Lead Liaison

Should I Write Business Blog Posts?

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Business blogs can be somewhat of a hot topic, as it relates to marketing investments. It might not be for every company, or every employee. Regardless, it’s important to think through the pro’s and con’s of starting (and maintaining!) a business blog before committing.

The Con’s of a Business Blog

  • It’s time consuming. You need to actually put thought into your business blog posts so that they offer value. You also want to strategically pick a topic that will drive traffic to your blog, and therefore your website. Brainstorming topics and content can take time away from other, more pressing tasks. And you’ll likely not see immediate results, so that isn’t very encouraging.
  • It can feel like busywork. Sometimes, you won’t have a fresh idea, yet you’ll still feel compelled to remain on a “content schedule” (which is important to business blog success). Content schedules are usually how marketers organize posts from team members and guest writers. It ensures that they regularly hit that goal. However, it can also lead to boring, uninspired posts if you’re not careful.
  • It goes out of date quickly. As the internet is flooded with business blog posts from companies large and small, readers are trained to look at the date of a post. If it wasn’t within the last year (give or take), and didn’t generate a lot of traffic right off the bat, it’s basically irrelevant. It feels like it was a waste of time and effort.

The Pro’s of a Business Blog

  • It increases search ranking. Google, and other search engines, have a part of their algorithm that rewards you for having lots of pages, rich with keywords, and that have been recently published. Since every blog counts as a page, there is a theory that this can help your company appear more in searches.
  • Still on the topic of search engine optimization (SEO), search engines heavily weigh the number of external sites linking to your website. External links to your business blog prove your content contains helpful, relevant information. A great blog can serve as “link bait” that other websites will be inclined to reference, creating those important external links (source). It can also help you shed light on internal links that are buried deep within your website, by linking them in your copy.
  • It’s an easy way to publish fresh content, and speak directly to your client base. And even if your clients aren’t reading blogs on a regular basis, they most likely are searching Google for answers.
  • It’s a relevant excuse to post to social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and get your name out there, encouraging brand awareness.
  • If you put proper thought and consideration into your blog post topics and content, it can be a great way to establish your company as thought leaders in your industry. There’s always a conversation going on online, and it’s important to be a part of it. Clients and Prospects will look to you as a reliable resource for information on your industry, and will (hopefully) then come to you when they are ready to buy.
  • Blogs are a relatively cost-efficient marketing investment. Your business probably already has a website. All it really costs is time.
  • It encourages your blog contributors to research, learn, and stay on top of news and trends. What better way to facilitate learning and inspire ideas?

The Conclusion

The decision to spend time on blog posts is going to be unique to your business. If you or your team is not fully on board, it will be like pulling teeth. If your company needs help with improving its Google ratings, and you can dedicate 30-40 minutes a week to come up with fresh content, blogs are wonderful. However, if you have a strong online presence already, and are already considered thought leaders, blogging may be unlikely to show you a true ROI.

Tips

If your organization does decide to publish a company blog, here are a few tips.

  • Request contributions from your colleagues. Ask qualified people on your team to take 20 minutes out of their week to email you a few paragraphs about something they have been thinking about that week, as it relates to your business and industry. You can then do the grunt work of making it blog-ready, and your posts will have more perspective and expertise if intelligent team members agree to contribute.
  • Create a content calendar, and stick to it. Decide how many posts you’d like to do per week, when you plan to post, and where you plan on sharing (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Make it a part of your weekly process.
  • Actively promote your content. Your blog won’t shoot to the top of search engines overnight. It takes work, dedication, and intentional promotion.

Interested in how Lead Liaison integrates with your website? Read our post on our Squarespace integration here.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation with Squarespace

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Marketing automation with Squarespace is easy to do when you connect two systems together, specifically – your website and marketing automation platform. As a standalone solution, Squarespace is a fantastic, cost effective way to build and manage your businesses website. However, without connecting it to a marketing automation platform you won’t be able to take advantage of data you collect on your website and run effective marketing campaigns with that data. Two important integration points are website traffic and form collection.

Lead Liaison provides a marketing automation platform that integrates these two areas, among others, with Squarespace. Customer’s using Squarespace as their website platform can easily add a few lines of JavaScript code into the footer or header of their Squarespace website. Once done, the marketing automation platform will begin tracking visitor activity, including names of businesses and people (something Google Analytics cannot do), and build rich profiles of visitor activity. As the system monitors visitor engagement, such as pages visited, documents downloaded, videos watched, on-site search terms, button/link clicks, and much more, a robust profile is created. This information is valuable insight that sales reps can use when contacting their prospect or following up website visitors. Marketers can also use this information for analytics, to gage how effective their Squarespace website is.

Web forms are another area where marketing automation platforms like Lead Liaison and Squarespace integrate. In Lead Liaison, users can build and style smart web forms and easily embed those into their Squarespace page. The smart web forms can pre-fill data, use advanced features like progress profiling, and most importantly easily capture the lead and/or inquiry and add it to your CRM. With the marketing automation platform, businesses can easily wrap critical business processes around the form submission. For example, lead distribution, lead qualification, lead follow up, and lead nurturing are all processes that can be built and automated using the marketing automation platform.

Once the marketing automation does it’s job of turning the Squarespace website from a static platform into an inbound marketing machine, marketers can use the rich data collected to run sophisticated outbound marketing campaigns. Instead of using basic email integrations with Squarespace, such as Mailchimp, for outbound communication, marketers can now leverage the true power of a modern day outbound marketing platform to run their campaigns. Marketing automation platforms like Lead Liaison help deliver omni-channel communications. Omni-channel communication includes both offline and online marketing channels. Instead of relying only on email, marketers can easily send handwritten letters, postcards, text messages, and more as one-off campaigns to select prospects, or as part of an advanced automated campaign. Imagine hooking up marketing automation with Squarespace and being able to automate a process around a web form submission. For example, the visitor comes to your Squarespace website, submits a form, gets an immediate response, gets sent to the right sales rep at the right time, then gets nurtured on behalf of the sales rep (because they’re not quite ready to buy – a common occurrence!). All of these things are possible when you connect your Squarespace website with a marketing automation platform like Lead Liaison.

One final area of integration is with dynamic content. Lead Liaison provides a solution called SiteEngage™, which adds a level of higher engagement to your Squarespace website. With this solution, businesses can tailor embedded content (images/text) on their Squarespace site to the visitor’s interests. For example, changing a text headline stating that your company loves working with people in the visitor’s state. Since your marketing automation platform will know where the visitor is from, this information can be used to personalize the website experience. The other benefit of making your Squarespace website dynamic with SiteEngage™, is with popups. In addition to smart web forms, Lead Liaison can use pop ups to help convert more visitors to your Squarespace website. These pop ups can use information on the visitor, like the state mentioned above, to tailor the content in the pop up. Pop ups can be trigger by button clicks, page scrolls, exit intent (closing the browser or hitting the back button), and page clicks.

To learn more about how you can integrate your Squarespace website with a marketing automation platform like Lead Liaison contact us today!

Lead Liaison

3 Awesome Results from Visitor Tracking

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If you’ve been in marketing for any amount of time, you know that Inbound Marketing is all the rage and visitor tracking is a must. That great content on your website doesn’t mean much if you don’t know who’s engaging with it.  But you know that already.

What you may not know is what you can get out of visitor tracking other than simply which pages on your website get the most traffic. When you use a visitor tracking platform like Lead Liaison’s ProspectVision™, you’ll be surprised what you can learn about your prospects, your content, and your campaigns. We’re going to look at some of the awesome results you get from visitor tracking.

Sales Learns What Visitors Care About

Having done B2B sales in the past, I can confidently say that prospecting isn’t fun. What’s worse is that a lot of old techniques aren’t working anymore. Knocking on random doors, smiling and dialing, and sending out cold email blasts isn’t going to get you a meeting. According to this great article at Forbes, only 1% of cold calls result in a deal, and 90% of decision makers don’t take cold calls. So how do you get around that? With a warm call, of course.

The great thing about prospecting from your website is that you know the prospect is already somewhat interested in you. More importantly, you can get in their heads. By seeing where they’ve gone, what videos they watched (or which parts of a video the skipped), and what content they’ve downloaded, you can get a pretty clear picture of what is important to them.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Check out this video to learn how HRchitect was able to close one of their biggest deals in one of their shortest sales cycles thanks to ProspectVision֭™

Marketers Can Evaluate the Value of the Campaigns

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, visitor tracking is not just for sales people. Marketers can use visitor tracking to rate the effectiveness of their campaigns. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a marketing effort is really worth it. Did the campaign generate any prospects? Did that, in turn, generate an opportunity? Did that opportunity close with a win?

When combined with Marketing Automation like Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ platform, it’s easy to learn where your precious marketing dollars are best spent. Imagine knowing not just where your prospects came from (organic search, PPC ad, etc.), but which campaigns have brought in the most visitors that later converted to prospects.

Since I help with many of our implementations, I’ve seen marketers be absolutely shocked by some of the things they’ve learned. Recently I was helping a client connect their Google AdWords account to Lead Liaison. Once we’d imported the data and connected it to the appropriate Prospect Profiles, he was shocked. He had spent over $10,000 on one ad campaign which ended up only creating 125 converted Prospects. That was $80 per Prospect with an email he could contact. Needless to say, he reallocated the budget for that campaign to one that was significantly more effective, reducing his cost per prospect from AdWords by about $65.   

You Learn Where Your Website is Doing Great (and What Needs Improving)

Chances are you have decent traffic to your home page. You probably also have at least one or two other pages that are visited at least somewhat frequently. Chances are also that you have content that hasn’t seen the light of day since it was put on your site.

With visitor tracking, you can learn which pieces of content are attracting the most visitors. By figuring out what is and isn’t working, you can continue to tweak your content to fit your user base. That’s the core of Inbound Marketing; delivering quality content that attracts visitors to your website.

You might be thinking “I already know which pages are visited the most and what content my visitors engage the most.” That’s great if you do, but like I said before, solutions like ProspectVision™ do so much more.

For every visitor, we create a prospect profile with a timeline. Even before we know their email and can identify them, we’re watching what they do. Sure, they might still convert with the same piece of content that everyone else seems attracted to, but the might have spent months anonymously poking around other parts of your site. With our timelines, we can show you the steps they took to get to that conversion. This is powerful insight into your prospects’ minds.

I can’t stress this enough: if you don’t have a visitor tracking solution, get one. If you’d like to know more about what ProspectVision™ and Lead Management Automation™ can do, click here for a demo.

Lead Liaison

Nonprofits Need Marketing Automation – Lead Liaison Knows Why

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Allen, TX – Marketing automation provider, Lead Liaison, announced this week that they have added another valuable collection of content to their library of resources. This collection is specific to nonprofit organizations, and has been dubbed their “Nonprofit Kit.”

Nonprofits have meaningful stories to tell, but often times lack the manpower and budget to make the desired impact. Attracting donors and increasing donations positively influences the communities around them. It’s becoming evermore important to track marketing efforts, communicate more efficiently, and increase brand awareness. This is why Lead Liaison took it upon themselves to create a “kit” that is tailored specifically to nonprofits.

The nonprofit kit includes a to-do checklist used for implementing a marketing automation strategy, specific to nonprofits. It contains case studies and testimonials that give color and context to the strategies that Lead Liaison recommends. The kit even includes a presentation that can be passed along to decision-makers, designed to help user-level employees demonstrate the benefits of implementing marketing automation to their supervisors.

Lead Liaison’s Nonprofit Kit encourages nonprofits to trigger personalized communication post-donation, and to build a communication plan to nurture potential online donors, current givers, or people who have given in the past. The kit covers the range of functionality that Lead Liaison offers, utilizing omni-channel marketing which fuels fundraising.

Capabilities like Lead Liaison’s website personalization solution, called SiteEngage™, allows nonprofits to connect with their customer or donor, identify what they are looking for, and provide content that better meets their needs and expectations. Lead Liaison also collects and manages donor information that might be otherwise overlooked or tossed aside. According to Neon CRM, 57% of nonprofits say they aren’t getting the most out of their donor data when it comes to crafting fundraising strategies. Lead Liaison also provides a CRM, OneFocus™, to aid nonprofit organizations with donor tracking as they progress through the giving stages and beyond.

Lead Liaison also assists with fundraising events. Fundraising events are an important part of nonprofit strategies. Lead Liaison can manage any event – from invitation and reminders to follow-up. Their mobile information capture app, GoCapture!™, allows nonprofits to collect donor information on site. Once that information is collected through the app, it is transferred to Lead Liaison’s database, providing an end-to-end event management experience.

Many nonprofits have taken advantage of this kit, and the sales and marketing solution-provider is confident that it will continue to contribute greatly to the rise in giving over the last few years.

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

Automated Patient Health Surveillance Provider Snap40 Selects Lead Liaison to Power Their Marketing Automation

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Allen, TX – Lead Liaison, a provider in cloud-based sales and marketing solutions, announced this week that UK-based health surveillance provider snap40 selected Lead Liaison’s platform to power their marketing automation.

Snap40 is headquartered in Scotland with offices expanding into the United States. They are ambitious about building a global company, meeting the needs of patients around the world.

Snap40 received funding and a great deal of support from The Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) over the last year, allowing them to expand their staff locally and internationally. This expansion resulted in an even greater need to streamline and organize their marketing and sales efforts. They needed a solution to help them in several key areas. They wanted more support for their prospecting process and their outreach to new accounts. They also wanted to increase engagement, capture interest, and nurture prospects based on those interests.

Snap40 found their solution in Lead Liaison. They were drawn to the marketing automation platform because of Lead Liaison’s reputation for supporting their clients. “It’s been super impressive,” says CEO and Co-Founder of snap40, Christopher McCann. “There has not been a time when we needed something and [their team] hasn’t delivered.” McCann made a concerted effort to point out that the Lead Liaison onboarding team even reached out to him when they saw improvements that could be made to their process.

It’s not just the support that attracted snap40 to Lead Liaison. They were also impressed by the level of innovation that Lead Liaison offers. “If we have a feature request, with other companies, it’s politely received. In our case with Lead Liaison, these requests are coming to fruition,” says McCann.

Snap40 just completed their onboarding with Lead Liaison. Unlike similar solutions, Lead Liaison offers an in-depth, hands on approach to onboarding. Their team aligns from the very beginning to ensure that their clients start off on the right foot. Each client is assigned a Team Lead, who serves as the client’s advocate during the lifetime of their relationship with Lead Liaison. In addition to the Team Lead, Lead Liaison provides a Solutions Specialist to help train each client during the onboarding period. These offerings are part of Lead Liaison’s Quickstart onboarding package. After the onboarding period, which usually lasts three months, Lead Liaison’s world renowned Support is available 24/7.

The health surveillance provider is a huge advocate of one of Lead Liaison’s most unique capabilities: handwritten letters. Snap40 implemented the use of handwritten letters immediately. “People don’t expect it,” says McCann. “We are communicating with a conservative market. [Handwritten letters] are not often used, so it really catches their attention. That’s all we really wanted. We wanted to raise the level of awareness for our company. This is a very physical way of interacting with a prospect – giving them something they can hold in their hand.”

“We wouldn’t have been able to do this if it wasn’t so easy,” McCann explains. “We have limited resources and don’t have the time to write it ourselves.” Snap40 recently had a prospect reach out to them because they received a handwritten letter – something many companies only dream of happening. In the last three months alone, they’ve sent nearly 1,000  handwritten letters. Lead Liaison has saved the company enormous amounts of time, and increased the level of high-touch communication with their prospects. McCann goes on, “We also wanted to send a flyer along with the letter. Lead Liaison added the capability to add a flyer. The fact that our prospect can hold something physical in their hand creates more awareness.” Fliers are being distributed along with the handwritten letter, with different versions for the US and UK. Snap40 has plans for several hundred more letters as they continue to capitalize on the opportunity to be unique in their market.

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).