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

Lead Liaison

Why Marketing Automation Makes Sense

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Why Marketing Automation Makes More SenseMarketing automation is the perfect tool for today’s consumer audience. Marketing automation makes sense. There are several features that give automated marketing the upper hand when it comes to conversion rates (we’ll get into that in a bit), but today’s consumer is certainly web-savvy—they spend more time on the internet than they do watching TV or reading magazines. So why not reach them where they’re already going to be, right?

Behavior-based lead scoring

Companies benefit from choosing marketing automation in that the potential customer’s behavior is tracked and scored. No need to manually track click-through rates from Google Analytics, your software is already doing that for you. Marketing automation tracks your leads and generates profiles based on their online behavior. This information warms the leads automatically for the sales reps. How awesome is that? No more shots in the dark, no more cold calling. Read more about how this is helpful for small business owners.

It’s not just for scheduling; it’s for maintaining a conversation

Automation is so often misunderstood as simply a means of scheduling. Sure, scheduling happens, but more importantly using marketing automation includes complex analytics that capture the behavior of your potential customers, scores it for you, and therefore helps maintain a relevant conversation that closes the lead. The important thing to note is that, although it sounds like kind of the opposite, automation actually helps to keep the personal touch in your interactions with leads. Automation supplies enough relevant information to take the relationship to the next level by offering products that the lead is already interested in. Of course, this can be done manually, but automating this relationship-building process saves so much time for your business, allowing your employees to spend their time closing the leads rather than researching them.

The bottom line is a higher conversion rate. These rates are ultimately a result of a system that creates highly targeted and personalized efforts, utilizing conditional logic. This means that once you reach out to your lead it is not in an unsolicited manner (such as a spammy email campaign). What good is your analytical data if you don’t utilize it in future lead generation endeavors? Marketing automation makes this process a breeze.

Lead Liaison

Lead Strategy Creation 101

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Lead Strategy Creation 101

Lead Strategy

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

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

Identifying Your Conversion Point

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

Lead Strategy: Identifying CPA

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

Creating a Lead Strategy

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

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

Lead Liaison

Getting Your Subscribers to Open and Click

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Getting Subscribers to Open and ClickIt’s tough to send good marketing emails. Even after they’ve opted in, you have to reaffirm their interest with each and every email you send. And let’s be honest, it takes time to develop a winning email marketing strategy, and no matter the size of your business, time is expensive. Here are a few quick and simple things to implement in your email marketing strategy:

A/B Testing

Try A/B testing with several strong subject lines to see what works better. What’s going to make your recipient open this email? The first step is getting it opened. Check out these email subject line hacks taken from SXSW session titles. Try out your own version of these against something else you think might work. It’s all about experimentation and understanding your subscribers. Tailor it to them personally as often as possible.

Spicy Subject Line

Surprise your subscribers with an interesting subject line. Play-up the sense of urgency and scarcity of your product. Along the same lines of A/B testing, test out what times of the day work best for your content. Are you grabbing your audience at a time when they’re looking for your services? Or are you sending at a time when your email is just one of many and it’s lost in the pile? Check out a few tips on improving your open rate here.

Know Your Subscribers

Understand your buyer persona. What makes them tick? Why would they have subscribed to your list and what kind of information are they seeking? This is where organizing your leads properly will really pay off. Read more about email tracking here. Targeting your subscribers personally makes them believe that email is for them, not just the whole pool of subscribers.

Lead Liaison keeps email marketing simple for you through our marketing automation services. We make it easy for you to succeed in each email campaign, keeping each email personalized, utilizing drip campaigns, keeping your lists clean and organized, and providing important analytics.

Lead Liaison

Mobile Marketing Automation: Is Your Business Ready?

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Mobile Marketing Automation

Mobile Marketing Automation

Mobile marketing automation is happening – though mobile marketing and marketing automation are not new concepts, businesses who pay attention to their mobile marketing are finding the information they gather more useful and profitable than ever.

If you’re thinking about doing mobile marketing for your business, the first question is, how mobile is your audience? If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, if you’re not working on being found in places like Google Local or doing any form of local marketing and if you have no plans to consider a mobile-friendly site in the future, you might consider skipping mobile marketing.

Is Mobile Marketing Right For You?

Not all businesses really need to do mobile marketing – but many who would find qualified mobile traffic are avoiding mobile. Likewise, the vast majority of businesses haven’t discovered how amazing marketing automation could be for their businesses. Considering a mobile marketing plan for your business could put you ahead of the curve.

Putting the Data Together

A marketing automation dashboard gives your company access to marketing funnels that are individualized and that work for your particular business. Your dashboard not only streamlines your funnel – it helps you better manage team workflow, marketing tasks and to more easily interpret your data stream.

Mobile marketing data may be vastly different from your regular data – for instance, mobile users may tend to look at your site at a specific time of day that laptop or desktop users don’t. Without the proper analytics, this type of information is hard to come by.  Many companies aren’t even using the free, most basic analytics out there. The only way to truly determine whether or not your marketing services are working to bring in new leads and re-engage existing clients is to consistently and carefully analyze your data.

With mobile use consistently on the rise, mobile marketing will play a key role in the success and productivity of future businesses. Many businesses don’t want to go into mobile marketing because they fear the cost – but there are many responsive website builders out there that will convert your website at low cost. For many businesses we work with, responsive web technology for mobile marketing has been worth looking into.

How Will I Know if I’m Ready?

Talk to us at Lead Liaison and let us take a look at your site, your offering and your mobile-readiness. Mobile marketing might actually benefit your business more than you know.

Lead Liaison

3 Ingredients to Content Marketing

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3 Ingredients to Content MarketingWe know that customers today are armed with more knowledge than ever before. Instead of your sales team being the lead communicator of your product’s details, buyers are getting their expertise via the internet. This means that by the time you reach them, many have already made up their mind and are primed to purchase. How do you reach them before they’ve made up their minds? As we’ve heard over and over again: content, content, content. Read more about how content creates success here. Creative content leads to inbound marketing, meaning higher close rate. Let us provide you with 3 ingredients to content marketing.

Creating innovative marketing content will allow you to influence the buyer tremendously—you want to be the one that furnishes their knowledge, especially if it’s about your product. By establishing a reputation as a knowledgeable resource you become an authority in the marketplace. Here’s a step-by-step process that will help you organize your content marketing and increase your revenue because of it:

  1. Publish to your blog appropriate content. What do your potential buyers want to know? Which topics are getting retweeted? Is there a big change in the industry that needs to be reported? When creating content, it’s also important to write in a way that’s enjoyable to read. Read more about a few ways to let your audience decide your content.
  2. Use your landing pages to better understand your readership. Analyzing the bounce rate will inform you of the modifications needed to improve the performance of your landing pages. You can also use transactional landing pages to directly interact with potential buyers. Then, you can import the stats from the landing pages into your CRM for better lead management.
  3. Optimize the visibility of the content and convert into marketing automation. Use the appropriate key words and gather results from your social media sharing to determine what your readers are looking for. This is a process that will be repeated and improved constantly. Learn more about optimizing your website conversions here.

Last but certainly not least, structure your content conveniently. You want potential customers to be able to find the information they are looking for. Optimize your user’s experience on your blog by organizing by topic and creating hashtags. If you are able to influence the user with the information on your site, your chances of closing are that much greater.

Lead Liaison

Steps to Simplify your Lead Nurturing

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Steps to Simplify NurturingLooking for a way to simplify your lead nurturing and better manage your leads? Effective lead nurturing starts in one place: organization. Ensure that your sales team knows the method behind the madness of the lead lists upon lead lists. Here is a simplified overview of what to keep in mind.

1. Segment, segment, segment. It cannot be stressed enough that organizing your streams of prospects into nurture tracks that fit them individually enhances their experience with your company, therefore increasing close rate. Understand what their interest level is and when they might consider buying. Don’t send the wrong targeted content campaign– that’s just asking them to unsubscribe. Still need to be convinced about the importance of high quality content? Read Why Smart Consumers Insist on High Quality Lead Nurturing Content.

2. Add a personal touch. Make sure they have a name and maybe even a face to go with the emails and the voice. Letting them know they have their own point of contact helps them feel more comfortable working with your company. Along the same lines, give new leads a warm welcome, roll out the royal treatment to let them know you’re in it for the long haul with their company. This can also be done with older leads, as a sort of recycling process to revamp their interest.

3. Keep the communication relevant and two way. Include feedback surveys in your campaign that invite them to share their thoughts. Be sure to target industry news to them specifically. Include exclusive offers to let them know you are interested in a long term relationship with them and are invested in the success of their business. Here are some ideas on including offers in nurturing to get you started.

4. Last but not least, keep marketing and sales teams in the same loop. What could be worse than sending an impersonal email to someone a sales rep has almost closed? Understanding the prospect’s journey is a crucial part of building the relationship.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation for Small Businesses : Why Automate?

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Marketing Automation for Small Businesses Marketing automation for small business is no joke – growth in the marketing automation industry is already up 50% per year based on 2012 and 2013 results, and some experts indicate that growth will increase another 10% by the end of 2014.

What does this mean for your small business? It means that marketing automation is clearly something business owners are finding effective – so if the price is right and a customized package can suit your individual needs, why not jump on board?  We’ve compiled a list of reasons why marketing automation for your small business is worth taking on. And here we go…

You’ll Save Money

For many companies, revenue seems to disappear at the speed of light. Small-business owners often don’t have enough time in their busy days to take a step back and look at how their current sales and marketing processes are benefiting their companies. The result is a messy lead flow, lost revenue and outdated systems governing the way your business operates.

The streamlined processes that good marketing automation puts in place for you can actually save you money and time. Your employees will have a better idea of how to sell, track and engage leads that are currently in your funnel, and you’ll have a better idea how these leads and automation steps are helping you meet your bottom line from month to month.

Marketing Automation: We Do it For You

The right marketing automation resource won’t just give you the tools you need and walk away. At Lead Liaison, we strive to create a process for our clients that truly works. Creating a process is all about putting tools in place that match the needs of each individual business, as well as providing training on those tools.

The right way to set up marketing for a small business is not just to put systems together and walk away, but to place the appropriate tools in a way that meet the company’s individual marketing needs. Only a qualified marketing automation specialist can help you understand what those needs are, and how to implement them in the best way for your business. The bottom line? With the right company, you don’t have to worry – the initial steps are done for you.

You’ll Save More than You Spend

When all this is done correctly, you’ll save more money than you spend. A streamlined sales funnel allows for better conversions – which allow for more income. Once this process is 100% refined, the service pays for itself. That break even point makes life easier for clients and their employees, and is the key reason why marketing automation services continue to grow year over year.

Let us assess your business and recommend a solution via a consult today!

Lead Liaison

How To Do Inbound Marketing

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How to Do Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing – Half the Battle

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

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

Drive More Traffic to Your Site:

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

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

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

Alternatives to LeadLander®

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimers:

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

Social Media Planning and the Super Bowl

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Social media planning could be the key to truly getting your brand out there and making a post viral – especially during a big game or event like the Super Bowl. Did you tune in last weekend? If so, you might have been there for the big Bowl, for the halftime show or even just for the commercials. Super Bowl organizers know how to do it right – they throw in a little something for everyone to pile on as many extra viewers as possible.

Social media is no different – now it’s standard to live tweet big events like Bowl games, so of course big brands are getting on board. JC Penney’s ‘mitten’ tweets are now famous –

JCPenney Super Bowl Ad

People seriously thought someone in JCPenney’s social media department was partying a little too hard during the big bowl game and might not have a job come Monday. Then this happened:

JCPenney Super Bowl Ad

At the time of this writing, the last JCPenney mittens tweet received 3718 retweets and 1985 favorites. Not bad!

Careful Social Media Planning

Utilizing social networks to broadcast messages like these is a great idea. On Superbowl Sunday, your audience is going to be in front of the TV, but will also have laptops and smartphones out live tweeting and Facebooking about the event. This means that your brand should definitely be at the party – but with conscious content that’s relevant to the event at hand.

Sure, you can sell your services – but events like these are a time to figure out how you can present them in a way that’s fun and relates to the Super Bowl. You also don’t have to be stuck in front of your computer during the big event – you can use Lead Liaison and other tools to create great content and schedule it before you leave the house. This will allow you to ensure the right social media is posted and gets out there during the big game.

Answering Back

Even if you’re busy during major events, ensure you spend some time the next day responding to Tweets and Facebook questions about your posts. Being there for your audience is a big part of not only being recognized as an interactive brand – tweeting back can increase the visibility of your posts and your marketing message.

You can automate everything. Good social media planning allows you to take the time you need to enjoy your Sunday while your marketing is still doing its work. The Lead Liaison team would love to help engage your social media planning into something that ends up in tremendous results. Let’s talk today!