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CRM lead generation involves using a CRM (customer relationship manager) to nurture relationships between you and your leads (potential customers) and existing customers. With a CRM you can manage client or customer information for any size business with greater efficiency and autonomy. Using a CRM for lead generation means closing more deals, increasing sales, and improving real-time decision making and long-term forecasting.
Business owners who utilize CRM lead generation forever alter the effectiveness of their business. Did you know that sales staff only spend about 36.6% of their time actually selling? What if you could institute an intuitive and convenient system that would allow you or your salesperson to spend more time building relationships and closing deals? As a business, your most important asset is your customer or client. Without a CRM, the details regarding these individuals are spread amongst you, your marketing team, your sales force, your accountant etc. - in their brains, inboxes, and stacks of invoices. Centralizing, sorting, and filtering all customer and sales information is what a CRM does best. Proper CRMs like those from Hubspot allow you to manage relationships and sales funnels without fighting overly complicated spreadsheets and hours of data entry. Organization is effortless with a CRM - you can manage your sales funnel with total visibility. You can also see all of the details related to a lead in one place including notes, interactions, and touch points. This allows you to visualize and make sales forecasts.
A proper CRM centralizes and brings all of your customer information together in one place. This is the first step toward increasing the efficiency of your business. Instead of employees using multiple spreadsheets, binders or databases, they'll have all of the relevant information for any given customer right at their fingertips and in one place. A CRM does require you to enter customer data at some point, but there are ways that you can automate this process and how the information makes it into your CRM. Website contact forms are a prime example. Instead of manually recording interaction with an email every time a customer contacts you, you can feed their entries through a contact form to your CRM. The conversation then gets recorded and the sales process begins. From this point, anyone could go back, reference that conversation and seamlessly pick up the sales process.
If you're storing customer information in hard-copy books or binders you stand to lose that information or misrecord entries. One of the biggest benefits of a CRM is having the ability to organize, sort, segment, filter and apply conditions to all of this information. Not only is customer info stored and backed up within a CRM, but you now also have more advanced ways of interpreting it. CRMs really derive their power from these advanced filters and conditions. These allow you or any other user the ability to group contacts and customers into any type of segment. When you group customers into segments, you can then specialize the interactions or messaging to suit that grouping. Before a lead becomes a customer there's often a lot of nurturing that takes place. You want to make sure that your sales staff knows who's ready to buy. They also need to know and what type of messaging they need to deliver to close the deal.
You need a CRM if multiple employees interact with a contact or lead before the sale or deal actually occurs. If there are multiple points of contact, each person needs to know what communication the lead last received. Keeping track of multiple conversations in multiple places at multiple times increases your chances of closing more deals. Because a CRM provides a single access point for all customer details. You'll always know exactly where a lead is at in their journey to becoming a buyer. Everyone on your team will know which leads need more nurturing, communication or information and which leads are ready to buy.
You need a CRM if you want to automate some of the repetitive interactions that take place between you and your customer. By automating the more repetitive and mundane aspects of your business, you stand to save time and money and reduce overall labor. Here are just a few things you can automate with a CRM:
Analyzing trends is critical to your business's future growth and development. The problem is having the right information displayed to you in the right way. Without this, you can't see the trends. With a CRM all of your information for customers and sales is in one, highly filtered and organizable space. With all of this customer and sales info, you can now apply filters to make interpretations and predictions. For instance, knowing a customers lifetime value (LTV) is crucial. This allows you to understand how their repeated business factors into your bottom line and total ROI. Using a CRM means that you have a historical view of all existing and future customers.
If you're still not convinced that CRM lead generation is right for your business, you may be right. A CRM is not perfect for everyone. It's intended for those who are interested in scaling up their business by managing information, spotting trends and making decisions that benefit their future. Talk to us if you're unsure about a CRM and how it can help you. We can assess your needs and steer you in the right direction. As part of our commitment to our clients, we provide each with a CRM regardless.
I’m tired of dating analogies in Internet marketing. But, when we’re talking about call to action mistakes (CTA mistakes) it is hard to find a better one, so let me get it out of the way. Outside of Vegas, meeting and getting married all at once is a pretty rare thing. Business relationships need to progress too.
With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of 5 call to action mistakes even professional Internet marketers make. In truth, marketers make a lot more than 5 CTA mistakes. The important thing is knowing how your customers progress through the buyer’s journey.
In general, expensive or complex purchases involve a lot of reinforcement. Impulse items, not so much. This list will help you create the perfect call to action.
I often tell clients, “nobody cares about you, or you company.” It’s a harsh statement, so I soften it a bit, but it’s true. Unless you’re Fabio, nobody is going to swoon over your “Click Here” button.
Imagine you’re a guy, and you’re in a bar with 250,000 other guys, and 3 girls, and your goal is to marry one of them. Get the picture? Those are tough odds even for Fabio. For you to reach your goal, the following has to happen.
The whole strategy is wrong. In reality, one of those 250,000 other dudes is probably going to kick your ass before you get anywhere near the girls. That’s the Internet.
Given the amount of work and planning it takes to get noticed online… Let me put it this way. Say you do get one of the girls to talk to you. It’s your big chance. All you need is a way to contact her later. So…
You hand her a page long form to fill out. It asks for her address, phone number, likes and dislikes, email address, where she works, and requires that she write in long form her favorite things about you.
When your position is weak, you can’t make demands. Keep your forms short and only require the information you absolutely need. Often, just an email address is enough to open the door to a second contact.
In business, we set goals all the time. Popular favorites include sales goals, revenue goals, cost reductions, walk-ins—it could be anything that’s important to a particular business. Most business owners are pretty good at keeping track of the big stuff, i.e. money in, money out.
Probably the most measurable part of any business is what happens online. Google Analytics, at the very least, will tell you all about where your visitors come from, what pages they visit, how much time they spend on them, what device they’re using to view your website and thousands of other details.
Virtually everything about your website is knowable, so it’s a pretty short leap to say, “Our conversion rate is 1%, so let’s get that up to 3%.” There are many ways to increase website conversions, but it starts with two things:
Yet, the vast majority of business owners pay almost no attention to what happens online. My next article is going to be about what online metrics are most important to business owners. Drop me an email (joe@ocgcreative.com) and I’ll send you a link when I publish it.
There’s a common misconception that you need to place calls to action all over your website. It isn’t true. While you absolutely should make it clear how to contact you from anywhere on the site, CTAs are intrusive and expect too much from the visitor.
Look, if the big red “click here” button didn’t work at the top of the page, it won’t work placed 30 more times down the page.
If your landing page strategy requires more than one CTA on a webpage, that’s fine as long as your page was well planned. In general, if your call to action is supported with factual, believable, relevant content that is bathed in sincerity, you’ll convert at least some visitors.
Ultimately, CTA placement should be tested. Until it is proven that one CTA location outperforms another, place a simple form near your most compelling content—usually near the top of the page. Leave it there and count conversions for the first thousand or so visits before testing another location.
It’s a very unscientific test, but it will help you get your brain into a testing and measuring mode. It also starts to lay a foundation for developing good habits as you begin to develop more reliable experiments.
If you read #2, and thought to yourself, “how would I know?” there are two essential tracking tools; Google Analytics and your CRM. Let’s look at Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics tool available. It’s free for all but the largest (by that I mean HUGE) companies, and is simple to set up and use. Chances are you’re using Google Analytics already if you have a website.
You may not know there are conversion tracking tools built in. Essentially, these work by identifying a checkout page or “thank you” page as your “conversion goal.” Every time that page is served, it counts as a conversion. You can track many different conversion points in Google Analytics.
Most of the time, your should use a different page for each conversion path. That way, you’ll better distinguish which results in what. There are many, many sources on the web that provide step-by-step instructions on how to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go into it here.
The second essential conversion tracking tool is your CRM. What, you don’t have or use a CRM? Client relationship management (or is it customer retention management?) should be the center of your universe. By linking all of your online conversions to your CRM, you’ll be able to recall critical details through every stage in the buyer’s journey.
Your business depends on attracting and keeping business. Yet, business owners everywhere store critical client history in their email inboxes. Don’t be one of them!
CRM is so important that it is included in all of our Internet marketing plans. Unfortunately, very few companies use CRM as effectively as they could, but that’s a topic for another day.
Business owners are often mislead into thinking website visitors behave differently than people. As it turns out, most website visitors ARE people. People use the Internet for lots of reasons, but topping the list is to learn things and solve problems.
At the beginning of this article, I said coldly that nobody cares about you or your website. Actually, they don’t trust you either. It should be your burning imperative to build trust. You do that by providing information people believe and can use.
Too often, the call to action is the focal point. Marketing jackasses tell clients, “you need CTAs. It’s all CTAs these days.” WRONG! Your goal should be to make yourself essential by being the trusted source of information.
Prove what you know. Prove that you deliver. If it takes a thousand words, write them. If you suck at writing, have someone write for you.
The key point is if you want people to take an interest in your business, they have to take an interest in you. For that, you have to be interesting and make the extra effort your competitors won’t.
This is hardly an exhaustive list. In truth, the most common CTA mistake is not taking a serious interest in your own conversions. Too often, web related duties are assigned to a nephew or the girl who answers the phone.
As a business owner, the opportunity cost of not having experts manage your online marketing is immense. It’s intangible, though, so you don’t feel it the same as if you are writing checks.
You wouldn’t dream of having a teenage daughter handle your accounting, yet it happens all the time in marketing. Just because Sally Sue likes Facebook doesn’t make her an Internet marketing expert.
Internet marketing (which includes calls to action) is a complex, statistical exercise. Most “marketing” agencies have no clue about how to run a statistically valid test on a CTA. Guessing doesn’t really cut it.
On the other hand, it can be fun, especially when you start getting results. The bottom line is you should embrace the call to action component of your website like you would any important business function. You’ll be surprised how much business your website can generate when you apply effort in the right areas.
CTAs are overall beneficial for a business and are typically associated with landing pages that are intended for your website visitors to perform a specific action. Learn more about the importance of landing pages here.
If you’re doing business in 2015, the term marketing automation has likely made its way into your vernacular—or at least your inbox. But unless you have a comprehensive marketing department, or a service provider who specializes in it, you’re probably not making full use of it as a time-and money-saving tool. If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you may even be fuzzy on exactly what it is. This brief primer is for you. Marketing automation is an umbrella term that refers to the process (and its technologies) of turning prospects into customers in a way that's data-driven and standardized. Marketing campaigns are automated, and usually channeled through email, social media, blogs, and websites. That automation allows your marketing staff to spend fewer resources on moving prospects through the sales channel, while speeding up that process. Data gathered during this process is useful both in the journey to a particular conversion, and for future marketing and even product planning. Automation typically has three components that work together: Intelligence/Analytics At this phase, prospect activities—for instance, who clicked what link in an email, or used a particular search term—are tracked and analyzed, allowing campaigns to be more highly-targeted to a prospect’s interests based on their behavior. Prospect-Campaign Automation Here, prospects are categorized based on the analysis of their interests gathered in the first phase, and then presented with marketing messages and campaigns that target that particular interest. This is where you’ll see marketing components like shopping cart reminders, and those uncanny Facebook ads that seemed to know what you were thinking earlier in the day. Workflow Automation Marketing campaigns activities can be creative and exciting, but they can also be tedious and labor-intensive. Workflow automation allows marketing staff to automate repetitive processes, like campaign budgeting, file approvals, brand asset management, campaign scheduling, and other internal activities. The field of marketing automation isn’t new, but for many years it was used primarily by larger organizations with the budgets, staff, and expertise to purchase and use those tools. In recent years, it has been gaining traction among even small businesses and entrepreneurs, thanks to more accessible and affordable technologies, and an increasing number of digital marketing agencies offering it as a one-stop service.
I'm starting to feel like we're beating the same drum with back to back articles about WordPress, but the simple fact is that marketing with WordPress makes a lot of sense for most businesses of pretty much any size. It takes planning and effort, but of all the low cost ways to grow and market your business, writing blog articles can eat away at your competitor's market share in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for them to compete with. It's hard to decide whether WordPress's incredible ability to reliably achieve top search rankings, or the ease by which site owners can manage their websites is the more valuable feature, but in my view search engines always win out over everything else. Not true in all situations, however. For a lot of business owners, providing a simple means of managing content is key. This is especially true for companies that use their websites to supply current information to an established user base. SEO may be be a factor in this case, but by no means most important. For most organizations, search engines rule. If you are selling a product or service, achieving top search engine rankings can mean the difference between success and failure. With WordPress, I've spent years experimenting with the right combination attributes and discovered that it is possible to achieve more or less real-time indexing of your website content. What this means is that, within minutes of your publishing an article (post or page), Google will have already added it to its search engine results page (SERP). I can't emphasize enough what realtime search indexing means to most businesses. By eliminating the normal crawl cycle, search engine marketers (as well as non-technical website owners or content managers) can get onto the SERP in a few minutes, a process that often takes 30 days or more--sometimes much more. Generally speaking, my list of top reasons business owners should consider WordPress is as follows...
All this sounds great, and it is. But, there are a few things for which WordPress may not be the best choice. Topping that list is large scale e-commerce. While there are many plugins (WooCommerce is one popular example) that make selling products possible, and even simple, none that I've worked with are ready for prime time. WordPress also may not be the best choice for websites that must present many varying types of data or content. For example, a site with several regions or feature areas on each type of page. To do this using WordPress, programmers often issue database calls to specific post categories or tags and display the result in the appropriate location on the webpage. It seems clever enough, but if you have a lot of them, things get out of hand pretty quickly. We've resolved the issue by doing unique things with custom post types, but there are times that a more traditional content management system (CMS) makes a better choice. This isn't so much of an issue here, but most web designers simply don't have the programming skills to do any serious custom work within the WordPress engine. As a result, many web designers install off the shelf themes and modify them. Many times, that's fine, but these modifications can be a nightmare if done improperly. For example, your website can be completely wiped out just by performing a routine update. Even with a few drawbacks, I'd say that 70% of the web development projects we do are custom WordPress websites. And, we are an engineering firm capable of building anything our clients dream up from scratch. If you've got questions about whether WordPress might be a good fit for your website project, drop me a note with a few details (joe@ocgcreative.com) and I'll be glad help you explore your options.
