consumer journey

The Importance of Understanding and Mapping the Consumer Journey

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Every consumer will go through different steps of consideration and purchase throughout the life cycle of a brand or service. In the past, the consumer buying cycle was explained by four stages: awareness, interest, evaluation, and purchase.

Modern marketing strategies put more emphasis on the emotional relationship brands have with their customers and how this relationship is developed throughout time. This new approach raises the importance of understanding how consumers move through different stages that will influence their behavior. As such, consumer journey mapping is a vital part of your marketing strategy.

Why is Consumer Journey Mapping Important?

Journey Mapping is a technique used to map out the journey of an average consumer throughout their buying cycle. It can help you uncover your UX gaps, identify weaknesses in your strategy, or even find ways of improving customer retention.

Journey mapping is an opportunity to think critically about how your customers discover, experience, and interact with your brand. Consumer journey maps can be complex, but the basic premise behind them is simple: visualize the entire customer journey through each user touchpoint (channel) imaginable.

What are the Stages of the Consumer Journey?

The following are the five stages of the consumer journey and the strategies you should implement to engage and nurture consumers through each stage: consumer journey mapping

1. Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is where consumers learn of your existence. There are multiple strategies that you can employ to generate awareness of your brand. Running TV commercials, publishing print ads, maintaining a social media presence, optimizing your website for SEO, and building relationships with influencers can all help to generate awareness.

The entire point of the awareness stage is to introduce your brand and what you do to those who aren’t familiar with it, whether they’re looking for a specific solution right now or not. Either way, it helps set consumers up for the next stage.

2. Interest Stage

It’s during the interest stage that consumers begin doing research into the problems or challenges that they have. At this point, they are simply looking to educate themselves. They may not be aware of what the solution to their problem looks like. In fact, they may not be completely clear about the challenge that they have.

To address consumers in this stage of their journey, you need to have information available that can help educate them. It’s why many businesses host a website blog and regularly publish content that educates and advises potential leads. By creating such content, you not only help nurture consumers through this stage, but you also help establish your brand authority, thereby building trust in your business.

3. Evaluation Stage

During the evaluation stage, the consumer will start thinking about what solution best fits their needs. The decision at this point is still up in the air and they’re weighing their options. At this stage, consumers may be more open to hearing about your products and services, which they may be comparing with those of your competitors.

To reach consumers during the evaluation stage of their journey, you need to showcase your unique value proposition. You can do this through content creation (by publishing white papers and ebooks, or by filming product demonstrations) or through offers (such as free trials or discounts on products).

It’s crucial that you establish a stellar reputation at this stage as well since consumers will be looking at reviews. As such, encourage past customers to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, and other review sites. Additionally, set up a testimonial page on your site.

4. Purchase Stage

purchase stageAt this stage, the consumer is close to buying your product. You’ll want to make it as easy for them as possible to make a purchasing decision. If you have an e-commerce page, make the checkout process as easy and streamlined as possible. Use an online chat feature that allows them to get in touch with a salesperson as soon as possible. Send automated email reminders to consumers who have abandoned their carts without checking out.

You should make it as easy as possible for consumers to make a purchase — and remove any roadblocks that can prevent the purchase.

5. Post-Purchase Stage

The consumer journey doesn’t end with a purchase. In fact, it will never end. You’ll want to make sure that they become long-term customers, which is why you’ll want to continue to nurture them using an email marketing campaign to build brand loyalty. You can even set up a brand ambassador program to help strengthen your relationship with consumers post-purchase.

Mapping the Consumer Journey is Crucial to Your Success

Mapping the consumer journey is important because it gives you a better understanding of how consumers act and how you can help nurture them towards a purchasing decision. By mapping out your consumer journey, you’ll be able to personalize your engagement with them more effectively and identify vital touchpoints that can help improve your conversions.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

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A website redesign is the perfect time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy into the site’s very fabric. In fact, your entire website needs to be optimized and focused on furthering your inbound marketing efforts. It is an investment that will pay off in higher conversions and increased sales.

Is Your Current Website Giving You What You Need?

You are in business to make money. Your website exists to market your business. Its design needs to further your need to make money. If your current website design is not doing that, it isn’t giving you what you need.

Here are some things to expect from your website:

  • The design should remain up to date.
  • You should be able to measure ROI easily.
  • You should have updated metrics available at all time.
  • The website should totally support your marketing efforts.
  • The website should drive conversions and build your lead database.

If your current design isn’t giving you these benefits, it’s time to invest in a new design, one that will give you these benefits and many more.

20 Tips To Improve Your Website Redesign Process

Every aspect of your website redesign should feed into your inbound marketing strategy. The strategy and marketing funnel needs to be integrated into the site’s very fabric. To make this type of design work, you need a platform that is growth-driven and you need a web team that can make updates on a regular basis.

What are the Advantages of an Inbound Marketing Website?

Your business will benefit in many ways when your inbound marketing strategy becomes what drives your website design.

  1. The website will be the basis of your 24/7 marketing funnel. Your website is where you drive traffic to, host your content, convert visitors to leads, and gather marketing data. That is why your inbound marketing strategy must drive your website design.
  2. Your website will educate leads early in their buyer’s journey. Buyers these days do a lot of research before making purchases. You want your website to be a rich source of information so the buyer will continuously visit during their journey.
  3. You will see every increasing improvement in design and performance. Why wait for your next website redesign to update your website? It should happen at least once a month as you make changes to meet marketing goals and fix problems.
  4. You can prove ROI with incremental improvements. Website updates cannot just involve aesthetics. They must include and revolve around marketing changes. With each change, you can measure your ROI quite easily.
  5. Your website can help nurture leads. The more you educate a lead, the more likely that person is to make a purchase. Your website must offer clear pathways through the buyer’s journey to help him or her reach a decision point.

If you want to take your marketing to the next level, it is time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy with your website design. Once you have the basics in place, you will see steady improvements in your marketing efforts. And that makes it all worth it.

This article is on Data Captive as well.

Want more resources on how to redesign your website? Click here!

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results

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Telling Your Brand Story To Baby Boomers

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The only thing in the world that is constant is change, and not many changes in recent history can compare to the way baby boomers have redefined how we approach everything in life, marketing and spending included. The baby boomer generation controls 70% of disposable income in the United States, and represent 44% of the US population. That is a considerable market share and one that you can tap into by telling your brand story in a way that appeals specifically to this generation.

The Importance of Experience

How your customers think is influenced by their unique life story, current circumstances, environment, and worldview. It is also influenced by their experience and the wisdom they have gained as they have progressed through life. Your brand story needs to take these elements into account and reflect the knowledge, experience, and interests of this age group. Your brand story needs to use language in a way that celebrates this wealth of life experience.

However, just as importantly, your brand storytelling must reflect on the role that this wealth of experience plays in the changing buying habits of the Baby Boomer generation. Worldviews change as you age and gain new information and perspectives. These changing views reflect in how this customer segment process information, and how they make decisions about products and services.

Life becomes more about relationships, developing positive relationships in particular, rather than categories. Family, friends, and nostalgia, play a significant role in the decision-making process. Choices are not black and white and are more likely to be emotionally led.

Check out this similar article about Brand Storytelling

Changes in Storytelling Style

When considering how to tell your brand story to Baby Boomers, you also need to recognize that the changes are not just emotional, but also physical. As the brain ages and its functions change, you must adapt your storytelling to communicate efficiently with this generation. While the younger brain wants unambiguous, precise details and facts, the brain of this generation is more intuitive and emotionally led. It is also more attuned to sensory images, meaning that your storytelling needs to use words in a multi-sensory manner to create these pictures.

Metaphors are an essential part of this creative process. They aid in the brain’s comprehension of a subject and help to make it more vivid. If you cannot paint pictures with words and metaphors, you risk losing the customer’s focus and interest in your story.

Luckily for you as the storyteller, the Baby Boomer generation as a whole loves stories. So, the stronger the story, the more likely you are to attract Baby Boomers to your brand. However, your stories need to be emotionally charged. If it just contains line after line of facts and statistics, it will quickly lose its appeal. As with any customer segment, good writing, detailed characters, and engaging content also remain essential to reaching the Baby Boomer generation.

Learn The StoryBranding Process

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Growth Driven Web Design: A Website As Active As You

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No company is stagnant. If you are a business owner, you understand this better than anyone. Revenues and sales change from month to month, goals shift and adapt as deadlines draw near, and new employees bring fresh perspective and energy to the company. So why do so many websites stay idle as the company they represent continues to change? Growth driven web design is a new approach that many companies, large and small, are benefiting from. Regarding attraction marketing, a good website design will help to attract customers.

What Is Growth Driven Web Design

With traditional web design, it is typical for a website to remain unchanged for over a year. This could spell trouble if your website does not satisfy the needs of your visitors. If visitors find that your website does offer a solution to their needs, they will move on to your competitors website without a second thought. With growth-driven web design, you are able to adapt your website to better fit your visitor’s needs as you begin to understand them.

Read More About Discovering the Growth Driven Design Process

As customers come to visit your website, what would you like to know about them? Things like how long do they stay on my website, what are their favorite pages, and how many of them actually are interested in my product are probably some of the first things that come to mind, right? With traditional website design, these questions cannot be answered until the website is completed, but by then it’s too late. With this new style of website design, these questions are not only answered, but addressed. By seeing where potential customers are looking, small changes to the website can help lead them where you want them to go.

Why Growth Driven Design Works

So how does one decide which changes to make? Obviously, every website and every industry is going to be different. With growth-driven web design, you are able to determine which aspects within the website should be given the biggest priority based on the characteristics of your website’s visitors. For some, the best way to increase conversion rates will be focusing on the landing page. Others may notice that the blog should be given the highest priority because that’s where most of their online traffic is coming from. In either case, this new approach to web design focuses on making necessary changes to these pages to meet the marketing goals we’d like to see you achieve.

A website should be as active as the person who owns it. A good sales associate would never stick to a single sales approach for each of their clients. They understand that constantly changing and adapting leads to their desired outcome. So why not let your website behave in the same way you would? By constantly and consistently improving your website, you are taking steps to optimize your customers online experience. As more traffic flows into your website and more of those people find what they are looking for, your business will see a significant increase in sales and customer satisfaction. We know this because growth-driven web design gathers information from your website’s visitors and uses that data to drive the decisions that will make your website stand out.

What about you? Do you think your business can benefit from a growth-driven web design? What would you like to learn about your website’s visitors? To learn more, click the link below for more information.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales

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The Brand Development Process Demystified

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“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. You can’t control the process but you can influence it.” Marty Neumeier- Brand Gap

Grandeur, class, and opulence are what come to your mind at the mention of a Rolls-Royce. This is because Rolls-Royce has defined and positioned itself as such. A good brand should be a culture associated with something irreplaceable.

Brand development process is being able to influence your audience to believe that they are buying into an adventure, an identity. It needs careful formulation to represent your business properly. Based on recognizable brands, here is the development process solved:

Discovery

As you think of a way to create your brand, think of it as a person. Can you define your personality? Your analysis should be able to answer the WHY question- why a customer should buy from you and not somebody else.

SWOT analysis has been commonly used to give a clear picture of company characteristics. Identify favorable and unfavorable internal and external factors of your company. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Other analytic tools include PESTEL and Porter’s Five Forces which measure influence and competitive intensity in the outside environment respectively.

Read more on Discovering Your True Brand Story and Bringing It To Life

Positioning

“Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage.” Theodore Levitt-Professor, Harvard Business School

Once you have discovered where you stand, develop your product promise. You must position yourself as provider of such to your audience. What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? Make your brand appeal different and focus on developing a unique USP applicable to your product/ service. Let your target market know that whatever you offer them is a solution to their problems.

Learn How To Strengthen Your Brand Through These Competitive Advantage Examples.

Visual expression

First impressions are the most lasting. Many customers are guilty of buying the packaging rather than the product. Think of all the people through centuries that have given their lives for a flag to appreciate the power of visual expression. Your brand development process should harness this visual reaction in people. Make them believe that your product stands for something, is different, and comes as authentic. Verbal expressions, design, packaging, sales and marketing are aids of powerful product impression.

Constant evolution

You can either change or let the change change you. Just like in football or any game, you have to stay relevant or face the bench. Your brand should be perceived as you want it to be long after you have launched your product. Constant evolution saves you from being obsolete and is vital in brand development process because it never stops. In order to be considered a brand, you should make your presence felt at all times by sustaining it. A good company always has ongoing research or audits to find out how to appraise their image, products, and services.

Learn The StoryBranding Process

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Creating Measurable Social Media Goals

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Social media is a necessary part of advertising online. It creates awareness of your brand, facilitates customer interaction, promotes your content, and does a host of other things.

Even though it is so important, a lot of businesses still struggle with how to do it successfully.

Here are some tips and strategies to help you refocus your campaigns, create stronger goals, and implement a tracking schedule, so your social media efforts will be successful.

Social Media Goals

Developing a group of goals should be the first step in any social media program. Your goals could be anything from attracting new followers and audience interactions, to an increase in white paper downloads and qualified leads. But, in order for your program to be successful, your goals should be attainable, measurable, and most importantly, a reflection of your overall business goals. Read more

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How To Develop Content To Build Customer Loyalty

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Today, online content plays a critical role in marketing your business. It showcases the products and services that you offer, as well as positions you as an expert in your industry or niche. But, did you know that it is also critical for building customer loyalty? Online content can help you convert prospects and bring customer back. Additionally with attraction marketing, what you put out there affects how you look. Here is a step-by-step guide to creating content that will increase customer loyalty:

Attract:

Attracting new prospects is critical if you are hope to increase your online traffic in the future. Well-written, targeted pieces of content rank well in search engine results. which brings in traffic naturally. Sharing content on social media helps drive even more traffic. Remember, every new prospect is a potential customer, so your content needs to make a good first impression and build trust.

Convert:

Once you have your website traffic flowing, the next step is to convert this traffic into leads. You can use content to do this in a few different ways. Here are two to get you started:

  • Case studies:
    • These showcase how your business helped a customer with a specific problem. The study outlines what problem the customer was facing, how the company helped solve the problem, and the final results along with the customer’s feedback. It offers a glimpse into how your company can help the prospect and how current customers view your brand.
  • Thought leadership:
    • This positions you as an expert in your industry or niche. You share expert information that is useful to the prospect as well as answer any questions that arise. Prospects can see the value you bring forward, which helps build trust and loyalty.

Leads do not instantly become sales. You have to nurture each lead through the sales funnel from evaluating products, to making a decision, to making a purchase. Additionally, a lead at the evaluation stage requires different marketing than a lead closer to making a purchase.

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead who has gone beyond browsing and is starting to evaluate options. That person is not yet ready to talk to a salesperson, but they are looking for more details on certain products or services.

After evaluating the options, leads will move towards making a decision. This is when they become an SQL, or a sales-qualified lead. Now a salesperson can step up to answer any remaining questions the SQL might have and help them make a final decision.

[Read About How To Delight Your Customers]

Close and Delight:

Closing a sale often takes a dozen or more touches. That is why every piece of content you post or send must work to build customer loyalty.

Once you convert a prospect to a customer, your job is not done yet. The final step to building customer loyalty is to delight the customer.

  • Send focused email campaigns to keep your brand in the customer’s mind.
  • Use customer-only promotions to improve retention.
  • Ask customers to provide feedback or fill out a survey to demonstrate that you value their opinions.
  • Offer product updates at a special discount for returning customers.
  • Use video to provide product demonstrations, tutorials, and customer stories.

Don’t Let Your Blog Become an Afterthought:

Your company’s blog should be a centerpiece in your content strategy. It is a place where you can share just about anything you want. Here is a short list of what you can include in your blog:

  • How-to posts
  • Industry and company news
  • Accessories for popular products
  • Services offered along with products
  • Helpful FYIs
  • Customer stories
  • Tutorials
  • Professional resources

Consistency is critical when it comes to updating your blog and with sending emails . Regular updates with new content will keep customers interest, in turn building loyalty and promoting your brand.

There is one tried and true adage you need to remember: it costs a lot less to retain a customer than to attract a new one. With this in mind, building your content strategy will keep customers coming back for more. Customer loyalty will help you build a successful business long-term.

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How To Assess Your Inbound Marketing Plan

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Inbound marketing has become one of the most efficient ways for marketers to sell online. It is based on developing high-quality content to relevant to the prospective buyers who you can turn into buyers. This kind of marketing allows the user to determine whether the inbound marketing plan is productive or not. Marketing metrics is a part of attraction marketing and your inbound marketing plan is a part of marketing metrics.

For most business firms actual and quantifiable results are more beneficial for better business decision. By using real-time metrics it is easy to identify the best content and customize the conversion tactics for more sales. The following are factors to be considered when measuring the effectiveness of your inbound marketing plan.

The Desired Goals And Objectives

One way to measure the performance of your campaign is listing the organizational goals. Assessing available opportunities as compared to the current number of customers, allows you to ensure both marketing and sales efforts are productive. Some of the real-time metrics that can be used for this step include; the number of conversion produced, where your prospects are in your sales funnel and lastly the number of buyers in your marketing niche. By stacking the results from such a test against the organizational goals will help you know the results of your marketing campaign.

Read More: 5 Examples Of Goals For Business Development.

Competitive Benchmarking

At times comparing your inbound marketing techniques to your competitors will allow you to identify the best strategies. By selecting the tactics that your competitors are succeeding at and eliminating those that fail your competitors will help you stay ahead. The first people to use inbound marketing in their industry have the chance to create a benchmark for their competitors. For better access to the progress of your competition, online tools like Google analytics or website grader will give you more information. Some platforms like Hubspot allow the user to see traffic density and the domains linked to your site. Such data will allow you to select the best inbound campaigns.

Social Media

Social media offer a way to get maximum attention to your website. Researching carefully about the target market allows you to know what social media platform get to the best of your customers and prospects. After deciding the best social media platform, you should approach it strategically. You can start by developing a plan on how to release some posts or discussing some topics depending on the content calendar. The idea is to compare the number of conversions each post brings. If one type of content brings more conversions then you should focus on it and eliminate the ones with fewer reads. The concept behind this is to drive conversions to the website from social media community.

Financial Spending

For any inbound marketing campaign, there must be a budget that comes with it. The budget should be based on the organizational goals to be achieved and the time frame. This provides a chance to compare between the marketing campaigns that are currently running. If you have a part of the campaign that has more expenses with fewer leads yet there are other options that are more productive, it will be better to switch and focus on the productive ones. For those campaigns that use more money like free advertising and free samples, you can re-strategize and utilize inbound marketing that has more measurable ROI features.

Develop Your Nurturing Process

Though for most buyers if your products are amazing they will buy immediately but for some a relationship is important. Lead nurturing allows you to focus on the target market and depending on the buyer’s journey it is easy to make your sales funnel a metric. By carefully designing the sales funnel to provide the prospect with motivation to buy and include clear calls to action, this will provide a position of measurement and comparison. If there are certain goals to be achieved linking conversion rates with the number of new customers will give you a clear picture of the growth curve.

Conclusion

Every company has a unique business structure, meaning they have different inbound marketing approaches. The success of a marketing campaign will depend on the contributions of the company sales team, this means you should clearly state your inbound marketing plan and goals to be achieved for better measurements.

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results

drip email marketing

Drip Email Marketing vs. Lead Nurturing Campaigns; When To Use Each

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Many marketing tools seem similar and are often mistaken for one another. Two tactics that are often confused are drip email marketing and lead nurturing campaign. It’s true that there are similarities in the way they work. However, they are two distinct tactics that serve different purposes. You should have both in your marketer’s toolbox to use when appropriate, especially with attraction marketing. Let’s learn a bit about each tactic and when they should be used.

Email Drip Marketing

Emails are a huge part of modern marketing. One email marketing option is email drip marketing. Named after drip coffee makers, this marketing tactic sends out emails at specific timed intervals. Time is the only factor used to indicate when an email is sent. Nothing else.

When should you use email drip marketing?

  • Educating prospects on all the products and services in your company’s portfolio.
  • Keeping your brand in front of your customers while they are contemplating a purchase.
  • Announcing new products or services for your business.
  • Showcasing best sellers in your portfolio.

A well-crafted drip email campaign can educate and inform your audience. However, done too frequently, or used only to pitch products or services, your audience may perceive these emails as spam.

[Read About Interactive Email Marketing Trends Here]

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

A lead nurturing campaign is not based on timed emails. It is based on the lead’s behavior. When a lead performs a specific behavior, it triggers an email with targeted information to be sent to your audience. These emails are designed to guide the lead through the buying process.

This type of campaign depends on gathered information about the lead’s behavior. Specific behaviors that can trigger an email include:

  • Which whitepapers grab the lead’s attention
  • How many times they visit a specific page on your website
  • Which webinar they attend
  • Which of blog post category they spend the most time in

The goal of the emails sent during a lead nurturing campaign is to deliver useful information at critical points in the sales cycle.

A marketing automation system is ideal for lead nurturing. You can build full campaigns within the system that automates almost everything in the process. The power of marketing automation systems is their ability to capture key data. This then triggers the specific emails that nurture leads.

They Complement Each Other Very Well

Drip email campaigns and lead nurturing campaigns, if well designed, will do their jobs well. They both help leads engage with your brand and give leads the information needed to make an informed decision about your products and services.

They are each powerful tools in the marketer’s toolbox on their own, but working together, they are even more powerful. Coordinated campaigns can help close deals faster and keep your brand ahead of the pack.

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Lead Generation Strategy

The Right Lead Nurturing Strategy Can Help You Stay Top of Mind

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Just as you put thoughtfully planned initiatives in place to help with new lead generation, you must also think about how you will then nurture these prospects through the sales cycle once you obtain the lead. Successful attraction marketing is having leads. A smart, strategic email and direct mail program can help you maintain a consistent connection with prospects and grow the relationships you have available to you—remaining ‘on their list’ and top of mind when they are ready to act.

Lead Nurturing Basics

It’s a proven fact: marketing needs to assist sales in order to achieve the most effective conversion results. So when you create a program that keeps prospects in touch with your thinking beyond just a salesperson’s outreach, you provide an opportunity to push the prospect through their journey faster. Utilize various outbound communications as key touch-points that complement the sales teams efforts, yet showcase your company’s thinking on a different level. Provide information contacts may be seeking out—not what you want to tell them—to build trust as they make their way to a purchase decision.

Key Considerations

The goal is to offer interesting, relevant and varied content that is not primarily self-serving in nature. Begin by creating a detailed plan for messaging and scheduling of communications. Think about common questions prospects may have, and how you can provide those answers while conveying your competitive advantages, promoting educational content you have to offer, and building trust in your abilities.

A study by DemandGen found that leads that are nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%. To ensure even greater success, target content to coincide with the behavior and mindset of your audiences at different points in their journey—naturally guiding them through the sales funnel by providing the right information at the right time in the buying process.

[Read About The Importance Of Lead Generation Content Marketing]

Fine Tuning

Set a solid foundation for your program by maintaining an up-to-date database with as much information on each prospect as possible. Determine the activity level, timing and quantity of communications that makes sense for each. Be organized, yet allow for adjustments as your program evolves. Track and score behavior and deliver content accordingly, allowing the sales team to receive better quality leads along the way to reach their goals. And remember: conversion is the ultimate objective. Always hold something back—never tell the whole story in your email—make them want to click through to your site or landing page to learn more.

How Marketing Automation Can Help

According to ChadwickMartinBailey, 56% of U.S. email users unsubscribe from a business or nonprofit email subscription because of content that is no longer relevant. Automation makes it easier to schedule emails, segment contacts, manage your content, trigger responsive emails based on actions, and track the lifecycle of prospects in your marketing funnel. By addressing their specific needs, contacts stay engaged; yet you are ultimately in control because you set the parameters for informing, interacting with and nurturing each lead. It provides you the ability to better target your contacts in a personalized way—assisting the buying decision based on their behavior—and leading to increased conversion rates. Consider investing in one of many standard marketing automation software systems to simplify your Top of Mind program initiatives.

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