Isn’t that nice? A little software package that promises to take the tedium away from trading?

Well, as magical as it may sound, you’re not going to get the most out of it by simply automating all your processes. Marketing automation can deliver so much more if you know how to style your organization around it.

Here are a few solid, water-tight tips to keep in mind when implementing your own marketing automation strategy.

Define Stuff

This is often the part where most results-oriented hiccups occur. You need to lay-down exactly what you expect from your automation program. More importantly, you need define what constitutes a ‘lead’ in terms of the type of prospect as well as the action they take.

Once you’ve sorted that out it becomes a whole lot easier for multiple departments to work together in pursuit of a single, definable goal. Plus, it makes realistic goal-setting a cinch.

Most automation solutions also allow you to score leads based on predefined criteria, so make your lead definitions are water tight before you set them down in stone.

Intergrate Your Marketing Management

The get your customer service, IT, sales and marketing departments to work together. One of the biggest hurdles that companies face is developing an organizational model that allows multiple facets to work together in creating an overall marketing strategy.

The benefits of integrated marketing lie in how your marketing department will have access to a lot more data, professional insight and technological resources to help them develop effective campaign strategy.

Content Matters

Automation is merely the process – useless without real substance backing it up. Create lots of high-quality content that will appeal to your customers and prospects alike.

Remember, the content you create will be the basis for all your lead generation and sales endeavors as far as automation is concerned. The idea is to create engaging material that motivates users to convert, or at the very least, heightens brand awareness.

Nurture Your Leads

This is one of the great benefits of automation. It lets you track and nurture each lead throughout the entire prospecting process. Again, to implement an effective lead generation policy, you’ll need lots of quality content to shunt prospects down the sales funnel to the eventual purchase order.

Test, Track and Analyze

Automation and tracking will generate a gold mine of data – data that you can use to refine your strategies. Of course you can’t just look at data and magically see better techniques. Neither is it advisable to put all your eggs in one basket by making guesses based on simple metrics.

The solution? – TESTING.

Test your design, color combinations, choice of words, landing pages. Test everything! From subject lines and headers to layout and typeface, if there’s anything that can be split tested, go ahead and test it.

Make your choices and formulate strategies based on the improvement in results and on ‘what feels right’.

But where are you to find those tidbits of marketing wisdom that can help you step out of line and get noticed? Are you sick of reading every generic how-to guide on the web in the hope that it’ll reveal a gem of insight known only to your and a select few?

Well, here I’ll list out some of the more obscure techniques used by a few very successful PPC marketers.

1. Remarketing
While it’s something you don’t hear a lot about, remarketing is a fairly useful strategy that can help with generating repeat business or with converting visitors. Remarketing works on a fairly simple premise – you attach a bit of code to Landing Page A and when visitors navigate away, they are bombarded with ads about the product the saw on Landing Page A.

This works to create the impression that you are everywhere on the web and directs a continuous stream of product-specific promotional material to a visitor.

2. Linguistic/Cultural Targeting
Segment your target audiences by the language they speak. There is absolutely no point in targeting Russians or Germans with English text. Even if they comprehend the literal meaning of your ad, they are likely to miss out on specific nuances and idioms that you may want to incorporate.

If you only produce English ads, limit your ad circulation to English-speaking countries. If you need to target other foreign segments, invest in a decent translation service that can render your ad in multiple languages without diluting its impact.

Keep in mind that blindly targeting English speaking regions may not be enough. You may also want to create culture specific ads. Consumer cultures present in US, India, the UK and Philippines are vastly different and creating ads that elicit cultural responses can work wonders for your conversion rate.

3. Monitor Your Placements
If your conversion rates are lower than you think they should be, check exactly where your ads are being placed. If you find any websites that your target audience is unlikely to frequent, make sure you add them to your ‘disapproved placements’ list.

4. Push Up Your PageRank
Now you may not be able to do a lot about the kind of keyword competition you encounter, but you can improve your PageRank. What does this do to help you run a better AdWords campaign?

Well, a higher PageRank means you pay less for more circulation. This is because Google understands the kind of ad revenue a popular site brings in as opposed to a virtually unknown one.  So get that SEO whip cracking and start driving some crazy traffic to your pages.

5. Don’t Put All Your Eggs In A Text Basket
If you only use text ads, you may be losing out on some high quality traffic. Of course, Google will display your text ads on both the Search and Display Networks. But there are lots of high ranking websites on the Display Network that don’t accept text ads.

So invest in an image ad too. Capiche?

6. Put Out Product Ads
Make sure you’ve enabled product ads from Google Merchant Center. This will allow your product image (along with a short description) to be displayed to a targeted audience as an extension to your ad. The product availability and price is also usually included.

This strategy works great when you’re trying to drive sales of a specific product among a particular audience.

If you find that your advertising drive is picking up more conversions as a result of the tips I’ve shared here, please do let me know. It’d make my day! Thanks!

Don’t fret too much, though. Because there is a  solution and it’s called an email feedback loop.

WHAT is an email feedback loop?

Essentially, a feedback loop is a system wherein an ISP notifies you every time a recipient has marked your email as spam. It usually is in the form of an email message that also requests you to remove the recipients email address from your mailing database. Note that spam traps can also trigger feedback from an ISP.

WHY you should subscribe to feedback loops?

• There is no clearer signal that a recipient doesn’t want to receive your email communications than a spam complaint about your mail. And the more you mail these irate prospects the angrier they’re likely to become at your brand. Frankly, I don’t see the point in continually annoying people in the hope that they’ll see something they like and make a purchase.

• Most ISPs have a certain threshold for spam complaints. If you exceed this threshold, your emails will cease to be delivered. By subscribing to a feedback loop and removing email addresses that register you as spam, you can keep yourself off the ISP blacklist and improve overall delivery rates.

• A feedback loop can also prove valuable by allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of your email marketing strategy. If a substantial percentage of recipients mark you as spam, you’ve must be doing something wrong.

• Maybe you mail them far too often. Maybe you don’t mail them often enough. Maybe you give out low quality content that doesn’t add value and is irrelevant. Perhaps subscribers don’t really understand the service you provide and how it helps them. Or possibly, your unsubscribe link doesn’t really work (or the process is too complicated).

In any case, if you keep receiving bad feedback from ISPs, you know it’s time to address the shortcomings in your strategy. Here are a few tips on how to improve your email marketing program.

HOW – Here, I’ll share a few tips on improving your delivery rates and getting the most out of using feedback loops.

• Don’t just throw away email addresses that have registered you as spam. A smarter ploy would be to remove these addresses from your email list and archive them simultaneously. By doing this you can always email these prospects 6 months later with a particularly attractive offer. If they still don’t respond, go ahead and permanently delete them from your database.

• Automate this process. Manually removing email addresses from a mailing list can be time consuming and tedious work. Improve efficiency by configuring your mailing software to automatically remove and archive spam complainants.

• Don’t subtract the total number of spam complaints by the total number of emails you send. You’ll wind up with inaccurate results. You need to measure the ratio of complaints versus inbox placement rates to formulate precise metrics.

• Integrate feedback loop data into your split testing efforts. This can help you identify why recipients mark you as spam and will set you on the path to finding an effective solution. Additionally, this sort of data analysis can also help you foresee trends in subscriber interests and behavior and will allow you to further fine-tune your email marketing program.

Ultimately, the single most influential factor when it comes to email deliverability is your sender reputation. Mess that up and your email marketing operations are guaranteed to go to hell. That’s why subscribing to feedback loops makes so much sense – they let you stem the flow of complaints before the tide overwhelms you.

Get smart. Get subscribed.

While SEO may seem like the ideal solution to your inbound marketing problems, but given the extreme competition out there, it won’t accomplish a lot without,

• Good writing
• Consistent content creation
• An engaging brand
• Creative design
• A damn good product

If you don’t have all of these critical components backing you up, your SEO efforts are going to pan out at some point and you’ll find yourself on a plateau that stretches right to the horizon.

However, if you’ve got a halfway decent marketing team that can deliver the aforementioned positives, here’s a peek at what SEO can do for you (and what it can’t).

Visibility

One of the key objectives of SEO is to get your website ranked higher among search engine results pages (SERPS) for specific keywords (that’s why it’s called Search Engine Optimization).

And most people seem to believe that the website in pole position on a SERP must be relevant because, much like the Titanic, Google is too big and efficient to be fallible. Not true, but hey – It gives your branding a real boost, so we’d rather not complain.

Traffic

Well, if you sell custom-made motorcycles, SEO can optimize your search rankings for key phrases like ‘custom motorcycles’, ‘custom crafted choppers’ and the like. By using a mix of broad and specific local search terms, starting with the latter (e.g. custom motorcycles detroit) and then moving on to more widely defined searches, a dedicated SEO team can slap your URLs all over the first ten search results that Google throws up.

Of course there’s a lot more to it than just keyword research. SEO teams will engage in link-building, social bookmarking, blog commentary, content marketing and a host of other techniques to ensure that your site has an astronomical number of inbound links.

What is the point of this, you ask?

Search drives focused traffic. That much is obvious.

In-bound links tell the Google crawler that you’re popular and popularity equals high search rankings.

What is also a fairly common realization is that few people move past the first SERP. That is why you need your site ranked among the first 10 results if you intend to drive a lot of traffic. Capiche?

Conversions

Traffic means nothing without a steady conversion rate. The idea is to garner ‘relevant traffic’! This means people who are in the market for your product or service. SEO can accomplish this by optimizing your website towards highly targeted keywords and by increasing the overall traffic to your site.

Conversion optimization, however, depends on a great many factors that lie outside the ambit of simple SEO, including writing and design skills.

On the flipside, the long tail approach to SEO is especially useful since most of the keywords involved are narrow searches that drive highly focused traffic to your landing pages. Although long tail traffic may not amount to much, you’re likely to see significantly higher conversion rates when compared to broader search hits.

Setting Goals

So, what have we learnt? Well, for one thing your SEO objectives need to be clearly defined because SEO works differently for different business models. Here’s a list of conceivable goals to set your SEO team,

• Attract a certain amount of traffic to your site.
• To change/improve public perception of your brand/cause.
• Generate qualified sales leads
• Improve your social media visibility

Each one of these goals will offer varying levels of profitability depending on your business model. For example, content farms stand to gain much from raw traffic generation, primarily because they extract most of their revenue from PPC advertising. Similarly, while almost all businesses can benefit from lead generation, e-commerce sites will probably make the most out of the high conversion rate that qualified leads offer.

But remember, all of these ‘goals’ are intertwined and most often you’ll find that a combination of all of the above is likely to work best for you.

However, you may need to place a disparate proportion of emphasis on each specific goal. That is why you need to identify exactly what your business needs are and prioritize your SEO efforts to maximize your ROI.

You get white listed – It takes a lot to create a mobile site that’s both functional and attractive. And you most certainly don’t want to squander those resources by having your site render improperly. With a .mobi site, network-level transcoders automatically white list your site, ensuring that it renders the way you designed it to.

Your SEO rankings go up – Internet zone files allow you to register a separate entry for .mobi domain names. That means your mobile site gets crawled much faster and consequently will rank higher on SERPs, which is  ALWAYS a good thing.

You have industry support – Some of the largest and most influential web entities are behind the creation and proliferation of the .mobi TLD.  These include Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone and T-Mobile to name a few. When you register a .mobi name, you gain an infrastructural base supported by the leading players on the web.

You invest in standardization – .mobi is a trustmark that has been developed solely to create a standardized and enhanced user experience as far as mobile internet is concerned. The .mobi tag is also perhaps the easiest way to differentiate between a regular website and a site that is created solely for the mobile user. This gives users the freedom to visit your mobile site (for quick and easy service) or your main company website (for harder to access but more extensive information) and can work wonders for your traffic in-flow.

Now what?

Most entrepreneurs have no idea how to use social media as a marketing tool and that’s a real shame because it can work wonders for your start-up. The objective that drives social media marketing is positive word-of-mouth. You need to engage with users and keep them satisfied and interested in what you have to say. That means listening to them and responding effectively.

Here are a few tips to keep you on top of YOUR social media game.

Set Goals - Figure out what you’d like to achieve with your social media marketing campaign. Are you looking to drive more traffic to your website? Increase brand awareness? Network with other businesses?  Whatever your plans are, don’t just build up a profile without first creating a result-oriented strategy.

Where Do You Need To Be? – It doesn’t make sense to aggressively build a brand on every social network in the world. Instead of wasting your time and resources on 7-8 different networks, focus on where you’re likely to achieve your business goals. If your business in intensely consumer-oriented, you’ll want to maximize your presence on networks like Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, if you operate on a B2B basis, sites like LinkedIn or Biznik should fit the bill.

Connect With Your Customers – It’s fairly redundant to sell your offering on a social media site. Instead, address complaints, give out teasers and company information, and deliver value with every response you generate. But above all, maintain an upbeat, conversational tone. A social network is a space where you can let customers get under your skin and see the personality behind all those inspired sales pitches and great products. Make sure it’s a winning one.

Virality Takes Research - Don’t assume that every smart piece of marketing you upload will generate an enormous number of hits. If you want to go viral, you’re going to have to invest in tons of research, identify the right trends and release your posts with spectacular timing. And again, when it come to being viral, make sure it has a positive effect on the brand. You don’t want your brand plastered all over the internet for all the wrong reasons.

Coupons, Discounts & Offers!
Everybody loves getting stuff for free. Especially stuff that, they’ll actually use. So remember, if you’re going to offer free coupons, make sure they’re highly relevant to your target market. Targeting geriatrics with discounts on tech products isn’t going to generate the right kind of results.

Demos & Free Trials!
If you offer a product, consider giving out free trials or demonstrations. There’s nothing like giving prospects a taste of what you have to offer, before whipping it out of reach again. With a little luck, they’ll love it so much that a stream of purchases will swiftly follow.

Loyalty Programs & VIP Clubs!
Give your regulars rewards for staying regular. If you’re into online retail, you could offer free shipping for all their purchases, or start up a reward point system to help them spend more without succumbing to purchase anxiety. The idea is to make them feel exclusive and cared for.

Information & Expertise!
Everybody wants to buy their products from ‘the experts’. So, become an authority in your field by regularly disseminating information through various portals. With the communication revolution in full swing there are more outlets than ever to do this. For example, if you sell beauty products you might want to hold a webinar on grooming and skin care. You can also create articles, blog posts, white papers, newsletters, market reports, pamphlets and a massive range of marketing collateral to help improve brand image.

You could employ anything from websites and QR codes to brochures and podcasts, but make sure the information you put across is accurate and relevant to your product. That way you’ll create an even stronger association between your field and your brand.

Webinars, Seminars & Forums!
Hold all of these on a regular basis and invite people to attend them. Besides being a great environment to receive feedback, answer questions and pick up new ideas, they also hold a lot of potential for branding. Plus, if you’re even modestly successful, you can bank on eventual media coverage to keep you floating in publicity.

Extra Goodies!
Add a little surprise to each purchase. Send them a free personalized keychain, a small collectibles or a piece of brand merchandise. Surprises goodies can go a long, long way in developing your brand image, as can superlative customer service.

With all of these on your plate, you’re going to have a lot of hard work in store for you. But with the right kind of targeting, some testing and a little effort, you’ll soon have more business that you can handle!

Four components of the “CRM Value Chain” to craft a practical, tangible CRM plan for your B2B sales team to follow are:

Marketing Management. Deciding who you are. This is your company’s marketing nerve center, where all core decisions are made about the customers and the brand. “The functions of marketing management [include] product features, packaging, and value propositions”.

Outbound Management. Telling the world who you are. “The outbound function should entail communications (TV, radio, email, etc.); experiences (product [and] service); and influentials (the media … bloggers … etc.)”

Customer-Focused Branding. Targeting individuals. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to think of the B2B brand as the collective set of attitudes and perceptions latent in the individuals inside the decision-making units at your firm’s customers.

Inbound Listening. Hearing what they’re saying about you. There are five primary elements of listening: sampling (tracking studies), chatter (Web or otherwise), engagement (two-way conversations), purchases (buying behavior) and loyalty.

To help you remove attention barriers from your email campaigns, these are some advice:

Create an immediate impression of value. Avoid a standard “You’ve been subscribed” message on your confirmation page. Instead, fuel anticipation by touting an exclusive, email-only discount that will arrive shortly. You might even include a sample screenshot of the offer so subscribers will know what to look for.

Don’t allow long periods to lapse between messages. If you send less than one email per month, you risk greater problems than losing a subscriber’s rapt attention. Once the gap between emails grows to a few months, people will start forgetting they even signed up. “Your problem moves beyond one of recognition to permission issues.”

Send email when your customers are most likely to read it. While there isn’t a hard-and-fast rule for sending an email, notes Brownlow, there might very well be a right day and time to send your email. Continual testing will reveal when that is.

Avoid trust-destroying tricks. Misleading subject lines may boost open rates in the short term. But in the long term, you teach your subscribers to delete your messages without reading them—or even to unsubscribe.

Prioritize rapid response. If you call a lead within 5 minutes—rather than letting 30 minutes elapse—you increase by 100% the chances of getting through. Further, being the first business to make contact boosts conversion odds by 238%. In this time-sensitive environment, you should avoid reliance on potentially sluggish CRM systems. In the several hours or full business day it may take your CRM system to route incoming lead information to you, your competition may have already contacted and closed the sale.

Be available anywhere, anytime. Make a point of responding immediately if an inbound lead appears during weekends or after hours. Studies have found non-business hours represent a valuable, but neglected, opportunity to connect with potential customers before anyone else.

Remain consistently persistent. “A Leads360 report found that 35% of leads are reached on the first call and up to 72% are reached with the second call”, “but 48% of leads never get a second call.” In other words, be sure you’re making that second call.

When it comes to converting inbound leads, time is of the essence. Get there first. And if you don’t, keep trying.