Search Articles

Most liked posts

Recent Articles

Posts Tagged ‘lead nurturing’

5 Steps to Keep Your Sales Funnel Full

December 10th, 2012 :: Monika Jansen

No matter how long they’ve been in business, a lot of small business owners are not very good at keeping the sales funnel full. You’ll do a marketing blitz, get super busy and focus on work. Because you’re so slammed, you will then ignore marketing and sales. Then your projects wrap up, and you’re back to square one – you need to do another marketing blitz.

The better, less frantic approach is to always be marketing – it’s the best way to keep your sales funnel full, especially if you tend to have a long sales cycle. Here’s a 5-step process to ensure those marketing blitzes become a thing of the past:

Step One: Create valuable information

Your goal is to first get people onto your website. Devote time each week to creating valuable content, like blog posts, white papers, eBooks, infographics and videos, that are full of keywords. Potential customers will find your site when they go searching for information on a specific topic.

Step Two: Pump up the SEO

Your goal remains the same: get people onto your website. Make sure your website is fully optimized for all the keywords you want to be found for, including location if that’s relevant. Even though it’s not technically SEO, use hashtags on Twitter to make it easy for people to find you.

Step Three: Convert Web visitors

Now that they’re on your site, your goal is to convert visitors into leads. There are two ways to do this: 1) If you’re offering an eBook or free demo, direct them to a landing page and ask for basic information before they can access the item. 2) Use compelling calls-to-action that direct visitors to do something – contact you, sign up for your e-newsletter, like you on Facebook, etc.

Step Four: Nurture and qualify leads

At this stage, your goals is to stay n touch with potential customers and build the relationship through social media and email marketing. Because you’ll stay top-of-mind, when they’re ready to buy, they’ll think of you first. You can also offer specials or coupons, to speed up the decision-making (on a personal level, this always works for me).

Step Five: Analyze your efforts

Your final goal is to simply look at your process and see if people are getting caught up somewhere in the process. Is a piece of content not attracting website visitors? Are people leaving your site when they reach a certain page? What offers are converting more leads into customers? Adjust, and continue.

What do you do to keep your sales funnel full?

Image courtesy of outsideinview.com

Google+

Tags: content marketing, lead nurturing, lead qualification, Marketing, sales funnel, Search Marketing, seo
Posted in Marketing, Search Marketing | 2 Comments »

5 Really Easy Ways to Increase Sales with Social Media

April 18th, 2011 :: Monika Jansen

Using social media to engage with potential and current customers is all you hear about anymore. Doing it properly is not that hard—really! Just follow these five common-sense guidelines, and you can turn your social media networks into sales channels.

1. Treat everyone like an individual

Not everyone who follows you on Twitter or likes your page on Facebook is a guaranteed potential customer. Some of them might be ready to buy now, some might just be looking, some might admire your brand but can’t afford you, some might just view you as a source of industry information and want to “keep in touch” via social media.

If you end up treating everyone the same on social media, you are missing out on valuable branding, marketing, and sales opportunities. Respond to each new follower as you would a person you just met at a party—with an open mind, ready to chat and see where the conversation goes.

2. Send personal messages

I hate getting automated tweets from the people who I just followed on Twitter. I’m seeing less and less of this, but people are still doing it, which amazes me. You don’t need to respond to every new follower! If you do, make it personal. Yes, this means you need to do it manually, but the social interaction is what social media was built around.

3. Engage instead of broadcast

When I get an alert that someone is following me on Twitter, I always check out their stream first to see if they are engaging with their followers. I look for retweets, mentions of other users, replies to other users, etc. If a person or company is just using Twitter as a broadcasting tool—especially to promote themselves, their product or their service—then forget it. I don’t follow them back! If I wanted to have commercials forced on me, I would watch live television.

4. Nurture, don’t push, the sale

Back in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York, there was a fabulous, locally owned clothing boutique that was super popular when I was growing up. My mom avoided it like the plague because the saleswomen would descend on you like vultures as soon as you walked in the door. Even if you said you were just browsing, they would proceed to follow you around the store. It was awful.

Don’t do the same thing to your social media followers. Ask them what you can help them with, if you can answer any questions, if they found what they are looking for, and so on. You don’t want to end up like the above-mentioned store: closed for business.

5. Give customers a reason to say “yes”

Obviously, you want to close the sale with potential customers, but you don’t want to be rude or pushy. So, in addition to chatting with your followers, you should also give them lots and lots of reasons to buy from you.

The best way to do this is to provide your followers with educational content that clearly demonstrates the benefits of working with you. Use social media to offer ebooks, white papers, case studies, testimonials, blog posts, articles and anything else that demonstrates how your superior product or service alleviates your customers’ pain points and delivers fabulous results.

Image Courtesy Flickr user epSos. de (Creative Commons)

Google+

Tags: automation, content, lead generation, lead nurturing, Marketing, sales, social media, social media engagement
Posted in Marketing, Small Business, Social Media | 3 Comments »

3 Lead Generation Case Studies: How Content, SEO, Social Media, and Lead Nurturing Can Increase Sales

March 30th, 2011 :: Monika Jansen

One of the hardest things for most small business owners to do is generate leads. Doing so effectively and efficiently is key, but of course that’s easier said than done. However, if you don’t do something, your sales will growth might plummet, just like it did for the Legos at left. Because it is best to learn from others than to make mistakes that can be avoided, here are three case studies, courtesy of an eBook co-written by HubSpot and Marketing Sherpa, that illustrate B2B lead generation problems and their solutions. The results are outstanding!

Makana Solutions

What they do: Subscription‐based software that helps organizations perform sales compensation planning.

Problem: The software is a new concept (this task is normally done manually) and their target market is composed of companies with 50 or fewer sales reps. Because prospects don’t know this software exists, they are not actively looking for it; therefore, creating demand and awareness are key to generating leads.

Solution: Makana transformed their website into an online destination for sales compensation planning best practices and practical advice. To do so, they added educational content, such as sample plans and webinars, they optimized their website for search using high-value keywords, and they used paid search to generate additional leads. They also added all Web leads to a customer relationship management program for follow-up.

Result: After three months, website traffic increased 200 percent, lead generation rates tripled, and lead conversion rates doubled.

BreakingPoint

What they do: Provide cyber-security solutions

Problem: They are a startup with limited funds and a target audience of security and quality assurance professionals in R&D laboratories who hate marketing.

Solution: A social media strategy that would create strong relationships with hard‐to‐find prospects and turn them into leads. BreakingPoint took a multi-pronged approach that included:

Starting a blog
Scanning social media for relevant conversations to follow
Using Twitter to share info, post fun stuff and conduct informal polls
Creating a LinkedIn group that focused on the industry, not the company
Tweaking their press releases by adding links to their website and distributing them via Qeb-based services more frequently
Promoting their social media channels on their website and in e-signatures
Measuring everything

Result: After six months, leads from the Web shot up to 55 percent of all leads.

IBM Cognos

What they do: Business intelligence software

Problem: Longer sales cycles and buying committees composed of more people were making traditional tactics less effective at driving sales. Email marketing, for instance, saw click-through rates (CTR) plummet.

Solution: IBM Cognos put lead nurturing processes in place that positioned the company as a thought leader, generated demand, and supported the sales team. To read these goals, they overhauled their website to provide useful content, such as white papers and demos, and they organized all the content and information by product line and industry. They also created a lead‐nurturing program based on the prospect’s profile, and they analyzed and tested the program to ensure they were getting results.

Result: Open rates increased from 13.2 percent to 33.3 percent, CTR increased from 0.09 percent to 15.5 percent, response rate increased from 0.05 percent to 17.5 percent, and costs‐per‐lead decreased by 30 percent to 40 percent. Better alignment between sales and marketing goals allowed the marketing team to generate 30 percent of all leads per quarter.

Image by Flickr user Mark Anderson (Creative Commons)

Google+

Tags: BreakingPoint, content, CRM, CTR, educational content, Email marketing, Hubspot, IBM Cognos, lead generation, lead generation case studies, lead nurturing, LinkedIn, Makana Solutions, Marketing Sherpa, paid search, press releases, seo, social media, social media strategy, Thought Leadership, Twitter, webinars
Posted in Marketing, Search Marketing, Small Business, Social Media, Thought Leadership | 4 Comments »

Want to Increase Sales? Give Lead Scoring a Try

March 7th, 2011 :: Monika Jansen

If you’re spending a lot of time nurturing potential customers whether or not they are ready to buy, ranking leads could help you determine who is ready to buy, who is still in the decision-making process, and who is just looking around out of curiosity.

Ranking leads is officially called lead scoring, and though it’s a sales and marketing methodology that is commonly used by large companies to determine the sales-readiness of leads, the basics of lead scoring are applicable to small companies, too. Lead scoring will help you learn how interested someone is in your business, if they fall within your target market, and what content they need in order to make the decision to become a customer. In other words, it will make your lead nurturing process more organized and targeted so you can spend more time on leads that matter.

Marketo published an excellent and really useful eBook on lead scoring that contains best practices and lots of worksheets to get you started. Here are the basics, which I adjusted for small businesses that do not have a large sales team:

1. Gather information

Look through your list of potential customers (which should be in a customer relationship management, or CRM, program, and not on a spreadsheet, piece of paper, or, worse, in your head). Look at:

Past deals and current opportunities
Online activity log: What pages did prospects visit, and where did they come from (search engines, other websites, etc.)?
Previous contact: Have you spoken or emailed in the past? Did a past marketing or promotional campaign catch their attention?

2. Determine your ideal target

Now you’ll score leads based on the information they share with you and their online behavior.

Explicit scoring is based on the information shared by the potential client, usually in a form they fill out. It includes demographic and firmographic information like job title, industry, company size, and annual revenue.

Implicit scoring consists of tracking their online behavior, such as downloading white papers or eBooks, subscribing to your blog, filling out a form, etc, to measure their level of interest in your products or solutions.

3. Establish a lead methodology

Assign points to each piece of information and behavior. You can also just use letter grades or the terms “hot,” “warm,” and “cold”—whatever works best for you. Then determine the score that will indicate a “sales-ready” lead.

Image by Flickr user BOLTandK2 (Creative Commons)

Google+

Tags: CRM, lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Marketing, sales, target market
Posted in Business Development, Marketing, Sales Process | No Comments »

7 Reasons You Need to Use a Social CRM

January 27th, 2011 :: Monika Jansen

One of my business New Year’s resolutions is to embrace my Facebook page, become more social on it, and engage with my audience more. Another resolution is to organize all of my contacts in one place and start using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. But in this day and age, of course, any technology worth its salt has a social element to it, so I am now hooked up with a social CRM called BatchBook. Check it out.

If you have never heard of a social CRM, time to get cozy with one. It will take your lead nurturing and conversion efforts to the next level. Here are seven reasons why you need to start using social CRM today:

1. Keep your contact information safe and sound.

If you have ever experienced a computer crash, my sympathies. It’s an ugly mess, and losing your precious client and potential client data could be disastrous. Of the social CRMs I looked at, all information resides on their servers instead of your hard drive. If your computer crashes, all is not lost—your information will still be intact and you can keep on keepin’ on.

2. Organize client notes, files and comments.

Any CRM, social or not, will allow you to organize notes, files, comments, and other information on your clients in one spot. If you’re working on a team, this is a super helpful way to keep everyone on the same page without e-mailing updates constantly.

3. Find contacts on social media.

This is the biggie. You will know where your clients and potential clients spend time online! You can find your contacts on Facebook and Twitter, and you’ll be notified if they have a blog. With BatchBook, you can even receive their new blog posts, tweets, etc. right on their contact page.

4. Listen to and analyze conversations.

The other biggie: You can find and join conversations that are happening online so you know what is important to your clients, and you can conduct searches to see what is being said about your company. No need to use a separate program—everything will stay organized in one spot.

5. Automate lead nurturing.

Forget filling up your Outlook calendar with reminders to get in touch with potential clients. Who can keep up with that anyway? With any CRM, you will be able to send e-mails containing white papers, brochure, data sheets, and other relevant information to leads at set intervals.

6. Track sales

Use the built-in project management tool to keep track of the sales, deals, and projects for each client. Another handy feature if you are working on a team.

7. It’s mobile.

Many social CRMs are mobile, so you can check the status of deals, update your to-do list, or add new client notes while you’re out and about.

If you use a social CRM, how has it helped you be more productive and increased your sales?

Image by Flickr user joey.ganoza (Creative Commons)

Google+

Tags: lead nurturing, Social CRM, social media
Posted in Social CRM, social media, Technology | 1 Comment »

5 Ways to Effectively Nurture Leads

December 29th, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

While generating leads is super important, it is even more important to hang onto them, convince them what a huge difference you’ll make in their lives, and convert them into clients. Nurturing them can, unfortunately, take a while. Ever hear of the “Law of 29”? It states that a prospect won’t turn into a client until they have viewed your marketing message 29 times. Twenty. Nine. Times.

It’s worth the effort, though: Companies that use lead nurturing have closing rates 300 percent higher than competitors who don’t nurture qualified and qualifiable leads (thanks to HubSpot for that statistic).

There are five ways to effectively nurture those prospects: drip marketing, blogs, newsletters, LinkedIn Answers and social media. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that you always need to include a call to action.

1. Drip Marketing

Funny name, but a great description that refers to sending, or dripping, messages to prospects over time. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to help you automate drip marketing, and be sure to send your prospects information based on how they contacted you. So, if it’s through your website’s contact us form, email them. If they contact you via Twitter, respond with a tweet.

Early in the buying cycle, send white papers, your newsletter, and/or eBooks. By the middle of the buying cycle, send special invitations, datasheets, and/or demos. At the end of the buying cycle, when you are ready for them to decide already, send pricing, feature comparisons, and/or testimonials.

2. Blogs

Invite prospects to subscribe to your blog, where, of course, they will receive useful, interesting, and relevant information on a regular basis. Engage with your readers by asking questions: do they agree or disagree and why; what has their experience been; should you write more on this topic? By starting discussions with your readers, you are also connecting to prospective clients and hopefully pushing them along the sales funnel.

3. Newsletters

A great way to keep your name in front of prospective clients! Just remember to only write a little bit about your company and a lot about your industry’s best practices, mistakes to avoid, easy ways to do x, etc. Feel free to repurpose blog posts, but always keep it short and include information your reader can use.

4. LinkedIn Answers

If you meet a prospective customer at a networking event, send them an invitation to join your network on LinkedIn (just personalize that invite!). Once you are connected, they will see your activity in their weekly LinkedIn update, including the fact that you are answering questions others have posed (and they can read those answers, too).

5. Social Media

Think of social media as a lead nurturing tool. You might not even know someone is a lead until they’ve been following you on Twitter or Facebook for so long they’ve gotten 29 messages (chances are high that they don’t read everything you post). This is why it’s so important to consistently send out useful, interesting, and engaging information, including outright calls to action.

What other tools or methods do you use to convert prospects into clients? I’d love to hear about them!

Image by Flickr user Rosalxxi (Creative Commons)

Google+

Tags: blogs, drip marketing, lead conversion, lead generation, lead nurturing, Marketing, newsletters, sales process, social media
Posted in Business Development, Email Marketing, Marketing, Sales Process, Social Media | No Comments »