison’s Lead Nurturing Tools

If you do have a representative at the event, be sure that they stay in tune with social media, but don’t neglect the face-to-face network opportunities inherent in events such as trade shows. You want to meet as many prospective clients as possible, but don’t let this be your only goal. You aren’t simply trying to sell – you want to be receptive and listen to what your new contacts are interested in.

After an event has occurred, enter any new client data obtained from the event or social media into Lead Liaison’s client database, and let the program qualify all prospective leads. Make sure to integrate any leads that may not pay off right away into Lead Liaison’s lead nurturing system – and also remember that trade shows offer you great opportunities to send a message to anyone already in your lead nurturing system.

Trade shows are fun events that bring together lots of disparate elements of any industry, and treated properly can yield fantastic information and lead generation. With a little planning and good use of marketing automation, you’ll be amazed at the difference even the most basic levels of interaction with these events will have.

Visit our revenue generation and marketing automation resource blog to learn more ways to use marketing automation to expand your client base and build your business with Lead Liaison.

Lead Liaison

Database Segmentation Can Be Easy

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Database Segmentation Can Be Easy Database segmentation is a crucial element of allowing your marketing and sales team to communicate effectively with leads and customers. It becomes even more important as the overall number of leads and customers grows to ensure that you are able to remain in contact with everyone. However, it is equally important that the communication you send to your customers is relevant to the individual, and that you are not spamming leads with unwanted information, potentially turning them away from your business. Lead Liaison features many intuitive automated tools to help you manage your growing database of customer contacts.

Different Methods Of Data Segmentation

One of the most important features of Lead Liaison is the ability to dynamically create lists in order to quickly and accurately send emails to your relevant leads. Lead Liaison has over 65 preset attributes to segment your database and help you communicate the correct information at the correct times to your leads. Those categories can broadly be defined as related to lead strength, helping you access customers when the Lead Liaison database has determined they are most ready to purchase your services, and personalization, so you can send communications based off specific relevant information gathered about your customers.

Segmenting customers according to the strength and type of leads helps you connect with customers when they are ready to purchase your service with the correct level of service appropriate for their needs and budget. Lead grade is an attribute that is defined in the Lead Liaison database based on how well an individual fits your buyer profile. This helps ensure that each customer is being approached with an appropriate level of service by your sales and marketing teams. Lead score is an attribute that is determined by a customer’s interaction with your website, sales team and marketing. This attribute helps you know how interested a customer is in your service and when they might be most likely to buy.

By creating lists based on personalization attributes, you can contact your customers with services that are specific to their location, needs or ability to interact with your services. One of the best ways to use this is by creating lists based on geography, so you can quickly communicate with your leads in a specific region with relevant information. Another important factor is a customer job title, since an owner or vice-president can make purchasing decisions that individuals lower in the hierarchy would not be able to. Past purchases is another important factor to consider when segmenting your customer database, so you can inform your customer of services that could be repeated or inform them of a complementary offer.

Use Data Segmentation To Maximize Efficiency

In addition to accessing customers to inform them of relevant opportunities, you can also use data segmentation to help reduce waste. Attributes such as delivery bounce, do not call or do not email all help to ensure that your marketing and sales teams aren’t wasting their time contacting someone who is uninterested in your service.

These are only some of the ways that Lead Liaison’s automated data segmentation services can help your business, visit our resource blog to learn more.