Lead Generation Strategies

closeup man writing arrow up graph increase 53876 14001

This year, and current market conditions are off to a challenging start for a lot of businesses in Canada, so it’s a good time to re-evaluate your marketing strategies. If you haven’t incorporated marketing automation as one of your leading strategies, then you’re certainly not making the most of your budget or time. Email marketing helps you build your brand and get better customers who spend more money with you.

The upside to adopting email marketing can be quite significant. It generates the highest return on investment (ROI) out of the most common digital channels, earning businesses an average of $38 for every dollar invested, according to a VentureBeat Insight study. It also cites that “84% of marketers believe email is important or critically important for customer loyalty.”

According to Grand View Research, the global marketing automation software market is expected to reach $ 7.63 billion by 2025. Automation is clearly the future of marketing. It can turn a lean marketing team into a momentum-driven force to be reckoned with. Given the hypercompetitive environment businesses operate in today, marketing automation can be the driving force for a start-up to compete with larger enterprises.

Email marketing and marketing automation clearly have a place for the modern company looking to grow in a challenging and competitive landscape. The results and case studies are clearly showing the impact it is having on companies that are adopting this technology, but are there strategies that can be implemented in conjunction with the use of the technology tools? Does creativity and execution play a role?

Automated email campaign ideas to engage your prospects.

Before we dive in, let’s not forget that a good marketing automation package may have all the features you need, but the pilot does have a role to play in the ultimate success of a campaign. Knowing your customers, and coming up with engaging content and creative can be the edge you need to go above and beyond.

1. The Lead Magnet — You can send an email to your prospects with the link to a recorded webinar, or video promotion. This will allow your prospects to view the content whenever they want. However, in order to view it, they’ll need to fill out a form to register, generating warm leads in the process.

2. The Welcome Email— The content of the email should introduce your business and how you can solve the problems of your potential customers. It should talk about what exactly they can expect from you. You can also choose to combine the lead magnet email along with this.

3. Content Specific Responses – General thank you email responses are missed opportunities. Segment your leads by opportunity so you can target the right content to your inquiries. For example, you run a music lessons website that offers piano and guitar lessons. Have a page that focuses on each offer so when a lead is generated you know what page it came from and can target the lead with a “12 weeks of piano tips” nurturing campaign.

3. The Testimonial — You can share the story of how one of your customers saw amazing results after using your products or services. Also, don’t forget to mention where your prospects can buy your services or products. These emails can help to establish your credibility.

4. The FAQ Email— Once your prospects know about your offer and your product features, they might have additional questions. Create an email with some of the commonly asked questions and your answers to them. You can include basic questions about your returns and refunds policies or warranty periods.

5. The Complete Offer — In this email, you can pitch your products or services. And if possible, offer a limited time incentive. This can increase the chances of your prospects buying your products.

6. The Final Call — This email serves to remind your prospects that it’s the last chance to grab the lucrative discounts you’re offering.



Some key statistics to consider

·  78% of marketers say automation increases revenue and 75% of brands using automation see an ROI in under 12 months

·  A 250% increase in your reply rates by automating your outreach and follow up emails

·  Using an automation tool can save 80% of your time on content scheduling and workforce management.

Wow. So, Are Companies Finding Success with Marketing Automation?

You betcha!

91% of the most successful users agree marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing.

Let’s dive a little deeper to see why marketing automation is important for marketers and business owners.

1. It Saves Time

You no longer have to go into a tool every morning and schedule your campaigns for the day. Thanks to marketing automation, you can schedule everything you need ahead of time, which will free you up to do other marketing activities.

2. Warm up your prospects so you don’t have to

Let your campaign do the work for you. A good nurturing campaign will gradually entice your prospects with value-added benefits that your company offers. When they are ready to buy they will let you know.

3. Set goals

Once you have your strategy in place, you’ll want to consider how you’ll measure progress and measure the success of your campaign. It’s important to define objectives for different elements of the strategy and to establish some benchmarks. Keep in mind that these should be SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

An example of a SMART goal for marketing automation might be something like this: “Increase leads by 25% and sales conversions via email marketing by 10% by the end of Q2 in 2020.”

In the beginning, you’ll have to estimate your benchmarks and then adjust accordingly once you have some data to work with that will help you better project what realistic goals are around your different marketing automation efforts. Over time, your benchmarks and goals will likely change based on what you’re working to accomplish (and what’s achievable.) This is wise, as a strategy for marketing automation isn’t a “one and done” effort. Instead, it needs to evolve over time according to what works (and what doesn’t.)

4. Optimize your campaign and then optimize some more

Marketing automation can significantly up the number of visitors to your website. However, while elevated traffic is great, it isn’t very useful if visitors do not convert. It’s your responsibility to make sure that your website has what it takes to convince visitors to take action.

Here are a number of strategies you can implement to help optimize your website for higher conversion rates:

·  Ensure fast load times of your pages

·  Use strong call to actions

·  Do A/B testing

·  Include testimonials (video if possible)

·  Target your emails in conjunction with your landing pages

No matter what size your organization is, marketing automation will drive efficiency and productivity from the get-go. Today’s modern marketers are lean marketing machines, and are constantly under pressure to deliver more, do more, spend less, and increase productivity with minimal resources.

Marketing automation helps increase leads, and improve conversions. To learn more please get in touch with us here.

Grow your business with increased profits

shoulder shot business man drawing diagrams wall poster 1098 18524

Grow the business by Increasing revenues

This is a great objective for any business, but for SMB this is how we survive. The biggest problem to solve is always more revenue.

We have a few choices: we can charge our current customers more; or we can sell new products or services to existing customers; or we can get more customers. Maybe we should look at all three?

Setting the right price point should be done as part of your competitive strategy – you don’t want to lose customers for price alone. So some analysis of the market is necessary before you decide to gain all your growth from squeezing your current customer base.

On the other hand, selling more, to existing customers and new customers, is completely within your control. Its probably the strongest, most sure path to growth. But it takes time and money and planning.

You could just increase your sales team and task them with increased sales. As long as you can feed them with leads, an increased sales capacity can be very effective. Hiring and ramping of course takes some time.

But while you are looking at the sales team capabilities and capacities, you can also look at lead generation. From a sales-effectiveness point of view, which do you think produces the highest conversions? A list of phone numbers of local prospects? Or a list of email addresses of people who have shown an interest in your product? It’s obvious to us that not only does marketing automation present the opportunity of turning ‘cold calls’ to ‘warm calls’; highly qualified leads that have a need, are investing in a search (indication of a budget) and are open to doing business with you. The highest conversion rate possible can be achieved with highly qualified leads.

There is no question in our minds that marketing automation is the most effective way to generate qualified leads. Instead of placing all your bets on aggressive outbound calling, you use your computers to drive visits to your website, to attract followers on social media, to consume your content (establishing you as an expert in your field) and eventually to contact you for more information. Since you are using computers, your reach is increased significantly. And using a planned ‘nurturing’ process you earn the trust and the start of a relationship with prospects. This ‘inbound’ marketing process is currently recognized as the greatest source of qualified leads to business.

If you have just started using digital marketing, you should see a big change right away. A full campaign to increase your inbound leads can take 3-9 months to see exactly how high the results can be. Gartner reported in 2015 that their survey of companies who have implemented marketing automation showed an across the board increase in revenues of between 30 and 40%! So be patient and stay the course!

Perhaps you are already convinced. It just makes sense to reach more people over the internet and use computers to provide interesting content to earn their attention. But you already have a website. And your secretary already re-posts interesting articles in social media. And you also send emails to prospects from a list you obtain from a marketing firm (anti-spam legislation?). But you don’t see a lot of results.

You are probably doing most of the right things, just not the best way to produce results. You might need some help. Here are 10 points to check to make sure you are making the most of your digital marketing:

·         Your web presence is a direct reflection on your professionalism and if not done well will act as a ‘sales preventer’ rather than a ‘sales driver’. The creative, the content and the overall user experience will impact visitors either positively or negatively, so get it right!
 

·         I know; you setup the keywords when you did your website. But have you reviewed how effective they are? Have you updated them recently? An effective SEO strategy includes regular updates to keywords and monthly analysis of SEO results.
 

·         Every page being viewed on your website should have some compelling ‘call to action’. The concept here is that as soon as a viewer of your web page sees something that interests them, they are presented with a convenient way to ask for more information. Viewers are more likely to engage and not be distracted by other content and fail to act.
 

·         When your website visitors complete a contact card, get back to them as quickly as possible. With the speed of the Internet setting the benchmark, anything that takes longer than minutes is ‘unresponsive’ and opens you to the possibility of the lead ‘going stale’. Responsiveness is easy to maintain with an automated response – an email that basically says: “thanks for the message” and “we’ll get back to you later with what you are looking for”.
 

·         The content in your blog or social media must provide the reader with some value. This is not just a volume of words with your address attributed, but rather a vehicle to provide customer value during the marketing and sales process, earning their business over time. It can be fun, it can be informative or it can be emotive – it just better not be boring!
 

·         Plan your ‘content assets’ and deliver them in a planned nurturing campaign, warming people up over time. Some industries can just offer a great price, ask for the business, close it and move on – most of us however need to earn the business with high visibility and ‘front of mind’ when a buying event occurs.
 

·         Monitor the progress of your campaigns with some feedback as well as the detailed analytics from your software. Be prepared to make changes where needed, but give it enough time to succeed.
 

·         Consider the nurturing campaigns a series of ‘conversations’ with customers and prospects. Don’t just plan to throw stuff out through media channels and expect results. Make sure there is logic to these conversations; that you are providing progressive, relevant value, and; that your customers are enjoying the sales process.
 

·         Make sure the post sales experience is at least as good as the sales process. Existing customers and prospects alike should have similar experiences. There are many surveys reporting that many buying and upsell decisions were made by the sales and post sales experience, so it is well worth investing in making it better.
 

·         Stay the course! Be patient and let the program gain momentum. Sure, review and make changes based on analysis of the data; but don’t stop. The mission is possible if you stay the course.
 

 If the  mind  is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.” – Clausewitz 

Accelerate Lead Generation With Engaging Content

content zand marketing

How to use your content to build your funnel and land high-quality leads that convert

The question to pose for this blog is, quality or quantity? I am going to say both!

Why does one have to come at a cost to the other. Content doesn’t just have to be a blog. Content comes through many channels and can be short and sweet or in depth and informative. The goal is to be engaging in everything you do.

First I will outline all the channels to consider and some ideas on what you can post to your blog, social media channels, or to the media.

Post to your blog on your website
– Advantages and benefits to your products or services
– Testimonials
– Case studies
– Relevant news and how it applies to your company
– Discuss industry reports (Gartner, Forresters, etc)
– Highlight your recent successes

Post to a 3rd party blog to gain awareness outside of your circle.
– Same content as above

Post to Social Media daily
– Ads
– Curated content
– Personal success stories
– Inspirational messages
– Link to all your blog articles
– Vlog
– Polls or surveys

Media
– Press releases (Great for SEO)
– Guest podcast (Create your own or guest on someone else’s podcast)
– YouTube channels (reach out to people in your industry who interview and discuss topics related to your industry on YouTube)

Re-targeting Marketing
– Sign-up with Adroll or Google Ads (Have your brand follow your prospects)

With all of these cost-effective methods of getting your word out, quality doesn’t have to be sacrificed for quantity. The only crime you can commit is if your content is boring, over-stated, and lacks real value. If you don’t have the talent or resources, click here to get started with us. Over time the impact can be tremendous to your business.