Page 31 – Lead Liaison

Create Stronger Copy by Appealing to Customers Instincts

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

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

Need to Belong

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

Hate the Enemy

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

Good Story Sells

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

Instant Gratification

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

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

Using Marketing Automation to Collect Meaningful Customer Feedback

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

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

Is the Feedback Going to be Useful?

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

Frame Questions Well to Receive Good Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Page, VP of Customer Success, adds:

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

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution that helps businesses accelerate sales by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales support with solutions such as a hot-lead dashboard, Buy Signals and a live ticker alert of businesses on the customer’s website. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas, and employs 22 people. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Build a Stronger Conversion Rate Optimization Structure

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

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

Content is King

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

Test Constantly

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

Be Prepared for the Long Term

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

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

Enliven Your Social Media Presence with These Social Media Strategies

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

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

Look for Successful Examples in Strange Places

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

Look for Examples in Parallel Markets

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

Take Advantage of Marketing Automation Tools

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

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

Create Personas to Guide Your Marketing Automation

July 30, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

In order to create strong, relevant copy that connects and engages leads, understand how your potential customers are thinking about your product and how you can influence their thinking. In order to do that you need to understand who you are marketing to and how your product or services interact complement each person. One great way to do this is to create profiles to guide your marketing automation strategies. Keep reading to learn how to go about creating these profiles and how to get the most information out of them.

Identify Personas

The first thing to do to begin recognizing who your leads are and how they could potentially interact with your business is gather all relevant data you have about your leads and customers. Gather things like demographics, buying statistics, job titles and any other information that may be useful. Start organizing this data by either creating a spreadsheet and then grouping relevant information, or by using the somewhat more old school method of writing traits on post-it notes and creating affinity diagrams. Look for patterns and ask questions of yourself and each other of why certain traits are being grouped together. You can also use technology like lead grading to qualify your database. Here’s a small sales tool that can help you group, score and/or grade your database.

Hone Personas

Once you have some basic groupings defined, it’s time to dig into them and define the typical individual that represents this group, what they want and how your product can provide that. This process establishes your the ideal buyer. If you have a way to get in touch with an actual customer or lead who fits within one of the different groups, then approach them. You’ll gain valuable insight that may be hard to glean from simply comparing data sets. Identify whether your groups are too narrow or too broad, and combine or divide them accordingly. Once you feel comfortable with your groups, personalize them by creating a persona with a name and a story, and try to determine how your product or service can help them solve their problems.

Share Personas

Now that you have your personas established, named and their behavior and background defined, it is time to share your work with coworkers. Email your findings around the department, and put personas up on the wall so people have an opportunity to think about the people they are creating content or design features for. The goal is to ultimately come to a shared understanding within your team of who you are working to appeal to, and that shared understanding should influence all communication being sent to your leads.

When using this technique to create personas to guide your marketing automation, remember, it doesn’t stop at the creation of a persona that helps you understand your customers. Always continue to perform A/B testing to see how different groups react to different material, and don’t be afraid to tailor content to specific groups. To learn more about understanding how your customers view your marketing materials, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.

What Is Marketing Automation, and Why Do You Need It?

July 23, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Marketing automation is a buzz term that has become increasingly common over the past several years. Although it might sound like a new concept, marketing automation has actually been around since late 1990s; it is only now that we have begun to hear more about it. So, what exactly is it, and is marketing automation something that your company needs?

What Is Marketing Automation?

In the most basic sense, marketing automation utilizes a single system for tracking data for leads, generating reports for all of your company’s marketing activities, and automating those activities. Certain features are also used in marketing automation to trigger marketing activities without the need for human interaction, saving significant time and resources.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can provide companies of all sizes with a vast number of benefits, including the ability to function more efficiently, capture more leads, and develop a more granular understanding of data.

One of the most important benefits of marketing automation is the fact that it offers the opportunity to generate more leads without expanding your budget. This can be particularly beneficial for small businesses and startups with limited budgets. By automating manual tasks, marketing departments are able to allocate more time to the creative side of marketing.

Marketing automation also offers the opportunity to prove return on investment for marketing efforts. Regardless of company size, the need to prove ROI always exists. Marketing at any level can be expensive, and companies must be able to show financial justification. With marketing automation, it becomes possible to track and report on leads, thus linking marketing efforts to proven sales opportunities.

Companies will also find that marketing automation can be quite empowering in terms of building online marketing campaigns. If you feel uncomfortable working with code, marketing automation can help you benefit from a variety of features without the need to invest time and money in designing customized landing pages.

Finally, marketing automation presents the opportunity to consolidate multiple tools into a single easy-to-use system. From social media to email marketing to mobile marketing, marketing automation can help you manage it all. As a result, you can launch cross-channel campaigns more easily and effectively.

Contact Lead Liaison if you’d like to learn more about marketing automation.

Alternate Content Marketing Strategies besides Email

July 21, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing/by Lead Liaison

Email has the ability to deliver a large amount of content quickly and its traditionally strong response rates. It’s probably the king of direct marketing strategies, but don’t forget that there are many other ways to reach your leads. There are other online options, such as through social media networks and mobile devices, and offline options, like direct mail or promotional materials. If you’re wondering how your company can take advantage of all these different ways to reach your leads, keep reading to learn how marketing automation companies such as Lead Liaison can provide a comprehensive alternate content marketing strategies that will benefit your business.

Social Media

Social media is becoming an increasingly vital element of any company’s online presence and overall marketing strategy. However, many small to medium sized businesses end up largely neglecting this important medium. There’s a large time investment required to cover multiple social networks and the demand for constant supervision. Lead Liaison’s social media management tools can help your business by allowing you to schedule your social media posts, removing the day-to-day upkeep that can bog marketing departments down. And if you simply can’t keep up with the content required to maintain a healthy social media presence, don’t worry! You can outsource your content creation needs to Lead Liaison, who can deliver quality content on topic and on time.

Text Messaging

While directly text messaging marketing materials is certainly a bit more aggressive than an email campaign, it gets results. Text message marketing receive a 98% open rate, which is substantially higher than the numbers email can provide. Using the data collected from your marketing automation tools and social intelligence software, you can narrowcast marketing materials and hit the right demographic at the right time to make the sales you need.

Direct Mail

While it may seem a little old school for a marketing automation strategy that relies on instant communication and data collection from the internet, direct mail remains an incredibly effective way to get a lead’s attention and get him/her interested in your product. A fact in the marketing world is that different leads react in different ways to different types of marketing material, and a lead who has generally ignored your email campaigns might finally become intrigued when a piece of marketing material lands on their desk.

Promo

Another old school method of marketing your company and your products is through the creation and distribution of promo materials. Nothing helps people remember your product better than seeing it on their desk with branded promotional materials!

If your company doesn’t have the resources or connections to arrange a large scale direct mail campaign or produce promotional materials, Lead Liaison can help. We can organize mailing campaigns and point you in the right direction to design promo items that reflect your company’s brand, and will help you convert leads to sales.

To learn more about how Lead Liaison and how marketing automation can help your company, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.

Great Strategies to Improve Efficiency of your Marketing Automation System

July 16, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Marketing automation is one of the most important new technologies to influence modern marketing in recent years, and if your company has already adopted it, then you are already ahead of the competition. However, marketing automation is a system with a lot of different tools, and if one tool is used incorrectly, it can be damaging to the entire system, ultimately making your software inefficient and costing you conversions. Take a look at some of these best practices described below and compare them to how your company is using its marketing automation software. Don’t be surprised if you see some significant improvements to your marketing automation’s efficiency after implementing these practices!

Improve efficiency of your marketing automation system using these three tips:

Lead Qualification

Marketing automation can generate a great number of new leads for your company in a short amount of time. It can generate so many new leads, in fact, that it can become overwhelming for your sales team to attempt to pursue them all. One of the most important things to implement in your marketing automation program is lead qualification. Lead qualification analyzes a leads behavior and any available data about the lead’s profile and assigns a lead score to each prospect. Using this system, you can ensure that your sales team is focusing on the leads most likely to be converted – not wasting their time pursuing leads that are uninterested.

Lead Nurturing

One of the most important ways to turn cold leads into qualified leads is through a successful lead nurturing program. You need to make sure your marketing team can craft a program that engages your leads, educating and informing them while not being too pushy and scaring them away through overselling. The key is to focus on educating, not selling. A successful lead nurturing program should be consistent with your company’s brand, and should be tailored to a lead’s interest level, as assessed by the lead score assigned to the lead. And likewise, your sales team should be in tune with how leads are progressing through a lead nurturing program, so they know when a lead has become qualified and is ready to be contacted by a sales rep.

A/B Testing

Another vital way to improve your marketing automation’s efficiency is by implementing effective A/B email testing. You may think you have a great lead nurturing program in place, but it doesn’t take very much effort to test it against a different strategy. The results may surprise you and your marketing team, and even if you don’t find a strategy that is entirely more effective than your current tactics, you may find one element of it that you can incorporate into other marketing materials. Marketing automation software such as Lead Liaison has built in tools that will let you see exactly how your leads are responding to your marketing materials so you can construct the best, most effective content possible.

These are just a couple of the many different important strategies you can use to improve efficiency of your marketing automation system. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online to learn more.

How to Create Content to Appeal to a New Market

July 14, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

One of the great advantages that marketing automation can provide for your company and your marketing team is its ability to send very specific content to a very specific audience. While it is true that you want all of the content delivered by your company to remain cohesive and consistent, with marketing automation you can gather specific demographic information about different groups and then send them targeted marketing materials. This gives you a great advantage over competitors who are simply blasting marketing material at anyone who might listen. It can be incredibly valuable if you are trying to secure a new market for your products or services. Keep reading to learn how to create content to appeal to a new market, and how software automation can help.

Tips for Reaching a New Market using Marketing Automation

The tools your marketing team will have access to when using marketing automation software such as Lead Liaison gives your company a unique opportunity to gather a great deal of intelligence about your new leads and how they react to marketing materials. Marketing automation software can collect data on things such as clickthroughs on emails sent out giving you a precise idea of how effective your marketing strategy is. Social intelligence functionality can pull demographics data from social profiles to help your marketing team refine new content. And always remember, content directed to a new market should be educational – as overselling can be disastrous.

Quality Content can be found from Marketing Automation Providers

When you’re looking to attract a new market, you should be sure that you have a campaign with enough content prepared to see it through. However, marketing teams can be stretched thin while trying to develop a whole new set of content and managing existing content delivery strategies. If that is the case, you can always consider outsourcing content creation. One excellent provider of quality marketing content is Lead Liaison, who can provide your company with access to thousands of professional writers to create marketing content.

When you need content from Lead Liaison, the process is very straightforward and totally transparent to ensure you receive high-quality content on time. You can direct the type of content you wish to have created for you, such as blog posts or web articles, and then give Lead Liaison a description of what you need the content to address. Lead Liaison will assign the content to a writer who is familiar with the subject, and the content is delivered to you within five days. However, if you need it sooner, you can place a rush order and will receive your content within three days. You can then review the content and request any edits you would like to see, and will ultimately end up with high-quality, ready to market material.

Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog to learn more about creating content to appeal to a new market, among other great marketing strategies.