Lead Liaison

Marketing Events & Event Lead Capture

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If you’re waiting for leads to come to you, you are making a huge mistake. There are tons of events out there that are ripe with leads. Check out the events, and then learn how to prepare for them. With the right amount of preparation, and a good event lead capture plan, you can become a lead generation machine.

Types of Marketing Events

It’s impossible to list all the marketing events out there, but they really fall into two categories. First, there are in-person events, and second, there are web-based events.

As it relates to in-person events, you really can’t beat a trade show when it comes to collecting hot leads. These theme-based shows are filled with exhibitors who try to attract potential buyers, as well as buyers who are actively looking for a solution. Decision makers often attend these shows, so you will be able to collect information about people who have the authority to make a purchase. That makes it all the more exciting and rewarding.

As far as web-based events go, webinars get the most attention. While decision makers often attend these, it also isn’t unusual to see some lower-level employees at these online events. Because of that, you will get a variety of leads when you host webinars.

Regardless of which type of event you host, you have to prepare for it. That means you have to decide how you are going to collect leads.

Preparing for Events

Lead generation has changed a lot over the years. You used to post a sign-up form at events, and that was how you collected leads. Maybe your leads would hear from you, and maybe they wouldn’t. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to contact them. The process was just so scattered that leads would get lost.

These days, you’ve got the tools you need to do a little more preparation. It doesn’t matter if you are going to an in-person event or hosting a webinar. The preparation process is KEY.

It starts with configuring an effective and efficient lead capture form. Forget about a piece of paper and a pen. Create a form using your marketing automation platform to make it easier. Then, you must deploy the form to the device that you want to use and choose your lead capture method or methods. This is where it gets exciting. New technology allows you to load leads from event attendee lists, scan QR codes, scan bar codes, or have the lead manually fill the information into your form.

Most people prepare up to this point, but that’s where they stop. However, that’s a mistake. Your leads then need to go into your business process automation system. They should be distributed and then be moved through the process with follow-ups and lead qualification techniques. You need to plan for all of that before you even collect the leads!

If you can properly prepare for events, you will be a step ahead of many of your competitors. Then, you can collect leads and communicate with them with ease. Using a tool like Lead Liaison’s mobile event lead capture app, GoCapture!™, can help you simplify your event lead capture process, so you can get busy selling!

Want to learn more about GoCapture!™? Click here to speak with an expert today!

Lead Liaison

Tools of the Trade: Trello

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In the busy world we live in, we all have our secrets to being more productive and more organized. Technology lends itself to creating more solutions. Lead Liaison is one of those solutions, and we have clients all over the globe that agree! But we didn’t get here by using outdated resources. Here at Lead Liaison, we’ve got several “tools of the trade” that help us be the best that we can be. In this series, we will talk about some of the tools that we use to be more effective in our day. In today’s post, we’ll talk about Trello.

Trello

What is Trello?

Trello is a web-based project management application that is accessible from your desktop, tablet, or smartphone. The way Trello organizes tasks and projects is based off of the Kanban System, which was developed by an industrial engineer at Toyota as a system to keep production levels high and maintain flexibility.

It’s incredibly easy to use, and best of all – it’s FREE. It’s fantastic for managing everything from large projects to small tasks, work projects to family chores. Trello cards are similar to sticky notes, in that you can arrange them (and rearrange them) however you wish. It’s a great way to see the big picture, while still being able to dive into the details with a single click.

Features

Projects are represented by boards, which contain lists, which contain cards. Users and boards can be grouped into organizations, and cards can be assigned to individual users. Cards also can contain comments, attachments, votes, due dates, and checklists (which I find the most helpful). It updates in real time, so that everyone stays on the same page. It’s available on your mobile device (even offline), so you can keep track of tasks on-the-go.

It’s also super easy to customize your experience with backgrounds and color codes.

How Do We Use It?

Here at Lead Liaison, we use Trello all the time. Most of us have it pinned in our browser and check it many times a day. Our marketing team, for example, uses Trello to manage marketing campaigns. We host a shared Marketing Board, which is shared with everyone on the team. It contains several lists: Urgent, In Progress, Back Burner, Future Campaigns, and Wish List. Our lists contain each marketing campaign on separate cards. Within those cards, we keep track of the checklist needed to complete each campaign, comments from the team, reminders, and more.

Trello can also be used for personal use, helping you organize things like Vacations or Chores. I’ve even heard of people using it to plan their wedding! The options are endless.

Cost

What’s extra-special about Trello is the fact that almost everything you would need is in their free version; unlimited boards, lists, cards, members, checklists, and attachments. Their Business Class gives you access to powerful integrations with Evernote, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Their Enterprise level pricing offers added security and support. Learn more about Trello’s pricing here.

Lead Liaison

An Innovative Marketing Team

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TeslaI was thinking today about how amazing Tesla’s marketing team is.  Their budget is dwarfed compared to their competition.  In fact, I have read reports that Tesla spends just $6 per car sold!  Toyota, their next most efficient competitor spends 40 times more for a car that costs 1/5 the price! A very small percentage of the population has owned (or even sat in) their car, yet a very high percentage would say that they would like to own one.  Tesla launched in 2003, and has slowly built up a fan base of customers… who don’t drive Tesla’s (yet).

How have they done this? After doing some research, I found these things:

  1. They had a vision before others.  The oldest millennials were only 12 years old, and had not developed a consumer personality, when Tesla was founded in 2003.  They realized that their immediate buyers would pay a premium to work out the technical kinks of developing an electric vehicle; while also buying time to build a long term brand focused on a new generation.
  2. They told a story.  Elon Musk, cofounder, CEO and Chairman of Tesla Motors, has promoted his vision, much like Bill Gates (a computer in every home) or Henry Ford (a car for every family) did before him.  This story was told over and over to people whom Tesla would not even target as potential buyers… for DECADES!
  3. Low cost communications.  The days of large media spends are dwindling in a new, hyper targeted communication’s economy.  No longer do effective marketers dominate market share through spray and pray communications such as TV and radio.  Instead, innovative companies are looking for ways to win the hearts of customers through personalized messaging.
  4. They have harnessed the halo effect and emotion.  Buyers of a Tesla see something sleek, innovative, and different.  As Americans, we are drawn to elegant design and prestige. Tesla has tapped into those emotions.  By playing to the heart of your consumer, they do not need to “sit” in a product to know that they will like it when they do.

Often times, in the world of marketing, we forget about relationships and emotions.  We can focus too heavily on strict budget and ROI analysis.  Our communications tend to be centered around “Fact Sheets”, price, and comparative analysis…  and we ignore the negative consequences that such approaches have on building the brand.

Likewise, most marketers tend to focus heavily on top and middle of the funnel prospect acquisition; instead of leveraging their core competency as chief communicator to touch on the hearts of the people that are going to buy from you.

Would your owners/investors/executive suite support you in taking a long term branding approach to achieve exponential success?  What creative means might you employ in your organization to build loyalty and a “cool” factor for your offering?  How would you change your core messaging and approach if your goal was to be the most successful company in your industry over the next 14 years; instead of being focused on next quarter?

Lead Liaison’s marketing automation encourages marketers to focus on long-term results and long-term relationships. Let one of Lead Liaison’s experts show you around our software. You’ll be surprised what all we support, and how easy it can be to shift gears.

Lead Liaison

The Real Cost of a Legacy Marketing Automation Package

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pexels-photo-75083Have you ever considered the real cost of a “spaceship” marketing automation platform (MAP)?

All too often we look at the subscription price of software as our “total investment.” You might even be willing to spend an extra $10,000-$30,000 on the software itself because a friend or sister company has had experience with it. But let’s dig deeper.

The bells-and-whistles companies that tout large user conferences and an abundance of consultants usually have secondary costs which are rarely investigated.  For example, I saw a recent posting for a “Marketo Expert.” The pay is $100,000+ per year (plus benefits). This tells me three things:

  1. The company is no longer looking for the best marketing mind. They are looking for a robot that knows how to use a complex software package that is already an anchor tied to their ankles.
  2. There probably isn’t a back-up resource with the expertise to use this software, meaning that they are in limbo as a result of lacking this resource.
  3. I would bet you dinner at a nice steak house that when the budget was submitted (and ROI was calculated) that a figure north of $200,000 was not presented to the CEO to buy this software. I’m also going to bet that this decision was driven by an employee that was looking to increase their personal value/salary as opposed to making the recommendation that was truly in the company’s best interest.

What’s even more upsetting is how discriminatory such rocketship systems are. If you need to be an “expert” in the software, it makes you wonder how the rest of your sales and marketing team will be able to collaborate and improve upon the value of such software via execution. How will the maximum number of our employees be able to benefit if the marketing automation platform that you’ve chosen needs someone solely dedicated to that particular brand?

Here is the good news: Even at a price point of $200,000+, and even after leaving untold thousands (or millions) of dollars on the table, this company’s marketing automation program is still likely to be profitable. What we should be asking ourselves is this: Why did we make this decision, when there are so many other programs out there that could have a greater impact on our bottom line. Why didn’t we demand ease of use over functionality that is difficult to use? Why are we willing to place our marketing execution program on the head of a single person, when we should rather be looking at things on a much broader scale?

There’s a better answer. Choose a marketing automation platform that is easy to learn, and doesn’t come with a bunch of hidden, extra costs for it to function properly. Choose a marketing automation platform that has a Support Team that will bend over backwards to help you achieve your marketing and sales goals, which simultaneously automating your lead scoring, segmentations, campaigns, and more. Choose Lead Liaison. 

Ryan Schefke

Should You Build Your Website on the HubSpot CMS?

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Are you thinking you should build your website on the HubSpot CMS? In this post we’ll cover five key points to consider.

COS vs. CMS

HubSpot refers to it’s platform to host and build your website as a COS, a Content Optimization System. On the other hand, other popular systems such as WordPress refer to their platform as a CMS, a Content Management System. HubSpot creatively uses the word “optimization” as they have mechanisms to help with SEO and personalization of content. These are not differentiating factors though – and you have to pay for the ability to personalize your content. For example, with SEO, there are readily available, and free, SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack, that you could easily add to your WordPress instance to start optimizing content. Regarding personalization, you can only do it if you’re using everything HubSpot. It might be wise to choose a solution to personalize content that is independent of the underlying platform. For example, Lead Liaison provides SiteEngage™, to create dynamic website content, which can be deployed on any CMS. If you talked to HubSpot, they’d pitch you on their COS having everything in it to handle marketing activities, like email marketing, social media, CTAs, and more. If you didn’t use the HubSpot CMS, and opted for something like WordPress instead, HubSpot would tell you that you’ll end up needing a bunch of other plug-ins to make your website work with marketing activities. Well, that’s not true. What you really need is a good marketing platform that can do all of that for you. Case in point, with something like Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation™ platform, it includes all the facilities to successfully track inbound marketing and deliver omni-channel outbound marketing, without the need to install plug-ins. Regardless of your CMS, you’ll have the flexibility to launch marketing campaigns and embed forms and CTAs into your CMS.

CMS Market Share

hubspot cms market shareAs of this post, WordPress had 59.2% market share, followed by Joomla! with 6.9% and Drupal with 4.7% according to w3techs.com. HubSpot CMS had .2%. That’s not a lot of market share that’s been gained in 11+ years (HubSpot CMS available since 2006). I’m not a betting man, but I wouldn’t put my money into a system that is not widely used, supported by a single company (not a community), has limited choices for plug-ins/integrations, and costs a lot of money.

Proprietary vs. Open Source

Proprietary systems such as HubSpot’s CMS are going to be expensive, and restrictive. You’ll easily end up spending 10s of thousands of dollars on a proprietary platform. The advantage of a proprietary system is that the provider, HubSpot in this case, controls the entire experience. They can make sure everything works well together. On the other hand, a system like WordPress is open source, meaning there’s no charge to use it. You might spend $40 to $60 on a theme, but you’ll have millions of plug-ins. WordPress is the CMS that runs more than 25% of all websites across the world! According to ManageWP, you’d be in good company with sites like The New York Times, National Geographic, Forbes, etc. using WordPress. The number of available choices to offered by an open source system vs. a proprietary system are overwhelming.

Choices, Locked Down or Freedom to Move

With over 50,800 plug-ins and growing daily, 72 translations of WordPress, average of $50 per hour for developers, and thousands of themes, you’ve got choices with open source systems like WordPress. With a proprietary system, choices are limited only to what the vendor provides or the vendors community provides. With .2% market share, don’t hope for much.

This statement from The Sales Lion does a good job of summarizing migration challenges if you’re on the HubSpot CMS and want to get off of it:

Both platforms are completely independent, and therefore there is no easy way to migrate from one to another. There is no simple export process to easily move your Hubspot site to WordPress or vice versa.

If you are moving from Hubspot to WordPress, you’ll have to build each page again, through a copy and paste process. CSS styling will have to be duplicated to match the styling from the previous site. This can be done more easily by building a theme for WordPress that matches that of your HubSpot site.

On the other hand, migrating between WordPress themes is easy! All of your data is stored in the same database. Changing the themes is as easy as making a few button clicks in the UI. The ability to choose between 1,000s of different themes is great. There’s no doubt your website will need a facelift every 5 to 10 years. Are you ready to easily make the change?

The Bottom Line

You definitely have a choice. If you want to have a sense of ownership of your website, go with an open source system. To quote Snyxius.com about WordPress vs. HubSpot:

The interface of the WordPress is so simple that you don’t have to rely on other to make changes or fix a tiny error for you. You can do it on your own this way. You are in full control of your site and your wallet.

I’m sure you’d be devastated if you went down the path of using the HubSpot CMS and didn’t like it. What would you do then? Probably not much, because HubSpot would own your entire site. It’s kind of like owning your own storefront, or leasing from someone else. If you had the chance to own your store front, you could do whatever you want. If you don’t, the landlord has complete control. Let’s just hope they don’t kick you out. In summary, make sure you set yourself up for maximum flexibility. Have a little diversity with your marketing, don’t put all of your eggs in a single basket, and make a good decision for the long run.