Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

Lead Liaison

Complexity and Commitment: Keys to Marketing Automation

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Freemium Marketing AutomationThe past week has been an interesting one in the world of marketing automation – particularly in terms of freemium marketing automation services making substantial changes in order to survive. We’ve been a captive audience to these changes here at Lead Liaison – it’s interesting to see what works for other marketing automation companies and what doesn’t.

David M. Raab wrote a great article on his Customer Experience Matrix blog about recent changes in the industry. It’s worth taking a look at to get an idea of this week’s mergers – in particular, SalesFUSION acquiring Loopfuse and CallidusCloud’s acquisition of LeadRocket. Raab hypothesizes – likely quite accurately – that the buyout of these two services may have something to do with the ‘freemium’ payment model the companies used to market their services.

Marketing Automation and Freemium Payment

Raab guesses quite accurately,

“My take is that freemium doesn’t fit well with marketing automation because marketing automation takes a lot of work to use effectively. Compare this with email and Web site hosting, where freemium has worked well: casual users can be quite successful with those products.”

A commenter observes that the ‘freemium’ model doesn’t tend to work with products that involve complexity. Marketing automation products are definitely complex – for many users, installing a marketing automation platform ensures that a new way of working on basic tasks needs to be adopted. This new way requires adoption at all levels of the business, training and a fully integrative customer support experience that just isn’t casual.

For Us, It’s About Commitment

Taking things a step further, we believe marketing automation is about commitment, not just complexity. Marketing automation systems are definitely complex. Dealing with that level of complexity and changes to a company’s workflow process requires a level of commitment businesses should be ready for. We truly believe that Lead Liaison’s marketing automation process can save a business a lot of hassle and can even lead to generating more revenue – but that does require some understanding of how the process will work for clients from start to finish.

We can communicate the need for that level of commitment from the beginning, but customers need to be on board all the way through. For us, freemium wouldn’t work as we need to be actively involved and available in our clients’ marketing dashboards – giving tutorials, being available for assistance and showing our clients better ways to use the platform. Commitment is key to dealing with the complexity of marketing automation – but that complexity is worth it, solving many challenges our clients face over time.

We’d love to talk to you about how we can take the pain out of the complexity involved in marketing automation – let us give you a consult today!

Lead Liaison

The Future of Marketing Automation: 3 Steps to Smarter Actions

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

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

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

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

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

Lead Liaison

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

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

Marketing Automation – Who’s Watching the Data?

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

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

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

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and Choosing Smaller Development

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

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

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

Marketing Automation Dashboards and User Friendliness

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

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

Shifting Their Thinking

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

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

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

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

8 Tips for Marketing Automation Management – Part 1

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8 Tips for Marketing Automation ManagementMarketing automation management requires a fundamental understanding of marketing automation technology and a commitment to implementing and improving strategies as needed. Although the marketing automation software streamlines and automates most of the processes, it will still require a human touch to get the most from it.

Here are the top 8 tips for marketing automation management:

1)      Utilize the Complete Marketing Platform

Marketing automation software is not an email campaign tool. It’s a comprehensive marketing platform that can enhance processes for qualifying prospects, managing communications, and following up on inquiries. When implementing marketing automation software, focus first on developing the processes for your business and then use the software to further simplify the process. It will only work well if you start with complete processes.

2)      Use Campaigns to Define Segments

A beneficial approach to defining database segments is to begin at the top of the sales funnel and then develop campaigns to define and segment similar groups. Every new campaign is an opportunity to further segment your database until you have an inclusive profile that fulfills all of the qualification criteria. A market profiling campaign will lay the ground work for obtaining potential contacts, if you don’t currently have a strong database.

3)      Develop Lead Scoring System

Marketing automation management involves constantly reviewing user activity, especially when you first start out. This can become challenging, as the size of your database and number of campaigns increase. That is why it is necessary to develop a lead scoring system and segmentation process designed to prioritize leads. Lead scoring rates the various types of content you send out, by giving each one a value based on likelihood of conversion. Potential leads are then scored based on what content they choose to view.

4)      Utilize Progressive Profiling

Requesting information from prospects that can be obtained without their assistance is counterproductive to marketing automation management and a waste of a lead’s time. Progressive profiling and prepopulated forms allow you quickly profile prospects. By eliminating repetition, this will also streamline and enhance the user experience.

Lead Liaison

Can You Get Content Creation and Marketing Automation Together? Yes!

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Get Content Creation and Marketing Automation TogetherIt has long been the cry of B2B marketers (well, “long” is relative in the digital age): “We’ve automated our marketing – but we need CONTENT!” We’ve got your content creation and marketing automation together in one!

Recent statistics support the need for third-party content creation:

  • 71% of Marketers use content marketing for lead generation
  • 82% of B2B Marketers are increasing content production in the next 12 months
  • 93% of B2B Marketers create content from scratch
  • 56% of B2B content is created by corporate marketing
  • 47% of B2B content is created by product marketing
  • 55% of B2B Marketers say their biggest challenge is having the time or bandwidth to create content

Now, consider this:

  • 37% of B2B Marketers use marketing automation for lead generation
  • 36% of B2B Marketers use marketing automation for lead nurturing
  • 39% of B2B Marketers don’t use marketing automation at all

Do those numbers look like there might be a need for marketing automation and content creation combined? Content and automation both drive traffic, conversions, and sales. When combined, they form a potent marketing strategy. Until now there has been no integrated answer for combining content with marketing automation.

We’ve got the answer.

With a few clicks you can order audience-centric content such as blog posts, white papers, press releases, website pages, social posts, and more. Once approved, content can be entered into your automated campaigns easily.

Once you have combined marketing automation and content creation, your corporate and product marketers will have bandwidth to devote to campaign development and execution, among other tasks. Learn more about our groundbreaking new feature.

A disturbing fact: Only 25% of B2B Marketers use content marketing for customer retention. This is unfortunate as it distinguishes a customer from a prospect. Keep in mind: a customer was once a prospect. In today’s multimedia environment, can a company afford to withdraw a customer from its content stream?

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and the 3 Pillars of Lead Management

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Marketing Automation and the 3 Pillars of Lead ManagementManaging your B2B marketing leads is a process that runs through three phases: generation, qualification, and nurturing. Back in the day, marketers generated leads that the sales team had to qualify and nurture. Now the three pillars of lead management can be optimized by using a marketing automation platform (MAP). The introduction of the MAP in the B2B community saves time, improves sales productivity, and helps manage leads until they are ready for your sales team.

Lead Generation

Lead gen is best practiced when you deploy outbound and inbound marketing assets. A marketing automation platform fits with both asset types. You’re able to track a lead’s behavior – which assets did he engage with, what time did he visit your site? Marketing automation allows you to “batch” lead gen activities over extended periods in very little time. For example, creating and scheduling three integrated email delivery and social posting campaigns can be accomplished by a single marketer in as little as a few hours.

Lead Qualification

Once leads have been captured, automated marketing engagements provide consistent opportunities to gather lead intelligence. Capturing data is a strength of marketing automation because it allows marketers to present consistent message delivery, which engenders trust from potential buyers. Marketing automation users gather lead intelligence more easily than using traditional methods through the automated delivery of multiple messages through multiple channels (scheduled at one time) – all exhibiting a consistent brand that leads can be comfortable sharing information with.

Lead Nurturing

Perhaps the most important stage of the lead management process is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing for most companies is best accomplished through a well-planned campaign of escalating messaging and increasingly engaging activities. You may start with an email campaign that offers a free download then extend an invitation to a webinar then provide a ten-minute product demonstration. For most companies earning over $2 million annually, there are likely multiple campaigns running at the same time. A marketing automation platform runs each campaign simultaneously, moving leads through the pipeline without extensive personnel resources.

With marketing automation you can execute and monitor all three phases of lead management from one user interface. These days, buyers are faced with countless distractions and it may take months or years to convert a prospect. Generating revenue requires a commitment to consistency that is easily maintained through a marketing automation platform.

Using a marketing automation platform like our Lead Management Automation™ application can ensure that the three pillars of lead management remain strong for your company.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation & Reputation Management Go Hand In Hand

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Marketing Automation & Reputation Management Go Hand In HandIt’s never fun or easy talking about what will happen to your business if your products or services are panned on the web somewhere – i.e., if your reputation management is on high alert because of a bad review. Let’s take Yelp reviews, for instance. If you’re a fan of the popular US version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you know how resistant some business owners can be to change.

Ramsay’s latest airings show him confronting “stuck” business owners with negative Yelp ratings. Many owners, rather than taking their customers’ complaints seriously, would rather tell themselves that “not everyone likes the food” rather than changing things they know don’t work about their businesses.

Are You Watching?

Some of us watch programs like these and think, What morons! How can these people not see their own business failings! Truthfully, even a business that’s turning a profit has failings, and reputation management is often a stumbling block for many business owners.

If you’re not watching Google, social media outlets and the news, you might be missing customer complaints. Just one unresolved customer complaint can turn into a reputation management fiasco for a company.  So, given the complexity of your current marketing campaigns and what little time we all have in a day, how can you make sure your reputation is being managed properly?

How Marketing Automation Affects Reputation Management

To succeed in today’s competitive business place – particularly if you’re monitoring your reputation – your marketing message has to be socialized. This means that the core points that make your product compelling should be laid out as part of your social media strategy. This also means you need to be watching your customers.

When you use marketing automation to maintain your brand, you have the ability to pinpoint specific users who spend time on your website. If they’re coming from a bad Yelp review by the droves, you’ll be able to set up an alert that gives you this information immediately. Social signals translate to users spending time on your site. If a customer needs to be taken care of via Facebook or Twitter, you can use socialized marketing automation tools to stay on top of resolving your customers’ complaints.

Consumers are using social media to air their grievances with business. Good reputation management is all about using the tools available to you to connect with customers and solve difficulties – sometimes even before they happen. Marketing automation can help you keep track of specific customers and integrate your marketing efforts in a way that no other marketing concepts can.

To find out more about socialized marketing tools and how reputation management is informed by marketing automation, contact Lead Liaison for a free consultation today!