More Ways to Battle [Not Set] in Search Engine Marketing

More Ways to Battle [Not Set] in Search Engine MarketingWe’ve talked about how Google’s ever-increasing [not set] parameters affect search engine marketing – but how can you tailor your sales process to better discover how users find you? Most SEOs and other digital marketers are viewing [not set] as a dead end – but if you can communicate about search queries with clients directly, you can get some valuable search data.

The “How Did You Find Us?”

If you’ve ever filled out a business comment card, you’ve probably told a company how you found out about their products or services. Online, this question tends to be a little antiquated these days, as a quick look at Google Analytics or the Lead Liaison Dashboard show us where to pull user search queries.

Now that technology is changing on us, there’s no reason we can’t bring back those helpful comment cards in a more digital-friendly format. It’s completely acceptable to ask clients straight away how they found you, including what they typed into Google to get to your website.

Search Engine Marketing and Engagement

Some folks just aren’t going to tell you – whether they’re uncomfortable doing so or just don’t feel like it – and that’s okay. But some are, and this could result in a data goldmine for you that your competitors aren’t even going to consider.

You can include a “How did you find us” dropdown on your email newsletter signup, with an extra blank that asks your client to specify a keyword they typed in to get to your website. You could also send out an incentive-based reader poll with “how did you find us?” questions making up the bulk of the survey. You’d be surprised at what even long-time clients are able to remember about getting to your website.

Try coaching your sales team to ask this question regularly by including it as part of a responsive call script or intake form. If you make the question part of your sales and marketing process, it will be natural for members of your team to start asking. Most importantly, don’t forget to ask what clients typed in to find you. If you throw around words like “keyword”, “key term” or “search query” clients may have no idea what you’re talking about.  The terminology is important!

When you have this data, start compiling it to account for some appearances of [not set]. You’re not fighting against the system here – you’re engaging with clients and doing your own homework to support your analytics data.

For more search engine marketing ideas that will help you understand your business stats, talk to a member of the Lead Liaison team today!

The Future of Marketing Automation: 3 Steps to Smarter Actions

The Future of Marketing Automation: 3 Steps to Smarter ActionsWhat’s the future of marketing automation? Instead of relying on a small marketing team to consistently execute campaigns and surpass quotas, enable the technology to work smarter for your business. The implementation of an automated marketing system will provide a more efficient allocation of your team’s time and resources. Use the data you gather for marketing automation to do more for your business through predictive analysis. Here’s how:

  1. Leverage your data. Know what’s worth promoting and what should be sacked. Using a predictive analysis program will enable a more productive use of the marketing and IT budgets. Use technology to enhance your move on target leads—don’t just follow up on “Lead A” because they had more clicks thus more ‘interest’ in a particular product, follow up on the right interests. Were the clicks here because they had a trial run product that recently expired? Did they inquire on a product because they own something similar or are having difficulties with another product your business offers? Understanding why the user interacts with your system will ultimately provide successful leads.

  2. Make the most of your leads. Cut your annual revenue loss by making smarter lead actions. In conjunction with leveraging the right data, use automation software to calculate lead scoring through efficient management of the marketing activity touchpoints.

  3. Integrate your sales and marketing teams. Keep the human touch of a good customer support system to pave the way for future upselling opportunities. Making personal telephone calls to keep direct contact with customers provides the most accurate feedback. Personalized marketing is successful marketing, but be sure to ‘personalize’ accurately. Use the information gathered by the sales team to better target and communicate with your leads.

In today’s marketing, a single channel of marketing isn’t enough. Utilizing a marketing automation system is more than email marketing. An effective system integrates sales prospecting, lead generation, and automation to leverage the data being gathered. What’s the best practice for executing a successful, comprehensive marketing campaign? Involve the sales team. The communication gap between customers, sales, and marketing is a huge shortcoming and often a cause for loss in revenue. Combining social media marketing, email marketing, smart landing pages, and promotions we can get a better grasp of the consumer base. These programs are ideal for companies large and small; a limited staff no longer means cutting channels. Marketing automation is a technology that will continue to grow and develop to improve the customer’s experience through targeted, analyzed marketing actions.

Why Lead Nurturing is Essential for B2B Marketing

Why Lead Nurturing is Essential for B2B MarketingB2B buyers are the toughest consumers to secure, because their decisions are based on the needs of an entire business rather than one particular person. It is harder for marketers to accurately profile the lead and determine their specific stage in the buying process. Company purchases could require a series of tests, comparisons, and approvals before a B2B buyer even considers contacting a potential supplier for more in-depth product information. It is harder to pinpoint a B2B buyer’s decision making process unless they willingly offer information about their company’s purchasing process. That is what makes lead nurturing so essential to B2B marketing. Marketers need to continuously provide B2B buyers with helpful content that will maintain their interest until they reach the point where they are ready to contact someone in sales.

Lead Nurturing Benefits B2B Buyers

Lead nurturing is essential in B2B marketing, because it gives B2B buyers the opportunity to research product and services at their leisure. If you send the valuable content to buyers by email, it will also make it more convenient for them. Just be careful not to send irrelevant or frequent mass emails to potential buyers. They’ve given your business access to their inbox, because they want trustworthy answers to their questions. They don’t want it filled with useless spam.

Creating Customized Lead Nurturing

If the potential lead has shown interest in a particular product you carry, any future lead nurturing emails should pertain to that specific product. This can be achieved by first profiling the lead and then grouping leads with similar needs into predefined lead segments. It will be too difficult to cater every email to every single person, but you can customize content to groups of leads that have comparable profiles. The email should also be addressed specifically to each individual lead and contain information that will make their purchasing decision easier. That will help strengthen the relationship with the B2B buyer.

Lead Segmentation before Nurturing

Website visitor tracking and marketing automation software are necessary for developing and analyzing a comprehensive lead profile. This automated process monitors and records a lead’s online activity and then profiles, ranks, and segments each lead based on their behavior. Once you understand what a group of potential leads is interested in, it is easier to create content that caters to their unique needs. If you are searching for more lead nurturing tips, please read our previous article on B2B Marketing Automation Tips.   High-quality lead nurturing is essential for B2B marketing. It gives buyers a chance to research their options in peace before they are swarmed by eager sales professionals. If the lead nurturing campaign is successful, a B2B buyer will already know they are interested in your particular product or service before they ever have to deal with a salesperson. That is why prospects that are successfully nurtured have a significantly higher conversion rate.

Lead Liaison Announces New Breakthrough in Content Management

Allen, TX (PRWEB) January 23, 2014

Lead Liaison takes the lead in innovation once again. The marketing automation company announced today the launch of their new Automatic Publishing feature, which enables users to automatically publish content through the automated marketing platform. The new feature allows access to over 2,000 content developers, so marketers can request content and manage distribution with ease.

Recent studies show that companies using a marketing automation platform have a 53% higher conversion rate than non-users (Aberdeen Group). Also, the use of marketing automation technology is expected to grow 50% by 2015 (SiriusDecisions). That’s why Lead Liaison goes a step further, and integrates content creation with marketing automation, to reduce the marketer’s stress of having to create content in-house.

“The growth of automated marketing platforms is inevitable,” said Alva Cardona, VP of Corporate Communications for Lead Liaison. “And, because we know that the use of marketing automation platforms will increase, we decided to add content creation and automatic publishing features, which provides the marketer with more resources to nurture leads,” added.

Research shows that, when leads are nurtured, a 20% increase in sales is reported, compared to non-nurtured leads (DemandGen Report). With this new feature, users can create more than ten types of marketing content to nurture leads, such as tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, press releases, articles, video scripts, and more, which can be requested to a team of writers, who work to satisfy your specific content needs. Also, feedback (and edits) can be provided as the content is being developed.

When requesting content through Lead Liaison’s automated marketing platform, users can designate specific topics, industries, keywords, and references. In addition, users can track progress of content requests using multiple filters as well. After content is ready, it can be published automatically using the Lead Liaison Social Post feature, pushed to the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the web, such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal or it can be saved to your company’s cloud drive, such as Google Drive or DropBox.

It is a fact that 71% of marketers already use content marketing for lead generation, and it is expected that the marketing automation market will grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015 (International Data Corporation). That’s why ¼ of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using automared marketing platforms. Marketers will discover Lead Liaison’s Content Creation and Automatic Publishing feature will immensely help their content (and marketing) strategies.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s innovative automatic publishing feature, request a 10-minute demo of this content creation solution.

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert and close leads. The company markets to businesses of all sizes and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly Revenue Generation Software® platform. Our innovative and robust software combines lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing, content creation, social media engagement and ROI reporting into a single platform.

For more information:
Alva Cardona
VP, Corporate Communications
alvacar(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)
KEYWORD: Lead Liaison

How To Nurture Leads With Your Mobile Phone

Nurture Leads With Your Mobile PhoneWhen it comes to nurturing leads, it means that you have a system through which you are able to communicate with potential clients constantly until they become fully fledged clients. This is done by giving out helpful information and making sure that your brand sticks in the minds of your potential clients.

So you have taken advantage of the internet and you have been working hard to nurture leads through various techniques by using your computer. But, how do you do it with your mobile phone? The answer to that is through content marketing. Content marketing has proven to be the best way to nurture your leads as well as increase traffic and sales. The best part it is, you can do it very easily with your mobile phone, especially if you are on the move.

Email Your Clients

Email is known to be the number one tool accessed by internet users. So if you have not incorporated email marketing in your business yet, you are lagging behind. Email permits you to stay connected with your prospects especially since they can access their email accounts instantly via their mobile phones. Therefore, while you are sharing content on your blogs and social media sites, you can also keep your potential clients updated through email. To do so, make sure all the emails you send out add some value to the receiver by providing useful information. Remember to also separate your target consumers who are still in the first stages of buying from those who are currently sales-ready.

Social Media

Remember that consumers have moved from using mailboxes and computers to using smartphones and tablets to stay connected. You should do the same. Through your mobile phone you can access practically all the popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can create campaigns to nurture your leads in such a way that they benefit both you and the consumer. Maintain a close connection to your potential clients on social media. You can do this by sharing content and answering questions. This way when it is time to purchase your service or product, your leads will automatically come to you.

Blog, Blog, Blog!

It is common sense that no prospect will come across your website and settle for your brand immediately. Create a blog and use it to reach out to the prospects that have not made up their minds yet. Do this by finding a specific niche, picking up your mobile phone and writing about it. However, feel free to divert a little bit from your service or product to make the blog more interesting, for instance giving solutions to certain problems your prospects may be experiencing.

Nurturing your leads requires that you keep close track all the time and treat each of your leads preciously. Through content marketing you will manage to create a positive perception of your business as one that is helpful and reliable in its industry. In addition to that, your prospects will gain trust in you.

The Importance of A/B Marketing Strategies on the Web

A/B Marketing StrategiesDid you know that a website’s design matters? The way your website was designed has an impact on your client’s reaction! Websites are normally designed with a certain aim, which is a call to action. The achievement of this call to action goal highly depends on the user’s response to the website content. With regard to this, many companies are incorporating the A/B marketing strategies into their testing.

In today’s digital world, A/B marketing strategies have proven to be a vital tool that businesses should possess, so as to enable them establish the most suitable features that work best for their websites. This tool is responsible for providing you with information regarding how users react to the content on your website. The reactions in question refer to the layout, use of words and pictures, the colour scheme, navigation among other elements. These factors are tested by comparing at least two different designs of a website’s landing page (hence the term A and B). When the comparisons are made, the version with the highest number of sales is considered to be the best.

So why is A/B testing important for your business?

Yes, it is a good thing to have this tool. However, it is more of a vital aspect that should be part of your marketing strategy. The good thing about A/B testing is that you will be in a position to constantly know which one of your website designs performs best. Here are some reasons why you should use A/B testing:

  • Help in market research: With A/B testing you will not waste any time or money on focus group discussions to find out what kind of websites consumers like best. As you well know, the outlook of your website is highly determined by customers depending on their preferences. This is a marketing tool that will help you in establishing that.
  • Problems are solved easily: If you have a specific feature on your website that is getting a negative response from users, A/B testing can assist you in determining why that particular feature is failing to work. Sometimes it could be as a result of the wrong choice of words, colours or even the certain placement of a button.
  • You are able to determine your objective: The major objective of any website is to have a high performance rate especially when it comes to call to action. Whatever you aim at achieving with your website, A/B testing will provide you with the knowledge to establish priorities make necessary adjustments and constantly carry out experiments on various designs so as to attract more traffic to your website.

There are some marketing professionals out there who carry around the assumption that A/B testing is a complex tool to use along with their marketing strategies. What they don’t know is that the best thing about this tool is that it is very cost-effective and, most of all, it helps you understand detailed facts regarding human psychology and how different designs have an impact on users.

How to Get the Most from Your Leads

How To Get The Most From Your LeadsEvery lead has different intentions, needs, and potential for conversion. Businesses that focus all of their energy on lead generation won’t generate the revenue they expect, because not all leads are created equally. Some leads may be ready to make a purchase while others will require additional information before they can make an informed decision. Businesses must also focus their energy on getting to know their leads and understand their needs to increase the chances of conversion.

Here are a few helpful tips on how you can get the most from your leads:

1.     Monitor Leads

You can get the most from your leads by understanding their behavior. Marketing automation software utilizes website visitor tracking technology to follow leads as they surf online. This will show marketers what pages they have viewed and which papers they have download.

2.     Profile Leads

The next step in making the most from your leads is creating comprehensive lead profile. Marketing automation software creates a detailed lead profile using the information leads share in online registries combined with behavioral details extracted from website visitor tracking.

3.     Rank Leads

Once leads are profiled, they should be ranked based on their likelihood for conversion. Each lead is compared with the profile of an existing consumer to determine exactly what they are looking for from your business and how far along they are in their buying process. Leads that show a high potential will be immediately passed on to sales.

4.     Segment Leads

If your lead generation strategies are effective, there will be too many leads to address individually. Segmenting leads into groups will make it easier to get the most from your leads, since you can customize lead nurturing content based on groups of leads with similar needs.

5.     Nurture Leads

The most important way to get more from your leads is lead nurturing. This is a business’ opportunity to create a meaningful connection with a leading while demonstrating their expertise. All lead nurturing content should be original, informative, interesting, and relevant.

6.     Qualify Leads

Marketing should be able to determine whether a lead is sincerely interested once that lead has been tracked, profiled, ranked, segmented, and nurtured. Marketing automation software will evaluate each lead’s potential and then notify sales the moment a lead shows signs of conversion.

To get the most from your leads, you must first understand exactly what they lead is searching for online and where they are in their buying process. By first monitoring, profiling, ranking, and segmenting your leads, you can develop customized lead nurturing content that will improve the chance of conversion. If you would like to learn more about getting the most from your leads, please read six essential elements in every successful lead nurturing email.

Analyzing Forbes’ 12 Step Process for Lead Nurturing

Forbes Process for Lead NurturingIn an effort to stay on top of trends, I am constantly researching new techniques to improve various aspects of the marketing automation process. During my research, I came across a two year old article that covered many of the same lead nurturing techniques that are utilize at Lead Liaison. Forbes article, the twelve step program for lead nurturing, may have been written in March of 2012, but the lead nurturing advice still holds true today. Marketing automation software has streamlined the process for lead nurturing, but the act of convincing leads to become consumers is still the same.

Lead Generation

The first step in the Forbes’ article on lead nurturing is acquiring quality leads. This seems pretty obvious, but every lead nurturing campaign needs an interested audience to be successful. Marketing automation addresses this crucial step using website visitor tracking.

First Contact

The next step in their lead nurturing program is having an automated or manual instant response system. This should be a friendly, non-obtrusive email advising leads that your sales and marketing team are available if they have any questions and concerns. Forbes’ article focuses more on sending an initial alert to the new contact that you will be in touch with them at a specific time in the future, whereas Lead Liaison’s marketing automation strategy focuses more on notifying the lead that help is available whenever they need it.

Follow Up

The next part of Forbes’ article covers contacting the prospect as promised. Marketing automation uses customized lead nurturing content to stay in touch with prospective leads. It also uses lead nurturing email to cover the fourth step covered in Forbes’ article; offer immediate value. Lead nurturing emails should give the reader valuable free advice to brand a business as an expert in their field.

Listen to Leads

Forbes’ fifth step examines the importance of understanding what each particular lead wants and needs. This would fall under marketing automation’s lead tracking and profiling process. Forbes’ follows this step with providing the lead with a chat feature for faster communication, which is now an essential part of most digital marketing strategy.

Repeat as Needed

The steps the article from Forbes’ covers next involve repeating the nurturing process until a lead is ready for conversion. It discusses the importance of staying in touch, offering more valuable information, and tracking all responses and activity. This strategy can be streamlined using automated website visitor tracking software and customized lead nurturing email campaigns.

Close the Sale

If everything goes according to plan, the lead will eventually be ready to make a commitment. The tenth step in the article is asking for their business, followed by asking for a referral. If you are utilizing marketing automation, your sales team will be automatically notified when a lead is showing signs of conversion, so this can be done immediately.

Assess Results

The final step the article covers is reviewing the results and learning from your mistakes. Every lead nurturing programs needs a system for analyzing the results, so you can make adjustments to improve the lead nurturing campaign’s ROI.

The article Forbes’ published nearly two years ago covers all of the important elements in a successful lead nurturing program. When all of these steps are executed effectively, lead nurturing can produce an endless stream of qualified leads.

The Benefits of IP Address Tracking

The Benefits of IP Address TrackingIP address tracking is a handy thing to have on your website. Once you have a user’s IP, you can begin the process of tying the visit to more personal information about the user. Knowing how individual users behave on your website can influence your advertising campaigns from top to bottom in a way that ultimately benefits your bottom line.

IP Address Tracking and Analytics Software

Here’s the rub – much of the analytics software people are using these days doesn’t rack IPs. In fact, dashboards like Google Analytics actually forbid IP tracking in their terms of service. They seem to want you to have as little information about your customers as possible.

Sure, privacy is important, but the amount of information you collect from an IP address is limited. For instance, you can’t use an IP to find out exactly where a user’s personal/home address might be.  However, sometimes an ISP links back to a user’s place of work. Knowing how much a person from another company is viewing your website, and how long they spend there, can give you intelligence information you can apply to your sales campaigns.

Using IP Information In Your Advertising

It’s more than likely that based on your call volume and call details, you can match up IP visitors with specific people who have filled out your forms or inquired about your services.  If a user takes a specific action on your site at the same time you’re logging an IP, you can match users with IPs. You can then track that IP throughout visits to get an idea of how a user is exploring specific pages on your site as well as how much time they’re spending.

If you have multiple visitors on your site at any given time, you might need to watch for further visits or take a look at the geographic source of IPs to get your information. It’s a good idea to work with your marketing and tech departments to ensure both are using this information to your best advantage.

Lead Liaison is proud to offer real-time IP and visitor tracking solutions for your business. With our streamer feature, you can watch visitors real-time as they use your site and determine how to have your sales people talking to them in a way that will make a sale. We’d love to talk to you about Streamer and our other tracking features – let us show you how IP tracking can benefit your business today!

Should I Be Video Marketing for My Business?

Should I be Video Marketing for My Business?Video marketing is a great way to create new and interactive content for your site, leverage your existing audience with a new medium, create new click-through opportunities in a multimedia context and to better rank for SEO. Many small businesses swear off video marketing because they assume there will be extravagant cost to shooting and editing video. With modern tools, you can take advantage of great ways to create your own video marketing content without the hassle or spend.

Creating Great Content

Creating videos is easy with some software your PC or Mac comes with. For the Mac, check out iMovie and play around with it. For the PC, Windows Movie Maker is a great alternative. You can add music or voice to a slideshow or pictures, or use a smartphone or webcam to video yourself introducing folks to your company.

Your video marketing efforts should follow certain guidelines. You don’t just want to put random videos of cute puppies out there – you’ll want to generate and share content that engages your users and shows them how your product offers value.  Failure to do so could get a quick bounce from your video or even bad PR for your company over time.

Be prepared to show your customers how you can provide value in your videos. Given them resources that don’t just sell your company, but that provide interesting, useful data they can use in their own business decisions. Doing so over time will make you a ‘thought leader’ – a company that creates content your clients rely on to add value to their own services.

Best Practices for Video Marketing

It’s not always easy to host videos on your own site. You’ll need to know how to convert them to a quick-load format. You’ll have to make sure you have the bandwidth in case a lot of people watch them. Rather than dealing with the hassle of hosting a video on your own site, try Youtube.

There are many advantages to Youtube above and beyond having a place to host your videos. Google owns Youtube, so ensuring that your video titles, tags and descriptions contain relevant keywords and your business name could help your videos rank quickly, as well as create a valuable backlink to your website. Sites like Youtube take the hassle out of video hosting while helping you to get the backlink and the shareable quality video marketing requires.

Lead Liaison is proud to announce a new in-dashboard video marketing distribution service! Talk to us today to find out how we will make video marketing a breeze for your company.