Lead Liaison

Create Personas to Guide Your Marketing Automation

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Create Profiles to Guide Your Marketing AutomationIn order to create strong, relevant copy that connects and engages leads, understand how your potential customers are thinking about your product and how you can influence their thinking. In order to do that you need to understand who you are marketing to and how your product or services interact complement each person. One great way to do this is to create profiles to guide your marketing automation strategies. Keep reading to learn how to go about creating these profiles and how to get the most information out of them.

Identify Personas

The first thing to do to begin recognizing who your leads are and how they could potentially interact with your business is gather all relevant data you have about your leads and customers. Gather things like demographics, buying statistics, job titles and any other information that may be useful. Start organizing this data by either creating a spreadsheet and then grouping relevant information, or by using the somewhat more old school method of writing traits on post-it notes and creating affinity diagrams. Look for patterns and ask questions of yourself and each other of why certain traits are being grouped together. You can also use technology like lead grading to qualify your database. Here’s a small sales tool that can help you group, score and/or grade your database.

Hone Personas

Once you have some basic groupings defined, it’s time to dig into them and define the typical individual that represents this group, what they want and how your product can provide that. This process establishes your the ideal buyer. If you have a way to get in touch with an actual customer or lead who fits within one of the different groups, then approach them. You’ll gain valuable insight that may be hard to glean from simply comparing data sets. Identify whether your groups are too narrow or too broad, and combine or divide them accordingly. Once you feel comfortable with your groups, personalize them by creating a persona with a name and a story, and try to determine how your product or service can help them solve their problems.

Share Personas

Now that you have your personas established, named and their behavior and background defined, it is time to share your work with coworkers. Email your findings around the department, and put personas up on the wall so people have an opportunity to think about the people they are creating content or design features for. The goal is to ultimately come to a shared understanding within your team of who you are working to appeal to, and that shared understanding should influence all communication being sent to your leads.

When using this technique to create personas to guide your marketing automation, remember, it doesn’t stop at the creation of a persona that helps you understand your customers. Always continue to perform A/B testing to see how different groups react to different material, and don’t be afraid to tailor content to specific groups. To learn more about understanding how your customers view your marketing materials, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.

Lead Liaison

What Is Marketing Automation, and Why Do You Need It?

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What is Marketing Automation?Marketing automation is a buzz term that has become increasingly common over the past several years. Although it might sound like a new concept, marketing automation has actually been around since late 1990s; it is only now that we have begun to hear more about it. So, what exactly is it, and is marketing automation something that your company needs?

What Is Marketing Automation?

In the most basic sense, marketing automation utilizes a single system for tracking data for leads, generating reports for all of your company’s marketing activities, and automating those activities. Certain features are also used in marketing automation to trigger marketing activities without the need for human interaction, saving significant time and resources.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can provide companies of all sizes with a vast number of benefits, including the ability to function more efficiently, capture more leads, and develop a more granular understanding of data.

One of the most important benefits of marketing automation is the fact that it offers the opportunity to generate more leads without expanding your budget. This can be particularly beneficial for small businesses and startups with limited budgets. By automating manual tasks, marketing departments are able to allocate more time to the creative side of marketing.

Marketing automation also offers the opportunity to prove return on investment for marketing efforts. Regardless of company size, the need to prove ROI always exists. Marketing at any level can be expensive, and companies must be able to show financial justification. With marketing automation, it becomes possible to track and report on leads, thus linking marketing efforts to proven sales opportunities.

Companies will also find that marketing automation can be quite empowering in terms of building online marketing campaigns. If you feel uncomfortable working with code, marketing automation can help you benefit from a variety of features without the need to invest time and money in designing customized landing pages.

Finally, marketing automation presents the opportunity to consolidate multiple tools into a single easy-to-use system. From social media to email marketing to mobile marketing, marketing automation can help you manage it all. As a result, you can launch cross-channel campaigns more easily and effectively.

Contact Lead Liaison if you’d like to learn more about marketing automation.

Lead Liaison

Alternate Content Marketing Strategies besides Email

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Alternate Content Marketing Strategies besides EmailEmail has the ability to deliver a large amount of content quickly and its traditionally strong response rates. It’s probably the king of direct marketing strategies, but don’t forget that there are many other ways to reach your leads. There are other online options, such as through social media networks and mobile devices, and offline options, like direct mail or promotional materials. If you’re wondering how your company can take advantage of all these different ways to reach your leads, keep reading to learn how marketing automation companies such as Lead Liaison can provide a comprehensive alternate content marketing strategies that will benefit your business.

Social Media

Social media is becoming an increasingly vital element of any company’s online presence and overall marketing strategy. However, many small to medium sized businesses end up largely neglecting this important medium. There’s a large time investment required to cover multiple social networks and the demand for constant supervision. Lead Liaison’s social media management tools can help your business by allowing you to schedule your social media posts, removing the day-to-day upkeep that can bog marketing departments down. And if you simply can’t keep up with the content required to maintain a healthy social media presence, don’t worry! You can outsource your content creation needs to Lead Liaison, who can deliver quality content on topic and on time.

Text Messaging

While directly text messaging marketing materials is certainly a bit more aggressive than an email campaign, it gets results. Text message marketing receive a 98% open rate, which is substantially higher than the numbers email can provide. Using the data collected from your marketing automation tools and social intelligence software, you can narrowcast marketing materials and hit the right demographic at the right time to make the sales you need.

Direct Mail

While it may seem a little old school for a marketing automation strategy that relies on instant communication and data collection from the internet, direct mail remains an incredibly effective way to get a lead’s attention and get him/her interested in your product. A fact in the marketing world is that different leads react in different ways to different types of marketing material, and a lead who has generally ignored your email campaigns might finally become intrigued when a piece of marketing material lands on their desk.

Promo

Another old school method of marketing your company and your products is through the creation and distribution of promo materials. Nothing helps people remember your product better than seeing it on their desk with branded promotional materials!

If your company doesn’t have the resources or connections to arrange a large scale direct mail campaign or produce promotional materials, Lead Liaison can help. We can organize mailing campaigns and point you in the right direction to design promo items that reflect your company’s brand, and will help you convert leads to sales.

To learn more about how Lead Liaison and how marketing automation can help your company, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.

Lead Liaison

Great Strategies to Improve Efficiency of your Marketing Automation System

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Great Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Automation’s EfficiencyMarketing automation is one of the most important new technologies to influence modern marketing in recent years, and if your company has already adopted it, then you are already ahead of the competition. However, marketing automation is a system with a lot of different tools, and if one tool is used incorrectly, it can be damaging to the entire system, ultimately making your software inefficient and costing you conversions. Take a look at some of these best practices described below and compare them to how your company is using its marketing automation software. Don’t be surprised if you see some significant improvements to your marketing automation’s efficiency after implementing these practices!

Improve efficiency of your marketing automation system using these three tips:

Lead Qualification

Marketing automation can generate a great number of new leads for your company in a short amount of time. It can generate so many new leads, in fact, that it can become overwhelming for your sales team to attempt to pursue them all. One of the most important things to implement in your marketing automation program is lead qualification. Lead qualification analyzes a leads behavior and any available data about the lead’s profile and assigns a lead score to each prospect. Using this system, you can ensure that your sales team is focusing on the leads most likely to be converted – not wasting their time pursuing leads that are uninterested.

Lead Nurturing

One of the most important ways to turn cold leads into qualified leads is through a successful lead nurturing program. You need to make sure your marketing team can craft a program that engages your leads, educating and informing them while not being too pushy and scaring them away through overselling. The key is to focus on educating, not selling. A successful lead nurturing program should be consistent with your company’s brand, and should be tailored to a lead’s interest level, as assessed by the lead score assigned to the lead. And likewise, your sales team should be in tune with how leads are progressing through a lead nurturing program, so they know when a lead has become qualified and is ready to be contacted by a sales rep.

A/B Testing

Another vital way to improve your marketing automation’s efficiency is by implementing effective A/B email testing. You may think you have a great lead nurturing program in place, but it doesn’t take very much effort to test it against a different strategy. The results may surprise you and your marketing team, and even if you don’t find a strategy that is entirely more effective than your current tactics, you may find one element of it that you can incorporate into other marketing materials. Marketing automation software such as Lead Liaison has built in tools that will let you see exactly how your leads are responding to your marketing materials so you can construct the best, most effective content possible.

These are just a couple of the many different important strategies you can use to improve efficiency of your marketing automation system. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online to learn more.

Lead Liaison

How to Create Content to Appeal to a New Market

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How to Create Content to Appeal to a New MarketOne of the great advantages that marketing automation can provide for your company and your marketing team is its ability to send very specific content to a very specific audience. While it is true that you want all of the content delivered by your company to remain cohesive and consistent, with marketing automation you can gather specific demographic information about different groups and then send them targeted marketing materials. This gives you a great advantage over competitors who are simply blasting marketing material at anyone who might listen. It can be incredibly valuable if you are trying to secure a new market for your products or services. Keep reading to learn how to create content to appeal to a new market, and how software automation can help.

Tips for Reaching a New Market using Marketing Automation

The tools your marketing team will have access to when using marketing automation software such as Lead Liaison gives your company a unique opportunity to gather a great deal of intelligence about your new leads and how they react to marketing materials. Marketing automation software can collect data on things such as clickthroughs on emails sent out giving you a precise idea of how effective your marketing strategy is. Social intelligence functionality can pull demographics data from social profiles to help your marketing team refine new content. And always remember, content directed to a new market should be educational – as overselling can be disastrous.

Quality Content can be found from Marketing Automation Providers

When you’re looking to attract a new market, you should be sure that you have a campaign with enough content prepared to see it through. However, marketing teams can be stretched thin while trying to develop a whole new set of content and managing existing content delivery strategies. If that is the case, you can always consider outsourcing content creation. One excellent provider of quality marketing content is Lead Liaison, who can provide your company with access to thousands of professional writers to create marketing content.

When you need content from Lead Liaison, the process is very straightforward and totally transparent to ensure you receive high-quality content on time. You can direct the type of content you wish to have created for you, such as blog posts or web articles, and then give Lead Liaison a description of what you need the content to address. Lead Liaison will assign the content to a writer who is familiar with the subject, and the content is delivered to you within five days. However, if you need it sooner, you can place a rush order and will receive your content within three days. You can then review the content and request any edits you would like to see, and will ultimately end up with high-quality, ready to market material.

Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog to learn more about creating content to appeal to a new market, among other great marketing strategies.

Lead Liaison

How to Reach Out to a Lost Lead Using Marketing Automation

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How to Reach Out to a Lost Lead Using Marketing AutomationIt can be disappointing when a lead officially moves over to the lost pile. Considering how the internet and marketing automation has increased sales and marketing teams’ ability to quickly acquire large amounts of new leads, it can be tempting to simply forget about lost leads and move on to the next set. However, those leads were once considered possibilities, and marketing automation software makes it an easy thing to casually contact leads without wasting any of your employees’ efforts. Keep reading to learn how you can reach out to a lost lead using marketing automation without costing you any time or money.

How a Lead is Lost

Leads become inactive and effectively lost for various reasons, although those reasons can generally be grouped into two broad categories, which happen at two distinct spots in the lead funnel. The first is distraction, which usually occurs at the top of your lead funnel. It simply means the lead didn’t have an opportunity to engage with your marketing materials and wasn’t hooked by your product. They may know who you are, but they aren’t interested enough to pay attention.

The second, and more difficult to overcome, is when a customer knows about your company and your services, but does not think you are the correct provider of a solution to their problem. This typically occurs much further down the sales funnel, and can be more difficult to overcome.

How to Regain a Lead’s Interest

If you have lost a lead due to distraction, then attention grabbing marketing automation solutions can yield great results. Social selling is a great way to get a lead’s attention, and a quick follow up with a limited time offer can create urgency and inspire a lead to renew their interest in your products or services.

If you lost a lead further down the lead funnel, the process can be a little more involved, but you still have some great options to reach out to that lost lead using marketing automation. Educational lead nurturing can help you regain a lead’s interest. Nurturing helps deliver unobtrusive, well-timed, direct communication that focuses more on educating a lead about different problems and their potential solutions as opposed to simply selling. An annual follow-up is another great way to remind a lead that you’re out there because people can get new titles, budgets can shift and problems can change over time.

If you opt for one of these routes, remember that a multi-channel, multi-touch solution such as what marketing automation providers like Lead Liaison can implement can be incredibly effective. Spreading communications across email, direct mail, text messages and promotional material ensures prospects don’t feel spammed by repeated and unrequested emails. And different people respond to different mediums – someone who isn’t on top of answering every email that comes their way may be much more receptive to a text message.

All in all, you should never truly give up on a lead, and with marketing automation, you don’t have to. Learn about more lead acquisition and marketing automation strategies on Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Announces Branding Update to Revenue Generation Software® Suite

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Four Product Offerings that Drive Company Revenue

Allen, TX (PRWEB) July 07, 2015 – Lead Liaison, the leading provider of marketing automation software to the mid-market, introduces branding updates to their Revenue Generation Software®.

Lead Liaison has always encompassed their Revenue Generation Software® as a suite of software solutions optimized for sales, marketers, and executives to help drive a company’s revenue. With today’s announcement, Lead Liaison introduces a consolidated portfolio of four products, Lead Management Automation (LMA)™, SiteEngage™, ProspectVision™, and Send & Track™.

Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ is Lead Liaison’s affordable, enterprise-grade marketing automation platform. As the core of their software suite, marketing automation helps businesses be more efficient by automating tasks that would typically be time consuming and labor intensive. Sales and marketers benefit from lead nurturing, lead qualification, lead distribution, deep sales intelligence, CRM integration, marketing content creation and much more in a well-constructed software platform.

SiteEngage™ is Lead Liaison’s solution that helps companies engage website visitors and convert anonymous website traffic into identified individuals. Companies can use SiteEngage™ to deeply personalize content, whether it’s embedded or displayed through an engagement window that’s overlaid onto a website. Companies use SiteEngage™ to build newsletter lists, display offers and secure new customers.

ProspectVision™ is Lead Liaison’s website visitor tracking solution. ProspectVision™ not only identifies companies that visit a website, but people as well. The holistic tracking solution doesn’t just track page views, it builds a rich prospect profile consisting of offline and online engagement (marketing email, direct mail, videos, sales emails, documents, and more).

Send & Track™ is Lead Liaison’s sales efficiency solution for Outlook, Google Mail and other email clients. Salespeople benefit from Send & Track™ by being able to create and nurture prospects right from their email client, such as Google Mail integrated with Google Chrome. This time saving solution helps insert templates, add prospects to lists, and much more – right from their fingertips, without having to login to separate software, such as a CRM.

Each solution complements one another and when used together, solidifies a concrete solution for B2C and B2B sales and marketing operations. Each solution contributes in its own way to one thing – customer revenue. Lead Liaison’s solutions are provided as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Bundle discounts are available. To purchase any of Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® contact a Lead Liaison Representative today.

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution that helps businesses accelerate sales by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales support with solutions such as a hot-lead dashboard, Buy Signals and a live ticker alert of businesses on the customer’s website. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas, and employs 22 people. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison

How to Use Social Selling and Marketing Automation

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How to Use Social Selling and Marketing AutomationIn a modern landscape of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, social selling is a vital skill to integrate into any marketing strategy. However, concurrently managing different social networks and sticking to a consistent message can be daunting. Marketing automation tools such as Lead Liaison have many different functions that can help your marketing team keep everything organized. Read on to learn how your company can use social selling and marketing automation to maximize exposure of your promotional materials and convert leads into customers.

Obstacles to Social Selling

There are a couple important obstacles that can limit your marketing team’s social selling efforts. One of the most basic is that while nearly everyone in the modern business world interacts with social networking, the way that your consumers interact with these platforms is constantly changing. Different leads use different social networking platforms, individual platforms are used in different ways, and different consumers use different devices to interact with those networks. Even if you’ve crafted an effective social selling strategy, a large part of your potential leads or new leads may not respond to your content – simply because they aren’t noticing it.

How can your marketing team cover all of the different social networks, constantly updating and double checking and interacting with customers, all while developing and implementing a coherent and compelling marketing strategy? Do you need to hire a whole new social media department?

Not if you take advantage of marketing automation software. Below are some of the ways you can use social selling and marketing automation to streamline and improve your company’s social media presence.

Scheduling

One of the biggest advantages that software automation technology can deliver to your marketing team and your company is the ability to schedule social media posts. This means that you can plan and implement a long-term social media campaign that will be unveiled over several weeks or even months across multiple platforms. This takes a lot of the day-to-day pressure off your marketing team, who no longer have to babysit every tweet, and is an invaluable tool to help make sure that your message stays consistent across all social media platforms. You can even help improve your company’s social media profile by clustering relevant posts around industry events such as a trade show, giving you maximum exposure at the perfect time.

Social Intelligence

Another great feature that can help you use social selling and marketing automation together is the social intelligence function built into Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools. Social intelligence can help you gather demographic data about your leads by analyzing social media profiles. This can help you further refine your social media campaigns, open up exciting opportunities for targeted marketing, and help your marketing analyze the effectiveness of current campaigns with A/B testing.

Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog to learn more about how you can use social selling and marketing automation to improve your marketing campaigns and many more great marketing automation strategies.

Lead Liaison

Is Your Company Ready to Adopt Marketing Automation?

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Is Your Company Ready to Adopt Marketing Automation?If your company is experience a period of growth, or worse, a period of stagnation after a period of growth, you may wonder how you can effectively market to all of your new leads and customers. While you may have heard of marketing automation, it can be tough to decide to switch your business over to a new approach to marketing, especially if you have been doing things a certain way for a long time. Here are some common issues businesses face before realizing their company is ready to adopt marketing automation.

The Competition is Gaining an Edge

If it seems like your immediate competitors are pulling ahead of you in sales or their ability to penetrate market share, they may have already upgraded their marketing strategies to incorporate marketing automation. If this is the case, you will need a new set of tools to interact with leads consistently and effectively. Marketing automation is the perfect answer to competitive pressure.

Your Company’s Growth is Making Marketing Difficult to Scale

If your sales and marketing teams have a hard time scaling up their efforts to personalize marketing materials to new leads and existing customers, marketing automation can be an invaluable tool. With marketing automation, prepared marketing content can quickly and automatically be personalized to all of your leads and customers, freeing up marketing teams to design new content and develop strategies and sales teams to focus on making sales.

Your Sales Team is Wasting Time Due to Lack of Lead Scoring

If your sales team expends energy on leads that aren’t interested because there isn’t a dependable lead scoring system in place, then marketing automation can help. Marketing automation builds a database of leads and then, through a process of evaluating the behavior exhibited by a lead and any demographic data available, qualifies the lead and assigns a lead score. This lead score lets your sales team know whether or not a lead is ready to be contacted directly. And if a lead is not, marketing automation software can insert a lead into a lead nurturing program and notify sales when the lead is qualified.

Your Sales Team is Marketing at Random

If you’re spending a lot on marketing but not seeing the results you expect, then it may be because your marketing team doesn’t have a method to direct marketing materials at the correct audience. In this case, high-quality marketing is being misdirected at a largely uncaring public when it could be delivered directly to interested leads. Marketing automation gives you the tools to see how an audience reacts to marketing materials so you can focus on the material and the audience that is working for you.

When your company is ready to adopt marketing automation, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more about the ways that marketing automation can revolutionize your marketing department.