August 2015 – Lead Liaison

How to Build a Strong Business Case for Switching to Marketing Automation

August 27, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Marketing automation is one of the most important new practices a business needs to pursue to be competitive in the digital world, as any savvy marketing professional is already aware. However, even if an organization knows there might be a better marketing and sales process out there, it can be difficult to get an entrenched sales or marketing team to change the way they do things. Here are a few ways that you can build a strong business case for switching to marketing automation that you can pitch to your team.

Focus on the Specific Marketing Challenges your Business is Faces

When trying to figure out in what different ways your business will benefit from the implementation of marketing automation tools, first examine your current marketing and sales systems to see what their biggest weaknesses are. Download our sales and marketing alignment template to do an internal assessment of your company’s sales and marketing processes. Examine the current methods of lead generation, lead nurturing and lead scoring and see what is developing the strongest and weakest results. Look at how marketing automation can revitalize weaker processes – for example, by turning a lackluster lead nurturing program into a multi-tiered system that is intensifies as a lead demonstrates more interest in your services – and clearly communicates benefits.

Illustrate the Broader Benefits of Marketing Automation

After taking some time to examine specific areas in which marketing automation provides noticeable improvements, think about ways that marketing automation can bring broader positive benefits to your business as a whole. Marketing automation can help bring immediate improvements to things like internal communications, instantly streamlining the way that sales and marketers share information. A successful marketing automation program can also yield significant improvements to the overall organization of your business, and can help you improve structurally. Finally, marketing automation yields higher lead generation and decreases conversion time, making it simply a profitable sales and marketing tool for almost any business to take advantage of.

Use Specific Tools to Encourage the Adoption of Marketing Automation

There is a large amount of very convincing data available about the effectiveness that is at the tip of your fingers. Case studies are a wonderful way to illustrate how other similar sized companies went about implementing marketing automation, and gives direct examples of the benefits they enjoyed afterward. Have a full picture of statistics on how your current marketing tools are performing, and how they might improve with the implementation of marketing automation. And, finally, do your research. Be prepared for any questions that might come your way. If you are already getting pushback on marketing automation, you should have some idea of why it is being opposed – understand that viewpoint, and be prepared to counter it.

If you stick to these basic strategies, you should be able to develop a strong business case for switching to marketing automation. Learn more about marketing automation and how your business can benefit from it Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Create Stronger Copy by Appealing to Customers Instincts

August 18, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

While everyone knows that with quick-fire mediums such as email or Internet, you need to write catchy headlines and content to engage customers quickly. However, once you’ve got them engaged, it is important to ensure content keeps their attention. However, considering all customers are, after all, human beings, there are a couple of psychological triggers you can take advantage of to start appealing to customers instincts and make sure they pay attention to what you’re trying to communicate.

Need to Belong

As social animals, we naturally gravitate towards and instinctually want to trust large groups. Take advantage of this instinct by making your services or products a part of a group that becomes desirable due to its mere existence. Copy that emphasizes a large number of users you already have implies in itself a level of quality that a lead will naturally want to trust. Strong, positive writing surrounding statements like this will emphasize the inherent value of your services.

Hate the Enemy

Another simple psychological element, uniform across humanity, that can be repurposed to write engaging copy, is our instinctual desire to vilify the enemy, whatever that enemy may be. If your product provides an alternative or a solution to something that people don’t like, then focus on that thing and how your product will eliminate a company’s pain. For example, if your product can eliminate something universally disliked, like long meetings or waiting in line, bring that experience up in your copy. You can get a lot of attention by briefly mentioning something universally reviled. Being reminded of the problem helps remind customers of how badly they want a solution.

Good Story Sells

While the Internet relies on quick information and must take into account short attention spans, a good story still holds a lot of power when communicating value to consumers. A compelling narrative engages customers and will help make your product or service seem distinct. In addition to being a great way to keep your customers attention, it can also have a real impact on how your product or service is valued to individuals. A product with a good story connected to it can actually inflate the perceived value of the object, and can help you sell deals or special offers.

Instant Gratification

Finally, never underestimate the simple power of a quick and easy, instant promise of instant gratification. Human beings are always attracted to the option that will get them what they want right away, and copy that emphasizes your company’s ability to deliver this can be highly effective. Copy that uses words that reinforce this, such as “now”, “fast” or “immediately” help accentuate the promise contained in the copy quickly.

By the subtle integration of these psychological triggers, you can start creating stronger copy by appealing to your customer’s instincts right away. To learn more about how to create effective copy, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

Using Marketing Automation to Collect Meaningful Customer Feedback

August 13, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

It isn’t a secret that in order to run successful marketing campaigns and effective websites, you must collect some degree of customer feedback in order to move forward. However, not everyone realizes customer feedback is not equal. Customer feedback that is incomplete or simply not informative enough can give leave your content to stagnate, or worse, misguide your entire marketing strategy. Use these techniques to ensure marketing and sales departments collect meaningful customer feedback so you know what you need to do differently to maximize sales.

Is the Feedback Going to be Useful?

The absolute last thing you want in the process of collecting user feedback is to interrupt a user’s experience. Make sure any and all feedback requests are placed in an appropriate spot with appropriate content. It can be a delicate thing to balance – you want the opportunity to collect feedback, but a feedback “agent” should never distract from an email or website’s core objective. One suggestion is to use surveys, built in to lead nurturing programs, to automate the process of collecting input from prospects and/or customers.

Frame Questions Well to Receive Good Feedback

You have to make sure that you are asking the right questions in order to get the information that will build good data. Asking open-ended questions such as “Did you like this page?” will, more often than not, net you open-ended answers that may not even really give you much to work with at all. Try to ask direct questions that result in direct answers, so everything contained in a customer’s feedback is useful.

Perform A/B Testing to Find the Best Format for Feedback

You may think that feedback itself is testing, and thus doesn’t need to be rigorously A/B tested; however, nothing could be further from the truth. The way in which you ask for customer feedback can have a much bigger impact than you might expect, and the ability to compare how answers vary in response to differently presented or worded questions can be surprising. In addition, the ability to compare those different sets of answers side by side can be invaluable, and help lead you to conclusions that you would not have been able to find with either set on its own. Even if you find a feedback pattern that suits your practices, running A/B testing on smaller, specialized demographics can also help sharpen your overall process.

Obviously, all of these processes take time, so be sure to pursue a feedback strategy that fits the overall resources available for your department. You want all the feedback you collect to be helpful, and not simply data mining that your marketing department will never have time to look at.

Using these strategies, you should be able to use your marketing automation software to collect meaningful customer feedback, and your marketing department can begin modifying their practices accordingly. To learn more about collecting strong customer feedback, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

Lead Liaison Adds Ability for Companies to Build Richer Prospect Profiles Across Offline and Online Marketing

Allen, TX (PRWEB) August 13, 2015 – Lead Liaison, the leading provider of sales and marketing automation software to the mid-market, has enhanced its website visitor tracking solution, ProspectVision™. The new offering leapfrogs competing products and continues to deliver the highest value-per-dollar in any visitor tracking solution available in the market.

Traditional website visitor tracking providers such as LeadLander, Lead Forensics, VisiStat, and VisitorTrack offer limited sales insight. Depending on the provider, you’ll get reports on page visits, static visitor activity, and company identification. Some providers even challenge privacy boundaries by sharing their customer’s tracking data with other companies using their solution – spoon feeding a company’s prospects and customers to their competitors. Legacy solutions typically lack necessary sales intelligence and scalability that small to mid-sized companies need to be successful. On the contrary, Lead Liaison builds richer prospect profiles by tracking more than just page views, identifies people, provides the largest database to IP mapping of over 4 billion routable IPs, and helps companies scale up to the most exciting thing in sales and marketing software since CRM, marketing automation.

Alan Page, VP of Customer Success, adds:

“When companies come to us saying they’re looking at spending $300, $400, $500 plus dollars a month on a visitor tracking solution, we sit down with them and have a serious talk. At the end of the conversation they understand how they could get boxed-in with another offering, while getting limited value out of it. When they get a sense for our value-per-dollar and understand the opportunity to be able to work with a single provider as they graduate to marketing automation, it’s a no brainer. In the past 30 days our business has exploded, growing our customer base by 38%, with just ProspectVision™ as the catalyst alone! Companies really understand it’s not just about tracking page views. It’s about building richer profiles by monitoring all different types of online behavior across offline and online marketing, such as engagement with marketing collateral, videos, emails, and more. When you combine ProspectVision™ with our website engagement solution, SiteEngage™, and our marketing automation platform, Lead Management Automation™ (LMA) we provide a powerful, exciting suite of solutions that offers companies freedom of choice and scale.”

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).

Build a Stronger Conversion Rate Optimization Structure

August 11, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Consistently improved conversion rate optimization is a process that requires two key components – time and money. And while time is in relatively high supply, sometimes money can be a real problem, especially for small to midsized businesses. However, in a pinch, taking the time to build a stronger conversion rate optimization structure can be all you really need in order to see marked improvements in conversion rate optimization. Read on to learn about some of the basic principles that build a stronger conversion rate optimization structure.

Content is King

Obviously, solid presentation is an extremely important part of web design, marketing materials, and the company’s overall brand. However, when you’re trying to improve overall conversion rate optimization, tweaking the color of a banner is not the change that will yield the best results. Ultimately, the level of lead involvement with marketing materials will be determined by the quality of its content. If someone has made it all the way to your website or decided to open an email that you sent, they are real people trying to find an effective solution to a problem they currently have. Strong content that communicates your company’s ability to provide a solution for that problem is what convinces leads to convert. In the long run, improving content will yield stronger results than a design will overall. Think about different types of content, such as documents or even popup content to help convert visitors. Lead Liaison’s SiteEngage™ solution helps create attractive content to help with conversion.

Test Constantly

It’s a principle that gets repeated with a high degree of frequency, but with good reason. The internet is constantly shifting and changing. To be competitive, your marketing team needs to be able to change along with it. Testing is the only surefire way to know whether your marketing materials get the results you want. Switch out marketing approaches and run A/B tests to see what’s more effective and give riskier strategies a chance, but make sure everything you try is compatible with your overall long-term conversion rate optimization strategy.

Be Prepared for the Long Term

To put it simply, short-term optimization strategies will not be effective over the long amounts of time needed to make a real change in conversion rate optimization. Be prepared to stick it out with customers, and take advantage of marketing automation software to develop tiered lead nurturing programs that ramp up interest effectively. It may be tough to wait for results to improve, but ultimately you’ll end up landing the best, most informed customers who will do the most for your business by spreading their appreciation of your product or services.

By adhering to these overarching principles, you should be able to build a much stronger conversion rate optimization strategy. It may take patience, but eventually you’ll start noticing a pattern of improvement in conversion rates. To learn more about maximizing conversion rates and other marketing automation topics, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

Enliven Your Social Media Presence with These Social Media Strategies

August 4, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Revenue Generation Blog, Social Media/by Lead Liaison

Sometimes, it can be a challenge for a marketing department to keep a business’s social media presence engaging and relevant in order to be an active tool for generating and encouraging leads to convert. It can be even more challenging if your business isn’t providing a service that is normally looked at as being a “sexy business”. However, no matter what industry you’re in, a creative marketing team should be able to craft a social media presence that adheres to your brand values while being an engaging advocate for your business. If you’re wondering how to do that, take cues from other business’s social media strategies in order to enliven your social media presence.

Look for Successful Examples in Strange Places

If you’re struggling to find a good example of successful social media strategies, start with some of the big boys. Sports teams have large, diverse audiences that want constant updates on what’s going on with their team. Every major football, basketball and baseball team works to keep their fans engaged and entertained even in the off season. How do they do it? Sports teams work hard to make sure their posts are consistently funny or very relevant, while always broad enough to appeal to an extremely diverse market. In addition, they also show a lot of gratitude for their audience. Every major team’s social media is dotted with posts in appreciation of their fan base, which is an easy attitude for any business to adopt.

Look for Examples in Parallel Markets

Another great way to get good inspiration is to find a parallel market to your own and see what those businesses are doing. See if the leaders of a field you’re not competitive with are doing anything exciting and take notes. Another great, low cost and very easy way to gain access to a market that you may not have much interest in is to engage one of the larger figures in that market via social media. Your Twitter or Facebook post may show up to a large group of individuals who otherwise would have no reason to think about your company.

Take Advantage of Marketing Automation Tools

Using tools provided by marketing automation software companies such as Lead Liaison, use integrated social media tools to schedule your social media posts to fit easily within a long-term, large-scale social media campaign. Take all the guesswork and complicated timing out of rolling out a social media campaign by scheduling posts months in advance to deliver company announcements and messages on time and on point. Not that the ability to schedule your posts should distract from running a dynamic and engaged social media presence, but it can certainly help organize everything.

By using these techniques and marketing automation tools, you should be able to find a way to enliven your social media presence in no time. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog to learn more about using your social media presence to benefit your business.