There are various types of marketing events to attend; traditional marketing events like trade shows, corporate events, social gatherings, and more. Regardless of the event, a marketer must go through some checkpoints before the event. In this article we’ll cover how to prepare for a marketing event to make your event as successful as possible.
Prepare your Booth
We’re assuming your next event will require you to showcase your brand a bit. Companies typically do this with a booth. If you don’t have a booth contact your local print shop and inquire about trade show or event displays. Lead Liaison uses a three (3) panel display with plenty of images. As a tip, keep your text to a minimum. Yes – you do want people stopping by your booth to engage in conversation with you, but you don’t want them blindly staring at your display struggling to read the text. You’d rather tell them what you do and converse with them, right? Try to think of adding only broad headings and key bullet points (no more than three per panel) to your display. If you don’t already have a graphics artist on your team, hit up a site like upwork.com and hire someone. For us, we used the graphics person at the print shop so we got a bonus. We got a graphics artist to help us out without having to shell out more money.
Once your display is ready, consider how to prepare for a marketing event that focuses on your audience. You can run a drawing where you have your booth visitors drop a business card into a fish bowl. You can offer some candy (in another fish bowl or tray), or you can give away some company swag. Here are some other ideas if you want to take a more creative route:
Talk to a handful of local companies in the area and have them sponsor services to run an auction. Hotels, restaurants, nail salons, etc. should all be happy for you to promote their services while visitors bid on each service. It’s a good interactive idea.
Do something off the wall such as a wheel for people to spin to win a prize of some sort. Most people will like playing the game and see that as a nice break to the monotony of the event.
Have a raffle for your services. For example, if you’re a software company give away a subscription to your software for a period of time. If you’re a professional services company offer a complementary version of your services (free consultation, free training, etc.).
Lead Capture
One of the most important things to consider when thinking about how to prepare for a marketing event is how you will capture your leads. Marketers must think through how they’ll capture leads at the marketing event. There are varying levels of lead capture. You could do what many companies do and only collect business cards from each person. If you did that, it would take a while to get the leads into the system, you risk human error losing cards or entering in information, you rely on the sales person to enter in the data, and even after all of that’s done – you’ve got to merge all the leads together, get them into your system, and properly distribute them.
An alternative method is to contact your trade show organizer to see what system they suggest. Most event organizers will contract a company for their lead retrieval system. The lead retrieval system will likely be a handheld barcode scanner or a mobile app. Choosing a system from the lead retrieval company will still limit you though. For example, the forms that are provided are limited. They are designed to only capture certain information, such as name, email, phone, etc. Even if you’re using their barcode scanner, only select information gets pulled in. If your company prefers to capture key information from your booth visitor, too bad – you’ve got to cram that information into the notes section, making lead capture even more cluttered when it’s time to get that data into your system. Moreover, you’ve got to get the captured leads into your system. Lead retrieval companies will put your leads into a central repository for you to download, or give you all of your leads while you’re at the show. Once you obtain them, they still have to be curated, uploaded into your company’s CRM, and distributed. This is just the capture part, and doesn’t include any follow up with attendees.
The last, and best option, is to use a professional-level event lead capture system. These systems have a backend and frontend to help you manage the end-to-end process for your event leads. On the backend, marketers can build and provision forms with custom fields and information relevant to the company. Marketers can also electronically roll out forms to different sales people and fellow marketers who might be attending the event. The forms can be pushed out to each user’s Android, iOS, or Windows device as the application should be cross platform (HTML5). The mobile event lead capture application will provide multiple lead capture methods. We’ve listed a handful of lead capture methods present in leading event capture apps:
Barcode / QR code scanning
Manual entry
List pre-fill
Business card scan
Leading event lead capture solutions will also work offline as most events could be in the basement of a hotel or in a crowded area where internet or cellular connectivity is limited or not available at all. The device should work seamlessly, whether offline or online, and hold the leads on the device or automatically pass them to the backend once the device connects. This leads us to the backend aspect of these systems. The backend should be sophisticated enough to help the marketer qualify, communicate, distribute, and nurture leads automatically. Here’s a short summary of each of these areas of the workflow on the backend:
Qualify: Leading systems will use scoring or grading as a way to qualify leads. Scoring is a way to measure engagement or interests. For example, if the prospect chose a specific value on the form then give them more points. Similarly with grading, if the prospect has a title that contains “Chief” then consider automatically giving them an A+ for their grade. Scoring and grading will help your sales reps separate out where to focus first, as they should look for the highest graded and scored leads from the event.
Communicate: Responding to the lead right away is important. Text the visitor back after an hour or so thanking them for their time and visit. Alternatively, send them an email, postcard, or handwritten letter shortly after meeting them.
Distribute: Make sure you route the lead to the route sales people as soon as it is submitted. Use various rules such as geography, demographics, or any information you collect on your form to determine where to send the lead. Getting the lead in the hands of your sales rep as soon as you can is critical for success.
Nurture: Build stronger relationships with your leads by running them through multi-step nurture processes that intelligently sends out touch points across traditional and digital marketing channels.
Coordinate your Team
Gather your sales and marketing team members together and do a recap of your upcoming event. If each person is using alead capture app like Lead Liaison’s GoCapture!™, make sure each user is in the system and their device is authenticated to receive the event form. Your team might also benefit from having one or two devices around the booth and putting the GoCapture!™ app into Kiosk Mode to more easily manage lead collection. Whatever your approach, make sure you have a documented process for capturing the leads and make sure your reps are fully trained on this process.
Distribute your Leads
The final, and possibly most crucial step, in thinking through how to prepare for a marketing event is to nail down how you will distribute your leads. As noted above, it’s critical to have a sound lead distribution plan following your marketing event. Make sure your reps are not taking their business cards back home with them or losing them in transport. To avoid this, leverage the OCR or business card transcription services offered by your event lead capture service. With Lead Liaison, we provide a transcription portal as a component of the backend lead capture system. Businesses can manage the portal themselves by transcribing their own cards. Alternatively, Lead Liaison’s transcription team could transcribe the card for a nominal fee. Either way, get those cards out of the hands of your reps and into the system in digital format for prompt lead distribution.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/congress-474319_1920.jpg10671916Ryan Schefkehttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngRyan Schefke2018-03-08 09:17:242019-05-24 19:49:07How to Prepare for a Marketing Event
To watch “PPC and Marketing Automation” in its entirety, click here.
Summary
Google Ads Premier Partner, Ben Herman, and marketing automation expert, Chris Kipgen, team up to cover how using AdWords and marketing automation together can get you more conversions at the same or lower cost per acquisition.
*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.
[Ben Herman:] The benefits of PPC and marketing automation includes covering the basics. You can quickly deliver a lot of traffic to test CTAs. So those are calls-to-action. That’s landing page optimization. Getting feedback and data on that and not real time but within about 24 hours depending on how much traffic you’re able to drive.
You’re also able to gather a ton of customer insights these days from AdWords alone as well as all the social platforms. But there’s demographic data, there’s a lot of age data. Things like that. So there’s a lot of ways to make decisions based on the data that comes back from paid search which makes it really great even if you just run small short campaigns to gather a lot of insight on your customers. And then also the ability to hyper-focus brand messaging and then segment your audiences across the board so that you can properly customize or tailor your messaging to each audience.
So the basics of paid search includes your clicks, you’ve got your impressions, your cost, your conversions, and your keyword position when it comes to– This is specific to like AdWords or Bing ads center any time we’re bidding on keywords essentially. There’s performance metrics for each of those. And so the next level of what we call the “Click through rate” the CTR, your conversion rate, and then your cost per acquisition. Those three are the drivers behind the success of any campaign. So we’re looking at all of those on the frontend before data even go in on the Lead Liaison platform.
And then of course there’s quality score and if anybody has managed a pay-per-click campaign, they understand that quality score is a big contributor. It’s part of the Google algorithm on the paid search side to help you get the best cost-per-click essentially. So you can have a lower cost if you have a higher quality score and that’s all based on relevance.
Basic lever for paid search would be click through rate. We approach all of our engagements, all of the campaigns, we optimize and manage on by starting on the simplistic level and then we kind of boil down to getting a little bit more complex. But on the high level, it starts through click through rate. That’s just your ad copy and really what that means is how effective is your ad copy. And the levers there are updating your ad copy or updating the bids.
The levers for quality score, all of it more complex but essentially, it’s going to be your ad relevance. So you can actually get a higher quality score by bidding on less keywords or more specific keywords in an ad group and then making sure that that keyword shows up in the ad headline. Again, not rocket science but time and time again when we go to optimizing campaign, we see ad groups that maybe have too many keywords or they don’t have ads that are relevant. Even if we’re trying to push a quality score from a 5 to a 6 or 6 to a 7, we always just go back to the fundamentals here of looking at ad copy and adjust enough.
The conversion rate. Conversions obviously are what we’re all going for. So the levers for conversion rate are pretty simple. What’s the call-to-action, where’s the placement of the form, what does the form look like? Is it three steps? Is it ten steps? What’s the time of day that we’re advertising? So some clients, the sweet spot between 6:00 AM and 11:00 AM in the morning, we tend to see that in like the healthcare side of the healthcare industries. And it becomes really important to make sure our ads are only showing during those key times of day where there’s a higher conversion rate. It can drop as much as half if you get to like 1:00 PM in those cases and then it’s not as effective for your ad spend.
So your driving conversions but not every completion of that transaction stage of that funnel is a sale, all right? And so what we considered the conversion as somewhere in the middle to the bottom of that transaction stage of the funnel. But we definitely understand that not everybody is going to purchase. So let’s say your conversion rate on a purchase is 3%, that means 97% of your visitors came and they were interested but they left. So what happens to them?
We want to make sure that if it’s not a sale or a purchase, we’re still capturing the data from that conversion. And that brings us to the micro versus macro conversions. And this is where Lead Liaison becomes really important. For the micro conversion, that would be any email or newsletter sign up, a gated content download or request for more information, schedule an appointment. Something that’s a little bit softer than somebody putting in their credit card and basically transacting at that moment.
These are all points where putting people into a marketing funnel and tagging and organizing them correctly is going to be imperative to future sales. So you maybe didn’t get the sale today but you didn’t lose the folks that came to your site. You get a higher conversion rate here. So let’s say you’re capturing extra 10 of these people. That’s 10 potential prospects you could keep warm or lukewarm as you kind of market them through or bring them through or nurture them through your sales cycle.
Then there’s the macro conversion which is what we all want in the end. So you’re trying to nurture people that didn’t maybe make it to the macro conversion right away. You’re trying to get them to the stage if they didn’t already get there. So that’s going to be your purchase. A webinar sign up for example, a request for quote, an account sign up, or a free trial set up. It’s basically considered. Macro conversions are cash money essentially. That’s when somebody did what you wanted them to do that helps you grow your top line revenue or your sales.
You’ve got all these conversions coming through even on the sales, the data needs to go somewhere. And that’s Lead Liaison. So in this case, we’re sending traffic from multiple marketing channel. So that’s going to be your paid channel, your organic channel, paid social. There’s a lot of different avenues for folks to get to a landing page or parts of your site these days that becomes really important that you got your data organized correctly.
After the click, data sent to Lead Liaison and Lead Liaison does a great job. We like it for connecting visitor back to what’s called, “Their current session” but that’s basically somebody’s been navigating through a website and the correct tracking them in place, you can actually see in Lead Liaison what page has somebody viewed prior to the transaction as or conversion as well as what maybe they came back to your site later. So future sessions are really important especially for those long sales cycles. You can see who maybe signed up for some information today, and then when they come back in the future which makes it really great for kind of prioritizing prospects for a sales team.
Organizing the data up-front, it’s almost just as important as driving that traffic in the first place. We recommend every single client that we worked with that we make sure everybody’s using it – Google Tag Manager. It’s super easy to use. It’s one code snippet and then through tag manager, you use your analytics and any other tracking. That’s how we use Lead Liaison as we embedded it into the tag manager tag. And that allows basically non-programmers on our end to non-developers to interact in that tags to website and get the tracking in place. It saves a lot of cost to our clients because we don’t have to incur dev time. We don’t have to get on a dev schedule and there is almost little to no testing that needs to happen once basic tags are added.
There is still some check and balances that need to be there. It’s not just code it and load it. Google got the process streamlined. We use a methodology for labeling or naming your campaigns. It needs to have multiple kind of data points and a campaign name for you to bring it back to the importance or the contribution that that campaign is making to your overall lead funnel.
We always put the campaign name, the funnel position. Was it top, mid, or bottom? Right? If you think of that ACT example. Awareness would be top consideration and mid and then bottom is going to be the transaction. So that’s how somebody found you essentially. So were they doing a branded search? Somebody is searching for a brand name of your client then the bottom is typically where that person comes in. But if they are searching for a non-branded term, just a generic keyword that then brings at prospect to your brand for the first time. That’s going to be the top. So we consider that awareness. These are very important when you’re labeling your campaigns so you can organize the data when you’re tagging and sending follow up emails and nurturing people through the full process.
Geo target and focus of the campaign are important as well. For different national campaigns, it’s a little bit easier but when you start advertising or having different messaging or different campaigns running in different cities, especially like the higher education realm, it becomes necessary that those are properly labeled as well so you can identify back where this person came from. Maybe you didn’t capture that data bit on the landing page, maybe when they filled out the form there wasn’t a dropdown for what state are you coming from or what city or something like that. You want to be able to easily go back in the future and send messages to these people based on a certain geo area. Your campaign name is a great way to do that. And there’s some other tools in Lead Liaison that let you do that as well. But on the front end, this is what we recommend.
The benefits that we get from marketing automation and connecting it back with paid search campaigns, we can nurture long and short sales cycle, we can keep prospects. Basically keep the brands of our client top mind for their– For leads, prospects, for whoever their target audience is that they’re trying to get in front of. Cross promote products and services that works great for kind of even after the transaction, even after somebody has bought something with the number of services or new product that’s available that either complements or matches what they purchased.
And then it greatly improves the sales team’s efficiency so when we talk with sales reps and folks in the past they’ve talked with a lot of prospects that were not ready to transact with them or they weren’t far enough for long. They need more information and they’re kind of repeating a lot of efforts. They’re sending them the same info all the time. There’s always processes that they’re doing which are completely automatable in a sales conducive way. There’s still that personal touch to those emails that can be accomplished.
And so building a list that evangelizes your new site content, that’s great for you if you’re doing a lot of new blog post. You could send out the list to your people every week of like, “Here’s kind of a run down or our weekly digest.” We do things like that for our own clients just to stay in front and we get such positive feedback about that. Because people are just excited to hear what’s going on at the end of the story.
Healthcare, higher education, events and conferences are some of just the easiest one to wrap our heads around when it comes to marketing automation. You can also use it in sports parallel marketing. Marketing automation fits to just about any B2B or B2C sales cycle even if it’s short, even if it’s long.
In healthcare, it’s great way for announcing new location, new services, and new specialists. Higher education, it’s great to keep top of mind because folks tend to be researching multiple colleges or advanced degree programs when they’re looking online. And so keep it in front of your folks that have expressed interest without having to use a lot of the rep’s time for follow up, can be really key for kind of nurturing people through each year cycle in some cases.
And then announcing campus visits, we see that all the time. It’s really nice when a rep is going to be going to a certain area and they don’t want to mingle around campus or set up a booth. They can do that but we want to let people know that they’re going to be there and it’s a great way to kind of take it from just the click to actual human contact there.
And then at events and conferences, you could be very flexible. And one of our favorite features is being able to streamline cross-device messaging. Which is fancy words for saying and utilize push notifications and text messages as well as email. When you let and people know everything from upcoming speaking events to room changes or breakout sessions. Different things that kind of happen along the way.
[Chris Kipgen:] For Lead Liaison, one of the first important points are pay-per-click and visitor tracking. So really what happens once they click on that link, it comes back to your website or even just click on a link in general in the case of Google AdWords. We’re also going to talk about ways that we could start to nurture the people who are coming from these ad clicks. There’s a couple different ways to do it and there’s several different ideas that we have. And therefore, so a lot of you are really getting into that automation keys.
Whenever the visitor clicks on the link in your paid advertisement, it’s going to redirect into our site. In the case of Google AdWords, we’re fully integrated with AdWords. We have a tracking URL that you put in to AdWords and that basically marks that link clicked and lets our system know that, hey someone has clicked on this particular ad. When it takes you back to website, we’re actually going to place that tracking cookie in their browser.
The tracking cookie allows us to remember our visitor from one visit to another and in just a second, we’re going to see how we’re able to remember someone whether they visit a geo six months ago, six days ago, and from the time that they come to your site to the time that they finally convert. And hopefully, eventually, we’ll actually get a sale or a demo or something equivalent out of that.
As they keep going through the cookie, we’re going to track every engagement that they do on your website and we’re going to put that into a really convenient timeline. You’ll see in just a second. But when they first get to our website, there’s a couple of things that we get just right off the bat. So using your reverse IP address lookup, we can get detailed information about the prospects location. In many cases, if that IP address is connected to your company, then we can also tell you what company is searching your site. And that’s really valuable to one of those organizations where you’re still doing a lot of outside sales and outside prospecting. It may at least give you a good idea of which company to start targeting. We can also tell you the type of browser and the type of device, if you’re kind of curious. We have more mobile users, we have computer users. We can see all of that just from their visit.
In the case of paid searches, we also capture the keywords. And in fact, we can even capture keywords from some organics or just depending on their search settings.
In Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking page, we just make sure that we have the right audience here on. With my example, you can see my visitor record that was on the page a little bit earlier today. So the system remembers me. We have me marked just as an employee type. That’s the purple dot is. As I go through here the page, you can see that we’re tracking things like the original lead source that came in firms so paid search would be what you would see from an ad click when they come in. In this case, this is PPC from Google, the internet service provider. I can see things like the site search terms that are in here and again, the state and country.
We actually have quite a few other pieces of information that we can choose from as well. If we’re connected to your CRM, we could tell you if they’re CRM or not. Their city. We do actually have a link for LinkedIn so it’ll actually take that prospects based on their company, their name. You can go to LinkedIn. Try to figure out who they are.
So a lot of really cool information that’s in there. You can also look into a general overview of that visitor record. So when a visitor first comes in, they’re going to look like this. This is an anonymous profile. So on the visitor tracking page, they’ll be listed as anonymous. That means that they clicked on the ad and made it to your website. They just haven’t done anything to identify who they are.
When it comes down to it, there’s no magic sauce. A reverse IP lookup isn’t going to tell us who they are. But this is where we’re going to come in and start helping you figure out who they are piece by piece. So this is the webpage. We’ll first look at our first visit. So we have things like the company, we have the original lead source that’s in the record, we know the general location of the prospect as well. A cool thing I can do is I might want to see what they’ve been doing on my website once they came in. So I can see the website visit and their timeline here and if I wanted, I could actually get a quick instant replay to actually see the steps that they took on my website.
So they started on homepage and then they moved through a couple of product pages and then finally, the Contact Us page. So I can get an idea how serious is this person, how long was he spending on each page. It’s a nice little feature that we have in there. Where Lead Liaison comes in, is going to be getting this anonymous profile to what we call, “a known profile”. So as they continue to stay on the website, we’re going to continue to track these engagements. In this case, you can see the anonymous profile.
He saw a few dialogues while he’s on the website. So a dialogue is a model or a kind of the old-fashioned term for that is a pop up that may come. In this case, this one says, “Hey sign up for our marketing automation playbook.” And this other subscriber engagement is a newsletter sign up. So just little things as he is browsing, going from page to page. We’re trying to get his attention and pull him in. And very briefly we’re going to switch back to the presentation over here.
And this would show you the other ways that we’re able to capture prospect’s information. So we can do that through the form of a one-to-one email. We have a couple plug-ins for Google Mail as well as for Outlook. You could send that email to your prospects maybe a prospecting email asking for a meeting. It’s kind of a first touch sort of thing. We’ll know if they click on the link in that email or not and we can actually pull in their email address and associate a tracking cookie that way. We can associate the tracking cookie through mass email. Classic used case would be a web form. So all of your forms could be integrated to Lead Liaison.
Marketing content in videos, both of these things can have an email that we are going to talk about in just a second. And then we have our product we call, “Site engage”. They’re popping up throughout the visitor’s engagements on the website.
The main thing when it comes to pay-per-click and these conversions is you want to make sure that that ad is taking them somewhere they’re going to convert. So a lot of times, I’ll see an ad taking prospects to the homepage. You can do things like send them to a landing page that maybe has a video about what you’re all about. Videos seem to have a very high conversion rate. Maybe you would take them to a page that has your product that they can download.
But we can use these pieces of content to actually capture the visitor’s information. Email gate and downloadable content is directed straight from our website. So if you were to go to our website right now, and we don’t already know who you are and you’re trying to download one of our web papers, we’re going to ask you to enter your email address received. There’s a couple ways to do this. You can also do a soft gate where you’ll have the option to skip this step if they don’t want to give their email.
So it’ll all going to depend on your client-base and on your general market if you feel like you need the hard gate or the soft gate. But this is a great way to convert someone and to get more information. And you know because they’re downloading your brochure. They’re downloading white paper you know they have some interest in the top they just downloaded. Also, on the right, we have a video with an email view. We have an integration through our partner Wistia.
Videos tend to have an extremely high conversion rate on them. Especially if you put that gate about 15% of the way through the video. So if it’s a 10-minute long video, about a minute and a half of the way through, clip that email gate in there. You’ll tend to have a higher conversion rate. So you get some people that see the first part they’re interested. We can say things like, “Hey if you’re interested, give us your information so we can send you a little more.”
So if anyone goes to our website and wants to view our previous webinar, we would be asking for their email. And the cool thing about it is remember, we actually know who that prospect is. Thanks to the tracking cookie in your browser. So if we have already converted them in the past, if we already know their email address, we’re not going to ask them again. We’re not going to bother them by having them enter their email a million different ways on your website. Once we know them, we know them.
And what would eventually happen with this prospect, let’s say they were to continue on down the cycle. Is eventually we’ll be able to convert them. So here is a converted profile. With this profile, we’ve identified their email address, their one form of capture or another. We’ll be able to capture their name, maybe we’d get that through your form submission but a cool feature of Lead Liaison, is once we get their email address, we’re going to scan social media. And we’re going to try to find their social media accounts that match up to that name. That match up to their email rather. And if we don’t already know their name, we can pull their name from social media, we can pull their job title, and we can pull a lot of stuff from there.
At the timeline, you’re able to see the engagements that they’ve had on your website. Right down to if they watched a video, how much is the video they watched, which parts they rewatched. We can see when they click down links and emails, every visit that they’ve had, what content they’ve downloaded. So it’s a great way of keeping them together.
We also have qualified them for you. We do scoring actions. We can score them every time they come to the website. We can also put in grading list. So based on their job title, based from their location, how much of a fit are they for your company. We can give them a grade from there. That way, to see prospects with the highest score and a high grade, you know that these are going to be worth going after compared to some of the others.
It’s a very valuable tool but through all of it, we’re always going to remember that original lead source, the pay-per-clicks. So even once they convert, even once they give their email and something else, when it comes to our live reporting, when it comes to just finding out where your prospects are coming from, we’re always going to remember the first way they came to your website. In the case of an ad click, we’ll always have it as the pay-per-click. So it’s a great tool for anyone who’s going to be making new set of paid advertisements.
We can use automations in combination with ad clicks in a few different ways. We can send buy signal alerts to our prospect owners. If we have a sales team and inside sales team or even an outside sales team. We can let them know, “Hey, someone has clicked on your ad.” They’ll get the alert right away. They can also know if that come from peak clicks so maybe from a known prospect instead of just an anonymous prospects. We can start tagging those prospects through segmentation so later on you might want to divide and specialized marketing to the people you know clicked on paid ads versus the people who have not clicked them paid ads.
And of course once we know them, once we have people converted, we have things like email nurture campaigns. So this could be your standard campaign where we send the email, we wait a week, we send another email, we wait a week. It’s a classic email campaign. Our marketing automation platform is omni-channel marketing.
We’re not limited to just email, we’re not limited to things like web forms and other inbound marketing. We can actually do things like direct mail, we can do things with hand-written letters, we can even send out text messages.
We also have what we call, “Behavior-based automation.” So this is triggered by the prospect taking new action. And in this case, we can actually say we want this to trigger based on the prospect clicking on an ad campaign. And I can even specify which campaign. These are all pulled in from Google AdWords. So I might say we have a search from 2014, this is a dummy account. Let’s say it’s a search made 2014 ad campaign. If the prospect clicks on the link in this campaign, then I’m going to take the actions well defined on the next page. I can also go down and I can narrow down further. So if I want it to only target people to certain area with a certain job title, with a certain annual income from other company, we have literally hundreds of ways of breaking down their criteria.
And as I get into the automations, I can choose any of the actions like from here. So again, the standard campaign, I can send the email, I can wait. Let’s say in this case five hours. I can send another email but I can do things too like add conditions. So I could say if this first email, say 4th of July email, I could add a condition saying if they click on the link in that first email, I’m going to send an email one and if they didn’t click the link, I’m going to send them email two. Or if I learn something else about them maybe if there are one industry, I send them one email. If they are in the other industry, I’ll send them another.
But these conditions are basically if then statements where we can build different branches into the automation. And heck I can go so far as to say, “Hey, they haven’t responded to the last five emails we’ve sent them.” So instead of sending an email then, I’m going to send a hand-written letter. And the neat thing about the hand-written letter is we actually will write that letter for you and we have really good handwriting by the way. So it’s not something you have to worry about there. Again we could send you alert, we can upgrade.
A lot of possibilities here. The last major piece is ROI reporting on paid search. So this is where we can start helping you on the backend. So it’s great that we’re tracking them. It’s great there we’re sending nurture out to them. But what are you getting out of all this is what comes down to this. This is where revenue appeals.
We have reports specifically based on AdWords ad clicks. The clicks, these are imported directly from AdWords. They know how many people have clicked on that ad. The cost is also directly imported from Adwords. Again, the cost is looking a little different because I think we only turned it on for two when we did this test. We also get the CPC or cost-per-click from an AdWords.
From there, we can tell you how many people in the system are associated with this particular ads. So how many people had visited your website that had clicked on this ad before. And then prospects, this will be people with their known email address. These are people that actually converted and their original lead source was the ad campaign. And from there, we’re actually able to tell you the cost per prospect. So we can take the initial cost divide it by the prospects and there’s your cost per prospect.
A good example of this is when I was working with a client a couple of months ago and he saw that he has an ad campaign. He’d spent roughly $10,000 on over the course of eight months. Added those $10,000 he only had a handful of converted prospects so yeah but 6,000 people visit his website and that’s okay but only a few of them actually converted. His cost per prospect was something to the effect of $80 per prospect. And that was insane to him as it used to be.
Versus a couple down, there was another ad campaign where he had spent a similar amount on it but it had a much higher conversion rate. And this case, he was actually taking them to a different part of his website and his cost per prospect was a much more reasonable $5-$6. So obviously, he pulled one ad campaign and started other ad campaigns instead. It’s great information, its great insight for you.
If you’re using Salesforce.com or Microsoft dynamics, we also have very deep connectors with them into their CRMs. So we can take it a step further and we can also tell you how many opportunities are associated with prospects that would come in from these campaigns. We can tell you the cost per opportunity and the total value and then finally, we can tell you your revenue and your total ROI. So we’ll use the revenue as your cost– Or the revenue likely cost and that’s where you’ll get your ROI percentage from. And the idea here is you want to have a very high ROI. I think we can all agree that that’s the end rule marketing that’s going to get ROI on it.
And we can go a little further than this too. Not only can we look at the individual ads but we can also look at keywords. So in this case, I can see the keywords for the people who are looking– The people that I have my one opportunity with $17,000 here, they had searched for visitor tracking stuff were Egypt. So for whatever reason, I now know that I have people looking for visitor tracking software in Egypt. You know it. I’m getting opportunities out of them.
So maybe I’m going to expand my location in Egypt a little bit more. Maybe I can focus more ad revenue there. Create some personalized content for it. That in a nutshell, are a few of the things that Lead Liaison can do in combination with AdWords. So there’s a lot to it there. Hopefully you saw similarly neat ideas or new– Or come up with something you might want to try a little later on.
Q&A
Q: Is there a threshold for visitor tracking? So how many sessions can it record?
So for visitor tracking, we do not have a set threshold. So we don’t cut it off after a hundred visitors or anything to that effect. We have some clients where we’re tracking hundreds of visits per day and remember, we’re tracking every unique visitors. So even if we don’t know who they are already, if they’re just anonymous, we’re still going to be tracking that. So again, no major limit to it. There might be some stipulations in the license where we’ve agreed on a certain number of visitors per day but that would have been done beforehand when we were analyzing your website for the amount of traffic. So we customize it to your site but we’ll never cut it off, we’ll never stop tracking people, we’ll never say no if you have too many.
Q: In regards to prospect profile, can you manually add it? The score. I think there is this score up there I think the one that you showed was about a thousand. Can you change that based on your business?
Yes. So there’s a couple ways of changing the scores. So first off, you can change the baseline scoring. When I say baseline scoring, I’m talking about each individual engagement that we have in there. So as for example, website visit would be a 10 points normally for your organization, you make it a ton of visits. You might want to lower that to 5 points from the baseline tracking just as one example.
You can change it for a particular prospect just like going in their profile and actually changing the score. And then you can also come up with custom scoring list. You might have a combination of engagements instead of just one engagement that you think has a closer buying signal and you’re able to do that for sure.
Q: Do you track multiple score touchpoints?
Multiple source touchpoint. So we will attribute the original lead source to whatever the first ones they come in on because we feel it’s very important. So let’s say they start with your website by clicking on an advertisement. Even if six months later they convert from watching your video, they’ve have a million different sort of visits, we know that it’s still very important to say, “Hey, this first one is how they’ve heard about you.” But we do track all of their different touchpoints. We do have other reporting or a live report so you can see how your different campaigns and different pieces of content have been effective.
Q: Is visitor tracking IP or cookie related?
It can be either. Normally, it’s going to be through a tracking cookie in the browser. And that’s going to be by far the most accurate way to make sure that it’s the same visitor coming through. We do realize in some locations, we have a lot of European clients. We do realize that cookies are a little bit stricter over there so we do have the option of doing IP tracking only. Which will use a combination of the IP address and browser session information to making connection with the prospect.
Q: With people using a private page on a web browser, are they being tracked as well?
Yes they are. Because there’s no cookies on a private page like for an incognito mode in Google Chrome for instance. Since that is a cookie-free sort of browser, when they come in, they would pop up as a new anonymous profile. However, if they did a conversion action like they put their email address in or anything else, we would then know that that session belongs to that prospect and we will put it into the appropriate profile.
Q: So you mentioned the ability to send text messages. Is that in the automation tab of Lead Liaison?
The text messages are done via a web hook with Twilio. So it’s actually going to be under settings app set up and web hooks you created there. The prerequisite for that is you would have to have your Twilio account and get the web hook information from them. If you would like to set that up or would like more information, you can send an email to support@Lead Liaison.com. They would be more than happy to give you the documentations and detailed instructions.
And then once you get that set up, then you can all as part of the automation. So it would be in the automation area once you’ve completed the set up. Once the web hook is set up, then in the automation there is a seen web hook action. So just like you saw over the emails you just drag over the web hook action and that would tell our system to send the text message over the Twilio and that would send the text out. And the cool thing is, those text do support data merge fields just like emails do so it can be personalized down to the individual person’s name, company, and such.
Q: Can Lead Liaison be used in place of email marketing platform?
Yes.That’s actually a major part of our platform. It’s built into it so when you set up with us through marketing automation, we set you up and records just like you would with a platform such as Woodpecker. We do email templates, we’re able to handle the bulk sending. Some of our larger clients were looking at sending out hundreds of thousands of emails per month. So we’re able to handle that with no problem.
The neat thing about using us for your email marketing is then all of those emails are tracked within Lead Liaison. So the emails opened are tracked, if they clicked on the link on the email, that’s tracked, it’s scored. So it’s really neat, it is for full email marketing platform but it’s combined with marketing automation into one seamless experience.
Q: Who is your target customer for Lead Liaison? For example, what is the typical ad spending out organization size of client who then purchase Lead Liaison?
I would say we take all. That’s going to be a really general question. So I think any customer is a target customer for Lead Liaison. I see ways that we can help businesses of all sizes. We currently and manage a lot of the client relation side of Lead Liaison and we’ve got clients from very small companies to very very large companies. And implementation is about the same across the board and I see help going in all different direction. So I would say there’s really not a target. So they’ve signed on with Lead Liaison, I can tell you from the accounts that I’ve worked with, the accounts that I’ve managed, I think my smallest account, they have something to the effect of like 500 prospects or even that. And they’re sending emails out of it and then I have other accounts where again, we’re talking about sending hundreds of thousands of pieces of content out on a monthly basis.
We have one just yesterday, I was helping them out with something that, email as going out to 75,000 prospects of one. So we really do have everyone from like small small businesses where there is like four or five people in an office all the way up to enterprise level. Where we have huge number of employees so we can support really just about anything there. Of course we do different marketing efforts for those different kinds. But that’s the great thing about marketing automation is it’s no extra work for us. We just put the content in and the system is able to sort it from there.
*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.
Slide 15
Lead Liaison and Administrate have partnered to bring you this exclusive webinar. Administrate is a Lead Liaison customer in addition to being partner. So the topics that we are presenting are the actual solution that each company uses to drive our own business and revenues to use in real life and it works.
Slide 16
So there are a lot of steps to manage when coordinating a webinar. Once the webinar was scheduled, the entire process was managed in Lead Liaison so that we could fully automate and even repurpose the event if we wanted to. Registration information was captured from the Lead Liaison landing page, hosting in Lead Liaison form. As event members status have changed from registered, attended, didn’t show, et cetera, their statuses are and will continue to be updated in Lead Liaison.
We created the invitation, the registration confirmation, the reminder emails, all in our email builder. And additionally, instead of incorporating the email only invitations and follow up, we were able to use multi-channel communication what we like to call omni-channel communication. Which is the text message that you received. Good news is, we are recording this and we’ll send it to you guys after the presentation. So when you [Unclear 00:10:42:07] might have missed it, you’ll still have a chance to view.
So after our presentation, we’ll be able to use Lead Liaison. We’ll be able to use the member statuses – the registered, attended, et cetera. We’ll be able to use that member status information to pull report or segment our database. A way that you guys could use Lead Liaison in the future.
Slide 17
Lead Liaison side will be presenting how to scale marketing and how to pass qualified leads to your sales people. Administrate will then present how to progress qualified leads through the sales funnel to revenue.
Slide 18
How does marketing automation system fit into the overall ecosystem? 83% of people don’t have an experience with marketing automation. These three circles could actually describe where it fits in. So on the far right hand side, you got your database which in this case we’ll call your audience. This could be prospect or leads, this could be customers, it could be partners. They’re over here on the right.
On the far left, you’ve got your CRM. It could be Administrate, it could be Salesforce.com, could be Microsoft dynamics. Whatever it might be. That’s over here on the left. That is sort of your system of record. Right in the middle, you’ve got marketing automation. Now, one important point is kind of a philosophy here at Lead Liaison is, we really don’t see marketing automation as a software or a feature. It’s really more of a strategy. So again, it fits right in between your customers, your database and your CRM.
So marketing automation is used to reach out to your database and your audience. When your audience interact and engages with your company, the marketing automation system itself needs to track all of that activity and be aware of it. And then in the meantime, all of that information should be syncing back and forth and communicating with your CRM. Again, all your system of record. So really, that marketing automation platform should be the engine for all of that communication between your audience.
Slide 19
We actually have three-day training courses on marketing automation and software platforms like this. It can help your company strengthen relationships through better communication. And number two, deliver sales insight. And number three, scale your operations. So obviously, number three is the subject of today’s webinar but I’m going to dig into three of these areas here.
Slide 20
Let’s talk about strengthening relationships. I’m sure everybody has heard about inbound marketing. It’s kind of a buzz [Unclear 00:14:36:29] that’s being created. So really inbound marketing is really about being in the right place at the right time. Outbound marketing, that’s really the opposite of inbound marketing. So that means reaching out to your audience. If we were to breakdown outbound marketing into two categories, we’ll break it down into online and offline. So let me step through these components real quick.
Online outbound marketing that would be email. So if you look at marketing automation platform, the key to very basic is the evolution of email marketing. Sure you probably use systems like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. But this is really version 2.0 of email communication. Outbound marketing is also sending text messages. So very similar to what we sent out for this particular webinar as a reminder.
The third piece of online marketing in reaching out is dynamic content. That mean taking content on your website and making that dynamic whether it’s a block of text, whether it’s an image. Changing that content based on who is visiting your site and what you know about them.
The fourth thing is popups. So based on visitor, maybe you have a visitor in London or at certain area, maybe Texas. Maybe you want to show them a certain popup or content based on their interest and where they’re coming from.
The last piece of reaching out and doing that digitally is sending surveys. So your system should be able to reach out and send polls and surveys to people.
And then the last point here which is offline marketing. So it’s very important to focus on that omni channel marketing. This is not about email only. You know when we say omni channel, its multi-channel. Sending the communication through digital means and through offline means. So postcards, handwritten letters. The power really comes from mixing up these two channels. The online and offline channel. So the key is to strengthen those relationships, use a platform that can help you do the online and offline and automate that and trigger this communication at the right time. That’s the key. And again, that’s going to help you strengthen those relationships.
Slide 21
Sales insight. So I’ll step through these real quick. Engagement history is super powerful to be able to deliver information like what you’re seeing on the left hand side of my screen to a sales rep. When they go to do their follow up and they know who they’re speaking to and what that person’s interests are about. So in this case, here’s a little preview of a profile and the timeline. You can see a website visit, some popups that were shown, and subsequently closed. You can see email. So if somebody is opening your email, they clicked the link in that email. When you’re a rep and you go to place that phone call, there’s nothing more important than knowing the interest of the person you’re connecting with.
The second thing here that can help your sales team and give them insight is who’s on your website? And quite simply, you want to know businesses and people that come to your website. So Lead Liaison for example, we’ll send out daily notifications to let the reps know who’s on their site. So it’s a great tool to help find them new leads and new opportunities.
The third piece of sales insight is buying signals. And it’s super powerful to– Again, you’re doing your outreach, you’re making phone calls, you’re prospecting. You won’t really know when somebody engages and maybe comes back to your website. So a lot of these of platforms will trigger what we call buying signals. And this is really a text message or an email to be both. But it will help the sales person understand the intent and when somebody is actually checking out the website and ready to engage. And those notifications will go to the owner. To the sales rep.
The fourth sales insight piece is lead priority. Most sales reps when they come in to the office, they’ve got a ton of things they’ve got to do that day. So you really need to establish priority and that priority can be done by the system itself by kind of separating hot prospects and showing that in a report or a dashboard. But also other mechanisms that this system use such as lead scoring and lead grading to help a sales rep understand what’s important and what’s not.
And then the last piece is social insight. So in Lead Liaison for example, whenever an email comes in to the system, we’ll go out to social media and we’ll pull in thousands of different data points from social media. So things like their gender. Male or female. Their age, twitter followers. Things like that. You can use that information obviously for marketing but as a sales rep, now you know more about who you’re communicating with. So it’s about getting to know your audience better.
Slide 22
The final piece here, in terms of kind of the essentials of marketing automation is about scaling your operations. A key thing is introduce automation. So if you look on the left hand side, you’ve got your basic funnel. It can be more advanced than this. Most customers here, most companies will have their own version of a funnel. But really you can break it down into these three different stages. You’ve a got a lead at the top of the funnel, you turn that lead into an opportunity, and then you have a customer.
Now on the right hand side, you see a color-coded version. So these are all the different ways an automation can help your business. Now, they’re color-coded for a reason. So the three top items here in red, these are primarily used in that lead phase of the funnel. So rapid inquiry follow up. This is a fact. 48% of reps don’t follow up with their leads. So being able to help automate and assign these leads to your reps and respond immediately, that’s very important. Early bird catches the worm.
And then lead generation. So as mentioned earlier, identifying businesses and people that come to your website, automate that. It’s really like putting a digital sales rep or an inside sales rep on your website. Obviously getting capital is very expensive but adding automation can help expose these opportunities for your sales team.
Distributing leads. Pretty round robin, could be giving it to a rep who doesn’t have much if they’re working on at that moment or geographical distribution. But these three things again can be automated as part of that lead stage of the funnel.
And then the middle of the funnel, lead qualification. Using concepts like scoring and grading to help prioritize these leads.
And then at the very bottom in green, when you’ve got a customer, you can use automation to help onboard your client. So right when they become a client, send them communications, give them tips and tricks, 30 days before their renewal whenever that might be, send them some notification. However you want to manage that is really up to you but automation can help with that onboarding.
And then the final and I’d say really important piece here, is nurturing. Now you see these, these green– You see these three color codes right here. The red, orange, and the green. Nurturing is the general concept. It’s not really a feature but it’s a general concept where you can use that multi-channel communication that I mentioned earlier. Whether online or offline communication to further strengthen and build that relationship. So whether it’s a new lead, whether it’s an opportunity or a client, nurture them. The best sorts of revenue for your business is going to come from your existing clients. It’s a lot easier to sell to them than to go generate new levels for your business. So use nurturing to help.
Slide 23
Look at this stat. So on the top left here, you see companies that excel at lead nurturing. According to Forrester Research, they generate 50% more sales ready lead at a lower cost. Because of automation and the fact that they can be more scalable, they’re not spending as much money. There is a lot of words in this stat here on the top right in blue. I really want you to look at the top one. I’ve mentioned this. 48% of reps never follow up. That’s horrible. So obviously, you want to follow up. Again, early bird catches the worm.
At the bottom here, you see 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact. Let me say it again. 80% of sales are made on the fifth to the twelfth contact. You’re take away from that should be that one touch is really not enough. Again, you’ve got to be nurturing, you’ve got to use different channels ’cause I know personally, if I got five to twelve emails in a row, I’m going to think it’s totally automated. Right? So it has to be personal which you got to mix it up. You’ve got to use your multiple channel to communicate. But it can’t just be one touch. It’s got to be more than one.
And then at the bottom here, this is really my call to action. You’re on this conference which will look like we got a lot of attendee from around the world. So if you’re a marketing leader and you’re not using marketing automation, you should be. Salesforce reports in their state of marketing, report that 67% of leaders currently use marketing automation. So don’t be the 33% of companies that are not using it because you’re not using it, you’re competition is.
Slide 24
How do you scale your marketing? What can you do? Well first thing is take action. On the left, these are the things that you can do. You can create a bunch of different content right? And get yourself out there. Promote your business. These are things like white papers, blog posts, videos, everything that I’m talking about there.
Syndicate a content. Let me give you an example. We wrote a five series blog post about integrating marketing automation with a specific CRM. So we took those five different blog posts and then we said, “Okay let’s turn that into a white paper so we can then put as a resource on our website. And then we’re going to make a video out of that. We might make five different videos.” So that’s what we mean by syndicating your content. Do it once but then chop it up and use it in different areas of your business.
And the third point about what you can do is have calls to action. It’s pretty self-explanatory but you have a landing page, you now have a call to action, have an offer, have a piece of content to download.
What can software do? So go out, get yourself a system like this, a marketing automation platform. Begin to track all your inbound activity. You could be doing anything on the left but if you’re not tracking it, it doesn’t do you any good. Begin to score your leads, nurture your leads, and then have that sort of a demarcation point where through your nurturing, you’re able to then– You’re marketing is able to hand off these warm leads over to their sales team.
You can obviously do that hand off when there’s a bottom of the funnel action. So what I mean by that is maybe somebody downloading a very key document like a brochure or a case study. Or somebody submitting a form like a general form or a Contact Us form. So those are bottom of the funnel actions. And when your marketing automation platform recognizes those, you want to quickly get that over to sales for their follow up. For their qualifying.
Second thing you could do when you hand off is set up score threshold. And I’ll actually show everybody what I mean by that but establishing value and when somebody goes past that value, then you hand it off to sales. And then the last thing to be what we call a life cycle stage. And a life cycle is really identifying where a potential buyer is or even a client in terms of their overall communication with you through their life cycle.
Slide 25
This is what Lead Liaison call the life cycle funnel. We actually have these seven stages in the platform. So anonymous is anybody that comes in to the system. So visitor-tracking wise, you go to a track website. We can identify that business. We might not know the person but we’ve identified the business so we created an anonymous profile. If you have an email in the system but there’s been no inbound activity, there what we call a suspect. Once we track and identify inbound activity, this could be an email click, a form submission, we say they’re engaged.
And then there is this stage here. Marketing qualified. And that’s an orange for a reason. At that point you might say, “Hey, they’re qualified. Let me send it over to my CRM, in this case Administrate. You could make that hand off at that point.
Slide 26
I actually am going to do a live demo.This would be a brief demo but a little background here. So we’re going to use a set of scoring threshold of 300 points. So when I say scoring, in Lead Liaison we actually score from 0 to a 1000. So what we’re going to do is use a feature, scoring threshold, and say once this prospect goes past 300, we want to go ahead and send them over into Administrate. Which should be the CRM of record in this example
[Lead Liaison live demo screen]
This is Lead Liaison right here where we just got a sandbox account. Now, I’m in the scoring area. So one thing to highlight, you can set these generics scores for all these activities. You can get very granular if you– For example web form submission. Every form submission will be 50 points. Now, you could say a specific form has a 100 points so on so forth. You can see per event because again, Lead Liaison was used to help to manage this webinar. Somebody signs up, they’d get a 100 points. So you set scoring there.
Choose a threshold. So again we set it at 300. Now if I click edit here, basically you can see if the prospect goes above 300, we want to do this thing. So it’s very modular. In this case, we’re going to sync to Administrate. And then we configure different parameters in terms of the values that we want to see and Administrate when we push it over. But you could do other things. It’s kind of like an action template. So if I want to set a life cycle stage as I’ve mentioned, and I want to maybe make it marketing qualified inside Lead Liaison, I could do that. So basically, you run all these different actions when the prospect goes above 300.
So over here we’ve got Administrate. I’ve got a tab open. We’ll kind of see the new opportunity created in Administrate. In Lead Liaison, what we’re going to do is create a new prospect. We’ll just do this from scratch. Tommy Walker. Making stuff up here. Okay. So now we’ll go their profile after we create the prospect. This is a prospect profile here again skipping details in the essence of time but what I’m going to do is go ahead and change their score. And remember that scoring threshold was 300. Notice over in Administrate.
I’ll refresh here, there’s no Tommy Walker in terms of an opportunity. So we don’t see anything there. We see Jane, Thomas, Cammie. So over here, we’ll change that again to say 350. Actually we’ll make it 400 and we’ll hit enter. So now we’ve changed that score to 400 again the score would typically be driven up by engagement and website visit and things like that okay. But we’re just manually doing that again in the essence of time.
So if we come over here, we had refreshed inside of Administrate. We’re going to see Tommy Walker. So the way that we’re recording the opportunity here is we’re putting the score, reporting purposes. And then there’s the individual over there and then again, all the parameters that you’ve configured will go along with that record down here.
Slide 27
So for those of you who don’t know, we just walked through Lead Liaison, a sales and marketing automation solution. None of you have really notice what training management system is. And so I wanted to make sure that people understood what that term meant. Training management system is supposed to run really the core operations of your training company. So that means anything from the sales and marketing process to the delivery of the training, with the reporting, it’s really sort of the backbone that manages the data of your students or instructors, your locations and venues. All the things that go into running the training.
A TMS is really designed to help you grow your business. There’s lots of great tools out there that help with training itself. With delivery of training, with the technology around it. But oftentime it’s very disjointed and not connected back to a central hub. And a training management system acts that central hub.
For our purposes today, we’ll going to be focused on the CRM component of Administrate and so if you’re on this webinar, you’re not a training company at all or you’re not into that space, these concepts are still applicable to any CRM really. We integrate with Salesforce, we’re on their app exchange, we have customers that use that as their primary CRM, and then get it into our workflows from there. But what we’re going to be talking about today is that CRM functionality that allows you to customize a sales pipe flow.
Slide 28
What we’ll be doing is talking about creating a streamlined process. We don’t want to have sort of a big wall between your marketing side, your sales side, and then the delivery side. If there’s anything that gets lost in between, it can create really terrible customer experience. You want them to have one interaction with your company regardless of where they are on this journey. So using Administrate and connecting tools that are purpose-built that can– Like Lead Liaison that can create a single experience for the customer is very very important.
Slide 29
Why would you want to manage your training sales funnel within a training management system? The goal over here really is to take your sales out of the land of just sort of guessing and gut feel and here’s what I think based on the relationships that I have. All that’s valuable inside that your sales people can have but you can’t rely on that in order to really scale an organization. In order to scale sales, you’re going to need to run sales like an operation like you would any other part of your business.
So to be able to set up a pipe that allows you to work through these stages of your sales process in a consistent manner, allows you the ability to start breaking it down and treating it more methodically so that you can see where your leads are, where they’re being nurtured, where they’re not, and how that is progressing. What this does is it provides transparency. You can start to see where your leads maybe falling off. If you analyze this information and start acting on it, you’ll be able to resolve any problems that you have during your workflow. Any areas where you’ve got a nice lead flow coming in and then it just gets stuck or drops off at one point. You can focus your efforts on that area and then resolve that and turn it into a nice predictable flow. At the end of this, you should have what we call predictable revenue and again, that’s a model kind of like the marketing automation is a model. You can create predictable revenue in a business like this using these types of methods.
Slide 30
I will use the same funnel graphic because what we’re saying is that this creates one continuous funnel from your marketing side to the sales side. And effectively, when you’re using Lead Liaison with Administrate, you are nurturing those leads in the demonstration. You are going all the way to marketing qualified.
Sales vetting, you can have the sales team do some initial calls to make sure that they are– Understand the business that they– Understand the needs and they get a proper follow up to them. So at that point you can go down to sales qualified. There’s nurturing that happens at this stage too. Oftentimes we think of this as perhaps being the longest stage of the nurturing. If you feel like you should be able to turn that– Okay we’ve got a qualified lead which you should be able to turn that into revenue right away. Depending on what you’re trying to sell, that could become a much longer process.
And then ultimately, you get down to proposals and winning. So what you want this to look like is a continuous even smooth funnel all the way from the first contact with your organization and constant contact until they have either won or decided that this is just isn’t for them.
Slide 31
If we go to the next slide you’ll see a screenshot of Administrate. The upper left hand corner there. This part of the screen demonstrates what it looks like when you’re working with the system like Administrate to actually push these leads through. It gives us a nice visual workflow of where these leads are coming in. For us, we actually as mentioned at the top of the webinar, we do use lead Liaison as a company and this is actually a picture of our pipe. So we use our own tools and Lead Liaison for our sales processes so we know how this works very first hand. So they come in from Lead Liaison as marketing qualified and they go through these stages. You’ll see the numbers generally go down until they become propose then onto won or lost.
So that’s how this works for us and that’s a very common workflow and you should be able to see very visually where you’re leads are in these stages. So let me go through a few examples.
Slide 32
This one is a slide that says,“Where are my leads stuck?” So when you first look at these numbers, these areas may not jump out to you. But what you’re looking for based on just ratios and based on changes over time are areas in your pipe where leads are not smoothly going from one stage to the next. Now of course you’re not going to have all 250 leads generated become one but you should have a consistent narrowing because what you’re doing is you’re qualifying them, making sure that you are a good fit for their business and vice versa. And making sure you can engage them into the point where they want your services.
So in the first column in column A, you would see that we have a 100 marketing qualified leads and then if they pass them off to the sales team and they actually only considered 10 of them qualified for what they’re going to pursue. That’s probably a red flag. That probably means that there’s some gap between what your marketing department and what your sales department are viewing as qualified and that maybe something that you can work together on to narrow that gap. Maybe sales is overqualified, they’re being too stringent, maybe you’ve got some kind of looseness going on on the marketing side and just sending too many over but you want to be able to close that gap.
Each of these examples has a place where you have something that you can identify and work on. And I will go through each and every one of them but the idea is you want to be able to find these areas, improve them, and this will get you to the point where you can predict your revenue.
Slide 33
So moving to the results slide, this whole process will remove the divide between your marketing and sales teams. One big continuous funnel. Sales and resources should be appropriately used. If you think about it, if you have a gap between these teams or the processes involved, what will happen is you’ll start misusing your resources in creating ways in your business. If your sales people are trying to nurture leads that really don’t have much interest or don’t know who you are yet and then you passed that lead over too quickly and you’re wasting that resources time. And the same could happen in the other direction. If you’re over qualifying, you could be wasting the effort you got to acquire the lead and this could be letting it fall out of your funnel when you could have revenue.
So think of creating this into a very structured process is going to allow you to be highly efficient with your business. So just the key is to analyze those metrics. They will tell you where you can improve, where you can grow, and if you keep your eye on the ball there you will get to that predictable revenue.
Slide 34
And for the 83% of people that don’t have experience with marketing automation and 46% of people that really don’t nurture leads, here’s a great opportunity. So we’re offering two free months on an annual subscription here. So added to your subscription, for any new clients of Administrate. So if you are interested in Administrate, I encourage you to take action and start to use their awesome system. So if you’re a new client or even an existing customer of Administrate, again we’ll give you two free months of $1,300 value.
In my demo, I did not show the connector but it’s a very straightforward connector and we’ll provide you some complimentary assistance in setting that up as well. So all of that is good through the end of the year. That’s our holiday gift to everybody attending.
Q&A
Q: The first question I have is, if I [Unclear 00:46:50:25] in Lead Liaison conversion form in our website, will it automatically pull through to Administrate? And can that be customized to match specific Administrate field?
A: So you certainly can. Those are formed inside Lead Liaison. All marketing automation platforms should have that capability but to visually drag and drop and build a form or you have an existing form, you know map the form. But once the form is submitted, you can use the techniques that I’ve showed you here. In my demo I used scoring threshold. But you could basically say it’s a form that’s submitted then you could invoke that send to Administrate connector or action I should say which again would push the record into Administrate.
Now this is the first iteration of the integration with Administrate. We do have plans to evolve that based on demand of course but we’re pushing it into Administrate as an opportunity as shown in my demo. So you do have some level of configurability on different parameters in the opportunity. So there is some customization but some of the other field that you might have, maybe like a custom build or something wouldn’t go in to the record inside Administrate.
Q: As a person unsubscribes to communication via Administrate, will the person be auto unsubscribed from Lead Liaison?
A: So I think there’s a little bit of a difference but in terms of the email capability between the two platforms, it wouldn’t really be connected. If your reps saw an opportunity and then they wanted to maybe take action on that, update the record, they could do that. But in terms of unsubscribes, if you are using Lead Liaison for nurturing newsletter communication things like that, we do have our own unsubscribe mechanisms on our platform but that would not update today in Administrate and vice versa.
If they’d unsubscribed during the marketing process, you can make sure that it basically never flows down. In Administrate we have an unsubscribe option too but if you want to make sure that you don’t then hit them back with remarketing, you need to make sure that that gets passed back. That’s not part of the automation that we have today.
Q: You mentioned marketing automation is like email 2.0. Why is that?
A: Well let’s talk about email 1.0 right? I’ve mentioned Mailchimp, Constant Contact, lot of email systems like that. You could send out an email and then maybe you cross your fingers. I mean back in the day people would say, “Oh. How many opens did I have?” or “How many clicks did I have?” But you really have to connect your email activity to your website activity and overall engagement.
So email 1.0, you send an email, you see some email stats and that’s about it. And then also email 1.0, you create an email, you send it to your database, you quote unquote blast an email out to your database and I don’t know about everybody on the call but I never want to be blasted. So marketing automation systems again with the 2.0 version of email, you can really deeply segment who you communicate with. So you’re sending the right message at the right time. And when people are engaging with your email, they open or click and come to your website and download content or submit a form, all that activity is added into their profile. So you really have a holistic view of what that prospect is doing. Way above and beyond just email activity.
*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.
Slide #7
So video is amazingly human, something that Ryan touched on a little bit earlier. It’s a great way for you to show your face to your company, to delight your users, and also to make sure that they’re sharing the content that you put out. So you’ll see here 69% of users say, “They shared a branded video, if they had the information that might be of interest to your friends.” Video is going to be the best way for you to get your information out there. It’s more compelling than any copy that you could write, and it’s a lot more human, it has you relate to your customers.
Slide #8
It builds brand rapport, humanizes your brand, and keeps folks attention and helps to explain and support. So instead of writing that giant explanation about this or that feature, you can make a video about it and have folks be really engaged with that video.
Slide #9
We did a really great AB test a few months ago, where we tested eight different emails. What we did was we cut the copy and the CTA and actually the image exactly the same. All we did was we changed that video thumbnail. So you got that play button on the image and you got that timestamp on there. So side-to-side, you have the same exact email, one that has that play button and timestamp, the other does not. We have different categories of email as well. So we didn’t just do only launch emails or only product feature emails. We had plugged emails, we have webinar invites, and we had all sorts of different conversational emails as well. So same email, same image, except for that play button and timestamp. And what we wanted to learn was, is one email going to perform better than the other? Are we going to get a higher click-through rate with one email than the other?
Slide #10
We ended up seeing, long story short, 21.52% difference. So you’re using a video thumbnail instead of a regular image, can increase your click-through rate by 21.52% on average. This was an incredible finding as I’m sure you’re also seeing. We definitely thought that it was going to have an impact. We just didn’t realize how big that impact would be. So this was a super exciting training on our end.
Slide #11
So using video in email, just a word video in your email subject line, can boost your open rates by 19%. So what we do in here is we’ll say, “Great video in here,” you know, and then continue on the subject line or, video in parenthesis or bracket and continue on to the subject line. So that will help folks get an idea of what they’re clicking into. It’s really good to have your audience know what they’re getting into in an email. Although those really fun subject lines might seem exciting, it might seem like it can boost your open rate, just telling folks what they’re in for, is going to be a better bet for us, what we’ve seen in the past.
Slide #12
You might be thinking, “Well where do I put video in email? Which is the right email to put a video thumbnail in?”
Slide #13
You actually have a ton of choices here. So adding video to a webinar registration page makes it more human, it makes it more inviting. You may have seen a video in our registration pages in the past, what that does is kind of, creates a human element. We give a little bit more of our personality in that video, and it makes that webinar registration page just stand out a little bit more.
Slide #14
You can also add video to a landing page of any type, and then use that thumbnail in your email promo. So if you got an email from us, asking you to register for this webinar, you will have seen that we used the video thumbnail in there, and we generally do that when we have video that plays to that same subject, we use that video thumbnail in the communication. Folks open up that email, they see, “Oh, there’s going to be a great video in here if they click that, takes it over to landing page, they feel more connected, they’re more likely to register.”
Slide #15
You can also use video for lead generation in general. So we do have this feature called transdial, essentially what it is, is a lead form that you can put on top of your video. So whatever video that may be, you can put that lead generation form in there and have folks enter their email to sign up for more content or to view the video in this case, or any other copy that you might want to put in there.
Slide #16
Here’s a good example that we use every once in a while. We have Santa Barbara Chicken Ranch. They used a turnstile so that video lead generation form on this video to encourage folks to sign up for a free quarter chicken plate. So essentially, they grew their email as by 800% just by putting that turnstile in there. You could choose a video that folks watch really often, that’s doing really well, that has a time engagement, you can use a fun product video like you see here, or you can use any other type of how-to video, or a case study, or example anything on your site that you think is going to go really well.
Slide #17
So a little bit of eating our own dog food here. Here’s where we use turnstile. For example, on our webinars page, if you go to wistia.com /webinars, you’ll see a whole bunch of webinars that we’ve done in the past, and when you go to click in, you can watch a little bit of that webinar, and then you’ll see there’s ton of style coming, about 10%, 20%. So that will say, “Hey, you know, did you like this video, so far. You can enter your email address to view the video and learn more.”
Slide #18
Now you might think, “Well, where do I put that lead gen form? Do I put it right in front, like that feels kind of weird, maybe folks who see the form, they don’t want to play the video, and if you put it at the very end, well they would watched the videos, so why would they enter their email address?” We’ve actually done a bunch of test here and we found that putting your turnstile 20% in the video is going to be the best bet. And you might think here, “Well you’re kind of cutting off the content for folks, doesn’t that feel weird for your user?” I would say, make sure to script your video around the turnstile. So when you shoot the video, you know that you’re planning to put the lead generation form in there. You could say, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch more to talk about. If you want to hear the rest of the conversation, just fill in your email address, and then out comes the turnstile. That’s going to be your best bet. You want to give folks a little bit of an idea of what else they’re going to hear about—going to want to make sure that those folks are already engaged and then put out that lead gen form, instead of putting it in the beginning or in the very end.
Slide #19
The same goes for calls to action. So any sort of CTA that you want to put in the video. Maybe it’s an annotation link that takes folks outside of the video, you might think, it’s better to put it at the end or it’s better to put it at the beginning. We’ve actually found way higher conversion rates when we put it right at the middle.
Slide #20
And what happens next, you can use video in email in workflows in a really great way. And I’m going to let Ryan take it over from here to tell us a little bit about that.
Slide #21
So we kind of blow this down into seven steps to help boost your conversions with your video emails. On the left hand side, you see the four items in purple, which are really about some basic concepts. On the right, these are more advanced concepts. So on the right, the precursor is that you would have a marketing automation system in place like Lead Liaison, it could be any of those systems. On the left, so these are the things you wanted to do and I’ll speak more about these shortly, but obviously, enable turnstile, like Margot mentioned. The second thing is you want to have a good landing page tool that could be your CMS like WordPress, could be lead pages, on bounce, anything like that. The third thing is you want to have an email marketing system to send out your email. So it could be MailChimp, constant contact, of course, if you’re using marketing automation, you’re going to have email tools built into it. And number four, you want to be able to trap engagement. You want to have a good visitor tracking system in place. You can really harness the power of marketing automation to do multiple things to again boost their conversions.
Slide # 21 and 22
So two important things, number one, you want to place the actual video on your website. So Margot talked about, creating a thumbnail image of your video. And this is important. Basically, email client like Outlook and Google mail, they can’t run HTML and very rich JavaScript, just like your browser can. So the email client is very different. So you want to put that video so you can use things like turnstile and more advanced tracking, put that on your website. So that’s number one, plays the video on your website. Number two, again, you want to have a good visitor tracking solution. And you know, visitor tracking is pretty straightforward and easy to use and install. So if anybody is using like Google analytics, it can be installed the same way. You take a couple lines of JavaScript, you put it on your website, in the footer of your website, and then that begins to kind of kick in and do its magic which I’ll speak about in a second. Usually a visitor tracking system starts around $250 per month, so pretty affordable.
Slide #22
Why do you want to do these things? Really you want to track the engagement. So Wistia provides some really amazing analytical tools to identify businesses and the conversions. But when you have a visitor tracking system in place that allows you to do three things. Of course, you can track businesses that come to your site and watch the video. You also contract people that come to your site. So even before they watch the video or enter their email that visitor tracking system can monitor what these people do. So the very first time they come to your website that that technology is tracking all of their behavior from cradle to grave. And all these time, it’s building a very rich profile of that person. So we like to call that, at Lead Liaison, a digital DNA. So it’s kind of understanding their interest and things that they do before they even watch the video, when they watch the video, and after they watched the video. I think, as marketers, we tend to be very in-hammer with this open and clicks, but the more meaningful thing is what do they do when they were on the website. How much of that video did they watch, how deep did they engaged, and where did they go after they watched the video. So a visitor tracking tool will basically help you track video engagement page views. When people download documents, so your brochures, whether it’s a restaurant menu, or a datasheet, whatever it is, on-site search terms, form submissions that people are clicking specific buttons or taking your call to action. You’re building that very rich profile of people.
Slide #23
So why is this important to really understand the buyer’s journey and what they do, and how does this help and who does it help really. So let’s answer that question. It primarily helps two people, sales and marketing. So if you’re on this call, and if you’re in marketing, I’m very sure, at one point in your career, you thought to yourself, “Man, you know, I give a ton of leads over to my sales team, and they just don’t do anything with it.” And if you’re on this call and you’re in sales, you probably think, “Boy, I really wish that marketing could give me better data, give me more qualified leads.” Well the good news is that, if you have visitor tracking and marketing automation, which is going to have visitor tracking built into it, there is kind of a happy media. So as the marketer, you can help sales people with two things–better timing and then better insight. So when I say timing that tracking solution will help you understand when that person engages. So even though you sent out, for example, your video email, it could be two or three days later before they actually click that video thumbnail, and then watch the video, and then do other things after the video. So you want to make sure you know when that happened so that sales can be notified of that activity. Also, as a sales person, its better invite. You now know what people care about, what their interests are, sort of like if you’re a car salesperson, right, it would be great to know when that person walked into the lot, what they were looking at on their computer, what kind of car they were interested in, what different features, things like that, and the sales person, when you go to engage, you want to know all of their interest, same concept. The second benefit here is marketers have more data. So they can make better marketing decisions. And I’ll talk about that in a second.
Slide #24 and 25
The next thing that you obviously want to do, do you want to enable turnstile, so Margot talked about that, and as you do that, you are ready to send your video email. And from my perspective, you got three options to do that. Option one, don’t have visitor tracking system and just use any email provider, again, constant contact, mailchimp. You can still send your video email. But today, again, we’re talking about how do you boost your conversions right, how you get more out of it. So having that video in your email, you’re going to get that 21.52% click through rate that Margot mentioned, but how can we do more? So option two, get a visitor tracking system in place, and use your email provider again, MailChimp, constant contact, but add some mail merge tokens in there. So in your links that you might have inside your email that points back to the video on your webpage, you can put certain parameters on the end of your link so that your visitor tracking solution will pick up that person and sort of build that profile that digital DNA of the individual. And in option three, send that email with marketing automation. So any good marketing automation system is going to have a really good email tool inside of it to help you build and send your email. It is going to have the capabilities to build a landing page, and then also, it’s going to give you capabilities to implement advanced concepts.
Slide #26
Let me speak about what those advance concepts are. Really it is about automation, and automation can help you achieve multiple things, but at the highest level, no marketing automation of the platform that can help you with lead qualification, help you with nurturing, and help you with retargeting. if you’re not familiar with marketing automation, you definitely should be. So, I kind of like marketing automation to how CRM was 10 to 15 years ago. It is becoming very, very popular. Today, if you look at the company and they don’t have a CRM, you kind of scratch your head and you say, “Hey, why don’t you have a CRM?” Marketing automation is really becoming the same way, and not necessarily a nice thing to have, it’s really a necessary thing to have. So why automation in general beneficial for companies and how can that help you convert more and boost your conversions? Well the data doesn’t lie. According to a new in this group, when you’re nurturing you’re shortening your sales like all by 23%, and you’re also generating bigger deal size, it’s like 47%. The final point, which is a point by Gardner, they site that automating lead management can help you achieve a 10% or greater increase in revenue in a 6 to 9 months period.
Slide #27
So extremely compelling fact here, why wouldn’t you use marketing automation is really the question. One capability of the marketing automation system to help you boost those conversion is, again, lead qualification. So let’s put this into full perspective. You’ve got your video thumbnail, and find your email, people click through. They click on that image that takes them to your website, on your landing page where they’ve got that full video. Well one click through happens, you can begin qualifying these leads. And this is great for sales people. So here you see an example of how marketing is really, you know, they’re the producer and sales is the consumer. So marketing is helping to automatically qualify by doing what we call scoring and grading, and serve up these warm prospects to their sales team. So you might be asking, well what’s the difference between the two? Not every marketing automation system offers both of these. Most of them provide scoring, but just to comment real quickly, scoring is a way to, it’s a number, you know, again, every system could be different, but it could be from zero to a thousand for example. And it’s a way to identify how interested a prospect is in your services. So the more that they engage, the higher that number is going to be. So the way for you to identify engaged buyers and interested buyer, grading is really a way for you as a company to identify individuals that are ideal match for you. It’s about identifying your ideal buyer. So in the B2B world, for example, is their job title, so the campaign VP, or are they in a certain geography of the world that would be a good match for you, and where your company does business. So that’s at all about being better at qualifying leads.
Slide #28
The next thing that marketing automation system can do is to help you nurture, and this is really where you’re going to see that boost in your conversions. So I wanted to give you three tips, you know, tip number one, is nurture interested prospects, and just the simple fact that people are clicking through that video email, and clicking on the thumbnail, that means they’re interested. You have to assume that. So they’re now taking action. They are engaging. And once they engage, you then want to nurture them a little bit more because they’re interested. So tip number one, don’t nurture random prospects or cold contacts. Do it with interested people. Tip number two, it’s a really important concept. You know, people don’t just buy right away. Every business is different, but a current B2B to B2C, it typically takes 7 to 13 or more different touch points to generate your sales ready qualified leads, got it, 7 to 13 different touch points. Again, B2B or B2C could be different. So the important thing, and I don’t know about you all, but you know, if I watch the video, and then I got 7 to 13 different emails, I’d be pulling out my hair and I might hate the company that’s communicating with me. So that’s not what it’s all about. It’s a misnomer that when you hear nurturing, it’s not just about email. Once somebody watches your video email, and host it on Wistia, and they go through the video, you got to have a mechanism to then nurture them but not just through email. Use things like postcards, use handwritten letters, use text messaging, use different channels, right, so it’s about multichannel marketing. Don’t just be boring and send out, you know, consecutive email. Switch it up a little bit, and today the advance marketing automation system can help you deliver multichannel nurturing. And then to kind of wrap this up, let’s just take a really simple example. Let’s say that your company offers three solutions, solution A, B, and C. And maybe you’ve got this video in your email, and it’s on solution B. When you send out your email and people watch that video, they click through, go to the landing page, don’t follow up and nurture them with information on solution A, you know, follow-up and engage in nurture them on solution B. Again, we call that at Lead Liaison responsive marketing. So it’s having that conversation with the person at the right time with the right content. It’s no longer about blasting you know an email to ten thousand people. It’s about engaging, and again, being relevant at the right time.
Slide #29
The final point before I wrap up with some best practices is really retargeting. I’ve spoken about a good visitor tracking solution to help you identify somebody’s interest and where they poke around on your website. That’s important. I’ve also spoken about a good marketing automation system to make sure that you can nurture in a very relevant way at the right time. Let’s take the two concepts and put them together, take all that data, take the nurturing, and let’s use it in the right way. So down the road, once you collected that data, let’s say for example, somebody watches your video on solution B, well maybe six months down the road, you have a new capability or a new feature for solution B. You should share it with everybody, but no longer are you going to blast it to you database of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people. You can use your marketing automation platforms to hyper target people that had engaged with your video email. So when you know people have watched solution B already and they did that sometime in the last six months, send those people the update because the other people probably don’t care about it.
Slide #30
Retargeting is a way to take all that data, take the capabilities you have with marketing automation, and then hyper target those individuals with the right message. Number one, I think it’s also a misnomer that people try to use video and email or nurturing just for prospects. It’s really about communicating with customers too. I’d encourage everybody on the phone to kind of think about pivot your pipeline, you know, or flip your phones or turn it upside down. Marketing automation system, the really purpose built to nurture people better in the middle of the funnel or even at bottom of the funnel.
Slide #31
These video emails and marketing automation, it’s not just for prospects. It’s about people in your funnel and your customers too. The second best practice here is when you’re creating your content, whether it’s your video itself, and Wistia does an excellent job with this, or your email, or your landing page, whatever it is, try to really think like a professor.
Slide #32
Make sure your content is educational. Don’t provide a sales pitch. Don’t get up there and talk about your product and features. Again, try to educate. It’s going to serve you well. The last point here is, and I think this is the beauty of Wistia and their ability to humanize communication is keep your emails free. I’ll tell a really quick story. We have a client, you know, and they create this newsletter, and it really is eight pages long. You have to scroll from top to bottom. And inside the newsletter, they’ve got crazy things, it’s a car dealership. And they’ve got things like recipes and just random things, you know. The beauty of putting video inside your email is that it can be short. Everybody on the phone call here today, probably have busy lives, you’re doing a million things, probably you have right now, but you want to, you know, people like small little communication bits, you know, small size. So strip out all the text, replace it with a video, you’re going to be much more effective, take that extra step to record the video and put that in your email.
Q&A
Q: What is the best way to get people to buy into using video and email, and is it worth taking the time to put forth that extra effort?
A: Yes, absolutely. It’s definitely worth that time. I would definitely say, put in that time It doesn’t have to be this super overproduce, really intense video that you hired another agency out do or maybe you do and that’s great too, but you can start with a smaller, a little more personal video. So somewhere where you can do that is in those webinar intro video. So for example, if you have a webinar that you’re going to do, pop on camera, you can actually do this right on a laptop or using your iPhone. We actually have some really great information on making videos like this on our Wistia blogging library. So I highly recommend going to wistima.com/blog or wistia.com/library and checking that out. It doesn’t have to be a giant video, you don’t have to put a ton of effort into it, just try it out and see how it works for you, and then go from there.
Q: Can you explain what turnstile is again?
A: A turnstile is that lead generation form shows that right on your video. So you can do this by going into your Wistia account, and selecting turnstile, and you can make that copy, say whatever you like, and you can connect it to your MailChimp or whatever you use for email as well, and then of course, into Lead Liaison. Okay, let’s see. What information can be collected in a turnstile, this is a question from Greg, and where does that collected information gets stored? So you can have your first name, last name or email in a turnstile right now, and you can pass that on to pretty much any email provider that you use, or you can download those into a CSV to use anywhere else. You’re using automation system or even visitor tracking, when people put in their information into the turnstile form that will automatically create a record in one of the systems for you so you shouldn’t have to do any exporting and importing things like that.
Q: What is the ideal length of videos?
A: From Wistia’s end, we’ve seen videos do the best when they’re under two minutes long. If you’re going to use video in email, I would definitely suggest starting at the 32nd mark, something like that, anywhere that’s under a minute. Because if you use that timestamp in your email in the video thumbnail, folks will look at it and they’ll see, “Oh, 45 seconds, I have that, I’m out of time, no problem, I’ll go click it. Whereas if you’re video is, let’s say three-minutes long, and they look at that, they’ll more likely to say, “Oh, three minutes. I don’t know, that seems like a lot of time. So I would just suggest start short and go from there. A minute or two is good, and I think the capabilities we’ve talked about today, you know, if you got, I mentioned you know, solution B, right. So maybe you have that video on your landing page, don’t try to cram everything and find that video. Remember, you now have the capabilities to automatically trigger follow-up communication. So it could be something like instead of a 10-minute video, you could have five, two-minute video clips. So they watch the first video, and you know, more soon or something like that, and then you follow up with those additional video emails, and you can completely automate all that. So you set up your campaign and let it run.
Q: Any tips for convince your boss strategy for adopting a marketing automation program, can you talked about that?
A: It’s a lot easier if you are you the boss, but if you do need to convince your boss, you know I think you’d sit there and you kind of look at really two things. Number one, you look at ROI. So every business is different. Again, it could be your chicken sandwiches like Margot talk about, or you’re selling 10, 50, 100 thousand dollar services. So you know, if automation can again accelerate the sale or help make bigger purchases, remember those numbers, 47% larger purchases on average by the use of marketing automation. That’s really compelling. So sit there and do the math based on your business. The second thing that I’d tell your boss is I would say that, you know, automation can help your company be more efficient. Now, that’s oftentimes a hard thing to measure and quantify, but if you can implement processes like this, that are automated that you can continue to reuse over and over, and through doing things like tracking your businesses and people that come to your website, that’s like adding a salesperson into your website. Again, depending on your business, sales people are not inexpensive. So you’ve got a big expense there. But you’ve got huge efficiency gains in building an automation in your business. It helps your company be more efficient and be more process oriented, and that’s critical when you want to grow your business. You know, you can’t build a business off of a poor foundation. You got have a good foundation. So I’d say to sum that up, look at the ROI based on your business, and then number two, really looked at the efficiency gains through automation, and how do you quantify that.
Q: Should the video thumbnail take the readers to a landing page with a video with another content or just play the video?
A: What you want you want to do is you want to take the video thumbnail which is that photo of what that video screen looks like with the play button and the timestamp, and put that in your email, and then link that out to either your website like Ryan was saying earlier, or to a landing page, or to your blog or wherever it is that that video may lift. So that video is not going to play in the email itself. It’s going to link your audience to wherever that video lift. So it’s on a website, your landing page, or blog, your library, wherever it may lift. From there, you’re going to be able to track with Wistia, how do people watch that video, are they watching to a certain point, are they following up in a certain point, are they re-watching, maybe they’re confused about something in the video, or maybe they’re really interested about something in the video. So you can get your analytics from that. Email clients, right, so when I say an email client, either things like, again, Google mail or Outlook or Lotus Notes, you know, whatever you’re using, many of them cannot play or run JavaScript right which is a coding language. So your browser is the client that really people should be using to watch your video, not the email client. There’s a big difference between the two. I think that really is a misunderstanding, you know, we have a ton of people come to us and, “Oh, we just want to put those video inside the email,” but that’s technologically not a great idea. Some clients can play it, but for the most part, you’re safer and better off to get that additional tracking putting your video on your landing page.
Q: What are your findings on using animated .gifs in an email to tease a video instead of just a still image thumbnail?
A: But you know, it’s hard to say when we haven’t the full AB test. We’ve seen them do really well for us, and I know, I click on gifts when they’re coming at me from a different company email. It’s just really engaging, it’s new, it’s different, it’s exciting, you can do a lot of really fun stuff with it. I would definitely say test it out. See how it works for your company. We haven’t done a full AB test so I can’t really say, “Oh, for sure it works really well.” But you know, we’ve seen good things, and we might test it out soon. So yeah, try it out.
Q: Can I use turnstile if I don’t have an email provider?
A: You definitely can, you can just download those emails into a CSV. You can definitely try it out or you know you can try out a provider for free, like if there’s a free plan or, you know, definitely, the answer short is yes. Hope you have travel insurance.
Q: Have you seen increase engagement based on the content of the thumbnail image?
A: So people versus product versus text. I would definitely say, Christopher, for us, human faces work best by far. I can’t give you specific numbers because we haven’t—I don’t think we’ve done any AB tests although you can check me on that, and go to wistia.com/blog and see that we have—we definitely see that, putting a human face in there is going to be way better than text. And I believe in the past better than product photos as well. It’s just more engaging, it’s more human, people want to see others smiling, excited, and it works best for us by far. We usually do photos of folks or video thumbnails of folks waving at the camera smiling or maybe they’re really excited something just happened and they’re like wow, but by far, human faces worked best for us.
Q: How do you encourage more staff to be a part of videos who don’t feel comfortable in front of the camera or do you encourage one or two staff members to become regulars sharing information for your office?
A: A lot of people don’t like being on camera. It’s totally natural. It gets a little bit—it’s a little bit getting used to, mixed up my phrases there. But actually, if you go to wistima.com/blog, we do have a blog post about how to work with folks on camera, how to make it easy for them. We have a few best practices that we use. I would definitely recommend checking out. We generally just tell people shake it out, shake out their emotions, jump around, get silly, get weird, and then you know, that helps you get ready for the video. We take a bunch of takes, so we don’t go all at once, and we also split up the script a little bit so folks feel more comfortable. Lots of different ways to do those. I would definitely check out that blog post. Okay, let’s see. And so I did mention that, and I don’t intend to lead with that always. But just to comment, it is a full-featured platform that we do offer. I encourage you to check it out. You know, Jennifer, that is a deeper level of conversation, but you know, we’re not a public company. We are private company. So we tend to provide better service and cater more on, you know, to that mid-type company as opposed to just trying to focus on larger enterprises. Also have some very unique capabilities in the platform. We tend to score really well when it comes to our automation capabilities. We’ve got some advance setting there, and then some cool ways, like I mentioned, to help you convert more people on your website.
Q: From your experience, is there a certain type of video that does better in emails than others?
A: So, how to videos, humor, emotional, etc. I’d say that we haven’t tested anything like that and I would say that it’s kind of difficult to tell because you’re just doing that video thumbnail, right. The video thumbnail generally doesn’t tell you a lot about the content of the video. It’s an engaging piece for folks to want to click into that landing page or wherever it is that you put the video to watch it. I would say in terms of the video thumbnail, if it’s something that is like overly funny, you know, it doesn’t do as well. We want folks to want to watch the video but we don’t want to make it ridiculous, because then people are like, wow does this really concern me, is this important. So I would just say, you know, make that video thumbnail engaging, but don’t go over the top, if that helps. Just do one, you know, I think it’s a little bit of a paradigm shift, you know, people are not really used to putting video in emails, but I mentioned earlier, the best practice, try to keep it educational, but do that, but you know, be consistent in your communication for that. Give them something of value, and then, maybe not the first one is a good metric for you, but after you give them something of value and your following up with more video emails, whether it’s an automated way, or just one-by-one, that’s going to be the best thing for you to help drive engagement.
Q: Do turnstiles always require response or is there an option for someone to decline to answer the information and continue?
A: There is a skip option on turnstile. So if you want folks to be able to just get the turnstile and not have the option of not entering their email address, you can definitely do that. I don’t recommend it, because then everyone will skip that, but I guess it does make it especially qualifying for the folks who do enter their email address. That’s absolutely up to you.
Q: Have you used the skip option before, Ryan?
A: Yes we do. We do offer that on certain videos. We put a lot of our training videos on Wistia. If you see on our website, we have explainer videos. So we have used that, of course, depending on the video, but one other important point I want to make and not to highlight our capability too much here, but going back to how you can send your email. You know, we’ve actually built in a feature inside Lead Liaison so that when you’re sending your video email, you obviously know who you’re sending it to through the marketing automation system. And when people click through that video thumbnail and go to your website, we know who that person is. So there’s a built-in option to not actually show turnstile because you know that they’re engaging you know who it is, and we know that from the immediate, you know, click through on your video email. That’s an optional thing where you don’t have to offer that up to them in the turnstile. You can show it or the technology can just automatically hide it, you know, why ask them, why stop things, just keep the video going. So that’s a feature inside our tracking system. It’s a great resource, and also really good reason to use Lead Liaison because if you know that person already, you don’t need their email address again. Showing them that turnstile is not the best user-experience for them. So if it’s someone that you already know, use that feature to hide that turnstile.
Q: Is it better to have the thumbnail take the reader to a webpage with just the video or one with the video plus other copy and maybe a registration form?
A: Take that person from the email to a page with the video with other copy there with a registration form, perhaps, wherever it is that that video lives. So whether it’s a landing page or it’s your blog post, and the video is just there to enhance the blog post, you can definitely do a page with just the video, but you want to go back and say, “What’s the point of this video? What’s the CTA for the video? What do I want this person to do once they watch the video?” And from there, I would just take that video and put it where you want it to be. I think that’s subjective in terms of adding, you know, your text in your form. If you are using a marketing automation platform, then you’re sending the email from the marketing automation system, you’re going to already know who that person is when they click the video thumbnail. So the cool thing is make it easy for the recipient. So when that form loads up, if you choose to have a form, you can read through that form. So again, save them time. Maybe you don’t require them to enter their information in the turnstile video. Now they can watch the video performance, you know, 90% pre-filled with their information. They just hit the enter button. So make it easy for people, simplify the process.
Q: When you test the effect of embedding a turnstile in the middle of the video, do you track what percentage of viewers simply build out of the video rather than enter their information?
A: No, we don’t track that. We just track the amount of folks who fill out that turnstile, and whether it works better in the middle, better in the beginning, better in the end. I can, however pull up, just to clarify on that. I can pull up that test that we did. We wrote a blog post about it. I will tweet it right after this webinar using with the #WistiaCast so you get a little bit of a better idea on how that test worked. I definitely am one of those people who wants to know everything about every test that’s absolutely me.
Marketing automation helps with three most-wanted things; speed, personalization, and better reach. But, if not done right, all of your marketing efforts can fire back pretty bad. Here are the most common mistakes that marketers do in automating their marketing efforts and how to avoid them.
Reaching Out To Wrong People at Wrong Time
One of the most common drawbacks of marketing automation is that your subscribers get more emails than they may want. And if you are being just another “spammer” who sends all sorts of emails to all of your subscribers, they are most likely going to unsubscribe from your communications, or your marketing automation provider or ESP will put a stop to it.
Irrelevant offers, no matter how cool they are, don’t attract the customers. Make sure that you are reaching out to the right customers and at right time with a relevant message.
Personalization Not Done Right
Personalization goes way beyond the general interests of your customers. It is important to keep a close track of your subscribers’ online journey and trigger multiple marketing channels including emails, direct mail and personalized website content while making them highly relevant.
Let us explain this with an example: suppose a customer buys a product or solution from you. It is highly likely that the customer may want to buy more items related to the orininal product/solution. It is important to let your customer know about other interesting solutions you have available, along with any special discounts and offers.
Not Allocating Proper Budget/Resources
Automation does all kinds of amazing things, yet a few people expect to gain big results by investing nothing other than money. Keep in mind that a credible automation platform may cost you between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. But, you also need to gauge how much time you have to invest in learning the platform and populating it with amazing content. The more you invest, the better results you get.
Automating Every Single Thing
Automation is good as it saves a lot of your time and resources. But don’t automate every single thing Automating campaigns and social media is good, but you will need to invest one-on-one time to engage with clients once they interact with your automations. There are many examples when companies turned all the odds into opportunities by prudently using the social media. Engage with your audience!
Final Words
Marketing automation is a powerful car, but it needs a driver. Make sure that you are ready to commit to marketing automation as a strategy, not just a solution.
Guest Post Bio:
Andrew Lowen is the CEO of Next Level Web, a trusted marketing agency based in San Diego, California. He has three lovely daughters and the most patient wife of all time. They specialize in Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, PPC Advertising, and Email Marketing (The Agency – not the daughters… yet). See case studies & results of happy clients at www.NextLevelWeb.com.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/pexels-photo-317356.jpeg40696144Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-02-23 14:51:552018-06-25 15:35:55Marketing Automation Gone Wrong – Turn Your Cons To Pros
As salespeople we are all excited about what we do, that’s why we do it. We are passionate about our products, services or solutions and will talk to anyone anytime about it if they show the least bit of interest. That’s what makes us great at what we do, but I also feel like maybe we’re giving the cookies away for free. It’s in our nature to “sell, sell, sell” anytime we can, but I’ve found that’s not always the best approach. You know you’ve got a great product, so don’t give it away the first time you talk to everyone. Make sure you have a truly qualified lead, before dedicating more valuable time.
There’s a system of selling called the SPIN method that, if you’re not familiar with, you should take a look at. The method can be broken down into a few basic parts. SPIN stands for: Situation, Problem, Implication, Need/Payoff. This is how to qualify your leads: ask questions! Find out what their current situation is. Do they use a competitor? Do they have events or marketing goals they need to scale up to meet?
Then ask questions to identify the problems they are having. Is it lack of communication between sales and marketing? Are they filling their pipeline and losing customers in the mix? The implication is as simple as “What would your team do with…?” or “If I can solve that for you would you…?”.
These steps are all you should be doing to find a qualified lead. Once you get to that point you’ll know; if it’s a good fit and what pain points they have that you can solve. Hopefully, a bit of additional qualifying info such as: do they have a budget, are you talking to someone with the authority to make this purchase, and what is their time-frame for the need (classic “BANT” criteria).
From there you can decide if it’s worth YOUR time to spend more time with them, or nurture them and move on. Hopefully that 15 minute call got them excited to move to the next step: filling their need. Go ahead and set up that next meeting! Now you’re spending more time with qualified, interested leads and not giving the cookies away for free to every person you talk to.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/pexels-photo-859264.jpeg51207680Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-02-13 14:59:292018-06-25 15:36:24The Value of a Qualified Lead
What’s the difference between marketing automation and sales enablement? On the surface, the two solutions seem very similar; however, they serve different purposes. In this article we’ll compare and contrast marketing automation with sales enablement.
Primary User
The first difference is with the primary user. Sales enablement is used by sales people whereas marketing automation is used by marketers. Now, don’t get me wrong – sales enablement can be used by people in roles outside of sales, but we’re talking about the primary user here. Marketing automation is more advanced than sales enablement and is designed to meet the demands of different types of sophisticated marketing campaigns. For example, marketing automation actions can have different business logic (rules) wrapped around the actions while sales enablement actions have no additional criteria. Marketing automation also has a number of different action types, such as the ability to change field values, delete records, sync records to a CRM, distribute leads, and more. On the other hand, sales enablement has only a handful of actions commonly used by sales people when doing outreach, such as emails, handwritten letters, text messages, and postcards.
Where Do the Emails Come From?
The second difference between marketing automation and sales enablement is the way that email messages are sent. With marketing automation, emails are sent through the marketing automation provider’s network. Emails sent through sales enablement are sent through the company’s email server. This is typically an Exchange server, Google, Office 365, etc. With sales enablement businesses have more control over their messages, typically better deliverability, and optional unsubscribe text in the emails.
Email Tracking Differences
The third major difference between sales enablement and marketing automation is the level of email tracking. Marketing automation solutions typically track opens and clicks; however, they do not typically detect when someone replies to an email. On the contrary, sales enablement solutions can detect replies, out of office notifications, forwards, and more – making it easy to automatically take action based on this outcome. With sales enablement, people can be automatically removed from the flow when they reply to a message or the conversation can be paused for a defined period when an out of office occurs. With marketing automation, prospects need to be manually removed, or removed with an automated action, if they need to be pulled out of a workflow. Ideally, your marketing automation platform is used for building an already established relationship; whereas sales enablement is ideal for creating brand new relationships. As a result, the need to manually remove people from a marketing automation workflow is much lower if the focus is on building an existing relationship.
Who You’re Targeting
This is a great segue into the last difference between the two systems, which is who the solution targets and where the solution is used in the overall buyer’s journey. Because of its simplicity and sales-friendly setup, sales enablement is ideally suited to fill the top of the funnel. Relationships are usually not forged yet at this stage, and sales enablement can help build those connections. Companies with an inside sales team, business development reps, or reps focusing on major accounts will benefit from using sales enablement. Marketing automation is ideal for people in the middle or bottom of the funnel, when a relationship already exists. Since communication is sent out through the providers network its important to follow the providers rules and sending policies, and send to only prospects with whom you have a relationship with who want to get your email. With sales enablement, emails go through your company’s servers. How you send messages and to whom is up to you.
In Summary
Feel free to use the below summary to forward to your friends and colleagues to help them better understand the differences between marketing automation and sales enablement.
automatically removes people that reply from any automated communication stream (Lead Liaison Rhythms™)
emails do not require an unsubscribe link
is a platform to set sales goals
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/sales-enablement-blog.png400698Ryan Schefkehttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngRyan Schefke2018-01-31 14:21:292018-06-25 15:36:48What’s the difference between marketing automation and sales enablement?
We have all been there. You schedule a call with a hot prospect, only to realize that they are a no-show for your initial sales call or demonstration. No-shows are notorious in the online meeting world (i.e. GoToMeetings, etc.). While everyone will be no-showed occasionally, the frequency of no-shows is directly related to your process.
What are the dangers of no-shows?
You have a limited amount of time to sell during the week. Every time you set aside a block of time and there is a no-show, you lose 5% of your income for that week. If and when you do reschedule, you have lesser value and a lower perception of importance to the prospect as you appear to be the needy one in the relationship. You have also lost out on time spent chasing other opportunities.
Top reasons for no-shows:
Rare and tragic personal issue/illness. It happens – people get sick and are unable to come to the office. With this, I would suggest a different strategy.
You didn’t create importance and interest in the meeting. Thus, other things became a higher priority.
The prospect lacks the ability to buy. Though they were curious about your offering, you failed to qualify if the buyer had the ability to buy your product if you were able to show them a path to success.
The prospect does not respect your time as a professional because your introduction was weak.
How do you combat no-shows?
Pre-qualification. By asking a lot of probing questions before the meeting, you are letting your prospect know that your time is important. You are also letting them know that you see a potential fit between their need and your capabilities. Lastly, you are letting them know that your meeting isn’t just a “getting to know you” session; but instead a bonafide opportunity to fix their pain points. It’s an opportunity that they can afford to invest in and execute.
Every introductory sales meeting should have a defined, but simple agenda. This agenda can be provided as a friendly reminder of the sales call the day before the meeting. This way, the prospect can fill in any blanks or important points that they may want you to address in detail. It’s also a great way to find out if other people will be attending the meeting from their side.
When someone does no-show, send a simple note letting them know that you arrived but they were not available. Instead of chasing a no-show prospect, put them into an automated workflow to educate and build their interest. If they are serious about doing business with you, they will suggest another time for a meeting. If they no-showed because they lack attention/interest/desire/action (AIDA), they are probably going to be in the same situation a week from now. Recognize that you scheduled your discussion too early in the process and start over. It’s your job to rebuild AIDA through education that does not require a lot of your time. The exception to this rule is personal tragedy/illness. In those cases, be human and let them know that you are available to talk again if/when their situation clears up.
Note: This is a very simple workflow that you can enact with Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation or Sales Enablement solutions. With the push of a button, I cancel my meeting and put the prospect into a very simple/well-thought-out flow which benefits both the prospect and the salesperson.
One last note. I know that a lot of business development people are going to turn to ask what should you do when a prospect fills out a “contact us” form, or asks you for a meeting? These opportunities can be huge home runs, or fool’s gold. The first thing that I do in this situation is use a solution like Lead Liaison’s ProspectVision™ to better understand how much the client knows about my company. I want to know how they were referred to my site (was it a partner, an article, a search engine, etc?). I also want to know what the prospect knows about me. For example, if they have spent hours and researched dozens of pages on my website (including the pricing page) before calling me, then they have essentially pre-qualified themselves. On the other hand, I am always wary of prospects that know little about my company but want a demo/discussion. Such prospects are likely to set up dozens of meeting with dozens of competitors simply to learn, with no goals or buying decisions on the horizon. In such situations, cancellations are very likely. Again, through a simple ProspectVision™ analysis, I’m often able to identify and overcome potential no-shows before the happen.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/pexels-photo-265101.jpeg29154381Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-01-24 14:47:452018-06-25 15:37:58Why Do People No-Show for Sales Appointments?
Nonprofits need marketing automation, plain and simple. Specifically because marketing automation can help nonprofits make the most of their marketing budgets. In this series, we are talking about the ways that nonprofits and marketing automation can work together to generate more giving.
Omni-Channel Fundraising for Nonprofits
Omni-channel fundraising should be part of a nonprofit’s strategy. Also a part of marketing automation, omni-channel fundraising allows nonprofits to reach audiences across multiple channels, both online and offline. It allows marketers to be omnipresent. When the strategy is implemented correctly, omni-channel fundraising drives up retention rates and increases the long-term value of donors.
Let’s look at the components that go into omni-channel fundraising.
Online Methods
The online world is full of potential donors, just looking for the perfect story or philosophy that hits home. These donors have a higher cumulative value than mail-acquired donors do, so you want to reach this market in any way possible.
Email Marketing & Social Media
Lead Liaison uses a multi-pronged approach to online fundraising. Automated email marketing (aka “Lead Nurturing”) is an excellent way to build relationships with donors on a personal level, while social media allows nonprofits to showcase their culture and promote events. You can also use social media for building and continuing conversations with donors.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) should be a part of any online fundraising campaign, as well. You’ll use this strategy to optimize your landing pages and forms, and to include a call to action that’s easily searchable. Lead Liaison tracks all the results and continues to optimize the campaign.
PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a tool you can use to quickly drive traffic to your nonprofit site. You can build and track campaigns, constantly optimizing them to generate the best results. In many cases, you may use the same keywords for your website and your pay-per-click campaigns, while testing out new keywords, as well. This will help you improve your paid reach while also improving your search engine optimization.
Text Messages
You should also include text messaging in your campaign. Ninety-nine percent of text messages are read within five minutes of being received, so you know your texts will get out in front of your market. Reach out to your donors on text, and let them donate by sending a text message. With an average text-to-give donation of $107, this is a lucrative option.
Offline Methods
In order to truly be everywhere, omni-channel fundraising should also include offline methods. Mail-acquired donors have good retention rates, so you’ll want to reach out via postcards or personal, handwritten letters. This helps build relationships and is an excellent way to stand out to donors. You can automate this process, so the postcards and letters (yes, you can even automate the handwritten letters!) go out to your lists without you having to fill out address labels or send the mailings yourself.
Omni-channel fundraising is an important aspect of marketing automation. The best campaigns reach people online and offline. This maximizes retention and donation amounts. Use these strategies to increase the amount of money you have coming into your nonprofit organization.
To learn more about how marketing automation can help nonprofits increase giving, nurture donors, and empower their communities, click here!
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/nonprofitsmarketingautomation.jpeg14142000Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-01-12 13:00:292018-06-25 15:38:35Nonprofits and Marketing Automation: Omni-Channel Fundraising
With over 1 billion active Facebook users, it’s considered the ‘go to’ platform for social media marketers.
Many social media experts have ploughed time and effort into building a great audience, have lots of engagement, and have suddenly seen this drop.
This is because the social media platform has been on rather a mission recently to drive businesses to use advertising services, and are limiting how many business page posts show in users feed.
Therefore it is crucial that those using Facebook start to ‘think smart’ about how their website and Facebook work together, to ensure that those adverts are doing exactly what you want – creating new leads!
What is Facebook Pixel?
One great tool comes from Facebook itself, which is the Facebook Pixel. By installing Facebook pixel on your website, you are able to track visitors from your Facebook campaigns on your site. This is a great way to see what ads are working, and perhaps which ones are not doing so well!
Better still, the Facebook pixel allows you to better understand your audience when building new advertisements. For example, how about running an advertisement which just targets those who visited a specific page of your website. For example, you sell a range of clothing – men’s, women’s and children’s. You can set up specific advertisements targeted at audiences separately depending on whether they visited the men’s, women’s or children’s section of your site. So far so good right?
You can even create ‘look alike’ audiences, based on your current audiences, so Facebook will target your advertisements to similar people as your current data base, so it’s a great way to reach relevant new audiences.
How to Combine Facebook Advertising with Automation
However, if you truly want to supercharge your marketing efforts – why not combine your advertising campaign with some awesome automation. If you are tracking custom events via both Facebook and your CRM – you can really start to subtly build brand awareness through a mutli-channel campaign.
Let’s take the fashion example again. You set up a responsive campaign to abandoned cart shoppers. This sparks an event 1 day after to email the buyer with a follow up offer. You then combine this with an ad campaign, based also on abandoned cart shoppers. Assuming they are on Facebook, they then see your ad at the side of the feed. Add in a few CTA’s to follow your Facebook page, and voila – you have are building a really engaging campaign, where users are being constantly but subtly being reminded of your brand!
Author Bio: Charlotte Sheridan is the director of The Small Biz Expert, a full service digital marketing agency specifically tailored to the needs of small businesses.
