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Lead Liaison

Email Marketing and Website Traffic Information: The Big Picture

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Email Marketing and Website Traffic InformationEmail marketing is an integral part of your overall marketing strategy, and the website traffic information you can glean from email reporting gives you an idea as to your email campaign’s effectiveness. However, when your email marketing platform doesn’t integrate with your other campaigns – like Adwords, Analytics, social media or your overall website visits – you may be missing data that can give you a better strategy.

Email Marketing and Website Traffic Information

A good email marketing campaign will undoubtedly bring some traffic to your website. If your current email marketing efforts don’t incorporate a linking strategy that sends visitors back to special pages on your website, it may be time to consider a change. Good linking practices can help you get your email reader even further down your sales funnel – and that’s the point of your email marketing in general.

Once you’re getting visitors back to your website via your email marketing campaigns – or if you’re getting visitors already – it’s time to take a look at how website traffic information from your email marketing efforts reflects on your overall marketing visits. Oh wait – you’re having a difficult time doing that with your current website traffic information tracking? Like many other businesses, you may not have an accurate idea of how your email marketing efforts, your Adwords or other PPC efforts or your general marketing strategy affect your campaigns on the whole.

Marketing Automation: A Holistic Perspective

The history of your email marketing may be unclear when you look at it through tools like Google Analytics. Folks who sign up for your email list may end up exploring certain areas of your website more than users who came through other methods. You may also find that the same specific email users are clicking on your email links again and again. When it comes to website traffic information, Google Analytics and other web tracking suites aren’t going to give you the kind of specific information about your visitors that you’ll get from marketing automation services. A good marketing automation dashboard will show you not just numbers – as in, xx amount of visitors have clicked over to your website from a certain email campaign – you’ll be able to see who these clicks are, assess their specific path through your website and more.

This isn’t just a fancy tool you’ll use to watch a certain visitor – its intelligence data, the kind that can change your email marketing strategy to give your users a better experience. Better experiences become greater sales and can even shorten your overall funnel or the efforts you put into doing your marketing.

When it comes to website traffic information, Lead Liaison’s suite of tools competes with other major marketing automation tools at only a portion of the price. Learn more by visiting leadliaison.com.

Lead Liaison

The Challenges and Benefits of Automated Lead Generation

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The Challenges and Benefits of Automated Lead GenerationMore and more companies are taking advantage of automated lead generation programs since marketing automation software has now proven its worth with countless industry leaders. Savvy businesses that have implemented a comprehensive marketing automation strategy are experiencing up to a 200% increase in their conversion rate.

Unfortunately, not everyone who uses automated lead generation software will reap the same benefits. Worthwhile lead generation has been a constant struggle for traditional marketers who don’t know how to use the software to its full capabilities, as discussed in Business News Daily’s article from April 23, 2013; Lead Generation B2B Challenges. Businesses that are not aware of how to extract useful information, accurately rank leads, and effectively nurture each lead will struggle to see all the benefits of lead generation.

Lead Generation Challenges

One of the greatest challenges with lead generation is that most marketing automation software systems are underutilized. Companies that don’t utilize a lead’s behavioral and demographic characteristics for lead scoring and customized lead nurturing will not see the results they would expect. Automated lead generation needs to be combined with a full-scale marketing automation program to ensure that every lead is understood and pointed in the right direction.

Benefits of Lead Generation

The benefits of lead generation are pretty obvious; having more leads means a higher potential for sales. However, it is the benefits of automated lead generation combined with a complete marketing automation program that will truly give you a worthwhile return on your investment.

When it is accompanied by a marketing automation program, lead generation is run using automated software that guarantees no lead will be missed. Every person who crosses paths with your website will be captured, profiled, and scored. The software tracks which pages each lead visits, how long they stay on each page, as well as any demographic details that they voluntarily offer through newsletter registries or pop-up questionnaires. Creating pop-up barriers that request leads sign up before they are provided with more valuable content is one of the best practices for fully utilizing lead generation and marketing automation software.

Gain Greater Insight into Leads

Automated lead generation is focused on gathering relevant information on each lead. This will make it easier to identify qualified leads, plus it will provide crucial profiling details that can be used to create more customized lead nurturing content.

The real benefits of lead generation are only realized if the lead is converted into a customer. Automated lead generation combined with marketing automation will offer marketers and sales professionals valuable insight into each lead, so they can use a more personalized approach and increase their chances of conversion.

Although there will be some challenges when it comes to achieving the greatest benefits from automated lead generation, it is still a valuable tool even when it is not used to its full capacity. Using marketing automation software for lead generation will ensure that every lead on your site is identified. When it the program is used to its full intent, it will also gather valuable details on each lead to support lead scoring, lead profiling, and lead nurturing efforts.

Lead Liaison

How to Optimize Your Social Media Campaign

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How to Optimize Your Social Media CampaignB2B marketers are scrambling to deploy social media campaigns in order to establish a foothold in this burgeoning channel. In fact, according to a recent Forrester Research study, 85% of business decision-makers believe having at least one social media channel is important when making tech purchase decisions. Here are 12 ways to make your SM campaign effective and optimize your social media campaign:

Be consistent. B2B marketers must post regularly and connect with their audiences frequently in order to be effective through SM channels.

Use images within your content. Whenever possible embed an image in your SM posts. Use images that are relevant to your business such as product images, users, employees, etc. Visual media is typically shared more often than copy.

Join LinkedIn discussion groups. Professionals join LinkedIn Groups to learn, share, and discuss – this is a great spot to provide insight, answers, or even the occasional joke (in good taste!)

Become a Quora user. Show your interest in being helpful by providing answers to questions about your industry, etc. There will be opportunities to improve an existing answer or posting your own.

Use social bookmarking sites to share information. Reddit, Digg, Delicious, and other social bookmarking sites allow b-to-b marketers to provide resources for prospects. Become a respected knowledge authority by sharing content from a variety of sources.

Respond to any and all comments. Be diligent in providing responses or comments to those who have engaged with your posts. Readers want to feel as if you are connected to them.

Use your prospect’s language. Put some effort in learning common phrases, terms, etc. that are used by your prospects. Avoid using language that, although familiar to you, may be confusing to your audience.

Embed AddThis widgets on your site, blog, etc. Make it easy to share your web pages, blog posts, and other digital assets by inserting a SM widget on every page.

Automate your posting activity. Deploy social media automation platforms, such as HootSuite, that allow marketers to automate delivery and manage multiple SM profiles. Automating SM deployment provides lean organizations with a cost effective way to deploy social messaging using fewer resources.

Share content from multiple networks. It’s easy to connect your social posts across multiple platforms. Cross-network sharing is a good way to catch prospects that may miss your original post.

Share video. Watching product demonstration videos is an effective way to learn about a company’s solutions. If possible, create and share videos that depict how to use your solutions, how to troubleshoot issues, and other helpful information.

Use analytics. Find out which messages are generating responses, which posts are being viewed, and what messaging should be dropped. Adapt social messaging to meet your market’s demands by maintaining an agile marketing strategy through the use of SM analytics.

At the end of the day, a B2B social media campaign is only as effective as its messaging. When deploying SM, break out your processes using a 70/30 rule: 70% of the time should be devoted to message creation and 30% should be devoted to message delivery.

Lead Liaison

How to Develop Your Customer Persona

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How to Develop Your Customer PersonaHave you ever wondered how fiction writers develop realistic characters that captivate readers? Have you thought about how actors develop roles that resonate with their audiences? Successful authors and actors spend a significant amount of time developing the personas they portray in order to connect with their “markets”. Similar tactics can be used by your marketers to develop a customer persona.

B2B marketers are expected to be marksmen, targeting their messaging to appeal to each buyer’s unique attributes. To be successful connecting with your prospects requires the same dedicated focus on developing personas that award-winning fiction authors and actors commit. Developing a customer persona is an essential step towards more effective and efficient marketing practices. There may be several customer types that engage with your brand. The key to successful customer persona development is to create a profile that embodies the same complexity as your typical customer. Consider as many characteristics as possible and be as specific as possible about each one when you’re building your customer persona.

Remember this caveat: Data integrity is important to the persona development process. Without good data, the quality of your customer model is diminished.

Determine “Physical” Characteristics

The most obvious starting point to developing a customer persona is to define who your typical B2B customers are. Break out business and personal characteristics including title, seniority, family makeup, education, geographic location, and any other identifiers that make up your typical customers.

Define Customer Habits

The next step is to define what your typical customer does. Although it can be challenging to collect data on every behavior embedded in a customer’s buying cycle, behaviors that are recorded, such as digital searches or trade show registrations, can be identified, categorized, and organized to reveal the footprints that your customers make on their way to choosing your solution. Typically, the patterns that emerge provide distinct habits that can be used to develop your customer persona.

Uncover Psychographics

This is the challenging step – even giants like Google are still working on better ways to understand digital human behavior – determining why your customers make buying decisions. Many SMBs don’t have the resources to devote to psychographic analysis; however, to successfully attract suitable prospects you should understand their attitudes, opinions, and values. Look at what motivates, scares, and interests your customers. Shape your customer persona to reflect what makes them tick.

Despite evidence that shows marketing automation is effective at improving your marketing and sales practices, if you’re marketers are randomly targeting prospects marketing tech won’t be as effective. Before you set out to connect with your prospects, make sure they are the right ones to target – develop a customer persona.

Lead Liaison

How to convert more B2B leads into customers? Marketing Automation!

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How to convert more B2B leads into customers? Marketing Automation!As the post title implies, our answer to the eternal sales question “how do we convert more leads into customers?” is to deploy marketing automation. Is that the only answer? No. But with the amount of data available today, marketing automation will do more to improve your B2B lead conversion rates than social media, PPC, or stale drip campaigns.

It’s quickly becoming apparent that marketing automation can play a significant role in improving your lead conversion ratio. From first touch (initial point of contact) to pass through (migration to CRM), lead conversion for companies in most industries is improving thanks to MA. The first step towards higher B2B close rates is to manage your leads effectively before they are sent to your sales team.

To begin, you should know your customers well. Who are they? What do they like? What do they do? Why do they buy? Much of this information is now available digitally, the key is to leverage the information you collect into effective lead management.

Lead Generation

An often overlooked concept about lead generation is that it should be approached holistically not unilaterally. When you need to convert more B2B leads into customers look to strengthen lead generation efforts. Lead gen starts with first touch, escalates through lead tracking, and winds up with capture. If you’re not focusing on developing good content for your touch points, tracking your website visitors using business intelligence integration, and capturing contact information through digital assets, you’re not effectively generating leads – and you can’t convert leads you don’t have. Make sure your lead gen scope is broader than list buys and PPC campaigns.

Lead Nurturing

Many think lead nurturing equals email drip campaigns. Though partly true, lead nurturing is so much more. Lead conversion through the nurturing process requires that you develop the relationship through escalating engagements. Simply sending the occasional “hi-how-are-you?” note won’t be sufficient to move your leads through the marketing pipeline. Build a campaign that offers more at advanced buying cycle stages: a webinar invite, a product demo. Remember, nurture means “to grow”.

Lead Scoring

There’s nothing worse for a sales agent than to receive a lead that turns out to be a graduate student completing his thesis. MA platforms provide lead scoring and grading capabilities that should allow you to sharpen the sales team’s focus towards the most suitable, marketing-qualified leads. Establish specific criteria that can be scored or graded. Most leading systems grade explicit lead attributes (industry, company size) and score implicit behaviors (webpage visit, webinar registration). Once a scoring matrix has been created, determine a scoring threshold that automatically migrates the lead to your CRM.

Lead Distribution

Lead distribution must be optimized to channel leads appropriately to your sales force. Which sales agents are available to respond quickly? Which agents have high close rates? Which agents know the lead’s industry best? Automated systems distribute leads using parameters that can maximize your sales team’s efficiency. Some MA platforms allow you to assign lead ownership according to predefined criteria, such as geography or seniority. Leads distributed effectively will shorten your average sales cycle and improve sales close rates.

Keep in mind that marketing automation is a tool that will improve sales conversions and help convert more B2B leads into customers. Though MA platforms have improved sales outcomes, much of the success that comes from lead management is dependent on the content you provide. If you don’t have strong creative minds to develop messaging in-house, consider outsourcing.

Lead Liaison

How to Grow Your Business Faster with Website Visitor Tracking

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How to Grow Your Business Faster with Website Visitor TrackingThanks to the global reach of the internet, online competition is fierce. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, there are countless companies across the world trying to secure the same leads as you. Businesses today must take advantage of new technology, like website visitor tracking, to ensure they are not missing out on any potential opportunities.

Faster Lead Generation

Many industry leaders have already discovered how they can use website visitor tracking and marketing automation software to grow their businesses faster. It is a simple and effective method for automatically capturing every lead that comes in contact with your website. It is estimated that 95% of the visitors on your site will end up leaving your site unnoticed, if you don’t use some form of website visitor tracking software.

Lead Profiling and Scoring

Bringing in more leads will most likely help to grow your business faster, but these results will be significantly amplified if marketers and sales professionals have a better understanding of each leads’ wants and needs. Website visitor tracking monitors a lead’s online behavior and then analyzes their unique buying process. When this program is accompanied with online registries, it can also provide valuable insight into a lead’s demographic characteristics. This will create a comprehensive lead profile.

Marketers can compare each new lead’s profile with existing clientele to determine their likelihood of conversion. This is referred to as lead scoring or ranking. Leads that demonstrate a significant potential for conversion can be passed immediately on to the sales department while those who are still undecided can remain in the marketing automation engine for further lead nurturing.

Lead Nurturing and Conversion  

The lead profile that is generated by website visitor tracking software should provide a clear picture of what the lead is interested in and the questions they have about their buying decision. This will make it easier to grow your business by creating helpful and personalized lead nurturing content designed to answer every lead’s questions and concerns.

Generate, Profile, Score, Nurture, & Convert

Website visitor tracking allows you to grow your business faster by ensuring that no lead is missed, that every lead is profiled and ranked, and that content is customized to give leads the answers they need. It is the most effective marketing method for lead generation and the easiest way to gain greater insight into what it will take to convert a lead into a customer.

Lead Liaison

How to Use B2B Social Media Automation Effectively – in 5 Easy Steps

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How to Use B2B Social Media Automation Effectively – in 5 Easy StepsA growing number of B2B companies want to learn how to use social media automation in their marketing campaigns. We thought it would be a good time to discuss how you can use social media automation to accomplish your marketing objectives.

  1. Create a posting schedule. For B2B marketers, it’s important to maintain a consistent profile for your leads. It can be helpful to create at least a month-long posting schedule with topic ideas and targeted audiences. Allow for flexibility if there is a need to post a message in response to an unforeseen event or issue but develop a messaging sequence that moves your B2B prospects through a series of unique posts.
  2. Select recipients. This can seem like an easy step but beware: ineffective SM use can spell doom for your business just like with other channels. Not all B2B leads are the same, and not all view social media favorably as a business tool. Focus on prospects that have engaged previously on the network rather than those that simply have an account profile.
  3. Create posts. Compose a message that is conversational (not salesy) and addresses a single issue that your prospects are interested in. Be careful not to compose messages that are complex or confusing. Keep posts short (hard not to on Twitter!) and engaging. Throw in a question, conduct a poll,  host a contest, find ways to engage your audience. And avoid repeatedly asking your prospects to share, like, or otherwise socially deliver your posts; doing so frequently can appear desperate.
  4. Select networks. Choose the networks to post on that are most visible to your prospects. In many cases, LinkedIn will be a solid choice. Investigate as many networks as possible and select the sites where your hottest prospects “hang out”. Our Lead Management Automation™ platform allows posting to multiple SM networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
  5. Schedule delivery. Determine when each post should be delivered and schedule social post delivery dates and times when posts will most likely be read. Select various times throughout the day to deliver your posts. It may be helpful to use A/B testing to determine the most effective times for social media posting.

As more B2B companies discover how to use social media within their marketing strategies, competition for prospects’ attention through SM channels will likely become as fierce as PPC and search marketing has been in recent years. The winners will be early adopters who position themselves effectively within the social media channel.

Lead Liaison

Marketing and Sales Process: Web Chat Automation

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Marketing and Sales Process: Web Chat AutomationIf you’re interested in engaging with users as part of your marketing and sales process, direct engagement from your website is a good way to do it using web chat automation. Users tend to have mixed experiences and reactions when it comes to web chat utilities, but for some, the ability to talk to someone right away without picking up the phone is a bonus. Giving customers the ability to choose whether or not they want to react with you is an important way of recognizing whether a web chat utility is a good option for your site.

Tracking Your Web Chat

Most full-featured web chat services have some type of analytics involved. You should be able to log into a centralized web chat dashboard to see a user’s history with you, their return rate and their activity on your site. Some of your users could be one-hit wonders – landing on your site once, never to return again – but it’s those return visitors you need to be paying attention to. If they’re coming back as prospects again and again, they want to be communicated with. Even if they don’t engage in web chat, they should be followed up with.

When you use marketing automation systems, you have the ability to integrate your web analytics in one. When a user hits your website multiple times and you’re able to see them coming back, you’ll be able to customize your greeting message and your reach-out to the potential customer. If your sales team has been in contact as a normal part of your marketing and sales process, automated marketing tools allow you to pull up that history, know where a potential lead is segmented and communicate with them appropriately. The right solution will be streamlined from start to finish.

Marketing and Sales Process for Webchat

Web chat is a great way to customize your responses to returning customers. When marketing automation allows you to segment customers and tailor your sales pitch to their individual experiences, you’re more likely to make a sale.

What happens when customers aren’t using your webchat? You may not need a fully-trained, full time person on webchat, but if customers aren’t using it, you don’t have to staff the chat 24 hours a day. Ask clients to leave a message with the chat – and if you’re using a system like Lead Liaison, the ‘away’ message will go to the client, while his or her query or information enters the system automatically. From there, simply follow up with the customer asap. Piece of cake!

If you’d like to see further engagement, try modifying the look and feel of your chat on your site or add specific greeting or away messages that may better suit the lead’s needs. Test out these different messages and ensure you are keeping track of those tests on your back end – or let automated marketing services do it for you!

Your marketing and sales process is integral to getting the right clients in the door. Let Lead Liaison help you track, automate and reach out to your target client with savvy webchat, email segmentation and advanced analytics tracking systems.

Lead Liaison

Why Prospect Management is Impossible Using Google Analytics

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Why Prospect Management is Impossible Using Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics has long been a useful tool for webmasters to monitor website traffic. But GA is not an effective prospect management tool. While it breaks down traffic sources, visitor activities, and conversion rates, Google Analytics doesn’t provide the functionality required to be useful tool for B to B marketers to manage leads.

Prospect management is at the heart of most business-to-business marketing automation practices. Google Analytics only provides part of the story. To effectively manage prospects, marketers must rely on more robust data sets and integrated engagement mechanisms. If your sales cycle lasts more than a single website visit, you need marketing automation to manage prospects as they move through the sales pipeline.

Here are a few ways in which our Lead Management Automation™ is a more effective prospect management to for B to B marketers:

  1. Automatically tracks leads that have engaged with your brand, whether it’s through a submitted web form, survey response, social post, or other digital asset
  2. Links IP addresses with business intelligence generated from Dun and Bradstreet and/or Hoover’s
  3. Assigns a lead score and grade based upon business intelligence and visitor activity
  4. LMA users can schedule digital engagements while viewing expanded lead information
  5. Segments visitors by industry, location, size, and other criteria
  6. Users can adjust messaging, asset delivery, and offers within the user interface
  7. Website traffic can be filtered through a robust set of parameters
  8. Visitor activity is grouped together to provide a holistic view of a prospect’s online behaviors
  9. Users can see organic search terms used to find your site
  10. A chat feature can be enabled to provide instant engagement with a website visitor
  11. While GA provides alerts pertaining to traffic anomalies, the LMA alerts users about who is on your site
  12. Google Analytics is not concerned with optimizing your marketing and sales practices. The interface is provided to display general traffic information so users might spend more on advertising rather than improve marketing and sales practices

While GA provides robust traffic intelligence, you can see why prospect management for B to B marketers should be conducted through a marketing automation platform like our Lead Management Automation solution. For more information, contact a Revenue Generation Specialist today.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Offers Real-time Visitor Tracking

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Marketing Automation Offers Real-time Visitor TrackingModern businesses need marketing automation to record and monitor who is on their website and how they are behaving. It is estimated that 70% of people begin their purchasing process online and visitor tracking is essential for capturing these leads. Websites that are not equipped with real-time visitor tracking capabilities can miss out on up to 95% of these potential consumers.

Real-time Visitor Tracking

High-quality marketing automation software will also be able to monitor their behavior while they are still active. Potential customers are online searching for answers and it will improve the chance of conversion if marketers and sales professionals can provide them with an immediate and helpful response.

Creates an Accurate Profile in Real-time

Marketing automation generates a detailed profile of every lead’s interests and needs. It follows leads along their buying journey and uses pop-up registries to obtain useful demographic information. Website visitor tracking can tell you who is on your site, their location, purchasing history, employment background, and which pages they are reading.

All of these details can be matched to characteristics of current clients to determine their likelihood of conversion. Marketing automation is the fastest way to develop a lead profile in real-time, so the sales team can quickly decide whether that visitor is worth pursuing.

Keep Better Track of Favorites

Marketing automation uses lead scoring to determine which leads have the highest potential. Leads are ranked based on similarities to existing clients and then prioritized. Once these potential customers are identified, they can be marked as “Favorites.”

The majority of reputable marketing automation companies, like Lead Liaison, will send instant updates via text messaging or email when a “Favorite” goes online. This will offer sales the ability to immediately connect with qualified leads in real-time.

Provides the Opportunity for Live Conversions

Many websites that use marketing automation and visitor tracking have installed a helpful chat feature where they can conduct live conversations with leads as they are actively researching their options. When the person is online browsing your site, a little box will appear in the corner asking if they need any assistance. This offers the ability for open dialogue and live conversions.

Marketing automation offers online businesses real-time visitor tracking. It allows you to quickly generate a profile on each lead, determine their potential, connect with favorites while they are online, and it provides the opportunity for live conversions. This level of concern and service is what modern consumers expect.