Are You Ready for Marketing Automation?

Found a great post, which includes a check-list, to see if you’re ready for marketing automation. I’ve listed some highlights here and a link to the full article:

 

It’s easy to stick to the tried-and-true methods of email marketing and direct marketing campaigns, relying on the sales team to nurture your leads until they close.

However, monitoring, implementing and delivering effective marketing campaigns can be complicated.

 

 

Do your marketers currently track campaigns? How so? Who is nurturing leads? When does the interaction between marketing and sales come into play?

If the answers to these questions are unknown or you don’t have a streamlined marketing process, it’s time to implement a marketing automation solution.

 

 

Here are some things to consider before you decide on a marketing automation platform for your company.

 

  • Your marketing department struggles to track and maintain your campaigns
  • Past closed deals aren’t generating significant repeat business
  • You have a CRM to track contacts, but it isn’t generating businesses for you
  • You need to segment your lead generation efforts across all channels, including social media
  • Sales and marketing lack insight into each other
  • You aren’t personalizing outbound communications
  • You don’t have the staff to manually contact every lead and each existing customer
  • Even your hottest leads need nurturing before committing to buy

    Marketing automation platforms allow you to nurture leads automatically with effective email drip campaigns that include personalized content until the lead is ready to close.

    Marketing automation helps create lists based on behavior so you can customize content. You can coordinate across channels, see what campaigns are the most effective and improve your ROI.

    When the lead is ready, marketing automation platforms let the relevant salesperson know so no time is wasted and no opportunity missed.

    If you have take time to properly implement and run your platform, you’ll be rewarded with a more effective and efficient sales pipeline down the road.

     

    Get thinking about time commitments, budget and see how marketing automation can help you get more from existing systems.

You can read the entire article HERE.

Drip Drip Drip (Campaign)

What is a Drip Campaign?

Drip Campaign Marketing by CellCon Consulting

At its most basic, a drip campaign is a series of marketing related emails that are sent out on a schedule. Today you may be using one of the popular “email blaster” services, where you pay a few dollars (or a few hundred) and blast your newsletter out to your clients and prospects.

And, while email newsletters are a good way to send out your company’s latest news, they have a major flaw: new subscribers only see new emails, and never get the first emails you’d sent out to your list. All they’ll see is what you send after they sign up.

With a planned drip campaign you set the time, frequency and content of the message that goes to everyone, no matter when in the campaign they signed.

Perhaps one email will go out as soon as someone signs up, another will go out 4 days later, with one more going out the next week. In addition, the emails can be varied based on triggers, or actions the person has performed like opening the first email or clicking on a particular link.

Is your company ready to move up from the mass-blast of a common newsletter and begin targeting your database with a more customized, relevant message?

 

 

Take Advantage of the Competition

You want to get Take Advantage of the Competition with help from CellCon Consulting - Adam Wolfahead.

How do you take advantage of the competition?

 

About two years ago, I designed a website for a wholesale distributor in the wireless prepaid area. To this day they still rank among the top 3 in numerous Google searches and get phone calls every day from new clients.

This is due to primarily two factors:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. Their website, from the beginning, was designed properly and is optimized for numerous search engines. Each landing page is optimized separately.

However another factor just as important

The lack of quality SEO done by their competition.

And, they’re using that. They’re taking advantage of the competition.

While you can’t control what your competition does, you can take advantage of opportunities they’ve left behind. Look at your competitors websites,  look at their print, look at their entire efforts – and capitalize on what they are not doing. I’m willing to bet that you can take advantage of something they’re missing.

Brand Consistency – Sending a Consistent Message

Brand Consistency - How CellCon Consulting can helpWhy is Brand Consistency important?

Recently, I received a few emails from people in the same company. Different folks, different roles, but the same company.

I was amazed at how different their signature lines were (ok, not really “amazed”, but it was a bit frightening.) Even the company name wasn’t consistent! 

Brand Consistency is key when you’re trying to build (or maintain) your brand.

It’s imperative that your employees are sending the same, high-quality message when they communicate to their customers, prospects and colleagues.

With today’s technology it’s not hard. Shared drives make it easy for everyone to use the same font, color, size, capitalization (etc.) when talking about the company name, tag line and message.

Keep it consistent folks. It’s a long term strategy that works.

Tracking Your Results

Tracking Your Results

Tracking your results using CellCon Consulting

Nu?? How was it? Take a look at your recent marketing efforts and tell yourself how they did. Can you tell me where your website visitors are coming from? What pages they’re looking at? Are they customers, hot prospects or none of the above?

If you can’t tell how well (or how poorly) your efforts are doing, then WHY ARE YOU DOING THEM? You are simply throwing money away.

  • How are people finding your website?
  • What pages are they looking at?
  • Are they doing what you want them to do (call? fill out a form? set an appointment?

Of course, CellCon Consulting can track the results of each and every marketing plan we create or assist with. Stop wasting money with marketing and advertising that may be working and allocate those funds to plans that you know work!  Let’s set up some time and chat about how we can help you get more business this year.

Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring

All visitors to your website are the same… or are they?

Lead Scoring by CellCon ConsultingDid you know you can “score” your leads? As you market to your target audience, you can assign (and track!) points based on demographic information, web pages visited, videos watched and email links clicked! In addition, you can assign negative points. For example, if a lead has been idle for certain amount of time you can reduce their score.

As your visitors show more interest, their score will rise. Making them “hotter” to you.

When lead scoring is effective, you should see:

  • Increased sales efficiency and effectiveness. It focuses sales attention on leads that the organization deems most valuable.
  • Increased marketing effectiveness. It will quantify what types of leads matter most, which helps marketing more effectively target its programs and deliver more high-quality leads to sales.

Want to learn more? CellCon Consulting can help you create your automated lead scoring system.Let’s set up some time and chat about how we can help you get more business this year.

Landing Page (Tips)

Landing Page

What is it – a single webpage (on your site) that talks about a very specific product or service. When used in conjunction with advertising, it can accomplish a number of goals:

  1. Increase sales conversions. People don’t like to click around. There’s a reason Vine videos are 6 seconds – the average attention span is 7 seconds. By using a landing page, you can instantly tell the viewer “Hey, this is what you’re looking for.”
  2. Increase SEO. Especially true when used with paid ads. People search on specific terms (ie “Divorce Attorney” – as opposed to attorney – or “Mortgage refinance” – as opposed to “mortgage”.) By having a page dedicated to a specific product or service, your SEO will go up for those specific search terms.

Of course, CellCon Consulting can help you create your own Landing Page (or set of pages) for your products or services. Let’s set up some time and chat about how we can help you get more business this year.

Tips Series

Starting today, and on a regular basis, I’ll be posting a quick “what is” of a marketing tip or strategy that could pay off very well if used correctly. Each one will be under the category of “Tips” and will be tagged with “Tips” as well. Keep an eye out for them (hint: the first one will publish tomorrow!)