Lead Liaison

The Value of Multi-Channel Marketing

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Multi-Channel Marketing is the Way to GoIn today’s marketplace, it’s essential to reach as many customers and prospects as possible. The best way to communicate with your target audience is with multi-channel marketing. Using just one marketing method – such as email – is no longer enough to remain competitive. The various marketing channels all offer unique advantages for promoting your company. By creating an integrated marketing plan, you ensure your company’s survival and profitability. Forrester Research reports that 86% of marketers understand that multi-channel marketing is essential for long-term growth. It’s important to understand the value of multi-channel marketing.

Email Campaigns

Marketing with email is still a viable and inexpensive option. With email you can send out useful information to targeted customers on your lists. You can also easily split test your emails to find the one that offers the highest return on investment. Express Pigeon reports that email marketing brings in a 4,300 percent ROI.

Print Media

Although many companies market online, it’s still a good idea to promote your business offline as well. Sending out print brochures, postcards, flyers, and other printed materials are a good way to generate new leads and bring potential customers to your website.

Promotional Items

Branding is another important method for selling your products or services. With a company name and logo on promotional items such as pens, calendars, note pads, and magnets, you can spread the word about your business by giving something useful away for free.

Direct Mail

For many, sending out direct mail pieces to a targeted audience is still an effective method of lead generation. Although it is more expensive than other methods, your letter is more likely to be opened and read, especially with fewer companies utilizing direct mail today.

Text Messaging

Mobile marketing is on the rise with around 98% of text messages read within a few minutes, reports EZTexting.com. By using text messages, you can communicate and interact with potential customers while increasing brand awareness. It’s no longer enough just to use email. To compete in the business world today, a company has to utilize a host of marketing strategies. The strategies should all work together, and compliment each other, to send out a unified message. By creating an integrated marketing approach via multiple channels, you boost your company’s success in a global marketplace.

Lead Liaison

How to Design a Successful Lead Distribution Process

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How to Design a Successful Lead Distribution ProcessDon’t let another lead slip through the cracks because of poor lead distribution practices. Minimize human error through an automated distribution system while also implementing an analytical way to effectively distribute your hard-earned leads. There are several methods of lead distribution to choose from; it is critical that you have done due diligence in determining the best process for distributing your leads. Take the following considerations into account when determining how to design a successful lead distribution process for your team that will maximize conversion.

Iterative Process

First and most importantly, optimize the distribution process through iterative evaluation—test, evaluate, optimize, and retest. Each lead is different and each sales rep unique, so it is expected that results will vary each time. Create a systematically evolving process that encompasses the most effective combination of the various distribution methods (round robin, push/pull, top performers, etc), depending on which stage of the sale you’re in. No one method will be the most effective; rather it’s a combination of them that will produce the successful lead distribution process.

Utilize Your Skill Sets

With your marketing automation practices, you are already collecting a plethora of data on each lead. Put it to use. Use the “specialization method” of lead distribution to assign leads to reps based on the lead’s interest and buying readiness (all of which can be found through visitor tracking practices). Evaluate the lead’s profile and distribute to a specific channel that will enable your rep to be the most prepared and able to accommodate the lead.

Evaluating each lead before distribution can be a timely process and may or may not be worth the marketing team’s time; reserve this method for leads that have greater buyer readiness (based on their previous behavior). Misdirecting a lead can have a detrimental consequence, for example, sending a lead to the incorrect sales rep and wasting the lead’s time as they are redirected to the correct sales rep with the corresponding expertise.

Effective Scaling

In order to design a successful lead distribution process, you must be able scale the lead management process effectively. For high volume lead processing, round robin is not the best route to take. Take time to understand the patterns, and from those results implement a shared push/pull method that enables sales reps to better manage their workloads (which translates to higher quality lead nurturing) while also holding them accountable for assigned tasks.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. There are many dynamic factors to consider when you are trying to design a successful lead distribution process, and because of this, the best distribution process is a constantly evolving one. Keep in mind the skill sets of your sales reps, the specifics of each product being sold, and the expectations of the leads. Utilize marketing automation practices to increase ROI and decrease lead loss. To learn more about how Lead Liaisons can make your lead distribution process more efficient, check out their solutions.

Lead Liaison

Create Content That Nurtures Your Leads

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Create Content That Nurtures Your LeadsUse your inbound marketing strategies beyond lead generation—learn how to create content that nurtures your leads too. Once leads have been generated and placed into the appropriate sales funnel, it’s crucial to qualify leads accordingly and determine as quickly as possible if a lead is not interested in you.

There are several things to keep in mind when determining best practices for nurturing qualified leads. Segmenting your streams of prospects into nurture tracks that meet their needs, ensuring a personal touch on all communications, maintaining a two-way communication channel, and integrating sales teams with marketing teams are all productive steps to nurture leads. Another way to help nurture your leads closer to the buying stage is to provide them with interesting and relevant content. Here are a few ways to integrate this into your lead nurturing system already in place:

Educate your leads

Help them to make a smart buying choice by thoroughly letting them know their options. Provide original market research stats (or find a reliable source) that show them how others in the industry make buying decisions. Be sure not to skew it too much in favor of your brand, though, to assure them it is legitimate data.

Use analytics from marketing automation

Determine how your leads prefer to receive information—via email, blog content, white papers, etc. Your marketing automation software allows you to accurately monitor the activity on your site, record when leads are available to communicate with you, and enable you to nurture targeted segments of leads. With all of this data, you are informed to create content that nurtures your leads and provides what they’re already looking for.

Repurpose content

Get the most out of each piece of content you publish. Create an informative white paper and split it up into sections to publish as individual blog posts. Then create a slide deck out of these different sections, and finally voice over the slide deck to create a video. This provides four separate types of content you can use to nurture your leads. You might find that leads that have been qualified into a particular stream prefer video over white paper, so this makes a more personalized attempt to reach out to them.

In order to create content that nurtures your leads in the most effective way, you need to utilize your marketing automation process to get the best understanding of what it is that your leads want to know. This will give you the best odds in turning leads into customers through nurturing your leads with content marketing. When considering your lead nurturing campaigns, be sure that no lead goes unnoticed and that you contact them when you say you will. Here are five additional tips to make sure you don’t lose your leads before have the opportunity to nurture them.

Lead Liaison

3 Ways Marketing Automation Helps Qualify Sales Leads

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3 Ways Marketing Automation Helps Qualify Sales LeadsDon’t waste your sales reps’ valuable time and energy chasing leads that are dead ends or aren’t your ideal buyers. But how do you weed out unfit leads from your database? It’s tedious work, even with the ability to do extensive research online. Let software relieve some of these headaches by using marketing automation to help qualify sales leads and determine which leads are worth the effort. We’re excited to share 3 ways marketing automation helps qualify sales leads.

Understand your ideal buyers

Train sales reps to qualify leads by considering long-term compatibility and potential relationships that can be built. By considering the profitability down the road, you have the opportunity to build and maintain a working relationship with these leads, communicate regularly through personalized outbound efforts, build trust, and ultimately end up with an ideal buyer. Merging creative efforts between your sales and marketing teams to determine the most effective traits you expect of the ideal buyers will greatly benefit your company. They come in handy not only for the sales team in their lead qualification process, but also for the marketing team in focusing their targeted efforts.

Maintain your database

In order to have a well-oiled CRM, it’s important to utilize lead management practices that will make life easier for sales reps and help them close more leads. Once you’ve set behavioral characteristics for your ideal buyers, Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software will help qualify sales leads and update that information for you. No need to worry about manually entering the details.

Ask the right questions

There’s no faster way to lose a lead or misqualify a lead than to have the sales rep asking indirect or irrelevant questions. Because you should be able to qualify your sales lead into one category or the other after the first call, it’s critical to gather the right information from them as efficiently as possible. During the collaboration meeting between the sales and marketing teams (as mentioned above), a helpful exercise is to brainstorm targeted questions for sales reps to ask prospects in that first phone conversation. We all know how sales calls can go—it’s easy to sound over-salesy if you exclaim the wonders of your company at the very start of the call. Instead, use that time to ask questions, determine if they may fit into the ideal buyer bucket, and most importantly, create a relationship and an emotional connection. Determine how they make decisions and what they’re looking for when they select a service provider.

Marketing automation software helps qualify sales leads through properly managing all of your lead information and ensuring accurate CRM upkeep so that sales reps have current data available to them as they need it. To learn more about how marketing automation software can help your business, check out Lead Liaison’s solutions.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation: You Still Need a Sales Strategy

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Marketing Automation: You Still Need a Sales StrategyAnyone running a business comes to find out they need some type of sales strategy. While marketing automation executes a lead to sales flow seamlessly for many businesses, others find that the one-size-fits-all solution they were looking for simply isn’t present when employing their marketing automation.

As a small business, how can you make sure using marketing automation software benefits your operation at a higher level? The key is found in your strategy. Think of it this way – many business owners employ a CRM and find it absolutely necessary to the growth and success of their companies. Organizing the information and having an agreed-upon method for continuous and optimal use of the CRM isn’t something that necessarily happens overnight – it takes a deep understanding of the software and a willingness amongst team members to use an agreed-upon operations method.  Without these things, onboarding a CRM would be pointless.

Sales Strategy Development for the Small Business

Many small business owners develop their companies themselves and get caught in the undertow of change as the company grows. Small business owners can find their staff increasing by a dozen people in a year. Suddenly there are many workers without a clear sales strategy for how information will be collected and employed in marketing campaigns.

This is why growth strategy is crucial before growth even happens. Knowing where to allocate resources, how businesses will collect information and how the information informs marketing and development processes is 100% critical to keeping this organized and manageable. Starting out with tangible business goals based on calendar years or quarters is a great way to figure out what resources are needed and who will perform what task.

Using Marketing Automation for Sales Strategy

Many business owners are finding that sales strategy and marketing automation processes are inseparable. Marketing and directional decisions should be made on concrete data – and the right tools are necessary to ensuring any data collected is on point. Even the most advanced marketing automation systems may return data that’s incomplete or doesn’t work for the business. This is where good training and human monitoring come in – sifting through data in an easy, manageable way is possible. This allows companies the opportunity to work on data that is incomplete or isn’t really helping the business achieve end goals.

In order to sift through that data and make good decisions based on overarching business goals and sales strategy, the right marketing automation company and training for staff have to be in place. Lead Liaison offers training and marketing automation solutions for businesses of all sizes. Connect with us for a consult to determine what would best serve your business!

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How to Integrate Social Media with your Lead Tracking

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Integrate Social Media with your Lead TrackingTo maximize your online presence, it’s important to make sure you’ve got all of your social media channels covered and that you’re regularly posting to each one. Keeping track of posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. can be a full-time job on its own. Save time and employee resources by letting marketing automation help you integrate social media with your lead tracking practices.

By tracking all of your marketing activity, including website traffic, targeted email opens, and clicks via social media campaigns, your marketing team can get a better understanding of which marketing channels are most effective and produce the highest quality leads. When you integrate social media with your lead tracking system that is already in place, you have a greater chance of generating quality leads that are more likely to convert.

With Lead Liaison’s social media solution, you have the ability to keep track of who is clicking which links, how often they’re doing so, and which of those prospects end up converting—all in one place. Using lead tracking software alongside social media campaigns allows you to track and measure real-time visitor activity and clearly see where site traffic is coming from to determine which of your marketing efforts are most successful in relation to your customer base.

Here are some capabilities to take advantage of when you integrate your social media with your lead tracking:

  • Scheduling: Create a predefined schedule for your social media posts. Spend a few hours Monday morning (or whenever you prefer) creating all the posts you’ll need for the week, and set up a time and day to send each one out. You can even create “canned messages,” which are multi-use messages that you don’t have to worry about retyping each time.
  • Nurturing: If you integrate social media with your lead tracking, you have the ability to better understand your prospects’ needs. This empowers you to send out more personalized and direct messages that your prospects are more likely to respond to. Tracking leads in this way also helps your team to manage who needs to be nurtured and who is ready to be given to sales and move on to the next level.
  • Enrich prospects’ profiles: Joining lead tracking practices with your social media campaigns also helps manage and update the prospects that are already in your pipeline, lending to a better understanding of their online activity, and can ultimately suggest their buying readiness. Keep track of shares and clicks and add that information to their profile in your system.

Most importantly, having that connection between tracking your leads efficiently and managing your social media marketing allows you to communicate with prospects more directly and effectively, leading to a higher conversion rate. Take advantage of your marketing automation system and integrate social media with your lead tracking.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Upstart Lead Liaison to Partner with Direct Mail Manager

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New Partnership Yields More Powerful Direct Mail Marketing Options as Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Marketing becomes More Important

Allen, TX – Lead Liaison to partner with Direct Mail Manager. Lead Liaison, a privately held provider of marketing automation solutions, is pleased to announce its latest partnership with Direct Mail Manager, a direct mail marketing and handling company. Lead Liaison provides small to mid-sized businesses with marketing automation capabilities with easy-to-use software, while Direct Mail Marketing creates intelligent promotional mail solutions for businesses.

Direct Mail Manager adds new functionality to Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® that allows customers to take their marketing efforts offline. With this enhancement, customers can use Lead Liaison to send direct mail pieces to targeted audiences in addition to email and text messages. Marketers can pinpoint a subset of their database based on demographics, behavioral and social characteristics for highly personalized and relevant multi-channel marketing.

This flexibility allows Lead Liaison to join industry giants as a true multi-channel marketing solution for B2C and B2B companies of all sizes and industries.

Regarding the recent partnership, Direct Mail Marketing CTO, Adam White  said, “By partnering with Lead Liaison, we enable businesses to automate and capture more customers with less work. Email has traditionally been the tool of choice for marketing automation. With the extremely targeted direct mail tools we offer being added to the marketing mix, we see customers getting ROI results that exceed email and traditional direct mail programs. In a world of electronic marketing, the tactile experience between company and customer with a postcard is difficult to ignore.”

VP of Customer Success, Alan Page, added, “We’re using this service ourselves – we created a QR code that goes out on postcards to qualified prospects that receive one of our personal demonstrations. The QR code takes the prospect back to one of our landing pages where we’re able to track online activity and alert sales when the prospect takes action. We’re combining direct mail with email and text messaging to showcase our multi-channel capability and give prospective clients a vision for what they can achieve. Our return on follow-ups from these postcards has been stellar thus far. We look forward to helping other companies achieve similar results and are already rolling this out with a home maintenance company. We’re in discussions with a handful of B2B companies that provide high-value solutions and recognize the importance of direct mail as another entry point to build stronger ties with customers and prospects.”

Lead Liaison’s direct mail services are currently in place and ready for subscribing customers to deploy. For more information, please visit the Direct Mail marketing section or see this blog post on direct mail with marketing automation. For an explainer video on an easy-to-use marketing automation platform check out the homepage.

About Postcard Services:

Since 2003 Postcard Services, a direct mailer and software development company, has been dedicated to creating tools that empower businesses of all sizes to create quality direct mail programs, without the expense of hiring multiple agencies.  The company’s retail division serves over 72,000 customers nationwide via its websites:  www.postcardservices.com, www.directmailmanager.com, and www.realtypostcard.com.  The corporate division provides an array of automated private label and other solutions for franchises, contact/call centers, and businesses with repeat direct mail needs.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automation.

Press inquiries: Amber Turrill, VP of Corporate Communications

Email: corporate@leadliaison.com

Phone: 888.895.3237

Lead Liaison

Discovering Hidden Agendas with Marketing Automation

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Discovering Hidden Agendas with Marketing AutomationPeople buy based on specific personal agendas and interests.  In order to sell to such people, you need to know what their personal interests are, what drives them…. and ultimately speak to their personal needs. Kevin Allen, Founder of Planet Jockey, said he was “one of the best pitch guys in the industry” because he could “sense what was in the heart of my [his] buyer”, as discussed in this video. In Kevin’s book, The Hidden Agenda: A Proven Way to Win Business and Create a Following, he talks about understanding the buyer and their needs to create a connection that assures a mutual win. The good news is that your company can discover hidden agendas with marketing automation.

Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® provides you unique insight into your customer’s hidden agenda at every stage of the process.   We help you to identify a prospect and their personal demonstrated interests in your product (even factors that they will not tell you about).  For example, Lead Liaison gives our clients insights into which topics on your website or video that a prospect showed interest in.  We tell you how deep their interest was (for example, how much of your video they watched), we will even let you know what time of day they tend to care about you the most!

Let’s take the concept of discovering hidden agendas with marketing automation a bit further. We then expand this search to a very granular personal level by spidering 110 social media sites to learn about that person’s interests and motivations.  We identify keywords that are important to them, and give you access to their public social media profiles (linkedin, facebook, etc).    Our platform is the technological arm of “The Hidden Agenda” concept.

Lead Liaison

Making Workflow Automation Simpler and More Manageable

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Workflow AutomationOne of the most challenging tasks business owners face is workflow automation. Without someone sitting in the middle of everything and pulling all the necessary levers to get things done, many businesses struggle with engaging in a variety of tasks – including marketing automation and lead flow.

Workflow automation doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t require hiring a full time project manager for your business. The right marketing automation system can give you a workflow out of the box without a lot of hassle or time training.

Determining Your Workflow

The key to using software to get your workflow automated is to establish dependencies. This means that once an action happens on the business side, tasks, follow up and lead flow are created automatically.

Before marketing automation, business owners and project managers had to determine and set up these lead flow channels themselves. Workflow changes all that. The right marketing automation system allows your company to create these dependencies, schedule them for you and keep everything in one place so you know what isn’t getting done and can delegate accordingly.

For instance, say your dashboard registers a new lead. This lead comes in the form of an opt-in, containing an address and business information. You can set up a dependency on your backend to add this new lead to a certain geo-targeted or relevant content list. You can set tasks in your project management system for your sales team to call this lead within a few days after you get it.

The Power of Workflow Automation

You can also collect emails and send correspondence each time a new user visits your site. That’s something that a human project manager simply can’t do for you – no one should be tasked with watching IP addresses and a ticker all day to try to get leads deeper into your funnel. That’s why automation is so important – it takes the hassle out of marketing and gives you the option to create dependencies that allow business management tasks ease of flow.

Lead Liaison’s dependencies and workflow automation are set up within a program called Sparks. Lead Liaison’s automated software will monitor your back end and lead flow, and then create a series of events in the system once certain triggers happen. From a filled out lead form to a visitor coming to your site, different Sparks can be set up to create events in the backend of your business you can use to make your daily operations more productive. We’d love to show you how Sparks works – connect with us today for a consult!

Lead Liaison

How to Use Marketing Automation to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages

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Use Marketing Automation to Drive Traffic to Your Landing PagesAre your landing pages optimized to drive sales? Landing page, lead capture page, and lander are all words used to describe the same thing: the gateway to your site. Essentially, your visitors will only take about five seconds to understand the call to action, so the point on your landing page needs to be loud and clear. The landing page is essential to lead generation and lead tracking. It gives you the opportunity to ask your leads to take the next step, whether that’s to complete a form or download a white paper. Use marketing automation to drive traffic to your landing pages and help distribute the analytics of your site directly to your sales team and saves time doing so.

Landing Page Testing 101

Maximize your visitor’s activity and gain more conversions on your landing pages through A/B testing. While it can be tedious work, you’ll get the best results if you set specific goals that are easily measurable. When A/B testing, it’s important to keep in mind you’re looking for a dramatically better performance from either Landing Page A or Landing Page B. Be sure to keep your URLs descriptive and provide unique meta-descriptions for each landing page. The goal is to constantly analyze and continuously improve landing page conversions. Here are some things to vary in a split test:

  • Vocabulary
  • CTAs/Conversion options
  • Layout/button placement
  • Images

Still new to A/B testing? KISSmetrics has a great guide to help you get started.

Tracking Your Landing Page Traffic

Inbound marketing is a great tool, but knowing how to use it to your best advantage without letting it soak up valuable employee time can get tricky. Use marketing automation to not only drive traffic to your landing page but also track it efficiently. Have clear and concise goals that you can track in terms of managing content creation and keeping tabs on how each category is performing. Are your blogs converting visitors into leads, or do most conversions come from keyword searches to your site? Here are a few things to watch:

  • Bounce rate: how long are visitors hanging out on your various pages?
  • Users’ activity: what are the strongest CTAs, which buttons rarely get clicked?
  • Inquiries from users/usability: are there any users confused about the layout/CTAs that have submitted an inquiry?

Marketing Automation that Helps Drive Traffic to Your Landing Page

Your landing page is the first impression visitors have, so it’s important to make it count. Automate your content creation process, send comprehensive analytics directly to your sales team, and implement unique landing pages that complement social media posts. Use marketing automation to analyze and determine landing page usability and effectiveness. Find out more about how Lead Liaison can help you manage your site visitors and track them in real time here.