How does your lead scoring rate against this benchmark?
Integrated 'SMarketing' is more than generating enquiries to pass them onto your sales team; leaving the ball in their court to qualify the leads, identifying if they are serious buyers or just researching. Qualifying these leads with the help of Lead Scoring Tools is proven to support companies not only to be more efficient, but to connect 'with sales-ready leads', so boosting conversion.
By setting scoring criteria for your leads, your Sales team can reach out at the right time in the buying cycle, with relevant information and more likely to convert as they will communicating with serious leads, ready for more information'.
Lead Lizard's lead scoring summary identifies which companies are adopting this process, their objectives for lead scoring and which is the most valuable asset when scoring.
Read our …
How to build a marketing automation programme to score leads
How do you know which leads to follow up, when to follow up and what's relevant to communicate based on where leads are in the sales funnel? These are challenges for any business using inbound marketing to generate demand and manage leads. Lead scoring is a vital methodology to ensure your leads are sales-qualified, ready for your sales team to follow up, so they are not left dormant and become missed sales.
The research from Snapapp and RingLead identifies that over 44% of companies have active lead scoring programs yet 32% are not successful with their programs. It goes on to say that companies will automatically fail if they do not address their data cleaning and accuracy, and shares both scoring indicators and how to improve your programs through a scoring hierarchy.
As well as planning…
How to generate leads from small B2B audiences in a niche market
Dominating a niche B2B market generally reduces competition, reduces price pressure and the ‘me too mentality’ brings a supplier closer to their customers and increases their loyalty. So why do so few companies make a success of niche marketing? What are the challenges associated with lead generation? What is the best combination of marketing tactics to achieve success?
Niche market definition
First let’s define a niche B2B market – the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines it as ‘A clearly defined segment of the market. It is about satisfying a specific customer need that is, in general, not covered by any major competitors’. Philip Kotler defines a niche as ‘a portion of the market in which individuals possess homogeneous needs and characteristics and the latter are not covered by the general offer…
5 ways to extend the use of popup technology on your site
Using the latest technology to engage visitors to your site is a must. In a recent post on using popups to grow email subscribers, Kath Pay discussed some best practices for capturing email addresses using popup technology.
In this post I’m looking at some of the ways you can extend popup technology to do more for your site. You’d be surprised how much that popups can do. Popups can be used to:
1. Ask for feedback
The latest popup technology allows you to fine tune who you show your message to. For instance, let’s say you only want your message to appear to people who leave your site without browsing for more than a minute.
When these short-term visitors go to leave your site, you can ask them, 'Was there another product or topic you would find interesting?'. Using popup technology this…
How to identify and manage the most efficient methods of generating leads
The most successful small businesses know how to identify and manage the most efficient methods of generating leads. Generally speaking, there are two main categories of lead generation tactics: outbound lead generation (where you reach out to the prospective customers via phone solicitation, direct mail, paid advertising, and email marketing) and inbound lead generation (where the customer finds you via Search Engine Optimization, social media, and PPC).
Deciding on the right lead generation strategy
Different methods (or combination of methods) might provide the best opportunity for new business leads, depending on your circumstances. Deciding on the right lead generation strategy depends on what you’re selling and how your customers get information that leads to a sale.
Here are a few key concepts to keep in mind when deciding your lead generation strategy:
Tip 1 - Not all customers are on social media, and…
Inbound marketing success requires digital channel integration
As referenced in the book, Inbound Marketing and SEO, Inbound Marketing is defined as an organisation gaining the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and timely content to people who actually want to receive the content. It’s a concept the polar opposite of customers being blasted email shots, their email addresses being sold off to 3rd parties without permission, money off coupons and direct mail shots where an organisation hopes enough customers would interact with the promotion to make it stick.
A number of digital communications channels are being utilised to adapt an Inbound approach with the aim to customise the delivery of content to a well-defined, targeted customer group such as Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media, working together as one joined up digital strategy, delivering the same message adapted for the chosen digital channel optimised to attract the…
How to build your email list using viral promotions
When building your email list, or indeed any lists for direct marketing, it is best practice to grow them organically, but of course that’s easier said than done and additional incentives will help grow a list more rapidly and can encourage sale as part of sales promotion. Social media will help amplify your promotions further.
Running viral promotions via social media, such as contests and sweepstakes and the other examples I will show in this post, are the perfect example of how social media can both increase engagement with prospects and clients as well as building your email list organically.
Before I explore the various viral promotions that you could utilise, we need to acknowledge the common pitfalls with viral promotions strategy and how to avoid them.
Prize hunters not paying customers
Viral promotions can attract the wrong type of prospects. There are always going to be those who will…
Insights on the best times to follow-up on leads in B2B marketing
Here's a summary of research specifically of interest to readers selling to marketers, but also relevant insight on best time for follow-up for B2B marketers selling technology to other professionals.
Traditional lead generation techniques work well when selling marketing technology to marketers - it's not seen as 'cold calling'. According to Jenny Vance, President of Leadjen 'Marketers wear many different hats in their organizations: social media, events, public relations and advertising, to name a few. It’s no wonder they are bombarded with sales messages. When done properly, traditional lead generation efforts to marketers can be very effective in driving sales appointments and revenue.'
Leadjen has backed this up with their study from 2010-2013, to look at best prospecting practices to Marketers, and traditional lead generation techniques. Leadjen made over 1 million calls and email contacts across more than 20,000 conversations. It…
4 Steps to Inbound Marketing Success
One of the biggest challenges business owners as well as marketers will face in 2014 is how they can use different online media together to achieve inbound marketing success. Many think of (social media, email, search…etc) in silos, and that’s the reason why many inbound marketing strategies may fail.
In order for you to be able to design a less siloed, more effective inbound marketing strategy, I have found you need 3 elements:
1. A defined customer journey
This begins when a complete stranger finds your brand online. They go through a conversion path that is designed to turn them into customers and then turn those customers into evangelists who will promote your brand for you. You might get lucky turning very few of those strangers into customers from the first interaction if your product and copy resonates with them really well, but then you’ll be missing on…
A Solid Lead Generation System starts with a Nose for News
Whether you are a kid with crayons, a Journalist or a Content Marketer, we all have an expectation that audiences will love every sentence we write. After all, we put a lot of effort into each thought – how can the story not be perfect?
The harsh fact is that most web readers skim stories, which means that it takes even more effort to make the important points of a piece relevant, clear and arranged in a logical style.
For Content Marketers, this storytelling technique is particularly important in developing a lead generation system.
Four Tips for Content Marketers
Content marketers would do well to imitate Journalists, who by training are some of the best storytellers because they focus on the following areas:
1. Relevance. Answers to the key questions of who, what, when, where, how and why are the foundation for making a story…
