Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Are you Ready for a Webinar?

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This is the first installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

How to Run a Webinar

You’re probably reading this with the mindset that you are going to do a webinar. You’ve thought about the topic, decided your company is going to do it, and thought about the material to use; but – are you really ready for a webinar? Executing a successful webinar can be expensive, and requires a lot of preparation. Here are some things to consider before moving forward:

Expect Higher Attendance with:

  1. Strong audience connection. If the audience already knows, likes and trusts you or they know, like and trust whoever is promoting the webinar then attendance will be much higher.
  2. Your opt-in database or cold audience. Participation will be much higher when marketing to your own opt-in list vs. a “cold audience”.
  3. Low industry/topic saturation. If your industry or even the topic has been saturated with webinars expect a lower turnout.
  4. Hot topics. If your subject matter is a hot topic right now that’s pushed the audience’s emotional hot buttons of pain, desire or curiosity, then you can expect a higher attendance rate.
  5. Big name involvement. If you’re going solo on the webinar, and don’t have a lot of people to invite, it’s a lot harder to drive attendance than having a co-presenter, as well as invite-support, from a big name company. For example, suppose you were a technology company with Google as your partner. Could you get a Google employee to co-present with you? Could Google help broadcast the event through their marketing channels thereby sending more people to your landing page? Your webinar will benefit from a big brand name, making it more attractive to your audience, with a larger pool of people to invite.
  6. A larger invitation list. The quality of your invitation list is certainly a factor, but the size of your invite list matters as well. Inviting 50 people to a webinar is a lot different than inviting 50,000.

Let’s be honest though. If you’re a young company (startup) without much brand recognition, a database that’s not quite “there” yet, and no partners to help with the event…you might still be able to pull off a good webinar with a few tricks. Try offering some incentive to get people to attend. Here are some ideas:

  • Offer up a free white paper (worth $X)
  • Provide a discount on your product/service if they attend
  • Offer a giveaway for the first X number of registrants (think iPod, Chromebook, etc.)

Attendance depends on the factors that will be described throughout this series. About 40-60% of registrants will show up for live viewings, but you can expect more registrants to trickle in and watch on demand over the next few days following your webinar.

Now, you’ve thought through things and you’ve decided you are ready. The next step is to get your data ready. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Getting your Data Ready!

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Marketing Guru Covers: What to Post on Social Media

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social media

It seems like some people have it all figured out when it comes to social media and others are sitting on the sidelines, wishing they could get some “likes” and “shares”. There is a good chance you’re one of the people on the sidelines, but that can change. You just need to know what to post on social media, and you can move up the ranks and become a power user.

Use Images

Visual content is all the rage right now. In fact, social media posts with images have an engagement rate that is 650 percent higher than posts without images. Any kind of image is great, but infographics are the best. There are tons of online resources for creating infographics. Use a resource like Piktochart to build your infographic and then post it on your social media accounts.

Use Videos

Videos are another great way to boost your engagement across the board. Video resonates in a way that the written word doesn’t, so you need to add some video to your social media campaign to make it memorable. There are many ways to do this. Tie your YouTube channel into your social media profiles and use Facebook video. Also, consider adding a Vine account to your Twitter profile. Twitter owns Vine, so it is easy to integrate the two. Then, you can create some short video loops that resonate with users.

Now that you know what to post, let’s look at what you should avoid.

What to Avoid

Constant promotion is the number one mistake that brands make on social media. People want some kind of value from your page. If you can’t provide it, they will go elsewhere and perhaps even unfollow you. You can plug your brand every once in awhile, but only after you provide a lot of value.

You also need to avoid providing the same type of content over and over again. As you know, images and videos are great for your social media strategy. However, don’t post 10 infographics in a row. You have to mix it up.

Your social media presence is very important for your brand. Keep these tips in mind when posting to your accounts. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or one of the other networks. You need a solid strategy if you’re going to move ahead.

See how Lead Liaison’s software helps you manage and track your social media efforts here.

Lead Liaison

The Marketing Guru Covers: What are the benefits of social media marketing?

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social media marketing

Social media is everywhere. Many companies are leveraging their social media presence to build a more personal relationship with their audience. But, how effective is it – really? What are the benefits of social media marketing?

Become Recognizable & Relatable

Social media marketing allows you to increase your online presence. By increasing your brand recognition, you also gain more loyal customers. If they see your name over and over again, you become a part of their lives. You become more familiar to them. You also become more humanized.

What’s even more valuable, is that each customer interaction is an opportunity to show your level of customer service. It’s a public, 1:1 interaction that other people can see, and “like” (or dislike, so beware!). In an article posted by B2C about social media marketing, they reference a statistic originally reported by Forbes: 71% of consumers who receive a quick response on social media say they are more likely to recommend that brand to other people. And we all know that the most solid form of referrals is word-of-mouth.

Convert more leads/prospects by increasing inbound traffic

Inbound marketing is the best way to build up your list of prospects and convert leads. Every time you post something, you open yourself up to opportunities for prospects to click your link, interact with your website, and perhaps even fill out a form or put in their email address. Every post is a new opportunity for someone to be guided back to your website. With tools like Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation platform, you can post to multiple social media accounts with the push of one button.

Save money

Compared to other marketing channels, social media posting is relatively inexpensive and time efficient. It’s trackable and measurable content, which adds to it’s value. It can be free, or you also have the option of using paid social media to give your content a significant boost. MCG Consulting Group lays it out like this, “boosting or sponsoring posts on a page with, let’s say, 20.000 likes, the average paid reach can be close to 40% (about 8,000 people) vs. the 2% organic reach, with an investment of $5 per post.  Even if you decide to boost every single post, posting on a frequency of 16 to 20 times per month with an average of likes of 500 to 800 per post, the reach could go up to 5,000,000 people who could have seen your posts during that specific period, with an investment equal or below $150.”

Learn more about our integration with social media!

 

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How Your Personality Affects Your Sales

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Have you ever thought about how your personality affects what you’re doing at work? When it comes to sales positions, personality types can reveal some particular insights. One that’s often relied on is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Known as MBTI, this test helps to delineate certain personality traits into predictable, understandable categories that are supposed to provide insight into why you make certain choices and how you perceive standard situations. By answering 93 questions, respondents are able to receive four key personality indicators, such as introversion versus extroversion.

When it comes to sales, those personality indicators can explain what you prefer—say face to face versus phone interactions—or how you process information—whether you trust experience or symbols, for example.

Each personality type has advantages and strengths in sales, and nothing rules out someone from making a success in the field. View the entire graphic here to understand more about how personality affects your sales effectiveness.

Psychology of Sales

View the entire infographic here!
Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Inbound Marketing

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Inbound Marketing: its meaning and how it relates to marketing automation. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Inbound Marketing

At one time, outbound marketing was all the craze. Then, marketers finally woke up and realized that inbound marketing is the way to get qualified leads. They realized something else, too, though. Inbound marketing is a time-consuming process. Fortunately, folks quickly discovered that combining inbound marketing tactics with marketing automation strategies allowed them to harness the power of inbound marketing without the burden of finding extra time to do so.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Before you dive into inbound marketing with marketing automation tools, you need to be certain you are clear on what this type of marketing is. To put it simply, inbound marketing is the process of using quality content to bring people to your website, and then turning those people into paying customers.

There are three main components of inbound marketing. First, you attract potential customers. You do this with blog posts, white papers, eBooks, and other forms of content. Each piece of content is targeted in order to attract the right people.

Then, you convert visitors into leads. You do this with calls-to-action and lead generation forms on your website.

Next, you go for the close with lead nurturing. During this process, people go inside of your sales funnel.

This is a simplified look at inbound marketing. If you had to go through the process all by yourself, you would have to roll up your sleeves and go through a series of tiresome steps over and over again. Fortunately, things can be simplified with marketing automation.

Marketing Automation to the Rescue

Marketing automation software has the power to track leads as they engage with different types of content. For instance, if they download a piece of content, the software can track that person from here on out. The software also has the power to score leads based on their actions once they arrive at the site. This will help you understand what strategies are working and which ones need to be replaced.

Normally, you would have to submerge yourself in hundreds of pages of data to understand user behavior, but marketing automation software is able to assign scores and provide data in seconds. This information makes it easy to run a powerful inbound marketing campaign.

If you try to manage an inbound marketing campaign on your own, it is incredibly complicated. You have people coming in from multiple traffic sources and once they arrive on your site, they engage with different pieces of information. Utilize marketing automation software to quiet the noise so you can see the real picture – what’s working and what’s not.

Request a Demo of Marketing Automation!

 

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Weighs in on How to Run a Webinar using Marketing Automation

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How to Run a Webinar

To view this Press Release in it’s original context, please visit PRWeb’s recent news.

In their newest publication, How to Run a Webinar, Lead Liaison dives into the details to spell out what it will take to make your webinar project the best it can be. The cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution is a trusted partner to B2B companies worldwide. Recently, they’ve teamed up with Lumen21, a provider of compliant cloud computing, to execute a webinar.

“It was so awesome working with Lead Liaison on our first webinar. Their software allowed us to basically templatize the entire webinar process from invite, to reminders, to follow up. Our team really loved being able to create all the pieces of the webinar that matched our branding. Emails, forms, landing pages, and automations were all used to pull it off. We added $660,000 into our sales pipeline from the webinar and are already planning our next event with Lead Liaison. The next one will be even easier now that the process is already setup!” – Jim Westrom, Sales Manager at Lumen21

Once a company has decided to put on a webinar, there has already been a lot of thought put into the content itself. The need for education on a certain topic pertaining to an industry is there and  offering up that information in a webinar format is increasing in popularity. But there’s a lot more that is involved in getting set up for successful execution.

Preparation – the Invitation and Registration Process

Preparation is key. This report shares proven tips and recommendations that will help determine who to include on the invitation list. As a leader in the marketing automation space, Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation software can helps determine who to invite by segmenting a database using lists, demographics, behaviors, and other types of criteria. The publication teaches people how to automate the invitation & registration processes, providing sample automations to prevent missing a beat.

Follow-up

It’s important to follow up with attendees and no-shows once the event is over. Lead Liaison provides perspective into communications that they’ve seen be successful in the past. Recommendations such as sending a link to a recording of the webinar out to those who attended and who were not able to attend, which takes users to a landing page that can not only monitor who watched the video, but also how much of the video they watched.

Make the Most Out of Your Efforts

Once a roadmap for webinar success has been built, use that model over and over again. When companies build their webinar processes within a marketing automation platform, they can use it countless times. How to Run a Webinar also provides ideas on how to syndicate content to make the most out of marketing investments. Ideas like creating Trackable Content with a white paper, or putting together an informational kit.

This publication is one of many extremely valuable resources offered by Lead Liaison. Visit their Resources page to find more.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue 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 providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. 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. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: PPC (Pay-Per-Click)

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pay-per-clickPPC (Pay-Per-Click): its meaning and how it relates to marketing automation. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Are you ready to build a marketing beast with PPC ads and marketing automation? If you think that pay-per-click (PPC) ads and marketing automation are two separate animals, you aren’t alone. Many marketers run their PPC ads and marketing automation campaigns separately, which is why they get subpar results. If you combine the two, you can create a marketing beast that not only lets you deliver qualified leads to your sales team but also allows you to maximize your ROI.

First, let’s take a closer look at PPC ads, and then, let’s go over how you can add marketing automation into the mix.

An Overview of PPC Marketing

PPC ads are ads that you pay for every time someone clicks on them. While several companies offer PPC ad opportunities, AdWords is the most popular. If you use this platform, you create an ad and then place it on the Google Search or Display Network. The ad is triggered when someone types in a keyword or visits a site that that you’re targeting. Then, if the person clicks on your ad, he or she goes to your website.

AdWords and other PPC networks have some tracking methods, but they are pretty weak. Because of that, it’s easy to get in over your head with PPC ads.

At least it was before marketing automation came to the rescue.

Marketing Automation – The Key to Running a Successful PPC Campaign

Marketing automation can do everything that AdWords and other PPC networks can’t. It can track your visitor from the moment he or she reaches your website. Then, the automation software creates a digital profile of each lead that visits your site. This allows the software to know what to do with each visitor. For example, one visitor might be ready to receive a call from a sales representative while another person might be ready to get an email about an exciting new product that you have.

This also provides a way for you to track your ROI for in a campaign. You can find out, without fail, how much your campaign is really costing you. You can also find out what your visitors expect when why come to your site after clicking on an ad.

If you’re using a PPC network on its own, you’re missing out. Don’t make the mistake of going solo. Pair your PPC campaign with marketing automation software so you can get the most out of PPC ads.

Request a Demo of Marketing Automation!

 

Lead Liaison

Finding Solutions with Marketing Automation

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Have you got some marketing or sales problems? It’s time to find solutions with marketing automation. Most marketers end up only using marketing automation as a glorified email system, when there is so much more they could be doing! There are many underutilized features. Instead of looking at your marketing automation company as a bunch of really cool features, try to focus more on the solutions that they bring.

Problem: Our company just lost our best sales person. Now we’ve got to start from scratch with someone else. We don’t have the time or resources to slow down right now!

Solution: Marketing automation will help your company build a process around different phases of your business. For example, discovery meetings, post-demos, new customers, anniversaries, these are all important events in a prospect’s lifecycle that you could systemize for your company. Marketing automation is the right tool to help you implement a process around each of these events. When sales and marketers use these resources, they spend less time doing it manually and communicate your company’s messaging more accurately and consistently. When there’s a process in place, it makes it easier to insert or replace new employees and help them get up to speed; thereby lowering the cost of employee turnover.

Problem: I’ve overused the method of email communication. I need more ways to communicate with my prospects.

Solution: Companies that follow up their initial contact using different methods, in a persistent manner, get people thinking about them more and more. They wonder why this company is spending so much time trying to contact them. Research shows it takes anywhere from 5 to 7 touches in B2B sales before you can get someone’s attention. All five touches shouldn’t use the same communication channels though, they should be different, hitting the prospect from different angles. It could be a postcard, a text message, or even a handwritten letter! Find a marketing automation company that offers multiple channels of communication. Lead Liaison has the most channels of communication on the market.

Problem: I need to shorten my sales cycle.

Solution: It’s a known fact that nurturing leads shortens sales cycles by 23% and increases deal size by 47%. What salesperson wouldn’t want to close bigger deals, faster? Lead nurturing is a subtle way to build stronger relationships with people. The way to communicate is through education, and not blowing up the person’s cell phone or inbox with constant messages asking them if they’re ready to buy. You also want to make your communication personal, with your communication coming from the salesperson (lead owner). This is the entire concept around inbound marketing. Educate people, and when they’re ready to buy they’ll contact you. Nurturing workflows are typically setup by a marketer and used, and reused, over and over by the sales team. Nurturing is a 1:1 strategy, not a one-to-many strategy, and can be applied to prospects, customers, or partners. Check out the “Help Sales” portion of our Marketing Automation Playbook for some ways in which nurturing workflows could be used.

Download the Playbook!
Lead Liaison

The Marketing Guru Covers: When to Post to Social Media

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Social MediaIf you want to be a social media mastermind, the first thing you have to master is when to post to social media. Otherwise, you won’t get the engagement that you need to succeed. Fortunately, you just need to follow some posting tips, and people will not only see your posts but also engage with them.

When to Post on Facebook

People tend to engage with Facebook when they don’t want to be at work. While people never really want to be at work, this feeling hits its peak on Thursday and Friday afternoons. With that in mind, save your best Facebook content for the end of the week.

You’ll get the most shares when you post to Facebook around 1 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. If you’re just looking for clicks, post content at 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays.

Best Time to Post on Instagram

If you want to be successful on Instagram, you need to have your pictures ready to post at 2 a.m. and 5 p.m. The reason is very simple. These two time slots have lots of engaged users, but people don’t tend to post a lot of pictures. Because of that, if you a post picture at this time, there is a very good chance that your content will get noticed.

When to Post on Twitter

Twitter is typically used like an RSS feed, which means that people turn to it during commutes and downtimes. They also use it when there is a lull in the workday, such as the slow period after lunch.

You can take advantage of this by tweeting from 6 a.m. until 8 a.m. to reach the commuters, and then from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. to take advantage of the slow period after lunch. Then, send out some tweets around 5 p.m. to reach people on their way home from work.

The Right Time to Post on LinkedIn

If you want to reach professionals, you need to do it on their schedule. Since LinkedIn is a professional network, you want to get people right when they’re leaving work. People are most likely to check in with LinkedIn as soon as they’re off the clock, so post right when the workday is over and wrap your posts up around 6 p.m.

Once you start posting on social networks at the right time, you’ll see your engagement rates jump through the roof. Make the process even easier by using marketing automation tools. That way, you won’t have to sit by your computer and hit “Send” each time the clock hits the right time.

Learn more!
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Lead Liaison Releases the Secrets to Marketing Success with the Marketing Automation Playbook

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Marketing Automation PlaybookALLEN, TX – Lead Liaison is known for their easy-to-use marketing automation software. What sets them apart is their exceptional level of support. Now, they’ve gone above and beyond to offer a helping hand to anybody who is currently using or planning to use a marketing automation system.

A Recipe for Implementing Marketing Automation

A common misconception with marketing automation tools is the idea that it’s a quick-fix to your marketing struggles. The truth of the matter is that it takes time, attention, and a great deal of effort to get your automations set up in a way that is effective for your sales and marketing teams. The more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. But it’s not always easy to figure out where to start, and where to take it. Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation Playbook gives people ideas on how to use marketing automation to help themselves be more efficient.

The Playbook walks through the steps of getting data ready, presents best practices, and provides ideas on how to make the most of a company’s marketing automation software license by increasing traffic to websites, communicating better with audiences and more.

“It’s an invaluable tool,” says Lead Liaison’s Director of Marketing, Jennifer Worsham. “Marketing automation isn’t something you can just flip on with a switch. It’s a strategy. You have to figure out what specifically you can automate or make more efficient. That’s where the Playbook comes in.”

Not Just Ideas

Not only does the Lead Liaison Marketing Automation Playbook walk through practical applications. It dives in deep to address common issues like measuring marketing return on investment, also known as ROI. Here’s a snippet from Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation Playbook:

“A good marketing automation system will help you attribute a cost to each campaign and assign each of your marketing assets (emails, webinar, imported contacts from the event) to the marketing campaign. When the marketing automation system is connected to your CRM, it will use the contacts associated with closed-won deals, identify their campaign, and use the revenue from the deal to attribute it to your campaign. Precise ROI analysis helps marketers justify their campaigns and prove their worth. Without this type of analysis, you’re flying by the seat of your pants.”

What’s even more helpful is that Lead Liaison provides their clients with an updated version of this Playbook, laying out how to do all of these things within its software in great detail. Marketing automation is a powerful tool, and thankfully Lead Liaison doesn’t leave users in the dark. They believe that is not the way to truly be a helpful tool for their clients.

Eager to see what the fuss is all about? Visit Lead Liaison’s Resource Page to download the Marketing Automation Playbook, as well as many other valuable resources.

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue 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 providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. 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. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).