Category Archives: Lead Generation
6 Steps for lead conversion
Sales leads are the crucial success point to any business-to-business (B2B) industry.
If you know when someone is looking to buy a product or service that you offer, you can contact them directly, pitch your service, and spell out their return on investment to secure the sale.
However, too much focus is placed on these quick win sales. What about the potential customer who doesn’t know how you can help them yet? What about the potential customer who wants a bit more information on prices? Surely they are just as valuable in the long term.
Only 27% of business to business (B2B) leads are sales-ready when first generated. This makes lead conversion essential for capitalizing on the other 73%, but up to 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.
This begs the question: Can I make my lead generation campaign nurture opportunities for the future? The answer is yes, and here is how…
Understand the Online Marketing Funnel
The traditional marketing funnel encompasses all marketing activity from PR to print advertising. However, from an online perspective, you can monitor and analyze anyone who is looking at your online activities and tailor your approach to reach them.
Essentially the four main elements of the online marketing funnel are:
Audit
Take a look at your current online traffic levels and conversion ratios. Do they match up? Some webmasters get obsessed with visitor levels, but having a lot of visitors without conversions to me only equals one thing: A leaky marketing funnel. Although people are interested in your product or service, you are losing them at the final hurdle.
This is where lead nurturing comes into play. By gaining information such as an email address, name, or phone number, you can continue to monitor and connect with them, ensuring they don’t fall off your radar and buy from a competitor.
Make sure you are monitoring online leads and conversions, but are finalizing sales by phone. The easiest way to do this is use a visitor level call tracking system. In the majority of B2B industries, a phone call is definitely a prerequisite before a sale is made.
Target, Target, Target!
After you have narrowed down what should be included in your online leads funnel, you need to put a plan in place to make sure you’re reaching the right people. Deciding how you judge which point of the sales process different customers are at is essentially deciding what it means to be sales ready. The more you can find out about a website visitor, the closer you can match their requirements with what you can offer them.
A study suggests that our brains help us to focus on one thing by allowing us to ignore everything else. This really puts emphasis on creating something that visitors really want to see; otherwise you simply become part of the white noise. Target quality leads over quantity, and use your strategy to nurture relationships with people who want to be targeted.
Leverage Existing Databases
Existing databases are an invaluable resource, especially for your lead nurturing efforts. When marketing budgets are tight, spending them on sourcing new leads will eat into your profits. Why go to that trouble when you have an entire list of past customers who may be looking to buy again?
One of the most important messages to take away from this is the more effort you put into creating a database and keeping it up to date, the more leverage you have to align them to you brand again.
Content Marketing on Steroids
Having a great product will be little use if no one knows about it, and social media is often the first stage of the online discovery process. To have a good social media campaign, you must first have some great content to share. To make the content work for you, you have to have a great website that offers a unique service. Content is what holds social media and product together.
Create some exciting content that will educate your potential buyers on exactly what you can do for them, testimonials on what you have done for others and establishing yourself as a thought leading brand in your industry is what you should be aiming for. This takes strategy and time to build up, but linking social to content is an absolute power house for lead attraction and conversion. High quality content that is contextually relevant sent to potential clients leads to a 208% higher conversion rate than batch and blast.
Hard selling is not needed and is often inappropriate in the first establishing steps to generating and nurturing a lead, but if you’re able to show how you can help a potential customer, using statistics and offering something of value to the reader or establishing your business as a thought leader, you’ll be able to get people thinking: “if they know this about my sector, and are giving it away for free… what else do they know and how can they help me?”
Decision Maker’s Needs
Although you are looking at your online marketing strategies, working closely with an offline sales team is essential. By understanding the buyer, you can understand their needs and wants and evaluate how best to nurture this lead. Targeting people around the decision maker in a business is likely to be useful and if you can schedule in-person meetings to get in front of the people they answer to, you’ll have a better chance at getting ball rolling and making the lead into a sale.
The average number of people involved in a decision is 6.8 — and that number goes as high as 21 individuals on buying committees at larger companies. Your nurturing content will need to speak to each of them individually and address their unique needs.
Lead nurturing is more than simply pressurizing people who are not ready to buy into purchasing. If done right, it can create a loyal customer base that trusts what you offer and believes in what you do. Taking a visitor from the initial website visit through to sale is a skill which will become increasingly valuable as the internet markets become increasingly wide and competitive. Get a head start today and begin formulating a lead nurturing plan for your business.
For more details contact me at contacttim82@gmail.com
Most Effective SEO Techniques
As we all know SEO techniques are quite crucial when it comes to delivering returns and for best ROI
There has been an argument always between webmasters about this. In my opinion, on-page seo is more important as it doesn’t affect search engines alone, but it reaches your readers.
But for your site to rank well on search results, you need to apply both on-page and off-page optimization.
Most Effective On Page SEO Techniques
1. Interlinking (100% effective)
This on-page seo technique helps search engines to better index your blog as search bots will crawl from one link to another adding all your new pages to their searchable index.
When writing a post, try as much as possible to include links to your other relevant posts, having at least 6-8 links pointing to other posts really works miracles.
2. Title, Meta Description, Keywords And Formatting (95% effective)
Your page title, meta description and keywords – This helps search engines place your content on the right place, it helps them determine what your content is all about.
Formatting – Post formatting is all about optimizing your content for search engines and readers, this includes: using header tags in your post heading and subheadings, ensuring that your text is not too tiny for readers eyes, including your targeted keywords in your post and highlighting them in bold or italics.
3. URL Optimization (90% effective)
You can optimize your url for better search engine results by:
A: Having a good permanent link – The first example is the default permalink of new word press blogs, if your link structure is still like that you can change it by visiting “settings” – “permalinks”, use a permalink that includes your post title, category name or both for good results.
B: Canonicalizing your URLs – Canonicalize your urls to avoid duplication. If a page of your blog can be accessed through multiple urls, search engines will treat those pages as duplicate contents. If you are a word press user, you can canonicalize your urls by using an seo plugin (seo by yoast) or visit “general settings” in your dashboard, include the full url of your blog (e.g. http://www.example.com/) and save. This redirects other versions of a page to prevent duplicate issues.
C: BONUS: Using breadcrumbs – Let visitors (and search bots) navigate your blog easily by enabling breadcrumbs.
4. Image Optimization (85% effective)
Images makes your post look professional, more readable and friendly. Here are ways to optimize your images.
A: Create your own images – 90% of images you use on your posts should be original and always give image credits when you copy an image.
B: Make it search engine friendly by using alt tag and avoid using names like 4850.jpg or image3.jpg on your images, include your keywords in your image name, here’s a good example “Apple iPhone4.jpg”.
C: Compress your images to avoid increasing your blog load time. If you are on wordpress there are lots of plugins to help you with that ex: wp smush.it.
5. Regular Blog Posting (80% effective)
I recently wrote a post on Setting up a blog. Read on the post to know the benefits of updating your blog regularly.
6. Quality Content (100% effective)
Create quality and original posts, posts that provides useful information and apply the above on-page seo techniques.
Best Off Page SEO Techniques
As i said earlier, off-page seo is done outside your blog, it’s all about promoting and advertising your blog. Off-page seo is mainly concentrated towards creating backlinks. Here are off-page seo techniques that works.
7. Social Bookmarking
Use top bookmarking sites like url.org, stumbleupon, delicious, folkd.com, bookmark.net and reddit. You can do a quick Google search to find more high pr social bookmarking sites.
8. Guest Posting
Guest posting doesn’t only create quality back-links for your blog, it drives targeted traffic.
9. Social Networking
Social networking seems to be the most popular of off-page optimization, even a newbie blogger can advertise and promote his blog on social networks. You can tweet your posts, share it on facebook, there are a lot of ways to promote your blog on social networks.
10. Commenting
Blog commenting has always been a good off-page optimization method. Dropping relevant comments on blogs creates back-links and even traffic. There are blogs that provide no-follow comments while others are do-follow, but i highly recommend you mix both do-follow and no-follow blogs when creating back-links.
11. Directory Submission
You can still gain quality back-links from link directory sites. I recommend you only go for those that doesn’t require reciprocal links. Below are few link directories to start with
http://www.sitepromotiondirectory.com/
http://www.freeprwebdirectory.com/
http://www.highrankdirectory.com/
http://www.britainbusinessdirectory.com/
http://www.submissionwebdirectory.com/
http://www.ukinternetdirectory.net/
12. Article Submission
I agree this is an old off-page seo technique but it’s still very effective. Submit your original and quality articles to high pr article directories and have quality backlinks pointing to your blog. Below are few top article directories to start with.
Courses and Consulting for Authors, Coaches, Consultants and Healers
http://www.sooperarticles.com/
http://www.articledashboard.com/
13. Forum Posting
Join forums that are related to your niche, add your URL to the resource box, join or open a conversation, help others on topics you understand deeply and gain free quality back-links and traffic to your blog.
14. Press Release Submission
This is a great way to drive huge targeted traffic to your new blog that hasn’t been indexed by search engines. Although Google no longer consider links from press release sites, the traffic it drives is still worth it. There are free and paid press release sites, below are some good ones to start with.
Free Press Release Sites
http://www.free-press-release.com/
Paid Press Release Sites
15. Link Exchange
To get the best out of link exchange, you need to exchange links with high pr sites. Find high pr sites related to your niche and request for a link exchange.
16. Submitting To Classifieds
Advertising your website on classified ads sites also helps. Below are few good ones to start with.
http://www.ebayclassifieds.com/
http://www.freeclassifiedstuff.com/
http://www.classifiedsforfree.com/
http://www.thefreeadforum.com/
For more details contact me
Importance of Corporate Branding
Branding has its own importance and its very crucial for the growth of the company.
A company brand is something that often combines a trade name, logo, slogan, and certain colors.
With the right branding, A Company could be recognizable without the name even being visible.
This is why businesses, including small businesses, cannot underestimate the power of creating, building, and developing a brand. Your company brand speaks volumes about your business both to other businesses and to the general public. Branding is, in short, one of the most effective methods of marketing and advertising around for a business.
Reasons why corporate branding is vital to any business
There are many reasons why branding is so important to both small and larger businesses. This is why it is never too early to start developing and building upon your company brand.
Here are just 5 of the reasons why branding is so important for your business:
Identity: Corporate branding gives your business an identity. Your slogan and logo become the face of your business, which is why a company with a strong enough brand can be recognized by any one of its branding elements even if the name of the company isn’t visible.
Customer relations: Customers find it far easier to relate to a brand, which means that you can build customer relationships far more easily when you have a strong brand identity.
Professionalism: Having a well developed, strong brand is something that will make your business come across as far more professional, polished, and even successful. This is something that will appeal to other companies you may be considering doing business with as well as to potential customers.
Trust: Your brand will speak volumes about your company and its values, and this is something that customers will come to put their trust in. Many consumers will only buy products from certain companies because their brand is one that they know and trust, so the power of branding when it comes to trust issues can be huge.
Sign of quality: As long as your business offers goods and services of a good quality, your branding can also become a mark of high quality. Customers will start to associate your high quality products or services with your brand, and pretty soon your brand alone will become synonymous with high quality.
Value: Solid corporate branding can help to add value to your business. If you decide to sell the business in years to come, you could improve both value and sale-ability with solid branding.
Do you need to build your brand? I can help. Contact me at contacttim82@gmail.com
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