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Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation for Agencies Just Got Easier

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Lead Liaison introduces a powerful, yet easy to use marketing automation for agencies solution with frictionless go-to-market options.

Lead Liaison has released an enhancement to its marketing automation solution for agencies. Marketing agencies of all sizes can now boost their digital service offerings with a professional-grade marketing automation platform at the core of their business at affordable prices.

According to manta.com, there are close to 135,000 Advertising & Marketing Companies in the United States alone. Now, all of these companies have an ideal sales and marketing automation platform to help manage their customers multi-channel marketing across a variety of online and offline channels in a very targeted way. Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® helps agencies automate web, email, direct mail (postcard), social media, SMS and promotional marketing using a drag and drop interface that’s simple, intuitive and powerful.

Lead Liaison’s marketing agency solution is vastly different from competing solutions offered by other marketing automation providers like Marketo, Eloqua or HubSpot. First, Lead Liaison offers a disruptive business model. Instead of gouging customers with various editions and escalating prices Lead Liaison delivers a single platformwith cost predictability – helping agencies go to market with less friction. Second, Lead Liaison provides the best value-per-dollar with enterprise-level software at small business prices; usually a fraction of what a marketing agency would pay another vendor for similar services. Marketing agencies can take a deep breath knowing they’ve got lower total cost of ownership with an easier solution to manage, lower fees, better digital marketing services and ultimately, peace of mind.

The catalyst for the enhancement is a new feature from Lead Liaison that makes it easy for marketing agencies to manage multiple accounts. A marketing agency administrator can dynamically switch between multiple end-customer accounts, just like switching between email accounts using Google Mail. Marketing agencies can also favorite accounts to have them appear below their login and selectively assign accounts to account managers, making it easy for account managers to work with their client pool.

On the short-term horizon is even more good news for marketing agencies looking to dive into marketing automation. The ability to white label, also known as private label, Lead Liaison’s software to keep tighter control of their customer base and retain brand experience.

For more information see Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation for Agencies page.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert, and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automated processes.

Press inquiries:

Amber Turrill
VP, Corporate Communications
corporate(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Lead Liaison

Consumer Engagement is Key to Brand Success

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Consumer Engagement is Brand SuccessConsumers aren’t just looking for you to hold their hand throughout the transaction process – they are looking for consumer engagement, the core concept in making trusted transactions happen for your business. Keeping consumers engaged is all about providing them with an experience that they can find informative and trustworthy. That experience should also hold their attention.

The right marketing automation software can help you measure engagement, but unless you have a solid consumer engagement strategy for your brand on the whole, automation isn’t going to give back the kind of helpful data you’re looking for. It’s important to incorporate marketing automation into your overall strategy. The automation itself is not meant to serve as a standalone strategy.

Understanding Consumer Engagement

The first step to engagement is to understand the various methods consumers use to engage. Social media is a big one – you’ll want to target areas on the web where consumers are spending a great amount of passive time. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are easily available via desktop or mobile, allowing you the ability to engage with consumers no matter where they – or you – are. Social media also presents ease of engagement, with the ability to chat so quickly back and forth that the flexibility and power of a chat room can be utilized.

The same holds true for blogs and forums. Even if you’re not engaging directly, you can create contextual ads that give customers the opportunity to find out about you and engage with you in other ways. The Google Adwords Display program is a good example of this. Adwords Display places your ad on relevant blogs and news sites. Customers can engage with you via a text, graphic or video ad.

Tracking Consumer Engagement

Once you have an engagement strategy in place, it’s important to let your marketing automation company do the monitoring, then interpret your data. For instance, you may want to measure social media engagement over time based on what time you’re posting. Your marketing automation service can give you an idea as to what the profile is of your average user, what time Tweets or Facebook posts are most effective and how users are getting to your website based on your social profiles.

Because this is sensitive data that can be critical to your company’s marketing strategy, it’s important to select a marketing automation partner with the right tools – a company with your best interests in mind. Lead Liaison helps businesses stay in line with success through marketing automation tools that work for businesses of all sizes. Visit us at Lead Liaison.com to find out more!

Lead Liaison

Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

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Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Lead Liaison

Leveraging the Power of Automated Text Messaging

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Automated Text MessagingMany people feel their relationships with their mobile technology – particularly smart phones- is sacred, limiting the opportunity for businesses to use automated text messaging and similar services to market their products. Many businesses overstepped their boundaries with automated text messaging, resulting in unsubscribes and giving text solicitation a bad name.

Fortunately, not all text messaging to potential clients is bad or unwanted. The key to working with bulk text messaging automation is understanding what clients want to see from you as well as proper segmentation. Blasting customers on the same list over and over again with daily texts is sure to get you bounces early on in the process.

So, how can you approach customers with automated text messaging in a way that doesn’t irritate the customer, but creates a conversion opportunity for your products or services?

Split Your List

Text messaging is something you should definitely take it easy on – messages should be brief, concise and sent infrequently. The lack of frequency requires a solid commitment to delivering only the most important messaging. That’s why it’s so important to split your list – make sure that the messaging you send out reaches the right clients.

Segment lists based on special offers, reminding clients when a certain promotion or webinar is taking place or announce contests. Make unsubscribe options very easy for clients to meet federal regulations. Ensuring you deliver the right kind of messaging to the right subscription list will decrease your chances of high unsubscribes.

Also, keep time frames in mind. Customers don’t want to receive texts from you on a daily basis. Avoid texting on holidays when clients may be enjoying time with their families and will only be distracted or annoyed by messaging.

Automated Text Messaging That Works

It’s important to work with a service that will allow you to segment lists and use text messaging for a variety of purposes. You can also create company lists that will allow you to remind employees of important meetings or office functions. You can use bulk texting to broadcast weather updates that affect work hours or keep your employees in the know about any other important happenings.

Bulk text messaging allows customers and even employees to stay on top of what’s happening at your organization. If used the right way with the best service provider, text messaging can provide some return on your investment.

Lead Liaison has partnered with Twilio to offer bulk text messaging, giving even more functionality to your site’s marketing automation back end! Contact us today to find out more.

Lead Liaison

Social Monitoring: Do You Need It?

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Social Monitoring: Do You Need It?Many businesses implement complex marketing automation systems with a goldmine of data coming in – yet never seem to think about social monitoring. Taking a look at how customers behave when they use your website or view your marketing materials can give you a ton of great information, but you’re not always going to get the full picture of a user’s behavior scope.

While you’re confronted with raw data that can inform your marketing plan and increase branding or even sales, you may be missing out on valuable information that puts you in the loop about what customers are actually looking for. By monitoring conversations surrounding your brand and relevant keywords, you can get a better idea of how to craft customized content and engage with your audiences at a higher level.

Social Monitoring: What is It?

In a nutshell, social monitoring is about watching what your customers are tuning into online in order to make decisions about the types of content you put out there and how you represent your brand.

For instance, if you own a tire company and communicate with customers directly on your Facebook page, you may find that a decent amount of customers ask questions about flats – repairing tires, when to buy new tires and how to avoid driving on a tire that is in dangerously bad shape. You see social media conversations on your Facebook as well as web searches asking questions about tires.

However, major news stories are out there highlighting the dangers of driving in various weather conditions without the appropriate tire. Your competitors are engaging in dialogue with potential customers on their own Facebook pages and within various news stories about tire conditions in bad weather.  If you’re not having these conversations, you’re missing out on putting yourself and your expertise in front of customers in a way that would result in brand recognition and sales.

Engaging Socially

The above is a simplistic example, but you can apply it to just about any industry. There are plenty of ways to figure out the kinds of things your customers want to talk about. Check hashtags on Twitter, set up an alert for your core business keywords using http://alerts.google.com, or incentivize customers to complete online surveys that gauge what types of topics they’re interested in talking about. You can also look to click through and open rate in your email marketing efforts to determine what content best engages customers.

Marketing automation is a must for your business, but the more data you can collect from other channels, the more reliably you can determine the best direction for your marketing. You deserve a marketing automation dashboard that gives you everything in a package – from article writing to social monitoring to robust reports and engagement suggestions. Check out Lead Liaison’s dashboard to find out more about how a well-rounded marketing automation tool can take your business to the next level!

Lead Liaison

Boost Demand Generation through Sales and Marketing Alignment

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Boost Demand Generation through Sales and Marketing AlignmentWe know successful deals aren’t created and closed by the sales team alone; there’s significant homage due to the marketing team in their demand generation efforts and kick-starting the funnel. To maximize outcome, the secret is to enable your business to boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment. Don’t get us wrong—this doesn’t mean cutting the marketing team altogether and asking sales to take over (check out this case study); rather, have the two teams work harmoniously to achieve the best results.

Manage the Data

Between the two departments, data should be gathered and analyzed and best practices defined. When determining which strategies have proven most successful, keep in mind the four primary phases of demand generation: awareness, interest, preference, and commitment.

The goals here are to drive awareness and interest through successful inbound and outbound marketing that will enhance the sales cycle. In order to boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment, both teams must be focused on determining the buyer persona. The marketing team gains awareness of and attention from potential prospects (suspects) through understanding who they are and what they want. This knowledge comes through the eyes of the sales team. By having a comprehensive profile of the current buyer persona, marketers can more directly target the audience and create more personalized campaigns, such as email marketing, which in turn drive higher return rates. Gather, analyze, and share the knowledge.

Guide Validation

Once the marketing team has generated demands, the next step is to convince the suspects that your solution is best through generating the leads. The marketing team has a plethora of ammunition to accomplish this: whitepapers, videos, blogs, reviews, direct mail, etc. Re-analyze and reuse the data collected from automated marketing solutions to further personalize each point of contact with the prospect to determine scoring and qualification, and pass only the qualified ones over to sales.

Nurturing the leads to the point of qualification comes when you boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment. If the demand generation is low, activity in the pipeline is low, close rates are low. It’s key to have a solid grasp of the initial steps in order to maximize flow in the funnel to the closing steps. Implementing marketing programs that work together with a structured sales process will help to build awareness about your solution, remind prospects why your solution is better than others, and convert prospects into customers.

Lead Liaison

The Value of Multi-Channel Marketing

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Multi-Channel Marketing is the Way to GoIn today’s marketplace, it’s essential to reach as many customers and prospects as possible. The best way to communicate with your target audience is with multi-channel marketing. Using just one marketing method – such as email – is no longer enough to remain competitive. The various marketing channels all offer unique advantages for promoting your company. By creating an integrated marketing plan, you ensure your company’s survival and profitability. Forrester Research reports that 86% of marketers understand that multi-channel marketing is essential for long-term growth. It’s important to understand the value of multi-channel marketing.

Email Campaigns

Marketing with email is still a viable and inexpensive option. With email you can send out useful information to targeted customers on your lists. You can also easily split test your emails to find the one that offers the highest return on investment. Express Pigeon reports that email marketing brings in a 4,300 percent ROI.

Print Media

Although many companies market online, it’s still a good idea to promote your business offline as well. Sending out print brochures, postcards, flyers, and other printed materials are a good way to generate new leads and bring potential customers to your website.

Promotional Items

Branding is another important method for selling your products or services. With a company name and logo on promotional items such as pens, calendars, note pads, and magnets, you can spread the word about your business by giving something useful away for free.

Direct Mail

For many, sending out direct mail pieces to a targeted audience is still an effective method of lead generation. Although it is more expensive than other methods, your letter is more likely to be opened and read, especially with fewer companies utilizing direct mail today.

Text Messaging

Mobile marketing is on the rise with around 98% of text messages read within a few minutes, reports EZTexting.com. By using text messages, you can communicate and interact with potential customers while increasing brand awareness. It’s no longer enough just to use email. To compete in the business world today, a company has to utilize a host of marketing strategies. The strategies should all work together, and compliment each other, to send out a unified message. By creating an integrated marketing approach via multiple channels, you boost your company’s success in a global marketplace.

Lead Liaison

How to Design a Successful Lead Distribution Process

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How to Design a Successful Lead Distribution ProcessDon’t let another lead slip through the cracks because of poor lead distribution practices. Minimize human error through an automated distribution system while also implementing an analytical way to effectively distribute your hard-earned leads. There are several methods of lead distribution to choose from; it is critical that you have done due diligence in determining the best process for distributing your leads. Take the following considerations into account when determining how to design a successful lead distribution process for your team that will maximize conversion.

Iterative Process

First and most importantly, optimize the distribution process through iterative evaluation—test, evaluate, optimize, and retest. Each lead is different and each sales rep unique, so it is expected that results will vary each time. Create a systematically evolving process that encompasses the most effective combination of the various distribution methods (round robin, push/pull, top performers, etc), depending on which stage of the sale you’re in. No one method will be the most effective; rather it’s a combination of them that will produce the successful lead distribution process.

Utilize Your Skill Sets

With your marketing automation practices, you are already collecting a plethora of data on each lead. Put it to use. Use the “specialization method” of lead distribution to assign leads to reps based on the lead’s interest and buying readiness (all of which can be found through visitor tracking practices). Evaluate the lead’s profile and distribute to a specific channel that will enable your rep to be the most prepared and able to accommodate the lead.

Evaluating each lead before distribution can be a timely process and may or may not be worth the marketing team’s time; reserve this method for leads that have greater buyer readiness (based on their previous behavior). Misdirecting a lead can have a detrimental consequence, for example, sending a lead to the incorrect sales rep and wasting the lead’s time as they are redirected to the correct sales rep with the corresponding expertise.

Effective Scaling

In order to design a successful lead distribution process, you must be able scale the lead management process effectively. For high volume lead processing, round robin is not the best route to take. Take time to understand the patterns, and from those results implement a shared push/pull method that enables sales reps to better manage their workloads (which translates to higher quality lead nurturing) while also holding them accountable for assigned tasks.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. There are many dynamic factors to consider when you are trying to design a successful lead distribution process, and because of this, the best distribution process is a constantly evolving one. Keep in mind the skill sets of your sales reps, the specifics of each product being sold, and the expectations of the leads. Utilize marketing automation practices to increase ROI and decrease lead loss. To learn more about how Lead Liaisons can make your lead distribution process more efficient, check out their solutions.

Lead Liaison

Create Content That Nurtures Your Leads

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Create Content That Nurtures Your LeadsUse your inbound marketing strategies beyond lead generation—learn how to create content that nurtures your leads too. Once leads have been generated and placed into the appropriate sales funnel, it’s crucial to qualify leads accordingly and determine as quickly as possible if a lead is not interested in you.

There are several things to keep in mind when determining best practices for nurturing qualified leads. Segmenting your streams of prospects into nurture tracks that meet their needs, ensuring a personal touch on all communications, maintaining a two-way communication channel, and integrating sales teams with marketing teams are all productive steps to nurture leads. Another way to help nurture your leads closer to the buying stage is to provide them with interesting and relevant content. Here are a few ways to integrate this into your lead nurturing system already in place:

Educate your leads

Help them to make a smart buying choice by thoroughly letting them know their options. Provide original market research stats (or find a reliable source) that show them how others in the industry make buying decisions. Be sure not to skew it too much in favor of your brand, though, to assure them it is legitimate data.

Use analytics from marketing automation

Determine how your leads prefer to receive information—via email, blog content, white papers, etc. Your marketing automation software allows you to accurately monitor the activity on your site, record when leads are available to communicate with you, and enable you to nurture targeted segments of leads. With all of this data, you are informed to create content that nurtures your leads and provides what they’re already looking for.

Repurpose content

Get the most out of each piece of content you publish. Create an informative white paper and split it up into sections to publish as individual blog posts. Then create a slide deck out of these different sections, and finally voice over the slide deck to create a video. This provides four separate types of content you can use to nurture your leads. You might find that leads that have been qualified into a particular stream prefer video over white paper, so this makes a more personalized attempt to reach out to them.

In order to create content that nurtures your leads in the most effective way, you need to utilize your marketing automation process to get the best understanding of what it is that your leads want to know. This will give you the best odds in turning leads into customers through nurturing your leads with content marketing. When considering your lead nurturing campaigns, be sure that no lead goes unnoticed and that you contact them when you say you will. Here are five additional tips to make sure you don’t lose your leads before have the opportunity to nurture them.

Lead Liaison

3 Ways Marketing Automation Helps Qualify Sales Leads

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3 Ways Marketing Automation Helps Qualify Sales LeadsDon’t waste your sales reps’ valuable time and energy chasing leads that are dead ends or aren’t your ideal buyers. But how do you weed out unfit leads from your database? It’s tedious work, even with the ability to do extensive research online. Let software relieve some of these headaches by using marketing automation to help qualify sales leads and determine which leads are worth the effort. We’re excited to share 3 ways marketing automation helps qualify sales leads.

Understand your ideal buyers

Train sales reps to qualify leads by considering long-term compatibility and potential relationships that can be built. By considering the profitability down the road, you have the opportunity to build and maintain a working relationship with these leads, communicate regularly through personalized outbound efforts, build trust, and ultimately end up with an ideal buyer. Merging creative efforts between your sales and marketing teams to determine the most effective traits you expect of the ideal buyers will greatly benefit your company. They come in handy not only for the sales team in their lead qualification process, but also for the marketing team in focusing their targeted efforts.

Maintain your database

In order to have a well-oiled CRM, it’s important to utilize lead management practices that will make life easier for sales reps and help them close more leads. Once you’ve set behavioral characteristics for your ideal buyers, Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software will help qualify sales leads and update that information for you. No need to worry about manually entering the details.

Ask the right questions

There’s no faster way to lose a lead or misqualify a lead than to have the sales rep asking indirect or irrelevant questions. Because you should be able to qualify your sales lead into one category or the other after the first call, it’s critical to gather the right information from them as efficiently as possible. During the collaboration meeting between the sales and marketing teams (as mentioned above), a helpful exercise is to brainstorm targeted questions for sales reps to ask prospects in that first phone conversation. We all know how sales calls can go—it’s easy to sound over-salesy if you exclaim the wonders of your company at the very start of the call. Instead, use that time to ask questions, determine if they may fit into the ideal buyer bucket, and most importantly, create a relationship and an emotional connection. Determine how they make decisions and what they’re looking for when they select a service provider.

Marketing automation software helps qualify sales leads through properly managing all of your lead information and ensuring accurate CRM upkeep so that sales reps have current data available to them as they need it. To learn more about how marketing automation software can help your business, check out Lead Liaison’s solutions.