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7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 2)

May 31, 2013/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Our previous post, 7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 1), shared three tips on how to make marketing automation more personable. Here’s the follow up to that article with four more useful tips to drive your marketing automation strategy.

Here are the last 4 of 7 tips on how to make marketing automation more personable:

4. Create Informative and Relevant Content

After leads are segmented, marketers can create personalized content that is relevant for each lead segment. This content should be focused on the needs that were established during the lead profiling step.

5. Encourage Feedback and Participation

The key to obtaining new customers using any form of marketing is engaging and connecting with the lead. One way to make marketing automation more personable is through questionnaires and helpful popups. For example, if someone clicks on a page about “web design,” a popup could appear in the right-hand corner offering “10 tips to improve your website design” which leads to an informative and relevant article. Make sure to keep the popups subtle, so they always appear helpful instead of pushy.

6. Evaluate the Success of Lead Nurturing Content

A good marketing automation strategy should be constantly changing in an effort to improve upon its current level of success. It is important to use marketing metrics to weigh the success of every lead nurturing campaign and then use that information to modify anything that doesn’t appear to be really connecting with your potential consumers.

7. Stay Committed After the Sale

Marketing automation is designed to build trust because it is based on a lead’s needs and personalized attention towards addressing their concerns. Don’t lose these relationships after the sale by switching from nurturing to neglecting. It is necessary that you continue to offer valuable information and support after a purchase is made. Success comes from building and maintaining strong mutually-beneficial relationships. This type of full-circle attention is what will make the marketing automation process more personable.

7 Tips on How to Make Marketing Automation More Personable (Part 1)

May 30, 2013/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Automated marketing systems are efficient at generating leads, but these leads won’t be worth much if they are not converted into consumers. Today’s consumers are tired of spam emails and computer-generated campaigns and they expect a more personalized touch.

Here are the first 3 of 7 tips on how to make marketing automation more personable:

1. Understand Your Lead’s Needs to make Marketing Automation More Personable

Marketing automation is designed to quickly gather and analyze behavioral and demographic details about potential consumers. It tracks their online activity to give marketers and sales professionals an insight into their needs. Businesses can make marketing automation programs more personable by understanding and focusing on what the lead truly wants from the company. For example, they don’t want a blender. They want a better way to make smoothies.

2. Use Sales and Marketing’s Input for Scoring Leads

When you are trying to determine a lead’s interest and needs, it helps to pick the brains of both your marketing and sales teams. Marketing professionals understand what trigger a lead’s interest and the sales teams know what it takes to satisfy their concerns. Scoring leads is necessary for prioritizing and providing personal attention to leads that are on the verge of making a decision.

3. Segment Leads into Similar Groups

It is too difficult to personally target every lead, especially since marketing automation can generate thousands or even millions of leads per month. Leads that have similar backgrounds and needs can be grouped together to simplify the process. This way lead nurturing campaigns can be personalized towards each lead segment rather than every single individual.

Marketing Automation Makes Visitor Tracking Even More Powerful

May 28, 2013/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Visitor tracking is one of the most important things you can do for your business. When people come to your website, they should have an opportunity to convert in some way – whether that’s contacting you, filling out a form or buying something. Once you have a clear visitor path in place on your website, you have the ability to track visitor behavior to see how appealing your offer is, whether your website should be changed or whether your current visitor funnel accommodates your actual sales cycle. Marketing automation technology can help you do all this.

Visitor Tracking and Google Analytics

Many businesses are already signed up on the free Google Analytics platform. It’s easy to use, it’s robust and you can get a good idea of how visitors are interacting with your site and data from Google Analytics reports. There are, however, some underlying components of your sales cycle using Google Analytics alone won’t address for you.

1) Ease of use – Many organizational executives don’t have the technical know-how to translate the reports into something meaningful for their businesses.

2) Ease of implementation – A similar problem. A company will need a web development professional to install Google Analytics or similar tracking software in most instances.

3) Addressing needs – Google Analytics and similar visitor tracking software will let you know about certain aspects of your users’ behaviors, but won’t translate them into your specific sales cycle. Many firms address this by hiring additional personnel or simply trying to squeeze working with the metrics into their sales and performance programs. If you’re doing your own full time executive or sales job, trust us that this approach doesn’t often work in the most efficient way for your business.

Marketing Automation Tailored to Your Sales Cycle

When you implement an automated marketing solution for your business, you’re addressing the unique needs of your business and your sales cycle at every level. Your marketing automation platform can work with a Google Analytics installation to help capture your data in a way that will truly benefit your business.

re sending that get the most conversions or reactions from your visitors. Marketing automation makes use of dozens of useful tools that help streamline your process and make running your business and marketing teams that much easier.To find out more about how Google Analytics compares to Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking read this post.

To find out more about how marketing automation can help you gather, analyze and execute on website visitor tracking today, talk to a specialist at Lead Liaison.

Why Marketing Automation is Revenue Generating Software

May 27, 2013/0 Comments/in Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Marketing automation is designed to generate revenue. It has its hands strategically placed in all aspects of the buying process. It covers everything from initial sales prospecting to final lead conversion, and it includes valuable metrics for evaluating the results.

Nine ways Marketing Automation Software Generates Revenue:

1. Sales Prospecting

Marketing automation begins with sales prospecting. The software is designed to expand your contact database by capturing a broad-range of potential online consumers. Depending on the marketing automation provider, it can also increase the numbers of leads by allowing marketers to upload their contact database and earn trading credits based on the quality of the leads they provided. Businesses can then take the credits they received and exchange them for new contacts.

More Leads = More Revenue

2. Database Segmentation

It is too hard to customize campaigns based on each individual lead, but there still needs to be some personalization based on leads’ basic needs. By dividing leads into segments with similar interests, marketers can send more relevant messages to segmented groups which will increase response rates and generate more revenue.

3. Lead Tracking

Marketing automation is revenue generating software because it can track every visitor’s online activity. This tracking software is used to expand on a lead’s current profile data and assess their interest in certain products or services. Marketing automation tracks both a lead’s activity and their inactivity, so marketers can capture the lead’s entire buying process.

4. Lead Generation

Marketing automation brings new leads into the marketing engine using web forms, landing pages, email campaigns, and website tracking. It is able to generate more revenue by capturing new leads from the 95% of your website traffic that currently goes by unnoticed.

5. Lead Routing

Marketing automation software improves efficiency by instantly distributing qualified leads to the sales team. Striking while the iron is hot can sometimes be the difference between converting a customer and permanently losing them to a competitor. Most marketing automation providers can send leads automatically through Salesforce.com, text messages on cell phones, or by email depending on the company’s preference.

6. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the most effective ways to convert customers and generate more revenue. If the material is well-written, informative, and relevant to a potential consumer’s needs, it can be a valuable sales tool. Marketing automation software can be setup to instantly send lead nurturing content based on parameters established by database segmentation.

7. Inbound Marketing

A good marketing automation strategy should be focused on increasing a company’s exposure and creating methods for prospective leads to easily locate their website. By establishing credibility on other reputable websites, marketing automation can build their brand authority and bring in new customers.

8. Lead Conversion

Every step of marketing automation is gently guiding the lead towards conversion. Once a lead is showing sincere signs of interest, it can be passed onto to sales to close the deal. Marketing automation generates more revenue by producing up to 50% more sales-ready leads.

9. Metrics

Marketing automation software includes metrics for analyzing and evaluating each campaign. It is hard to judge whether or not a campaign was successful, unless you can physically see the results. This is the final and most important step to using marketing automation to generate revenue. Constant review and improvement will be necessary to ensure that it is capturing, nurturing, and converting every lead within the loop.

Lead Liaison Hits B2B Marketing Automation Milestone

May 20, 2013/0 Comments/in Press Releases, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Allen, TX (PRWEB) May 15, 2013 – Marketing automation innovator Lead Liaison has made a commitment to delivering more support to its customers than its largest competitors, and the company is on pace to fulfill that commitment. Lead Liaison announced on Monday that it had hit a B2B marketing automation milestone by delivering its 300^th content piece ahead of schedule by over one month.

Since beginning an aggressive customer support campaign in November 2012, Lead Liaison has published business to business solution guides, industry datasheets, blog posts, social media links, decision-making tools, and sales and marketing resources. The company set a target date of June 30, 2012 to deliver 300 pieces of content that provide assistance to its customers. On May 8 it surpassed that goal.

Lead Liaison has become a fast-rising player in the b2b marketing automation space, a space dominated by giants Eloqua, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot, partly due to its focus on providing digital sales and marketing resources at a steady rate.

Within this extremely competitive industry, marketing automation vendors have relied upon publishing digital content to attract and educate their markets, commonly known as “content marketing”. Article distribution, blog posting, press releases, and publication of extended documents like white papers or research reports have been commonly used to elevate awareness about automated marketing and lead management solutions. Content marketing to b2b marketing automation customers is typically driven through regularly publishing new content. Within the industry, companies often seek to surpass content milestones such as 100, 300, 700, and 1,000 published content pieces.

For Lead Liaison, the concept of content marketing doesn’t simply mean using content to attract customers, however. The company is using content to support its customers’ sales and marketing activities.

“Our mission is more than simply achieving top-of-mind-awareness by becoming a knowledge authority. We want (customers) to feel supported before, during, and after implementing our marketing automation and lead management solutions,” said vice president of communications Alex Brown. “We have felt, for a long time, that the key to driving sustained growth in this industry is through the integration of software solutions and knowledge sharing.”

Alex BrownVP Corporate Communications–Lead Liaison

Examples of content Lead Liaison has published include industry analysis, sales and marketing advice, lead management tools, and product tutorials. Topics such as aligning marketing and sales teams, managing the flow of marketing leads, developing an email marketing campaign, and others have been covered within the 300 pieces of content. And tools such as the Lead Management Grader, Scoring Model Designer, and 92 Lead Management Data Points have helped customers become more refined and targeted in their business to business sales and marketing practices.

For more information about Lead Liaison’s marketing automation products or its support services contact Lead Liaison at 888 895 3237 or sales(at)leadliaison(dot)com.

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Lead Liaison is an application development company that designs, develops, and sells cloud-based marketing and sales automation software. The company markets to small and medium-sized businesses worldwide, and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly revenue generation software platform. Applications cover all phases of lead management automation including sales prospecting, lead generation, and marketing automation functions that directly influence revenue generation. It’s innovative and robust lead management platform combines unparalleled sales prospecting, lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing and ROI reporting. The Software as a Service (SaaS) model delivers an effective user experience and integrated cloud computing capabilities.

For More Information

Alex Brown
VP, Corporate Communications
abrown(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Marketing Automation Can Increase the Value of Your Business

May 17, 2013/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Executives have a lot to do. Plenty of people who are building businesses are grooming them for sale – and who can blame anyone for that? Businesses with tremendous growth potential are true cash cows, ready to make years of steady income for the right buyer.

In selling a small to medium sized business, owners and investors know they need to make the business look as profitable as possible to potential buyers. For businesses who are selling service instead of retail, account managers and the sales team already face difficult divisions. Sales folks who are driven by commission often over-promise, so by the time accounts get to analysts there’s already a problem.

This problem can be exacerbated by executives who are hard-driving their sales staff without follow-up on the quality of work environment and account performance with regard to the account service teams. If this sounds like your situation, watch your cancellation numbers – more often than not, overselling without account teams to handle the load can result in tons of dropped clients and bad reviews.

Enter Marketing Automation…

If you’re grooming your business for sale and you find that in your business, “one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing,” marketing automation could be the key to streamlining communications between different parts of your business – and as an overall result, your customers’ experiences with you.

With a marketing automation system in place – and the support to cover any process questions you need addressed – you can rest assured that the start to finish sales and performance processes for your business are handled.

Marketing automation allows sales people to better quality leads, put a system into place that is hands-off for following up on leads, keep better track of customer communication and offer a more streamlined transition to account management.

Marketing automation allows leads that haven’t converted to stay in your funnel more efficiently. Lead scoring allows you and your sales teams to communicate in the most effective way with clients who haven’t yet made a commitment to you.

Marketing automation makes setting up and performing work on new accounts easier for your account analysts. Email management, reporting and handling overall marketing functions for your business can become a more streamlined process with the right marketing automation tools at hand.

Making the Ultimate Sale

A potential investor or buyer for your business is going to want to see not just increased sales numbers and great profitability/growth potential. They’ll want to know you have a great process in place for ensuring future success and a great investment. Marketing automation tools placed properly and utilized by your team can actually increase the value of your business. When you can demonstrate that the future of determining the value of leads and acting on that value is secure, you’re showing investors they can trust they’re making a good purchase.

Don’t wait until the selling process starts to get marketing automation in place – make sure your employees are able to use this technology now! Lead Liaison is happy to help discuss your marketing and selling needs to address how marketing automation can make your business more valuable.

Connect Your B2B Sales and Marketing Teams with Marketing Automation

May 16, 2013/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

B2B sales and marketing practices have different objectives but the same goal: revenue generation. While marketing builds awareness and begins the engagement process, sales connects directly with prospects ready to buy. Often the challenge for many companies is aligning sales and marketing to accomplish the goal.

Enter marketing automation. Sales and marketing departments can now be aligned through the use of marketing automation software, such as our Lead Management Automation™ solution. MA improves sales strategies and marketing strategies by providing a conduit that bridges both departments through data sharing. Sales can see current and past automated marketing campaigns while marketing can link campaigns with conversion rates.

A marketing automation solution like our Lead Management Automation software provides sales and marketing alignment in several ways:

Lead Capture – Marketers and sales agents can identify digital leads by lead source, company attributes, geographic region, and other parameters.
Lead Qualification and Scoring – Leads captured through digital marketing campaigns are systematically advanced through a qualification process that segments leads into hot, warm, and cold buckets, which sales and marketing managers can review to determine if the lead scoring model is effectively placing leads in the appropriate buckets.
Lead Intelligence – Both departments can review data gathered through digital marketing campaigns to determine if marketing assets are collecting information effectively and sales is using this lead intelligence effectively to close sales.
Lead Management – Sales and marketing teams can manage leads more effectively by coordinating marketing campaign delivery with sales activities.
Lead Distribution – Tools like our real time alerts and sales activity scheduler allow marketing to distribute leads to sales through CRM integration, providing a seamless connection between both functions.
Marketing Analytics – Our marketing automation software provides detailed performance metrics that allow marketing and sales to evaluate targeting, messaging, and lead generation effectiveness.

With the use of our Lead Management Automation platform, your company can align its sales and marketing practices to provide higher conversion rates. If you are struggling with how to effectively align sales and marketing, contact a knowledgeable Lead Liaison account representative today.

Marketing Automation Leads to Revenue Generation

May 14, 2013/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

“Revenue generation” describes the marketing-to-sales transition process that provides the most efficient and effective means of closing B2B sales. The use of marketing automation in your marketing and sales practices leads to revenue generation more quickly than traditional sales and marketing practices. Through the automated features that nurture leads and score their progress through the buying cycle, the hottest leads are moved to the front of the line for sales calls. This prioritization leads to faster revenue generation – a goal of every B2B sales team.

The primary reason marketing automation has taken off recently is specifically because it helps revenue generation practices for companies of all sizes. After all, B2B companies are in business to generate revenue, right?

Manage Leads

Marketing automation allows you to manage B2B leads gathered through digital channels such as email, social media, and web forms and through traditional channels such as trade shows, direct mail, and cold-calling. Once leads enter your database, they can be segmented and organized by region, channel, size, and other factors. These leads can then be assigned a score based on attributes (company size, revenues, etc.) and behavior (website visits, downloads, etc.). Once leads have been scored , your sales department will have a prioritized list of hot, warm, and cold leads. This increases sales productivity by automatically providing qualified, scored, nurtured, and prioritized selling opportunities.

Marketing-Qualified to Sales-Qualified

Marketing automation digitally advances leads from a status of being a marketing-qualified lead following a sufficient level of digital engagement with marketing assets to a sales-qualified lead, where the most active leads are ready for a sales contact. Sales agents generally appreciate being given quality leads. Through traditional processes up to 80% of leads are discarded, lost, or ignored, often because sales agents don’t trust the quality of the leads being distributed. Marketing automation can help limit the number of poor quality leads that the sales department receives by selecting only leads that pass a scoring threshold for lead distribution. Leads can be handed off to direct or indirect sales channels for action and closure.

Marketing automation streamlines the process of preparing leads for sales contact. Marketers can determine whether certain marketing campaigns have been effective at generating interest in your solutions. And leads can be distributed to the sales department according to lead scoring metrics that put the most likely buyers at the top of contact list.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing departments often do not work closely at lead management and demand generation. Marketing automation supports sales and marketing alignment through integration with CRM software. This boosts the productivity from each department by providing a seamless, automated transition from marketing to sales. Marketing can determine if campaigns are driving the best leads from your digital assets and sales can determine if the leads received are of sufficient quality to be contacted quickly.

Sales agents have a clearly defined view of available sales opportunities as marketers generate demand through targeted messaging that can be automatically distributed at scheduled intervals. Marketers can have a clearer picture of which campaigns have provided quality leads based upon close rates.

Research has shown that marketing automation provides a more efficient transition from marketing to sales. This leads to better revenue generation practices. Is that what your company is looking for?

If you’d like to learn how our Lead Management Automation™ software can make your enterprise more effective at revenue generation contact Lead Liaison at 888 895 3237 or sales@leadliaison.com.

Marketing Automation, Financial Services, and the 1:1 Relationship

May 10, 2013/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

The financial services (FS) industry is one of the most trust-dependent, intimately-related B2B relationships in the world. Because of the sensitive (and heavily regulated) nature of financial services, marketing and sales practices are often geared towards developing a 1:1 connection. Customer acquisition and retention have traditionally been conducted through a process of face-to-face meetings and distributed physical marketing collateral. Even commodity-oriented services like consumer credit card providers attempt to give the appearance of a 1:1 relationship.

There has been a movement by financial services marketers during the past few years toward marketing automation (MA). Marketing automation routinely distributes digital marketing collateral such as email messages and provides performance measurement capabilities that reveal response rates and Internet search activity. A robust marketing automation platform, like our Lead Management Automation™, delivers a number of marketing efficiencies while maintaining a personalized experience for prospects and customers.

Lead Generation

Historically, financial services marketers have relied on print advertising, referrals, and word-of-mouth to generate leads. Although those tactics still work today, the financial services consumer now searches the web for service providers and to compare offers. B2B buyers are using the net daily to shop for third-party vendors. According to the Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project, 91% of Internet users search online for products and services.

Marketing automation provides lead generation through a process of targeted message delivery and contact data collection. MA reduces the costs of day-to-day market engagements by allowing marketers to stage auto delivery of digital campaigns and automatically collect data about prospects who respond to messaging.

In addition, lead generation through organic search results and paid ad campaigns is seamlessly integrated with outbound activities such as email marketing. When a prospect visits your FS website, information is automatically collected and imported to a database of leads. Leads can still be attracted by a 1:1 connection because marketing messages can be easily customized with fields that address prospects personally and give the appearance of a 1:1 connection.

Lead Nurturing

Customer acquisition in the FS industry entails building a mature relationship with a prospect. The most trusted and recognizable companies typically garner the lion’s share of client accounts. Lead nurturing is one of the primary benefits of marketing automation. Through a serial delivery of valuable information to prospects, FS marketers can not only easily engage with a wider pool of prospects but also create deeper engagement with prospects that indicate interest in your FS solutions.

Through traditional FS marketing strategies, lead nurturing requires contacting individual prospects via phone or email, conversing about prospect needs and company solutions, recording the engagement details, and updating contact information manually. With marketing automation those steps are streamlined while a 1:1 relationship is maintained.

Marketing to Sales

The critical point in FS marketing is where marketing has attracted enough interest and a sales call becomes the next step. Today’s financial services buyers are more proactive, in control, and discerning. Competing for individual accounts requires a strategy of connecting sales agents with prospects in a timely manner. An MA platform provides a structured process of moving leads through the sales pipeline efficiently and effectively while maintaining a 1:1 relationship.

Using marketing automation, progressively engaging messages are delivered so sales agents now connect with better educated prospects. As lead nurturing takes place prospects are moved from a marketing-qualified lead (one that has engaged with digital messaging) to a sales-qualified lead (one that is ready to discuss a purchase). Sales agents can easily identify the hottest leads through a scoring matrix that grades both prospect attributes (such as company size) and online behavior (such as downloading a product brochure). The 1:1 relationship can then be advanced through the sales staff until a deal is made.

Although the use of marketing automation in the financial services industry is in its infancy, the benefits of automating marketing practices is already yielding results, driving down costs, and improving ROI for many notable companies, all while maintaining a 1:1 relationship appearance. Contact Lead Liaison today to find out how to become more efficient and effective at your financial services marketing.

Marketing Automation Guides Leads from Generation to Conversion

May 8, 2013/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation/by Lead Liaison

The marketing automation system is designed to gently guide leads from the initial generation to final conversion. There is a steady stream of potential customers surfing online every day in search of new products and services. Marketing automation software captures, nurtures, qualifies, and converts more online leads than any other automated marketing system.

Automated Lead Generation

Marketing automation software is designed to capture every potential lead that comes in contact with a website. The process is completely automated, so no lead can escape its grasp. Their online profile and behavior is automatically extracted and used for lead profiling and scoring.

Improved SEO Drives Traffic

The content marketing automation produces is successful at nurturing leads, but it also helps drive more traffic to a website. Search engine’s rank websites based on quality content and keywords. Marketing automation assists SEO efforts by using keyword-rich articles to inform and engage visitors.

Better Lead Profiling

It is easier to guide a lead from generation to conversion when a company understands their needs and interests. Marketing automation uses online registrations and surveys, as well as their online activity to develop a comprehensive profile of the lead.

Scores & Prioritizes Leads

By comparing the lead’s profile against the profile of an existing customer, marketers can better evaluate whether the lead is ready for conversion. Every demographic and behavioral characteristic is given a value based on relevancy and then ranked by how closely they match to current customers. The sales team is only given leads that a high chance of conversion, so their valuable time is never wasted.

Segments Leads into Similar Groups

Marketing automation is a craft that balances automated technology with personalized attention. It cannot successfully convert leads by using the same approach on every potential consumer. Unfortunately, it also cannot efficiently address hundreds or thousands of lead’s individual needs. The compromise to this problem is lead segments. By grouping leads together that have similar interests and backgrounds, marketers can offer a more personalized approach without having to customize their efforts for every single lead that is generated.

Nurturing Leads with Customized Content

One of the most effective ways that marketing automation guides leads from generation to conversion is through lead nurturing. By taking the information gathered in profiling, marketers can develop customized content directed at each lead segment. This information is created to build trust and strengthen relationships with potential consumers by offering them value prior to conversion.

Marketing automation guides leads from generation to conversion by first capturing them as they surf online, and then profiling, scoring, segmenting, and prioritizing each lead based on their characteristics and needs. It also uses quality content to both enhance SEO and nurture leads into consumers. Marketing automation covers the complete lead management process from start to finish.