Posts Tagged ‘InsideUp Lead Generation Blogs – lead generation’

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Five Ways to Build Your Presence on LinkedIn

Friday, November 11th, 2011

As Twitter and Facebook’s no-nonsense cousin, LinkedIn may not be quite as popular, but many business marketers have discovered its potential for establishing thought leadership and building brand recognition.

Since LinkedIn was designed as a platform to help business people connect, you will find it offers a number of tools created specifically for that purpose.  Here are a few ways you can use LinkedIn to create awareness about your services and, quite possibly, garner some quality leads.

  1. First, be sure to fully flesh out your profile with information about your company. You can embed your videos and company blog on the profile page, and add a  “share” button so your content can be sent to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Also, be sure your company is listed in the company directory, with details about the services you provide.
  2. One of the best ways to establish yourself as an authority in your field is to answer questions on the LinkedIn Answers page. You can find this section under the drop-down menu labeled “More” at the top of the home page. Browse the categories in the column on the right-hand side of the page for topics in which you have expertise to share. Maintain credibility by refraining from making promotional statements and focus on supplying helpful information.
  3. Join several LinkedIn groups. How to Use LinkedIn For Business: A Beginner’s Guide, by Hubspot, recommends joining, not only groups pertaining to your industry, but also several outside your industry so you can connect with businesses that might need your services. You can even create and manage your own group. By actively participating in group discussions, offering valuable tips and insights, you can expand your circle of influence and enhance your reputation as a respected authority in your field.
  4. Take advantage of LinkedIn Applications to create surveys and slide presentations, display your portfolio, embed your blogs and tweets, keep up with professional events and conferences, and more.
  5. Regularly post status updates and share content. Keep your LinkedIn presence fresh by posting news about your company on a weekly basis. Provide content in the way of blog posts that others will find useful enough to share. With more than a million users, content posted on LinkedIn can become viral. If your content is widely shared, it may even be featured on LinkedIn Today, the site’s news aggregate service, providing you with even more exposure.

Visit LinkedIn’s learning center for more tips on how to get the most from your LinkedIn membership. And while you’re there, stop by and visit our profile!

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Seven Secrets of Magnetic Marketing Copy

Monday, June 13th, 2011

A compelling sales letter, email marketing, social media campaigns–a successful online B2B marketing strategy should include all of these. Lead generation, of course, is the ultimate goal of all marketing collateral. By applying a few key principles you can make your B2B copy much more effective:

  1. Know your audience. In order to focus on the needs of your prospective customers, you must be thoroughly familiar with their needs and concerns. Think about what you already know about your target market and note details such as where most of your audience is in the sales cycle, what are their goals and their frustrations. If you find you aren’t very familiar with your target market, do some additional research–ask questions or send out a survey.
  2. Use this knowledge to capture your prospect’s attention and pique their interest. Begin with a headline that asks a pointed question related to a common need they are likely to have.
  3. Respect your audience. “Speak” to them as if you were talking to a friend. Your B2B prospects will appreciate a straightforward message that doesn’t waste their time. Also, avoid making exaggerated or unsubstantiated promises just to get their attention.
  4. Avoid using inflated business jargon. Phrases such as “innovative solutions” and “enhanced insight” have lost their meaning through overuse. Tell your readers in simple terms exactly what to expect from your product or service.
  5. Emphasize the benefits of doing business with your company. Answer your prospect’s unspoken question, “Why should I use your B2B service?” Communicate to them your own unique selling point. Avoid general terms such as “superior customer service.” Tell your readers about the specific benefits your company will give them that they won’t find elsewhere.
  6. Offer value before you’ve made a sale. Even if they don’t purchase your product immediately, give your prospects something useful to take away. If you are doing email marketing, this might take the form of a newsletter with tips and insights relevant to your prospect’s concerns.
  7. Always include a call to action. Let your prospective customers know what their next step should be if they want to benefit from the services your company offers.

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Ways to Use Facebook to Market Your Business

Monday, June 6th, 2011

According to a recent survey regarding social media, 68 percent of Facebook fans stated they are highly likely to recommend products they like to their friends. In fact, Facebook users spend an average of $71.84 more each year than consumers who don’t use Facebook.

Another advantage of using Facebook for business is that it’s a form of inbound marketing; visitors to your page are probably already interested in what you have to offer.

Fan pages offer a number of tools to help you add content and customize the page to reflect your brand. It’s important to note that there is a difference between your Facebook profile page or “wall” and your Fan page, or business page.

After logging in to your Facebook account, follow these simple steps to create your Fan page:

  1. Click the link on the left side of the page that says “Ads and Pages.”
  2. On the page that appears, click the button that says “Add Page
  3. Choose the type of page you want to add. Most businesses will want to choose the option that reads “Brand, Product, or Organization.”
  4. Next, choose the type of page you plan to create. If your main goal is to direct visitors to your website, then select “Website.”
  5. Enter a name for your page. This can be the name of your business or website.
  6. Click “Create Page.”
  7. Add a photo by in the box in the upper left that has a question mark. Click “Change Picture” to upload your photo.
  8. Click “Edit Page” below the picture to start creating content for your page. Add a welcome message and a link to your website. Always provide useful information that your visitors would want to share with their friends. When you’re done, click “View Page,” and then “Publish Page” in the upper right corner when you’re ready to publish.

You can also add an opt-in form to your Facebook page by clicking on “Applications,” selecting “FBML” and pasting the code from your email provider into the FBML box.

Make your site engaging by adding videos (also in the “Applications” page). Start a discussion forum to help you get to know your potential customers. Post questions and encourage visitors to share their opinions. You can post updates to the “Notes” page, which functions essentially as a blog.

Businesses can also create a Facebook ad campaign. Facebook ads can be highly effective because you have the ability to target your campaign according to the expressed interests of Facebook users.

Once you’ve gained a level of familiarity with Facebook, you’ll be able to add content and post updates quickly and efficiently, keeping your Fan page fresh and appealing.

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Six Reasons Your Marketing Budget Should Include Highly Targeted External Lead Sources

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Staying productive and profitable during slow times can be an ongoing challenge. Every business experiences fluctuations and times when the demand for new leads is exceptionally high.

While your sales team may be able to generate some of their own leads during times like this, research shows that the majority of leads generated by sales are not highly targeted.

In order to meet these challenges, 51.9 percent of B2B marketers plan to substantially increase their marketing budgets in the coming year, according to BtoB’s “2011 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey. Of those respondents planning to boost their budgets this year, the majority said they plan double digit increases, and 25 percent will increase marketing spend by more than 20%. Customer acquisition is this year’s top marketing priority for 69.1 percent of the survey’s participants.

Whatever your marketing budget for the coming year, allocating a portion of it for purchasing targeted leads can prove to be one of your best strategies for several reasons:

  1. High quality, pre-targeted external leads can offset those inevitable slow times that virtually every business contends with periodically.
  2. Real-time leads with verified, contactable data will keep your sales team busy closing sales instead of scrambling to generate leads.
  3. Online lead generation companies use highly developed systems for gathering, scoring and verifying leads, saving your business the time and expense entailed in carrying out these processes in house.
  4. With a full pipeline of fresh leads from a reliable source, you can turn your focus toward other vital aspects of your business, such as customer retention and future growth strategies.
  5. Results are easily measured. Tracking and measuring are critical determining factors in marketing budget allocation. In-house social media and email marketing campaigns can be somewhat problematic to measure, but the process of tracking purchased leads is more straightforward.
  6. The best lead generation companies deliver warm, inbound leads who are already seeking your services. These leads will produce the maximum ROI for your marketing budget. In one recent case study, for example, leads purchased from InsideUp resulted in 125 percent ROI for the client.

As online marketing options continue to be refined and tested, you can ensure a steady flow of leads—and a reliable ROI—by augmenting your in-house lead generation tactics with ready-to-buy, real time leads.

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Get to Know Your Prospects Through Progressive Profiling

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

If you haven’t been getting to know your customers through progressive profiling, you could be missing out on one of the most powerful strategies in B2B marketing. Progressive profiling allows you to gradually engage prospects while learning more about their needs on each visit to your company’s website.

For example, a prospect who initially downloads a technical whitepaper and later returns seeking detailed product data sheets or a free trial is likely getting closer to making a buying decision.

Each subsequent visit gives you the opportunity to gather additional detail such as company size, purchasing budget and details regarding their company’s needs and interests. To do this effectively you will need to have a “smart” form on your website. This application saves each bit of data gathered during a prospect’s visits to your site.

One of the key advantages of this method of customer profiling and lead gathering is that it avoids the use of lengthy forms. Often, persons seeking business services will have already visited several sites by the time they encounter yours, and may have tired of filling out forms.

Progressive profiling can become an indispensable part of your marketing strategy, but it does require time to effectively plan the process and manage the data you gather.

If your site does not initially produce enough qualified needs, you may want to complement your efforts with pre-qualified leads from a lead generation company. Many businesses find that purchasing at least some of their leads helps keep the pipeline full and compensates for any lack of qualified leads gained through the company website.

To be certain you’re getting leads of the highest possible quality—ones that would be equivalent to those you gather through progressively profiling visitors to your site—make sure the lead gen company utilizes this methodology in their own lead-gathering process.

The ones who do are very adept at collecting information about your prospects and categorizing leads according to detailed demographics. Some have a highly refined scoring system that will rate leads by their online activity during each visit to the lead gen company’s site. This type of system delivers warm leads in real time, ones that will bring an excellent return on your investment.

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Two Cost-Effective Alternatives to In-House Email Marketing

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Email marketing is without doubt one of the best ways for B2B companies to acquire new leads. That’s why a recent study by BtoB Magazine found that 80 percent of the companies surveyed plan to increase their online marketing budget and of those, 68.6 percent intend to invest more in their email marketing campaigns.

To produce high quality leads, however, email marketing must be well planned and executed, with proper attention given to segmenting and targeting your audience. To optimize the results of your campaigns, you must determine your most crucial and actionable key performance indicators and test the results of each campaign accordingly.

Many companies report that the most challenging aspect of successful email marketing lies in finding employees with the expertise to properly develop and implement an email strategy. A recent survey by InsideUp found that for 70 percent of B2B companies, lack of expertise within their firm and difficulty finding qualified people to do the work were the biggest obstacles to successful online marketing.

Additionally, in-house email marketing can drain your budget and resources and make your marketing department more dependant on IT. It will also require a substantial investment  in customized software and server technology.

If this scenario rings true for your company, there are two excellent options that will allow you to reap the benefits of email marketing without the expense and hassle involved with hiring an in-house staff.

1. Outsource Your Email Marketing – Finding a quality email marketing company to take care of your needs can save your company considerable expense, not only in regard to hiring an in-house staff, but also in terms of email server processing power and internal bandwidth. You will have the advantage of the email provider’s expertise in all aspects of email marketing, such as list management, customized content, deliverability, testing and tracking, and regulatory compliance.

2. Purchase Quality, Pre-Qualified Leads – The crème of online lead generation companies have turned the process of generating quality, real-time warm leads into a veritable science. By diverting a portion of your online marketing budget toward purchasing leads that have been verified and scored using a detailed scoring process, you gain immediate access to prospects who are actively seeking your services–at a fraction of what it would cost to pull leads of similar quality from your own email marketing campaigns.

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InsideUp Lead Generation Blogs – Could Your Company Use Leads with 125% ROI?

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Any company considering purchasing leads from an online lead supplier will naturally want to know what type of results to expect. Will the leads you receive prove to be worth the investment? One of the best ways to answer this question is to research the results other companies have achieved while using a third party lead supplier.

One such firm, TeleDirect, is a call center services firm employing more than 100 professional CSRs. The Sacramento Business Journal has listed the company as one of its “Fastest Growing Companies” in each of the past six years.

The company recently needed a continuous pipeline of qualified, high-ROI leads that would be sales-ready within a few weeks’ time. However, the company’s marketing executives had learned from experience to be selective when choosing third-party lead suppliers. Some vendors, they found, employ unrefined, generic lead-gathering methods, resulting in low-quality, unqualified leads.

Supplying their sales team with a continuous flow of fresh leads had been a key to company success, allowing TeleDirect’s sales force to concentrate on the sales process and conversions rather than spending too much time and resources on prospecting or qualifying potential leads. However, call center executives felt that they were using too many external lead sources and needed to bring efficiencies into their lead-gen program.

Knowing that call center service buyers rarely submit their contact information to an individual vendor, and that most prospects prefer comparison shopping, TeleDirect chose to purchase leads from InsideUp, where prospects enjoy the efficiency of using an online service to evaluate the pricing and features of several vendors simultaneously.

The results? TeleDirect Call Centers received an average 125% return-on-investment within the first 30 days of signing up new call center customers. This means that the total revenue it generated from customers within just 30 days of signup is 125% of the total cost of generating those leads using InsideUp’s platform.

On average, 80% of InsideUp’s lead prospects requested custom proposals from TeleDirect, permitting TeleDirect’s sales team to work with interested and engaged potential new customers. By using InsideUp leads, TeleDirect was also able to reduce its external sources of sales leads by 50 percent.

InsideUp’s lead verification process ensures that leads provided to TeleDirect have a high response rate. InsideUp remains one of the company’s core lead sources. TeleDirect’s CEO, Tom Coshow, put it this way, “InsideUp far exceeded our expectations. InsideUp leads were not only qualified and verified..they were either warm or hot to the touch! Plus they were exactly the prospects that hit our sweet spot. Thanks to InsideUp, our business has grown significantly.”

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Twelve Key Ways Marketing Automation Can Benefit Your Business

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

According to a new report by DemandGen, the number of companies that have adopted marketing automation solutions in 2010 is double that of the previous year. Several giants such as IBM and Oracle were among them.

With marketing automation’s capacity to help companies maximize their return on investment, manage revenue cycles, and create brand awareness, the number of B2B companies taking advantage of this technology is expected to continue to grow. But you don’t have to be a mega organization to reap the benefits of CRM and other forms of marketing automation software. So what, exactly, is marketing automation and how can it help your business grow?

According to SearchCRM, marketing automation software is used to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. Its use makes processes, which had been performed manually, much more efficient. It also provides new features and capabilities that companies have yet to exploit. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management (CRM).

Marketo further defines marketing automation as a tool for increasing operational efficiency and driving revenue. It automates the routine and repeatable tasks involved in lead management, lead nurturing and lead scoring. It will also build and maintain your company’s marketing lead database. It can also be integrated with your company’s existing sales force automation systems.

Automation software enables marketing departments to measure what works and demonstrate the impact of specific marketing and lead nurturing campaigns on company revenue. Used effectively, it can foster collaboration between marketing and sales teams and increase productivity.

The two main functions of marketing automation are campaign management and customer segmentation. Organizations use factors such as gender, age, and education to separate and categorize customer data. This helps marketers create campaigns targeted to particular demographics and measure the effectiveness of advertising and lead nurturing strategies.

Within these two main functions, marketing automation programs perform a multitude of tasks. Some of these will vary by provider, but most will help increase the effectiveness of your marketing in these 12 ways:

  1. Increase productivity by replacing repetitive manual tasks with automated systems.
  2. Help to manage your company’s revenue cycles.
  3. Automate lead generation and lead nurturing processes.
  4. Create marketing work-flow systems, budget plans and organizational calendars.
  5. Manage organization-wide marketing campaigns
  6. Manage mailing lists based on existing lead, account and contact data.
  7. Assist on campaign asset creation.
  8. Analyze campaign effectiveness based on customer data.
  9. Use information captured in lead details to qualify leads to next stage.
  10. Deploy mass email campaigns to targeted mailing lists.
  11. Import leads from external sources, such as lead suppliers and Web downloads.
  12. Create, automate and deliver multi-channel promotional messaging.

If you’re planning to purchase marketing automation software tools, it’s important to realize that your initial purchase is only the beginning. When companies express disappointment with their marketing automation system, this is often because they have not taken the time to learn how to use it fully. To get the most benefit from your software, you will need to integrate it with the right resources, people, and processes.

Think of marketing automation as one component of your complete marketing solution. When used effectively, it can help you build brand awareness and realize a higher return on your sales leads.

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Strong Social Media Growth Presents Challenges…Benefits to B2B Marketers

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

The big news for B2B companies for 2011 is the undeniable trend toward social media marketing. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that B2B companies will increase budgets for interactive marketing spend to $54 million by 2014, double the amount spent in 2009. And for good reason: according to SiriusDecisions, by 2015 as much as 75 percent of B2B demand will come from the Internet.

Clearly there is great potential for B2B social marketing as prospects regularly go online to research business services and vendors. Social media can — and should — be used to engage prospects and interact with them throughout the buying cycle. Many companies are already immersing themselves in the social media marketing scene, with excellent results. A recent report by Mashable cited a study in which the vast majority — 86 percent — of B2B companies said they use social media for marketing.

Yet according to Marketing Sherpa’s recent social media benchmark survey, shown in the chart below, 48 percent of participants stated that social media was only “somewhat effective” at generating leads.

This is likely due to the fact that many companies lack well-defined strategies for capturing online prospects through social media, as well as the resources to develop and implement such strategies. A study by White Horse Marketing reported that 60 percent of B2B firms have no staff dedicated to social media and a mere 10 percent use outside agencies or consultants.

Successful social media marketing does require a substantial commitment in terms of time and budget. B2B online marketing is always evolving — and becoming more fragmented. It is no longer a simple matter of mastering search marketing. Companies must now become adept at effectively leveraging video, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and a plethora of other tools. Finding out where your prospects are and what type of online media they are using involves constant, diligent research followed by continual fine-tuning of your social media strategy based on your research results.

Consider using the expertise and experience of an outside company that both understands B2B marketing and knows how to effectively use social media to generate quality leads as part of an overall lead generation platform. Using a third-party source for leads could help your organization save countless labor hours and other resources that might otherwise be swallowed up in the social media vortex.

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New Study: Salespeople Spend Excess Time Prospecting for New Leads

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

How is your sales team spending their time? Recent findings by CSO Insights reveal key areas where B2B companies can enhance their marketing efforts and increase sales. In a survey for CSO’s Sales Performance Optimization Report, 1,800 companies reported that their sales representatives spend nearly 20 percent of their time generating leads.

Obviously this is not the most effective use of a sales agent’s valuable time and skills. Unfortunately, however, this has become standard practice in many businesses. This is not surprising in light of the findings in Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.
Out of 935 respondents, an astonishing 80 percent admitted to sending unqualified leads on to their sales team.

Still, customer acquisition was found to be an even higher priority this year than in previous years, with over 90 percent of marketers in the CSO report stating that acquiring new customers has become their top priority. (Click image to enlarge.)

Other activities that typically consume a sales agent’s time include attending meetings and handling administrative tasks (18%),  account service calls, (15.2%) and other activities such as travel and training (36.6%), leaving only 11.5 percent of the average salesperson’s workday for closing sales.

How can businesses dealing with these challenges keep their pipelines filled with qualified leads? Many companies are creating a balance by purchasing pre-qualified leads so that their sales team can spend more time closing and less time trying to generate and qualify new leads. Even if such a move produced a conservative 10 percent increase in sales productivity, the potential for much greater revenue is obvious.

Supplementing your marketing strategy by purchasing qualified leads will also free your sales team to spend more time nurturing those leads that fail to close on the first call. When you consider that for every 100 raw leads, only 4 to 7 are ready to buy, it’s easy to see how businesses can further improve ROI by shifting their sales teams’ focus toward nurturing the other 93 to 96 percent of leads throughout the buying cycle.

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