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3 Things you Need to Do When Looking at Analytics

Your Analytics - Tracking, Testing and Goal Setting

 Over the past few years, marketing has transformed from an art into a science. Tracking, testing and metrics are key data points to help you make decisions that drive your business. Today we get real-time insights into what’s working and what’s not. Right now, from my smartphone, I have access to our company’s marketing metrics and the metrics for every single one of our clients. I quickly see if organic traffic is up or down vs. last month. If the social media initiatives we launched across are working or not. If a specific client’s conversion rates have increased as a result of a new piece of content we created or if we need to reconsider the CTA (call to action) button we created for that content.

Never before have we, as business owners, CEOs and marketing professionals, had this level of insight into marketing performance.

One of the most important parts of tracking the performance of your inbound marketing program is setting up a regular rhythm to review your performance. Even if you are looking at your stats daily, you still need a weekly 30-minute session to dig a little deeper and you need a monthly 60-minute session to review performance for the past month, set goals for the next month and discuss any adjustments that need to be made so that you ensure you hit your goals going forward.

It’s actually less critical that you hit your numbers and more important that you have a plan in place when you don’t hit your numbers. Every business can have a down month, but making sure your down month doesn’t turn into two, three or four down months in a row is the objective of this monthly session.

Here are some actual tactical adjustments we have made during one of these sessions:

 

• If visitors to your website are down for this month vs. last month, schedule a series of weekly guest blog posts for the upcoming month. Guest blog posts can add hundreds of visitors over a few days and contribute up to 20 leads a day in some cases.

• If leads are down this month vs. last month, time for a new free report or tip guide to drive up conversions. One you get traffic to your website up on a consistent basis, you should consider adding new educational content to turn those visitors into leads. Adding new content to your site on a monthly basis could increase lead generation by 30% month over month.

• If your site is getting a lot of returning visitors and not enough new visitors, take a look at your publication strategy. Find a few new websites that cater to your target personas and get them to publish one of your existing whitepapers, tip guides or e-books. Create a dedicated landing page to track traffic and conversions. If the website you select has enough daily visitors, then this tactic is sure to increase both traffic and leads for your business.

 

What gets measured gets done. Once you have this process in place, you will see month over month improvements. When you look back over a 12-month period you will see dramatic increases in both website visits and leads for your business. In some cases, clients have seen 5x increases in traffic and 3x increases in leads.

 

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Why Software Makes it Easier to Generate Leads

Your Leads - They Need Proper

Care and Feeding

 

You don’t need software to implement an inbound marketing program for your company, but it sure does make it easier. It’s going to help you in three very specific areas: education, analytics and automation. For most of you, this is going to be your first inbound marketing program. Some guidance and education is necessary when you do something for the first time. Software provides that guidance. For example, you might forget to include one of your keywords in the title of your blog post. You want a software tool that reminds you. You might forget to tag a new landing page, but if your software recommends keywords that makes your job easier.

 

TIP: If you want an inbound marketing program that generates leads, software isn’t optional, it’s a requirement for automation and analytics.

 

There is a community of inbound marketers and if your software connects you to that community you benefit from their experience, knowledge and learning. Now you become a better, more effective inbound marketer, too. There are a lot of marketing analytics tools. Google Analytics is a free tool available to everyone, but marketing automation software typically comes with everything you need to gain insights into the performance of your marketing and make the necessary adjustments to see you reach your goals in short order.

 

You don’t want to spend your time creating charts and graphs and you don’t want to spend your time trying to interpret them either. It should be quick, clear and flexible enough for you to drill down into important areas on an as-needed basis. Part of inbound marketing is executing a consistent and repeatable set of tactics like blogging daily, emailing monthly, nurturing leads as they come in and sharing content across all your social media sites. Marketing software helps make these regular tasks easy and it helps make them fast. Remember, you want to be spending your time thinking, being creative, coming up with new ideas to generate leads – not posting every single blog post to all your social media sites. There are a variety of good marketing automation software tools including Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and Infusionsoft. If you are looking to automate some of the marketing tasks you execute today all of these software tools provide a lot of value, but if you are planning to implement an inbound marketing program, HubSpot is the only one that helps you with all aspects of inbound marketing including connecting you with a community of inbound marketing experts.

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Why You Need to Give Your Leads some TLC

Your Leads - They Need Proper

Care and Feeding

 

Just because someone visits your website and downloads one of your e-books doesn’t mean they are ready to chat with you about hiring your company or buying your products … at least not yet. Actually, no one is really ready to have a personal conversation with anyone until the pain associated with their issue becomes acute. As marketers, you never know when that pain is going to be acute, so you have to continually nurture your leads with even more educational content. The real purpose for this nurturing is to help them feel progressively more comfortable with your firm. The more you help them with links, educational materials, videos, blogs and other relevant content, the more likely they are to hire your company.

 

TIP: Since your prospects will never buy until their pain becomes acute, lead nurturing keeps your company in front of them, so when their pain does become acute, they pick you.

 

This nurturing process can be automated and it’s recommended that this not only be automated but also planned out and personalized based on the lead’s target persona and profile. This ensures that everyone has the same remarkable experience, regardless of who they are and where they are in their own internal buying process. Regular email marketing campaigns are excellent examples of lead nurturing. Every month you publish an educational article along with a few other items you want your prospects and clients to know about and now everyone gets reminded of what you do, how you do it and why they should feel good about working with you.

 

Another great way to nurture your leads is with automated personal emails. These Outlookstyle emails come for you or someone at your company. They are personalized and include links to additional educational content. They could be specific blog posts, additional whitepapers, upcoming webinars or special e-books available just for them. These automated emails are scheduled upfront to send at predefined intervals (say 3 days, 6 days and 9 days) after a significant event or interaction with your company. Of course, the timing can be adjusted at any time and customized for any situation. Along with these emails we also get intelligence on the performance of these campaigns. Who is opening them? When did they open them? Did they click through to any of the materials? This information is critical to helping you adjust the performance of the campaign and move these leads through the funnel toward becoming a new customer as quickly and as efficiently as possible. 

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

How to Place Content to Drive New Prospoects

Your Publication - Placing Content Drives New Prospects

 

Publishing is a concept that is familiar to everyone. Newspapers, magazines, TV stations and even websites publish stories in one form or another. I bet you didn’t know that, as a business, you have to be a publisher also. Why? Because your prospects are out there and with the traditional media infrastructure fading fast, you have to be smart enough to get your educational content in front of your target prospects. 

 

 TIP : Don’t duplicate content. While it seems like you would be able to reuse a blog post from your site on an industry site, if Google finds out (and they will) it’s going to be a long time before you see the top of any search rankings. 

 

A great way to do that is by guest blogging. Popular blog sites have thousands of readers and even more people who have subscribed to the blog. By offering your opinion and sharing helpful tips and advice on a popular blog, you drive brand new prospects to your website. If they like what they see on your website and they get a remarkable experience (remember this from earlier in the book) they turn into leads. Another way to publish your content is to extend your existing relationship with trade publications, trade associations and industry groups. Every industry has associations and groups like this. While their magazines might be getting thinner and thinner, their online properties are growing fast. They are looking for smart, educational and creative content to share with their readers, members and visitors. If your company can provide that content, they are usually happy to give you access to their website. Now these perfectly targeted prospects see your content, click through, land on your website and turn into leads. When you think about it, it’s not much different than what you used to do. Instead of buying space and placing advertisements, now you offer educational content with links back to your website. It should cost a lot less and drive a lot more business for your company than traditional outbound marketing. Better yet, it’s perfectly aligned with how your prospects want to buy, bringing your company that much closer to getting the deal.

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

How Social Media is Your Secret Weapon

Your Social Media - Give Them Something To Talk About

 

If you think your prospects and customers aren’t on social media, think again. If you believe that your prospects aren’t searching for businesses just like yours on social media, think again. If you still feel strongly that prospective customers aren’t talking about your business on social media, think again. With 1 billion people on Facebook and 250 million people on LinkedIn and 200 million people on Twitter and 190 million people using Google+, you can be sure that your prospective clients are on social media looking for firms just like yours right now. Social media has never been more important to businesses like yours than it is today. In the past 12 months, clients have seen social media catch up to organic search as a major source for new visitors to their websites.

 

 TIP: If your content is remarkable people will share it and when you have people talking about your content you have more visitors to your website and more leads for your business. 

 

The key is not to create another profile page, but to create social sites that continue your inbound marketing approach by leveraging educational content. Social media is where people come to converse. Your company has the expertise to facilitate those conversations, to start those conversations and to feed those conversations with content. The more active you can be in those conversations, the more new visitors you will send to your website, the more your website will be found on search engines, the more leads you will generate for your business and the more new client opportunities will present themselves to your firm. It all fits together, perhaps even more perfectly than you think. When you blog, you need to share that blog on social media. Besides publishing that blog content to your corporate social media sites on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google +, you also need make sure that all your people are sharing that content with every single one of their business contacts on LinkedIn.

 

In addition to all that personal sharing, you should be pushing that blog content into the LinkedIn groups where your prospects are members. These groups have literally hundreds of thousands of members all looking for educational content to be shared in those LinkedIn groups. This isn’t always easy. Some of those groups are moderated and moderators typically have to publish that content. Most moderators do a decent job keeping up with it, but others are actually absentee moderators. The best way around moderators is to be an active contributor to these groups. If you are a top contributor, you can be sure your content will be distributed to all the members in a timely fashion. Finally, instead of just using a static corporate profile, make sure you reuse your offers from the Trio of Offers on your website. This entices visitors to your social media pages to click back to your website to download the educational materials. Now your social media pages are actively driving traffic to your site and turning that traffic into leads. These four small changes to the way you market your business could result in an increase in social media traffic to your website and an increase in leads over the next few days – not months.

 

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014