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

Lead Liaison

Curating News Content via Automated Article Marketing

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Article MarketingThere’s something to be said for the way we process news and how that factors in to overall article marketing strategy. In the not-too-distant past, article marketing was all about stuffing articles with keywords and submitting them to as many article directories you could find. These days, article marketing necessitates a unique approach that includes curating useful content and reaching out to top-ranking websites to create connections. Doing it any other way could result in some serious Google penalties for your website – as well as the isolation of your loyal audience.

Using News to Curate Content

Many companies feel they have blogs that are newsworthy. Using news content for your article marketing isn’t really as easy as creating a great story and putting it on your social media accounts. There are several steps to ensuring your curated content is out there and visible by your target audience.

For starters, you might want to consider attempting to get your articles featured on Google News. This isn’t as easy as directly submitting them to Google.  First, you will want to focus on having a regular readership and comments/feedback on the articles you use for article marketing.

Second, the articles actually need to be newsworthy. Don’t just use press releases- create news stories that focus on current events in your industry. It’s also important to consider creating a Google news sitemap. Follow the instructions you see in the link and set up your sitemap. Make sure to update it each time you have a news story worth reading!

Automated Content

Many small business folks are looking to do their article marketing via automated content. This ensures that each time content is created, it will go out on your blog and anywhere else you tell it in a timely fashion. Creating a news site for your article marketing necessitates your content going out on a schedule that you can stick to. Automated content can help you ensure you’re getting content out to readers when they expect to see it. If you’re creating a news site, Google isn’t going to take you very seriously if you don’t have timely, updated content.

Lead Liaison recently rolled out our new automated content management feature and we’d love to have you check it out!  Automated marketing platforms are becoming the go-to for busy business folks who don’t have the time to curate and share newsworthy content. If you’re doing article marketing for your business, please take a look at our automated content services and let us know what you think!

Lead Liaison

Complexity and Commitment: Keys to Marketing Automation

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Freemium Marketing AutomationThe past week has been an interesting one in the world of marketing automation – particularly in terms of freemium marketing automation services making substantial changes in order to survive. We’ve been a captive audience to these changes here at Lead Liaison – it’s interesting to see what works for other marketing automation companies and what doesn’t.

David M. Raab wrote a great article on his Customer Experience Matrix blog about recent changes in the industry. It’s worth taking a look at to get an idea of this week’s mergers – in particular, SalesFUSION acquiring Loopfuse and CallidusCloud’s acquisition of LeadRocket. Raab hypothesizes – likely quite accurately – that the buyout of these two services may have something to do with the ‘freemium’ payment model the companies used to market their services.

Marketing Automation and Freemium Payment

Raab guesses quite accurately,

“My take is that freemium doesn’t fit well with marketing automation because marketing automation takes a lot of work to use effectively. Compare this with email and Web site hosting, where freemium has worked well: casual users can be quite successful with those products.”

A commenter observes that the ‘freemium’ model doesn’t tend to work with products that involve complexity. Marketing automation products are definitely complex – for many users, installing a marketing automation platform ensures that a new way of working on basic tasks needs to be adopted. This new way requires adoption at all levels of the business, training and a fully integrative customer support experience that just isn’t casual.

For Us, It’s About Commitment

Taking things a step further, we believe marketing automation is about commitment, not just complexity. Marketing automation systems are definitely complex. Dealing with that level of complexity and changes to a company’s workflow process requires a level of commitment businesses should be ready for. We truly believe that Lead Liaison’s marketing automation process can save a business a lot of hassle and can even lead to generating more revenue – but that does require some understanding of how the process will work for clients from start to finish.

We can communicate the need for that level of commitment from the beginning, but customers need to be on board all the way through. For us, freemium wouldn’t work as we need to be actively involved and available in our clients’ marketing dashboards – giving tutorials, being available for assistance and showing our clients better ways to use the platform. Commitment is key to dealing with the complexity of marketing automation – but that complexity is worth it, solving many challenges our clients face over time.

We’d love to talk to you about how we can take the pain out of the complexity involved in marketing automation – let us give you a consult today!

Lead Liaison

What Does Context Have to Do with Content Marketing?

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What Does Context Have to Do with Content Marketing?After Google’s latest algorithm change, context is the new king of content marketing. This means that regardless of how much keyword-optimized content, how many words you have on your page or how great your content is, you may not rank the way you’d like to if you aren’t answering the questions users pose with search queries related to your site.

We’ve talked extensively about Google’s Hummingbird update. This and other changes by Google ensure that context is the most important criteria in a user’s search. Users aren’t just looking for info about a certain topic, they’re looking for information that specifically answers whatever questions they’re trying to pose.

Context and Content Marketing

This is where you come in. These days ensuring you’re giving users the right context can be about over explaining things. In the pre-Hummingbird days, one of the most important things you could do in developing site pages is keep the user on your site for as long as possible, not overwhelming them with content and giving them the right navigation to “fall down the rabbit hole” in your site – exploring page after page to browse content in several areas. Post-hummingbird page strategy isn’t that different. You still want users to get happily lost in the wealth of information you’re giving them – but you want the pages they land on to answer the specific questions they’re looking for answers to.

For instance, “What kinds of flowers should I plant in spring” should bring up an intro page on a site with a wealth of information about different kinds of spring flowers and individual pages on how to best plant them – not just an article about “The 10 Best Spring Flowers to Plant.” This may not happen just yet, but keep in mind Google is crafting search to lean toward content, so the more information you can provide that answers user questions, the better.

How Do I Change My Site?

Less is not more – don’t worry about rewriting existing pages on your site. If anything, add more content to those pages or link to content that ensures users will get their questions answered. And most importantly, if your content marketing isn’t truly answering any questions, start by thinking about what your users want to see from you. If you don’t know the questions it’ll be hard to come by the answers.

Lead Liaison has a truly unique content marketing platform unlike any other marketing automation dashboard out there. Our writers can craft content marketing focused around the general questions your site visitors want answered. Let us show you how!

Lead Liaison

5 Lead Generation Techniques That Work

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

1.     E-Books

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

2.     Email marketing

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

3.     Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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

 

4.     Company Blog

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

5.     Online Video Marketing

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

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

Lead Liaison

Should You Be Creating Infographics For Your Company?

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Should You Be Creating Infographics For Your Company?Creating infographics is one great way to share information with your audience base. For many small businesses, one of the main challenges in creating infographics is finding the time or the talent. It’s also important for small business to integrate graphic creation into an already-existing content strategy, rather than making them chief in the strategy.

Network dissemination is also important to consider – if you’re only using Twitter and you’re posting mostly infographics, chances are your audience will never see this content. Finding network-appropriate content should be part of your overall marketing strategy.

Is Creating Infographics Difficult?

Pretty much anyone can use a free graphics editor and slap together an infographic, but keep in mind that your audience wants to see streamlined content. The difference between a low-quality and high-quality infographic is something your audience doesn’t have to be graphics experts to pick up. Other businesses have set the bar with high-quality graphics and content, so it’s important to ensure that a graphics and design expert is looking over or even making your creations.

So is creating infographics difficult? Not necessarily – but creating high quality infographics is something you might need some help with. If nothing else, high quality templates are available for purchase from stock photo sites. You can always use a simple photo editor and modify these to suit your needs.

Diversifying Content

We’ve talked about how creating a content strategy that fits what your audience wants to see is the most important thing you can do. Once a small business gets a good method going for creating and disseminating infographics, these graphics often overtake a business’s social media stream.

Treat the infographics created by your company as you would any other type of content. Make sure that you’re measuring responsiveness – do more people comment, like or share infographics than they do text or image content you release? Do you find your numbers dropping when you use more or less graphics? As with any other social media content, the way you use graphics in your social media feed is an experiment at first. If you find tons of people responding and engaging when you post infographics, you’ll want to make sure. Opposite results should yield less infographics in your social media streams.

Brand Your Company

Don’t forget to include your company’s branding – including company name and logo – in your infographics. You don’t want another company sharing your images and taking credit for them! Branding ensures people will know the useful and beautiful data they’re seeing comes from you.

Your infographics should contain great data as well as beautiful imagery. Let us help with the data! Our content writers can put compelling stats together for your images. Talk to the Lead Liaison team about getting social media and content help for your company ASAP!

Lead Liaison

Solidify Your Email Marketing Efforts in 2014

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email-marketing-tips-for-2014Good email marketing requires not only the ability to create compelling content, but a strategy for ensuring click throughs and open rates increase throughout your marketing efforts. For many companies, time is such a factor that developing a strategy around increasing readership and engagement becomes difficult. If you’re looking to solidify your email marketing efforts in 2014 look no further, we can help.

Fortunately, there are some strategies companies of all sizes can implement to ensure they’re getting the best content to their reader base and are increasing engagement as time passes. Now is a great time to start thinking about how your company manages email marketing and if there are potential ways to increase your stats and reach your readership more effectively.

Consider Your Subject Lines

If you haven’t yet created a subject line that features a call to action why not test one out? A call to action typically begins with a strong verb that compels the reader to do something. Good examples of strong subject lines are:

  • Be the change you want to be.
  • Enjoy the holidays for once!
  • Open your own store today.

It’s important that your email subject line be fairly brief and concise. Verbose subjects don’t tend to get a lot of opens, particularly since most people use an email client that obscures part of the subject line. It’s always a good rule of thumb to get to the point quickly.

Strategically Place Links

Don’t just put a URL leading to your site in the sidebar of your email. Prominently feature a link back to your site or content in a few different places. One great way to get people clicking is to feature an interesting article that includes about 2-3 paragraphs of text in your email, and then post a “Read More” link where your article starts to get really compelling.

You can also experiment with creating a footer or other area in your email that groups “related content” links that allow people to click through to your site.

Vary Your Email Marketing Techniques

Rather than just sending out the normal company newsletter, try creating a new post when your company has a big sale, news or even if there’s a new blog post available to read. Check your email stats and take stock of what your client base seems interested in reading. By managing your stats, you can get an idea of how to best get the open rate and click throughs that you’re looking for.

If you need help creating content or managing your email marketing stats, Lead Liaison would love to help! Let us show you how today.

Lead Liaison

The Future of Marketing Automation: 3 Steps to Smarter Actions

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The Future of Marketing Automation: 3 Steps to Smarter ActionsWhat’s the future of marketing automation? Instead of relying on a small marketing team to consistently execute campaigns and surpass quotas, enable the technology to work smarter for your business. The implementation of an automated marketing system will provide a more efficient allocation of your team’s time and resources. Use the data you gather for marketing automation to do more for your business through predictive analysis. Here’s how:

  1. Leverage your data. Know what’s worth promoting and what should be sacked. Using a predictive analysis program will enable a more productive use of the marketing and IT budgets. Use technology to enhance your move on target leads—don’t just follow up on “Lead A” because they had more clicks thus more ‘interest’ in a particular product, follow up on the right interests. Were the clicks here because they had a trial run product that recently expired? Did they inquire on a product because they own something similar or are having difficulties with another product your business offers? Understanding why the user interacts with your system will ultimately provide successful leads.

  2. Make the most of your leads. Cut your annual revenue loss by making smarter lead actions. In conjunction with leveraging the right data, use automation software to calculate lead scoring through efficient management of the marketing activity touchpoints.

  3. Integrate your sales and marketing teams. Keep the human touch of a good customer support system to pave the way for future upselling opportunities. Making personal telephone calls to keep direct contact with customers provides the most accurate feedback. Personalized marketing is successful marketing, but be sure to ‘personalize’ accurately. Use the information gathered by the sales team to better target and communicate with your leads.

In today’s marketing, a single channel of marketing isn’t enough. Utilizing a marketing automation system is more than email marketing. An effective system integrates sales prospecting, lead generation, and automation to leverage the data being gathered. What’s the best practice for executing a successful, comprehensive marketing campaign? Involve the sales team. The communication gap between customers, sales, and marketing is a huge shortcoming and often a cause for loss in revenue. Combining social media marketing, email marketing, smart landing pages, and promotions we can get a better grasp of the consumer base. These programs are ideal for companies large and small; a limited staff no longer means cutting channels. Marketing automation is a technology that will continue to grow and develop to improve the customer’s experience through targeted, analyzed marketing actions.

Lead Liaison

Why Lead Nurturing is Essential for B2B Marketing

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Why Lead Nurturing is Essential for B2B MarketingB2B buyers are the toughest consumers to secure, because their decisions are based on the needs of an entire business rather than one particular person. It is harder for marketers to accurately profile the lead and determine their specific stage in the buying process. Company purchases could require a series of tests, comparisons, and approvals before a B2B buyer even considers contacting a potential supplier for more in-depth product information. It is harder to pinpoint a B2B buyer’s decision making process unless they willingly offer information about their company’s purchasing process. That is what makes lead nurturing so essential to B2B marketing. Marketers need to continuously provide B2B buyers with helpful content that will maintain their interest until they reach the point where they are ready to contact someone in sales.

Lead Nurturing Benefits B2B Buyers

Lead nurturing is essential in B2B marketing, because it gives B2B buyers the opportunity to research product and services at their leisure. If you send the valuable content to buyers by email, it will also make it more convenient for them. Just be careful not to send irrelevant or frequent mass emails to potential buyers. They’ve given your business access to their inbox, because they want trustworthy answers to their questions. They don’t want it filled with useless spam.

Creating Customized Lead Nurturing

If the potential lead has shown interest in a particular product you carry, any future lead nurturing emails should pertain to that specific product. This can be achieved by first profiling the lead and then grouping leads with similar needs into predefined lead segments. It will be too difficult to cater every email to every single person, but you can customize content to groups of leads that have comparable profiles. The email should also be addressed specifically to each individual lead and contain information that will make their purchasing decision easier. That will help strengthen the relationship with the B2B buyer.

Lead Segmentation before Nurturing

Website visitor tracking and marketing automation software are necessary for developing and analyzing a comprehensive lead profile. This automated process monitors and records a lead’s online activity and then profiles, ranks, and segments each lead based on their behavior. Once you understand what a group of potential leads is interested in, it is easier to create content that caters to their unique needs. If you are searching for more lead nurturing tips, please read our previous article on B2B Marketing Automation Tips.   High-quality lead nurturing is essential for B2B marketing. It gives buyers a chance to research their options in peace before they are swarmed by eager sales professionals. If the lead nurturing campaign is successful, a B2B buyer will already know they are interested in your particular product or service before they ever have to deal with a salesperson. That is why prospects that are successfully nurtured have a significantly higher conversion rate.

Lead Liaison

How To Nurture Leads With Your Mobile Phone

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Nurture Leads With Your Mobile PhoneWhen it comes to nurturing leads, it means that you have a system through which you are able to communicate with potential clients constantly until they become fully fledged clients. This is done by giving out helpful information and making sure that your brand sticks in the minds of your potential clients.

So you have taken advantage of the internet and you have been working hard to nurture leads through various techniques by using your computer. But, how do you do it with your mobile phone? The answer to that is through content marketing. Content marketing has proven to be the best way to nurture your leads as well as increase traffic and sales. The best part it is, you can do it very easily with your mobile phone, especially if you are on the move.

Email Your Clients

Email is known to be the number one tool accessed by internet users. So if you have not incorporated email marketing in your business yet, you are lagging behind. Email permits you to stay connected with your prospects especially since they can access their email accounts instantly via their mobile phones. Therefore, while you are sharing content on your blogs and social media sites, you can also keep your potential clients updated through email. To do so, make sure all the emails you send out add some value to the receiver by providing useful information. Remember to also separate your target consumers who are still in the first stages of buying from those who are currently sales-ready.

Social Media

Remember that consumers have moved from using mailboxes and computers to using smartphones and tablets to stay connected. You should do the same. Through your mobile phone you can access practically all the popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can create campaigns to nurture your leads in such a way that they benefit both you and the consumer. Maintain a close connection to your potential clients on social media. You can do this by sharing content and answering questions. This way when it is time to purchase your service or product, your leads will automatically come to you.

Blog, Blog, Blog!

It is common sense that no prospect will come across your website and settle for your brand immediately. Create a blog and use it to reach out to the prospects that have not made up their minds yet. Do this by finding a specific niche, picking up your mobile phone and writing about it. However, feel free to divert a little bit from your service or product to make the blog more interesting, for instance giving solutions to certain problems your prospects may be experiencing.

Nurturing your leads requires that you keep close track all the time and treat each of your leads preciously. Through content marketing you will manage to create a positive perception of your business as one that is helpful and reliable in its industry. In addition to that, your prospects will gain trust in you.

Lead Liaison

The Importance of A/B Marketing Strategies on the Web

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A/B Marketing StrategiesDid you know that a website’s design matters? The way your website was designed has an impact on your client’s reaction! Websites are normally designed with a certain aim, which is a call to action. The achievement of this call to action goal highly depends on the user’s response to the website content. With regard to this, many companies are incorporating the A/B marketing strategies into their testing.

In today’s digital world, A/B marketing strategies have proven to be a vital tool that businesses should possess, so as to enable them establish the most suitable features that work best for their websites. This tool is responsible for providing you with information regarding how users react to the content on your website. The reactions in question refer to the layout, use of words and pictures, the colour scheme, navigation among other elements. These factors are tested by comparing at least two different designs of a website’s landing page (hence the term A and B). When the comparisons are made, the version with the highest number of sales is considered to be the best.

So why is A/B testing important for your business?

Yes, it is a good thing to have this tool. However, it is more of a vital aspect that should be part of your marketing strategy. The good thing about A/B testing is that you will be in a position to constantly know which one of your website designs performs best. Here are some reasons why you should use A/B testing:

  • Help in market research: With A/B testing you will not waste any time or money on focus group discussions to find out what kind of websites consumers like best. As you well know, the outlook of your website is highly determined by customers depending on their preferences. This is a marketing tool that will help you in establishing that.
  • Problems are solved easily: If you have a specific feature on your website that is getting a negative response from users, A/B testing can assist you in determining why that particular feature is failing to work. Sometimes it could be as a result of the wrong choice of words, colours or even the certain placement of a button.
  • You are able to determine your objective: The major objective of any website is to have a high performance rate especially when it comes to call to action. Whatever you aim at achieving with your website, A/B testing will provide you with the knowledge to establish priorities make necessary adjustments and constantly carry out experiments on various designs so as to attract more traffic to your website.

There are some marketing professionals out there who carry around the assumption that A/B testing is a complex tool to use along with their marketing strategies. What they don’t know is that the best thing about this tool is that it is very cost-effective and, most of all, it helps you understand detailed facts regarding human psychology and how different designs have an impact on users.