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Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing: its meaning and how it relates to marketing automation. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Inbound Marketing

At one time, outbound marketing was all the craze. Then, marketers finally woke up and realized that inbound marketing is the way to get qualified leads. They realized something else, too, though. Inbound marketing is a time-consuming process. Fortunately, folks quickly discovered that combining inbound marketing tactics with marketing automation strategies allowed them to harness the power of inbound marketing without the burden of finding extra time to do so.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Before you dive into inbound marketing with marketing automation tools, you need to be certain you are clear on what this type of marketing is. To put it simply, inbound marketing is the process of using quality content to bring people to your website, and then turning those people into paying customers.

There are three main components of inbound marketing. First, you attract potential customers. You do this with blog posts, white papers, eBooks, and other forms of content. Each piece of content is targeted in order to attract the right people.

Then, you convert visitors into leads. You do this with calls-to-action and lead generation forms on your website.

Next, you go for the close with lead nurturing. During this process, people go inside of your sales funnel.

This is a simplified look at inbound marketing. If you had to go through the process all by yourself, you would have to roll up your sleeves and go through a series of tiresome steps over and over again. Fortunately, things can be simplified with marketing automation.

Marketing Automation to the Rescue

Marketing automation software has the power to track leads as they engage with different types of content. For instance, if they download a piece of content, the software can track that person from here on out. The software also has the power to score leads based on their actions once they arrive at the site. This will help you understand what strategies are working and which ones need to be replaced.

Normally, you would have to submerge yourself in hundreds of pages of data to understand user behavior, but marketing automation software is able to assign scores and provide data in seconds. This information makes it easy to run a powerful inbound marketing campaign.

If you try to manage an inbound marketing campaign on your own, it is incredibly complicated. You have people coming in from multiple traffic sources and once they arrive on your site, they engage with different pieces of information. Utilize marketing automation software to quiet the noise so you can see the real picture – what’s working and what’s not.

 

How Does Marketing Automation Help Inbound Marketing?

How Marketing Automation Helps with Inbound MarketingOccasionally 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.

How To Do Inbound Marketing

How to Do Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing – Half the Battle

We’ve encountered a handful of companies over the past few months that have told us they need to make investments in SEO and “inbound marketing” before adopting our technology. When we hear that – we believe there’s a misunderstanding. We feel entitled to help companies understand how to do inbound marketing the right way. Inbound marketing is great, but it’s only half of the solution. Lead Liaison provides a very strong solution for companies looking to strengthen inbound marketing. And inbound marketing is not complete without the other end, what you do with those visitors once they get to your site. Not doing anything is like throwing a party and when people come to the door and ring your door bell you don’t let them in.

We help companies with their inbound marketing efforts in two ways. First, we drive more traffic to a companies website. Second, we make sure the company has deep visibility into their visitors behavior once they get to your site (visitor tracking on steroids) and convert those visitors once they get there – perhaps the most important thing. In other words, we make sure companies get the most out of their investment to drive traffic to their site. Here’s a summary of each area:

Drive More Traffic to Your Site:

  1. Our software will help you become content kings (or queens). A necessary activity for search engines and any inbound strategy. Your company can complement their marketing content strategy by outsourcing blog posts, Tweets, Facebook Posts, white papers and more and automatically publish the content.
  2. We can help you build beautiful looking landing pages in minutes, casting a bigger web.
  3. Easily engage in social media by posting to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts on behalf of all your employees.

Better Visibility and Conversion Rates – The Other End of Inbound Marketing

  1. Unlike basic visitor tracking solutions that track page visits, we’ll track a much more comprehensive set of behaviors such as document downloads, video watches, emails clicked, pages viewed, forms submitted, etc. What’s awesome is that this entire profile will be stored in Salesforce.com. Your sales team will have more insight to close the deal.
  2. We’ll convert more visitors with web forms, gates in front of content/video, email, and 1-to-1 emails.
  3. We’ll automatically nurture your prospects
  4. We’ll automatically qualify them and when they’re hot – we’ll alert sales
One prospect we spoke to said they sent out weekly newsletters to their prospects using a separate system. That’s great, but they’re doing this to drive inbound traffic, right? With their current solution, they’re using a separate email system that’s not connected to the rest of their sales and marketing tools. We offered them a professional-grade email marketing engine that’s built into our platform. Right now, they’ve got to dig through results to find opens and click throughs. When one of their prospects clicks a link in an email we’re going to show them that information on a visitor report, alert sales, and save that information along with all the prospects other behavior into Salesforce.com – in a single view.
We hope you enjoyed our tips on how to do inbound marketing the right way.
We can help your inbound marketing efforts. Give us a shot.

Turn Inbound Marketing Into Lead Nurturing

Turn Inbound Marketing Into Lead NurturingInbound marketing is essential to the lead nurturing process. World class organizations know how to turn inbound marketing into lead nurturing. Channels such as PPC, SEO and SMM provide ways to get exposure, but it’s what you do with the leads that come as a result of inbound marketing that makes the difference between creating sales and wasting time. Prospects are directed to your website because of a desire to respond to your marketing message; they are already interested, so now is the time to convert them to qualified leads in order to move them through to sales engagement. Here is the process to turn inbound marketing interest into sales-ready leads.

Attract

First, get your leads’ attention by being where they are. Learn the most relevant search terms related to your company or product, and include them in your site’s meta data and online content. Look for underused phrases and terms that have little competition to attract niche segments. Find out what your customers’ interests are and deploy creatives through channels that address those interests. Often, you’ll find more success by segmenting your markets and delivering targeted messages through specific channels, rather than relying on channels that attract a broad audience.

Engage

The next step is to build interest by providing free information. Use thought leadership vehicles – such as a company blog or a how-to video – to establish a relationship of trust. Podcasts, videos, newsletters, blogs or white papers all provide a way to increase your lead’s interest in learning more. At this stage, the objective should be to collect minimal contact information like an email address in order to establish an informal connection. Most prospects will not provide much information without first getting something valuable in return, so make sure the content you provide is worthy of their commitment.

Convert

Build the relationship to a point of being able to gather contact information through the use of forms. This converts a marketing lead into a sales lead by establishing the prospect’s identity and giving you permission to contact her in the future. Be careful not to request detailed information too early in the sales cycle; often it’s more effective to build trust first, then elevate the engagement. Providing premium content such as detailed industry research, for example, can allow you to establish a formal connection with your prospects, and provide a gateway to your lead nurturing process.

Nurture

Once a sales lead has given permission to continue a relationship, maintain a connection through email drip campaigns, outbound calls, direct mailers or other channels. At this point the relationship has been established but your prospect is not sales-ready. Be sure to continue providing value to each prospect, but also use the nurturing stage to learn more about him. Find out more about his budget, authority, needs, and timing (BANT). Once you’ve nurtured the lead to the point of imminent purchase, move him into your CRM for a sales call. It can take weeks, months, even years to take an inbound marketing response to a sales-ready prospect, but it is important to recognize the process and maintain a consistent approach. Some techniques can – and should be – tweaked along the way, but following this framework can generate demand for years to come. Interested in understanding how Lead Liaison can help you turn inbound marketing into lead nurturing? Give us a howdy today!

Progressive SEO Tactics Which Define Inbound Marketing

Progressive SEO Tactics Which Define Inbound Marketing You’ve probably studied numerous search engine optimization tactics which assist your business in saving money normally spent on marketing efforts.  The general consensus states you’ve probably read how inbound marketing tactics will grow your business by producing enticing content which organically ranks.  Combining both SEO tactics and inbound marketing efforts into one sweet package, however, is an area we’ll implore your astute business sense in today, providing specific steps on how progressive SEO tactics which define inbound marketing can redefine your business presence online.  Content is great, keywords are necessary and meta data definitely needs accuracy.  We’ll stretch well beyond those ideologies today, however, and bring your link efforts to light by introducing better content strategies.

Solving The Keyword Puzzle

It may seem trivial to many businesses; however, when businesses begin their online explorations they need to clearly define keywords before opening their doors, yet you’d be surprised how inaccurately this is done.  Many people use the Google Keyword Research Tool to find their highly relevant and widely searched keywords, hoping to vault immediately ahead of competition.  Sure, it works to a point.  What would be even better is employing keyword co-occurrence, otherwise called semantic connectivity.  Since recent updates to algorithmic patterns mean content is under fire, choosing words which naturally have similar meaning or belong with each other will make your keyword selection seem less forceful.  For example, let’s say you operate a music website; here is the old way and new way.

  • Older way to choose keywords: music, musical, a music, music a, music store
  • Newer way to choose keywords: audio, melodies, tunes, sounds, beats, songs

As you can see, we’re using synonyms of these keywords as our main website meta data.  We’ll then write content which blends these terms into something which naturally looks like it belongs.  Why is this relevant to inbound marketing? The more natural your content is written without forcing keywords, the greater relevance Google will find in your content which organically raises your position in search results.

Buddy Up With Blogs

Next phase of inbound SEO is how Google will adjudicate relationships you’ve formed with similar niche sites.  To increase your site’s worth, the evolution of guest blogging has now become hotter than ever, and for perfect reasons.  Instead of comment spamming to get relevant links, we’ll need to locate blogs related to your business and write for them with only one relevant deep site link in either your author bio or within content (depending on site rules).  How do we find guest blogs?  Here are some specific ways we can do this:

  • Use My Blog Guest to find blog or site owners looking for relevant content.  Write the content to their specifications with specific reference to a blog post within your own blog.  Sign your guest post with author biography dictating what your business or blog is about.
  • Search Google cold-turkey by using the following search query – blog: “submit guest post”.  You could specify “powered by WordPress” or even throw a specific keyword in your search query.  Alternatively, you could simply search for ‘top places to submit guest post’ and sift through thousands of blogs all day to find your niche.  Not exactly effective time management, however, to take this route when better search strings are available to use.

Once you’ve found relevant blogs where your content can reside, and upon approval of your post, you can write another post on your site with the title of your recently approved guest post as a themed link. This gives you both juice and makes people want to follow your other stories.

Why is this relevant to inbound marketing? Simply put, Google wants your content to contain inbound and outbound links to content which is similar to your own instead of boring contextual links parked in your link section.  The more you guest post and share your ideas with others, the more others will be drawn back to your content.

Making Internal Connections

Equally important to inbound marketing is tactically linking content together within your website to tell Google that everything you’re writing about or selling is relevant to each other, and keywords which you’ve chosen to target.  This is great for not only getting better page ranks, but also perfect for targeting search traffic to generate customer traffic specifically targeted to your businesses.  Making sure to link each keyword to specific keywords which belong together between content will greatly improve your inbound marketing efforts.

Ideas To Increase Content Readability

Since the greatest inbound marketing tactic which professional SEO companies will not tell you is organic rankings are golden, your efforts all begin with providing readable content your readers can relate to.  These readers will naturally find you if your content doesn’t appear to be repetitious, and avoiding repetition means coming up with well-discovered content from your own expertise and not copied from other sources.  Let’s look at several ways that naturally relevant content can create organic SEO opportunities which directly feed into the definition of inbound marketing.

  • Solve problems. You can write how-to’s, funny literature and content which seems to be heart-felt yet people have issues, and your business needs to address consumer woes and solve them. When writing your content, keep in mind prevalent worldwide issues.  Address the issues, what problems these issues are causing, and how you plan on defeating these problematic areas.  Constantly telling people how to do something will rob your business of customers as you’ll simply teach consumers how not to use your product or service.
  • Answer questions. If your website or blog receives lots of inquiries, perhaps spend your time writing content which collectively answers these questions.  When people feel suppressed by your solvency, they’ll be more apt to purchase from you or at least follow your content closer.
  • Debrief customers. People always wonder how things work in boiler rooms, office meetings or in datacenters.  Deliver a sense of demystification by describing what really goes on behind closed doors so people feel more ‘in the loop’ with you.  Making people feel completely in control opens more doors, and brings better meaning to word of mouth advertising.
  • Provide visualizations. Google loves videos, great content and website interaction.  You can easily combine the three to propel your inbound marketing efforts to the next stratosphere by making videos of your content, and even providing afterthoughts under the video.  When people have visual verification you exist, the walls come down and more business will come your way.

The Main Inbound Marketing SEO Tactic Is Content

If you list every possible search engine optimization method known to man, many relate to outbound marketing.  Link building, social sharing, PPC and other major forms of generating mass traffic are all relevant to shouting at customers instead of letting them find you.  Content creation, both through guest blogging and self-published works, is the best and only effective mannerism which inbound marketing truly comes to form.  Content may not be ‘king’ in the books of many SEO professionals, yet Google is proving through recent changes that more brownie points are given to websites which have useful, well-researched and deeply linked content as opposed to those who have millions of irrelevant links or multitudes of social media followings.

Most Undervalued Inbound Marketing Strategies Around

Most Undervalued Inbound Marketing Strategies AroundConsistently high ranking websites will often profess hard-core search engine optimization, gleaming content creation and white hat link building techniques will not only assist in perfecting search positioning, it will make your overall internet marketing strategies increase significantly.  There are even more sustainable inbound marketing strategies and tactics, however, that are often overlooked, unused and simply scoffed at when marketing professionals begin their mass campaigning – tactics that can increase other vital areas while obtaining worthwhile targeted leads.   Some of the most undervalued, overlooked and most use-able internet marketing tactics we’ve found to still work wonders are highlighted below.

Facebook Advertisements

Sure, you may not have interests in Zoosk, care about free cellphones or have the desire to play Pawn Stars using numerous Facebook applications.  The Facebook ad system is, by and large, one of the best platforms to get your word out to the masses on a targeted level.  Instead of slapping up your advertisement to the entire Facebook world (terrible for click-thru rates, by the way), you can target your advertisement to those who have verified they like your particular niche.  You can target specific areas, age ranges and even cities.  Having this platform for internet marketing purposes is a gift; hopefully when Facebook’s stock takes off the platform will be left alone since it makes the company literally millions a month.  This platform is perfect for B2B lead generation, too, and for obvious reasons.

Since geo-targeting advertisements means plenty of repetitious ads will be shown, rotating advertisements to refresh your ‘pitch’ or angle will prevent user disinterest while harvesting the traffic you seek.  Selecting mobile B2B users as well as regular computer users will get people on the go.

Emailing Isn’t Dead

Many fear their domain-based emails will soon be moot to the overall marketing scene considering millions of social media users have @Facebook or other social media email addresses to save time while fighting spam.  Fear not, my friends: there will always be millions of old-school internet practices while include emailing friends since attachments haven’t been perfected in other social platforms.  Also, when speaking of email addresses, consider these thoughts:

  1. New TLD’s will soon be added, making .com, .net and .org the most prized possession around.
  2. Hosting companies will always offer, and improve, emailing standards and techniques to accompany domain purchases.
  3. Emails are as valuable as phone numbers; once you have aged contacts who never change their email addresses, you have addresses with value.  Not that you would sell them, right?
  4. Email lists are easier to cross-implement into social media campaigns as you’ll already have contacts to invite, friend or network with.
  5. Email marketing efforts are being recreated, perfected and still show positive numbers even to this day. Although a future filled with virtual everything is imminent, emailing will still jump on board  even if the platform changes to audio emails.  Spend your email marketing dollars wisely, build long-term lists and keep everyone on your list engaged in activities your website promulgates while your list continues to grow.

Video InStream Marketing

After loading your chosen video, you may see an annoying advertisement for something irrelevant to the new Nickelback video.  That annoying advertisement, however, is video marketing gold for those who use InStream services.  Considering over 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, and millions of more videos are added to other sites, in-video marketing definitely takes the cake as back-burner goldmines for savvy internet marketing professionals.   Advertising using keywords via YouTube is effective, although the CPC rates are higher; using InStream video marketing ads, you could experience roughly 66% lower CPC rates while still reaching the masses.

Since you’ll only pay for legitimate views to your video, and often times the ads can be set to popup several times throughout the snippet, you’ll potentially have higher website visitor-ship resulting from these in-video ads. And, much like any other paid advertising platform, your ads will only appear to targeted areas, people and ages you specify.

LinkedIn Ads And Mailings

Serious internet marketing professionals appreciate the value of LinkedIn’s professional network since they can display feature-rich advertisements to those who would most likely view them.  Since professional networks such as this are slightly higher for advertising costs, you will definitely have much better luck marketing your services throughout the million-plus different networks.

Internet marketing pros that have LinkedIn accounts can network with individuals who, in turn, give you permission to trade insights, email your offerings and also gather close contacts with their permission.  You can extract their contact information and send them periodic newsletters that fall within their interest category or simply keep in touch and grow a close business relationship with them.

Conclusion

Stepping outside the norm to give other platforms such as emailing, InStream marketing, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn the chance to work for you will prove equally beneficial to that of your SEO, content marketing, video campaigns and even landing page pushes.  Never count out what isn’t popular because that particular internet marketing strategy is making someone money, and that someone could be you.

12 Ways to Repurpose Content

Repurpose ContentLooking for ways to repurpose content? Many companies struggle creating content. Marketing content is important, but pervasiveness of that content is even more important. Much like a spider casts a web far and wide; marketers must cast their content in a similar manner. However, instead of getting worn down trying to create new content for each marketing channel (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.) repurpose content for each marketing channel.

To start improving inbound marketing create one piece of content. We recommend writing a blog article as your starting point. Keep blogs short and rich with insightful information. Think about who your audience is. Ask yourself, who will read this content and why would they read it? Once your blog article is created repurpose your content on the internet to allow potential buyers to easily find your company. We came across Brody Dorland’s post, A Lesson in Content Repurposing, Infographic Style. Brody provides a very useful infographic with some print instructions to hang the graphic in your office. The graphic outlines 12 things marketers can do to repurpose content and improve inbound marketing. We’ve also pinned it to the side of this post for your convenience. Click on the image to see a larger view.

Finally, close the loop and measure ROI of your content. We suggest using lead tracking technology such as ours to help you automatically scan inbound leads, qualify, distribute and nurture them. Follow these steps to repurpose content and measure content ROI. Your sales team will be chanting your name! Ping us using the short form on this page to learn more about how our technology can help you get the highest return on your content creation dollars.

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The Quintessential Small Business Marketing System

Quintessential Small Business Marketing SystemMost micro and small businesses have two things in common; they lack resources and need to grow revenue. In this article we help B2B business with minimal resources understand the building blocks of a small business marketing system necessary to grow revenue.

A quintessential small business marketing system is made of three components – CRM, inbound marketing and revenue generation software. All three components are cost effective as they run in the “cloud” – meaning they’re accessible through any web browser, based off-premise/off-site and have little to no maintenance costs.

Small Business Marketing System

Components of a Small Business Marketing System

First, the core of a small business marketing system is a CRM solution. Lead Liaison uses Salesforce.com as our database of record. It’s an affordable way to help us track accounts (partners, customers, and vendors), leads, contacts and opportunities. Salesforce.com enables our business to stay organized, monitor activity and plan for growth. It’s a nice data repository but unfortunately lacks operational solutions to satisfy our sales and marketing demands – revenue generation software fills this void.

Second, create a marketing presence with at no cost – except for sweat equity. Small businesses need to get noticed without pumping in hundreds of thousands of dollars in outbound marketing campaigns. That means a paradigm shift in how marketing is typically done. It means foregoing trade shows, direct mail and email blasts. Instead, have an inbound marketing strategy to attract interested prospects. But don’t be confused, inbound marketing is very different from outbound marketing. Inbound marketing means developing content and strategy to get found on the internet whereas outbound marketing is very targeted directly towards contacts or individuals. Effectively, inbound marketing is like building a spider web for your business. Develop an inbound marketing strategy by having a consistent presence in social media, blogging and SEO. Create “miniature webs” to catch interested prospects that inevitably end up on your website. To do this, spin up numerous landing pages and web forms on your website – once again, revenue generation software fills this void.

Third, bring in revenue generation software to complement your CRM and capitalize on results of your inbound marketing efforts. Revenue generation software helps businesses overcome resource challenges by automating a number of common sales and marketing tasks. It helps businesses build relationships by creating relevant and timely conversations with prospects and customers, nurturing them through the sales cycle, generating leads and serves as the foundation for your marketing campaigns. It’s the engine of a small business marketing system.

All three ingredients, CRM, inbound marketing and revenue generation software work together to form a cohesive small business marketing system. Content used for inbound marketing can be leveraged and repurposed with revenue generation software while revenue generation software enriches CRM with useful lead qualification criteria.

We’ll gladly help your company build a small business marketing system by coaching you through the process and providing you with best-in-breed revenue generation software. Let us know if we can help!

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How to Get More Customers

Have you ever taken the time to pull your team together and discuss how to get more customers? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. It’s not something businesses typically take the time to plan ahead for. Here are four ideas you can focus on to get more customers into and out of a revenue cycle.

• Know who your customers are
• Focus on inbound marketing
• Stay in touch
• Keep your sales team efficient

First, if you want to know how to get more customers you’ve got to understand who your customers are. What is your ideal customer profile? In other words, identify what industries they’re in, how much revenue they produce and where they hang out. Study your last 12 months of customer wins and analyze the profile of each customer. Do they fall into common categories? If so, jot those down into your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Once you know where your customers are you’re ready to progress to the next phase, focusing on inbound marketing.

Second, create an inbound marketing strategy and execute a plan. Inbound marketing is really not about how to get more customers, but how to be in the right place at the same time as your customers. Customers will come to you. See our article on Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing for a better understanding of inbound marketing. In summary, inbound marketing means you’re actively participating and distributing content through blogs, social media, SEO/organic search and paid search. Traditional outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail and trade shows. More and more marketers are shifting budget dollars from outbound to inbound marketing as they recognize buyers jump online to research solutions before they select a vendor to contact. Here’s why, see the projected growth for social networks and blogs over the next several years:

How to Get More CustomersChoose your inbound marketing investments carefully when planning how to get more customers. Ideal channels vary based on the type of business you’re in – B2B or B2C. For example, see the chart below. If the green bar is higher than the orange bar it’s an ideal channel for B2B marketers.

Getting Customers Through Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is like the bait on your fishing pole. Once you get the fish on the hook you’ve got to know how to reel them in and get them on the boat. A solid inbound marketing strategy combined with cohesive lead management life cycle processes that include sales prospecting, lead capture, lead follow up, lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution and lead nurturing will help you reel in the big fish.

Check back later this week for part two of how to get more customers.

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Increase ROI of Inbound Marketing

Increase ROI of Inbound MarketingWe recently had a meeting with one of our prospects who told us they do no outbound marketing (or “push marketing”) and focus solely on inbound marketing. At first, they said they didn’t need Lead Liaison because they don’t do outbound marketing. They couldn’t be more wrong. Coincidentally, if you’re only doing inbound marketing you can’t afford to not have Lead Liaison. This meeting as well as the overall public debate on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing sparked a discussion internally on how to increase ROI of inbound marketing using Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software. We documented some of these reasons for you, enjoy!

Using technology to increase ROI of inbound marketing

Lead Liaison provides a revenue generation platform that boosts ROI of inbound marketing. Here’s a list of how our solutions can help you:

Lead tracking

As prospects find you as a result of your SEO, content and social media strategies (three core components of inbound marketing) they’ll eventually find their way back to your website. Lead tracking technology identifies the name of the business visiting your website along with business intelligence information (revenue, location, description, etc.), telling sales when someone is interested – all in real time. Lead tracking also records a website visitor’s online behavior including pages viewed and keywords used in searches to help sales and marketers understand what prospects care about.

Content creation

Revenue generation software helps marketers spin up new landing pages and web forms in minutes. Instead of relying on HTML programming or IT support, marketers create professional looking landing pages and web forms using a visual designer. The visual designer is similar to PowerPoint and uses drag and drop technology to construct content. Generous use of landing pages and web forms is typically a good thing. It’s common to create a landing page with a web form for each new content area or content piece in your marketing library. Doing so will increase the probability of capturing leads and increase ROI of inbound marketing.

Database segmentation

As an alternative to buying purchased lists or list rentals, which typically offer ROIs in the 1% – 2% range, marketers can leverage technology and their own internally developed database to increase ROI of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing typically implies buying large lists and sending out generic, non-personal email blasts. Using database segmentation marketers can “carve out” specific sections of their database to deliver optimized content relevant to prospects interests.

Lead nurturing

As new prospects discover you via your inbound marketing techniques, revenue generation software will help you nurture your leads. Lead nurturing delivers consistent communications to your new-found leads based on the prospects interests, demographics, and lifetime interaction with your marketing content. Recycling and nurturing your database will increase ROI of inbound marketing by lowering investments in inbound marketing as highly qualified leads never fall through the funnel or get left behind.

Lead qualification

A growing investment in inbound marketing probably means a growing number of inbound leads. Lead qualification, sometimes referred to as lead nurturing, uses technology to automatically score leads and identify who’s hot and who’s not. Lead scoring helps sales prioritize time effectively.

Emphasizing inbound marketing over outbound marketing while leveraging revenue generation software will shorten sales, produce higher quality leads, and improve organizational efficiency.

See our post on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing for a more thorough comparison between the two marketing strategies.

We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How do you feel revenue generation software can help your inbound marketing efforts?

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