Lead Management Software
Lead Management Software – Capture, Distribute and Track leads within your sales teams.
The 4 keys to generating business through online marketing
Posted on 04. Oct, 2011 by Duncan Macdonald in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management Blog
If you want to drive the sales process to generate business, you need to look further than just having a web presence. It requires a combination of marketing and sales skills, ideally working closely together but with the gap between these closing, lead generation and inbound marketing techniques provide an opportunity for those with limited budgets to take advantage of opportunities available online.
Concentrating on the following 4 key areas will help generate traffic, leads and ultimately sales.
1. Generating traffic
You can’t look at converting visitors into leads until you have got visitor to your site in the first place. Generating the traffic needed to fill the top of the funnel has become ever more important and is driven by good inbound marketing principles. To be successful at Inbound marketing you need to create valuable content yet getting started can be a challenging concept.
The benefits of being known as a thought leader in your industry brings increased credibility, helping your business stand out from its competitors. Prospects in the long term are more likely to trust, engage and ultimately buy from you. In the short term it results in increased traffic to your website which is a huge step in the right direction.
Create a blog that covers topics relating to your market but more importantly addresses the every day problems your potential customers are facing. Couple this with some keyword focus and you will see additional benefits such as a boost in search engine optimization (SEO). Your content does not need to be limited to blogs – vary the format, provide guides, tip sheets, videos and webinars.
Contribute your best content to market specific websites. Many sites will happily accommodate guest articles getting your message out to new audiences and helps provide creditable link building for your SEO.
Leveraging Social Media is perhaps one of the easiest ways to communicate with a larger audience. Social media such as twitter, facebook, and linkedin, provide a platform to broadcast your message, but remember prospects use these sites to ask questions and find answers. This provides a great opportunity to talk directly to potential customers.
2. Creating Leads
The Inbound marketing techniques described above will generate traffic, the hard part is now turning this traffic into leads.
Always provide a clear call to action on your content, something that tells the prospect what to do next, how to register, sign up for a trial or request a call. This should be linked to a landing page, that is quick to complete, does not ask unnecessary questions of the prospect and reinforce the benefits of your solution.
Offer premium or exclusive content. This could be webinars, email offers, trials/demos, for which the prospect will need to register. You will have already built trust through your free content, and if you can clearly communicate the value in the premium content, then prospects will be happy to register.
3. Nurturing the prospect
Just because the prospect registered does not mean they are ready to buy. By understanding the profile of a sales ready prospect you can ensure that leads are passed to sales when ready, but importantly you don’t hassle a prospect too early in their buying cycle. You can read in details and see the 7 tips to help here - http://www.b12leads.com/index.php/lead-nurturing-6-tips/
To keep the prospects that are not sales ready moving you will need to nurture. Provide further content that helps progress them to the next buying steps. This will be different from the content used to create the lead, more focused on their particular needs
4. Closing the loop
It is all well and good creating the lead but often overlooked is the importance of when ready, getting the lead to the right salesperson, ensuring the lead is followed-up in a timely fashion and tracking the leads until closure.
Not only is this important in terms of actually closing those deals , without an effective tracking process it is impossible to optimize the above stages.
Closing the loop is about understanding what has worked and what hasn’t. This isn’t just a measure of the quantity of leads created but a measure of actual success in terms of deals done, revenue generated. Knowing where the best leads come from, what content triggers this, means you can fine tune each stage of the process.
B12Leads is an online lead management tool to capture, distribute and convert leads. Everything you would expect from a CRM tool but with a focus on keeping track of leads and your sales teams. An affordable solution that has everything you need to take control of your sales pipeline.
