Lead Liaison

Optimize your Marketing Automation Content with an Effective Call to Action

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Optimize Your Marketing Automation Content With An Effective Call To ActionLooking for ways to optimize your marketing automation content with an effective call to action? A call to action is one of the oldest and most important elements of web design, because it is what ultimately seals the deal and engages the customer to make an online sale or enter deeper into conversation with your company. A call to action is most traditionally thought of as a button on a web page that gets a customer to do something – such as a buy or download button. However, these days a call to action can be embedded in many different types of content and can come in many different forms – a well written sales pitch in an email can be thought of as a call to action, if it engages the lead to interact further with marketing material.

When Is It Appropriate To Include A Call To Action?

While a call to action is a valuable tool for many different types of content, it is important to know when a call to action can be misleading. As we’ve discussed before, if your content is directed towards a low-end lead, and is designed to simply remind customers of your existence and ability to be helpful, then attempting to sell to them can drive them away. Your marketing team needs to use good judgement when they try to sell your products, and should always take advantage of the tools your marketing automation software has to test different strategies against one another.

None of that is to say that you shouldn’t be trying to sell – just that you need to know when. With that out of the way, here are some of the essential elements of an effective call to action.

Simplicity

Whether the call to action contained in your content is an image or an invitation in the copy, it should always be straightforward and impossible to misunderstand. You should never miss a sale due to an unclear image or cluttered language.

Clarity

Utilizing strong action words can make or break an effective call to action. Words such as register, click, download or buy will provide clear direction to your viewers. If these words are built into an image or a button then use sharp contrast to make those words really stand out.

Visibility

Don’t bury your call to action. A great strategy is to place your call to action in a highly visible area, such as the middle center or in the top right corner relative to where the bulk of your content is displayed. Try to avoid making the user scroll, make it impossible to miss.

Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is another important factor in a call to action that yields higher conversion rates. If there are a limited amount of items left or a limited time to get them, communicate that. Getting a potential customer to act now rather than later is important. That said, however, never attempt to mislead someone – breaking trust with them will hurt your company much more in the long run.

These are some of the most important steps in designing an effective call to action for your marketing automation content, but you can learn about even more ways to engage your leads at Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

Lead Liaison

How To Use Marketing Automation Software To Generate Leads

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How To Use Marketing Automation Software To Generate LeadsLooking for software to generate leads? At its very core, marketing automation is software that works to combine the strengths of your marketing department with the strengths of your sales department. It is a system that reduces static between the two departments and streamlines every tool that each department has so they can reach the customer or prospect at the right time. This process starts at the very beginning, and this article will show you how to use marketing automation software to generate leads – but generate better leads.

Data Collection

One of the first ways that marketing automation software generates leads is simply by recording all the information a potential lead provides from places such as advertisements, your webpage, or even email click-throughs. All of this data is aggregated within the software, and is then assigned a lead score based on the lead profile that the software is able to interpret from the leads various activity. This helps you determine which leads are ready to be approached and – sometimes even more importantly – when they are not. This makes sure that an overly enthusiastic member of your sales team won’t scare them away, keeping a potential lead from ever making a purchase from your business.

Lead Nurturing

However, like I said earlier, marketing automation software doesn’t just give you more leads – it gives you better leads. Let’s say you have a lead that is quite clearly not going to be converted any time soon. Do you simply walk away? Not with marketing automation software. With marketing automation, you place all of your less interested leads in low impact, noninvasive lead nurturing programs that will send helpful and friendly content that will help remind the lead that not only do you exist, but you can help them solve their problems, whether they have given you any money or not.

While cold emails may seem risky, TechnologyAdvise.com has published statistics that indicate 60% of consumers read marketing emails, and any responses you get to your emails will feed directly back into your marketing automation software lead profiling technology.

Personalization

Another important way to use marketing automation software to generate more leads is by taking advantage of the personalization and automation tools  built into the software. These tools are as varied as they are intriguing. For example, you can use social media automation tools to schedule social media posts around important dates or events, such as a trade show, in your industry. This can help make your business an active participant of the social media community surrounding the event and reach a wider audience.

Another great personalization tool you can use to help generate more leads is by using your software automation to perform active advertisement testing. By sending one set of advertising materials to one group and another to a different set, you can see what material performs the best, and how different demographics respond to it. You may discover a market for your product that you didn’t even know existed – along with an entirely new set of leads.

These are just some of the ways you can use marketing automation software to generate leads. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online to learn more about how you can improve you marketing automation strategies.

Lead Liaison

Remember When your Marketing Automation Company Focused on Marketing?

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What is a Vendors Focus on Marketing Automation?It seems that the trend in the Marketing Automation Industry is for companies to become a Jack of All Trades. We all know how that story ends.  If you don’t, please ask the next guy you see with a Member’s Only Jacket and Blackberry.

There are ways to tell your Marketing Automation “partner” is out for their best interest and not yours:

  1. They tout their CMS, even though 86% of the market uses WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.  Good luck getting apps for that CMS, and if you do… they are going to make a pretty penny off you.  If you don’t believe me, go look for apps in the Blackberry store.  People don’t develop apps for closed environments with small market share.
  2. They sell you on their CRM tool as an advantage of buying their Marketing Automation Platform.  Awesome!  Now you get to tell sales that they are locked into a substandard CRM because your Marketing Automation provider decided that it would be more profitable for them to sell a CRM than to integrate with the best players in the space.  Not a good business decision, and a horrible way to go about aligning sales and marketing efforts.
  3. They only offer one Email Service Provider.  All-in-One solution providers LOVE locking you into their ecosystem.  Even the best email solution providers today, may not be the best ESP’s tomorrow.  Never buy from a company that is owned by an ESP (they are the copier salespeople of the industry) as they have not prepared for technical Armageddon.
  4. SEO and Marketing Automation are two very different beasts, with two unique skillsets.  Your marketing department probably needs both; but they probably also need toilet paper and computers.  I wouldn’t buy any of these items from the same company for obvious reasons.  Bottom line:  Either your MA or SEO will suffer (or both) if you buy from one  vendor.  You will save a ton of money and get much better results by choosing best of breed in each category.
  5. Your Marketing Automation product is being offered by an agency that is super proud of its “partner” status.  The translation: They have invested a ton of time and money in a solution that might not be a good fit for you.  Unfortunately, these “partner programs” dictate that they will recommend the company that they are invested in regardless of the value that it drives to your business.   If you have doubt, demand an agreement with your agency that they will not have a financial benefit from working with any software provider.  That should not only include your account, but all other account that such an agency works with.   Otherwise, the Agency may shift its dollars.

You should also avoid the “All-in-One” solutions that focus on Real Estate, Flower Shops, and Supplement Companies.  Even if you conduct business in these areas.  There are a ton of these companies that prey on Mom and Pop shops.  They advertise on Facebook and other consumer focused websites because they are looking for people that don’t have experience and won’t ask the tough questions.  Some of their users will claim success because they don’t know any better.  Others will be outraged that they were not able to achieve the required level of support, expertise and functionality for $ 200/month.

  • A solid solution provider will help you build a story.
  • Help you tie together all of the technologies that benefit your organization.
  • Create a compelling narrative that you can share with prospects.
  • Have a vested interest in your organization’s success.

If you have any questions about Marketing Automation or how your company could strengthen its efforts, I welcome your request.  Even if my company, Lead Liaison, isn’t a perfect fit for you…I’ll point you in the right direction.

Don’t wait any longer.

Lead Liaison

How Marketing Automation Increases Lead Conversion

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How Marketing Automation Increases Lead ConversionLead conversion is a vital statistic for any successful marketing and sales team. It can also be a difficult statistic to influence in a competitive world, one where failing to contact a lead at the perfect time can result in a competitor taking the sale. However, according to the Aberdeen Group’s Marketing Lead Management Report,

“Companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates from initial response-to-MQ.”

Read on to learn how some of the essential practices of marketing automation can increase lead conversion.

Lead Scoring

Marketing automation tools, by their very nature, gather a large amount of raw data. From web clicks and form submissions to social media demographic data, your marketing automation software is constantly gathering and analyzing a lot of data about every lead in your database. This data is used to then create an individual profile for each lead – one that is continually being updated. This profile is then evaluated by the metrics that your sales and marketing teams deem most important, and is assigned a lead score. This lead score indicates how likely an individual is to be converted to a client.

Once a lead has been assigned this score, it can go to one of two places. If the lead is warm, it will be sent straight to your sales team, who can try to convert the lead as quickly as they can. If the lead is not warm, it will be sent to your marketing automation software’s lead nurturing tools.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is a marketing automation process of contacting individual leads with promotional and educational material in order to make them more likely to purchase your company’s product or service. Lead nurturing also takes advantage of the large amounts of data that has been collected about each lead so that each lead can be placed on the most appropriate lead nurturing program. Once a lead has been placed on a lead nurturing track, your marketing automation program will continue to gather data on the lead, recording things such as email click through and giving you an even fuller picture of your leads.

If your lead exhibits positive behavior that may lead to a sale, then their lead score will increase, and when the time is optimal, will be handed over to your sales department.

Lead Conversion

When a lead is presented to your sales team, either by exhibiting positive buy signs when assessed initially as a lead or as a result of a successful lead nurturing program, your sales team will have all the information they need to convert the lead. With access to a leads entire history of interaction with your website and promotional emails, you can make sure the right person will know the right thing to say to make the sale.

These are just a few of the ways that marketing automation increases lead conversion. If you want to learn more about the benefits that marketing automation can have for your business, you should check out Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

Lead Liaison

4 Ways Integrating CRM and Marketing Automation Can Help Sales

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Integrating CRM and Marketing AutomationCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are nothing new. Developed in the 80s, CRMs have become an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. However, since some of those systems are based on technology and business practices that have been around for decades, not everyone is using them to their best potential by integrating them into their marketing automation strategies. Read on to learn about 4 ways that integrating CRM and marketing automation can help your sales team close deals.

1. Unparalleled insight into how your marketing tactics are performing

With a well integrated CRM and marketing automation system in place, you’ll know exactly how well any marketing strategies are performing, because you will have a total picture of how your customers are interacting with your marketing materials. Your marketing team will be able to track forms customers have submitted, pages they’ve viewed and emails they’ve opened, among many other things. This will give you total transparency and enable your marketing team to see what is helping your company make sales and generate leads – and what isn’t.

2. Your sales team can focus on only the best leads, making them much more efficient

Once your marketing team has finished successfully integrating CRM and Marketing Automation, your sales team will be able to operate at peak efficiency. Your sales team will be able to track any and all online interactions that any given lead has had with your company. These interactions can be used in conjunction with any demographic information your company has available about a lead, and all of that information is evaluated to create a lead score.

This lead score will indicate how likely a lead is to buy, and can be quickly and accurately assessed by your sales team. This means that your sales team can spend their time contacting only the most likely to convert leads, without spending valuable time following up with leads unlikely to ever make a sale.

3. Increase your sales opportunities with lead nurturing

According to Emailmonday,

“B2B marketers see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads after successfully deploying a lead nurturing program.”

By integrating CRM and marketing automation tools you can set your colder leads on highly targeted lead nurturing tracks. A lead that has been nurtured will ultimately be much better educated about the services your company can provide. And a better educated lead, if your marketing material has been effective, will be much more likely to buy.

4. Make your sales cycle faster by streamlining the process

Integrating CRM and marketing automation can make your entire sales cycle faster by reducing the time it takes to qualify a lead. It accomplishes this by helping you identify the best time to contact a lead in a lead nurturing program. By taking all of the data available and involving your sales team in the development of nurturing campaigns, you can ensure that your leads get the most appropriate content at the right times to cut down the time it takes for a lead to be ready to convert.

Integrating your CRM and marketing automation tools is an important part of a successful marketing program, and there are many more ways in which your company can benefit from this process. By carefully managing your existing processes with marketing automation, you can transform your marketing and sales departments.

Lead Liaison

Make Sales by Ensuring your Automated Marketing Material Gets your Customers’ Attention

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Make Sales By Ensuring Your Automated Marketing Material Gets Your Customers’ AttentionSuccessful lead nurturing campaigns depend on a certain degree of subtlety. In order to maintain a strong connection and build a relationship with a lead that may not be ready to buy, the lead can’t feel like they are constantly being pitched at with every communication they receive.

However, a sales strategy has no real value if it doesn’t result in sales. In order to make those sales, you must make sure that even subtle automated marketing material gets your customers’ attention. You can do this by following three simple steps – pull them in, establish value, and then make an offer.

Pulling Them In

Even when the material you are sending out on a lead nurturing track is intended to be very subtle, every contact you have with a customer should still have a hook that will pull them in and make them think about your products and services. Great headlines and strong content are key to this. Make sure everything you send out has something that will interest a customer, and make sure everything you send to a customer is well put together and coherent.

The marketing automation tools provided in Lead Liaison’s software offer an incredible opportunity to customize content to appeal to target groups. By using Lead Liaison’s social intelligence capabilities you can build detailed profiles of different demographics of leads, and send them content tailored to appeal to them directly.

Demonstrating Value

Another way to make sure you’re getting the full attention of your leads when you contact them is by establishing value through your content. You do this by communicating your expertise, and then demonstrating your willingness to share it with your customers. Design content that will educate your leads about not only the services you provide, but the broader realities of the industry and how to overcome specific obstacles. This will not only establish your company as an expert in the field, but will make sure your automated marketing material gets customers’ attention every time.

This is another process where marketing automation tools prove invaluable – an essential part of any lead nurturing strategy is communicating different levels of information as your relationship with a lead develops.

Making An Offer

No matter how far down a nurturing path a lead is, you should always remember that every communication is still an opportunity. Whether it’s the first email or the twenty-first email you’ve sent, every communication should remind your leads that you’re here to sell a solution to the challenges they face. Always include an offer that will entice your leads, and hopefully get them to convert.

Using Lead Liaison’s lead tracking tools, your sales team will be alerted when customers respond to prompts sent through an email campaign, and will be automatically alerted that a lead has exhibited a buy signal, giving them the opportunity to contact the lead and make the sales your company needs.

By adhering to these simple principles, you can make sure that all your automated marketing material gets customers’ attention every time. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resources blog to learn more about the important ways that marketing automation can help your business.

Lead Liaison

Use Marketing Automation to Expand Your Online Presence

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Use Marketing Automation to Expand Your Online PresenceTry to use marketing automation to expand your online presence. No matter what field you are in, your company’s internet presence is a valuable part of how you interact with your customers. Not only are the constantly expanding social media networks a wonderful way to grow your company’s profile and develop new leads, but the internet is hands down the fastest way for anyone, anywhere, to find out about your business. On top of that, by utilizing marketing automation tools built into Lead Liaison, your company’s website can become an invaluable tool to gather essential data about how your customers interact with your site and marketing materials. Read on to learn about how marketing automation can expand your online presence.

Marketing Automation and Social Media

Lead Liaison has intuitive and effective social media marketing automation tools built into its software. Lead Liaison’s social media marketing automation tools allow your marketing team to develop a comprehensive social media strategy, and then schedule posts to major social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to ensure that your social media profiles remain relevant and up to date.

Be sure your social media strategies are not static, however. Make sure you make an effort to interact with your community of customers and your industry at large. Tweeting about an ongoing trade show or other industry event will introduce you to new potential leads and is an integral way in which marketing automation can expand your online presence.

Data Tracking and Lead Nurturing

One of the more complex ways that Lead Liaison’s tools can help you expand your online presence is by using data tracking software included in our suite of programs. Lead Liaison’s data tracking tools analyze which elements of your website are being clicked on and which are not, letting you know what parts of your marketing campaign are working. The data tracking software also communicates with Lead Liaison’s lead database, collecting data about individual leads based on their interaction with your marketing material and helping your sales staff know how warm any given lead might be.

The data collected from your website is also essential to establishing successful lead nurturing programs. By organizing email campaigns for a lead nurturing program based on specific lead qualifiers and demographics, you can send content to your leads that will be most appropriate to their demonstrated interest in your company and products.

This process can also be tied into the social media tools available from Lead Liaison. Our marketing automation tools include a feature called social intelligence, which can scan a variety of different social media sites to develop a further picture of a lead by collecting information on things such as age, gender and interests. This process allows you to send extremely targeted content to interested leads.

These are just some of the ways you can use marketing automation to grow your online presence. Visit our marketing automation resource blog to learn about more of the ways that Lead Liaison’s tools can help your company.

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Evaluate and Focus your Lead Nurturing Strategies using Lead Liaison

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Evaluate and Focus your Lead Nurturing Strategies using Lead LiaisonHaving a diverse and complete lead nurturing strategy in place is a very important part of any overall marketing automation strategy. We’re excited to share some ideas on how you can focus your lead nurturing strategies. Lead Liaison’s built in lead nurturing tools can be extremely helpful in implementing a successful lead nurturing strategy; however, you need to be sure you are implementing the most complete and effective plan for regularly contacting your leads. Take some time to evaluate your current lead nurturing system by thinking about some of these common mistakes. Make sure you’re up to speed by reading over these best lead nurturing practices.

Common Lead Nurturing Mistakes

There are some very basic mistakes that, even though they are easy to fix, can derail any lead nurturing strategy. The most basic one is ignoring your leads. Focus your lead nurturing strategies by making sure unqualified leads are entered into a lead nurturing program to ensure every potential lead is contacted and engaged. On the other side of this is the issue of spamming leads. Excessive emails and social messaging contact is sure to eventually annoy and deter a lead, driving them to a competitor. Make sure that all the content that makes up your lead nurturing program is well put together and engaging – people notice when content is sloppy or off topic.

Another common mistake is not engaging in split testing your lead nurturing programs. Obviously, you should have different lead nurturing paths for different demographics of leads, but you shouldn’t be afraid to try different things within different groups. Different approaches yield different results, and you’ll quickly be able to see which approach gives you better results.

Best Practices for Lead Nurturing

One great way to focus your lead nurturing strategies is to engage a lead with your lead nurturing program’s content is by educating the customer. Inform the customer how your product can solve their various problems, or simply deliver informative content that is relevant to your business or industry. Add a personal touch, and be careful not to skew all of the information you deliver into a pitch for your product, if content is too biased it can turn a customer off. Do your best to add a personal touch to as much of your content as possible to help your lead nurturing communication connect with a lead.

Remember to integrate all of the various data that Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools can deliver to your marketing team, and use that data to place the lead into the most effective lead nurturing program. On a higher level, make sure your sales team and your marketing team are communicating with one another and are generally in sync – both departments will be able to interpret different things about different leads and lead behavior.

Learn more about Lead Liaison’s other great marketing automation tools by visiting our website. Check out our marketing automation resource blog to learn more about how marketing automation can streamline your business.

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How to Grow your Small Business using Small Business Marketing Automation Tools from Lead Liaison

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How to Grow your Small Business using Marketing Automation Tools from Lead LiaisonAre you looking for small business marketing automation tools? It goes without saying that growing a small business, where resources and time are limited for everyone involved, is a very difficult process. Lead Liaison’s suite of marketing automation tools can help you increase the reach of your marketing strategies and the effectiveness of your sales team. With the proper application of these strategies and the tools Lead Liaison can provide for your company, you’ll not only achieve higher sales but have prepared your business to expand to a larger, more efficient organization.

Engage your Leads with Marketing Automation

There are many different things to keep track of to ensure you engage the maximum number of leads your company can handle. One of the most important places to engage with potential customers is on social media outlets such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, but manually updating all these profiles can be overwhelming for a small marketing team. One of Lead Liaison’s small business marketing automation tools is social media automation. By investing time in scheduling your social media posts, you can be prepared to tweet or comment on any relevant events coming up for months ahead of time. Your team will be able to focus on the important things rather than live tweeting an industry event.

In addition, Lead Liaison’s small business marketing automation tools give you access to data that would be unavailable without our suite of tools. Information such as what companies are clicking on your website and whether or not they have followed a link in an email is all tracked and stored by lead liaison’s data tracking tools. This additional sales intelligence is included with small business marketing automation and  gives your sales people specific information about individual leads and the general behavior of your customer base in general.

Increase your Company’s Sales Potential

Data gathered by Lead Liaison’s data tracking software is not merely for strategizing your marketing approach, it is also delivered in usable, informative reports to your sales team.  This is very important for companies that have a small sales team. By tracking things like buy signals, your salespeople can focus their time contacting only the most qualified and likely to purchase leads.

What about the leads that aren’t ready to buy? Obviously you don’t want to forget about them, but often times small companies don’t have the resources to maintain contact with people who are not purchasing anything. That’s where Lead Liaison’s small business lead nurturing tools prove invaluable to a small sales team. Lead Liaison’s lead nurturing tools put colder leads in paths that will automatically keep in contact with a lead and continue to collect data about the lead’s behavior towards your website and communications. If the lead indicates a new found interest in your company or your product, someone on your sales team will be alerted and they can try to contact the lead and make the sale.

Lead Liaison has many other great small business marketing automation tools that will prove invaluable to a rapidly growing business. Visit our automated marketing resource blog to find more great strategies to build your business.

Lead Liaison

5 Reasons Your Company Needs Website Visitor Tracking

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5 Reasons that your Company Needs Website Visitor TrackingVisitor tracking gives salespeople the ability to monitor site visitors by name/company/location so that they can better identify prospects and their thoughts.   Progressive companies are beginning to understand that visitor tracking is the foundation for all digital marketing and sales efforts.

Here are 5 key signs that you should be using individual visitor tracking on your website:

1) You invest in SEO, PPC, or retargeting campaigns

These technologies draw people to the “door” that is your digital presence.  If you don’t have a way to “hear” who is at your door, and what they are thinking; it kills your ability to develop a relationship with each individual buyer.

Now consider how much you are spending for SEO/PPC/RC campaigns.  If you spend $5 per visitor, and only 1 in 40 site visitors identifies themselves; then you are paying almost $300 per lead.  A quality visitor tracking system will help you triple the effectiveness of turning your SEO/PPC/RC investment into leads that can close.  Our clients find that on average, their company gets 9X more bang for its buck when using visitor tracking with SEO/PPC/RC campaigns.

 2) If your company has a sales team

Why would you pay for a sales team, and not help their success?  Gone are the days of “pounding phones”.   The trends in digital marketing revolve around self-education and timing.   If you are able to identify WHO is investigating you, it allows you to intelligently approach potential customers AT THE RIGHT TIME.  Bottomline: visitor tracking helps you work smarter and more efficiently.

3) Your salespeople will go to a tradeshow or networking event in the next 12 months

Only a small percentage of your prospective clients are ready to buy at any given point in time.  You have two options.  You can use visitor tracking as a way to highlight when contacts are ready to talk or you can have your salespeople call everyone every two weeks and hope they stumble upon something good.  The latter is a very costly strategy, that will kill your reputation of potential buyers.

 4) You use email

It doesn’t matter if your email is coming from Gmail, Outlook, a CRM, a marketing automation platform, or a third party “email blaster” provider.   90% of your emails will never be responded to.  That doesn’t mean that they aren’t effective.  Instead, it means that your emails are simply planting seeds for future action in the minds of your prospects. You need visitor tracking to give your salespeople the necessary information to have a “green sales thumb”.  That means that they know:

  • When a prospect is interested
  • What they are interested in
  • Their potential concerns with approaching you.

 5) You have a website

Most companies see value in tools like Google Analytics that will tell you things like “ 155 people were on my website today”.  How does that help salespeople?   True sales value comes from giving your salespeople the name, company, location, and interests of the visitor.