Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

Lead Liaison

The Real Value in Lead Nurturing

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The Real Value in Lead NurturingInterested in knowing the real value in lead nurturing? Your business needs quality leads in order for it to generate revenue and stay competitive.  There needs to be a constant flow of new potential customers in order to survive.  By using modern marketing automation software, it will give you a greater advantage when it comes to generating leads and making the most out of each new prospect.  The secret to successful lead generation and effective marketing starts with an accurate scoring process.  The scoring process assesses the potential in each online inquiry to determine which leads are qualified and worth it for your sales team to pursue.  The next and most valuable step in the process is turning the qualified leads into actual sales.  This happens by using a process called lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing will score leads based on inherent buying signals and it will assess how well they match your ideal customer profile.  By scoring the lead based on their personal compatibility to your company, you can then determine which leads are worthy of more effort and which are not worth your time at all.  If you are using marketing automation for your lead generation then you can also program the software that you are using to send automatic alerts to your sales reps based on the ones that have the highest potential for conversion.

Lead nurturing through marketing automation will also set up auto-response emails and
marketing campaigns directly to potential customers.  Typically, a lead nurturing program includes a variation of informative letters, emails, articles, voicemails, case studies, success stories, events, white papers and webcasts strategically planned to target specific qualified leads.  The greater variety in the approach, the more likely there will be a positive response.

A key aspect of effective lead nurturing is the ability to provide valuable education and information to prospects at no charge to them, so that you are first establishing yourself as a trusted advisor.  You will then become the perceived expert in your respective field and they will turn to you with their future questions or concerns.  You don’t need to have a strong sales pitch or an outrageous gimmick to grab their attention.  Instead, simply provide insights and solutions on your area of expertise to build your reputation in the potential customer’s eyes.  Then the odds are that you will be the first company they will call on when there is a need for your services.

Your business cannot grow without a stream of quality leads coming in on a regular basis.  Your business needs to continue to secure new customers and now the process of obtaining and converting those leads into sales is more efficient.  Through a solid lead nurturing strategy and a productive sales team, the possibilities are endless!

Lead Liaison

Minimize Marketing Efforts, Maximize Profits with Marketing Automation

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Minimize Marketing Efforts, Maximize Profits

Maximize Profits with Marketing Automation & Minimize Efforts

Want to know how to minimize marketing efforts and maximize profits with marketing automation? Organizations can save up to one-fourth of their total sales and marketing costs by adopting marketing automation tools and strategy. Any business these days entails too many tasks and requires you to devote too many hours in a day. You need to put in more effort and more time, as the challenges and competition grow further and the reach to empowered consumers spreads out. Marketing automation effectively allows streamlining of workflow and enhances customer interaction in a more personalized way assuring maximum efficiency and profit with minimum efforts.

Marketing Automation Assures Better Leads and Sales

You can beat challenges and create better leads with the implementation of marketing automation. Remember all leads do not assure sales. It is only identification and tracking of better leads that guarantee sales. Effective marketing automation strategy enables businesses to identify, select, and manage leads without putting in too much effort and time. Automated systems provide metrics on each visitor, prospect, and lead maturation trends empowering you to make strategic decisions. With minimal effort you can track leads, convert sales prospects, and make your marketing deliver better results.

Marketing Automation Optimizes Time and Efforts

To beat competition businesses need to meet in more time than usual to outwork their competitors. On one side, you have to carry on the process of business expansion and on the other, you need to learn new concepts, technology, social marketing, lead generation, and build and manage relationships. Use marketing automation to relieve yourself of time-consuming tasks that keep your days buried in work.  The latest digital marketing tools enable you to monitor and follow leads without manual intervention. This leaves you with time to optimize business strategy, look for innovations, and stay with your family while reaping benefits of error-free automatic marketing.

Improve Client Management and Relationship Building

Much like businesses, today’s customers value time and personal engagement. They want relevant, customized, and on-time messages that befit their life style, choice, and orientation. With marketing automation tools, you can track buying behavior of customers, create rich prospect profiles, and build up relevant engagement strategies. It also allows you to create segmented database of customers and develop insight into customer communication at different key points, welcoming, purchasing, post-purchasing, and upselling. You or your staff can easily communicate with prospective customers or existing clients while continuing lead tracking.

Beat the Competition with Better Campaign Management

Use marketing automation to reinforce your campaign and gain competitive advantage. Automated marketing allows businesses to design campaigns of content based on customized scenarios and share it with clients. With advanced automation tools, you can create campaigns through email, blogging, and social media with minimum efforts.  It assists in streamlining pre-existing, new, and potential clients as per their preference and segments prospects. This enables marketers to send regular messages with milestones tailored according to individual needs and time and empowers sales. You can schedule the campaign, make it personalized, and improve the possibility of sales.

Put marketing automation to the test and build a solid strategy to reach customers early and effectively. It not only assures qualified leads, prospect conversion, and data analysis, but also saves time and resources analyzing ROI. Start your intelligent marketing using the right automation strategy, expand your customer base, drive revenue, and stay ahead of competitors.

Lead Liaison

Targeting Leads Using Marketing Automation

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Targeting Leads Using Marketing AutomationTry targeting leads using marketing automation. Thanks to impressive advancements in modern technology anyone can now manage the targeting, timing, and content of their outbound marketing messages in direct response to prospect’s online behavior.  Marketing automation is designed to first qualify each potential lead and then target the leads based on their established online history.  Lead qualification criteria are setup specifically for each business, so every aspect can be customized to find leads that have the greatest potential.

It is quality over quantity when it comes to potential business, so any program that can categorize each lead based on how their interests relate to your company’s main focus is worth its weight in gold.  Marketing automation searches for strong leads that have a higher chance of conversion.

Marketing automation qualifies leads by analyzing prospects online activity, so a potential vendor can better understand needs and buying patterns even before first contact is made.  This way the marketing team can create campaigns designed specifically to appeal to customers they are targeting.  Marketing automation uses website activity profiles to segment your audiences for various campaigns based on their personal interests. For example, if you know someone has registered to run a marathon and you sell high end fitness gear, then you can direct the ad towards how your shoes are superior for long distances.

Every marketer wants to get to know their potential customer’s faster and the best way to tap into their thought process is to analyze the sites they are visiting, the articles they are reading and the products they are purchasing.  Marketing automation does all of that in less time than humanly possible.

Marketing automation also allows you to personalize your lead nurturing efforts to target specific leads by providing them with useful and relevant content.  Imagine sending educational articles geared toward subjects that the potential customer is interested in reading.  Companies can sell their product or service in a more subtle way.

Marketing automation can also create landing pages that adapt to different audience segments.  A company has mere seconds to grab a potential customer’s attention since first impressions are important.   By customizing every interaction to prospect’s unique taste, it will automatically improve your conversion rate.

In today’s high tech world there is no need to randomly spread marketing messages hoping the right people will see it at the right time.  By using marketing automation a company can specifically target each prospect based on their personal interests.

Lead Liaison

Use Marketing Automation to Avoid Human Error

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To ensure that marketers are able to target potential leads with the right messages at the right time, today’s businesses need a marketing automation software platform that can automatically tailor messaging, as well as the timing of their marketing communications to provide the optimal results.  Automation provides a more accurate and thorough process than someone who may have their own agenda.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates

By having an unbiased view without personal preferences, lead data produced will end up being a more realistic reflection of each lead.  Every interaction is being judged by the same criteria and will be evaluated solely on merit rather than human opinion.   Leads that may not strike an individual as having potential could rate as a qualified lead when objectively considered by a marketing automation program.

Marketing automation software can also run email campaigns and track responses, which is normally a very tedious and time consuming task.  If a person was managing your campaigns, they may miss out on opportunities simply due to time crunches or failure to see the potential in a specific lead.   Marketing automation can organize and interpret data faster without the potential for human error.

People may have the tendency to rush through work assignments and they often miss important things without realizing it.  It is only human to make mistakes, but fortunately software programs are guaranteed to do exactly what you instruct them to do.  That way you can be sure that everything it is supposed to look for has been reviewed and that every potentially useful fact has been considered.  An automated system can easily adapt to handle an increase in volume without an increase in cost or time.  If it wasn’t automated, there would be an increase in salary and a higher probability of human error any time work load increased.   Human capital is going to go up when business improves, but not marketing automation. If the company already has a smooth running operation and a clear understanding of their target market, then it only makes sense to put it on autopilot.

Use marketing automation to improve efficiency of your business’s lead generation efforts and to remove costly human error.

Lead Liaison

Maximizing Results Using Marketing Automation

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Maximizing Results Using Marketing AutomationIt’s important to understand how to begin maximizing results using marketing automation. Marketing automation is a tool for increasing operational efficiency and for generating revenue. It is about automating the routine and repeatable tasks associated with lead management, lead nurturing, lead qualifying, and creating and maintaining a marketing lead database. If it is done right, then it can help marketing organizations improve their productivity as well as their collaboration with sales organizations. Automation software enables marketing departments to measure what works and determine the impact on revenue. It does this by integrating with your existing sales force automation system, so that it makes marketing a true partner with sales throughout the lead management process.

Making the Most Out of Your Reach

Marketing automation helps you locate and engage prospects everywhere possible. Prospects may touch your blog, community site, social pages or a partner page, but they may not be visiting any site pages that are monitored by your revenue generating software (RGS) system. So simply engage the prospects wherever they are, with interactive, branded, marketing strategies that are embedded wherever possible. You can use partner-owned channels, their web sites, email blasts, community sites or any other avenue that is available. Rapidly create and offer engaging co-branded marketing units to partners, so they can easily incorporate into their campaigns. You can also launch using their channels to mutual prospects. This allows you to capture a short-form lead, right at the point of engagement. This will result in less re-directs, less friction, fewer dropped leads and fewer opportunities missed.

Tracking Prospects

Marketing automation can tell you what web pages a specific prospect has visited. You can use that information to score a lead to determine if the lead is sales-ready. You send out newsletters and nurturing emails to tens of thousands of prospects every month. You can learn more about specific prospects and their needs directly from your email. Marketing automation allows you to get answers in a simple, non-intrusive way, no matter where the prospect engaged with your brand.

Gathering Data

Marketing automation systems, along with real-time IP data providers are delivering more accurate information from prospects for landing pages and it is common to pre-fill form fields with the prospect’s crucial customer information (mapped from the prospect’s IP address). It is now possible is to leverage the same real-time IP data, combined with target account or account relationship information in an RGS system to dynamically change and serve highly targeted, relevant, marketing offers everywhere. Marketers will soon be able to define rules in their RGS system to map or update target accounts into different sales pipeline stages. RGS systems will then interact with external partner systems to make all of this possible.

Get More from Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can increase sales through lead nurturing using multi-touch, multi-offers nurturing campaigns. It also uses outbound marketing to follow up, nurture and qualify inbound sales leads. Use automation-driven campaigns to generate more referral or to up-sell  cross-sell, and resell to existing customers. Marketing automation can increase sales productivity by focusing on qualified leads and reactivate old leads. It also offers useful content to build your site’s credibility. There are so many powerful ways that marketing automation can maximize your results and generate increased revenue.

Lead Liaison

How to Optimize your Marketing Efforts Using Marketing Automation

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How to optimize your marketing efforts using marketing automationOptimize your marketing efforts using marketing automation. In today’s competitive business environment marketing needs to be directed to the right person at the right time in the right manner.  It is no surprise at all that older techniques no longer bring in the results that one would normally anticipate.  Consumers are changing, competition has become global and technology is offering businesses more opportunities to directly engage with potential customers.  Your marketing plan has to keep up with current trends if you expect it to grow to reach its full potential.

Marketing automation has the power to generate revenue in faster and more predictable cycles than traditional marketing campaigns.  In order to obtain optimal responses from your marketing efforts, you will need a proven system that can qualify leads that are worth nurturing and targeting.  Using it will increase your profitability due to the use of marketing strategies that are designed specifically to improve your lead conversion rate.  It works because it starts with scoring and qualifying leads before your sales team’s valuable time is invested and it follows up with a proven plan to nurture those leads into new business.

You can use marketing automation to develop new ways to segment your list of leads by combining demographic information with the behavioral data of potential consumers.  You can create marketing offers targeted to specific buyer profiles or personalities.  Marketing automation will help you identify the areas of your revenue cycle that need the most improvement, so you can prioritize your efforts.

Instead of a manual process that can be quite time-consuming and could lead to human error, marketing automation solutions are programmed to be efficient and accurate.  It will enable you to create sophisticated and engaging campaigns that automatically respond to prospect’s behaviors, life-cycle segments and other predetermined criteria.

Marketing automation is necessary technology to support and optimize your potential for growth.  Use it to handle the many complex and time-consuming aspects of lead scoring, lead nurturing and lead management, so your time can be spent securing leads that have the greatest potential for conversion.  At its essence, marketing automation is the optimization of the entire marketing process, from campaign planning to execution to the analysis of the ROI.

One of the beauties of marketing automation software is that companies can use it in numerous ways to meet the specific goals of their particular business. Companies will employ marketing automation to create, execute, manage, and measure the success of their online marketing programs in order to get optimal results.

Lead Liaison

How Marketing Automation Can Help your Marketing Team Achieve More with Less

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How Marketing Automation Can Help your Marketing Team Achieve More with Less

Trying to figure out how marketing automation can help? Before we start off with the details and get into complications, let’s get a clear perspective about what marketing automation is, it’s a process to replace repetitive, ‘manual’ actions which involve excessive human interaction with automated solutions to streamline the marketing processes within an organization. Let’s consider a bottling factory. Before automation, the plant had about 300 workers on their payroll bottling 3000 bottles an hour – after installation of a machine the rate jumped to 100,000 bottles in 30 minutes. Net effect? Increased productivity. What the plant did was to ‘automate’ a clearly manual process with the help of a machine which essentially is an example of what marketing automation is – a naive one perhaps.

The focus in automating your company’s marketing tasks is on moving leads from the top of the marketing funnel through to becoming sales-ready leads at the other end of the funnel. Prospects are scored, based on their activities and then presented drip campaign messaging via email and social channels, thus nurturing them from first interest through to the final nod. Marketing automation may be applied within the company’s infrastructure for many purposes, some of which may be:

• Designing and running email marketing campaigns

• Automation of repetitive, inherently manual business tasks

• Developing an automated campaign to increase visibility and hence sales

• Ideally suited for low-budget SMEs

I should clarify here that marketing automation is not a product category, rather, it’s a lose definition of products that help marketing teams reach out to ever greater numbers, qualify leads and run their marketing campaigns that yield better results.

One primary benefit your marketing team can immediately reap from putting in place an easy-to-use marketing automation service (not software, but a service) will be an increase in the number of quality leads given to your sales staff. The definition of ‘quality’ here is essentially iterative since it would vary from team to team, organization to organization. Lead qualification is something that can definitely increase your sales team’s efficiency and eventually, your sales!

In addition to ‘implementing’ marketing tasks, you can also ‘measure’ your marketing activities. No one does blind marketing anymore, specially with tight budgets. Automation tools can help you track your marketing expense e.g. on online advertising networks like Google Adwords. Measuring your online marketing campaign will equip your marketing team with the right data to tweak their future campaigns for improved penetration and eventually, more conversions.

The world of desktop software for marketing management has largely been replaced with web based services, hosted and served from the ‘Cloud’. These services are sold as subscriptions following the SaaS model. This has clear advantages over software installed on workstations/laptops. First, you don’t need any installation, all you need is a subscription  to the service and you’re good to go.

SaaS has now become a common IT services delivery method for many organizations – either big or small. It is adaptable for many business models such as accounting, collaboration, customer relation and human resource management. One of the key features of SaaS is that companies no longer have to spend resources on IT as they can simply subscribe to SaaS providers. They can provide readymade structures – ready to be integrated into your home grown systems.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Begins With Consumer Intelligence

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Marketing Automation Begins With Consumer IntelligenceConsumer intelligence comes first. Walmart pioneer Sam Walton was adequately prepared to open his Bentonville, Arkansas dime store to offer customers low prices on daily needs and even niceties for children. Through his small scope in customer interactivity, he was able to affect an entire community – and do so one customer at a time. In today’s budget conscious eco-friendly society, consumerists are jumping straight for automation of customer marketing, taking lesser amounts of time with each campaign in actually segmenting and learning the human’s decision changes before running their diatribe of marketing materials across social media and email marketing platforms. Before any successful automated marketing solution can transpire, proper intelligence into customer needs, desires and budget constraints needs to be passably performed prior to automation if companies want their overall ROAS (return on ad spend) showing up above the red.

Research Habitual Activities

Since marketing automation relies heavily upon proliferation of consumer purchase habits. Since in order for purchases to happen a customer will research, study and interact with certain questions, automated marketing programs will cease effectiveness if specific polls, studies and lead scoring aren’t performed prior to campaign launches. Demographical data, such as geo-specific customer locality and types of products or services being sought online, needs scored along with social media data to propagate factual information sets to be considered when marketing automation processes commence. Since humans are creatures of habit, spending the time to study these habitual activities will provide information your competition fails to collect due to haste.

Giving Away Reaps Equivocal Returns

Another heavily used and plausibly marketable source of collecting customer intelligence is through giveaways such as eBooks, DVD’s or coupons via email or snail mail. Through carefully asked questions placed in data collection fields, you can understand buying habits, collect useful customer database fillers and even learn frequencies of social media interaction – along with what sects are being connected with the most such as family, groups or games. The initial revenue drop experienced through giveaways can easily recuperate with valuable customer information collected.

View Tracking

Commonly called mystery shopping when done in person, another way one can implement customer intelligence into marketing automation betterment would be tracking views in online storefronts. By seeing what customers are looking at but not buying, product offers can be price-adjusted to placate customers who may show interest yet lack funding for your marketed products or services. Views can be tracked through cookie integration or server-side programming which self-tracks pages visited by IP address.

Customer Intelligence Is Obligatory

Marketing automation, undoubtedly, has won the aggressive marketing company and small business over with easy methodologies of handling multiple segments and niches. In order to ameliorate the human error factor, performing customer intelligence prior to sequestering marketing campaigns is an imminent marketing gorilla which must be adamantly tamed through more exacting data collection, scoring and redirection efforts. Without intelligible customer data practices, you’ll begin automating for naught. Spend the quality time in giving away samplings, asking direct questions and viewing your targeted niche from a distance to substantiate, then propagate, more effective marketing automation efforts altogether.

Lead Liaison

Six Advantages of Marketing Automation Software

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Six Advantages of Marketing Automation SoftwareWhat are the advantages of marketing automation software? In order for your sales to increase, your marketing and sales teams have to work together more efficiently. They also have to work efficiently on their respective teams. Quality information is needed for both teams to do this together and individually. Marketing automation software helps provide the productivity boost that both teams need while increasing your sales. Amongst these benefits are many others that can both increase your marketing and sales team’s productivity and increase your company’s sales.

Identifies Quality Leads

Sales representatives and marketing reps may significantly disagree on what each feels is a quality lead. This not only breeds discord between the two departments, but it can also waste your company’s most valuable asset, TIME. The alignment of both sales and marketing is a crucial part of the success of your business, and getting the two on the same page is a hard task; that’s where marketing automation software comes in. The software clearly defines what a quality lead is by using demographics, behavioral data ad a lead scoring system. This information is then ready to be followed up by sales.

Organization and Management

With the use of the CRM system, marketing automation software helps to create a better sense of organization in the marketing department. The marketing team can use the CRM system to:

● Track prospective customers
● Communicate with prospective customers
● Address concerns

The marketing automation software allows the marketing team to do this all while retaining the prospective customers in the sales cycle.

Increase Sales

Marketing automation software makes the sales team more efficient by providing them with:

● Quality leads
● Behavioral data

The combination of these two points single handedly increases productivity in your sales department by 20 percent.

Marketing Campaign Control

Organizing content is by far one of the most important tasks in the marketing department. Marketing and IT have to work together to create web pages that contain content such as advertisements and promotions for campaigns. Marketing automation allows a marketing rep to create web pages directed at campaigns without needing an IT rep.

Identifies Best Campaigns

Marketing automation software minimizes the time it takes to sort through campaigns. The software automatically recognizes which campaigns make the most sense and which are not beneficial to your company. This not only saves time, but provides a better return on dollars put into your marketing programs.

Improved Content Marketing

Marketing automation software can help with developing a successful content marketing strategy. During the buying process a typical sales person is dealing with 3 to 4 stakeholders. Marketing automation software identifies the roles of those involved in the buying process. This helps you to create content that is more targeted to these people, instead of using ‘existing’ content on the site that may not adequately address their needs.

Lead Liaison

The Key Functions of Marketing Automation Software

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Key Functions of Marketing Automation SoftwareWhat are the key functions of marketing automation software? Although people may differ over the exact definition of ‘marketing automation’, one thing that can be agreed upon is the benefits. Marketing automation software provides a mix of benefits, which include improved sales and improved marketing and sales relations. Now that you’ve decided to use marketing automation, you should understand the main functions that bring about these many more benefits.

Identifying Effective Campaigns

Identifying which campaigns could work for your company and which ones won’t is very time consuming. Often times these educated guestimates do not go without potential risks (and there are a lot of them). Marketing automation software takes the guess work out of effective campaign identification. Through sophisticated data, this software accurately identifies which campaigns are worthwhile and which are not. This not only saves time, but also gives you a bigger return on your company’s marketing campaign investments.

Identifying Quality Leads

This is the lifeline of your company. The sales and marketing departments need to work together to see a potential buyer from the query stage to an actual sale. However, this is not always easy. Why? Because both departments often disagree about what constitutes as a quality lead. This translates to a loss of time and the potential oversight of sale. Marketing automation gathers information from your website such as demographics and behavioral data to identify quality leads. This information is then passed on to sales who can follow-up directly with the potential buyer.

Improving Marketing Content

A lot of businesses rely on stale content to ‘seduce’ a potential buyer into a purchase. However, trouble comes when the information isn’t what the potential buyer needs, or when the content doesn’t address the questions or concerns of a potential buyer. Marketing automation software identifies the needs of the potential customers, which helps the marketing team to create appropriate content.

These three main functions can be split and dissected into literally hundreds of benefits that can profit your business. Most marketing automation software programs have the same basic key functions, although they may work differently to achieve the same goal.