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Marketing Automation Trends to Watch

December 31, 2014/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Time to keep your eye on a few marketing automation trends to watch. With more than 60% of top performing companies utilizing marketing automation, one might believe that marketing automation has hit its peak. After all, there’s nowhere left to go but down. However, the percentage of businesses utilizing marketing automation continues to increase. While the benefits of these services are impossible to ignore, it’s important to be aware of upcoming trends to make the most out of your marketing automation.

With marketing automation pervading all business functions, it’s not enough to just automate and personalize content and messages. In fact, marketers are beginning to demand automation that predicts interactions and lead conversion rates. Software continues to evolve at such a fast pace that predictions about consumer behavior and buying patterns isn’t that far off. As algorithms and technology advance, marketers are able to determine who their best customers will be.

Mobile Marketing Automation

An astounding ninety-one percent of American’s now own cell phones. What this means for marketing automation is that messages and content are being delivered whenever and wherever a customer is. In fact, market research predicts that mobile apps will own almost 30 percent of all sales in just two short years – by 2017. Additionally, the price point of mobile marketing is astounding: for every $1 spent, marketers can expect $20 in sales returns.

Even now, mobile data and location services can give marketers powerful information, like what brands or stores a customer is near. That information means that soon marketing automation will be able to transmit messages that are not only personalized but messages that are specific to the right time and place, as well as tracking online and offline events. Marketing automation is also evolving to let marketers make their own goals. The best indication of success is real-time customer behavior instead of clicks and opens. Tracking these numbers will give valuable insight into measuring smaller progressions to reach an ultimate goal, which is set by you and not the service.

Looking into the Future

Another big trend in marketing automation is the fact that you are no longer required to possess a deep technological knowledge to understand or operate marketing automation software. Drop down menus and drag and drop functionality have changed the way marketing automation is used. It’s incredibly simple software that can make a tremendous impact on how you do business and your results. Also, no longer is the software a big expense – even the best marketing automation software out there can be affordable and relatively inexpensive – especially when you consider your return on investment.

These trends are just some that you can expect to see over the next 12 months. While there will be others, these are the ones most likely to make a significant impact in 2015.

Disappointed with LeadLander®?

December 26, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Generation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Are you disappointed with LeadLander®? LeadLander® sells its product with a simple premise: throw some tracking code on your website and wait for the magic to happen.

Then you wait….and wait….and where is all of this magic?

The reality is that you need a strategy with any visitor tracking product that you use. Your strategy should include four basic questions and include capabilities to achieve the answers to these questions:

How do you draw active/interested buyers of your product to your site?
Can your program filter buyers based on their likelihood of buying at any given time?
Does your strategy allow you to distinguish between which products/services that an individual buyer is most likely to be interested in?
Once a buyer is identified, what happens next in your sales process? Does your technology support execution of this strategy?

We used the solution for about two years. We started to call it LostLander. It sent us off on a wild goose chase the majority of the time. We ended up spending more money than we did without it. Instead of turning into a revenue driver, it was a cost center. – Lance Boyd, Former VP of Sales at Arxan Technologies.

The good news is that a few simple strategies are likely to raise your sales results, and help you maximize the value of many of the sales and marketing efforts that you are presently engaged in. If you are interested in a free consultation on marketing strategies; I highly recommend contacting us and asking for a free 30 minute consultation.

Disclaimers:

(1) Lead Liaison is not affiliated in any way with LeadLander®, does not provide LeadLander®’s services, and does not own the LeadLander® Service Mark. Lead Liaison provides its own unique visitor tracking solution as shown here.
Reference our Blog Disclaimer.

Marketing Automation: Before and After

December 19, 2014/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

If you’re on the fence about marketing automation, it might be best for you to take a look at how it can transform your business by comparing the before with the after.

First, you may be wondering how a move to marketing automation will benefit your business financially. It’s a fair question and one with an interesting answer. On average, marketing automation costs less than what it would cost you to hire three to four employees to do the same job. Combined with payroll taxes, health insurance, and other benefits – this could mean huge savings for companies.

Marketing automation is also able to make a significant impact in small to medium sized companies. For the most part, those marketing departments are relatively small, so it’s difficult to devote the time and energy to daily tasks let alone things like updating databases and tracking content performance. Marketing automation can make a major impact in these areas by doing that work for you.

Marketing Automation: The Before

When we start getting into the before of larger, multi-national companies, the impact that automation can have becomes even clearer. Large companies are often running campaigns and social media accounts for several locations or departments, all at the same time. As an example, Unilever owns more than 400 brands worldwide. They have a variety of marketing campaigns for different brands, in different parts of the world, for different products; at any given time. Marketing automation would help a company like Unilever manage the activity on all of their social media sites, including scheduling content, tracking interactions and followers, and delivering real-time data to see how a strategy is performing overall.

Working the Demographics

Besides tracking how well your campaigns are performing, marketing automation gives you the ability to target them to specific demographics. If you’re targeting clients of all kinds, marketing automation can help you specify where they fall in the buying pipeline. Are they marketing managers themselves or are they business owners? Automation can help you keep that information straight while sending targeted messages to all of your clients. Most companies will see an increase in sales and conversion rates once they implement marketing automation solutions.

Beyond all this, marketing automation will create a more predictable revenue cycle and align your sales and marketing teams, which will substantially increase your growth. Some experts say that by using marketing automation, a company can expect a 29% increase in won deals as opposed to 19% won deals, without marketing automation. Your sales department will benefit as well. For a majority of companies, 73% of the leads that the sales department receive, go nowhere. With marketing automation, you’re able to identify and cut out the 73% ahead of time, which means that your sales team is able to focus on high-quality leads. Not only that but since nurtured leads tend to spend about 47% more than non-nurtured leads, you don’t have to wait around for your sales team to establish relationships. Marketing automation has already done that for you, with targeted, personalized messages and content.

These are only a few of the ways that marketing automation can benefit your company and transform your sales team. If the after looks better than the before to you, contact us today to get started with your marketing automation solution!

What Companies Provide Marketing Automation?

December 12, 2014/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

In the never-ending list of software options that business owners consider when trying to improve efficiency and save money, marketing automation ranks high. In fact, marketing automation software has become one of the most in-demand tools for marketers. In all that noise, it’s difficult to navigate what companies provide marketing automation software, and which one is best suited for your particular wants and needs. Let’s take a look at some options.

First, there’s a key distinction to make. 100s of companies claim to provide marketing automation. Case in point, many email marketing companies say they’re a marketing automation provider. There are only a handful of pure-play marketing automation companies that focus deeply on key areas of automation, including lead qualification, lead nurturing, lead distribution and sales intelligence. What it really boils down to is the size of company you’re looking to work with, public or private, and how fat your wallet is. Here are some pure-play vendors to keep in mind:

Oracle Eloqua

With more than 50,000 users, Oracle’s Eloqua software ranks at the top of the list of marketing automation software. Robust and allowing for considerable customization, Eloqua is appropriate software for businesses that focus on email marketing and data cleansing. Eloqua also offers pre-designed templates for landing pages as well as the option to block free email addresses on contact forms, which provides better quality leads to sales teams.

Before choosing any marketing automation software, you need to decide what your priorities are. You should be aware that high technical skills and knowledge will be required to use Eloqua.

Marketo

Marketo’s marketing automation software has evolved since its introduction several years ago. Marketo has expanded to include B2B personalization and marketing management (budgeting software)solutions. Marketo’s platform allows users to stream their overall marketing process and efforts. In general, Marketo has seen extraordinary growth since introducing their software and was ranked the 78^th fastest growing business in 2012.

Marketo has its ups and downs – one of its obvious downs being as a company of its size, individual attention may be limited. The novelty of going with a boutique firm in this space never wears off.

Pardot

Pardot introduced their marketing automation software in 2007 and was acquired by ExactTarget in 2012. Ranked the 172^nd fastest growing business in 2012, Pardot experienced a 2,001% increase in growth over a three-year period. Offering an email design interface including multiple pre-built templates, Pardot allows users to configure email content that’s driven by date fields or sales rep assignments. Additionally, many users claim that Pardot is able to improve inbound marketing strategies while letting companies focus on the most promising leads.

Developing a wish list of features and requirements and then choosing the tool that best suits your needs is the best way to choose a marketing automation program. This way, you’re likely to spend your budget on the best software out there while embracing the technology that will likely improve your business processes. Marketing automation is becoming mainstream and with it, the list of companies who provide this software is growing. Research carefully, include your sales and marketing teams, and choose software that will best drive revenue and covert leads into customers.

Better yet, take a look at Lead Liaison’s offerings and work with a company that is not clamoring to satisfy Wall Street, can meet your individual needs, and give you more in-depth training than anyone else on the market. You’ll need a fat wallet for Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot, and you’ll have plenty of money left over to eat lunch with Lead Liaison. We can help you take the next step in considering marketing automation solutions! Feel free to ping us to learn more!

Is Marketing Automation a Good Idea?

December 4, 2014/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Have you been asking yourself, is marketing automation a good idea? Or maybe, is marketing automation worth the hassle? To run an effective marketing campaign and gather appropriate leads, marketers should take advantage of marketing automation. Marketing automation gives you the ability to manage the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound messages in the most effective way possible. By implementing marketing automation, you’ll be able to personalize your marketing to each prospect’s wants and needs based on where they are in the buying pipeline.

Of course, everyone knows that increased revenues are the number one reason most businesses decide to incorporate marketing automation. In fact, out of top performing companies, 70% are found to use marketing automation. But what you might not realize about marketing automation is that it also helps companies build and improve internal communications, making your sales and marketing teams more effective. When marketing and sales teams come together, their mutual decisions are most effectively implemented through marketing automation. This improvement results in effective lead nurturing, scoring, and a handoff process designed to meet both the marketing goals of the organization and sales requirements.

Marketing Automation: Is It a Good Idea?

Many times, marketing automation is the solution to specific challenges an organization has. For example, if you’re having issues capturing appropriate and solid leads, marketing automation can help solve this by accurately targeting leads. It also gives you, the marketer, the advantage of sending out effective and personalized messages but automating this process so you’re able to focus on more important aspects of your campaigns. Marketing automation will provide you with real-time data and analytics, letting you know what’s working and what’s not. It takes the guesswork out of marketing and allows you to nail down the details that draw in your targeted audience.

Marketing automation works best for companies who are in specific situations, such as:

Companies in a large market with numerous leads;
Organizations with a longer sales process;
Businesses with sites that are content heavy;
Processes and systems already in place, to coordinate.

Will Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation is not a magic wand or a quick fix. It’s a process that will take work, time, and adjustments. Marketing automation strategies will be tested and adjusted continuously based off the information it gives you. It will take initial effort on your part but your long-term workload will be lessened, if the system is implemented correctly. For companies who are producing quality content and getting a steady flow of leads from their sites, marketing automation could be a solution to effective and timely follow-up.

If you think that marketing automation might be an effective tool for your campaign and you’re ready to talk, contact us today for a quote!

Improve the Efficiency of Your Sales Team

December 2, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Revenue Generation Blog, Sales/by Lead Liaison

If the primary function of your business is to provide a product or service to customers, you must ensure that you improve the efficiency of your sales team. No matter how top notch your products or services may be, if your sales process is incompetent, eventually your business will suffer or fail. We’ve collected and compiled some top ways to improve your sales processes.

Sales Pipeline Management: A Key to Success

Measuring your sales pipeline and its ROI are a challenging for any business. But it’s the first step in the process of making sure your sales team is working smarter and not harder. First, make sure you’re delivering attractive content to generate online traffic. Keep track of metrics and data to track any stagnation and to calculate how long you expect each of your prospects to spend in your sales pipeline. Identify each type of customer in your sales pipeline – this way you can tailor up-sell offers based on a prospect’s individual behavior.

Lead Sourcing

Make sure you’re spending time tracking which leads are likely to close. Training your sales team on the three primary ways of calculating lead sourcing can lead to a more successful sales process:

A conversion rate will tell your team which sales sources are converting leads to opportunities. Using a simple formula will assist you in comparing current sources with ones you hope to use in the future. If you find that sources aren’t working for your leads – strategize with your marketing and sales team as to why this is the case. Are you approaching the leads from this source in the wrong way or is this simply a case of the source being unattractive to the right customer?
Figuring out your lead to close length will give you information on how long a lead source takes to close. Each source that you’re using will bring your company leads at different steps in the purchasing process.
Average value per lead calculations will tell you which sources provide you with the best customer fit, for the best value. Do you want several smaller sales per month or one or two big sales? Average value per lead will help you start devoting your time and effort into sources where the best leads are active, providing you with the type and frequency of sale that you want.

Sales and Marketing: Working Together for the Best Leads

Collaboration between sales and marketing teams takes more than just a few monthly meetings. Encourage your sales team to give marketing feedback on the leads received on a regular basis. This will give your marketing team the chance to make adjustments to their marketing automation program. Products marketers should share new product features with the sales team – this will make your sales team more knowledgeable on the products.

Pinpointing deficits in your leads funnels, using metrics to measure your lead sourcing, and ensuring that your sales and marketing team are working well together are all vital ways to ensure your success.

How Can I Generate More Leads?

November 25, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Generation/by Lead Liaison

When it comes to the best ways to generate sales leads, we all know that social media is a well-used platform. However, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook usually generate few sales leads. Let’s take a look at how we can utilize marketing automation in our goal to generate more leads and answer the question, how can I generate more leads?

Leveraging your Marketing Automation Program

Marketing automation has been shown to increase lead conversion and provide focused information on scheduling, tracking, and defining marketing programs and processes. A marketing automation program gives you all the tools needed to generate leads and track them as they move through the sales funnel. Real time analytics give you insight into where your leads are in the buying process and an average timeline on when you can expect them to buy. This gives you the opportunity to personalize your messages to your leads depending upon their needs, instead of sending out generic messages that will often be ignored or deleted.

Marketing automation can also make capturing lead information easy and effective. With a landing page, leads are able to quickly and easily enter their contact information or request your product catalog or a call about your services. Using marketing automation effectively means that you will be able to track the success of landing pages and make adjustments where you see fit.

Another crucial area where marketing automation is effective lies in the content you’re posting on your blog. Marketing automation is able to track the effectiveness of the information you’re posting – including how appealing it is to your leads and audience. Figuring out the proper number of communications for your prospects will ensure your posts don’t wind up being overlooked or worse, deleted before they’re noticed or read.

Marketing Automation Helps Qualify Leads

Often, we make the mistake of including ALL leads in our communications. This only causes good, qualified leads to fall among the wayside, lost in a crowd of leads that aren’t worth the time investment. Marketing automation helps you qualify your leads by giving your marketers precision in all of their marketing processes. By monitoring leads and gathering useful information, including what search terms they’ve used and what content they’ve viewed, marketing automation makes it easier to understand where the consumer is in the buying process.

It also makes it easier to score leads. Lead scoring is a simple process of assigning number values to certain behaviors and attributes so you can measure the value of a lead. This numerical value will help you determine whether the lead is to be passed onto the sales team or if the lead needs more information, content, or research. Marketing automation will also score company demographics such as location, company size, and other criteria to ensure that the correct types of leads are being funneled to your company.

The marketing automation sector is expected to increase from $3.2 billion to $4.2 billion in 2015 – this is a significant increase and indicates the tremendous impact of marketing automation. Adding marketing automation to your repertoire will add increased value to your business process and marketing department as a whole.

Ready to take the next step? Let’s help you with adding marketing automation to your business repertoire!

Marketing Automation: Why Does Lead Nurturing Make Sense?

November 18, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Lead nurturing, the marketing process of developing relationships with leads regardless of their current timing to purchase, is a straightforward concept. But many don’t realize the importance of lead nurturing or how it can help. Let’s look at lead nurturing and how it relates to marketing automation.

Why Lead Nurturing Makes Sense

One of the biggest pros for lead nurturing is the ability to market personalized messages to prospects. These messages can be generic in nature but personalized to an audience that’s only in Lead Stage 1 of marketing automation. These leads have only just entered the market and do not have a current timeline for purchasing.

It’s important if you’re looking into automation not to just send leads cold emails. Your first objective for beginning lead nurturing is to establish permission to stay in contact with the lead. If your audience loses interest in your messages, they’ll unsubscribe from your mailing list or mark emails as spam.

Target Your Leads

Make sure you’re creating content that your visitors want to see. The more you can find out about a lead who’s visited your website, the better. By creating high quality content that is relevant to your leads, you’re increasing the possibility of converting leads to customers significantly. Make sure that when sending out your messages, you’re not overdoing it. Ask yourself: when’s the best time to send messages so you can ensure your prospects will see them? Answer that and then tailor your messages to be sent out at the best possible time.

Another best practice for lead nurturing that might seem like it’s coming from the stone age, is using plain text emails instead of HTML. A few lines of content and a personalized signature go a long way toward establishing an individualized message, which is targeted to your audience. HTML based emails are fine when sending out training tips or when the emails are clearly coming from the marketing department and not the sales department.

When Lead Nurturing Works

Lead nurturing is a powerful way to use marketing automation to stay in touch with prospects. When it works, you’re able to establish purchaser preference while also gaining useful knowledge about your prospects timing. If you’re ready to take the next best step with lead nurturing and marketing automation, contact us today! Lead Liaison staff would love to chat with you about your company’s individual marketing needs.

Is Visitor Tracking Violating Your Privacy Statement?

November 16, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Generation/by Lead Liaison

Visitor Tracking Could Violate Your Privacy Statement

Do you have a privacy statement? If so, you might be violating it with many visitor tracking programs. It’s important to ask your self, is visitor tracking violating your privacy statement? Make sure you know what you’re getting into and who you’re dealing with.

Here is how it works. Company A has a strong marketing effort. They get 1,000,000 people to “opt-in” by submitting a form. Visitor ID Company drops a cookie on the machine as part of the transaction, and tracks the behaviors of that party including visits so that it can create a better experience between Company A and the visitor.

Nothing wrong so far.

The trouble begins when Visitor ID Company wants to attract Company B. They offer Company B a 7 or 14 day trial and use Company A’s database to correlate unique visitor IPs to their database. Some have even been known to throw in “sample data” from a competitor’s traffic to show what could be achieved while the trial period is in progress.

Here are the problems:

Company A has just helped its competitor
Company A has breached its moral and legal obligations (in some cases) to its clients to protect their relationship
Company B is wasting sales time pursuing fake leads or bad data entered by company A
Visitor ID Company has mislead a prospect into buying results that are a representation of what could happen… under the guise that it just happened.

Long story short, you have just breached your customer’s data by working with a visitor tracking solution that shares data. The good news is that there are a limited number of companies that DO NOT share data. Those companies actually pull superior data for your sales team in the long term; because they don’t add the other company’s garbage (such as false records).

The downside, is that during a “trial” the company that is using gray-hat techniques will often seem to be a superior/easier to use solution. So, be careful when conducting your trial and make sure that the vendors you look at are willing to sign a privacy policy that matches the ones you give to your prospects and customers.

How Does Marketing Automation Help Inbound Marketing?

November 16, 2014/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation/by Lead Liaison

Occasionally we run into customers that are fortunate enough to have way too much business. They’ve got more leads than they can handle. That sounds like a good problem to have, right? Well, what if there are so many leads that the organization has a hard time keeping up? This is a reality for some businesses. They fall behind as all of their leads are look-a-likes and some of them start falling through the cracks.

There are two solutions to this problem. First, make sense of the data and leads resulting from your inbound marketing. Second, use automation to transform the task of following up into an efficient, well oiled machine. In this post, we’ll focus on the first step, making sense of your inbound traffic and help you understand how does marketing automation help inbound marketing.

How Marketing Automation Helps with Inbound Marketing

There are three corner stones of making sense of your inbound marketing. We call these the “three Ps of inbound marketing”; profiling, prioritizing and pinging.

Profiling your Prospects

You’ve got to profile your prospects by building a clear picture of who they are and what they’ve done before coming into your lead funnel. Create a digital DNA of your prospects that combines demographics, online behavior and social information.

Prioritizing your Prospects

Prioritize your inbound marketing by automating the process of lead qualification. Most marketing automation systems use lead scoring and lead grading as two ways to prioritize website activity using any criteria. Marketing automation companies that get it right offer both automatic and manual lead scoring, for greater control. As inbound traffic comes in each of your prospect’s behavior is scored. The higher the score the hotter the lead. Lead grading helps you identify ideal buyers. These two pieces of criteria are then combined with other criteria, such as recency of activity, and placed on a hot lead dashboard, which simplifies the process of identifying who’s hot and who’s not.

Pinging you

You know your inbound marketing efforts are paying dividends when your prospects express key buying behavior. We call these Buy Signals at Lead Liaison. When a Buy Signal is triggered we alert you via text or email. If you’re buried in new leads its good to know when you need to follow up with the hot ones instead of treating everyone as equals.