Enhance Your Lead Management Methods for a Better ROI

Today’s B2B marketing professionals are being pressured to enhance their businesses while operating on a tight budget. To succeed, they need to improve the ROI in their sales and marketing programs. The lead generation process can be efficiently streamlined with the right lead management. You can be assured of a faithful customer base, if your sales team is following organized and prioritized leads.

Most enterprises spend enormous amounts of money, time and resources for B2B lead generation to only find that their sales leads are not as highly-qualified as they had intended. While it’s one thing to generate business leads, it is quite another to take your sales to the next level. It is essential to find ways to get more out of your business leads by conducting smarter appointment setting and more efficient follow up, leading to better sales meetings and bigger results. Efficient lead management begins with the ability to hit revenue targets in your sales pipeline.

A mutual effort between sales and marketing is the most important in lead management, as these two departments determine the success of a business to a large extent. The main  purpose of lead management is to create a relationship with each prospective customer in a way that their interest develops into an opportunity for sales. Sales lead management begins when interest is first identified, whether through awareness efforts or direct connection efforts. Prospective leads originate in a variety of different ways, and there are sometimes loose structures in place to manage all those leads. Improvement in lead management begins with the ability to hit revenue targets in your sales pipeline.

As we know, leads are crucial links to any prospective sale. Converting these leads to sales and enforcing a stable lead management process is what ensures success in a business. As mundane as this may sound, the secret to success in B2B is in process. It´s not about marketing creativity or en about conducting more or better  lead generation campaigns. The leverage lies in converting more inquiries into qualified leads and, then, more qualified leads into sales. With efficient methods one can enhance customer relationship to increase sales, and in turn bring about productivity and profitability for your enterprise.

The lead management system plays a significant role in all business matters, and modern day lead management is more about using technology. Therefore, lead management tools have gained great importance in effective lead generation. As implementation of appropriate lead management is essential for extracting the best output from the process of lead tracking,  choose your lead management solution with care.

Read more on - Marketing Automation, Marketing Automation software

Driving Sales With Effective Lead Generation Solutions

Lead generation is the most important initiative in the B2B marketer’s responsibilities. The opportunity to improve and refine the volume and quality of leads is a never ending battle. With fierce competition looming around, marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to come up with innovative and effective lead generation strategies  and solutions to keep a continual flow of qualified leads through the sales funnel.

Successful lead generation happens only when there is collaboration and harmony with between the sales and the marketing teams. Many Inside sales teams are constantly frustrated by dead end calls. Often lead generation solutions provide incomplete and outdated, contact information on leads with little or no context. It is therefore  important to integrate lead management, lead nurturing and lead optimization with the single goal of finding prospects for your business.

For companies to be successful, lead generation needs to be the focus of business. Effective planning and maintaining a consistent marketing effort are the two biggest challenges of any promotion, and by adopting the right lead generation plan with helpful tools, there can be a significant difference. If you do not have a workable lead generation system, then your attempts at lead generation can get difficult. It is therefore necessary to have a complete set of sales lead generation tools at your fingertips to reach your sales prospects.

A reputable lead generation solution utilizes sophisticated  tools and advanced methods to build impressive client bases. People have the tools and expertise required to find the qualified leads that companies need in order to grow, succeed, and expand their client rosters. With the right service provider you can capture qualified leads, rich with information. Such pre-qualified leads, have a significantly higher conversion rate than cold contacts. This helps sales achieve sales targets faster.

Partner with an efficient service provider to drive sales and get more power to control the processes and lower the risks. By engaging with the best partner, your business can accelerate marketing-through-sales cycles and achieve measurable and robust ROI.

With a complete set of sales lead generation tools at your fingertips, you can reach your sales prospects. With organizations looking for ways to build a strong return on investment, adopting the lead generation and lead management methods and techniques allows you to boost your business sales, and enable your company to earn lucrative profits ultimately.

Lead generation needs to be all about quality and not quantity, so reinforce your sales pipelines, and give your business an edge with the best lead generation solution.

Read more on - Marketing Automation software, Lead Management System

SEO Tips for B2B Lead Generation

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an inbound marketing technique that helps B2B marketers to be found by prospects, while lead generation means focusing on activities that drive traffic to website. For a website link to be visible to prospective clients, B2B web pages need to be search engine optimized. Here are some important tips.

Title Page

• Every html document must have a TITLE element in the head section, commonly referred as a Meta tag (title tag).
• The title Meta tag is placed in the html source code of the web page in a browser, at the very top of the page right after the opening <head> tag. In the Meta Description.
• This Meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and Meta description tags in the headline section of the pages’ HTML code.
• The description tag goes below the TITLE and above CSS. It should be short and should be kept fewer than 200 characters.
• Meta Description is also the text (summary) that is displayed in the search results, just below the page Title.

Headline

• Include the keyword in the headline as it carries more value.
• A sub-headline tag has more authority over the next level tag and so on.
• Write unique keywords within the headline tag with a short sentence or a tag line including the relevant keyword.
• In sub-headlines, emphasize the use of the headline tags to highlight the relevant keywords in the headings of the web pages

Keywords

• Give emphasis on the selected keyword, so that it will be easier for the search engine spiders to determine the keywords.  Overall, it is better to use bold or strong tags on the targeted keyword so that marketing automation tools will be able to derive metrics for keyword clicks.
• Keywords in the URL are important because they influence the way people link to the marketed product. Hyphens can be included to accommodate multiple phrases in a keyword. Include at least one internal link with keyword as anchor text.
• The internal links help web pages in the website to get indexed by the search engines, build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase included as an anchor text, and increase the page rank of an internal page.  Marketing automation software can be deployed to track links clicked by website visitors, which can be used for lead generation.
• Include the keyword in the alt tag on one of the image. If the B2B web pages use images, image maps or photos, the ALT image tags must be used. ALT image tags are an extension to images which displays alternative text for users who cannot read images (such as Search Engines).

Read more on - Drip Marketing, marketing funnel

Relevance of Social Media in B2B Marketing

Today social media channels have established themselves as an important marketing platform for B2B companies, enabling B2B marketers to reach out to their niche target segments and gain their trust. The best part about social media is the flexibility it provides marketers to customize their marketing strategies and plans as per the needs of the communities being reached out to.

It is an efficient medium to promote company product and services in the B2B marketing scenario. And, due to the significant increase in the budgets being allocated by B2B companies for social media marketing in recent times, this medium is actively used as a useful B2B marketing channel.

Here are some important pointers for social media B2B marketing.

• Join social media sites and be an active participant by following groups and actively sharing useful content to read. Other ways of engaging target audience would include activities such as polling, voting, releasing research reports, etc.
• Developing quality content and sharing it with the target segment is the best way to show authenticity.  Sharing of content like best practises, guides, etc., can get people to talk and discuss about it. SEO optimize content so that it caters to readers who use search engines often.
• Since mobile technology enables users to connect to social media networks from anywhere, marketers need to provide content sharing options such as SMS and email, which will enable prospects to access their content anywhere, anytime.
• Social media marketing needs to be tracked on a regular basis to make sure that the active participants are nurtured at the right time. Metrics vary depending on the site chosen and the content shared in it. Some of the metrics include number of posts, number of responses, number of inbound links and conversion rates.

A social media campaign is incomplete if content is not shared on multimedia sites. People consume information they like in different formats, and social media allows marketers to present their information in the form of videos, podcasts etc. adding new ways of reaching out to a company’s target audience in a format that is popular with them.

Companies can share video content for multiple user viewerships through sites such as YouTube. These sites are user friendly and help to track views expressed on the video content. Also, video content can be embedded into corporate blogs, websites, shared on social networking sites to increase blog traffic and virality for the video.

Marketing automation can be used to automate the lead generation and lead nurturing process.
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Read more on - Marketing Automation software, Lead Management

Targeted Lead Nurturing Using Marketing Automation Solutions

In B2B marketing, lead nurturing is a vital process that enables marketers to slowly and steadily convert a prospect into a sales-ready lead. For lead nurturing to be successful, marketers require real time background information to devise a lead nurturing workflow.

Lead background information gathering is usually done in the website through forms. The information gathered is used by sales teams. Usually marketers collect basic information such as industry segment and email id is collected. Since this information is not sufficient for lead nurturing, intelligent marketing automation tools are being deployed. The main benefit of a marketing automation tool lies in its ability to track background information about website visitors that can be used for lead scoring and lead nurturing activities.

In some cases, sales teams may lose interest in the lead due to lack of progress, while marketing department may loose sight and might not follow up on the leads as they have already identified and handed them over to Sales. This results in loss of prospective leads on account of lack of sustained interaction with the lead and collaboration between internal teams.

So, to procure information on prospective clients and not let the good ones leak out at any stage in the marketing funnel, marketing automation tools are imperative. Effective marketing automation software can help marketers to procure a sustainable flow of qualified sales leads over a long period of time.

Marketing automation software can enable marketers to easily identify and nurture leads.  It can:

• Identify leads that have shown an interest but are not yet sales ready can be nurtured.
• Nurture leads by informing and educating them with relevant information.
• Understand the intent of the leads, and their purchasing stage.
• Classify the leads on the basis of sales readiness.
• Pass leads to Sales enabling them to reach prospects that are ready to buy now, with a relevant solution.
• Execute personalized and intent driven lead nurturing campaigns.

In the future, B2B marketers will extend the use of marketing automation platforms to other phases of the customer lifecycle as well. Today most B2B companies use marketing automation platforms exclusively for demand generation, and may not understand their versatility. With a few tweaks they can be used extensively for customer training, retention and loyalty programs, and to generate customer feedback.


Read more on - lead generation

Executing a Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign

A MarketingProfs report states that “Across the various platforms, brands cited the following adoption levels: Facebook (87%), Twitter (83%), LinkedIn (76%), YouTube (66%), and blogs (57%).”

There are many new social media channels rolling in every day and marketers are continuously pressurized to engage prospects that are active on each of them.  In social media marketing, one solution does not apply to all channels, is a known fact. Example: a Facebook marketing strategy is completely different from a marketing strategy executed in LinkedIn or Pinterest.

However, there are some best practices that have to be followed when it comes to executing social media B2B marketing strategies. While marketing is only a part of the activity, it should always be remembered that marketers need to first build a community of prospects, partners and customers who will be evangelists for their company some day.

Step 1: Identify Target Audience

The first step for social media success is to identify your target audience. First, join social networks, where peers are already on board. Applying some smart brand building techniques combined with personalized nurturing of prospects, based on their interest levels, is the first best practice to adopt for social media campaigns to be effective.  

It is important to find out the top social applications used by your target segment. They, analyze forums for offers and promotions that have worked very well with your target audience to assess how they respond to them.

Step 2: Personalize Marketing Strategy

Every social networking site is different and hence marketing strategies must be planned and executed accordingly. Some important pointers for personalization of marketing strategy are:

• Find out who the key social media influencers are with the help of free search tools such as Technorati, Twitter Search or Google Blog search.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to reach out to these purchasing influencers.
• Determine the key business objectives that are to be met with social media marketing, first.
• Allocate manpower to dedicatedly create, track and monitor social media campaigns.
• Use marketing automation tools to track website visitor intent and use that intelligence to create personalized campaigns.
• Devise a social media marketing strategy based on your revenue targets, product releases, upcoming events, etc.
• Prioritize your social media campaigns activities based on how fast your brand image gets established on the social site. Example: If your Twitter stream is going  great guns vs. your Facebook presence that is still lacklustre, it makes sense to spend more time and campaign money on Twitter than Facebook.

Leads procured through social media can be scored using lead scoring model and nurtured through smart drip marketing campaigns.


Read more on   -  Lead Management

Winning Strategies for Lead Generation

Inside sales teams were a frustrated lot, earlier. This is because they constantly had to deal with dead end calls as they worked with incomplete lead contact information. Marketing automation tools have made this process simpler by capturing qualified leads visiting the website. By tracking down leads that show buying interest, teams could generate faster sales and develop a more targeted responses to those browsing the website.

When leads are generated using lead intelligence, they have a significantly higher conversion success rate than cold contacts. When lead website activity is tracked, they can be scored based on the profile set by the marketer. This way, marketers can pre-qualify their leads, and pass them on to sales teams when they deem fit.  A robust lead generation system combined with some smart marketing techniques will aid marketers in closing deals faster.

Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most widely used B2B marketing technique that is used to connect with prospects. It can be used to send personalized and targeted messages for lead generation and lead nurturing purposes. Marketers can choose to email exciting offers, propositions, events, newsletters, etc. Analyst reports, survey results or website metrics are always a good draw with prospects. So, sharing these reports through email will aid in increasing click through rates for landing pages.

Content Marketing
Marketing collaterals like newsletters and articles are an effective way to touch base with subscribed prospects. When prospect is in the awareness stage, he will be actively looking for information about related products and solutions. So, well-written and researched articles/whitepapers/case studies/success stories can help to engage him on a regular basis.

Nurture
Marketers need to follow up on all leads that have shown interest in the product, irrespective of their buying stages. With the help of marketing automation systems, marketers need to install a regular follow-up system on all leads and customers to ensure they remain warm.  Integrating their own CRM system with marketing automation software will help to automatically nurture these leads.

Display Customer Success
The company website has to project the product’s benefits and the customers who have benefited from it. Customer success stories or case studies are widely read by prospects in the considering state. Therefore, it is important to have a testimonial column on websites which displays the customer success stories as well.

Marketing automation
Using automated tools, marketers can build a pipeline of qualified leads in the marketing funnel (who will be nurtured through email marketing), track visitor intent in real time, shorten sales cycles and boost revenue, and align marketing and sales goals.


Also read more on - Lead Scoring Model, Search Engine Optimization Tools

Leveraging Marketing Automation for Lead Scoring

Lead scoring enables marketers to assign a quantitative value to website visits based on the visiting person’s profile, which includes demographic information and website behavioral activities. The value assigned is determined based on what profile the marketer is interested in. For example, if a marketer is specifically interested in Canadian prospects coming from the automobile industry background, these parameters could be assigned a greater value to denote that whether prospects match (or not) with the marketer’s search criteria.

Scoring also lets marketers to sort leads and identify changes in behavioral patterns so that marketers can work with sales-ready leads. And, lead scoring is one of the primary uses of implementing a robust marketing automation solution.

Marketing automation tools help to automate the manual process of lead management and lead generation. By using the lead tracking features of marketing automation software, marketers can touch base with leads they are interested in, by assessing their buying interest.

Marketing automation can enable B2B marketers to:

• Analyze lead scores to personalize email campaigns.
• Assess the effectiveness of campaigns executed for a specific geographical location or specific purpose.
• Create automated responses to prospect web activity such as form-fills or registrations.
• Create mailing lists based on scores.
• Identify buying stage of prospects and their responses.
• Restrict or provide access to prospect information based on his buying stage.

By implementing a lead scoring model in marketing automation software, companies can:

1. Identify the improvement in quality of leads procured over a period of time. When lead profile criteria is fine  tuned on a regular basis, marketers will be able to rightly define a sales ready lead and then plan effectively towards closing the business deal.
2. Decrease the overheads experienced due to manual processes and focus more on the campaign execution process.
3. Note a marked improvement in campaign development and management. This means, marketers will spend less time in transitioning leads from one phase to another, thereby contributing to the base line.
4. Bridge the divide between sales and marketing departments so that they work can together in identifying sales-ready leads.

Marketing automation solutions and lead scoring is a winning combination for B2B marketers who want to gain visibility into lead intent. This lead intelligence can be leveraged to move leads faster in the marketing funnel and drive revenue for the company.

Read more on - marketing automation solutions, Search Engine Optimization Tools

Social Media Campaigns- The New-age Marketing Mantra

Every business enterprise has a profit oriented objective and enterprises work with various strategies and methods to achieve this objective. Marketing of products and services through various means help the enterprises in achieving their goal. However marketing strategies have  changed over the years with the changing and technology landscape.  Today, most of the leading and brands as well as some small and medium enterprises have their footprints on the world wide web. The increasing use of digital media as a communication tool by the customers has promoted the e-commerce initiatives of  enterprises.

With diminishing world economy, social media has gained a place in the marketing strategies of the leading organizations the world over. Social media campaigns help organizations market their products and services to a wider customer base across the globe. Though there is no alternatives to a physical presence in a business meet, building customer relationships on global level through face to face interaction  will require  enterprises to pool in  large amounts from their exchequer. However   technological innovations over the years has paved way for a number of marketing automation solutions which facilitates customer building and retention, market expansions, entry into new market and launching of new products and services.

The presence of a next generation techno savvy customer helps enterprises benefit from social media and email marketing  campaigns. These effect of these campaigns are further enhanced with virtual conferences,  online catalogs, blogs  and social media networking sites.  The social media enhances the effectiveness of in-person events by using the social networking sites to share information such as agendas, speakers, topic and event highlights. It helps organizations to identify prospective attendees on the basis of  biographical or demographic information and customize invitations for the event. Further, it also helps enterprises to create social teams to spread the word across a wider public.

The social networking sites is a forum for prospective  and existing customers to interact with one another.  Enterprises with the presence on the web  join the social networking sites or create a  social profile as part of their social media campaigns. This helps prospective customer reach out to understand the products and services better through interactions with one another and with the organization.

The media irrespective of  its  digital or physical form, is a great method of increasing brand awareness and customer engagement leading to long term loyalty and boost in sales. However, in today's technologically enabled business environment the social media plays a major role in doing these functions. Social media campaigns which come in all shapes and sizes gives it the uniqueness. However, irrespective of this being a part of B2C marketing or B2B marketing automation,  a set of clear objectives and laser sharp targeting is the success mantra for the social media campaigns.

Also read more on - lead generation, 
Drip Campaigns