lead generation – Mautic https://mautic.org World's Largest Open Source Marketing Automation Project Wed, 18 Dec 2024 11:51:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 https://mautic.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/iTunesArtwork2x-150x150.png lead generation – Mautic https://mautic.org 32 32 6 Strategies for Generating Leads Using LinkedIn https://mautic.org/blog/6-strategies-generating-leads-using-linkedin Mon, 05 Jun 2023 12:49:00 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/6-strategies-generating-leads-using-linkedin/ The processes involved in finding, accumulating, and courting potential clients on LinkedIn are referred to as lead generation on LinkedIn.

When used properly, it may help companies grow organically and profitably while forging closer bonds with their leads.

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile

To draw in potential leads, you should enhance your LinkedIn profile. Playing the “role” becomes crucial because this is a professional platform.

Simply put, you need to optimize your profile for engagement:

  • A relevant title that concisely describes your position with the organization and your area of expertise should be included with a clear headshot.
  • Make sure your job description is compelling, useful, and informative.
  • Ensure that your profile is quickly found by the proper target audience, make sure your “About” summary emphasizes your skills, expertise, and accomplishments and is keyword-rich.
  • Use LinkedIn’s “Featured” section to highlight significant projects, works of literature, blog articles, etc. and attract new clients.
  • Last but not least, present “social proof” by requesting genuine recommendations from coworkers, friends, etc.

2. Join LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn groups, which are specialized spaces for professionals of all levels to share their opinions and experiences or ask questions about the group issue in one place, can be searched for leads.

Fundamentally, you should participate in LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your industry or niche. You can position yourself as an authority in your field in this way. Also, this may draw potential customers that are interested in your goods or services.

Find the groups that your buyer persona would be in. Join those communities and use them to generate leads for LinkedIn by contacting the group’s members or looking for posts that show a buying signal or intent.

3. Share valuable content

Make an effort to provide your LinkedIn connections with informative content. It should offer insights and solutions to the problems your target audience has, such as blog posts, articles, and infographics.

This will increase your trustworthiness and draw in new customers.

The most effective strategy to draw in the leads you want is to publish content on LinkedIn as a thought leader – that is, as someone recognized as an authority in your field.

As you start to see responses, you can either collect all of the LinkedIn profiles in one place and manually reach out to them, or you can utilize LinkedIn automation and email tools to do it automatically.

4. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid feature that enables you to locate and contact potential leads. It provides sophisticated search criteria that enable you to focus your search and identify leads that fit the profile of your ideal client.

LinkedIn tracks accounts that have connected with your business on numerous levels. It then categorizes them based on your level of interest and suggests some to you.

It is the ideal method for generating leads from individuals who have previously expressed interest in your business.

5. Engage with your connections

Comment on your contacts’ posts, share their material, and send them individualized notes to engage with them. Relationships and trust will be formed as a result, potentially opening up business chances.

Being a thought leader is great. You won’t succeed, though, until you utilize social media for what it was meant to be used for: connecting with others and fostering genuine relationships.

Reach out and strike up a discussion with someone in your network if you want to develop a relationship with them.

6. Make Use of LinkedIn Tools

If you are in the business of leveraging LinkedIn to generate leads, there are a ton of solutions available to make your life easier.

What you need to understand is that tools like these are highly useful and desirable, but rather difficult to choose from due to both benefits and drawbacks.

The following tasks benefit from using tools:

  • Automating common tasks like connecting invites, follow-up messages, requesting that individuals follow a firm’s page, endorsing connections.
  • Launching automatic marketing campaigns.
  • Automating the process of sending invitation requests and follow-up messages, enabling you to create a list of ready gen leads.
  • Quick lead processing and information gathering about lead sources.

You also need to consider any potential negative effects:

  • Due to the variety of tools available and the fierce competition, finding the correct automation tool for testing that can optimize value can be difficult.
  • Because some of the sophisticated automation technologies are expensive, it might become an expensive endeavor.
  • While limiting the alternatives, caution should be exercised because not all tools are secure to use.

Conclusion

Time and time again, LinkedIn has shown to be a reliable and strong platform for generating high-quality leads.

It takes more than just collecting the first and last names of your leads to use a LinkedIn lead generator.

The goal is to establish a stronger relationship with your leads using natural and sustainable methods while spending an optimum amount of time and effort in nurturing those leads.

You can learn more about quality methods of managing your LinkedIn connections on this link. The article will help you get a better overview of your connections and help you generate more leads by better organizing your network.

Nevena Rogar is a freelance content writer at LeadDelta. You can follow her on LinkedIn and read more of her articles on LeadDelta blog and on Clippings.

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3 Secrets For Growing a Community Online https://mautic.org/blog/3-secrets-for-growing-a-community-online Wed, 23 Mar 2016 11:30:03 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/3-secrets-for-growing-a-community-online/ As marketers we are continually seeking ways to reach and connect with our audience. But more than that, we want community. Community is more than simply a group of buyers. Community seeks to connect with your brand. They believe in the central idea or core value proposition you offer, and want to share it with others. So how do you take your message and develop a community out of it?

Although Mautic is still young, we’re amazed at the community that we’ve been surrounded by. As we seek to foster this growth, we thought we’d share some key themes for how to develop a vibrant, connected community.

community

Change Your Language

When we set out to develop Mautic, we started with an idea. We wanted to change the way people looked at marketing. We wanted to level the playing field for every business and help them connect with their audience in a meaningful way. But we knew it was going to take a special group of people who felt as connected to the vision as we did. This is true of any brand. But it had to begin by changing our language. How often do we talk about “converting leads”? Whether we like it or not, we are conditioned as marketers to consider our buyers as potential leads, instead of individuals who are part of a community. It may be semantics, but if your brand wants to build a true community, you will see them and describe them differently. It will also change the way you interact with them.

Would you rather be considered a lead or a guest? Disney has built a culture and a brand that seeks to interact with people in a different way. It permeates their brand and the language they use everyday. In the book Built To Last, Jim Collins describes the terminology that Disney uses to build the voice of the Disney brand.

  • Employees are “cast members.”
  • Customers are “guests.”
  • A crowd is an “audience.”
  • A work shift is a “performance.”
  • A job is a “part.”
  • A job description is a “script.”
  • A uniform is a “costume.”
  • The personnel department is “casting.”
  • Being on duty is “onstage.”
  • Being off duty is “backstage.”

These simple changes to their language reinforces the message they seek to communicate. It also greatly impacts the customer or “guest” experience. If you’re like Disney and your central message is “making people happy”, you will not call your guests, potential leads.

Make Community Sticky

In their book Made to Stick, the Heath brothers reveal the key elements to making ideas stick. These core tenets are vital to not only growing ideas, but communities as well. They are: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories.

  • Simple: If your mother doesn’t understand your core message, start again. Your central value statement should be simple and easy to interpret.
  • Unexpected: How do you get someone’s attention? You must be willing to do something that is out of the norm. How about giving away powerful software for free?
  • Concrete: No business speak here. Your message must not mince words. You must say exactly what you mean, and mean exactly what you say.
  • Credible: Does your message backup your value? How can people determine this? Are there reliable sources? Can your community test your product or service?
  • Emotional: This often makes people in business feel uncomfortable. Research shows us again and again that we are driven by emotion or feelings. Don’t be afraid to get real.
  • Stories: Who in your community uses your product or service? What are they using it for? Is it changing their life in some way? These stories will serve to further connect and fuel your community.

Mautic is filled with individuals who have gravitated to these principles. Leaders like Takuro Hishikawa in Japan, Rodrigo Demetrio in Brasil and even more in Europe, Thailand, the US and around the world. These individuals jump in and help others by equipping them with translated documentation. They gather their network to share common ideas and solutions. They take their free time to assist those who are trying to setup and troubleshoot. This is community.

Everyone who has contributed to Mautic has engaged and participated because they believe in one or more of these “sticky” principles. It connects them at a level that is deeper than simply intrinsic value. It’s a feeling.

Feelings and Idea Flow

In addition to the key elements above, when a community is developed, it must not remain stagnant. There is a flow that naturally comes from collaborating with others as we move toward the realization of a common ideal. In the book Social Physics, Alex Pentland highlights this with the concept of idea flow;

“Synchronization and uniformity of idea flow within a group is critical: When an overwhelming majority seem ready to adopt a new idea, this convinces even the skeptics to go along. A surprising finding is that when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others— e.g., rowing together, dancing together — our bodies release endorphins, natural opiates that give a pleasant high as a reward for working together.”

It feels good to be part of a team that works together to realize a vision. This is not simply research. This is a physiological fact. When you feel connected to a community that is aligned around a common goal, your body engages. It gives you that sense of accomplishment, a sense that provides feedback in the form of emotional satisfaction.

The Right Kind of Community

We’ve highlighted some key elements to developing your community online. But we must be careful to grow the right kind of community. It is not simply a “group of people that share a similar characteristic”. This is more about facts and figures than principles and ideals. True community is a “feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.” This definition is what makes our communities sticky. Promoting this concept and designing an idea flow by helping each other achieve our goals, is what will truly connect us.

This translates directly to how we market and sell. When we recognize that sales creates customers and that community creates advocacy, it changes the way we interact. We will make efforts to connect with them using a different language, on a higher level and with a common purpose.

This approach works. Over the last year and a half Mautic has seen tremendous growth. We have used these principles to grow a simple idea into 10,000 communicators who have used Mautic and a community of over 4,500 individuals who consistently interact with and share the vision of a marketing solution that thinks differently.

As you seek to reach your audience and develop your brand, what are other principles you’ve discovered to help your community grow? Share them in the comments below!

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Marketing, Sales, Value & the Customer Journey https://mautic.org/blog/marketing-sales-and-creating-value Thu, 10 Mar 2016 14:09:15 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/marketing-sales-and-creating-value/ As a marketer, I’ve spent many years interacting with sales teams. As a matter of fact, I’ve been a card carrying salesman myself. So I can definitely identify with the challenges facing both marketing and sales teams. On one hand, there is the marketing team. They are a creative group that wants to bring value by developing campaigns that reach buyers (and win awards). And then you have the sales team. They are laser focused on one thing, bringing value by offering solutions (and closing the deal). Sure each group will say they respect their colleagues across the cubicle wall, but do their actions support it? And how does this relationship work in the digital age? How do these teams reach across the aisle to bring value to the customer?

cubicleDesks

It begins with some self-awareness. Marketing holds the organizational mantle on creativity. They pride themselves on having all the right tools for assessing and understanding the customer need. They focus group test. They A/B test. Then after all the data has been gathered, they develop the most engaging campaigns ever. Sales is no different. They are one of the key pillars for organizational success. They stand in that magical circle called the “Moment of Truth”, and close deals. They brush up on their emotional intelligence skills. They develop deep client knowledge and wield it at the perfect time to bring the sale across the line.

This still happens today. Many organizations still rely on traditional marketing and sales teams to reach customers and deliver sales. But are they focused on the right metrics? The customer is more informed than ever before. The tables have been turned. The customer is now in the driver’s seat. Marketing and sales need to better understand the customer journey in a digital sense. Investing in new social and digital tools are not bad. But if sales and marketing don’t work together, they will never accomplish what they can together. And it begins by adding value.

At the Intersection of Value

Consider the graphic below. It has two lines. The gray line is representative of the customer journey. It has a beginning and a perceived end, which we’ll discover is not really an end at all. The black curved line is your business. As we move from left to right, the goal is to maximize the moments where these two lines intersect. Segments of the journey are indicated by brackets. They are Discovery, Research, Moments of Truth, and Customer Engagement. As these buyer touch-points occur, it’s our job to create and provide as much value as we can. It is in these moments where buyers form their thoughts about your brand. You must help them meet their need by providing value at every point along the way.

value

Marketing and sales have a unique opportunity to work together to deliver value at every stage of the customer journey. They first need to align on the major segments of that journey. After this is agreed upon, they must align on the value that is delivered at each one of those stages.

Creating Value at Every Stage

We’ve talked about the marketing/sales funnel and how it’s broken. We are in agreement that this is not where we have been before. So how do we know what value we should create at each buying stage? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s look at four typical stages along this customer journey.

  • Discovery: The first area we need to tackle is when the buyer learns they have a need. Understanding this stage is a challenge. Start by asking your existing customers about what caused the need. What were they doing when they first discovered they needed your product/service? Where were they? This causal effect will assist you in determining the right content/value approach you should take. It will also help you understand what sites and channels are used when they discover it.
  • Research: We all do it. The data doesn’t lie. Research shows that we are going online to find answers to all manner and kinds of questions. And your customers are doing it too. This has never been more true even in the car buying experience.

    Today, half of all car shoppers with mobile devices use their smartphones while at the dealership. The top action people perform with their phones while on the lot, not surprisingly, is confirming that they are getting a good price on a vehicle. Searches for Kelley Blue Book and competing dealers occur more often when at the dealership. – Think with Google

    These answers are the key to developing the value we seek to create. Learn as much as you can about where your customers are coming from. What sites do they visit when researching? Are they visiting your website? What content are they viewing? Is it valuable to the research they are doing?

  • Moments of Truth: The buyer has become aware of the need. They’ve researched all the solutions. They will now enter the zone that we affectionately call the “Moment of Truth”. It is in this space where your potential customer will make a decision to buy. Our job is to engage the buyer with the reassurance of their buying decision. Sure we will have an amazing call-to-action. The button will be the perfect color and be in the perfect spot. But where is the value? When buyers make a decision, we must create the most value-filled buying experience possible. Is it easy to buy a product on your site? What does your follow up look like?
  • Customer Engagement: Now that the buyer has become a customer, the value changes again. It now becomes a matter of user experience and engagement. When was the last time you used your own product? What questions popped up? Was it easy to find the answers? What if the answers were sent before you had the question? It is important that your customer sees the value in a long-term relationship.

Listen and Verify

But it does not stop at providing value. This does not automatically get you the sale. As any marketer worth their credentials will attest, you must always be listening. Each one of these touch-points should be tracked. It will provide you with the data you need to “listen” and verify that it is the right value being provided at the right stage.

For sales and marketing to be successful, it must retool. But more importantly, they must align their focus on providing value to the customer at every stage of the buying journey.

Marketing automation tools are valuable in helping you learn more about your customer. But the value doesn’t stop there. It can be assist you in creating a value-based customer journey that equips the buyer at every stage.

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How to Make Marketing Automation Personal https://mautic.org/blog/how-to-make-marketing-automation-personal Wed, 10 Feb 2016 11:58:15 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/how-to-make-marketing-automation-personal/ We’ve heard it before and we’ll hear it again. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard friends, family and colleagues talk about the frustration of SPAM. Emails and correspondence that is irrelevant and unrelated to the needs they currently have. It’s begins with insensitive telemarketers and transitions to direct mail and unwanted emails. Gary Vaynerchuk once said: “Marketers ruin everything.” And I’ve found that to be true. The wider the net we cast, the less personal we become. Sometimes we just try too hard. Listen, I understand. We are trying to reach our audience in new and unique ways, with new and unique tools. But how can we reach them in a personal way?

I was traveling the other day and found myself at a restaurant seated next to a couple of gentlemen from the local car dealership. Normally I don’t find myself listening in on the conversations of those around me, but the restaurant was quiet, and I couldn’t help but follow along. It started slow, and as they continued, I gathered that one was the manager and the other was the GM. As they began to discuss the current state of the dealership, the conversation began to take an interesting turn.

Personal Marketing

The manager was talking about how challenging it was to keep team members from leaving the business. He was expressing frustration that some of the individuals that had left, were now back asking for their jobs back. And as they discussed the nature of their departure and return, the manager began talking about the culture of the business. “It’s not like it was when I was on the sales floor”, he chided. “When I was working the floor we did whatever it took to make the customer feel welcome.”

The day was cold, overcast and it had been raining, and as the manager continued, he said, “You know, on a day like today, our team would have been standing at the front door with umbrellas, waiting for customers to arrive. And when they would, we would be out there asking the customers what they wanted before they event stepped out of the car. And if they did, we’d have the umbrella handy to cover them as they walked into the dealership. Now, the sales team simply stands at the front door and hovers, waiting for them to walk up to the door.”

And if they did, we’d have the umbrella handy to cover them as they walked into the dealership.

He continued to express his disdain for the current sales team and how they have lost the hunger or drive to meet the needs of the customers who have come to their dealership. “It’s a different group.” he muttered.

Why Automation

I think it’s important for us to do a bit of a reset on the purpose of automation. It has only been a couple of years since automation has really taken off, and already, there are marketers that believe automation can replace the entire function of marketing. They are like the sales team in the story our manager talked about. They have quickly forgotten the art of marketing. They have forsaken the customer and believe that they already know exactly what the customer wants, and will wait for them to “make the right decision”.

Friends, marketing automation will not, and should not, replace your marketing team. It was developed to help you see your marketing environment in a more holistic way. It helps you take into account the location and potential needs of your customer and help you provide information and value to them in a quick and efficient manner.

Personal Automation

So let’s get back to our manager. When he was on the sales floor, he was always thinking about the customer. When the rain clouds were out, he was prepared with an umbrella, ready to meet their needs before they even asked. As marketers, we should always consider the needs of the customer based on their environment.

Where are your customers? What is their environment? Is it raining or is it sunny? Who are they with? Is it lunch time, are they hungry? The list goes on and on and on. These questions help us gain a critical view of our customers. When we see them in a way that is not a data point, but a person, seeking value, we will look at them and our marketing in a different light. Here is a great article on developing a value-based model for your business.

Time to Get the Umbrella

As you continue to seek the perfect automation tools to help you share your product or service to your audience, please take a long, hard look at your customer. They are the reason you are in business. Providing value to them goes beyond the sale. As we’ve discussed, you certainly want to maintain a healthy view of your goals, but if you don’t keep your customer front and center, your automation efforts will feel not feel personal. They will end up feeling like the car sales team that our manager talked about.

So stop staring out the window, get the umbrella, go out in the rain and put your feet into the shoes of your customer. Because when you do, your marketing efforts will feel less automated and will start to feel more personal.

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Finding and Marketing Your Target Audience https://mautic.org/blog/finding-and-marketing-your-target-audience Wed, 07 Oct 2015 11:55:33 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/finding-and-marketing-your-target-audience/ Identifying your potential customers should always be one of the first things you do when beginning your marketing automation. This process of finding your target market needs to be done with thought and careful planning. Why is this planned approach to your target market so important? Because if you incorrectly identify your target, if you’re off by too great a distance then you will be met with a failed product launch. Even as you build your business and create your product offerings you should be preparing your marketing. This means finding your target market should be an active part of your business development. Here are 7 recommended steps to follow as you seek to create the perfect marketing strategy.

1. Think like your audience

You know your product. You know what you are working on or the services providing. In fact, you have been eating, sleeping, and breathing your business longer than anyone else. As a result of your personal involvement you have come to identify with certain terms, keywords, and a distinct way of thinking about your business, your product, and the needs your solution meets. This is the first problem you will face. Rather than thinking as the person who has created this amazing business you must think like your audience. When you think like your audience this affects your entire marketing strategy. Everything from the keywords you use in your content marketing to the flow of your campaign workflows within your marketing automation will be affected by the thinking of your target audience.

2. Go where they go

But let’s step back even further. Before you can think like our target audience you need to go where they go. You need to find those locations online (and on social) where your potential customers like to visit. There are several reasons why this step is important. First, by finding and visiting those places where your audience lives you will learn what interests and motivates them. Second, this will help you think like them (see the first point above). When you live a day in someone else’s shoes you have a much better understanding what they are going through, and what they are thinking. You must go where they go. And be mindful that this is not the same for every business. You may find a great audience for your business on Twitter while someone else may find that LinkedIn is their ideal social network hangout.

3. What does tomorrow hold

As a business owner and someone who knows their product and potential market you must do more than just create something your target audience wants today you must create what they will need in the future. You must identify how your market will evolve and do more than just provide a feature set or product that meets their needs today. You have to anticipate what the future holds. Henry Ford has been credited with saying something along these lines:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
More details via HBR

The veracity of the quote aside, the sentiment is true. Often your target audience is unaware of what they will desire in 6 months, 12 months, the future. Your job is to find your target, identify their future desires, and market towards this goal. Obviously this is a challenging task. While you cannot predict the future you should be consistently innovating and pushing the boundaries in anticipation for what will be required in the future.

4. How big is your audience

One of the most important questions you should ask as you seek out your target audience should be how big the potential market is. If you incorrectly identify your audience, if you overestimate the potential you will find your business is producing more than the demand and you’ll fail to be successful. You should look to well-known and respected sources regarding the potential market. As a business owner or marketer you are undoubtedly optimistic. You believe your product is needed by everyone everywhere. This is not the truth. Remember, you can’t be too cautious about believing your own stories. Do the digging, look at the cold hard facts. There are numerous reports and surveys carried out on most potential markets. Some of these reports may require you to purchase them. Do so. It cannot be stressed enough that you understand the true size of your potential market. Failure to accurately identify this metric will leave you standing in an empty room, alone, with an amazing but unneeded product.

5. How big is the room

In addition to the audience but somewhat related, you should also do digging into the size of the room. This means looking beyond the existing audience but the empty space where your audience may expand. This point ties the previous two points nicely together. You need to seek out what the future for your target looks like as well as how big that audience currently is. Then once you have this two metrics you can massage them to forecast the potential future market and ultimately the size of the “room”. In this case you’re looking at the negative space. Where will your product be able to expand and grow and add market share. Within different verticals where are the walls (or ceilings) what are the limiting factors for your audience? Don’t fall into the trap of believing your target is too perfect and beyond the constraints of any room – every business, every product has limitations and boundaries. Identify these early.

6. What does your competition see

If you are in a market where your competitors existed first you have a distinct advantage. Dig into their marketing strategy, their keyword targeting, their landing pages and their email marketing campaigns. Don’t blindly attempt to reinvent the wheel. Look around and see what’s been done already. You can gain an infinite amount of wisdom by learning from the mistakes of others. Just because you are doing something different, something revolutionary, or something never seen before does not mean there is no value in what others have done previously. Learn from what your competitors see. What have they identified as the potential target audience or what leads have the most potential. This is smart marketing. This is smart lead generation. Use the countless hours of others to better find and market to your target audience.

7. Plan smart marketing

This step is listed last because you should complete the first 6 steps first. While you should put a first priority on finding and relating with your target audience this last step is quite important. Once you have found your target audience you need to create a plan to market to them. This smart marketing involves how you create your marketing landing pages, the format and structure of your email marketing campaigns, and the keywords you should focus on when crafting your content marketing strategy. When you know your target audience you will be fully equipped to prepare a marketing plan that meets your potential leads where they live. Mautic has a powerful marketing automation platform capable of organizing multiple campaigns based on your target audience, but perhaps an even greater feature exists. Mautic allows you to test landing pages, keyword strategies, form conversions, and as a result better identify your potential leads. You should be marketing smarter. Mautic helps.


The act of finding and marketing to your target audience is a fundamental building block for a successful business. Following the above 7 steps will help you to have a clear picture regarding your potential audience. Clarity on this aspect of your business will give you unmatched opportunity for growth. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to make informed decisions on future strategies, advanced marketing opportunities, and more. You’ll make the most of your marketing dollars and you’ll be fully equipped for growth and success.

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4 Ways To Do Lead Management Right [Slideshare] https://mautic.org/blog/4-ways-lead-management-right Thu, 09 Jul 2015 19:12:50 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/4-ways-lead-management-right/ Here are 4 simple ways to make sure you do your lead management the right way

If you’re looking for more detail about lead management then be sure to check out this far more comprehensive step-by-step guide.

These are the four roads that will lead to a better sales funnel. Not a comprehensive sales lead model but should get you started in the right direction.

  1. The Right Technology

    • Know Your Needs: Before you can select the right technology you need to fully understand the problems you want this technology to solve.
    • Prepare to Scale: Don’t select the marketing software you will use based on your current situation. You expect to be successful; plan for the future.
    • Identify Your Costs: What you spend on the right technology is an investment in your future; identify what you will spend implementing marketing tech.
  2. The Right Beginning

    • Sales Team: Sales teams and marketing teams must work together to create the best strategy for customer growth.
    • Marketing: Marketing begins when your business begins. There is no such thing as too early to begin marketing.
    • Audience: The identified target audience dictates a sales and marketing focus from the very beginning.
  3. The Right Campaigns

    • Timing: Campaigns need to be bold in sharing the right information at the right times with your leads.
    • Repetition: Campaigns should always have a clear and distinct purpose or goal to be accomplished.
    • Purpose: Campaigns should be organized to execute at the ideal times.
  4. The Right Reporting

    • Lead Tracking: Right reporting focuses on lead activity: such as time spent on page, pages visited, and social sharing.
    • Engagements: Reporting should include engagement activity between company and lead.
    • Conversions: Right reporting identifies which pages and forms provide the best conversions.

Need help with your lead management or other marketing help? Then Mautic is here for you! Just Download Mautic or Launch Your Demo.

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The Missing Piece in Lead Management https://mautic.org/blog/lead-management Tue, 07 Jul 2015 02:10:39 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/lead-management/ The Missing Piece in Lead Management

How good is your lead management?

Lead management is one of the most well-known struggles in all of the marketing and sales world. How a business finds, nurtures, and generates leads is the topic of many conversations and a source of constant worry within a company. The process of managing these potential leads and converting them into customers takes time and much work. In this comprehensive article we are going to uncover what many businesses may be missing. We’ll begin by looking at the current tools that most businesses are using in their lead management.


Existing Tools Being Used

Examine each of these three tools and recognize how they are used. Identify which you are familiar with and see if the description below is how you also would use them. There is nothing inherently wrong with each of these tools and indeed many businesses find success with them. There is however, something missing.

The Timeless Contact Form

There are very few businesses who do not realize the importance of the internet. This is a great starting point and one which has become quite well-known today. One page which exists on almost every website is of course the infamous contact form. This form is used as a way for visitors to easily send a request for contact to the company. This is the equivalent of an old-school open door to a business’s brick-and-mortar store. Only it’s worse. This isn’t an open door to an entire store, but rather an open door to a sales person.

lead management contact form

Unfortunately many seem to think this contact form is a fantastic piece of the lead management process. How many customers would be interested in knocking on a door to ask for a sales person? Not nearly as many as most companies would like. Still the contact form is one tool currently used for lead management by most businesses.

The Infamous Company Newsletter

This next current marketing tool is another vestige of old-school marketing. The newsletter is similar to the old mailers sent out by companies to all their existing customers. Today this mailer has turned from advertising to existing customers to attempting to advertise to new customers. This is due in part to statistics such as this:

70% of email readers open emails from a brand or company in search of a deal, discount, or coupon.
The Social Habit

These types of numbers are the reason why so many companies rely heavily on newsletters for generating new leads. But sending a generic newsletter is not the key of a strong lead management process. Indeed newsletters (emails) are a fantastic way of building a brand and keeping in contact with leads and customers alike, but newsletters alone are not a lead management process.

The Cutting Edge CRM

Those businesses working with customer relationship management tools are indeed the most advanced of these businesses using existing tools. These CRM tools let the business collect and organize their customers, manage data about their customers, and keep detailed records regarding each of these customers. The CRM works well for existing customers, and for manually entered leads.

A CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41%!
Track Via

Many of these businesses do great things with sales teams focused around their CRM and they do well in their process. They do well, but perhaps they are still missing something. Perhaps even still they are lacking something. There is something missing from their lead management process.

The Lead Sales Funnel

Before we identify this missing piece of the sales lead management process let’s next look at the typical sales funnel and define each of the pieces of this process and the role it plays in the lead management process.

lead management sales funnel marketing automation

This sales funnel is a simplified version of everything implemented in a typical business marketing strategy. But even in this simplified form we can see the main aspects of this funnel. Let’s look at each stage in this funnel.

The Leads Stage

In this introductory stage you are simply looking to reach as many potential leads as possible. This is the widest of the stages and most broad form of marketing available to your business. You are seeking here to simply spread your name and your presence to your potential target market. This target market is every possible lead who may be interested in your products or services either now or at any point in the future.

The Prospect Stage

This is the very large and generic middle piece of the sales funnel. This is the prospect stage or the stage where you as a business must seek to engage new leads and persuade them to continue in the sale process. This is a smaller group of leads than the original general stage of all available target audience leads.

The Customers Stage

This is the desired outcome stage for all leads. The greater this stage of the funnel the better the business does. These are the leads who have been successfully converted from lead to a customer. This is the smallest of the stages and the most desired. This conversion is the stage where businesses tend to focus their time and attentions (obviously due to the direct relation to greater revenues).

Now that we have identified the three rather general stages of a sales funnel we must look at what is missing. What is the missing piece in a lead management funnel? Where do businesses fail to properly funnel their leads through the sales process?


Marketing Automation: The Missing Piece

Now let’s explore the missing piece of the lead management process. Marketing automation is a process which has been growing in popularity and usage. In fact, recently the statistic was shared,

98% of all businesses are seeking to implement a dedicated marketing automation system.”
MediaPost

What an incredible percentage of businesses have recognized the power of marketing automation. This implies that the problem is not in failing to recognize the need for marketing automation but something else. Marketing automation, as stated earlier, is more than software. Marketing automation is a process. This is the missing piece of the lead management process. The implementation and execution of an automated marketing process is of utmost importance and requires a number of key steps. We will spend the next several sections looking at these steps and how to implement them.

New Visitors

The first area where marketing automation should be implemented involves new visitors. That’s right, the process of marketing automation begins even in the very top of the sales funnel (Leads/Target). Here is how marketing automation works with new visitors.

Upon the very first visit of a lead to your website your marketing automation process will identify and begin tracking their activities. A basic tracking pixel will collect several bits of information and begin building a lead profile for this site visitor. This is not something you must manually do but will be done automatically and silently with every new visitor to you website. Tracking activity of each lead, the pages they visit, the time they spend on each page, all of these activities help to provide better information regarding your new lead.

Contacting, Promoting & Marketing

The next part of the sales funnel where marketing automation helps involves contacting promoting, and marketing to leads and potential leads. Here we begin to filter down into the second stage of the lead funnel we’ve mentioned above (Prospects/Engage). This is the true power of marketing automation and the part of the funnel where marketing automation software and more importantly process is truly the missing piece for many. Here are a few ways this is executed.

Landing Pages

The landing pages are ways in which you can present relevant information to your leads as they visit your website. These dedicated landing pages are created for a specific purpose and with a specific call-to-action. We have written an article previously entitled, Landing Page Love, which gives details and examples of some great landing pages.

Forms

Remember when we spoke previously of the contact forms used by almost all businesses? These are in fact only one of the many types of forms which can be implemented and used by your marketing. These forms, rather than merely sending an email with the form submissions or collecting them in a single database, would serve to continue to fill-out the lead profiles for each of the visitors who submit the form. Dynamic forms that populate a lead profile are far, far more powerful than a mere submission-to-email form. These forms are also capable of building on top of each other and thus continue to build the lead’s profile as they fill out each form

(e.g. you might have one form that collects only email address, and a second form which asks merely for social media handle).

Newsletters & Emails

The email and the newsletter is a powerful feature of marketing automation. Again, this involves much more than a stale monthly newsletter. As we now have established through the use of website tracking, landing pages, and forms to build a better lead profile we can now use that information to provide relevant information to each through the use of automated emails. More than just mail merge functionality however, marketing automation holds the power of multiple messages based on specific decisions and triggers

This is where marketing automation becomes dominant. This is the heart of the missing piece of the lead management process. This strategy involves multiple points of contact done at just the right time, and without direct involvement from your sales team.

Businesses who increase the number of times contacting a lead from 1 to 8 show a massive increase in contact ratios.
Ken Krogue

Important: This process must be done correctly and not in a nagging or obnoxious manner. You don’t want to annoy your potential leads; instead you want to nurture them by providing relevant information and resources when they are most needed.

Integrate Everything

More than merely implementing a marketing automation tool the marketing automation process must be work closely with all the other aspects of your marketing strategy. As you should hopefully see, marketing automation processes should involve every stage of your sales funnel and work to provide a cohesive sales and marketing strategy. Being comprehensive means integrating marketing automation with the various other tools already in use in marketing. Here are a few ways marketing automation should be integrated:

1. With Your Website

Your marketing automation software and processes must integrate with your website. The reasons for this integration are many and can be seen in several ways above. Notice how the tracking pixel is integrated into the lead profile building process. Integrations with your website help make your marketing process a seamless experience for your leads.

2. With Your Forms

Again, as mentioned previously, integrating your marketing automation with your forms enables you to build robust lead profiles and continue the process of creating potential customers. Mautic helps in this regard through CMS-specific plugin which allow the dynamic insertion of forms directly within your website. These forms submit information directly back to the marketing automation platform.

3. With Your Email

Marketing automation must integrate deeply with your email marketing efforts. Integrating these two platforms has not been done often due to the silo that SaaS marketing automation tools employ. Mautic, as an open source platform, allows you to select the email marketing software of your choosing and integrate directly. This puts the power of your email within your marketing automation platform. This is a new level of integration and puts you firmly in control of your entire marketing process. Your lead management process begins to become complete.

4. With Your CRM

The final integration mentioned here is one which most marketing automation tools use and deem to be of high importance. A good marketing automation platform should integrate with your CRM. This is on the other end of the sales funnel. Marketing automation truly stretches the entire length of the funnel. At this end of the sales funnel and lead management process the marketing automation tool will finally integrate your now qualified leads with your CRM tool. Now, when your sales team opens their CRM dashboard they are greeted with a list of highly qualified “hot” leads ready to be personally contacted. You will notice this is the first time your sales team must directly contact potential leads. This marketing automation process must integrate with your CRM. Mautic allows you to integrate with any number of popular CRM systems and offers a powerful API for other integrations as well.

Marketing automation has historically had a problem with poor integrations* (VentureBeat) and as a result has found a somewhat difficult time being truly successful.

By the way, Mautic offers dozens of integrations and the open source nature of the code ensures that an unlimited number of additional integrations can (and will be) created.


Don’t Give Up

It is at this point that a word of caution and encouragement should be offered. Proper marketing automation, lead management, and sales funnel completions take time and energy. Very few businesses find overnight success as a result of their lead management process. Remember this statistic,

“79 percent of marketing leads never convert to sales”
HubSpot

“Once it’s up and running, a successful long-term content marketing plan will pay lifelong dividends . If you don’t see those immediately, don’t despair. Just focus on providing your followers with the most engaging content possible.” Forbes

So, don’t lose heart. Don’t give up. Keep providing strong, relevant content and information. Trust in the process of your sales funnel and your marketing automation and continue to pursue your target audience. As the article above states, remember this is a long-term commitment and not a short campaign.


Refine Your Strategies

Now, while you should not lose heart, and you should continue in your efforts you should also refine your lead management strategies. You should focus your sales funnel and you should constantly seek to improve your lead processes. There are a number of ways in which you can be sure your strategies are most effective.

1. Implementing A/B Testing

Marketing automation platforms, like Mautic, allow you to create multiple page versions for landing pages and emails. These A/B tests help you to determine which pages are most effective in converting leads. If you are new to A/B testing, here is a short MauticMinuteTM video to help explain the concept.

It is not a difficult job and one which will lead to wonderful improvements in your return should they be handled correctly. Don’t neglect this opportunity to maximize your return on investments and ultimately improve your lead management and sales funnel.

2. Continue Improving

Once you have identified ways to improve your content, your marketing, and your sales funnel you must do everything you can to continue improving them. Don’t simply identify improvements – implement them! Always be seeking improvements and make the most of your marketing automation process.


Reviewing the Funnel

You have now covered the sales funnel from the broadest aspects of your anonymous, targeted leads all the way to your highly qualified list of hot leads ready for personal contact. You have seen how the marketing automation process is the missing piece of your lead management and how to remedy this problem. The solution lies not in finding the software solution but in implementing the best processes involving every stage of your lead management sales funnel. Remember these key steps:

  1. Marketing automation improves lead management at the highest level of the sales funnel.
  2. Marketing automation offers ongoing contact and lead nurturing in the prospecting stage of the lead management process.
  3. Marketing automation seamlessly integrates with CRM systems to migrate leads ready for direct, personal contact.

Implement these recommendations for your marketing automation process into your sales lead management and you’ll find the missing piece to your sales funnel.


If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool which can support and grow your B2B marketing efforts we recommend you take a quick look at Mautic, which provides cutting-edge features, an intuitive interface and a solid platform to help you turn suggested marketing tactics into actionable campaigns, informative landing pages, and ongoing email marketing.

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Looking at Leads https://mautic.org/blog/hands-on-with-leads Wed, 11 Feb 2015 21:10:33 +0000 https://www.mautic.org/hands-on-with-leads/ We get it. things happen and circumstances change plans. The live Mautic Hangout was an incredible experience but don’t feel bad if you missed it. This is your chance.

If for some reason you were unable to attend the recent Mautic Hangout: Hands on with Mautic – looking at leads, we have great news. You can watch the entire webinar any time at your convenience. You will find the video from the recent Hangout available on Youtube and embedded below. Grab the popcorn (or maybe a pen and paper for notes) and click play. Pause, rewind, fast forward as you need, whatever helps you learn! But most importantly – enjoy!

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing Campaigns Webinar

As you watch the video above you may also want to review the slides on their own. Below is an embed of the slideshare. Interested in printing them out or saving a local PDF? No problem, just click the link and view or download them directly on Slideshare.

Lead Generation Slideshare

Next Time

We hope you enjoy the video and presentation. If you have an opportunity to join us live on the next Hangout we’d love to see you! Visit our Google+ Community Page to stay in touch and find out about upcoming webinars.

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