August 2014 – Page 2 of 2

Grow Your Business through Customer Responsive Marketing Automation

August 14, 2014/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Building a relationship with prospective customers should not be seen as a one-way street, with your brand constantly reaching out—calling, mailing, posting—and hearing nothing in return. Rather, this process is more successfully a bi-directional path with many winding trails. Encouraging customer responsive marketing automation will pave this process of nurturing your leads to their state of buying readiness. Providing the means and the channel(s) of communication between your brand and your prospects can open up an enlightening conversation.

Everyone likes a personalized message (except when it’s a little too personalized). I couldn’t delete emails starting “Greetings #1 Customer” any faster. It’s no surprise that personalized marketing encourages customers to respond and interact at a higher rate. Personalization of each message based on their previous interactions with your brand (read: lead scoring) helps to determine their stage of the buying cycle, and thus the types of messages you should be sending.

Seamless Interaction

The end goal of carefully personalizing each message broadcasted is to encourage seamless interaction between sales and prospects across multiple channels. There are a multitude of tools that make customer responsive marketing automation a process easily integrated with your current system. Mobile applications are increasingly a crucial part of engaging customers and text messaging is burgeoning into an acceptable means for B2B communication.

Tailor your customer experience and encourage their response by scheduling social media posts (make it easier on yourself) that survey or poll your followers. This somewhat organic way of discovering data can then be used to create relevant content. Ask about the customers’ needs, determine an appropriate means to “score” your posts (evaluate the number of “likes” or “retweets,” for example) to gauge your audience’s interest level in various topics. Don’t forget to keep in consideration the peak times for posting to maximize exposure and response.

Realize Customer Needs

Through customer responsive marketing automation, your business is enabled to more fully realize your customer needs through their interaction with your brand. Analyze their past behaviors (CTRs, landing pages, etc.) to predict how they might respond to future messaging campaigns. Incorporating customer service into the customer responsive marketing automation process becomes second nature through technology. Catering to the customers’ needs at a time when they’re ready (timing is everything) can be the make it or break it of the deal. It’s important to have the marketing and sales teams in communication with each other to coordinate respective campaigns and actions to maximize touchpoints, get to know the prospect, and go in for the win. Utilizing strategic techniques such as the “sense and respond” in correlation with other technology advances will provide a better grasp of what prospects and customers alike want and expect from your brand.

Marketing Automation: How Does the CEO Fit In?

August 13, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

When is it best for a company’s CEO to get involved with the marketing team’s overall efforts – this is the question marketing automation answers for many organizations. The idea that the CEO of any-sized company turns his or her back to the marketing team’s efforts – taking a “set it and forget it” approach to advertising – is one that comes to life for many agencies and gets in the way of upgrading legitimate marketing efforts.

Knowing this, how can any organization’s CEO make sure that the company marketing team is on board with making changes that benefit the organization from the ground up?

Understanding Marketing Automation

Many companies avoid choosing marketing automation services due to the work it would create on their end. Let’s face it – many companies don’t make it a priority to connect sales and marketing departments the way they should. This results in a disjointed effort between sales and analysts, creating unhappy customers and getting in the way of productivity.

Marketing automation is a great way to not only establish and track legitimate leads for any organization, but to develop an internal process that unites sales, marketing and execution departments. Because the process of getting a lead all the way to working for a customer require follow-up, tracking and cooperation on the back end, a work system can be set in place that solidifies the efforts of these departments like never before. The result is a workflow that’s not just fully automated, but addresses the unique needs of all areas of the business.

Getting the Right Training

The training involved with implementing marketing automation is not just for employees or individual department heads – the top-level of the organization – particularly the CEO or business decision maker – should have some idea of how marketing automation works and how it may be implemented within the organization as a whole.

The best way to ensure these strategies are in place and working for a business is to have the CEO go through the appropriate training, delegate responsibility and understand how everything works. This can only be accomplished with a marketing automation team that cares about its business and customers. A solid marketing automation system needs to be in place, but a team willing to train employees (and CEOs) and to stick around for follow-up is integral to the process working for everyone involved.

The Lead Liaison team doesn’t drop off service after marketing automation – we stick around to make sure all companies’ needs are met from the top down. Talk to us about a consult today!

3 Steps to Drive Lead Qualification through Marketing Automation

August 5, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Qualification, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

It’s no surprise that marketing automation opens opportunities for managing your leads like never before; but how else can you use the system to benefit your business? A case study by Marketing Sherpa found that utilizing marketing automation can drive more 75% more leads. Even though you’ve got this huge flood of leads, we know they don’t qualify and convert themselves. What could be the risks involved with passing all of the new leads on to sales? How hazardous is it to prematurely qualify leads? Manage the influx of leads and drive lead qualification through marketing automation.

What qualities do “qualified leads” embody? Although this is a crucial question, it will inevitably be different for each organization that attempts to define it. It is imperative that the sales and marketing agree on some of the “static” characteristics of the ideal lead that is nearing their buying decision. Some of the static definitions of each lead will derive from pieces of their profile that are unlikely to change in the next few quarters, such as their job title, the size of their company, their geographic location, etc. Each of these items will factor into their score, and ultimately, how they’re qualified and whether or not they get pushed to sales. Here are three things that will help drive lead qualification through marketing automation:

Monitor Lead Engagement

In order to properly and completely profile each lead and potential lead, it’s necessary to have a good handle on the amount of contact they’ve had with your brand. There’s nothing worse than to scare away a prospect by pushing them to sales too early. With the right tools, marketing automation can make tracking visitor activity a breeze, with gadgets like desktop clients. Monitor your landing page traffic in real time, see which links/images are getting the most hits, and discover who’s spending the greatest amount of time on your site. With the various tools that marketing automation affords your business, it becomes less of a chore to discover and evaluate the potential buyers’ interest levels.

Prioritize and Push (only) the Hottest Leads to Sales

Shorten the sales cycle by prioritizing the prospects who have shown their readiness to make buying decisions. Understand, gauge, and encourage their readiness through effective and diligent lead nurturing practices. Utilize personalized email messages and targeted content to engage and drive lead qualification through marketing automation. By prioritizing the leads that are most ready to buy, your sales team is less likely to waste their time chasing prospects who do not feel informed enough to make a decision. Along the same thread, don’t give up on these leads. They may only require a little extra TLC and the right nurturing campaign to push them over to the qualified side.

Ensure your CRM is Synced

Chances are, your marketing automation software is equipped to automatically synch with the CRM. Be sure you’re not entering the same information in multiple platforms. Synching up the common platforms between both the sales and the marketing teams provides a greater visibility, stronger communication, and an overall clearer plan of action.