Innovative Marketing Ideas

3 Tips That Can Help You Find New Customers

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:54:00 GMT

In conversations with business owners, I am often asked how we can help them find new customers. Should they buy contact information, send direct mail or hire telemarketing services? While these can all be relevant ways to create awareness about your products and services, they are all based on you reaching out to the many in the hope of finding the few.

Let customers find you

Todays buyers and consumers are increasingly going online to do research before making a purchase decision. They use online search to find information and educate themselves about the products and services available.

Most of us will use online search to find information and review one or more company website to learn more about their products and services. As a marketer or business owner, your challenge is to make sure your company is included in customers online research process.

1. Can customers find you?

Will customers find your company when searching online on Google, Bing or Yahoo? While some might search for your company or product name, majority of customers are likely to search for more generic terms like accounting services or laptop reviews. By making sure your company is listed in the search results you can improve your chances that new customers learn about your products and services. To learn more about how search engine work, see this video from Google.

If you want to learn how your website ranks on popular search engines, we offer a free Search Engine Optimization report. Click here to get your free SEO report.

2. Is your website helping your customer

When a visitor comes to your company website for the first time an initial impression will be formed very quickly. A good impression will drastically increase your chances of that visitor staying on your site. This include both the visual and functional aspect of the website. Because most visitors only spend a few seconds before deciding to explore further or to leave your website, it is important that both website content and design help deliver a positive experience.

Optimize your website to help your customers through their buying process. Because B2B buyers often go through a lengthy decision making process, your customers are likely to return to your website at different stages. Website content should be designed to help your customer through each stage of their decision making process.

3. Turn web traffic into leads

While a good search engine ranking and high number of website visitors are great, they are only valuable if you can convert them into new customer wins. This means that you need to convert anonymous website visitors into known contacts or leads.

First step is to convert an anonymous visitor into a known contact. This can be achieved using various types of marketing promotions and registration forms. It might include giving away a research report or free sample of your product through an online registration form. The objective is to start building a relationship with the contact, by offering valuable content, that can assist the customer through their decision making process. By using the online registration form, you can request for the customers permission to continue the dialog through other channels like email or telephone.

Once you capture new leads, a continued interaction is important to stay top of mind. Include leads in drip campaigns and monitor how leads interact with your campaigns and website. By monitoring campaign interaction, you can better identify hot leads and target your messaging more accurately. This way, you can target your campaigns based on where the customer is in their buying process and gradually turn online leads into sales ready leads.

Uncover new sales leads through your website

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:13:00 GMT

Your web site data can show you more than just daily visit and page views. While solutions like Google Analytics are fantastic tools for regular website analysis, more detailed web activity tracking can help uncover more prospect and close more deals.

Getting sales and marketing in the loop.

With web activity tracking, you are able to turn anonymous web traffic into known web visitor data. Now you can see which companies and prospects are visiting your website. Because of this, you are able to see when your accounts and contacts are visiting your website, know what information they are interested in and how often they return.

For you marketing team, it provides new insights into your marketing database. Web analytics data, can be used to effectively target prospects based on their interest and web site interaction. You can segment you database based on how contacts interact with your website and campaigns.

Web activity data is captured for each individual CRM contact

Web activity tracking, can also help your sales and accounts team. Automatic alerts can be used to tell the account owner, when their accounts or contacts visit your website. Sales can prioritize lead follow up, by ranking leads based on how they interact with your company. A contact that often visit your website or recently looked at your How to buy page, is often more like to buy compared to a contact that never visited your website.

Web activity tracking tend to work best when combined with automatic lead scoring. Instead of monitoring each individual web activity, lead scoring helps you monitor web activity and alert you, once a pre-defined activity or lead score is reached.

With web activity, you company can benefit through better targeted marketing campaigns and more efficient sales follow up. Web activity tracking is included in our integrated marketing platform.

Google Wonder Wheel is gone

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:20:00 GMT

That's right, no more wonders from the Google Wonder Wheel.

I personally used Google's Wonder Wheel all the time as part of SEO work. Wonder Wheel is a great and easy to use tool to help identify relationships between a keyword and related search terms.

That's right, no more wonders from the Google Wonder Wheel.

I personally used Google's Wonder Wheel all the time as part of SEO work. Wonder Wheel is a great and easy to use tool to help identify relationships between a keyword and related search terms.

Google Wonder Wheel was first introduced in 2009 and was a free tool available in the left hand column in the Google search window.

During the recent re-design of the Google website, Google Wonder Wheel was taken offline and is currently no longer available. Hopefully, this is only a temporary decision and I hope we will see Google Wonder Wheel back online again soon.

Is search engine optimization right for your business?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:26:00 GMT

Before you begin investing in search engine optimization, it is worthwhile to evaluate how it can help your business and understand the effort required. Because companies operate in different industries, have different target audience and competition, each search engine optimization project is unique.

5 things to consider before you buy SEO services:

Be clear about your business objective - While a better search engine ranking, might help you get more website traffic, this is usually not the final business objective. Most companies are looking to generate new leads, win customers and grow revenue. Make sure your SEO project helps your achieve the real business objective.

Is search marketing relevant for your business? - Although more and more consumers and B2B buyers rely on online research before making a purchase decision, it does not mean search marketing is the right approach for all companies.

How much effort is required? - Some SEO campaigns require extra effort and investments to secure a top ranking. Be sure to understand how competitive SEO is for your business before you begin.

What are you paying for? - Although search engine optimization might be difficult to understand, you should always know what you are paying for. Make sure your SEO consultant provides regular progress reports and explains what will be done and why.

What can you do yourself? - While you might prefer to outsource your SEO campaigns, it is still important that your SEO campaign it not executed in isolation from that rest of your company activities.

Get a free SEO Analysis Report

To help you answer some of the questions above, we recommend you get a SEO analysis report. With the analysis report, you will get a detailed report about your current search ranking, competitors, estimated opportunity and effort required to improve your search ranking. Click below to get a free SEO analysis report.

Get a free SEO Analysis report

Developing a Lead Nurturing program

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 05:42:00 GMT

Lead nurturing is a powerful tool that has been proven to have remarkable results. Through lead nurturing, companies can keep in communication with prospective clients until they are ready to buy.

If your current sales and marketing strategies don’t currently include lead nurturing, you may be losing valuable leads. Even if you have acquired these leads, companies with more effective and advanced communication strategies may be beating you to closing the deal.

To learn more about, download our introduction paper on lead nurturing. In this white paper we will explore lead nurturing strategies as well as recent statistics pointing to the value of this process. The fact of the matter is that lead nurturing is essential for businesses that are looking to effectively compete in today’s market.

Feel free to download the report here

New Website

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:48:00 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for dropping by. We have just moved here to our new website and as you can see, we are still busy unpacking.

Feel free to look around or check back in a few days

Cheers