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!
Lead Liaison

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).

 

Lead Liaison

How to Prepare Your Business for a Marketing Automation Tool

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marketing automation checklistAre you wondering how to prepare your business for a marketing automation tool? Marketing automation lets you automate various processes, but before you can enjoy the benefits, you need to prepare your business for the software. Otherwise, you won’t be able to use the various features. If you take the time to prepare your website and your business for visitor tracking and other marketing automation tools beforehand, you’ll enjoy the wealth of benefits they provide.

Set Goals and Identify KPIs

Your marketing automation success rests with your ability to identify goals and develop key performance indicators based on those goals. Once you know your goals, you can program your marketing automation tools to help you achieve them. At the same time, the KPIs will ensure that you collect and measure the right data at all times. Then, you’ll know if you’re on the right track or if you need to make adjustments so you can reach your goals.

Build Up Your Content

Many companies start with marketing automation tools, only to realize they don’t have enough content. These tools work best when there is a lot of content available. In the marketing world, there is no such thing as too much quality content. Put your team to work and have them create some great content for you. Build it up as much as possible before you deploy your marketing automation software.

Identify Your Funnel

Companies often have poorly defined sales funnels, even within their own walls. For example, sales and marketing teams might refer to different groups as leads. In order for marketing automation to work, you need to have a clearly defined sales funnel, and everyone in the organization must understand the funnel and how it works. Discuss the names for each part of the funnel and agree on how people pass through the funnel. Also, discuss the probability of people moving from one point of the funnel to the next. In addition, determine when you need to send someone from the funnel to your sales team so your team can close the deal. You need to iron out all of these details before moving forward.

Once you have everything ready, you are ready to take the plunge with marketing automation! Everything will be ready, making the integration much smoother. Then, you can dive right in with minimal downtime. Your processes will be up and running before you know it.

Ready to schedule your demo? Click here!
Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: What is Dynamic Content?

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Dynamic Content: its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Are you asking yourself, what is dynamic content?

dynamic contentDynamic content can be the magic link between content and conversions. It is content within a website, a form, a landing page, or an email that changes based on the interests or past behaviors of the viewer. It creates an experience that is customized for the viewer that that moment, and can quickly grab your prospect’s or customer’s attention by personalizing content to the visitor.

It eliminates the need for multiple landing pages, depending on things like location. If you want your webpage to have an image of barbeque when someone from Texas is viewing your page, that’s an example of a dynamic webpage. It’s a way to hyper-target your audience.

How does it work?

Marketing automation tools such as Lead Liaison build a rich profile of your website visitors that strengthens over time. That tool can then combine behavioral information (things the visitor does within your website) with demographics from your CRM. Then, that data can be retrieved in real-time and used in a rule set that tells the system when and where to show personalized content.

You can set dynamic content to change based off of things like:

  • Location
  • Lead score
  • Actions taken (such as clicks, email opens, document downloads, and more)

You can use it to:

  • Customize a viewer’s web experience
  • Personalize emails – a viewer’s name is retrieved from your contact database and inserted into the email

“In-house marketers who are personalizing web experiences and who are also able to quantify the improvement (in the context of online sales or their key website performance metric) are seeing, on average, a 19% uplift in sales.” – Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy

Dynamic content is a powerful tool for businesses, marketers, and for user experience. Learn more about implementing this within your own marketing by clicking here:

Tell me more!
Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Lead Scoring – The Fast Way to Convert Leads

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lead scoringIn order for marketing automation to be successful, you need to understand the quality of your leads. Leads are evaluated based on their readiness to buy, with cold leads requiring a lot of nurturing and hot leads ready to take their credit cards out and buy. Lead scoring is an effective way to identify hot leads, so that you can send them over to your sales team. Companies that do this properly spend more time focusing on leads that are “ripe”, while “unripe” leads continue to be nurtured through other automations.

Lead Scoring 101 – How It Works

When people visit your site, they complete a series of actions, and each action tells a story. If someone reads your About Us page, it shows a little bit of interest. However, if someone drops something in a shopping cart or downloads a white paper, it tells a different story. Every person who visits your website is a lead but each person is different, and you must treat them as such. You cannot treat the person who visits your About Us page the same as you treat the person who abandons something in the shopping cart.

That’s where lead scoring comes into play. With this marketing automation strategy, you assign a value to each action on your site. For instance, you could say that putting something in a shopping cart is worth 100 points and downloading a white paper is worth 50 points.

Setting a Target Score with Lead Scoring

You will need to set a target score that indicates a lead is ready to go to your sales team. This magic number means someone is ready to talk to a member of the team and make a purchase. Don’t set this number too low, or you’ll aggravate your visitors. Then again, don’t set it too high, or you’ll lose potential customers. This will take some practice. Spend some time finding your industry’s sweet spot. Each industry (and even each company) has its own sweet spot. Finally, don’t pick a number and stick with it. Have sales and marketing work together to always fine tune the lead scoring threshold. Consider creating a sales and marketing service level agreement to identify what should be scored.

Consider Other Qualifications Besides Lead Scoring

For many companies, lead scoring isn’t enough. Qualify your leads further by combining lead scoring with additional criteria, such as age, location, education level, company, and more using concepts like lead grading. It’s possible to adjust the lead score based on these criteria to better represent the quality of the lead.

Lead scoring is an advanced process and one you should not take on by yourself. It’s something that you get set a process for and move on, giving you more time to closing that deal. Automate it with easy-to-use software like Lead Liaison. This lead scoring software will help you identify your leads and convert them into customers.

Get a Demo of Lead Scoring

 

Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Landing Page

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Landing Pages: its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

What is a landing page?

As it relates to marketing automation, a landing page is a web page that has two functions: to convert a lead and to serve up information. So we should start there. Converting a lead means to take a prospect (or “lead”) and convert them into a contact or an opportunity.

Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. – Search Engine Land

The way a landing page converts a lead is usually by a form. It is typically reached through clicking a link or advertisement. It is a key component of any marketing campaign, and exists as a way to measure campaign traffic.

The most valuable thing you can get from a landing page is a person’s email address. In exchange for that, you can offer all sorts of things like:

  • Coupons
  • Downloadable content
  • Free trials
  • Access to a cool video

What should it look like?

A landing page should be uncluttered. Visitors typically only spend about 5 seconds interpreting what is needed from these types of pages. The call to action should be clear. For example, “Submit your name and email address for a 50% off coupon!”

If within 3 seconds, the visitor can’t assimilate how the page will benefit them in any way then they won’t stay. – True Conversion

It’s common for landing pages to exist on their own, without navigation to the main website or menu. The page should look like it is a part of your website (same color scheme, logo, etc), but only have one option: to collect the visitor’s information.

With the right software, you can build trackable landing pages into your marketing campaigns in no time.

Get started building landing pages and more!

 

Lead Liaison

7 Ways to Attract B2B Buyers With Mobile Marketing

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B2B Mobile Marketing

This article was posted as a Guest Blog Post by our affiliates at Trumpia. 

Google is now reporting that 42 percent of B2B buyers are starting their research process on their phones. This number will only continue to rise as the B2B buyers increase with Millennial professionals who are well-versed in mobile technology.

Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile are seeing a downward ranking on Google (who knows full well that their users are often on devices with smaller screens). Users that land on pages poorly designed for their device are likely to back out and go somewhere else. No one wants to pinch and scroll just to read the marketing message or try to click in tiny links to navigate a page. Instead, companies need to use optimized web site designs so that their pages fit on any screen. Optimized pages load quickly and are set up differently to fit on smaller screens.

1. Design Responsive Emails

Along with your website, your emails are going to be likely viewed on mobile devices as well. In order to have easily readable emails, you will want to utilize responsive designs that will adapt to the screen size they are viewed on. Keep your subject line brief, preferably 3-5 words so that it won’t be cut off by the device. Limit your graphics and compress them to a small size so that you won’t even add a second to the email load time.

2. Build an App

Apps are frequently used by mobile users. Many businesses are finding that an app specific to their brand products or services can help increase retention with users. Apps can help draw back customers by managing rewards programs, streamlining the order process, enhancing the purchase experience and more. In order to create an app that really adds benefit to your customers, you will want to identify a very specific type of customer or lead and then focus on services that will directly address a business pain or marketing strategy for that type of customer. Don’t make your apps too broad or they will cease to be of any real value to anyone.

3. Utilize Established App Platforms

When you realize that mobile marketing is important to snagging a major part of your audience, then you will also realize that many apps are already getting a lot of attention. Use popular apps, like Facebook and LinkedIn, to address an audience that loves to browse content. Pinterest and Instagram appeal to leads that love looking at visual inspiration. Make sure you keep your profile updated with valuable content and fill out all details (especially contact information), so your viewers don’t have to search to find you later.

4. Create Optimized Landing Pages

If you’ve already optimized your website and email campaigns, then you will want to start creating optimized landing pages. These are going to be different than your typical landing page, because they will be designed to fast action and streamlined CTAs. Keep your pages short, sweet and visually straightforward. Remember that keeping information “above the fold” (before the user has to scroll further down on the screen to see more) is important for getting your message across immediately.

5. Trim Your Content

All of this optimizing for smaller screens is going to mean that you need to write content that is concise. While an article can be a longer form of content, your web pages, landing pages and emails all need to be to the point. SMS is a great way to deliver snappy content directly to a user’s device. It is especially important to keep your headlines short, as well as subject lines and headers that break up your content.

6. Foster Sharability

There are several things you can do to increase sharing and engagement from your B2B audience:

  • Don’t focus on your brand — focus on what your audience needs and wants
  • Post about industry important topics, trends, tips and stories that are not product- or service-related
  • Utilize emotion to drive importance — users that feel empowered, sad, scared, enraged or inspired are more likely to share the content they identify with
  • Use images to intrigue readers to stop scrolling and click on your content — images throughout the text will also keep your users eyes moving

7. Streamline Your Funnel

Finally, make sure you are very careful to create a sales funnel that does not have rabbit trails for your leads. Mobile users are making decisions quickly, while they are on the go, taking a short break or waiting on something. Keep your CTA clear and singularly focused so they are not distracted before getting to a decision point.

What’s Next?

How do you ensure that your customer is getting the best mobile experience possible when interacting with your brand? Make sure to share them with us in the comments below. I would love to read them.

Author Biography

Sophorn Chhay is the marketing guy at  Trumpia, a mobile content delivery service that allows users to customize their one-to-one marketing efforts by interconnecting and optimizing all digital platforms. As an innovator in two-way SMS/MMS marketing, Trumpia’s mission is to empower brands and public figures with interactive access to their audiences, reaching targeted affinity groups in a personal way. Trumpia delivers world-class content such as video, ticketing, polling, products sales, contests and giveaways.

Follow Sophorn on Twitter (@Trumpia), LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation Company Introduces World’s Easiest to Use Web Form Builder

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ALLEN, TX — July 14, 2016 — Lead Liaison, a leader in marketing automation software, announces exciting new features to enhance user experience within their top rated platform.

World’s Easiest to Use Web Form Builder

Great marketing automation companies are superb listeners. One attribute that Lead Liaison is known for is the attention they give to what users have to say about their application. This upgrade is no different. Feedback indicated that there was a need for an easier interface when creating forms within Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their new form builder, which mirrors user experience for their email builder, was released last week. It features drag and drop functionality and the ability to customize color, fonts, field sizes and more with just one click. This feature is expected to cut down on time markers spend creating campaign content.

Jen Worsham, Director of Marketing & Client Relations at Lead Liaison says “Being able to style a form from the user interface is huge! Prior to this new generation form builder, customers would have to create separate style sheets. Now, they simply select colors, fonts, and more with a few mouse clicks. This visual web form builder lessens the dependency that marketers need for IT and web developers to assist them in the form creation process.”

Email Enhancements that Save Time

Lead Liaison already makes database segmentation easy, allowing users to segment their leads into various categories, based off of things like lead score or location. In previous versions, users would need to build a separate list within the email function of the app in order to target specific groups. Now, they’ve made communicating to those groups even easier with their “Send to portion of database” email option.

“Our visual email builder is the best in the industry, hands down. It’s super easy to construct emails with our drag and drop designer. Now the user gets an inline experience, where they can create and send an email to a new list all without having to diverge from the core email sending experience. I expect a lot of marketers to recoup more of their valuable time with this new time-saving feature.” – Worsham

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, visithttp://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).
Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

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Clickthrough Rate (CTR): its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Companies dedicate a lot of resources to creating marketing content. But what’s more important is measuring the effectiveness of that content, so that you know where to spend those marketing dollars going forward. The calculation of a particular content’s clickthrough rate can be an effective tool to measure how well your keywords and ads are performing. It calculates the number of clicks that your link receives divided by the number of times your link is shown,  formatted as a percentage.

clickthrough rateA Quantifiable Number

These days, it’s hard to measure the emotional reaction to a piece of virtual content. Measuring the clickthrough rate allows you to see who engaged with an ad or call to action (CTA) in an email campaign – indicating that they were interested. A high CTR says that people want to know more. A low CTR indicates that your ad might need some improvement, or possibly that your call to action was not relevant enough.

Observation

Another way to measure interest in your content, particularly sales emails, would be with a tracking plugin. This allows you to observe the clickthrough. Lead Liaison has a Google Mail plugin called Send & Track, which allows senders to track 1:1 emails by reporting if and when the recipient opened a link within the message. What’s more, when a recipient clicks on the link within your email, Lead Liaison’s ProspectVision™ is then able to connect that person to all of their actions within your website.

The key is to find out what’s working and what’s not. Paying attention to this information will help justify resources spent, and will make you more prepared to make content decisions going forward.