Without a doubt, lead generation is crucial as the beginning of the sales process. However, generating a lead does not ensure a competed journey through the sales cycle and conversion to a sale. In a B2B sales environment, a marketing team may be focused on overall numbers, generating quantity on the theory that more leads will create more conversions to sales, and thereby more revenue. However, this is not necessarily the case. A prospect must have the intent and ability to purchase. In B2B environments, collaboration between marketing and sales is important to achieve success. The  ...

In today’s online world, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are now more often prioritized in the lead conversion process. In fact, Page Rank, the algorithm Google uses rank websites in its search engine results, is being continually updated to reflect the significance of UI/UX. Routinely, websites with too little content are ranked poorly. It has also been speculated that “dwell time,” the time a person stays on a particular website before returning to the search engine results page, is a component of the search algorithm. While the exact tools and approaches used in the  ...

Marketers expend considerable time and resources to generate leads, working to engage a visitor to the company’s website, trade show display or seminar event at least enough to gain contact information for future interaction. Generating the lead is the first step toward reaching the goal of converting that prospect into a customer. Today’s digital age of computing and the Internet has significantly changed lead generation, empowering buyers to control much of the sales process, particularly in the inbound marketing context. Buyers have easy access to readily available information to  ...

In the lead generation cycle, the most important step is the first interaction a potential lead has with your company. Today, this initial interaction often occurs online on a business’ website. For this reason, companies are now pouring considerable time and effort into optimizing their sites for lead generation. Just how are they doing so? It starts with good UI and UX design. Your design is key to a visitor’s overall experience, and has the power to bring about significant increases in conversions. Optimizing UX Design A business intent on building a strong, loyal customer base should  ...

Sales companies, particularly in the inbound marketing arena, expend considerable time and resources to generate leads, working to draw prospects to the company’s website and to engage the visitor at least enough to gain contact information for future interaction. If the marketer’s lead generation efforts are successful in prompting a visit to the website, then the experience the visitor has on the site is absolutely crucial. If a visitor has a positive experience, the user is more likely to engage in further activity; however, if negative, the user will likely abandon the site and the  ...

Twitter enjoys great popularity among many users, including celebrities and politicians; and reports it has 316 million active monthly users and 500 million updates sent per day with 80 percent of those users active on mobile platforms. As such, Twitter appears to be a very attractive potential audience for marketers to build brand awareness as well as generate leads. The company has offered paid advertising through “Promoted Tweets” for a number of years. Some marketers have used the platform to promote brand awareness in a general way but many businesses did not find it to be an  ...

Marketers in inbound sales are continuously looking to generate leads, and it is crucial to be able to accurately measure the success of such endeavors using actual data. A previous article discussed using Facebook Ads for a lead generation campaign and described the remarkable number of “drill down” options of descriptors that can be layered and filtered, allowing a marketer to precisely structure the desired target audience for a Campaign Ad Set. Similarly, Facebook offers an extensive range of metrics that are available to a marketer to evaluate a Campaign, Ad Set or Ad. Facebook Ad  ...

Facebook asserts that it has more than 1.4 billion users with more than 900 million visiting the site every day. Such an extraordinarily large audience is certainly attractive to marketers for potential lead generation, but also so large as to be unwieldy. Facebook offers paid advertising with tools and options to help marketers reach targeted Facebook users with their content. Facebook Ads Facebook Ads are placed in a user’s newsfeed, the stream of information a user views on Facebook, where the ads are likely to be seen. Facebook ads can be a powerful channel for generating leads with  ...

The internet has proven itself to be one of the most, if not the most, important technological advancements of mankind. It also allows for commerce to take place, with businesses being able to sell their goods to new customers all across the globe and the customers being able to buy what they want from the comfort of their homes. But as the internet grew, companies all began facing the same problem. They were being whitewashed in the sea of the internet, lost in an endless maelstrom of commercial webpages. The current revolution of digital marketing has helped cut through this with new  ...