The leads you collect today aren’t necessarily ready to buy immediately. Some of them are, of course, but others may still be researching potential products or solutions and are not ready to make a purchase decision. Your existing customers may also be leads for other products you sell, or be interested in buying more of the products or services they already buy.
By leveraging your own qualified list of customers and prospects, you have the ability to shorten the sales cycle and generate additional revenue. The lead you collect today is a lead that may need to be gently and strategically nurtured to become a customer.
In order to build a strong program to nurture leads, you need to take the following steps:
- Decide which segments you would like to focus on for the lead nurture program
- Identify the buying cycle for each segment
- Create email messaging and offers specific to the buying cycle of each segment
- Think through the Touch Points, Triggers and Timing for the email campaign
- Design the email creative and produce all of the content
- Implement the lead nurture strategy using a marketing automation or email tool
- Develop a personalization and testing strategy
By carefully implementing each step in the process, you can create a lead nurture program that effectively turns contacts into sales-ready leads.
For more insight to help you build a complete Lead Nurture program, download the entire white paper here.
Using LinkedIn Effectively: Part 2 – Growing and Organizing your Connections
Once you build out your profile, you can start to connect with people by inviting them to accept you as a connection. You can do this one at a time, or upload an entire contact list and broadly send invitations.
I’ve found that different people feel differently about how well they should know someone before they connect with them. Because I’m letting them into my network and they will see my other connections, my rule is that I need to have personally met or connected with everyone on my list in some way. I don’t accept connections from people I don’t know, or especially from sales people who I have never met.
As you start to build out your connection list, it’s important to keep it current and organized. Every time I meet someone by phone or get their email address I send them an invitation with a personal note to remind them where we met. Whenever I meet someone and get a card I send them an invitation. A LinkedIn tool that makes this very easy is CardMuch. This is a mobile app that lets me take a picture of a business card, automatically verifies the information, and then invites them to connect on LinkedIn. By scanning and inviting people the same day that I meet them, a very high percentage of the people I invite connect with me.
Once I got several hundred LinkedIn connections, I found that it became very difficult to remember everyone on the list. A very useful tool in LinkedIn is categorizing people on your list. I create custom categories such as “friend”, “family”, “client”, prospect”, “employee”, “vendor”, “competitor”, “church”, etc. to keep my contacts organized. I even create custom names for associations or organizations that remind me where I met my contact. You can see that I use LinkedIn for both personal and business connections, since it’s a powerful way to stay in touch with everyone I know.
Since I’ve been using LinkedIn for years, I’ve found that there are people on my list who I met once and don’t remember well and may have no reason to contact again. Rather than disconnecting with them, I move them to a category I call “network”, so that I can still reach out to them in the future, but they don’t clutter my other lists.
By consistently adding new contacts and keeping them organized, I’m able to quickly reconnect with hundreds of people that I’ve met as needed. If you cultivate it well, this can be a powerful asset that will serve you well through your entire career.
Here’s a link to the full video from my LinkedIn Presentation. http://youtu.be/Vx8oBSW7YKo
Using LinkedIn Effectively: Part 1 – Building Your Profile
LinkedIn is a powerful social media tool for professionals. With over 175 million members, it’s an excellent way to present yourself professionally, stay connected, build your network, and find new business opportunities.
Building your LinkedIn Profile Some people use it exclusively for job hunting, while others use it for keeping their business cards in order. In this series of articles I’ll discuss the basics of LinkedIn, as well as some of the more advanced ways it can work for you.
To get started on LinkedIn you first need to create a free account and build out your personal profile which will look a lot like your resume. Your profile will include your picture, a summary of your background, job experience, education, languages, skills, interests, organizations you belong to, as well as any personal details that you want to include. It will also include activity or messages that you post to LinkedIn. Because it has so many features, it’s so much more powerful than any resume you could ever send. And since it will be used by all of your connections, not just potential employers, you can include information that will be important to many different types of connections.
It’s important to build out every section of your profile in order to tell your story as fully as possible. Even your picture tells a story. For most users, it’s important to present a professional image that lets other people know more about who you are. This generally will not be as casual or goofy as your Facebook photo which might only be viewed by a few friends. Stay away from pictures with animals, expensive yachts and bathing suits, unless that’s the story you want to tell. In this age of easy and inexpensive digital photography, a current “selfie” photo at your office might be better than a professional photo at a holiday event years ago.
Another important part of your profile is the summary. It tells people who you are and what you are looking for. If you are looking for a job, you can make that very clear in your summary. If you are in business development, or an expert software developer, this is the place to make that clear and even give a few examples. Keep in mind that this is a summary and resist the urge to make this lengthy in order to keep your readers engaged.
LinkedIn also lets you list a number of skills which will be very important later, so take the time to list as many
skills as you think are credible for you.
A great feature of LinkedIn is that it helps you build your profile with suggestions and it even tracks your progress and how your profile ranks in ‘completeness.’
If you take the time to build out a solid profile in LinkedIn, it will serve you in many ways for years to come.
Here’s a link to the full video from my LinkedIn Presentation. http://youtu.be/Vx8oBSW7YKo
4 Reasons Why You Should Hire Nowspeed as Your Internet Marketing Agency
As the head of your marketing department, you have a ton of responsibilities. You have to manage your products, your services, your budget and probably a slew of other marketing tasks. Most importantly, you need a good marketing team.
Do you have the right marketing people to make sure your marketing engine firing on all cylinders?
Finding good marketing people at a cost-effective price to manage your social media platforms, paid search marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and website content can be quite a challenge. We often see the following scenarios.
- A company has marketing people with the right skill sets in place but is not getting the desired results.
- A company has marketing people with the right skill set at the right price and is getting good results, but then their marketing people leave for another opportunity.
- A company can’t find the marketing skill set at an appropriate price, forcing the company to devote resources for an extended job search or to pay more than expected.
- In today’s hyper-competitive world, not getting the maximum results from your marketing team is not only unacceptable but could potentially cost you your job or your company.
1. Nowspeed has the Marketing Expertise
Every marketing department has many needs; from building marketing strategy and writing landing page copy to optimizing your Facebook page and deciding which keywords should be broad or exact. For marketing teams which have small staffs, it is virtually impossible to find someone who can do meet all of your PPC, SEO, Social Media, Email and Website Design requirements. Nowspeed has experienced people who specialize all of these internet marketing services. Most of our team members have spent over 10 years working on their marketing specialties. They are delivering these services for multiple clients so they are knowledgeable about how to deliver results across many industries. We support our team by giving our people the tools and the training to stay at this high level.
2. Nowspeed is Cost Effective and Time Effective
For the cost of 1 marketing person, we can deliver 2 or 3 of these marketing services. More importantly, for our retainer clients, we can shift resources across new marketing services depending on your needs for that month. Your time and your team’s time is very valuable. Letting your team focus on internal marketing decisions and issues while letting us handle the optimization of search, social, email and websites saves you both time and money.
3. Nowspeed is Up On Marketing’s Rapid Evolvement
Marketing is changing daily and it is difficult to make the correct decision when all the marketing platforms are changing daily. Over the past few months, we have seen Google changing its search algorithm, Facebook has changed the visibility for company page posts, Twitter introduce small business marketing and Pinterest explode. If you are not aware of all the marketing changes, how can you make accurate marketing decisions?
4. Nowspeed Delivers Marketing Results
We are delivering absolutely, fantastic results for our clients. From tripling landing page conversion rate to doubling website conversions and from quintupling the number of Twitter followers to driving leads across all the platforms, we want you to share in our success.
If you are having trouble with your marketing effectiveness, give me a call today and let’s discuss how we can help.
Olivier Sartor
Account Director
Nowspeed
(508) 616-0111, 216
Happy September Bloggers!
It’s hard to believe that the summer of 2012 is finally coming to an end. But it’s also an exciting time of year to look forward to all the beautiful fall colors, apple picking, football season, and being able to wear that favorite snugly sweater again!
The Nowspeed team has had quite an amazing summer with lots of new social media clients coming on board, an awesome company summer outing at F1 Racing, lots and lots of thoughtful team meetings to enhance the Nowspeed workflow, and creative innovative lunches to add some spice to our everyday lives. More recently, we were able to take a sailing trip from Barden’s Boat Yard Inc. in Marion, MA. To view some amazing pictures of our exploration, click here.
Here are some marketing tips we’d like to share with you which we also posted on our @Nowspeed Twitter account:
- 20 Point Content Marketing Project Checklist via Heidi Cohen
- What are the Top 10 Facebook Pages? via Jeff Bullas
- For Conventions, TV Viewing Down, Social Media Up via Boston.com
- The Hidden Cost of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor via Search Engine Land
- Your new waiter is a tablet via CNN Money
Justin Barton
Tom McGovern
Trish Reske
David DiMartino
Erin Foskett
Waseem Kawaf
Daniel Rodriguez
