Lead Liaison

The Challenges and Benefits of Automated Lead Generation

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The Challenges and Benefits of Automated Lead GenerationMore and more companies are taking advantage of automated lead generation programs since marketing automation software has now proven its worth with countless industry leaders. Savvy businesses that have implemented a comprehensive marketing automation strategy are experiencing up to a 200% increase in their conversion rate.

Unfortunately, not everyone who uses automated lead generation software will reap the same benefits. Worthwhile lead generation has been a constant struggle for traditional marketers who don’t know how to use the software to its full capabilities, as discussed in Business News Daily’s article from April 23, 2013; Lead Generation B2B Challenges. Businesses that are not aware of how to extract useful information, accurately rank leads, and effectively nurture each lead will struggle to see all the benefits of lead generation.

Lead Generation Challenges

One of the greatest challenges with lead generation is that most marketing automation software systems are underutilized. Companies that don’t utilize a lead’s behavioral and demographic characteristics for lead scoring and customized lead nurturing will not see the results they would expect. Automated lead generation needs to be combined with a full-scale marketing automation program to ensure that every lead is understood and pointed in the right direction.

Benefits of Lead Generation

The benefits of lead generation are pretty obvious; having more leads means a higher potential for sales. However, it is the benefits of automated lead generation combined with a complete marketing automation program that will truly give you a worthwhile return on your investment.

When it is accompanied by a marketing automation program, lead generation is run using automated software that guarantees no lead will be missed. Every person who crosses paths with your website will be captured, profiled, and scored. The software tracks which pages each lead visits, how long they stay on each page, as well as any demographic details that they voluntarily offer through newsletter registries or pop-up questionnaires. Creating pop-up barriers that request leads sign up before they are provided with more valuable content is one of the best practices for fully utilizing lead generation and marketing automation software.

Gain Greater Insight into Leads

Automated lead generation is focused on gathering relevant information on each lead. This will make it easier to identify qualified leads, plus it will provide crucial profiling details that can be used to create more customized lead nurturing content.

The real benefits of lead generation are only realized if the lead is converted into a customer. Automated lead generation combined with marketing automation will offer marketers and sales professionals valuable insight into each lead, so they can use a more personalized approach and increase their chances of conversion.

Although there will be some challenges when it comes to achieving the greatest benefits from automated lead generation, it is still a valuable tool even when it is not used to its full capacity. Using marketing automation software for lead generation will ensure that every lead on your site is identified. When it the program is used to its full intent, it will also gather valuable details on each lead to support lead scoring, lead profiling, and lead nurturing efforts.

Lead Liaison

How to Optimize Your Social Media Campaign

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How to Optimize Your Social Media CampaignB2B marketers are scrambling to deploy social media campaigns in order to establish a foothold in this burgeoning channel. In fact, according to a recent Forrester Research study, 85% of business decision-makers believe having at least one social media channel is important when making tech purchase decisions. Here are 12 ways to make your SM campaign effective and optimize your social media campaign:

Be consistent. B2B marketers must post regularly and connect with their audiences frequently in order to be effective through SM channels.

Use images within your content. Whenever possible embed an image in your SM posts. Use images that are relevant to your business such as product images, users, employees, etc. Visual media is typically shared more often than copy.

Join LinkedIn discussion groups. Professionals join LinkedIn Groups to learn, share, and discuss – this is a great spot to provide insight, answers, or even the occasional joke (in good taste!)

Become a Quora user. Show your interest in being helpful by providing answers to questions about your industry, etc. There will be opportunities to improve an existing answer or posting your own.

Use social bookmarking sites to share information. Reddit, Digg, Delicious, and other social bookmarking sites allow b-to-b marketers to provide resources for prospects. Become a respected knowledge authority by sharing content from a variety of sources.

Respond to any and all comments. Be diligent in providing responses or comments to those who have engaged with your posts. Readers want to feel as if you are connected to them.

Use your prospect’s language. Put some effort in learning common phrases, terms, etc. that are used by your prospects. Avoid using language that, although familiar to you, may be confusing to your audience.

Embed AddThis widgets on your site, blog, etc. Make it easy to share your web pages, blog posts, and other digital assets by inserting a SM widget on every page.

Automate your posting activity. Deploy social media automation platforms, such as HootSuite, that allow marketers to automate delivery and manage multiple SM profiles. Automating SM deployment provides lean organizations with a cost effective way to deploy social messaging using fewer resources.

Share content from multiple networks. It’s easy to connect your social posts across multiple platforms. Cross-network sharing is a good way to catch prospects that may miss your original post.

Share video. Watching product demonstration videos is an effective way to learn about a company’s solutions. If possible, create and share videos that depict how to use your solutions, how to troubleshoot issues, and other helpful information.

Use analytics. Find out which messages are generating responses, which posts are being viewed, and what messaging should be dropped. Adapt social messaging to meet your market’s demands by maintaining an agile marketing strategy through the use of SM analytics.

At the end of the day, a B2B social media campaign is only as effective as its messaging. When deploying SM, break out your processes using a 70/30 rule: 70% of the time should be devoted to message creation and 30% should be devoted to message delivery.

Lead Liaison

How to Develop Your Customer Persona

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How to Develop Your Customer PersonaHave you ever wondered how fiction writers develop realistic characters that captivate readers? Have you thought about how actors develop roles that resonate with their audiences? Successful authors and actors spend a significant amount of time developing the personas they portray in order to connect with their “markets”. Similar tactics can be used by your marketers to develop a customer persona.

B2B marketers are expected to be marksmen, targeting their messaging to appeal to each buyer’s unique attributes. To be successful connecting with your prospects requires the same dedicated focus on developing personas that award-winning fiction authors and actors commit. Developing a customer persona is an essential step towards more effective and efficient marketing practices. There may be several customer types that engage with your brand. The key to successful customer persona development is to create a profile that embodies the same complexity as your typical customer. Consider as many characteristics as possible and be as specific as possible about each one when you’re building your customer persona.

Remember this caveat: Data integrity is important to the persona development process. Without good data, the quality of your customer model is diminished.

Determine “Physical” Characteristics

The most obvious starting point to developing a customer persona is to define who your typical B2B customers are. Break out business and personal characteristics including title, seniority, family makeup, education, geographic location, and any other identifiers that make up your typical customers.

Define Customer Habits

The next step is to define what your typical customer does. Although it can be challenging to collect data on every behavior embedded in a customer’s buying cycle, behaviors that are recorded, such as digital searches or trade show registrations, can be identified, categorized, and organized to reveal the footprints that your customers make on their way to choosing your solution. Typically, the patterns that emerge provide distinct habits that can be used to develop your customer persona.

Uncover Psychographics

This is the challenging step – even giants like Google are still working on better ways to understand digital human behavior – determining why your customers make buying decisions. Many SMBs don’t have the resources to devote to psychographic analysis; however, to successfully attract suitable prospects you should understand their attitudes, opinions, and values. Look at what motivates, scares, and interests your customers. Shape your customer persona to reflect what makes them tick.

Despite evidence that shows marketing automation is effective at improving your marketing and sales practices, if you’re marketers are randomly targeting prospects marketing tech won’t be as effective. Before you set out to connect with your prospects, make sure they are the right ones to target – develop a customer persona.

Lead Liaison

How to convert more B2B leads into customers? Marketing Automation!

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How to convert more B2B leads into customers? Marketing Automation!As the post title implies, our answer to the eternal sales question “how do we convert more leads into customers?” is to deploy marketing automation. Is that the only answer? No. But with the amount of data available today, marketing automation will do more to improve your B2B lead conversion rates than social media, PPC, or stale drip campaigns.

It’s quickly becoming apparent that marketing automation can play a significant role in improving your lead conversion ratio. From first touch (initial point of contact) to pass through (migration to CRM), lead conversion for companies in most industries is improving thanks to MA. The first step towards higher B2B close rates is to manage your leads effectively before they are sent to your sales team.

To begin, you should know your customers well. Who are they? What do they like? What do they do? Why do they buy? Much of this information is now available digitally, the key is to leverage the information you collect into effective lead management.

Lead Generation

An often overlooked concept about lead generation is that it should be approached holistically not unilaterally. When you need to convert more B2B leads into customers look to strengthen lead generation efforts. Lead gen starts with first touch, escalates through lead tracking, and winds up with capture. If you’re not focusing on developing good content for your touch points, tracking your website visitors using business intelligence integration, and capturing contact information through digital assets, you’re not effectively generating leads – and you can’t convert leads you don’t have. Make sure your lead gen scope is broader than list buys and PPC campaigns.

Lead Nurturing

Many think lead nurturing equals email drip campaigns. Though partly true, lead nurturing is so much more. Lead conversion through the nurturing process requires that you develop the relationship through escalating engagements. Simply sending the occasional “hi-how-are-you?” note won’t be sufficient to move your leads through the marketing pipeline. Build a campaign that offers more at advanced buying cycle stages: a webinar invite, a product demo. Remember, nurture means “to grow”.

Lead Scoring

There’s nothing worse for a sales agent than to receive a lead that turns out to be a graduate student completing his thesis. MA platforms provide lead scoring and grading capabilities that should allow you to sharpen the sales team’s focus towards the most suitable, marketing-qualified leads. Establish specific criteria that can be scored or graded. Most leading systems grade explicit lead attributes (industry, company size) and score implicit behaviors (webpage visit, webinar registration). Once a scoring matrix has been created, determine a scoring threshold that automatically migrates the lead to your CRM.

Lead Distribution

Lead distribution must be optimized to channel leads appropriately to your sales force. Which sales agents are available to respond quickly? Which agents have high close rates? Which agents know the lead’s industry best? Automated systems distribute leads using parameters that can maximize your sales team’s efficiency. Some MA platforms allow you to assign lead ownership according to predefined criteria, such as geography or seniority. Leads distributed effectively will shorten your average sales cycle and improve sales close rates.

Keep in mind that marketing automation is a tool that will improve sales conversions and help convert more B2B leads into customers. Though MA platforms have improved sales outcomes, much of the success that comes from lead management is dependent on the content you provide. If you don’t have strong creative minds to develop messaging in-house, consider outsourcing.