All articles, commentary, etc. that does not fit under Best Practices, Press Releases, Testimonials, or Documentation goes here.

Lead Liaison

The Benefits of IP Address Tracking

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The Benefits of IP Address TrackingIP address tracking is a handy thing to have on your website. Once you have a user’s IP, you can begin the process of tying the visit to more personal information about the user. Knowing how individual users behave on your website can influence your advertising campaigns from top to bottom in a way that ultimately benefits your bottom line.

IP Address Tracking and Analytics Software

Here’s the rub – much of the analytics software people are using these days doesn’t rack IPs. In fact, dashboards like Google Analytics actually forbid IP tracking in their terms of service. They seem to want you to have as little information about your customers as possible.

Sure, privacy is important, but the amount of information you collect from an IP address is limited. For instance, you can’t use an IP to find out exactly where a user’s personal/home address might be.  However, sometimes an ISP links back to a user’s place of work. Knowing how much a person from another company is viewing your website, and how long they spend there, can give you intelligence information you can apply to your sales campaigns.

Using IP Information In Your Advertising

It’s more than likely that based on your call volume and call details, you can match up IP visitors with specific people who have filled out your forms or inquired about your services.  If a user takes a specific action on your site at the same time you’re logging an IP, you can match users with IPs. You can then track that IP throughout visits to get an idea of how a user is exploring specific pages on your site as well as how much time they’re spending.

If you have multiple visitors on your site at any given time, you might need to watch for further visits or take a look at the geographic source of IPs to get your information. It’s a good idea to work with your marketing and tech departments to ensure both are using this information to your best advantage.

Lead Liaison is proud to offer real-time IP and visitor tracking solutions for your business. With our streamer feature, you can watch visitors real-time as they use your site and determine how to have your sales people talking to them in a way that will make a sale. We’d love to talk to you about Streamer and our other tracking features – let us show you how IP tracking can benefit your business today!

Lead Liaison

Should I Be Video Marketing for My Business?

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Should I be Video Marketing for My Business?Video marketing is a great way to create new and interactive content for your site, leverage your existing audience with a new medium, create new click-through opportunities in a multimedia context and to better rank for SEO. Many small businesses swear off video marketing because they assume there will be extravagant cost to shooting and editing video. With modern tools, you can take advantage of great ways to create your own video marketing content without the hassle or spend.

Creating Great Content

Creating videos is easy with some software your PC or Mac comes with. For the Mac, check out iMovie and play around with it. For the PC, Windows Movie Maker is a great alternative. You can add music or voice to a slideshow or pictures, or use a smartphone or webcam to video yourself introducing folks to your company.

Your video marketing efforts should follow certain guidelines. You don’t just want to put random videos of cute puppies out there – you’ll want to generate and share content that engages your users and shows them how your product offers value.  Failure to do so could get a quick bounce from your video or even bad PR for your company over time.

Be prepared to show your customers how you can provide value in your videos. Given them resources that don’t just sell your company, but that provide interesting, useful data they can use in their own business decisions. Doing so over time will make you a ‘thought leader’ – a company that creates content your clients rely on to add value to their own services.

Best Practices for Video Marketing

It’s not always easy to host videos on your own site. You’ll need to know how to convert them to a quick-load format. You’ll have to make sure you have the bandwidth in case a lot of people watch them. Rather than dealing with the hassle of hosting a video on your own site, try Youtube.

There are many advantages to Youtube above and beyond having a place to host your videos. Google owns Youtube, so ensuring that your video titles, tags and descriptions contain relevant keywords and your business name could help your videos rank quickly, as well as create a valuable backlink to your website. Sites like Youtube take the hassle out of video hosting while helping you to get the backlink and the shareable quality video marketing requires.

Lead Liaison is proud to announce a new in-dashboard video marketing distribution service! Talk to us today to find out how we will make video marketing a breeze for your company.

Lead Liaison

The Strategic Alliance between Lead Profiling and Lead Nurturing

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The Strategic Alliance between Lead Profiling and Lead Nurturing

I was reading this great article titled; Lead Nurturing; Ripening the Right Bananas, which explained how lead nurturing turns unripe leads into loyal consumers. The article was helpful, but I immediately noticed a crucial step in the process that they had left out; lead profiling. Successful lead nurturing begins with thorough lead profiling.

Lead Nurturing Needs Lead Profiling

Although the article did an excellent job of summarizing the benefits of lead nurturing, it didn’t supply the reader with a real strategy for creating meaningful connections with unripe leads. Leads that are not ready to convert require customized coaxing to convince them to respond favorably to the campaign. Businesses cannot effectively turn leads into consumers without first understanding the leads’ behavior, interests, and needs.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. How can a company convince someone they need a particular product or service, if they don’t first understand how their product or service will benefit that specific lead?

Lead Profiling for Lead Nurturing

The building blocks for any effective lead nurturing campaign is comprehensive lead profiling. The most efficient way to develop a complete lead profile is marketing automation. Marketing automation software uses website visitor tracking to find out exactly what information a lead is seeking out, which articles or pages they have already viewed, and any demographic characteristics that can be obtained through their IP address or online registries. All of this crucial information is compiled to create a beneficial lead profile.

Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing

Visitor tracking and profile is necessary for the foundation, but there is still more work that needs to be done before a business develops lead nurturing content. The marketing automation process always involves ranking and segmenting leads based on specific behavior and characteristics. All of this is done to increase engagement and lead nurturing ROI. Lead nurturing content must be relevant and customized based on the predetermined lead segments to create a real connection with the reader.

Relationship Building with Lead Nurturing

Businesses can’t expect to develop an intimate and meaningful relationship with potential prospects if they first don’t take the time to get to know them personally. Leads know they have endless purchasing options online and they won’t settle for a business that doesn’t make an effort to understand their needs and concerns.

Developing a strategic alliance between lead profiling and lead nurturing makes it easier to turn leads into consumers. It makes the prospect feel like the company truly cares about their concerns and is offering valuable advice for free. To generate significant ROI from lead nurturing campaigns, companies must first track, profile, and segment every lead into comparable groups. That is the only proven way to create relevant content that will be truly beneficial to your prospects’ lives.

Lead Liaison

Online Reputation Management & Online Marketing: What’s the difference?

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Online Reputation Management & Online Marketing: What's the difference?Businesses nowadays look for cost-effective ways to expand, and yet many don’t know the benefits of promoting on the web. Still, there are good things and bad things about building and managing your brand on the Internet.

Your online branding is as important as your physical office. Why? Because prospective clients can find your business faster (and easier) by doing a Google Search. They will have the ability to find reviews on your products and services, as well as what is being said about your business online.

And, let’s face it: people trust what other people say. This is called “word of mouth”, and it’s important on & offline. So, how can you take control of what is being said about your business?

How can you effectively monitor and manage your brand online?

First, let’s get into the technical terms that you need to know in order to protect & manage your online brand. Wether you’re a person or a corporation (or even a celebrity), you need to realize that reputation management on the web is all about taking control of your (or your business’) online marketing.

Online reputation management can be defined as the combined knowledge of techniques and tools that can be utilized to promote goods & services through a variety of media platforms on the web 2.0; it’s taking control of what is being said by influencing the conversation on the web (and having a great internet content strategy).

But, is the meaning of the term “Online Marketing” any different from the term “Online Reputation Management”?

Online Reputation Mangement (ORM) is supposed to be a different approach to public relations; it’s thinking outside the box when it comes to personal and corporate branding. Besides, the rules are different outside the traditional way of doing media relations.

Maybe this can be called “brand hacking” (if you’re doing ORM in unethical ways, like censoring negative comments & complaints or using SEO to trick Google and influence search results). So, if you’re actively trying to affect search results to mantain and protect your brand’s reputation, then you’re doing ORM.

In other words, the Internet and Social Media have changed what once was a must-know public relations issue, into a practice of utmost importance when it comes to search engine results (and everyone is doing it).

On the other side, Online Marketing (Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Marketing) is also a way to influence the conversation and make it skew in your favor. Doesn’t that make you think? Maybe there is no real difference between these two terms…

So, is the “best defense” a good “offense”?

This is a very popular saying that can be applied in almost all areas of human life, including recreational games and war. Overall, this idea is about creating a strategic advantage, and it’s something you should be preoccupied with when it comes to the Internet.

Lee Haney, US bodybuilder, once said: “PR is extremely important, and being able to use it in the right way means everything. You have to market your success.”

Marketing can be defined as the ongoing process of communication between the public and the brand, where the value of a product or service is promoted to a business’ customers. It’s also about building long-term relationships between the customers and brands. This type of communication is bilateral in the web 2.0, and it’s all about monitoring the conversation; that means, “listening” is as important as “talking”.

That’s why a content strategy is always useful in both online marketing and online reputation management. You can start by building and managing profiles in Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Then, you can continue your SEM and SSM efforts by buying a domain name (such as www.yourname.com or www.yourbusiness.com) or starting a blog, to build your personal & professional brand on the web.

However, the web 2.0 still represents a challenge even to the most skilled Online Marketers and Public Relations Experts. And, whether you’re interested in protecting & managing your brand, or actively promoting a good image of you or your business, you must know the difference between ORM and OM.

But, in order to keep things ethical when it comes to influencing the conversation in this platform, you must think of Online Marketing & Online Reputation Management in a holistic way, taking in account that both practices are active ways of monitoring and protecting your brand on the web.

Lead Liaison

Six Tips on How to Grow a Business Using Lead Nurturing

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Grow your business using lead nurturingThe sole purpose of any lead nurturing campaign is to grow the business. It should be focused on building brand authority, establishing expertise, and creating lasting relationships with new and existing consumers. Every lead nurturing campaign should be designed to expand your customer base and help your business develop a loyal following.

If you are not already convinced of the power lead nurturing has to grow a business, please read why smart consumers insist on high quality lead nurturing content first. Once you’ve accepted that lead nurturing is essential for marketing a business online, the next step is to follow these six simple tips for greater lead nurturing success.

Here are six tips on how to grow a business using lead nurturing:

Know Your Target Audience

Understanding your target consumer’s needs and interests is necessary before you create a lead nurturing campaign. Start by utilizing the website visitor tracking capabilities of marketing automation software to monitor and profile potential leads’ activity on your website. This software will record and analyze behavioral trends and relevant demographic traits to help define your company’s typical consumer.

Understand Your Leads’ Needs

After you get to know your consumers better, the next step is determining what they need from your business. This is not necessarily a specific product or service. Focus more on addressing a solution to their problem. For example, if you sell diet aids, your prospects’ need proven weight loss solutions, which of course will include your product. The key is making sure your lead nurturing campaigns are focused on fulfilling their needs rather than pushing your products or services.

Create a Diverse Campaign Strategy

You can grow a business faster using lead nurturing if you combine it with a multi-media digital campaign. Use a blend of lead nurturing emails, downloadable whitepapers, website blogs, and social media to guide potential leads in the right direction.

Offer Valuable Free Advice

Lead nurturing campaigns should offer potential consumers valuable advice to establish your company’s authority and expertise. The content should contain useful and relevant information that won’t be easily obtained elsewhere. Leads that receive valuable free advice from a business are more likely to be loyal customers in the future.

Personalize Lead Nurturing Campaigns

You can develop stronger relationships with potential leads by personally addressing each lead nurturing email, as well as customizing the content for predetermined lead segment. Marketing automation software can be used to group potential prospects that have similar lead profiles.

Measure Campaigns Results

To grow a business using lead nurturing, it is essential that you monitor the engagement level for each different campaign. Compare the results of all of your lead nurturing campaigns to determine which forms of media and what topics are generating the most interest. Lead nurturing is not an exact science and you may need to adjust your strategy along the way.

If you want to quickly grow a business with lead nurturing, it is essential that you know your target audience, understand your lead’s needs, create a diverse campaign strategy, personalize your lead nurturing campaigns, and measure the results. This will allow you to effectively and efficiently connect with more sales-ready leads.

Lead Liaison

Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Will Be Essential in 2014

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Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Will Be Essential in 2014The last year has been an immensely successful year for most businesses’ digital marketing campaigns. Marketing automation, social media marketing, and other online marketing tools have made it significantly easier for companies to interact and engage a wider spectrum of new leads. These impressive new platforms have resulted in significant gains in market share for many online businesses. However, this gain in their share of the market had to come from somewhere. Many other businesses digital marketing campaigns failed, while some were non-existent. These companies are quickly discovering the reason for their decline and are creating plans to reclaim their lost consumers. High-quality lead nurturing will be essential in 2014.

Marketing Focus for 2014

The focus next year for companies that were successful in 2013 will be on maintaining their gains in market share, as more companies start to take advantage of the power of marketing automation and social media. The playing field will return to neutral, since almost every business in the world has now realized how much can be achieved with compelling and informative digital marketing campaigns. If everyone is utilizing digital marketing campaigns, there has to be something distinct that sets your business apart from the competition. Businesses need to give potential prospects a reason to choose their product or service over the countless competitors who are reaching them through the same online channels.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

The quality and consistency of lead nurturing content is one factor that can have a huge and personal impact on potential leads. Lead nurturing campaigns must grab the reader’s attention, provide them with real value, and then inspire them to react. According to Forrester Research, businesses that excel at lead nurturing will generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% reduction in the cost per lead obtained. Original and insightful content will continue to be the main focus of digital marketing campaigns in 2014, although there will be a greater emphasis on customizing the content based on relevant lead segments. For more information on how you can using lead nurturing to grow your share of the market, please read Using lead nurturing to build trust and establish long-term clients.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software is a business’ best bet for tapping into the leads’ needs and behavior. It profiles their online activity and uses online registration to gather demographic characteristics. All of the information obtain during the website visitor tracking aspect of marketing automation can be used to formulate lead nurturing campaigns that speak directly to distinct groups of leads. Businesses that succeed in generating and distributing relevant content that offers leads real value will maintain or gain market share in 2014. Any online entities that fail to take the most of resources like marketing automation and social media will quickly discover that they are losing out to those that do.

Lead Liaison

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

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Putting Marketing Automation to WorkMarketing automation is not about automating your marketing efforts. That sounds like a funny and perhaps incorrect thing to say, but it’s the truth. Small businesses don’t get involved with marketing automation simply to automate the process, they do it to deepen their understanding of current processes and make better decisions about business. Despite this, many small businesses view marketing automation as the be-all, end-all to understanding deeper data. Small companies often institute expensive marketing automation platforms only to find they never actively work with interpreting the data they receive – everything’s just on autopilot.  While setting your marketing campaigns up and letting them fly with marketing automation can save time, businesses that do so are missing the point – the core value is in the information.

Marketing Automation – Who’s Watching the Data?

Rather than taking a set-it-and-forget-it attitude toward automated marketing campaigns, it’s important to have someone in your company interpreting the data you see in your dashboard. It’s great to have a product like the Lead Liaison Streamer on your desktop so you can see real-time data about visitors. However, Streamer is far less effective if you set it up on your desktop only to run around to meetings throughout the day. Making automation work can bring results into your company you never thought possible, but it’s important to have someone on your staff looking at the data as it comes in if it’s a habit you won’t keep. As the primary decision maker in your business, you already know data is power – now it’s time to have someone on your staff presenting the data to you so you can decide together how to move forward on your marketing campaigns.

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

The first step to making marketing automation work for your business is getting a dashboard set up that’s easy to read and functional across your business. The left hand should always know what the right is doing – visitor data should be ported across every area of your campaigns when you plan for the future. To accomplish this, you’ll need to work with a seasoned team who can install the dashboard for you and teach you how to use it. The training shouldn’t be too difficult, but does require a solid relationship with your marketing automation company. For this reason, it’s important to work with someone who will be happy to troubleshoot, stick around and give you the information to make you and your marketing people excel with your new dashboard. We’d love to help make marketing automation work for you! Talk to Lead Liaison today about putting marketing automation into practice.

Lead Liaison

Six Essential Elements in Every Successful Lead Nurturing Email

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6 Elements for Successful Lead NurturingLead nurturing emails can be a powerful and efficient marketing tool when they are well-written. The trick is making sure every email has all of the essential elements to turn a prospective buyer into a loyal consumer.

Emails should be catered to their specific needs and interests rather than strictly promoting a product. It also needs to provide the reader with valuable information while casually guiding them towards the optimal outcome for the business. Lead nurturing emails are a company’s greatest opportunity to connect and entice potential consumers.

These are six essential elements that are in every successful lead nurturing email:

Catchy Headline and Intro

A lead nurturing email won’t be successful if it doesn’t capture their attention within the first few words. It is important to make sure the headline and first sentence clearly identify the topic and how the lead nurturing email will benefit the reader.

Solutions to Their Problems

Every lead nurturing email should come across as unbiased advice to a good friend. It doesn’t need to discuss every beneficial attributes of your business. It should only be focused on how your product or service can benefit their lives. Always remember that they are interested in solving their problems, not in supporting your business.

Offers Real Value

There has to be something in the lead nurturing email that immediately benefits the reader. It should provide them with useful information or make them a worthwhile offer. If you give someone valuable guidance, they will return to you the next time they are seeking answers to their problems.

Establishes Your Expertise

Every lead nurturing campaign should demonstrate your industry knowledge and authority on the subject matter. It should be well-research, grammatically correct, and professional written. It should also be relevant to your readers and to your brand.

Teaches Something New

Every lead nurturing email should contain a new tidbit of information that hasn’t been previously shared. Potential leads will stop reading your emails if you just regurgitate the same advice using different words.

An Irresistible Offer

The last thing every successful lead nurturing email should contain is an offer that is too good to pass up. It is always a good idea to conclude each email with a unique, special offer that they must act on immediately. Make sure the final offer highlights how your product or service will benefit the reader.

Every successful lead nurturing email campaign needs a catchy headline and intro to grab their attention and provide them with a solution to their problems. It should also offer real value, establish your expertise, teach the reader something new, and then finally present them with an offer they can’t refuse. If you still need more worthwhile lead nurturing campaign ideas, please read Lead Liaison’s earlier blog, three campaign ideas for lead nurturing success.

Lead Liaison

Content Marketing in 2014

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Content Marketing in 20142013 saw one of history’s most major shifts in SEO and content marketing, affecting brands around the globe. Google’s secure search shift led to a lack of keyword data readily available to the monitoring end user, leaving businesses in the dark about what keywords are being typed in to find their websites.

The “death of SEO” naturally isn’t really an ending, but the beginning of a need for more content-conscious strategies, necessitating sites that are as user friendly and engaging as before with a new stream of fresh content and marketing tactics that don’t adhere to the old paradigm.

Content Marketing in 2014

To break all this down into simpler terms, you really need to make sure you’re putting stuff on your site. That ‘stuff’ shouldn’t be just anything – but well-researched, well-planned blogs that add to the value you present your readers, – content that generates traffic and that focuses on keywords that can elevate your brand. If you don’t have a content strategy in place or understand what your readers want to see, that can be hard to do.

If your historical data doesn’t show you what kind of content interests readers, take a look at the type of content being released by popular blogs and news sites relevant to your industry. Don’t copy the topics exactly – focus on writing posts that discuss the same stories from a different angle. Also consider adding content that fulfills a need. If you would love to see a news story on a particular topic but can’t find anything out there to fit your needs, your company should be the one writing that story.

Planning Ahead

No one likes to do it – particularly a busy decision maker –but your good intentions about writing weekly blogs may not be something you have time to do. It’s important to makes sure you plan on picking up only the slack you can, and hiring content writers to pad out your pages where appropriate. If you’re concerned this will render your voice in authentic, then make sure to suggest topical guidelines and a keyword focus for each page so your content team will have some direction.

Lack of good content writers isn’t a unique problem – this is why Lead Liaison developed the content marketing dashboard for our customers. We’d love for you to take a look at what we have to offer and let us help develop content for your business!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and Choosing Smaller Development

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Marketing Automation and Choosing Smaller DevelopmentIt’s no secret that company owners and decision makers are excited about marketing automation – but will the excitement lead to bigger software companies watering down the concept or removing user friendliness from the equation?

Marketing automation is a fantastic solution, especially for small businesses that don’t have the money or the team to take charge of the marketing workflow process. With the ability to trigger marketing collateral that goes out automatically and sample the returning data in just a few clicks, marketing automation platforms give companies a solid way to track users, gather data and make marketing decisions they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

However, big companies are starting to get in on the game – and with major software companies developing their own marketing automation dashboards, how will the end user benefit?

Marketing Automation Dashboards and User Friendliness

If you’ve ever dealt with a major brand workflow or supply chain software, you’ll know user-friendliness isn’t the name of the game. Big software doesn’t care as much about the end user as they do retention of contracts. If they can provide a be-all end-all solution to small businesses, there’s no need to make products more user-friendly – and that happens for several reasons.

The first is cost. If business makers realize they don’t have to diversify software products by sticking with one company, this results in a big contract win for larger software providers.  Second, larger companies can charge more for training and additional management when they focus on the big picture rather than the smaller, end-user picture.

Shifting Their Thinking

Smaller businesses can’t necessarily afford larger software packages – so diversifying software that meets different marketing roles can be key to giving end users a good experience as well as ensuring software needs are met. This includes the choice of a marketing automation platform that is user friendly, cost efficient and ultimately provides value to the business.

Smaller businesses that diversity their software packages rather than hiring one big company to do everything are an example to larger businesses that diversifying can be key to shorter contracts, saved money and a better user experience. That’s why it’s a good idea to work with marketing automation companies with a smaller client base and a larger market opportunity. The training, ease of use and bugs are all taken care of while you don’t pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for the marketing automation services you need.

To find out more about how choosing a smaller company for your marketing automation needs can benefit your business, chat with a Lead Liaison rep today!