Lead Liaison

Six Tips on How to Grow a Business Using Lead Nurturing

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Grow your business using lead nurturingThe sole purpose of any lead nurturing campaign is to grow the business. It should be focused on building brand authority, establishing expertise, and creating lasting relationships with new and existing consumers. Every lead nurturing campaign should be designed to expand your customer base and help your business develop a loyal following.

If you are not already convinced of the power lead nurturing has to grow a business, please read why smart consumers insist on high quality lead nurturing content first. Once you’ve accepted that lead nurturing is essential for marketing a business online, the next step is to follow these six simple tips for greater lead nurturing success.

Here are six tips on how to grow a business using lead nurturing:

Know Your Target Audience

Understanding your target consumer’s needs and interests is necessary before you create a lead nurturing campaign. Start by utilizing the website visitor tracking capabilities of marketing automation software to monitor and profile potential leads’ activity on your website. This software will record and analyze behavioral trends and relevant demographic traits to help define your company’s typical consumer.

Understand Your Leads’ Needs

After you get to know your consumers better, the next step is determining what they need from your business. This is not necessarily a specific product or service. Focus more on addressing a solution to their problem. For example, if you sell diet aids, your prospects’ need proven weight loss solutions, which of course will include your product. The key is making sure your lead nurturing campaigns are focused on fulfilling their needs rather than pushing your products or services.

Create a Diverse Campaign Strategy

You can grow a business faster using lead nurturing if you combine it with a multi-media digital campaign. Use a blend of lead nurturing emails, downloadable whitepapers, website blogs, and social media to guide potential leads in the right direction.

Offer Valuable Free Advice

Lead nurturing campaigns should offer potential consumers valuable advice to establish your company’s authority and expertise. The content should contain useful and relevant information that won’t be easily obtained elsewhere. Leads that receive valuable free advice from a business are more likely to be loyal customers in the future.

Personalize Lead Nurturing Campaigns

You can develop stronger relationships with potential leads by personally addressing each lead nurturing email, as well as customizing the content for predetermined lead segment. Marketing automation software can be used to group potential prospects that have similar lead profiles.

Measure Campaigns Results

To grow a business using lead nurturing, it is essential that you monitor the engagement level for each different campaign. Compare the results of all of your lead nurturing campaigns to determine which forms of media and what topics are generating the most interest. Lead nurturing is not an exact science and you may need to adjust your strategy along the way.

If you want to quickly grow a business with lead nurturing, it is essential that you know your target audience, understand your lead’s needs, create a diverse campaign strategy, personalize your lead nurturing campaigns, and measure the results. This will allow you to effectively and efficiently connect with more sales-ready leads.

Lead Liaison

Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Will Be Essential in 2014

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Why High-Quality Lead Nurturing Will Be Essential in 2014The last year has been an immensely successful year for most businesses’ digital marketing campaigns. Marketing automation, social media marketing, and other online marketing tools have made it significantly easier for companies to interact and engage a wider spectrum of new leads. These impressive new platforms have resulted in significant gains in market share for many online businesses. However, this gain in their share of the market had to come from somewhere. Many other businesses digital marketing campaigns failed, while some were non-existent. These companies are quickly discovering the reason for their decline and are creating plans to reclaim their lost consumers. High-quality lead nurturing will be essential in 2014.

Marketing Focus for 2014

The focus next year for companies that were successful in 2013 will be on maintaining their gains in market share, as more companies start to take advantage of the power of marketing automation and social media. The playing field will return to neutral, since almost every business in the world has now realized how much can be achieved with compelling and informative digital marketing campaigns. If everyone is utilizing digital marketing campaigns, there has to be something distinct that sets your business apart from the competition. Businesses need to give potential prospects a reason to choose their product or service over the countless competitors who are reaching them through the same online channels.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

The quality and consistency of lead nurturing content is one factor that can have a huge and personal impact on potential leads. Lead nurturing campaigns must grab the reader’s attention, provide them with real value, and then inspire them to react. According to Forrester Research, businesses that excel at lead nurturing will generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% reduction in the cost per lead obtained. Original and insightful content will continue to be the main focus of digital marketing campaigns in 2014, although there will be a greater emphasis on customizing the content based on relevant lead segments. For more information on how you can using lead nurturing to grow your share of the market, please read Using lead nurturing to build trust and establish long-term clients.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software is a business’ best bet for tapping into the leads’ needs and behavior. It profiles their online activity and uses online registration to gather demographic characteristics. All of the information obtain during the website visitor tracking aspect of marketing automation can be used to formulate lead nurturing campaigns that speak directly to distinct groups of leads. Businesses that succeed in generating and distributing relevant content that offers leads real value will maintain or gain market share in 2014. Any online entities that fail to take the most of resources like marketing automation and social media will quickly discover that they are losing out to those that do.

Lead Liaison

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

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

Marketing Automation – Who’s Watching the Data?

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

Putting Marketing Automation to Work

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

Lead Liaison

Six Essential Elements in Every Successful Lead Nurturing Email

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6 Elements for Successful Lead NurturingLead nurturing emails can be a powerful and efficient marketing tool when they are well-written. The trick is making sure every email has all of the essential elements to turn a prospective buyer into a loyal consumer.

Emails should be catered to their specific needs and interests rather than strictly promoting a product. It also needs to provide the reader with valuable information while casually guiding them towards the optimal outcome for the business. Lead nurturing emails are a company’s greatest opportunity to connect and entice potential consumers.

These are six essential elements that are in every successful lead nurturing email:

Catchy Headline and Intro

A lead nurturing email won’t be successful if it doesn’t capture their attention within the first few words. It is important to make sure the headline and first sentence clearly identify the topic and how the lead nurturing email will benefit the reader.

Solutions to Their Problems

Every lead nurturing email should come across as unbiased advice to a good friend. It doesn’t need to discuss every beneficial attributes of your business. It should only be focused on how your product or service can benefit their lives. Always remember that they are interested in solving their problems, not in supporting your business.

Offers Real Value

There has to be something in the lead nurturing email that immediately benefits the reader. It should provide them with useful information or make them a worthwhile offer. If you give someone valuable guidance, they will return to you the next time they are seeking answers to their problems.

Establishes Your Expertise

Every lead nurturing campaign should demonstrate your industry knowledge and authority on the subject matter. It should be well-research, grammatically correct, and professional written. It should also be relevant to your readers and to your brand.

Teaches Something New

Every lead nurturing email should contain a new tidbit of information that hasn’t been previously shared. Potential leads will stop reading your emails if you just regurgitate the same advice using different words.

An Irresistible Offer

The last thing every successful lead nurturing email should contain is an offer that is too good to pass up. It is always a good idea to conclude each email with a unique, special offer that they must act on immediately. Make sure the final offer highlights how your product or service will benefit the reader.

Every successful lead nurturing email campaign needs a catchy headline and intro to grab their attention and provide them with a solution to their problems. It should also offer real value, establish your expertise, teach the reader something new, and then finally present them with an offer they can’t refuse. If you still need more worthwhile lead nurturing campaign ideas, please read Lead Liaison’s earlier blog, three campaign ideas for lead nurturing success.

Lead Liaison

Content Marketing in 2014

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Content Marketing in 20142013 saw one of history’s most major shifts in SEO and content marketing, affecting brands around the globe. Google’s secure search shift led to a lack of keyword data readily available to the monitoring end user, leaving businesses in the dark about what keywords are being typed in to find their websites.

The “death of SEO” naturally isn’t really an ending, but the beginning of a need for more content-conscious strategies, necessitating sites that are as user friendly and engaging as before with a new stream of fresh content and marketing tactics that don’t adhere to the old paradigm.

Content Marketing in 2014

To break all this down into simpler terms, you really need to make sure you’re putting stuff on your site. That ‘stuff’ shouldn’t be just anything – but well-researched, well-planned blogs that add to the value you present your readers, – content that generates traffic and that focuses on keywords that can elevate your brand. If you don’t have a content strategy in place or understand what your readers want to see, that can be hard to do.

If your historical data doesn’t show you what kind of content interests readers, take a look at the type of content being released by popular blogs and news sites relevant to your industry. Don’t copy the topics exactly – focus on writing posts that discuss the same stories from a different angle. Also consider adding content that fulfills a need. If you would love to see a news story on a particular topic but can’t find anything out there to fit your needs, your company should be the one writing that story.

Planning Ahead

No one likes to do it – particularly a busy decision maker –but your good intentions about writing weekly blogs may not be something you have time to do. It’s important to makes sure you plan on picking up only the slack you can, and hiring content writers to pad out your pages where appropriate. If you’re concerned this will render your voice in authentic, then make sure to suggest topical guidelines and a keyword focus for each page so your content team will have some direction.

Lack of good content writers isn’t a unique problem – this is why Lead Liaison developed the content marketing dashboard for our customers. We’d love for you to take a look at what we have to offer and let us help develop content for your business!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation and Choosing Smaller Development

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

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

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

Marketing Automation Dashboards and User Friendliness

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

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

Shifting Their Thinking

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

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

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

Lead Liaison

How to Engage Prospects Early in the Buying Process

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How to Engage Prospects Early in the Buying ProcessPeople and businesses are changing the way they approach the buying process due to the abundance of online resources available. Numerous studies have shown that over 90% of people begin their buying process online using either a search engine or social media. There are so many viable options to choose online, which is why very few consumers will look elsewhere for information.

Early Engagement

Savvy marketers and entrepreneurs must reach and engage these prospects in the early stages of their buying process, before they settle for a competitor. They must recognize that someone is interested in their product or service and engage them instantaneously. One of the easiest ways to identify and connect with new consumers is marketing automation software.

Marketing Automation Software    

Surfing various websites for useful information is usually the initial step in the buying process, which is why the first step in the marketing automation process is using website visitor tracking. This powerful software tracks and monitors any leads that have connected with a company’s website or social media profiles. It records exactly what your leads are doing online in real time. If you are not already convinced of the incredible capabilities of website visitor tracking, take a moment to read Lead Liaison’s previous blog on five reasons why it is necessary to follow leads with website visitor tracking.

Lead Profiling & Ranking

Once marketing automation software has identified potential leads, the next step in engaging them is to understand their behavior and buying needs. Every detail the lead shares is tracked and analysed to create a comprehensive lead profile. Marketing automation experts will then rate their online activity based on the characteristics of existing consumers and determine where they are at in their buying process.

Lead Nurturing

The most essential step in the marketing automation process for engaging prospects early in their buying process is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing content is the most effective and efficient way to demonstrate a company’s expertise. A recent study by the Annuitas Group proved that nurtured leads generate 47% larger purchases than traditional marketing leads.

Lead nurturing allows businesses to gently guide leads towards a purchase by clearly demonstrating the value a particular product or service can add to their life. It should never be a hard-sell pitch or a blatant advertisement. The goal of lead nurturing is to engage prospects, give them the vital details they need to make a sound purchasing decision, and then subtle show why that purchase should be made with your business. It is a delicate art that is usually best left to trained content creators and marketing automation experts.

Engaging prospects early on in the buying process is essential for success in the modern world of online sales. Use marketing automation software, lead profile and ranking, and most importantly lead nurturing to create a lasting connection with potential prospects.

Lead Liaison

What’s the Impact of Google Caching Email Images?

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What's the impact of Google Caching Email Images?Google has changed their posture on caching images in emails. This event is actually good news for our customers for the following three reasons:

  1. The tiny image we insert into each email campaign is a unique image per recipient. Email Opens will still be counted; however, only repeat email opens will not be counted since the image is cached and no response will be sent back to our servers. This is good news since many people scroll through their email inbox and tab over emails. Less Opens per email will provide less noise.
  2. Google announced that images will load by default, instead of being turned off by default. This is good news since more unique opens will be reported; whereas before, the recipient would have to click the link to download images. The recipient could read an email without an open being reported. Now, a unique open will always be reported.
  3. The value of Lead Liaison just went up! Instead of companies using Email Opens as a key stat, they’ll start to look at what really matters, the click throughs. Fortunately, Lead Liaison does an excellent job at tracking what links are clicked in an email and capturing the recipients subsequent behavior as they navigate your site. That’s what you really care about. If they went to your site and poked around or not.
Lead Liaison’s leading edge marketing automation software includes next generation email marketing capabilities that diminish the impact of Google’s changes to image loading.  If you’re interested in learning more about how Lead Liaison can profile a potential buyer’s activity by tracking link click throughs, social post clicks, webpage visits, page views, forms submitted, landing pages, videos watched and more then contact us for a personalized demonstration.
Lead Liaison

Content Marketing Don’t-Do’s for 2014

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Content Marketing Don’t-Do’s for 2014The New Year is almost upon us, and content marketing isn’t a concept that will leave us anytime soon. Even seasoned marketers and business professionals have bad content habits. Since 2014 is just around the corner, there’s no better time (aside from say, right now) to re-engage your audience and leave some bad content habits behind. Hey, this goes for us, too! We could all use a big dose of efficiency for the New Year.

With this in mind, we’ve created a list of content don’t-do’s for 2014. Let’s get started.

When Content Marketing, let your audience determine your direction. 

If your social media accounts and blogs are new, you may not really have an idea of what your audience responds well to. If you’re using marketing automation services like Lead Liaison to keep track of content marketing, it’s time to take a look at the data.

Discover from Facebook Insights which of your posts gets the most interaction and the most clicks back over to your website. Take a look at what blogs inspire comments. Figure out which emails have the highest open rate and click through numbers. Don’t give up on letting the data show you what your audience is responding to.

Create Content That Works 

It’s difficult to create content when you know no one’s responding. Take a look at content that doesn’t have high engagement and see if you can effectively stay away from those topics.

Actually Write the Stuff

If you don’t have time to do content marketing, it’s time to stop lying to yourself about getting it done. Writing blogs, emails and social media status updates don’t necessarily have to be your forte. In case you haven’t noticed yet, Lead Liaison has a great content marketing solution that can help you get content up and running.

Spellcheck

Is it a pain? It is. But these days, most of us have Word or some similar software. Rather than writing directly into your Facebook posts, your automation dashboard, or your blog, use Microsoft Word and then paste your spellchecked copy over. It seems simple, but you’d be amazed at the amount of folks who still don’t do this.

Write What You Enjoy

Copywriting of any sort becomes a tedious task if you hate it. If you can tolerate it, write about the parts of your business and industry that you actually enjoy. If not, maybe it’s time to bring in some help! Talk to the friendly Lead Liaison team about our reliable content marketing solutions today.

Lead Liaison

Sales Funnel Management vs. the Holidays

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Sales Funnel Management vs. the HolidaysThere’s something about the holidays that tends to throw sales funnel management off a little bit. Because traffic typically slows during the holiday, the accumulation of sales data often goes unmanaged well into the new year. Employees are off doing their own thing with their families, and oftentimes the vacation isn’t enough to make full alertness and appreciation for work a possibility when they return to their desks in January.

If your business is going well for you – or even if it’s not – you may already have a workflow in place for collecting and interpreting data. Businesses who experience a slow time of year in January are often in a good position to modify their tracking and workflow for better sales funnel management. However, what do you do if the holidays slow your team down so significantly that your holiday data is never truly looked at?

Segment, Segment, Segment

One of the biggest issues most businesses have with sales funnel management during the holidays is the time factor. Particularly if your business tends to be rather slow during the holidays, traffic and page use can be glossed over in a way that robs you of valuable sales funnel management data. This data can give you insight into how you should change your website or your product offerings for success during the new year.

If this is happening, segment the data. Ask your team to prepare two special meetings  – one that focuses entirely on holiday data (and not just MoM ‘month over month’ for December data!) to get an idea of how the “holiday mind” can result in different usage of your website over time.

Streamlining Sales Funnel Management

Many businesses don’t factor in the differences between how “holiday-minded” users view their sites and how this type of traffic varies over the rest of the year. Again, rather than thinking in a MoM data collection space, it’s important to compare traffic during the weeks leading up to the holidays with traffic for the rest of the year.

You may find that the data is telling you to significantly change up your workflow, monitoring and conversion optimization processes before the holiday hits. Paying attention to your data at the granular level –whether site visits, page usage or form fill-outs – can help you design a work flow process that better accommodates time off and work flow for the holiday season.

Marketing automation can do all this for you – there’s no need to dig up holiday data when it’s presented to you cleanly in an easy-to-use dashboard. Talk to the Lead Liaison experts today about how we can help with your holiday sales funnel management!