Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation for Beginners

April 16, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Thinking about marketing automation for beginners? Are you a marketing automation newbie? Marketing is a fundamental operation of your small business: attracting new customers (as well as retaining current customers) is the key to profits and expanding success. Without marketing your business goes stale, contacts dry up, and your customers will look to your competitors to meet their needs. But many of the marketing tasks that you have can be automated and can guarantee positive results for your team and your bottom line.

Much of the marketing responsibilities you have are repetitive and wasteful activities that are simple tasks which can be easily, quickly, and affordably automated. Lead capturing, managing relationships with your customers, creating captivating and personalized content, and email campaigns can all be automated. It also gives you quick and easy ways to quantify the feedback received by your customers, allowing you to make adjustments as needed. Focusing on fine-tuning the marketing process while pushing your customers successfully through the sales funnel will be much easier once you automate your marketing.

When considering marketing automation for beginners, the easiest way to begin to automate your marketing is with automated follow up. Quite simply, when a potential customer expresses interest in your product, your marketing automation software triggers an email response – generally this will be a reply thanking them for their interest and welcoming them while giving them information about the product. If the customer has signed up for a freemium trial of a product that automated message will contain information regarding the trial period and what to expect after the trial expires. Automating the nurturing process can shorten the life cycle of your sales, which will unveil new opportunities for your sales team. Once your automation process is set up, it’s almost an entirely self-sustaining system but you can always make adjustments, add more features, and test new actions.

Marketing automation also gives you the opportunity to align your sales and marketing teams – which will save you money and resources – while strengthening both processes. This will create steady, predictable growth in your business while increasing efficiency. Moreover, you will get specific tools and help from your marketing automation provider who will become a legitimate partner in your success, enabling your small business to compete with larger companies.

Let Lead Liaison help you get started with marketing automation for your business. Click here to contact us.

Integrate CRM And Marketing Automation For Best Results

April 2, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Think your standalone CRM can drive your business? Try to integrate CRM and marketing automation for best results. One of the great challenges of marketing in the new landscape of online business is the fact that while your prospective customers have every opportunity to inspect your business and services, your sales team has very few opportunities to learn about new leads. Sure, strategic marketing can certainly help you attract the clientele that will gain the most from your services, but unless a customer offers you information, your sales people are sometimes flying blind.

In order to give your sales force information on the customers that they are approaching, one of the most effective ways to obtain information is by using a CRM, such as Salesforce.com. Through these programs, you can gain information such as web visits, e-mail opens and video views to gain some insight into their interests and purchasing inclinations, giving your marketing and sales teams a degree of insight into the character of their leads. However, this still has an issue – all this data can be overwhelming, and isn’t entirely useful in cold, hard blocks. The solution? Integrating your CRM with marketing automation software, such as Lead Liaison.

Lead Liaison was designed from the ground up to integrate with CRMs, take the data provided, and deliver it into meaningful statistical representation of individual leads and your customer base as a whole. Integrating marketing automation software with a CRM means that all the data your sales team needs is contained in one easy to use interface, so your sales team will be able to move seamlessly from accessing the data they need to make sales.

Benefits of CRM and Marketing Integration

It pays dividends to integrate CRM and marketing automation. One of the primary functions of Lead Liaison is to use the data collected by a CRM, such as search terms used and total visits, and record them into a contact record within your CRM. Once this contact information is prepared, an algorithm compiling information such as geography, job title, and revenue is used to assign a lead grade and to tell your sales team how likely an individual is to be interested in purchasing your company’s product or services. This grade is used in conjunction with factors like buy signals on Lead Liaison’s hot lead dashboard, called Briefcase, where leads are given a lead score that helps your sales people make the sales your company needs.

Another great feature that is possible with the integration of a CRM with marketing automation software is lead nurturing. Just because a lead isn’t ready to purchase your services at the time of contact, it doesn’t mean they won’t ever be. Lead nurturing maintains a low level relationship with the customer with automated contact such as occasional e-mails, all while continuing to track the leads behavior through your CRM. If that lead exhibits behavior that indicates they may once again be interesting in your services, a sales member is alerted, so they can contact the customer.

This are just some of the great benefits that are possible with CRM and marketing automation. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resources on the web to find out about more.

Marketing Automation Tools Every Company Should Be Using

March 24, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Marketing automation is far from a trendy phrase that businesses are using to create buzz. When marketing automation tools are implemented, lead nurturing skyrockets: an astounding 451% of companies see an increase in quality leads and 53% higher conversion rates. Marketing automation will also save you time, money, and stress and will condense many of your daily activities so your team can focus on more important tasks. Clearly, marketing automation is a solution that many businesses should be engaging. If you’re just now considering adding marketing automation, you may be overwhelmed in the sea of options. We’ve broken down a few marketing automation tools for you to consider.

Blog Content Management Systems

You’re probably familiar with this type of marketing automation system and don’t even know it. Popular blog content management systems include WordPress which is an active user community that has an enormous range of plugins available, all designed to help you create and manage a blog. Other options include Joomla and Drupal. Like WordPress, Joomla has an enormous interactive user community who can answer your questions or address concerns. Drupal is an additional option that is an open source CMS and is used to create blogs as well as enterprise applications.

Landing Pages and Lead Capture Forms

A landing page is a single web page, designed to be individual from your main web pages. In simpler terms, a landing page can be any web page that someone ‘lands’ on but it’s generally used for one main purpose: to guide users to convert. Some landing pages are ‘click-through’ which means your user will click a link through to another page. Typically, this page will be a descriptor page offering them more information about your products. Lead capture forms are often on the landing page: a place where users can submit their information for a Freemium trial, get a free sample, or request that the sales team call them back with more information. Truly, the lead capture form should be the focus of your landing page and its placement is important.

Contact Management and Lead Nurturing

The most popular contact management suites for midsized companies include Lead Liaison, which allows you to rank your website and sales team generated leads according to buying interest – making your leads all the more powerful and improving conversion rates. Some content management suites also allow you to manage your social media accounts and offer extensions that will make you even more automated – especially common and time-consuming tasks. You can even choose software that will track your interactions with potential customers, making it clear where they fall in the conversion funnel.

Email Marketing

Perhaps the most time-consuming and tedious task, automating your email marketing frees up a considerable amount of your time. Want to email all contacts that are about to exhaust their Freemium version? Email marketing automation can send out targeted communications and automated messages while also appearing to be customized to each receiver: this means that you’ll create a more personal relationship, which will hopefully lead to higher conversion rates.

This isn’t an inclusive list of all the marketing automation tools available but it is a good place to start. There are options that can automate some or all of your marketing. You just have to do your research and decide which one is right for your company and your customers!

Myths about Marketing Automation

March 19, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

We’ve heard it all from companies about why they’re delaying their decision to use marketing automation. Myths about marketing automation get in the way of making logical decisions. We gathered our sales force and asked them, what are the myths you’re hearing from companies about marketing automation? The list went on and on, here’s a short list of objections to marketing automation that our sales force commonly runs into:

Waiting for website to be re-done
Not a priority right now (focused on sales right now)
Technologies changing (ERP, CRM, etc)
Not enough time to implement
Busy hiring salespeople and traveling
Downturn in economy/industry
Not ready to benefit from all functionality in the system
cost/competition

Let’s take a moment to address this:

Great Myths about Marketing Automation

One of the great failures in sales and marketing comes from a belief that you are not in a position to prepare for the future. Marketing automation is a great example of an investment that you can make today in the future of your growth and sales success.

Here are five common reasons why people wrongly believe that they cannot tackle a program that will yield sales results within 30-90 days in most cases:

Myth # 1: Until my website is perfect, we can’t really benefit from marketing automation

Truth: 75-80% of the value of marketing automation has nothing to do with your website! In fact, poor messaging on your website is MORE of a reason that you want to identify and nurture prospects who may not have given your brand enough time to truly understand what you do.

Myth #2 : You need to spend a ton of time preparing strategies and focusing on marketing automation for it to be successful.

Truth: Some of the most successful users of marketing automation spend less than 15 minutes a week building and deploying content. As an example, one Lead Liaison client was able to build a connection with 100s of prospects as a result of a message that took less than 20 minutes to create and deploy. With historic sales and marketing approaches, it would have taken a dozen sales people a year to reach that many people. Now those salespeople can focus on stage two messaging with more qualified prospects!

Myth #3 : When shifting technology (CRM, ERP, etc) you should not use marketing automation because you will have to restart your efforts later.

Truth: Unless you are using an all-in-one system (which we heavily discourage), a good marketing automation system will stand on its own.

Myth #4: We are putting all our focus on the website, tradeshow, end-of-the quarter, etc. We don’t have time for marketing automation.

Truth: The fact that your company didn’t invest in marketing automation is precisely why you are working so hard to put out fires this quarter, and this will repeat itself next quarter as you make excuses for not acting now. Furthermore, marketing automation can make your other efforts (like tradeshows) more effective and efficient.

Myth #5: We are watching costs right now, so we are delaying our marketing automation program.

Truth: If your organization isn’t striving to increase sales revenue and profitability, then you should shut down your doors right now. Why would you invest in sales people, a marketing department, etc.. if you aren’t committed to making every penny of those investments matter? Marketing automation tends to cost 10% to 20% of what a company pays for a single employee. If you have 5 salespeople that you are paying for every day; but do not want to spend the extra 4% to make those people successful… you are putting your company at a huge competitive disadvantage.

Bottomline: Implementing marketing automation is not a big deal. It’s easy and scaleable. Based on the simple premise that people buy more of the products and services that they know, trust, and feel are best supported.

Each month that you delay in implementing marketing automation is a day in which your competition creates a competitive advantage that could have been yours. Such delays will result not only in a loss of existing business; but struggles to increase your revenue in the short-term and long-term.

Effectively Implementing Marketing Automation

March 17, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Often, the biggest challenge in effectively implementing marketing automation software to your repertoire of business tools is how to deliver messages that are appropriate to your audience while engaging leads. Marketing automation can help you reach a broader audience than other marketing strategies but it can be stressful software to implement and the concept can often seem overwhelming.

Decide What Your Goal Is

A successful marketing automation program really begins with a company deciding what they want to accomplish. Creating a plan for implementation before purchasing or even considering software is key for success. It’s easy to get carried away by all the excitement that good marketing automation can bring but you’ll need to set expectations to be really satisfied. If you really want to be successful at marketing automation, your sales and marketing teams will need to get on board with the plan and come to an agreement on how they will work together and what their roles will be. Starting with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing is always a good first step.

With marketing automation, your marketing team’s new job will be to deliver the right message at the right time so you can engage your audience and nurture your leads. This means that marketing will be getting a new workload, probably from the sales team, and everyone will need to realize his or her new roles. Avoiding unwelcome surprises regarding workload, tasks, and interaction between teams will be easier if all these issues are discussed beforehand.

Start Small

It’s tempting to take your marketing automation software and throw everything into it but it might not be wise, especially at the beginning. Sometimes, less truly is more, and trying to include every feature of your marketing automation program right at the offset is more likely to set you back than push you forward. You’ll be in a much greater position if you start small, measure your successes and reevaluate your challenges, than you will be if you toss everything into the pot and hope for the best.

To get off on right foot effectively implementing marketing automation, think of your first full-fledged campaign as a trial run and learning experience will help mitigate any difficulties or disappointments. What you learn from your first sales and marketing campaign can help you learn what works and what doesn’t work for your next one. You also need to decide what exactly you’ll be automating. Do you have on the fly content that needs to be automated or are you looking for a more complex plan on creating, distributing, and re-employing your creative content? Don’t forget to include in your plans some action items for what should happen after the leads start coming in. You need to ensure you have a dedicated and knowledgeable sales team who can answer all your leads questions and concerns.

Keep in mind while you’re doing all of this that the process, planning, and implementation can be overwhelming. Remember that your investment into marketing automation isn’t just your monthly or quarterly subscription, but it’s also the time you put into the software and the data it produces.

Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Automation

March 11, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

As marketing and technology continue to embrace one another, it seems inevitable that the future holds great innovations, especially in the field of marketing automation. While marketing automation has made many common marketing tasks like copywriting and strategy computerized, there is a field of marketing jobs that are still to be innovated using technology. As technology evolves, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and marketing automation are real.

Marketing automation is a billion dollar market but despite the money being invested into it, we still haven’t figured out a way to consistently legitimize the data and use it to make action plans. All in all, marketing still relies heavily on the people behind the marketing including our biases, beliefs, opinions, experiences, and education. Since the majority of customers are constantly connected via social media or mobile devices, the influx of data received is often overwhelming. Marketing automation can save time and money while increasing efficiency, but still, when it comes to providing us with information about consumer spending habits and buy decisions, those statistics are often confusing and platforms used can’t strategically recommend action plans.

All of these significant problems have one solution and a grand one at that: artificial intelligence. While it may seem like a notion straight out of a science fiction movie, artificial intelligence is actually used among some of the most profitable companies marketing automation programs including Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. Artificial intelligence is used to turn data into real, marketable experiences that drive traffic and attract customers. Instead of raw data, you get highly personalized content that delivers as if a person with tone, personality, and voice wrote the content. This means that customers and potential customers are more connected to the material and, therefore, more likely to engage and buy.

Natural language, dynamic learning, and hypothesis generation are all traits of a successful artificial intelligence program. Marketing automation uses these programs by adding an intellectual layer to the marketing – this means that content generated is done much faster, more effectively, and cheaper than any employee could ever do. The future of artificial intelligence in marketing automation means that time spent reviewing analytics, writing and scheduling social media posts, copywriting and a variety of other time consuming tasks could be done by your automation program. This frees you up from repetitive tasks and gives you the ability to focus on moving leads throughout the purchasing funnel while establishing important relationships with customers.

Artificial intelligence and marketing automation together is the next logical advancement in the evolution of marketing automation. Driven marketing tools will deliver more personalized content that’s intelligent – already this technology is being used when delivering online customer service chat sessions. Self-service web, voice response systems, and other marketing automation media incorporating artificial intelligence will be coming to a marketing automation system near you. The future is here!

How Can Marketing Automation Save Money: How Does $181,059 Sound!

March 9, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

How Can Marketing Automation Save Money?

“Marketing automation” has become such a buzz phrase over recent years that most vendors try to incorporate the term into their pitch, and sometimes go as far as completely branding their business as marketing automation. In reality, there aren’t that many pure-play marketing automation companies out there in the industry. 100s of providers stake claim on marketing automation to be part of the buzz, which causes confusion in the marketplace. Companies have a hard time understanding marketing automation let alone how marketing automation can save money. In this post we provide a quantitative analysis to answer the question, how can marketing automation save money? We’ll also touch on our approach to marketing automation.

ROI of Marketing Automation Based on Functional Usage

You’ll see some fancy calculators to add up the ROI of marketing automation, but not many resources provide a ROI analysis based on functional areas. We did that for you and looked at what a typical company would spend after investing in a piece-milled software strategy. When you list out the category of tools that companies use to help drive revenue, the list typically includes sales efficiency tools, landing page designers, form designers, email marketing, automation, and a handful of other tools. The problem with buying all of these ad-hoc solutions is two-fold. First, they don’t all play nice together as disparate solutions. Second, your wallet gets pretty thin when you’re buying all these pieces separately. We decided to do a little analysis and tally up individual, best-in-breed solutions to see how much money would drain from your budget over a five year period if a company were to acquire all of these solutions standalone.

How Much Money Can Marketing Automation Save You?

Below you’ll find the assumptions we used, cost of individual solutions, and a ROI analysis at the end.

The bottom line: Lead Liaison can save your company $181,059 or 362%! What we didn’t include are the incremental costs for:

Multiple learning curves
Multiple resources required to manage each ad-hoc solution

Add those in and you could very well double the ROI from what we’ve reported above.

Assumptions:

Assumptions

At least 5 sales people

Up to 10,000 contacts

No more than 100 forms

No more than 25,000 unique visitors per month

Email frequency to database 2x per month

Use each software package for 5 years

Cost of Individual Solutions:

Solution	Monthly Price	Package	Purpose
Tout App	$250	Team	Email for Sales
Blogging	$600	2 Posts Per Week, $75 per Blog	Marketing Content
Litmus	$149	Plus	Email Testing
Marketo	$1,795	Standard	Marketing Automation
VisiStat	$500	Rocket	Visitor Tracking
HootSuite	$10	Pro	Social Posting
Gravity Forms/ Formstack	$99	Business License / Gold	Web Forms
Unbounce	$99	Pro 99	Landing Pages
Mailchimp	$150	Growing business	Email Marketing
Opt-In Monster	$199	Pro	Engaging Popups

Total Spend on Ad-Hoc Solutions:

TOTAL	$3,851
ANNUAL SPEND	$46,212
LIFETIME SPEND	$231,059

ROI with Lead Liaison:

AVERAGE ANNUAL SPEND with Lead Liaison	$10,000
LIFETIME SPEND with Lead Liaison	$50,000
ROI of Lead Liaison	362.12%
SAVINGS with Lead Liaison	$181,059

Lead Liaison’s Philosophy

We’ve got a different philosophy about marketing automation here at Lead Liaison. We don’t hate marketing automation, we just hate how the term is overused, misused, and misunderstood. The truth is that marketing automation is not software, it’s a strategy. You can’t really buy marketing automation software, but you can buy software that helps execute your strategy, which should include automation. No software out-of-the-box is going to automate your marketing – that’s wishful thinking.

Choices are getting “clouded” too. Some companies like HubSpot try to be the all-in-one solution, and get your CRM business too. Unfortunately, or fortunately for some, HubSpot is morphing into an Oracle or Salesforce.com type of company, is now public – trying to satisfy Wall Street, and now trying to take all your sales and marketing dollars with the emphasis on their new CRM. Lead Liaison fits in between the all-in-ones and marketing automation providers with our Revenue Generation Software® platform optimized for mid-market companies. Our mission has always been to focus on automation that improves a company’s sales and marketing operations but more importantly, generates more revenue for our customers. We believe companies care about revenue, not just automating marketing. We’re CRM agnostic, offer professional-grade sales and marketing automation functionality at killer prices, and have the industry’s deepest integration with 3rd party solutions.

It’s Simple Really: Your Introduction to Marketing Automation

March 5, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

The Age of Technology is truly upon us. If it doesn’t send email, it wasn’t built in this century. If the toaster can’t be programmed with Bluetooth, you need a new toaster. And now, we’re taking things a step further. And you’re going to be part of it. You’re ready to embrace automated marketing. Excellent… what is that?

Despite its popularity, more than a few companies struggle to grasp the concept of marketing automation. We’ll give you a fun and light-weight introduction to marketing automation. Here’s where part of the problem lies:

Marketing, people understand. Automation is the part that trips them up.

So lets break down “automation.”

Imagine instead, your FAQ page. A customer or prospective client has a question, you have the answer there waiting for them. You provide information they didn’t realize they’d need. And it came at no added cost to you. Now imagine a FAQ page, addressed to and tailored for each individual client.

How is that useful?

You want your customers to feel valued. To do that, you need to show them they’re more than just a number to you, that their needs are your priority.

You want to get your latest products and special offers seen by the right audience. To do that, you need to gather what relevant information is available and send out the appropriate response.

You want to make the most of your leads.

This is what marketing automation software was created for.

Automated marketing encourages leads to become personalized sales.

Great. Job done, right?

Lets go back to the FAQ page. Have you ever been denied the option of sending in your unique complaint, referred only to a static script of answers, with the very distinct sense that the site owners are trying to avoid dealing with you? How did that influence your opinion of that company?

This is where automated marketing falls short.

When handled badly, it’s mistakenly viewed as lead generation, in a campaign left unable to adapt. Investing in automation and failing to take into account your client’s specific and ever-changing needs is a sure-fire way to lose on that investment. In the end, your once quality leads have discredited your company.

Marketing is still the question of “what can I do for you?” Automation hasn’t changed that.

Knowing what it is is only half the battle. Knowing what it’s for, whether it’s right for you and how to use it is the real key to success.

Marketing Automation: What Defines Top Performers?

March 3, 2015/0 Comments/in Marketing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

In organizations, job retention in the marketing department remains low. In fact, job tenures in a typical marketing department are as little as three years and it’s one role that is under constant analysis and assessment. When performance wanes, marketers can expect to have to answer big questions and fight for their jobs. Successful marketers from one company may have trouble transitioning to another because what works for one industry may not work in another. This can lead to confusion about what traits top performers have.

Most top performers tend to focus on keeping their existing customers while spending less time on expanding their customer base. Keeping your customers loyal and happy tends to work out much better for companies rather than chasing after new customers. It’s also less expensive with top performers only spending approximately 20 percent of their budget on expansion where others in the field spend around 30 percent. When it comes to customers, top performers also make it a priority to manage the entire life cycle of their clients. Instead of leaving the majority of the life cycle to sales and technical support, top performers recognize that marketing has a huge role to play in successfully managing the entire customer experience.

Speaking of the customer life cycles, top performers tie response rates, satisfaction scores, and other metrics into how well they’re performing. Instead of measuring typical things like number of leads, top performers are able to control their technology and make it work for them instead of the other way around. In fact, 30% to 75% of top performing marketers personalize their technology and data to get a better perspective on how they’re performing and what they should change to boost performance.

Finally, top performers recognize that retention is a problem. Recruiting and retention is a priority among top performing companies but it doesn’t stop there. Top companies make sure that they provide their crucial employees with the training, technology, and resources needed to get their job done – therefore, customer satisfaction tends to rank just as high as customer satisfaction with these companies.

Obviously, when it comes to performance, recognizing the link between customers, marketers, and the sales team is key. But you also have to take all of that data and put it to good use – making it work for you – instead of the other way around. Marketing automation may vary from industry to industry but top performers know that one thing remains true: using your stats and metrics to evolve and change your marketing strategy will maximize your effectiveness.

The Cost of Marketing Automation

February 17, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Being ready to take the plunge into marketing automation means that you have many questions – and perhaps none is as important as what it will cost. After all, the cost of marketing automation will have to be low enough to convince shareholders to take the leap but high enough that your company is getting the best that marketing automation has to offer. You’ll also need to use the cost revenue and savings that marketing automation will provide as a business case to add it to the repertoire of software you’re already using.

Today, the cost of marketing automation is broken down monthly, quarterly, or annually, based upon a company’s preference. The cost widely varies with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars a month to over six figures a month. Prices will depend upon the different features you add to your plans but, in general, you can expect your price to rise as you add features. The number of leads and contents that your database will hold will increase the price of your subscription dramatically. Other factors that will drive up price include the efficiency of each edition offered. A standard and basic edition of the marketing software will cost far less than a premium version of the same software, but the premium version will contain many more features.

Savings for marketing automation can come in a variety of ways. Your vendor may be able to save you money and may provide discounts if you opt for an annual contract as opposed to a monthly pay-as-you-go contract or a quarterly contract. If you want to give some of your sales team access to your marketing automation, the majority of vendors will provide this access free of charge, up to a reasonable number of users. On average, a safe estimate is that a marketing automation solution will take up between 3-5% of your total marketing budget. Large companies typically spend 3.1% of their budget and 1.6% of their attrition rate. Overall, a company is expected to spend 7% across the board on marketing automation – but this average includes small, medium, and large companies and a variety of industries.

Be aware of add-ons that some companies offer in fine print. These add-ons will increase your cost and may not be necessary for functionality. In many cases, the add-ons are ‘fun extras’ that might be neat to have but you don’t really need. Depending on the vendor you select and your marketing goals, you can get the best value for your buck as long as you read the fine print and get bids from many different marketing automation vendors. We hope this article on the cost of marketing automation was useful to get you thinking and budgeting!