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Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation: You Still Need a Sales Strategy

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Marketing Automation: You Still Need a Sales StrategyAnyone running a business comes to find out they need some type of sales strategy. While marketing automation executes a lead to sales flow seamlessly for many businesses, others find that the one-size-fits-all solution they were looking for simply isn’t present when employing their marketing automation.

As a small business, how can you make sure using marketing automation software benefits your operation at a higher level? The key is found in your strategy. Think of it this way – many business owners employ a CRM and find it absolutely necessary to the growth and success of their companies. Organizing the information and having an agreed-upon method for continuous and optimal use of the CRM isn’t something that necessarily happens overnight – it takes a deep understanding of the software and a willingness amongst team members to use an agreed-upon operations method.  Without these things, onboarding a CRM would be pointless.

Sales Strategy Development for the Small Business

Many small business owners develop their companies themselves and get caught in the undertow of change as the company grows. Small business owners can find their staff increasing by a dozen people in a year. Suddenly there are many workers without a clear sales strategy for how information will be collected and employed in marketing campaigns.

This is why growth strategy is crucial before growth even happens. Knowing where to allocate resources, how businesses will collect information and how the information informs marketing and development processes is 100% critical to keeping this organized and manageable. Starting out with tangible business goals based on calendar years or quarters is a great way to figure out what resources are needed and who will perform what task.

Using Marketing Automation for Sales Strategy

Many business owners are finding that sales strategy and marketing automation processes are inseparable. Marketing and directional decisions should be made on concrete data – and the right tools are necessary to ensuring any data collected is on point. Even the most advanced marketing automation systems may return data that’s incomplete or doesn’t work for the business. This is where good training and human monitoring come in – sifting through data in an easy, manageable way is possible. This allows companies the opportunity to work on data that is incomplete or isn’t really helping the business achieve end goals.

In order to sift through that data and make good decisions based on overarching business goals and sales strategy, the right marketing automation company and training for staff have to be in place. Lead Liaison offers training and marketing automation solutions for businesses of all sizes. Connect with us for a consult to determine what would best serve your business!

Lead Liaison

How to Integrate Social Media with your Lead Tracking

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Integrate Social Media with your Lead TrackingTo maximize your online presence, it’s important to make sure you’ve got all of your social media channels covered and that you’re regularly posting to each one. Keeping track of posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. can be a full-time job on its own. Save time and employee resources by letting marketing automation help you integrate social media with your lead tracking practices.

By tracking all of your marketing activity, including website traffic, targeted email opens, and clicks via social media campaigns, your marketing team can get a better understanding of which marketing channels are most effective and produce the highest quality leads. When you integrate social media with your lead tracking system that is already in place, you have a greater chance of generating quality leads that are more likely to convert.

With Lead Liaison’s social media solution, you have the ability to keep track of who is clicking which links, how often they’re doing so, and which of those prospects end up converting—all in one place. Using lead tracking software alongside social media campaigns allows you to track and measure real-time visitor activity and clearly see where site traffic is coming from to determine which of your marketing efforts are most successful in relation to your customer base.

Here are some capabilities to take advantage of when you integrate your social media with your lead tracking:

  • Scheduling: Create a predefined schedule for your social media posts. Spend a few hours Monday morning (or whenever you prefer) creating all the posts you’ll need for the week, and set up a time and day to send each one out. You can even create “canned messages,” which are multi-use messages that you don’t have to worry about retyping each time.
  • Nurturing: If you integrate social media with your lead tracking, you have the ability to better understand your prospects’ needs. This empowers you to send out more personalized and direct messages that your prospects are more likely to respond to. Tracking leads in this way also helps your team to manage who needs to be nurtured and who is ready to be given to sales and move on to the next level.
  • Enrich prospects’ profiles: Joining lead tracking practices with your social media campaigns also helps manage and update the prospects that are already in your pipeline, lending to a better understanding of their online activity, and can ultimately suggest their buying readiness. Keep track of shares and clicks and add that information to their profile in your system.

Most importantly, having that connection between tracking your leads efficiently and managing your social media marketing allows you to communicate with prospects more directly and effectively, leading to a higher conversion rate. Take advantage of your marketing automation system and integrate social media with your lead tracking.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Upstart Lead Liaison to Partner with Direct Mail Manager

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New Partnership Yields More Powerful Direct Mail Marketing Options as Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Marketing becomes More Important

Allen, TX – Lead Liaison to partner with Direct Mail Manager. Lead Liaison, a privately held provider of marketing automation solutions, is pleased to announce its latest partnership with Direct Mail Manager, a direct mail marketing and handling company. Lead Liaison provides small to mid-sized businesses with marketing automation capabilities with easy-to-use software, while Direct Mail Marketing creates intelligent promotional mail solutions for businesses.

Direct Mail Manager adds new functionality to Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® that allows customers to take their marketing efforts offline. With this enhancement, customers can use Lead Liaison to send direct mail pieces to targeted audiences in addition to email and text messages. Marketers can pinpoint a subset of their database based on demographics, behavioral and social characteristics for highly personalized and relevant multi-channel marketing.

This flexibility allows Lead Liaison to join industry giants as a true multi-channel marketing solution for B2C and B2B companies of all sizes and industries.

Regarding the recent partnership, Direct Mail Marketing CTO, Adam White  said, “By partnering with Lead Liaison, we enable businesses to automate and capture more customers with less work. Email has traditionally been the tool of choice for marketing automation. With the extremely targeted direct mail tools we offer being added to the marketing mix, we see customers getting ROI results that exceed email and traditional direct mail programs. In a world of electronic marketing, the tactile experience between company and customer with a postcard is difficult to ignore.”

VP of Customer Success, Alan Page, added, “We’re using this service ourselves – we created a QR code that goes out on postcards to qualified prospects that receive one of our personal demonstrations. The QR code takes the prospect back to one of our landing pages where we’re able to track online activity and alert sales when the prospect takes action. We’re combining direct mail with email and text messaging to showcase our multi-channel capability and give prospective clients a vision for what they can achieve. Our return on follow-ups from these postcards has been stellar thus far. We look forward to helping other companies achieve similar results and are already rolling this out with a home maintenance company. We’re in discussions with a handful of B2B companies that provide high-value solutions and recognize the importance of direct mail as another entry point to build stronger ties with customers and prospects.”

Lead Liaison’s direct mail services are currently in place and ready for subscribing customers to deploy. For more information, please visit the Direct Mail marketing section or see this blog post on direct mail with marketing automation. For an explainer video on an easy-to-use marketing automation platform check out the homepage.

About Postcard Services:

Since 2003 Postcard Services, a direct mailer and software development company, has been dedicated to creating tools that empower businesses of all sizes to create quality direct mail programs, without the expense of hiring multiple agencies.  The company’s retail division serves over 72,000 customers nationwide via its websites:  www.postcardservices.com, www.directmailmanager.com, and www.realtypostcard.com.  The corporate division provides an array of automated private label and other solutions for franchises, contact/call centers, and businesses with repeat direct mail needs.

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 automation.

Press inquiries: Amber Turrill, VP of Corporate Communications

Email: corporate@leadliaison.com

Phone: 888.895.3237

Lead Liaison

Discovering Hidden Agendas with Marketing Automation

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Discovering Hidden Agendas with Marketing AutomationPeople buy based on specific personal agendas and interests.  In order to sell to such people, you need to know what their personal interests are, what drives them…. and ultimately speak to their personal needs. Kevin Allen, Founder of Planet Jockey, said he was “one of the best pitch guys in the industry” because he could “sense what was in the heart of my [his] buyer”, as discussed in this video. In Kevin’s book, The Hidden Agenda: A Proven Way to Win Business and Create a Following, he talks about understanding the buyer and their needs to create a connection that assures a mutual win. The good news is that your company can discover hidden agendas with marketing automation.

Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® provides you unique insight into your customer’s hidden agenda at every stage of the process.   We help you to identify a prospect and their personal demonstrated interests in your product (even factors that they will not tell you about).  For example, Lead Liaison gives our clients insights into which topics on your website or video that a prospect showed interest in.  We tell you how deep their interest was (for example, how much of your video they watched), we will even let you know what time of day they tend to care about you the most!

Let’s take the concept of discovering hidden agendas with marketing automation a bit further. We then expand this search to a very granular personal level by spidering 110 social media sites to learn about that person’s interests and motivations.  We identify keywords that are important to them, and give you access to their public social media profiles (linkedin, facebook, etc).    Our platform is the technological arm of “The Hidden Agenda” concept.

Lead Liaison

Making Workflow Automation Simpler and More Manageable

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Workflow AutomationOne of the most challenging tasks business owners face is workflow automation. Without someone sitting in the middle of everything and pulling all the necessary levers to get things done, many businesses struggle with engaging in a variety of tasks – including marketing automation and lead flow.

Workflow automation doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t require hiring a full time project manager for your business. The right marketing automation system can give you a workflow out of the box without a lot of hassle or time training.

Determining Your Workflow

The key to using software to get your workflow automated is to establish dependencies. This means that once an action happens on the business side, tasks, follow up and lead flow are created automatically.

Before marketing automation, business owners and project managers had to determine and set up these lead flow channels themselves. Workflow changes all that. The right marketing automation system allows your company to create these dependencies, schedule them for you and keep everything in one place so you know what isn’t getting done and can delegate accordingly.

For instance, say your dashboard registers a new lead. This lead comes in the form of an opt-in, containing an address and business information. You can set up a dependency on your backend to add this new lead to a certain geo-targeted or relevant content list. You can set tasks in your project management system for your sales team to call this lead within a few days after you get it.

The Power of Workflow Automation

You can also collect emails and send correspondence each time a new user visits your site. That’s something that a human project manager simply can’t do for you – no one should be tasked with watching IP addresses and a ticker all day to try to get leads deeper into your funnel. That’s why automation is so important – it takes the hassle out of marketing and gives you the option to create dependencies that allow business management tasks ease of flow.

Lead Liaison’s dependencies and workflow automation are set up within a program called Sparks. Lead Liaison’s automated software will monitor your back end and lead flow, and then create a series of events in the system once certain triggers happen. From a filled out lead form to a visitor coming to your site, different Sparks can be set up to create events in the backend of your business you can use to make your daily operations more productive. We’d love to show you how Sparks works – connect with us today for a consult!

Lead Liaison

How to Use Marketing Automation to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages

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Use Marketing Automation to Drive Traffic to Your Landing PagesAre your landing pages optimized to drive sales? Landing page, lead capture page, and lander are all words used to describe the same thing: the gateway to your site. Essentially, your visitors will only take about five seconds to understand the call to action, so the point on your landing page needs to be loud and clear. The landing page is essential to lead generation and lead tracking. It gives you the opportunity to ask your leads to take the next step, whether that’s to complete a form or download a white paper. Use marketing automation to drive traffic to your landing pages and help distribute the analytics of your site directly to your sales team and saves time doing so.

Landing Page Testing 101

Maximize your visitor’s activity and gain more conversions on your landing pages through A/B testing. While it can be tedious work, you’ll get the best results if you set specific goals that are easily measurable. When A/B testing, it’s important to keep in mind you’re looking for a dramatically better performance from either Landing Page A or Landing Page B. Be sure to keep your URLs descriptive and provide unique meta-descriptions for each landing page. The goal is to constantly analyze and continuously improve landing page conversions. Here are some things to vary in a split test:

  • Vocabulary
  • CTAs/Conversion options
  • Layout/button placement
  • Images

Still new to A/B testing? KISSmetrics has a great guide to help you get started.

Tracking Your Landing Page Traffic

Inbound marketing is a great tool, but knowing how to use it to your best advantage without letting it soak up valuable employee time can get tricky. Use marketing automation to not only drive traffic to your landing page but also track it efficiently. Have clear and concise goals that you can track in terms of managing content creation and keeping tabs on how each category is performing. Are your blogs converting visitors into leads, or do most conversions come from keyword searches to your site? Here are a few things to watch:

  • Bounce rate: how long are visitors hanging out on your various pages?
  • Users’ activity: what are the strongest CTAs, which buttons rarely get clicked?
  • Inquiries from users/usability: are there any users confused about the layout/CTAs that have submitted an inquiry?

Marketing Automation that Helps Drive Traffic to Your Landing Page

Your landing page is the first impression visitors have, so it’s important to make it count. Automate your content creation process, send comprehensive analytics directly to your sales team, and implement unique landing pages that complement social media posts. Use marketing automation to analyze and determine landing page usability and effectiveness. Find out more about how Lead Liaison can help you manage your site visitors and track them in real time here.

Lead Liaison

Drip Marketing 101

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Not familiar with drip marketing? Now might be the time to get acquainted. Drip marketing is exactly what you’re probably thinking – it’s a process where you create marketing materials that go out to your customers slowly over time, hopefully converting them to your offering and building a dynamic relationship of trust.

Drip Marketing 101All good drip marketing starts with a concept. Since you are slowly converting customers to your products or services, it’s important to first determine what specific item you want to sell. In most cases, you’re not doing direct marketing – throwing the product in your customers’ faces and hoping they will bite. You are presenting them with a concept that you build up as the right choice to solve their individual problems.

So now that you’ve decided to drip, how do you decide what your concept should be, and where do you start?

Drip Marketing for Newbies

Drip marketing happens via email. Before you do anything else, it’s most important to identify a way that you can collect email addresses from your clients. If you only have email addresses from existing customers, your drip campaign will have to focus on getting further sales or increasing profitability with your current customer base.

We strongly recommend considering how you can collect email addresses for potential clients as well as current ones. You may want to ensure you have a newsletter sign-up on your website. You may consider offering premium content in exchange for an email address.

Nailing Down Your Content

For example, if you are selling camping equipment, you might make your content offering something like, “10 Tips to Make it in the Wild.” You could then start an auto responder on your current email service provider that goes out to your subscribing customers for a certain period of days. Regardless of what your industry is, you should be able to think of something you can offer your customers as premium content.

Many businesses start a drip campaign or auto responder and then never think about their drip marketing again- giving old and new customers the same information over and over again. The best way to approach running a drip marketing campaign is to analyze the results you get from your first campaign, and make adjustments accordingly. Many successful business owners run multiple drip campaigns with premium content going out to segmented users.

Segmenting your users can be tricky – but with Lead Liaison’s marketing automation dashboard, segmenting your audience and setting up your drip marketing campaigns is easier than ever before. To find out more information, contact us and let us connect you with a solution that works for your business!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Segmentation and Personalization for Clients

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Marketing SegmentationIs marketing segmentation necessary to a successful advertising campaign? Not necessarily. Success is based on generating ROI – bringing in enough revenue to cover your advertising expenses and overhead while retaining a profit. That’s the bottom line for most advertising campaigns –right?

Well, not necessarily. If you’re running a successful advertising campaign, return is imminent. At the same time, businesses who are successfully marketing should always be taking steps to deepen their marketing funnels and ensure marketing segmentation reaches users in a way that encourages conversion. Many business owners are so wrapped up in their day-to-day business operations that deepening marketing segments is last on their lists.

More Intimate Marketing Segmentation

Establishing trust with your user base or customers is in some cases about deepening intimacy. By deepening intimacy you’re basically approaching users in a way that identifies with their unique needs right away.  When customers get marketing from you, they should feel like you’re speaking to their specific needs. The more you can establish that intimacy and create a more personalized experience, the higher your likelihood of conversion. If you’re prepared to work with marketing segmentation, you can find opportunities to create more intimate and personalized marketing materials with less hassle.

Establishing Personalization in Marketing

Marketing segmentation helps you establish personalization by knowing who you’re talking to. In order to understand the different segmented needs of your audience, you’ll need to understand the audience and what needs set them apart. For instance, if you sell a beauty product that’s mostly used by teens and women in their early 20s, you have two separate buying markets: Younger women and the parents of teens.

Knowing this information, you can look back at analytics or at your marketing automation to get an idea of who’s visiting your website and materials based on what channels. You might find that most of the teens find you via Instagram and buying parents open most of your emails. Knowing this, you can craft customized marketing materials for these networks and test those materials over time.

Once you’ve worked with marketing segmentation and sent out personalized messaging, you can continue to work with modifying that messaging over time to bring in higher conversion rates. You can continue sending out comprehensive marketing messaging to your entire client list while you’re doing this, ensuring multiple opportunities for your audience to buy while retaining personalization.

If you need some help decoding your marketing segmentation, give us a call! Lead Liaison’s marketing automation dashboard makes marketing segmentation a snap. Let us tell you more!

Lead Liaison

How to Keep Tabs on Your Leads

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How to Keep Tabs on PeopleSo you’ve got your marketing automation software in place, but are you utilizing it to optimize lead scoring? Once a lead is qualified by marketing to hop into the sales ring, it is important for the marketing team to transfer all pertinent lead details to sales so that each lead’s score reflects their conversion readiness. Lead scoring is not all equal, and different actions by the lead call for different scores. Make use of social media marketing together with sales and marketing alignment to ensure your sales reps are as ready as can be. Learn how to keep tabs on your leads. 

Know Who’s Coming to Your Site

Identify your leads. Understand who the visitors to your site are by asking a few (not too many) questions when they take certain actions. Find a balance between requiring too much information and not enough—if you allow prospects to browse your online content and even download a white paper without filling in some identifying details, you’re letting the leads slip right out of your hands. On the other hand, prospects can tell when you’re being too nosey, asking for more information than necessary, sometimes even pushing them to click the “x” in the corner and close your page all together. There’s a balance in there somewhere, try implementing some A/B testing to find it.

To capitalize on multi-channel marketing and social media marketing, provide your lead the option for a social media login. It’s not only convenient for the user to simply click once without having to create a new password, but it also allows the opportunity to gather more information from the user via their social media profile and better tailor their experience with your brand. They’ve filled in their preferences and “likes” for the world to see on social media, why not use that information to better understand them?

Let your Leads Know you Appreciate Them

While you keep tabs on your leads make sure to offer special coupons, badges, and other rewards to your leads that take the next step or requested action in the conversion process. Giving them an incentive to provide more information (and potentially even share it with their own network) is an opportunity for your brand to reach new prospects without additional effort on your part. Freebies and other forms of recognition help to build trust and encourage more conversions. Ask your leads to share the love.

Maintain Sales and Marketing Alignment

Use lead scoring to bridge marketing and sales teams. Your marketing team can utilize all of this information—preferences from social media logins, incentives/badges leads have earned, how each visitor interacts with the site—to score each lead, input this information to the CRM, and provide a detailed summary of each lead’s buying readiness. Many features in marketing automation software make it easy to transition a lead from marketing to sales, and even drastically improve conversion because of the transfer of knowledge per lead and the ability to personalize each touchpoint.

Make the Most of Lead Scoring

Finally, be sure to use certain parameters when implementing your lead scoring system. When using the incentive method, let your leads know there’s a deadline or an expiration date on their “points.” Often, you’ll see this will push them to take an action sooner or make a decision about something they were previously on the fence about. Use your marketing automation software to help you keep track of lead scoring as well as the amount of time the lead has been in your system to avoid inflating the lead’s score. This will help authenticate each lead’s score and provide more accurate transferral of information.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Lite?

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Marketing Automation Lite?Marketing automation isn’t new technology these days – companies both large and small are latching on to the fact that marketing automation can help them differentiate different sales leads to develop strategic marketing techniques for different audiences. Many of us have heard of or been offered marketing automation trials via the largest companies out there. There’s a lot of competition and plenty to learn with regard to what the right marketing automation solution is for each company.

Smaller, local companies may not have leads trickling in on a national level. Many of our clients are asking for a sort of marketing automation lite, and companies like Reach Local are advertising these services to clients who run smaller businesses. So, is a scaled down and more flexible version of marketing automation preferable and possible for smaller businesses?

Why Marketing Automation?

Local businesses are a great target for marketing automation dashboarding. All businesses need to know where clients are coming from and to nail down a more specific target market.

Here’s the thing about marketing automation – it works regardless of how large or small your business is. Whether you’re getting two leads a day or twenty, whether you have a large customer service base to mobilize or you’re just getting started, more in depth information about your business never hurt anyone. In fact, the more you know about your customers, the more you’ll be able to create custom funnels that expose particular customers to data that will further convince them to buy. Why would any business – of any size – want to pass over that kind of powerful insight?

Marketing Automation – Light

It further stands to reason that any marketing automation company worth its salt should be willing to offer custom and completely individualized solutions based on a business’s particular needs. “Marketing automation lite” is just another marketing gimmick. The right marketing automation company won’t hesitate to give you the tools you need for your business to succeed, regardless of your business size. As you grow, you should be able to add custom tools to your marketing automation dashboarding to provide further insight and add to the analytics needs of your business.

Lead Liaison provides companies with services that fit a company’s size and needs – whether your business is large or small, we can give you a solution that will help connect you with your customers, de-mystify analytics and increase sales. We don’t put things in a pretty package – all our customers, large or small, get the same level of individualized service. Talk to us about a custom quote today!