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Sales & Marketing

Lead Generating Strategy

A good lead-nurturing strategy can drive many positive results for your business.

  • Lead nurturing is a strategy that businesses use to maintain and grow relationships with potential customers.
  • Lead nurturing can help you gain your audience’s trust and increase sales.
  • There are several lead-nurturing strategies you can try, such as focusing on content marketing, using data to target prospects by email and learning more about your audience via surveys.
  • This article is for marketing professionals who want to build stronger relationships with customers via lead nurturing.

Nurturing leads is important to the growth of any business. According to Forrester Research, companies that are successful at nurturing leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. However, lead nurturing can fall by the wayside at many companies. If you haven’t already implemented a lead-nurturing strategy, you should consider doing so. But before you get started, make sure you understand why lead nurturing is important and what strategies you can apply to your own business.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is when businesses build relationships with prospects. It is an important aspect of inbound marketing, which is the use of content marketing, social media and other online communications methods to attract customers’ attention. When a potential customer finds your business, they may not be ready to purchase your products or services. Nurturing leads is an effective strategy for driving sales, because it can keep you top of mind for prospects so they come back when they are ready to purchase.

Lead nurturing is similar to any relationship: The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. But if you fail to strengthen a relationship, then you’ll naturally drift apart. [Looking for customer relationship management software to help manage your leads? Check out our reviews of the best CRM software solutions.]

What is the importance of nurturing your leads?

Although the ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to drive sales, it offers several other benefits:

  • Introduces prospects to your company. Lead nurturing is an effective way to teach prospects about your services and products. You may not have enough space on a landing page to truly explain the impact of your products and services, but lead nurturing allows you to show potential customers a more complete picture of who you are and what you can do for them.
  • Helps you gain your audience’s trust. Showing your potential customers that you understand their pain points or giving them useful tips can help you connect with your audience and gain their trust. Sharing your knowledge lets them know that your relationship isn’t just about your company making a sale but also about providing them with necessary tools and information.
  • Makes you a thought leader. As you create thoughtful, relevant content and communications, lead nurturing can boost your reputation and help you be seen as a leader in your industry.
  • Helps your audience remember you. If you communicate regularly with your prospects, they will likely remember you. Staying top of mind is especially helpful so they will turn to you when they need or want your products or services.
  • Bolsters your sales strategy. Sales teams are usually focused on selling in the moment, which means many potential customers aren’t being targeted. Lead nurturing gives you the opportunity to target future customers.
  • Reduces customer acquisition costs. Lead generation allows you to turn to less-expensive methods of attracting customers, and spending less on marketing is good for your customer acquisition costs (CAC = total marketing cost/number of sales).
  • Increases sales. With lead nurturing, you can turn prospects into higher-quality leads. In fact, nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% bigger than non-nurtured leads, Annuitas reported based on research from Marketing Sherpa

7 effective lead-nurturing strategies

There are plenty of strategies you can use to nurture leads, but keep in mind that they can change over time. A method you successfully used to engage with your prospects in the past may not work in the future. The right CRM software will allow you to automate a lot of the nurturing strategies you need to close new business.

Here are seven effective strategies for nurturing leads:

Use email marketing.

Fifty-five percent of marketers say email marketing drives the highest return on investment of all digital marketing strategies, according to research from Campaign Monitor.

Not only is email marketing more cost-effective than advertising, but it can also be personalized through data and user behavior research. Email segmentation, or the  division of email subscribers into smaller groups based on different parameters, allows you to target leads more effectively.

For example, if your company created an e-book, you could send it only to subscribers who have engaged with past e-books or similar content, because they are more likely to welcome it. If you were to send it to your entire email list, some recipients would not open it and might even be annoyed by receiving an extra email, which would damage your relationship.

Email segmentation is versatile. You can target customers according to the products they browse, the type of content they download, where they are in the sales funnel, what emails they open and more. As you get more information about your prospects, you’ll be able to create more-personalized messages.

In addition to segmenting emails to increase engagement, you should do the following:

Another benefit of email nurturing is that you can automate it. With the right tools, you can easily create email lists, as well as schedule emails when it’s most convenient for you.

Keep in mind that with this strategy, you must strike the right balance. You want to communicate with your audience regularly so that you’re building a relationship but not too often that they feel you are spamming them.

To get started with email nurturing, you’ll need the right tools. Here are some to consider:

Build out your content marketing.

Content marketing is an incredibly useful strategy that revolves around creating content, such as blog posts, e-books, FAQs, how-to articles, webinars, research reports and more. You can use this content to build brand awareness and draw in more people.

Content marketing also feeds into your other lead-nurturing strategies. For example, you can use social media and email to distribute the content you produce. Or, you can add CTAs, such as encouraging readers to sign up for your newsletter or reaching out for more information.

Content marketing can also help to improve your company’s reputation. Through content, you can show that you are concerned and understand your prospects’ needs. Instead of concentrating solely on your own products and services, you can shift the focus onto your potential customers.

Using the sales funnel, you can account for different leads’ needs. There are three stages in the sales funnel:

  • Awareness (top of the funnel). This stage begins after a person comes into contact with your company and connects in some way. At this point, they may just be learning about your business and its products and services. You should make an effort to understand potential customers’ needs. This stage lends itself to blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, e-books, videos and infographics.
  • Consideration (middle of the funnel). In this stage, things start to get more serious. Potential customers may begin to understand how your products or services could work for them, and they start to consider purchasing them. This is a good time to build trust with your leads. You can engage them with events, webinars, emails, whitepapers and case studies.
  • Purchase (bottom of the funnel). This is when you persuade your leads to purchase from you, and it’s an opportunity to create loyal customers. Content in this stage includes coupons, product features, use cases, product comparison pages, testimonials and pricing pages.

While it’s important to think about targeting your audience when you’re creating content, you’ll also want to make sure you are creating good content. Take these steps to enhance your content strategy efforts:

  • Come up with a content plan.
  • Focus on quality.
  • Use keywords to find relevant topics.
  • Avoid keyword stuffing.
  • Write for humans, not algorithms.
  • Check for grammatical errors.
  • Create relevant content.
  • Ensure your content has value.
  • Write search-engine-optimized content.
  • Include CTAs.
  • Share your content on your other channels.

Get active on social media.

Social media is an effective way to build relationships with prospects. It gives them an easy way to talk to you, and it also puts your content where many people spend their time. In fact, internet users ages 16 to 64 spend an average of 2.25 hours on social media each day, according to Hootsuite.

You can use social media to distribute your content and to show some of your brand’s personality. Follow these tips to excel at social media:

  • Update your content regularly.
  • Post the right content to the right social media channel.
  • Chat with your audience.
  • Study your analytics.
  • Understand your audience.
  • Be mindful of trends.
  • Use tools to automate and improve the process.
  • Consider starting an account dedicated to customer service.

You can also use social media to retarget ads. After potential customers leave your site, they may forget about your products and services, but social retargeting can remind them about your business.

Align sales, marketing and customer support teams.

Nurturing leads is a team effort. Sales and customer support teams learn about a company’s audience firsthand, and the marketing team has a lot of actionable data.

Effective collaboration among these teams will result in better insight, which will lead to better solutions.

Conduct surveys.

To build a connection with your leads, you must understand their needs. Surveys allow leads to tell you what they feel in their own words. If you ask them about their goals or the problems they face, you’ll be able to make a plan for how to get them to the end of the buyer’s journey.

Score leads.

Lead scoring lets you assign a value, often numerical, to your leads based on their behaviors.

Because not every lead will be in the same stage of the sales funnel, you shouldn’t invest the same amount of energy into each prospect. For example, your lead-scoring model may assign more points to prospects who spend time browsing your site and have higher click-through rates, and fewer points to those who have signed up for a newsletter but rarely open emails. Your efforts will likely make a bigger difference if you focus on the prospects who are engaging with you.

You can try to connect with those who score highly on a more personal level, such as by having a sales rep reach out to them.

Follow up with your leads after you make the sale.

Lead nurturing doesn’t end after the sale. After a customer has bought your product or service, you want them to keep coming back, because they are likely to spend three times as much as one-time customers, according to a report from e-commerce marketing platform Yotpo.

7 Lead-Nurturing Strategies [BusinessNewsDaily]

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Sales & Marketing

4 Tips to Increase Blog Subscribers ASAP

Blogs do a lot of heavy lifting for businesses. Not only can blogs act to boost a website’s visibility, but they can also generate potential leads  directly. Unfortunately, building up an online audience is easier said than done. Most of the time, increasing a blog’s reach will take months –– if not years –– of hard work. However, there are a few things you can do to get more subscribers quickly. Check out our top four tips on the subject here: 

Create Relevant Content

Generally speaking there are two types of content blog writers can produce: evergreen and topical. Evergreen content (like an evergreen tree) is “fresh” year round. It has a long-term appeal and addresses a subject that will always (or almost always) remain relevant. Topical content, on the other hand, addresses a specific idea, event, or problem that has only just occurred and that may not have value in five or ten years’ time. However, businesses that create quality topical content can –– in some instances –– attract a lot of visitors to their site quickly. Striking while the iron is hot can help you establish your business as a leading voice in your industry. So don’t pass up the opportunity to write quality topical content from time to time. 

Make Guest Appearances

One classic way to garner more interest in your business is to invite a guest blogger (or bloggers) to write content for your site. Getting a respected leader in your community to write on your blog can be a great way to quickly attract new visitors. Alternatively, bloggers can also make guest appearances on other websites as well. By writing excellent content for a guest site, you can win over potential new readers to your own site. 

Offer a Promotion

Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated all the time. Rather, if you want to get people to subscribe to your blog, give them a good reason to do so! Running promotions and giveaways for your subscribers will encourage new visitors to check out your content. Just make sure to give away worthwhile prizes. Otherwise, no one will bother to sign up. 

Spread it Far and Wide

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about solution vs suspension mixtures or advice for real estate agents, you should always share your best blog content on social media and beyond. Many successful companies create newsletters highlighting their blog, and it never hurts to talk about your blog to potential clients. The more your business promotes your blog, the more consumers will view it as a viable resource. Keep that in mind moving forward!

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Sales & Marketing

Marketing tools that would take a few hours to set up and that would bring continuing results

With approximately 30 million small and medium businesses in the world, competition has gone wild. New advertising channels and digital marketing brought a revolution in the business world, which basically means that, without online marketing, your business doesn’t exist. Somebody would say it’s sad, but actually, new marketing channels are heaven for everyone who wants to run over competition and breakthroughs in the business world in the best and most creative way.

Most of the businesses nowadays are breaking down due to inadequate or nonexistent online marketing strategies, so one thing is sure: you don’t want to be one of them. So, If you want to build a successful marketing strategy, regardless of your industry, it’s imperative to have a good plan empowered by social media, SEO optimized websites, and to follow the latest online marketing trends.

In this article, we’ll talk about the ultimate marketing tools that you’ll need when starting a business.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a definitive must-have today – there’s no doubt about it. As the most popular search engine, Google developed its analytics tracker which you can easily implement to your website. Google Analytics gives you the ability to track all actions from your visitors which is extremely important since you can see all behaviors your visitors’ have online. You can see what particular social media campaign or set of keywords is driving the most traffic to your website so you can use this data and adjust your future strategy so you can have the best possible results. Also, you can see what are preferred devices your visitors are using so you can adapt campaigns for desktop or mobile devices according to it.

Conclusion: if you want to succeed in the long term, creating a strategy based on visible parameters, Google Analytics isn’t a tool that you should avoid. It’s the primary tool you should install and learn to use.

Trello

Trello is the perfect organizational tool for all who want to keep the digital marketing team updated and synchronized.

It helps to manage all projects without stress, saving time – you can schedule and share blog posts with Trello before you publish them which is super useful because you can review the post and eventually change it before it goes online.

Trello helps you to keep everything related to your online marketing strategy in place: you can easily set up a board, invite colleagues working on projects, and share all content you want. Before Trello, email was basically the only communication channel for sharing information between the team. Of course, email is still the best formal channel for communicating with clients, for example, but Trello and other similar programs minimize confusion and lack of time while working on projects.

MailChimp

How many times have you subscribed to an email list for discounts and newsletters? Most of the companies today use MailChimp as a self-service support option, ensuring that all can quickly find answers to all of your questions and give its customers all information quickly and easily. MailChimp is absolutely one of the most used marketing providers in the world. It’s dating back to 2001, long before any company started using email as part of the marketing strategy. 

When you know the fact that more than 85% of B2B and B2C companies use email marketing strategy, it’s not surprising that MailChimp finds its wide use worldwide: in fact, it is estimated that there are currently more than 12 million users. Benefits, like a free plan for companies with less than 2000 subscribers and ones who don’t send more than 12000 emails per month, greatly facilitate its wide application and encourage small companies to grow in proportion to the use of the program.

With this benefit, companies can start using MailChimp pretty early, using the tool for free while acquiring new subscribers.

Hootsuite

With the increasing relevance of social networks in the promotion and success of companies regardless of the industry or the age, social media marketing became a crucial and unavoidable part of every successful marketing strategy. There are many marketing tools specialized on social media that help you to manage various online channels, but Hootsuite is an absolutely ultimate tool in which efficiency is proven by more than 10 million users. Hootsuite integrates with more than 35 popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube allowing its users to schedule social media posts in advance, reply to comments, and mentions through one dashboard using pre-written responses, and tons of other benefits. In this way, Hootsuite saves time and reduces the frustration of using each platform.

All in one SEO pack 

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is absolutely necessary if WordPress is your content management system (CMS).

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is necessary if WordPress is your content management system (CMS). Today WordPress is one of the most popular CMS in the world because it’s user-friendly especially if you’re a newbie, endless possibilities of customization, and lots of other benefits. If you are in search of an affordable hosting company for your WordPress website, Hostinger is highly recommended because its packages are a mix of high speed, 24/7 customer support, one-click-installation, and a dedicated team that will be dedicated to your needs. As you probably know, nowadays a great focus is on search engine optimization (SEO) and this tool will make sure that you always make good decisions regarding your content and its attraction to search engines. With All in One SEO Pack, you’ll get features like automatic generation of META tags, notifications from top search engines, such as Google and Bing, of any site changes, XML sitemap support, etc. Besides all benefits, the major thing that makes this plugin so popular is its ease of use.

With more than a million installs, All in One SEO pack is proven as one of the best helpers in SEO strategy, and also is completely free.

Conclusion

Digital marketing pretty fast became an ultimate weapon of a successful business – marketers became digital cowboys catching all the latest trends and following them in chase of conversions and profit. With digital tools that make the job easier and allow better maneuvering through the online jungle, everything is much easier. To ensure your marketing strategy will succeed, check all potential useful tools, read the reviews, inform yourself, and test them – we hope this list will be helpful in that chase.

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Sales & Marketing

Growing Sales On Youtube

One-third of internet users say they purchased a product because of YouTube.

You’d think brands would be YouTube experts. They’re not. Kids are doing a better job.

Literally.

There are 8-year-olds generating billions (with a B) of views with no paid advertising. There isn’t a single brand among the top 100 YouTube channels.

What is that brands are doing wrong? How can brands be successful on YouTube? There are three things to obsess over in order to grow a YouTube channel:

  1. Focus on a single topic and content series
  2. Optimize and refine your content
  3. Ask people to subscribe

Over 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.  With so much noise you need to find your niche and stick with it. Otherwise, people forget you. As a result, you’ll want to build your channel around what is called a ‘hub’ content series. This means you create episodic content with a consistent format, schedule, cast and topic.

The top creators all built their channels around hub content.

For example, Dude Perfect. The channel has over 50 million subscribers and 10.5 billion views. The content is entirely built around elaborate trick shots. Additionally, they upload, like clockwork, every other Monday.

Related: How to Create a YouTube Channel in 3 Simple Steps

The Try Guys consist of four friends documenting new experiences. The format is always the same. The foursome tries different things within each video, and experiences range from baking, to fire cupping, to nail extensions, and eating challenges. New videos are released on a set schedule. New videos go live every Wednesday and Saturday. As a result of their focused efforts, they’ve managed to grow to 7 million subscribers and over a billion views.

The commonality with these channels is a laser focus on a single topic, hub format, and upload schedule.

Internet sleuth’s uncovered the ideal length and watch time for content. They found that YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes, “10+ minute videos with 45%+ viewer retention per video.” As a result, once you have a hub format you have to work to extend your watch time with each video. YouTube provides audience retention data to help with this.

Within YouTube analytics, you can see, on a second by second basis where the peaks and troughs are in a video. This enables you to know what aspects of a video causes people to lose interest and where they’re rewatching.

With each new video, you’ll want to ditch the stuff that is losing viewers and do more of what people rewatch. The ultimate goal is to gradually make changes based on insights to increase watch time with each new video. The marginal gains will add up.

Imagine your first video has an average watch time of two minutes. Now let’s say you apply learnings and can increase watch time 2%. If you can keep that up with each additional video, then after 100 videos you’ll have watch time of well over 5 minutes. After 200 videos you’d have an average watch time of over 14 minutes.

In applying this methodology you can methodically increase watch time and create high ranking content.

Brands often make the assumption that if their content is great people will subscribe. The reality is you have to ask people to subscribe. Ask, early, often and make it incredibly simple.

YouTube provides numerous levers for channels to convert viewers to subscribers. If you look at successful YouTube creators, they use all of them.

End screens, a tool that allows you to add clickable overlays at the end of a video, is a great way to convert a viewer to a subscriber. If someone made it to the end of your video, they likely enjoyed the content. As a result, they’d be predisposed to hearing more from you. Verbally ask viewers to subscribe and point to the placement of the subscribe button. Remind the viewer it’s a great way to get more videos like the one they just watched.

There are a number of additional tactics.

YouTube allows you to add a ‘watermark’ in the right-hand corner of videos. Watermarks are ‘click to subscribe’ buttons. Brands often use their logo as the watermark. A logo doesn’t communicate the desired action. When you upload an image that says ‘subscribe’, the rate of clicks to subscribe (with that functionality) double on average.

Additionally, don’t be shy about promoting your channel. If you have an email list or large social following cross-promote those audiences. Create a one-click to subscribe feature. You can create a subscribe link for your channel by adding the channel name to this url: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=CHANNELNAME.

YouTube is well worth the investment in time and resources for virtually every brand. It can’t be ignored. It drives one-third of internet users to make a purchase and is the second largest search engine.

While YouTube is a difficult platform to grow an audience, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Focus on growing your overall channel’s watch time. Accomplish this by staying focused on your hub format. Use YouTube’s watch time analytics to inform small adjustments with each upcoming video. Encourage viewers to subscribe.

It may take time, but you will grow an audience.

3 Keys to Growing Sales and Views on YouTube [Entrepreneurial]

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Sales & Marketing

How businesses benefit from translation services

It is evident that websites with multiple language options reach larger audiences; the more languages there are available, the more likely it is that an individual can understand and navigate the website. In line with this, businesses can benefit from translation services in terms of international collaboration as well as customer-base growth: making key information easily accessible to other businesses globally can be a pathway to new partnerships. The partnerships themselves can introduce benefits such as access to foreign equipment, infrastructure and sharing of costs and risks on new projects. 

Topcontent is a prime example of a content agency that offers writing and translation services. They can produce content and translate texts in over 15 different languages for customers. With an efficient content order and delivery system, including automated publishing, their translators approach tasks in a quick, yet methodical manner.  

Human translators, as opposed to machine translation services, ensure unique, tailored translations that can appropriately present the original content in a way that suits the new target audience.  Sometimes certain aspects of websites or texts cannot be translated directly, as cultural factors may dictate that what is deemed appropriate to one audience is not appropriate to another. Both big and small businesses can benefit from this; whether there is a large or niche customer base, the text or website needs to read well in every language it is available in. A poorly translated website looks unreliable and can be difficult for both existing and potential customers to navigate. 

People appreciate commitments to inclusion: translations eliminate any discomfort or disagreement that may stem from being unfamiliar with the content due to misunderstanding the language used. This can be timesaving for business interactions and ensures that anyone can access any necessary information.

Businesses benefit from the greater engagement, guaranteed quality, and recognition of cultural differences that professional translation services can offer.