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Lead Liaison

5 Lead Generation Techniques That Work

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

1.     E-Books

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

2.     Email marketing

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

3.     Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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

 

4.     Company Blog

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

5.     Online Video Marketing

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

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

Lead Liaison

Should You Be Creating Infographics For Your Company?

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

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

Is Creating Infographics Difficult?

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

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

Diversifying Content

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

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

Brand Your Company

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

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

Lead Liaison

Solidify Your Email Marketing Efforts in 2014

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

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

Consider Your Subject Lines

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

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

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

Strategically Place Links

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

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

Vary Your Email Marketing Techniques

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

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

Lead Liaison

More Ways to Battle [Not Set] in Search Engine Marketing

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More Ways to Battle [Not Set] in Search Engine MarketingWe’ve talked about how Google’s ever-increasing [not set] parameters affect search engine marketing – but how can you tailor your sales process to better discover how users find you? Most SEOs and other digital marketers are viewing [not set] as a dead end – but if you can communicate about search queries with clients directly, you can get some valuable search data.

The “How Did You Find Us?”

If you’ve ever filled out a business comment card, you’ve probably told a company how you found out about their products or services. Online, this question tends to be a little antiquated these days, as a quick look at Google Analytics or the Lead Liaison Dashboard show us where to pull user search queries.

Now that technology is changing on us, there’s no reason we can’t bring back those helpful comment cards in a more digital-friendly format. It’s completely acceptable to ask clients straight away how they found you, including what they typed into Google to get to your website.

Search Engine Marketing and Engagement

Some folks just aren’t going to tell you – whether they’re uncomfortable doing so or just don’t feel like it – and that’s okay. But some are, and this could result in a data goldmine for you that your competitors aren’t even going to consider.

You can include a “How did you find us” dropdown on your email newsletter signup, with an extra blank that asks your client to specify a keyword they typed in to get to your website. You could also send out an incentive-based reader poll with “how did you find us?” questions making up the bulk of the survey. You’d be surprised at what even long-time clients are able to remember about getting to your website.

Try coaching your sales team to ask this question regularly by including it as part of a responsive call script or intake form. If you make the question part of your sales and marketing process, it will be natural for members of your team to start asking. Most importantly, don’t forget to ask what clients typed in to find you. If you throw around words like “keyword”, “key term” or “search query” clients may have no idea what you’re talking about.  The terminology is important!

When you have this data, start compiling it to account for some appearances of [not set]. You’re not fighting against the system here – you’re engaging with clients and doing your own homework to support your analytics data.

For more search engine marketing ideas that will help you understand your business stats, talk to a member of the Lead Liaison team today!

Lead Liaison

The Future of Marketing Automation: 3 Steps to Smarter Actions

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

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

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

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

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

Lead Liaison

Why Lead Nurturing is Essential for B2B Marketing

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

Lead Nurturing Benefits B2B Buyers

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

Creating Customized Lead Nurturing

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

Lead Segmentation before Nurturing

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

Lead Liaison

How To Nurture Leads With Your Mobile Phone

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

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

Email Your Clients

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

Social Media

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

Blog, Blog, Blog!

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

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

Lead Liaison

The Importance of A/B Marketing Strategies on the Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead Liaison

How to Get the Most from Your Leads

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How To Get The Most From Your LeadsEvery lead has different intentions, needs, and potential for conversion. Businesses that focus all of their energy on lead generation won’t generate the revenue they expect, because not all leads are created equally. Some leads may be ready to make a purchase while others will require additional information before they can make an informed decision. Businesses must also focus their energy on getting to know their leads and understand their needs to increase the chances of conversion.

Here are a few helpful tips on how you can get the most from your leads:

1.     Monitor Leads

You can get the most from your leads by understanding their behavior. Marketing automation software utilizes website visitor tracking technology to follow leads as they surf online. This will show marketers what pages they have viewed and which papers they have download.

2.     Profile Leads

The next step in making the most from your leads is creating comprehensive lead profile. Marketing automation software creates a detailed lead profile using the information leads share in online registries combined with behavioral details extracted from website visitor tracking.

3.     Rank Leads

Once leads are profiled, they should be ranked based on their likelihood for conversion. Each lead is compared with the profile of an existing consumer to determine exactly what they are looking for from your business and how far along they are in their buying process. Leads that show a high potential will be immediately passed on to sales.

4.     Segment Leads

If your lead generation strategies are effective, there will be too many leads to address individually. Segmenting leads into groups will make it easier to get the most from your leads, since you can customize lead nurturing content based on groups of leads with similar needs.

5.     Nurture Leads

The most important way to get more from your leads is lead nurturing. This is a business’ opportunity to create a meaningful connection with a leading while demonstrating their expertise. All lead nurturing content should be original, informative, interesting, and relevant.

6.     Qualify Leads

Marketing should be able to determine whether a lead is sincerely interested once that lead has been tracked, profiled, ranked, segmented, and nurtured. Marketing automation software will evaluate each lead’s potential and then notify sales the moment a lead shows signs of conversion.

To get the most from your leads, you must first understand exactly what they lead is searching for online and where they are in their buying process. By first monitoring, profiling, ranking, and segmenting your leads, you can develop customized lead nurturing content that will improve the chance of conversion. If you would like to learn more about getting the most from your leads, please read six essential elements in every successful lead nurturing email.

Lead Liaison

Analyzing Forbes’ 12 Step Process for Lead Nurturing

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Forbes Process for Lead NurturingIn an effort to stay on top of trends, I am constantly researching new techniques to improve various aspects of the marketing automation process. During my research, I came across a two year old article that covered many of the same lead nurturing techniques that are utilize at Lead Liaison. Forbes article, the twelve step program for lead nurturing, may have been written in March of 2012, but the lead nurturing advice still holds true today. Marketing automation software has streamlined the process for lead nurturing, but the act of convincing leads to become consumers is still the same.

Lead Generation

The first step in the Forbes’ article on lead nurturing is acquiring quality leads. This seems pretty obvious, but every lead nurturing campaign needs an interested audience to be successful. Marketing automation addresses this crucial step using website visitor tracking.

First Contact

The next step in their lead nurturing program is having an automated or manual instant response system. This should be a friendly, non-obtrusive email advising leads that your sales and marketing team are available if they have any questions and concerns. Forbes’ article focuses more on sending an initial alert to the new contact that you will be in touch with them at a specific time in the future, whereas Lead Liaison’s marketing automation strategy focuses more on notifying the lead that help is available whenever they need it.

Follow Up

The next part of Forbes’ article covers contacting the prospect as promised. Marketing automation uses customized lead nurturing content to stay in touch with prospective leads. It also uses lead nurturing email to cover the fourth step covered in Forbes’ article; offer immediate value. Lead nurturing emails should give the reader valuable free advice to brand a business as an expert in their field.

Listen to Leads

Forbes’ fifth step examines the importance of understanding what each particular lead wants and needs. This would fall under marketing automation’s lead tracking and profiling process. Forbes’ follows this step with providing the lead with a chat feature for faster communication, which is now an essential part of most digital marketing strategy.

Repeat as Needed

The steps the article from Forbes’ covers next involve repeating the nurturing process until a lead is ready for conversion. It discusses the importance of staying in touch, offering more valuable information, and tracking all responses and activity. This strategy can be streamlined using automated website visitor tracking software and customized lead nurturing email campaigns.

Close the Sale

If everything goes according to plan, the lead will eventually be ready to make a commitment. The tenth step in the article is asking for their business, followed by asking for a referral. If you are utilizing marketing automation, your sales team will be automatically notified when a lead is showing signs of conversion, so this can be done immediately.

Assess Results

The final step the article covers is reviewing the results and learning from your mistakes. Every lead nurturing programs needs a system for analyzing the results, so you can make adjustments to improve the lead nurturing campaign’s ROI.

The article Forbes’ published nearly two years ago covers all of the important elements in a successful lead nurturing program. When all of these steps are executed effectively, lead nurturing can produce an endless stream of qualified leads.