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The Changing Face of Lead Generation
Oct 17th
The Changing Face of Lead Generation
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last few years professing the virtues of what I’ve been calling the lead generation trio made up of some combination or advertising, public relations and referrals.
GoDakshin via Flickr
The idea behind the trio concept is to acknowledge the need to spread your lead generation activities out and diversify them in a manner that allows prospects to experience your brand in different variations and from entirely different points of view.
The components of the lead generation trio are dependent upon one another to work. They support and compliment each other and the sum the effort is definitely greater than the parts.
Lead generation in general has changed dramatically over the last few years as traditional broadcast or outbound methods have grown increasingly ineffective.
This doesn’t mean, however, that marketers are left without proactive methods for generating leads.
The fundamental idea of the blended lead generation approach is still valid, but when choosing members of a lead generation trio, business owners must now take into the account the shifting online and social landscape.
While I still contend that advertising is a primary lead driver when employed correctly, I further believe that SEO, or the ability to be found, and social media, or the ability to create direct engagement, have become primary lead drivers and must be included in any discussion concerned with rounding out the new lead generation trio.
In fact, you could easily make the case that referrals have become a member of the social media family and that public relations is now a subset of SEO. I know this point of view won’t sit well with some PR practitioners, but here’s how I now see the major lead generation activities
Advertising – this includes online ads, offline ads, direct mail, pay per click and the all-important elements of ad testing, conversion and tracking.
I believe every business that focuses on promoting content using advertising tools and incorporates landing pages, including mobile landing pages, into their conversion process can still generate leads in a quasi outbound manner.
The thing that advertising has going for it that no other form of lead generation can match is control. This is the one vehicle that allows you to select who gets your message and when.
SEO – The area of SEO is really much bigger than page and search optimization. I use this term to incorporate the production and use of keyword rich content and the acquisition of links in ways that make it easy for prospects to find your business when they search globally, locally and mobily (I know that’s not a word, but perhaps it should be these days.)
Using this broader description of SEO makes it easy to incorporate a great deal of today’s public relations activity, a great deal of which is designed to create content, links and direct prospect contact under the banner of SEO.
Social media – I’ve been saying this for some time now, but social media behavior and tactics have simply become baked into marketing in general, and of late I’ve seen this behavior mature to the point where it’s become a stable aspect of the lead generation trio.
I know many people still cringe at the idea of social and sales being mentioned in the same sentence, but social platforms have now become such an integral part of content discovery and sharing that it is nearly impossible to effectively generate leads via any form of advertising without the integration of social and most forms of successful SEO now rely on social platforms as well.
In a way social media has become the ultimate referral vehicle. Throw ratings and reviews into the social mix and you’ve pretty much round out the new face of lead generation.
So, if you still view SEO as the art of search engine manipulation or social media as a tactic still struggling to produce ROI, think again. Advertising, SEO and social media are now the foundational elements of a solid lead generation program and like so many things that are meant to go together – you can’t have one without the others.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
6 Lead Generation Strategies for Local Businesses
Oct 6th
Small businesses advertising in their own local market often operate under the “big local lie.” It’s common to see small business owners who have tricked themselves into believing that they don’t need to advertise at all and can rely solely on referrals for lead generation and repeat sales.
These small businesses will quickly discover that relying on referrals alone will cause them to get stuck in a growth holding pattern.
Let’s look at six ways smart local businesses can get more leads. As you can see, it doesn’t take a big marketing budget for small businesses to increase new leads and get more referrals.
- Focus on Lead Capture—Establish a standard process for your business to capture lead information during any interaction with a potential customer. Train employees on the process and emphasize its importance for future business growth. When you’re interested in direct responses, you need to ask the right questions. You need to gather useful information that allows you to make business decisions that add up to profits. Coupons, discounts and trials are effective offers for capturing lead information in person. Forms, white papers and demos are effective ways to engage with your website audience and capture useful information.
- Use Local SEO—Establish a Web presence for your business and optimize your website. Tools like Google Places are essential for getting listed and found online. Use the Google keyword tool to research common phrases people use to find your product or service. Make sure your page titles use those key words, and write page copy with those key words. Also, find and engage with local, influential bloggers. Build a relationship with them, or even offer to write a guest blog post twice a month. It’s never too late to get involved in social media and use it as a mechanism to drive traffic to your website. Make sure you’re using lead magnets across your social properties to capture information.
- Segment Your Contact Database—Get the right message to the right person at the right time by tracking behavior. Monitor who visits your website, what Web forms they fill out, what emails they open and what links they click. Demographics and psychographics allow you to target your message and offering. Clearly outline the benefit your product or service offers based on your potential customer’s needs.
- Create Partnerships—Build relationships with businesses that offer complementary products and services. Build your partner’s business into your business and yours into theirs. Make lead capture and your partner’s offering part of the entire sales and delivery process. The key to a powerful partnership is to create added value for your customers.
- Promote Local—Local consumers want to benefit their local community. Consumers will buy local when it is convenient, when they have a relationship with you, and when they are informed. Consumers will even be willing to pay more for a product or service once they are loyal to a local business. There are numerous coalitions and organizations that support locally owned businesses, which form the backbone of the local economy. Join your local chapter of Local First and chamber of commerce to stay informed and visible to local consumers.
- Develop a Referral Strategy—Create a methodical way to generate referrals. Outline a systematic referral process and incentivize your employees for collecting referrals. The best time to ask for referrals is at the time of purchase, shortly after a recent purchase or after a customer satisfaction survey. Caution: Never ask for a referral when a customer is not happy. Track referral volume and conversion rate month-to-month.
Lead generation does not have to break the bank. Established processes and focused execution have the power to grow and sustain a small business. To hear about more strategies for increasing local lead generation activities, check out this previously recorded webinar.
6 Lead Generation Strategies for Local Businesses
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Best Lead Qualifying Tool for Mlm & Direct Sales
Sep 29th
Huge market of multi-level marketing distributors seek way to qualify leads. This simple e-book is their answer. Pitch page promotes e-book: About 10 Things You Must Know Before Joining an Mlm . Niches: Mlm , direct marketing, direct sales, and many more
Best Lead Qualifying Tool for Mlm & Direct Sales
Easy Video Lead Capture
Sep 24th
How To Create An Easy Video Marketing Blog To Attract More Subscribers And Make More Money
Easy Video Lead Capture
Mlm Business Plan & Social Marketing Lead Generation System
Jun 30th
Get your Mlm Business linked to Social Networks. Social Marketing Training for Entreprenurers. Get Free Mlm leads from your Facebook Fan Pages. ECoaching Videos for Mlm Coaching. Triple Your Mlm income with free qualified leads and do it automatically.
Mlm Business Plan & Social Marketing Lead Generation System
Cash In Now On The Ultimate Lead Capture Software
May 20th
Monstrous lead generating software that hypnotizes visitors into action. Mouth-watering sales page. Super-easy setup. 60% commission pays over $58.20 every sale. Great support site with contest (must register to qualify) http://affiliates.leadsqueeze.com
Cash In Now On The Ultimate Lead Capture Software
Keeping Customers Is the New Lead Generation
Apr 12th
Keeping Customers Is the New Lead Generation
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Used to be that we could go out there and hunt down new leads and customers with a measured precision. We found a message that worked, found a medium that reached the right folks, tested, measured, refined and bingo – turn on the tap to growth.
Image Neil T via Flickr
And then a couple of things happened. Our prospects developed tools wise enough to block and ignore messages, social media platforms turned the equation into a dialogue vs. a monologue, and the worst recession in years crippled our prospect’s confidence.
Customer churn, something that might have been acceptable at some point in your trajectory, is devastating in today’s market reality.
Today a lost customer costs in two very significant ways.
First, replacing a customer has become harder to do and, perhaps more importantly, a happy customer is the greatest lead generation tool available. A thrilled customer is the most potent marketing asset your organization can leverage. Smart marketers realize this and explore ways to collaborate, enable and grow with their existing customers as a powerful lead generation channel.
Keeping a customer happy doesn’t stop at delivering on your promise. While not every company even passes that test, there is an expectation that you will deliver. To turn your customers into a collaboration partner you’ve got to up your total customer experience game.
I know everyone talks about that, but what does it really mean in the practical every day world.
It’s more than just creating a fun and exciting experience. I think those are important aspects, but turning your customers into committed partners requires an experience that possess mutually beneficial elements. They must get something in return for their commitment.
Below are some of the elements I think you need to consider in an effort to draw your customers close enough to turn them into committed partners.
Personalize the follow-up
You need to stay top of mind, you need to keep in touch, but that’s a minimum level effort. If you want to stand out you need to personalize your follow-up by connecting with your customers via social networks and exploring ways to tailor your message to their world. You need to ask them frequently about what they need to know, hear, read and consume and find ways to deliver that.
Review results
Your marketing and customer service processes must contain a way for you to help your customers realize the impact of working with you. You must gauge this for your own sake and so that you can find and fix occasions when something didn’t work as planned. Imagine how much business leaks from organizations because clients don’t have the time, energy or desire to find out how to get what they thought they were going to get. If you don’t do this step you’re throwing money away.
Publish together
Every one of our customers has a suite of publishing tools available to them. They can blog about us, create video product demos, review us, and tweet sweet little nothings with very little effort or cost. Oh, and the search engines really kind of love to find all that stuff too.
So, if you want to draw your customers in deeper, get in the publishing game with them. Teach them how to use these tools and then find ways to shoot success stories together, let them guest blog post and respond to comments, show them how to write reviews and find other great resources on review sites. Most importantly, find a way to show them why doing this is good for them.
Pair with peers
One of the greatest gifts you can give your customers is to facilitate their networking efforts. In most cases, some segment of your market consists of customers that are peers in some way – all small business CEOs, all purchasing agents, etc.
What if you found ways to create roundtable discussion communities and brought these peers together to discuss meaningful developments in their industry? What if some of these were customers and some were not? Do you see how you, your customers, and your lead generation efforts could benefit from this?
Be sharable
One the easiest ways to power your thrilled customers is to make your content assets as sharable as possible.
Add sharing plugins, Like and Retweet buttons, and make it very easy to pass your ebooks, slides and email newsletters.
Gather
A couple times a year take groups of four or five of your customers to lunch. You don’t have to do much more than bring them together and let them meet. You will be surprised how often they find ways they can help each other.
Once in a while bring as many of your customers together as you can. Acknowledge your referral champions and create a video booth where they can share their testimonials and success stories.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
How to Create a Content Lead Generation System
Dec 2nd
How to Create a Content Lead Generation System
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Everyone’s talking about content these days and like it not you’ve got to get in the publishing game. (Content Rules – great book on the subject just out.)
Of course this doesn’t mean get the game just to play. The idea behind all of this content creation you’re being asked to do is to use it to build your business in the long term – to get more leads and sales.
The following systematic approach to content creation will help guide you in the most effective use of your limited time on the way to creating a momentum building content lead generation system.
Content Creation Strategy
Like all good systems and processes, your content lead system must start with strategy. With that in mind there are three very important concepts to consider
- The total body of work – think big picture when you think content. Pretend (or for real) that you are outlining a book about your entire subject of expertise. Now, as you think about content work through the outline and remember that are creating a body of work that may take months and years to finish.
- Purpose and repurpose – As you create content always think about the purpose you have in mind – drive traffic, get links, draw reaction – and the repurpose opportunities – blend several posts into an article, use it as seminar, create an ebook from a category of blog posts.
- Medium diverse – One great way to get more bang for your buck is to republish your content in various forms. Record and archive seminars, transcribe audio and video and offer multiple forms of the same content.
Tools – Moleskine notebooks to capture ideas, Dragon Dictation or Casting Words to transcribe audio and video to text, Audio and Video capture tools such as iPhone or Flip Camera
Content Inspiration
Even with a big picture body of work approach you can get blocked when it comes to creating fresh and frequent content. It’s a good idea to have ready made sources of inspiration to turn to and help keep you up to speed on all the real time happenings in your world.
- Questions – make a note of all the questions that prospects and customers ask and get in the habit of posting answers to these inquiries.
- Delicious – use bookmarking tool like delicious so you can mark things you’ve found for later reading and so you can see what other people are bookmarking for categories you need to keep up on.
- Google Reader – Subscribe to and browse 50 or so related blogs – you can do this on your phone while you stand in line at the coffee shop.
- Alltop – Convenient way to see lots of blog posts sorted by countless topics
- StumbleUpon – Unique way to find of the beaten path stuff about topics you choose
- Google Keywords – Sometimes you just need to write about what people are searching for and using a keyword tools helps you know the best way to say it.
- SmartBriefs – Daily digests of some of the best of the web on a variety of topics.
Content Automation
Few people are still as geeky about RSS as me anymore, but I still love what you can do with it. (Back archives and tutorials on RSS use)
My favorite use is to create content automatically or on the fly by installing a bit of RSS magic. Using this approach you can create fresh content for your own site or even custom filtered feeds just for your best customers.
Here’s a quick tip: Bookmark mentions of your company in delicious using company name tag, grab the RSS feed from the tag on delicious and take it Feedburner and use the Buzz Boost feature to create HTML code to publish this info to your “In the news page.” The page updates automatically every time you bookmark an news mention.
Tools: Google News, Feedburner, Delicious, Yahoo Pipes
Advertising Content
If you want your advertising to be more effective and your content to generate leads don’t sell your stuff, advertise your content.
Use your Facebook and other PPC advertising to point to your valuable free ebook or upcoming online seminar and past seminar archive. Turn your advertising into a trust building platform rather than an expensive turnoff.
On Demand Content
One of the most dramatic advances in the communication of sales messages has come in the form of presentation platforms.
With today’s low cost and easy to use video tools you can create full featured, highly engaging sales presentations and host them online to effectively generate and nurture leads night and day.
Using a tool like SlideRocket allows you to also easily embed forms in your interactive presentations and receive alerts when people view the show and complete the form.
Content Partnerships
And now for the big payoff for all your content creation.
Once you create a blog, ebook, white paper, podcast, videocast, online and offline educational seminar you can take these proven and practiced bits of content and start offering them to your strategic partners.
Let them cobrand your ebook and offer it to their clients. Invite them write guest blog content and interview them for your podcast. Offer to provide your awesome seminar free of charge to their customers.
While content creation may seem like a lot of work, using even a fraction of the ideas contained here you can make the ROI of content creation crush just about any other form of lead generation today.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
SlideRocket Set to Blast Into the Online Lead Generation Space
Oct 6th
SlideRocket Set to Blast Into the Online Lead Generation Space
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
SlideRocket is an online presentation editor positioned initially to take on the likes of PowerPoint and Keynote on the web. Today I think it took a giant leap forward.
I’ve always liked SlideRocket’s ease of use for design and find it easier to use than most desktop software. Over the last year or so the tool has continued, in my opinion, to improve by making it easier to add video, use presentations offline, and host online presentations that don’t require any download or plugin on the part of the attendee.
SlideRocket is also a great presentation asset manager because it allows you to share and collaborate on presentations with team members and even updates all your presentations and slides when you make a change to an asset such as a logo. Organizations that share or use common presentations for sales and demos should really appreciate that functionality.
This week SlideRocket announced additional features that also make it a powerful sales and lead generation tool.
SlideRocket users can now embed live collaborative comments as well as polls and surveys into presentations and have these presentations available 24/7 as marketing assets.
Viewers can add comments, like sticky notes, anywhere in a presentation and have the comments delivered to the presentation author in real time organized in one place.
While other online meeting tools such as GoToWebinar and WebEx use polling and surveys, what makes SlideRocket’s implementation different is the ability to create and host interactive presentations that can be viewed at any time and then get real time alerts as people add comments and complete survey data.
For the small business this is almost like having your best sales person standing by making presentations, qualifying, nurturing, and perhaps even closing leads day and night.
As you can see I’m pretty bullish on this update because I think this could be a game changer in the world of small business lead generation.
Imagine running a PPC or offline ad campaign that sends people to a landing page to view your educational presentation featuring, slides, data, audio, video, surveying and polling and knowing in real time who is viewing the presentation, how they are responding, where they spending the most time or where they stop viewing.
There are other providers of real time lead analytics, but few compare to Slide Rocket’s ease of use and ability to engage.
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View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
MediaVest Hires Sarah Baehr, Former Media Lead at Razorfish
Oct 5th
| He has written extensively about social media, search marketing, video advertising, and Internet policy, and is a frequent moderator at industry events. |
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