Tag Archive for: Marketing Automation

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Enliven Your Social Media Presence with These Social Media Strategies

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Enliven Your Social Media Presence with These Social Media StrategiesSometimes, it can be a challenge for a marketing department to keep a business’s social media presence engaging and relevant in order to be an active tool for generating and encouraging leads to convert. It can be even more challenging if your business isn’t providing a service that is normally looked at as being a “sexy business”. However, no matter what industry you’re in, a creative marketing team should be able to craft a social media presence that adheres to your brand values while being an engaging advocate for your business. If you’re wondering how to do that, take cues from other business’s social media strategies in order to enliven your social media presence.

Look for Successful Examples in Strange Places

If you’re struggling to find a good example of successful social media strategies, start with some of the big boys. Sports teams have large, diverse audiences that want constant updates on what’s going on with their team. Every major football, basketball and baseball team works to keep their fans engaged and entertained even in the off season. How do they do it? Sports teams work hard to make sure their posts are consistently funny or very relevant, while always broad enough to appeal to an extremely diverse market. In addition, they also show a lot of gratitude for their audience. Every major team’s social media is dotted with posts in appreciation of their fan base, which is an easy attitude for any business to adopt.

Look for Examples in Parallel Markets

Another great way to get good inspiration is to find a parallel market to your own and see what those businesses are doing. See if the leaders of a field you’re not competitive with are doing anything exciting and take notes. Another great, low cost and very easy way to gain access to a market that you may not have much interest in is to engage one of the larger figures in that market via social media. Your Twitter or Facebook post may show up to a large group of individuals who otherwise would have no reason to think about your company.

Take Advantage of Marketing Automation Tools

Using tools provided by marketing automation software companies such as Lead Liaison, use integrated social media tools to schedule your social media posts to fit easily within a long-term, large-scale social media campaign. Take all the guesswork and complicated timing out of rolling out a social media campaign by scheduling posts months in advance to deliver company announcements and messages on time and on point. Not that the ability to schedule your posts should distract from running a dynamic and engaged social media presence, but it can certainly help organize everything.

By using these techniques and marketing automation tools, you should be able to find a way to enliven your social media presence in no time. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog to learn more about using your social media presence to benefit your business.

Lead Liaison

Create Personas to Guide Your Marketing Automation

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Create Profiles to Guide Your Marketing AutomationIn order to create strong, relevant copy that connects and engages leads, understand how your potential customers are thinking about your product and how you can influence their thinking. In order to do that you need to understand who you are marketing to and how your product or services interact complement each person. One great way to do this is to create profiles to guide your marketing automation strategies. Keep reading to learn how to go about creating these profiles and how to get the most information out of them.

Identify Personas

The first thing to do to begin recognizing who your leads are and how they could potentially interact with your business is gather all relevant data you have about your leads and customers. Gather things like demographics, buying statistics, job titles and any other information that may be useful. Start organizing this data by either creating a spreadsheet and then grouping relevant information, or by using the somewhat more old school method of writing traits on post-it notes and creating affinity diagrams. Look for patterns and ask questions of yourself and each other of why certain traits are being grouped together. You can also use technology like lead grading to qualify your database. Here’s a small sales tool that can help you group, score and/or grade your database.

Hone Personas

Once you have some basic groupings defined, it’s time to dig into them and define the typical individual that represents this group, what they want and how your product can provide that. This process establishes your the ideal buyer. If you have a way to get in touch with an actual customer or lead who fits within one of the different groups, then approach them. You’ll gain valuable insight that may be hard to glean from simply comparing data sets. Identify whether your groups are too narrow or too broad, and combine or divide them accordingly. Once you feel comfortable with your groups, personalize them by creating a persona with a name and a story, and try to determine how your product or service can help them solve their problems.

Share Personas

Now that you have your personas established, named and their behavior and background defined, it is time to share your work with coworkers. Email your findings around the department, and put personas up on the wall so people have an opportunity to think about the people they are creating content or design features for. The goal is to ultimately come to a shared understanding within your team of who you are working to appeal to, and that shared understanding should influence all communication being sent to your leads.

When using this technique to create personas to guide your marketing automation, remember, it doesn’t stop at the creation of a persona that helps you understand your customers. Always continue to perform A/B testing to see how different groups react to different material, and don’t be afraid to tailor content to specific groups. To learn more about understanding how your customers view your marketing materials, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.

Lead Liaison

What Is Marketing Automation, and Why Do You Need It?

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What is Marketing Automation?Marketing automation is a buzz term that has become increasingly common over the past several years. Although it might sound like a new concept, marketing automation has actually been around since late 1990s; it is only now that we have begun to hear more about it. So, what exactly is it, and is marketing automation something that your company needs?

What Is Marketing Automation?

In the most basic sense, marketing automation utilizes a single system for tracking data for leads, generating reports for all of your company’s marketing activities, and automating those activities. Certain features are also used in marketing automation to trigger marketing activities without the need for human interaction, saving significant time and resources.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can provide companies of all sizes with a vast number of benefits, including the ability to function more efficiently, capture more leads, and develop a more granular understanding of data.

One of the most important benefits of marketing automation is the fact that it offers the opportunity to generate more leads without expanding your budget. This can be particularly beneficial for small businesses and startups with limited budgets. By automating manual tasks, marketing departments are able to allocate more time to the creative side of marketing.

Marketing automation also offers the opportunity to prove return on investment for marketing efforts. Regardless of company size, the need to prove ROI always exists. Marketing at any level can be expensive, and companies must be able to show financial justification. With marketing automation, it becomes possible to track and report on leads, thus linking marketing efforts to proven sales opportunities.

Companies will also find that marketing automation can be quite empowering in terms of building online marketing campaigns. If you feel uncomfortable working with code, marketing automation can help you benefit from a variety of features without the need to invest time and money in designing customized landing pages.

Finally, marketing automation presents the opportunity to consolidate multiple tools into a single easy-to-use system. From social media to email marketing to mobile marketing, marketing automation can help you manage it all. As a result, you can launch cross-channel campaigns more easily and effectively.

Contact Lead Liaison if you’d like to learn more about marketing automation.

Lead Liaison

Great Strategies to Improve Efficiency of your Marketing Automation System

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Great Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Automation’s EfficiencyMarketing automation is one of the most important new technologies to influence modern marketing in recent years, and if your company has already adopted it, then you are already ahead of the competition. However, marketing automation is a system with a lot of different tools, and if one tool is used incorrectly, it can be damaging to the entire system, ultimately making your software inefficient and costing you conversions. Take a look at some of these best practices described below and compare them to how your company is using its marketing automation software. Don’t be surprised if you see some significant improvements to your marketing automation’s efficiency after implementing these practices!

Improve efficiency of your marketing automation system using these three tips:

Lead Qualification

Marketing automation can generate a great number of new leads for your company in a short amount of time. It can generate so many new leads, in fact, that it can become overwhelming for your sales team to attempt to pursue them all. One of the most important things to implement in your marketing automation program is lead qualification. Lead qualification analyzes a leads behavior and any available data about the lead’s profile and assigns a lead score to each prospect. Using this system, you can ensure that your sales team is focusing on the leads most likely to be converted – not wasting their time pursuing leads that are uninterested.

Lead Nurturing

One of the most important ways to turn cold leads into qualified leads is through a successful lead nurturing program. You need to make sure your marketing team can craft a program that engages your leads, educating and informing them while not being too pushy and scaring them away through overselling. The key is to focus on educating, not selling. A successful lead nurturing program should be consistent with your company’s brand, and should be tailored to a lead’s interest level, as assessed by the lead score assigned to the lead. And likewise, your sales team should be in tune with how leads are progressing through a lead nurturing program, so they know when a lead has become qualified and is ready to be contacted by a sales rep.

A/B Testing

Another vital way to improve your marketing automation’s efficiency is by implementing effective A/B email testing. You may think you have a great lead nurturing program in place, but it doesn’t take very much effort to test it against a different strategy. The results may surprise you and your marketing team, and even if you don’t find a strategy that is entirely more effective than your current tactics, you may find one element of it that you can incorporate into other marketing materials. Marketing automation software such as Lead Liaison has built in tools that will let you see exactly how your leads are responding to your marketing materials so you can construct the best, most effective content possible.

These are just a couple of the many different important strategies you can use to improve efficiency of your marketing automation system. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online to learn more.

Lead Liaison

How to Reach Out to a Lost Lead Using Marketing Automation

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How to Reach Out to a Lost Lead Using Marketing AutomationIt can be disappointing when a lead officially moves over to the lost pile. Considering how the internet and marketing automation has increased sales and marketing teams’ ability to quickly acquire large amounts of new leads, it can be tempting to simply forget about lost leads and move on to the next set. However, those leads were once considered possibilities, and marketing automation software makes it an easy thing to casually contact leads without wasting any of your employees’ efforts. Keep reading to learn how you can reach out to a lost lead using marketing automation without costing you any time or money.

How a Lead is Lost

Leads become inactive and effectively lost for various reasons, although those reasons can generally be grouped into two broad categories, which happen at two distinct spots in the lead funnel. The first is distraction, which usually occurs at the top of your lead funnel. It simply means the lead didn’t have an opportunity to engage with your marketing materials and wasn’t hooked by your product. They may know who you are, but they aren’t interested enough to pay attention.

The second, and more difficult to overcome, is when a customer knows about your company and your services, but does not think you are the correct provider of a solution to their problem. This typically occurs much further down the sales funnel, and can be more difficult to overcome.

How to Regain a Lead’s Interest

If you have lost a lead due to distraction, then attention grabbing marketing automation solutions can yield great results. Social selling is a great way to get a lead’s attention, and a quick follow up with a limited time offer can create urgency and inspire a lead to renew their interest in your products or services.

If you lost a lead further down the lead funnel, the process can be a little more involved, but you still have some great options to reach out to that lost lead using marketing automation. Educational lead nurturing can help you regain a lead’s interest. Nurturing helps deliver unobtrusive, well-timed, direct communication that focuses more on educating a lead about different problems and their potential solutions as opposed to simply selling. An annual follow-up is another great way to remind a lead that you’re out there because people can get new titles, budgets can shift and problems can change over time.

If you opt for one of these routes, remember that a multi-channel, multi-touch solution such as what marketing automation providers like Lead Liaison can implement can be incredibly effective. Spreading communications across email, direct mail, text messages and promotional material ensures prospects don’t feel spammed by repeated and unrequested emails. And different people respond to different mediums – someone who isn’t on top of answering every email that comes their way may be much more receptive to a text message.

All in all, you should never truly give up on a lead, and with marketing automation, you don’t have to. Learn about more lead acquisition and marketing automation strategies on Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

Is Your Company Ready to Adopt Marketing Automation?

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Is Your Company Ready to Adopt Marketing Automation?If your company is experience a period of growth, or worse, a period of stagnation after a period of growth, you may wonder how you can effectively market to all of your new leads and customers. While you may have heard of marketing automation, it can be tough to decide to switch your business over to a new approach to marketing, especially if you have been doing things a certain way for a long time. Here are some common issues businesses face before realizing their company is ready to adopt marketing automation.

The Competition is Gaining an Edge

If it seems like your immediate competitors are pulling ahead of you in sales or their ability to penetrate market share, they may have already upgraded their marketing strategies to incorporate marketing automation. If this is the case, you will need a new set of tools to interact with leads consistently and effectively. Marketing automation is the perfect answer to competitive pressure.

Your Company’s Growth is Making Marketing Difficult to Scale

If your sales and marketing teams have a hard time scaling up their efforts to personalize marketing materials to new leads and existing customers, marketing automation can be an invaluable tool. With marketing automation, prepared marketing content can quickly and automatically be personalized to all of your leads and customers, freeing up marketing teams to design new content and develop strategies and sales teams to focus on making sales.

Your Sales Team is Wasting Time Due to Lack of Lead Scoring

If your sales team expends energy on leads that aren’t interested because there isn’t a dependable lead scoring system in place, then marketing automation can help. Marketing automation builds a database of leads and then, through a process of evaluating the behavior exhibited by a lead and any demographic data available, qualifies the lead and assigns a lead score. This lead score lets your sales team know whether or not a lead is ready to be contacted directly. And if a lead is not, marketing automation software can insert a lead into a lead nurturing program and notify sales when the lead is qualified.

Your Sales Team is Marketing at Random

If you’re spending a lot on marketing but not seeing the results you expect, then it may be because your marketing team doesn’t have a method to direct marketing materials at the correct audience. In this case, high-quality marketing is being misdirected at a largely uncaring public when it could be delivered directly to interested leads. Marketing automation gives you the tools to see how an audience reacts to marketing materials so you can focus on the material and the audience that is working for you.

When your company is ready to adopt marketing automation, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more about the ways that marketing automation can revolutionize your marketing department.

Lead Liaison

How Do Analytics Influence Marketing Automation

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how do analytics influence marketing automationAnalytics are a key element in many of the functions that make marketing automation such an effective tool for interacting with and eventually converting leads. At its core, analytics is simply a catch all term for looking at raw data collected by marketing automation software about the behavior and demographics of leads currently monitored by your marketing automation software. By collecting and understanding this data, your marketing automation software will help your sales and marketing teams build more effective strategies for converting leads. Let’s take a closer look at how analytics influence marketing automation.

In all honesty, analytics influence almost every part of modern marketing automation, but there certainly are a few clear examples of marketing automation functions interacting with analytics. When your marketing automation software acquires a new lead, it also scores that lead to help your sales team determine whether or not it is an appropriate time to contact them directly or to place them in a lead nurturing program.

If a lead is entered into a lead nurturing program, then your marketing automation software builds a lead profile and performs continued analysis on the leads behavior to measure whether they should be moved to a more aggressive lead nurturing program. It can even determine if they are ready to buy. If this is the case, then your marketing automation software sends an alert to your sales team so that they can contact the lead at the optimal time.

Below are a few different types of analytics that influence marketing automation that every marketing team should be aware of and monitor regularly.

Behavioral Analytics

Behavioral analytics tracks how customers interact with elements of your online presence, such as your website, blog posts or other online promotional material. This can help your marketing team understand what is getting a response from leads, and what is not.

Customer Lifecycle Analytics

These analytics help your marketing and sales team understand how your customers interact with your marketing materials in the past, where current leads are in processes such as lead nurturing and how to predict the behavior of future leads.  This type of analytics influences many different marketing automation processes.

Messaging Analytics

This type of analytics helps your marketing team judge how well your direct marketing campaigns perform. Messaging analytics are a great place to run side by side comparison marketing campaigns. Running side by side marketing campaigns helps you test which marketing strategies, and can yield surprising results, which may help you discover new markets and new ways to advertise to them.

Conversion Analytics

Although all types of analytics are important and should be given equal attention, conversion analytics are definitely the type of analytics that influence marketing automation perhaps the most. If you’re not converting at a successful rate, then some part of your process is flawed and should be revised.

There are many more types of analytics that help craft successful marketing automation campaigns. You can learn about these and much more at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

Problems That Can Limit Your Marketing Automation Strategy

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Problems That Can Limit Your Marketing Automation StrategyMarketing automation is an incredible powerful tool that can bring an increased numbers of potential leads and higher conversion rates than your business has ever seen. However, if you’ve invested in marketing automation software and are not seeing the results you were hoping for, it can be incredibly frustrating. Here are some of the basic problems that can limit your marketing automation strategy and keep your business from the success it deserves.

Untrained Staff

With a name like marketing automation, it can be easy to think that the software can market automatically. This is far from true however, and if you are implementing a marketing automation strategy, then you must ensure that your staff is ready to use it. Marketing automation can present a lot of new ways for your marketing and sales teams to interact with leads and customers, and you need to ensure that both teams are ready to take advantage of those new opportunities.

In the same vein, you should also ensure that your marketing and sales teams are working well together and able to deliver and share the data that concerns either team. These two departments have always had a need for cooperation, but with marketing automation, there will be quite a bit of new data. It is important that the two groups can communicate with one another to ensure the best marketing material is reaches your leads and the sales team takes advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.

Incorrectly Used Tools

Marketing has a lot of extremely useful components, ranging from lead scoring to automated email marketing. However, it is important that each of these components be used in conjunction and correctly. If your data tracking software gives you a bunch of new leads because they visited your website, make sure your sales team isn’t immediately harvesting those leads to pitch and drive away potential customers. They should understand what lead profiling and lead scoring is, and how to use that in conjunction with lead nurturing and buy signals.

Underprepared Content Strategy

Another all too common problem that can limit your marketing automation strategy, especially for a company that has just started using marketing automation, is not having a content strategy ready to go. When you begin to run multiple email marketing campaigns for different levels of leads, you will quickly need a lot of content to stay on course, and companies who are just starting out sometimes can underestimate the volume of work that must go into that. In addition, all of that content must meet a high standard of quality, as subpar content can be even more damaging than a lack of content. So if you’re getting ready to adopt an email marketing campaign, be prepared to put the work in.

These are just a few common problems that can limit your marketing automation strategy. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation marketing automation resource blog online to learn about more.

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Why Content Creation is Crucial to your Marketing Automation

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Why Content Creation Is Crucial To Your Marketing AutomationThe strategic use of content created by your marketing team for your marketing automation solution is one of the greatest strengths of marketing automation’s ability to convert a lead. While marketing automation has many different strengths in its varied abilities to gather and deliver leads and data to your marketing and sales teams, if you want to convert those leads, you must approach them with compelling content that is appropriate to the person receiving it. In order to do that, you must be able to utilize your marketing automation lead scoring tools to determine what stage of content each lead is receptive to. Read on to learn why content creation is crucial to your marketing automation strategy.

Early-Stage Leads

An early-stage lead is someone who isn’t ready to be actively pitched, and are at risk of being turned away from your company if they are approached too aggressively. When approaching an early-stage lead, your content is primarily concerned with two main goals – reminding the lead that your company exists and that you and your business can help them solve problems. Low impact, helpful content such as blog posts or how-to articles sent to them as a part of a relaxed lead nurturing campaign will be most effective. Keeping these leads engaged and receptive is why these seemingly unimportant types of content creation is crucial to your overall marketing automation strategy.

Mid-Stage Leads

Mid-stage leads are where you and your marketing can begin to get more direct with a lead, although mid-stage leads can be tricky and are still susceptible to becoming disinterested in your company if they are over-sold to. In general, a mid-stage lead is aware that they have a problem – but they may not be sure what the solution, or who can help them solve it.

If the lead scoring software that is a part of your marketing automation software detects that a lead has become more active in responding to your softer content, then now is the time to put them in a more aggressive lead nurturing program. Sending those leads content such as data sheets, case studies or demo videos will help a customer understand the solutions your company can provide, and help move them into the last stage. Once again, having the right kind of content created is crucial to making sure your leads move seamlessly through your lead nurturing programs.

Late-Stage Leads

When a lead reaches the late stage, it means that not only are they aware of a problem and its potential solutions, it also means that they know that your company can provide those solutions. This is a crucial point for your sales team to act and contact the lead to make the sale, but even then, you need to be able to support your sales team with solid content. Competitor comparisons, product demonstrations and personalized webinars will all help to ensure your sales team has the best possible chance to convert your leads into customers.

These are just some of the ways that content creation is crucial to your marketing automation strategy. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more.

Lead Liaison

How To Use Marketing Automation Software To Generate Leads

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How To Use Marketing Automation Software To Generate LeadsLooking for software to generate leads? At its very core, marketing automation is software that works to combine the strengths of your marketing department with the strengths of your sales department. It is a system that reduces static between the two departments and streamlines every tool that each department has so they can reach the customer or prospect at the right time. This process starts at the very beginning, and this article will show you how to use marketing automation software to generate leads – but generate better leads.

Data Collection

One of the first ways that marketing automation software generates leads is simply by recording all the information a potential lead provides from places such as advertisements, your webpage, or even email click-throughs. All of this data is aggregated within the software, and is then assigned a lead score based on the lead profile that the software is able to interpret from the leads various activity. This helps you determine which leads are ready to be approached and – sometimes even more importantly – when they are not. This makes sure that an overly enthusiastic member of your sales team won’t scare them away, keeping a potential lead from ever making a purchase from your business.

Lead Nurturing

However, like I said earlier, marketing automation software doesn’t just give you more leads – it gives you better leads. Let’s say you have a lead that is quite clearly not going to be converted any time soon. Do you simply walk away? Not with marketing automation software. With marketing automation, you place all of your less interested leads in low impact, noninvasive lead nurturing programs that will send helpful and friendly content that will help remind the lead that not only do you exist, but you can help them solve their problems, whether they have given you any money or not.

While cold emails may seem risky, TechnologyAdvise.com has published statistics that indicate 60% of consumers read marketing emails, and any responses you get to your emails will feed directly back into your marketing automation software lead profiling technology.

Personalization

Another important way to use marketing automation software to generate more leads is by taking advantage of the personalization and automation tools  built into the software. These tools are as varied as they are intriguing. For example, you can use social media automation tools to schedule social media posts around important dates or events, such as a trade show, in your industry. This can help make your business an active participant of the social media community surrounding the event and reach a wider audience.

Another great personalization tool you can use to help generate more leads is by using your software automation to perform active advertisement testing. By sending one set of advertising materials to one group and another to a different set, you can see what material performs the best, and how different demographics respond to it. You may discover a market for your product that you didn’t even know existed – along with an entirely new set of leads.

These are just some of the ways you can use marketing automation software to generate leads. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more about how you can improve you marketing automation strategies.