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Lead Liaison

How to Engage Prospects Early in the Buying Process

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How to Engage Prospects Early in the Buying ProcessPeople and businesses are changing the way they approach the buying process due to the abundance of online resources available. Numerous studies have shown that over 90% of people begin their buying process online using either a search engine or social media. There are so many viable options to choose online, which is why very few consumers will look elsewhere for information.

Early Engagement

Savvy marketers and entrepreneurs must reach and engage these prospects in the early stages of their buying process, before they settle for a competitor. They must recognize that someone is interested in their product or service and engage them instantaneously. One of the easiest ways to identify and connect with new consumers is marketing automation software.

Marketing Automation Software    

Surfing various websites for useful information is usually the initial step in the buying process, which is why the first step in the marketing automation process is using website visitor tracking. This powerful software tracks and monitors any leads that have connected with a company’s website or social media profiles. It records exactly what your leads are doing online in real time. If you are not already convinced of the incredible capabilities of website visitor tracking, take a moment to read Lead Liaison’s previous blog on five reasons why it is necessary to follow leads with website visitor tracking.

Lead Profiling & Ranking

Once marketing automation software has identified potential leads, the next step in engaging them is to understand their behavior and buying needs. Every detail the lead shares is tracked and analysed to create a comprehensive lead profile. Marketing automation experts will then rate their online activity based on the characteristics of existing consumers and determine where they are at in their buying process.

Lead Nurturing

The most essential step in the marketing automation process for engaging prospects early in their buying process is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing content is the most effective and efficient way to demonstrate a company’s expertise. A recent study by the Annuitas Group proved that nurtured leads generate 47% larger purchases than traditional marketing leads.

Lead nurturing allows businesses to gently guide leads towards a purchase by clearly demonstrating the value a particular product or service can add to their life. It should never be a hard-sell pitch or a blatant advertisement. The goal of lead nurturing is to engage prospects, give them the vital details they need to make a sound purchasing decision, and then subtle show why that purchase should be made with your business. It is a delicate art that is usually best left to trained content creators and marketing automation experts.

Engaging prospects early on in the buying process is essential for success in the modern world of online sales. Use marketing automation software, lead profile and ranking, and most importantly lead nurturing to create a lasting connection with potential prospects.

Lead Liaison

What’s the Impact of Google Caching Email Images?

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What's the impact of Google Caching Email Images?Google has changed their posture on caching images in emails. This event is actually good news for our customers for the following three reasons:

  1. The tiny image we insert into each email campaign is a unique image per recipient. Email Opens will still be counted; however, only repeat email opens will not be counted since the image is cached and no response will be sent back to our servers. This is good news since many people scroll through their email inbox and tab over emails. Less Opens per email will provide less noise.
  2. Google announced that images will load by default, instead of being turned off by default. This is good news since more unique opens will be reported; whereas before, the recipient would have to click the link to download images. The recipient could read an email without an open being reported. Now, a unique open will always be reported.
  3. The value of Lead Liaison just went up! Instead of companies using Email Opens as a key stat, they’ll start to look at what really matters, the click throughs. Fortunately, Lead Liaison does an excellent job at tracking what links are clicked in an email and capturing the recipients subsequent behavior as they navigate your site. That’s what you really care about. If they went to your site and poked around or not.
Lead Liaison’s leading edge marketing automation software includes next generation email marketing capabilities that diminish the impact of Google’s changes to image loading.  If you’re interested in learning more about how Lead Liaison can profile a potential buyer’s activity by tracking link click throughs, social post clicks, webpage visits, page views, forms submitted, landing pages, videos watched and more then contact us for a personalized demonstration.
Lead Liaison

Content Marketing Don’t-Do’s for 2014

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Content Marketing Don’t-Do’s for 2014The New Year is almost upon us, and content marketing isn’t a concept that will leave us anytime soon. Even seasoned marketers and business professionals have bad content habits. Since 2014 is just around the corner, there’s no better time (aside from say, right now) to re-engage your audience and leave some bad content habits behind. Hey, this goes for us, too! We could all use a big dose of efficiency for the New Year.

With this in mind, we’ve created a list of content don’t-do’s for 2014. Let’s get started.

When Content Marketing, let your audience determine your direction. 

If your social media accounts and blogs are new, you may not really have an idea of what your audience responds well to. If you’re using marketing automation services like Lead Liaison to keep track of content marketing, it’s time to take a look at the data.

Discover from Facebook Insights which of your posts gets the most interaction and the most clicks back over to your website. Take a look at what blogs inspire comments. Figure out which emails have the highest open rate and click through numbers. Don’t give up on letting the data show you what your audience is responding to.

Create Content That Works 

It’s difficult to create content when you know no one’s responding. Take a look at content that doesn’t have high engagement and see if you can effectively stay away from those topics.

Actually Write the Stuff

If you don’t have time to do content marketing, it’s time to stop lying to yourself about getting it done. Writing blogs, emails and social media status updates don’t necessarily have to be your forte. In case you haven’t noticed yet, Lead Liaison has a great content marketing solution that can help you get content up and running.

Spellcheck

Is it a pain? It is. But these days, most of us have Word or some similar software. Rather than writing directly into your Facebook posts, your automation dashboard, or your blog, use Microsoft Word and then paste your spellchecked copy over. It seems simple, but you’d be amazed at the amount of folks who still don’t do this.

Write What You Enjoy

Copywriting of any sort becomes a tedious task if you hate it. If you can tolerate it, write about the parts of your business and industry that you actually enjoy. If not, maybe it’s time to bring in some help! Talk to the friendly Lead Liaison team about our reliable content marketing solutions today.

Lead Liaison

Sales Funnel Management vs. the Holidays

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Sales Funnel Management vs. the HolidaysThere’s something about the holidays that tends to throw sales funnel management off a little bit. Because traffic typically slows during the holiday, the accumulation of sales data often goes unmanaged well into the new year. Employees are off doing their own thing with their families, and oftentimes the vacation isn’t enough to make full alertness and appreciation for work a possibility when they return to their desks in January.

If your business is going well for you – or even if it’s not – you may already have a workflow in place for collecting and interpreting data. Businesses who experience a slow time of year in January are often in a good position to modify their tracking and workflow for better sales funnel management. However, what do you do if the holidays slow your team down so significantly that your holiday data is never truly looked at?

Segment, Segment, Segment

One of the biggest issues most businesses have with sales funnel management during the holidays is the time factor. Particularly if your business tends to be rather slow during the holidays, traffic and page use can be glossed over in a way that robs you of valuable sales funnel management data. This data can give you insight into how you should change your website or your product offerings for success during the new year.

If this is happening, segment the data. Ask your team to prepare two special meetings  – one that focuses entirely on holiday data (and not just MoM ‘month over month’ for December data!) to get an idea of how the “holiday mind” can result in different usage of your website over time.

Streamlining Sales Funnel Management

Many businesses don’t factor in the differences between how “holiday-minded” users view their sites and how this type of traffic varies over the rest of the year. Again, rather than thinking in a MoM data collection space, it’s important to compare traffic during the weeks leading up to the holidays with traffic for the rest of the year.

You may find that the data is telling you to significantly change up your workflow, monitoring and conversion optimization processes before the holiday hits. Paying attention to your data at the granular level –whether site visits, page usage or form fill-outs – can help you design a work flow process that better accommodates time off and work flow for the holiday season.

Marketing automation can do all this for you – there’s no need to dig up holiday data when it’s presented to you cleanly in an easy-to-use dashboard. Talk to the Lead Liaison experts today about how we can help with your holiday sales funnel management!

Lead Liaison

Why Social Media Content Should Include Text

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Why Social Media Content Should Include TextSocial media content is what drives engagement for your brand. Whether you’re posting just a few times a week or interacting daily with your customers, it’s important to create and maintain a social media presence over time.

Part of creating a social media content strategy is knowing what your customers want to see. For many businesses, the only way to truly find this out is to test various forms of content over time. Many people respond better to images, some to news stories, some to blogs from your own site. And of course, there are infographics.

The Power of the Infographic

Infographics are awesome, but splitting up your content into different types will really determine how your audience wishes to engage with you. You can never really be sure what will go over best. It’s a good idea not to make the assumption that every person in your audience is a visual person and enjoys seeing their social media content in picture form. Images don’t appeal to everyone – in part because they don’t always load quickly on certain connections.

Facebook is Not Instagram

Instagram is a great way to share image content. You can even use that content to showcase your products or services. As long as you’re interacting with other Instagram users, they’ll follow you and you’ll have an opportunity to put what you’re selling right in front of them. It can truly be a powerful platform.

Because Facebook is capable of hosting various types of multimedia content, why not set up your company Instagram to send images straight to your Facebook? That way you can save your Facebook postings for social media content relevant to information from your site, news posts, blogs or other text-ready updates.

Social Media Content is Necessary

If you’re posting a few times a week, you may not have enough content out there to drive engagement. This is particularly the case if you’re only posting images and not sharing multiple forms of content. It’s a good rule of thumb to mix up your content and test it using all the capabilities Instagram has to offer.

Some folks stick to images because they simply don’t have the wordsmithing abilities to create blogs and content for their site, much less social media content updates. We can help! Lead Liaison offers social media content services right within your dashboard. Simply send out your request and our writers will take care of your needs within a specific timeframe – whether you’re looking for social media content updates, blogs or other pieces of writing. Let’s talk about your content needs today!

Lead Liaison

Do You Have Time for Your Social Media Marketing?

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Do you have time for social media marketing?Your social media marketing commitment has to be one you can handle. There’s really no alternative – regardless of whether you’re hiring someone to do your social media or making time weekly to do it yourself, keeping an eye on your social media and how it affects your overall marketing campaigns is critical to success.

Hiring

Some people alleviate their social media management issues by hiring a team to take care of their Facebook, G+, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media marketing pages. This is always a great idea if you can afford it- but what about supervision? How will you know your social media marketing team has your best interests in mind and is posting engaging content that’s relevant to your business?

Ask any team you’re considering working with if they have a strategic way of targeting your audience. You should also ask how and when they plan on reporting back to you. If you or someone on you team isn’t monitoring an advertising team you outsource to, you won’t have any control over what’s posted about you.

Making Time for Social Media Marketing

Time constraint is a huge factor in how social media marketing is handled. You can schedule time weekly to check out engagement, use a social media aggregator and make any necessary updates to your profiles. However, many folks are going a step beyond that. Some small business owners vow to check into social media daily and answer questions, but simply don’t have the time to do it.

If you’re doing your own social media marketing, methodology is important. Have a set schedule that includes what tasks need to be done for the week along with a time frame. If you can’t make time to do these tasks week after week, or someone on your team isn’t doing them efficiently, it’s time to look at other options like outsourcing.

Tracking Social Media

Engagement is about more than getting people to notice you, come to your website and buy from you.  It’s about building trust between you and your customers. Analytics and tracking allow you to see how effective your social media marketing campaigns truly are. If you’re not checking metrics such as brand mentions, clicks to your website from social media or new followers, you could be missing a good opportunity to leverage more interaction for your brand.

Most analytics tracking systems don’t give you the data you need to single out and nurture individual customers who come from your social media marketing efforts. Lead Liaison can! Talk to us today about upping your social media game and tracking customers from entrance to exit.

Lead Liaison

How to Maximize Marketing Automation ROI with High Quality Content

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How to Maximize Marketing Automation ROI with High Quality ContentHigh quality content is an essential element of modern marketing and one of the strongest factors in maximizing marketing automation ROI. Content is one of the primary ways that marketers generate, engage, and nurture leads. It is used to build brands, establish authority, attract new social media followers, and retain existing customers. All of these benefits can contribute to your marketing automation return on investment when they are effectively executed.

Here are a few tips on how to maximize your marketing automation ROI with high quality content:

Create Valuable Content

Every piece of content should provide prospective leads with real value. High-quality content will educate the reader and give them a reason to turn to your business whenever they require additional information. Basically it should be a subtle pitch that demonstrates your expertise while offering beneficial guidance. To consistently provide readers with significant value, the content must always be focused first on the concerns and needs of your typical consumers. Selling a product or service should also be the secondary focus.

Create Personalized Content

Marketing automation software generates detailed lead profiles based on a prospect’s online behavior and demographic characteristics. Utilizing the information in your lead profiles to personalize content will maximize ROI by creating a more meaningful connection with the prospect. It shows that someone is paying attention to their concerns, which will inspire loyalty and ultimately produce greater marketing automation ROI.

Create Newsworthy Content

Each article and email that is sent using marketing automation software must provide some unique and newsworthy insight. People that trust you with access to their email inbox do not want to read the same information over and over again. High-quality content that will maximize marketing automation ROI will offer original and worthwhile information that the reader doesn’t already know about your industry, product, or services.

Create Diverse Campaigns

Content includes more than just text. Every image and video can help to establish and strengthen a brand. Visual representations are more eye-catching and usually have a higher success rate than written copy on its own. You can add images to your emails and articles to grab a lead’s attention or create infographics and videos that use imagery to inform potential prospects. For additional information on creating effective video campaigns, please read How to make video marketing work for you.

Create Registration Forms

The content with the highest value should be hidden behind registration forms to obtain additional demographic information from potential leads. This will make it easier to further develop lead profiles and create more customize content. Content that is guarded by a registration form should offer a few trade secrets or particularly useful information that can’t be accessed elsewhere on your site. Individuals that fill out a registration form to access certain information will have higher expectations from the content they receive.
High quality content is a simple and proven method for maximizing marketing automation ROI. Make sure all of your content is valuable, personalized, newsworthy, and diverse. If it is particularly beneficial content, place it behind a brief registration form. All of these tips will help increase the return on your investment.

Lead Liaison

8 Tips for Marketing Automation Management – Part 2

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Tips for Marketing Automation ManagementYesterday we posted part 1 of Marketing Automation Management. Here’s part 2 with the final four tips. 

1)      Use Lead Profiles to Create Content

It is necessary to consider the characteristics of potential leads when you are creating new content or evaluating your current content. Understanding and making different types of content available can help you further profile prospects while creating a meaningful connection. Determine what content is getting the best response and how it relates to the lead profiles that have already been established.

2)       Minimize Alternate Links on Landing Pages

Landing pages are designed to generate a specific response from your target prospects. Using landing pages that include a standard menu and multiple links, or one that mimics your main website will distract potential leads from the ultimate purpose. Make sure to minimize links to only the bare essentials.

3)       Create Campaigns from Start to Finish

Since every piece of content should be designed to trigger a specific reaction. You will need to ensure that each subsequent piece will build towards the purpose of the campaign. It is beneficial to map out the objective for the entire campaign before you actually create a single piece of content.

4)       Redevelop, Revise, and Reuse

Once a process, program or resource has been developed, don’t forget to reuse it in future campaigns. Redeveloping quality content and proven concepts is an essential part of marketing automation management. Incorporating these elements into new campaigns is an effective way to leverage your content and keep leads engaged. Marketing automation management is a massive undertaking and it should be managed by a professional who understands how to effectively utilize the software, as well as these eight tips. If you need help getting the most from your marketing automation software, please ask the experts at Lead Liaison for assistance.

Lead Liaison

Hiring a Content Writer: Do’s and Don’ts

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Dos and donts of hiring a content writerHiring a content writer seems pretty easy, right? You put an ad out there or consult a hiring service. You go through work samples and resumes, and then make your selection. After you hire the right person, you’ll never have to worry about your content again. In fact, hiring a content writer will ensure years of awesome content you never even have to proof read.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. We’ve heard all the horror stories – from important deadlines not met to work farmed out overseas to writing so terrible you can’t believe the person you hired wrote those writing samples you were so excited about. It happens all too often.

If you’re thinking of hiring a content writer, there are some simple do’s and don’ts to keep in mind throughout the process. Here are a few to think about:

Don’t Assume the Samples Are For Real

Many people hiring a content writer ask the writer to pen a paragraph as a ‘sample’ without offering compensation. This immediately breaks the trust bond between you and your worker. Look over any past writing samples they send you – and always ask for samples –but also consider contacting references rather than asking for a personalized sample. Reputable, seasoned contractors are not going to do any work for free.

Cheaper is Not Always Better

If you’re thinking of paying $1 an hour, you can’t always rely on high quality content resulting. Rather than paying hourly or by word count/page, you might consider striking up a deal with your copywriter. For long-term work, he or she might be willing to take $5-20 an article depending on the length and complexity. Consider what makes sense for you financially, and then be upfront about what you expect and what you can afford.

You’re Hiring a Content Writer, Not Buying Software

Automated article spinning software exists, but if you’re looking to give users an authentic experience and avoid search engine penalties, make sure your content writers create unique content every time they write for you. During the interview process, ask upfront if your potential writer is using automated software or farming article writing overseas. It happens more often than you think.

Lead Liaison’s content marketing system is tied directly into our marketing automation dashboard. We work with real, experienced writers. Rather than hiring a content writer on your own, let us provide you with the quality content you’re looking for right away. Let’s talk about how our writers can benefit your business!

Lead Liaison

Why Content Creation is Crucial to Your Success

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Create Content for SuccessOnline companies are quickly discovering the significant impact content creation has on the success of their business. Content includes everything from the text they use on their main webpages to the videos and articles that are posted on various social media sites and blogs. It is a businesses best opportunity to connect with potential leads and establish themselves as an authority in their field.

Here are a few powerful reasons why content creation is crucial to your success:

Consumers Prefer Content

Recent studies have shown that 73% of consumers prefer to receive information about a company in the form of helpful articles instead of traditional advertising. In the same study, 61% of consumers say that they are more likely to purchase from a company that deliver high-quality and informative content than one that doesn’t share online content.

Content Establishes Authority

The content on your website, blogs, and social media networks should be used to demonstrate your expertise and establish brand authority. If you are the first source to announce a revolutionary breakthrough or your content consistently provides visitors with reliable answers to their important questions, they will be more likely to regularly follow your blogs and social profiles. It will also build trust in your company’s expertise.

Content Creates Connections

If you capture someone attention with a great headline and then follow it up with valuable information, it can create a lasting connection with a loyal follower. Content created by a content creation specialist will be specifically designed to trigger a real emotional connection. If a individual believes a company’s content helped them resolve a personal issue it will create a lasting relationship and brand loyalty.

Content Encourages Engagement

Compelling content inspires participation. Content creation specialists will produce content that grabs visitor’s attention and encourages them to comment or share the information with others. The more your content is passed around, the greater opportunity there is to generate new leads.

Content Improves SEO

High-quality content written by a professional content creation specialist will appeal to both online visitors and search engines. Using the right keywords and phrases, establishing relevant and credible links within the content, and consistently posting helpful content will ultimately boost your search engine ranking.

Content Increases Conversion

Consumers prefer reading content over traditional advertising, it establishes your company as an authority in its respective field, creates lasting connections, encourages engagement, and improves your search engine ranking. All of these components will work together to increase your conversion rate. If your content is not regularly attracting new business, you probably don’t have the right content creation specialist on your team.

A skilled content creation specialist will ensure that every piece of content establishes authority, creates a connection, encourages engagement, improves SEO, and increases conversion. Content that accomplishes all of these things is crucial to the success of your business. Now that the importance of content creation has been established, you can learn how to create high-quality content for your business by reading How to Continuously Create Compelling Content.