ChrisSimpson.info
Internet Marketing, SEO and Social Media

What if you discovered how to use the power of marketing communication to make money online? Do you want to know what it takes to spread your marketing message online quickly and easily? The purpose of this article is to show you exactly how to market your products easily on the web that makes you you profits in return. Here are 5 simple steps to get you started on the right track spreading your marketing messages online.

Step 1 – What is exactly marketing communications?

Step 2 – Email marketing is the most powerful form of marketing communication.

Step 3 – Automation is extremely important to boost your profits from this type of medium.

Step 4 – Use the massive power of autoresponder to automate your marketing messages.

Step 5 – Various other types of marketing communications in place.

The purpose of this article is to get you started today making massive profits step by step. Here are step by step details that you can apply quickly and easily.

Step 1 – What is exactly marketing communications?

Marketing communication is the medium of providing information to the clients to market products and services. The definition looks simple but it is quite complicated to apply this strategy into any business if you do not possess the adequate knowledge to do the same. This article will show you how you can implement a simple marketing communication strategy on your website to boost your Internet profits. The key to market your products and services is using e-mail marketing.

Step 2 – Email marketing is the most powerful form of marketing communication.

E-mail marketing helps you to provide your marketing message to your clients in the most efficient way. This is the most powerful form of marketing communication in place online and is one of the most efficient ways to promote any products or services. Here’s how to automate your e-mail marketing campaign and make profits on autopilot.

Step 3 – Automation is extremely important to boost your profits from this type of medium.

You can automate the entire e-mail marketing campaign using tools like autoresponder. This helps to load your e-mail messages at one central place and helps to market your products and services by giving quality content to your clients. Here’s how to use autoresponder to its fullest extent.

Step 4 – Use the massive power of autoresponder to automate your marketing messages.

All you have to do is set up simple quality content e-mails in your autoresponder system and this system will sell your products and services on autopilot. Set up a simple squeeze page and get your visitors to opt in to your list where they get inside your autoresponder system and receive these messages on continuous basis absolutely automatically. This makes you money by selling your products using a powerful e-mail marketing campaign. Here are some other types of marketing communications in place.

Step 5 – Various other types of marketing communications in place.

Use blogs, content website, ezines and newsletters as well as writing and distributing articles are some of the more ways of using this type of medium to spread your marketing message.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed a brand new free guide.

Download it free here: Internet Marketing

Do you want to learn how to use articles like this to drive targeted traffic to your site?

Click here: Article Writing Guide

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Sean Mize teaches coaches, consultants, and small business owners how to package their knowledge and sell it in high priced coaching, consulting, and online class packages, and is an expert at using articles like this to drive traffic to his website, and has taught hundreds of clients his secrets. Sean says “If you have an existing marketable service or skill that you can teach others, I can teach you to package it into a high-priced class or coaching program, guaranteed”

If you are the market leader, everyone else wants your market share so everyone is your enemy. Your job is to ruthlessly defend your territory. If your enemies are smart, they won’t attack head-on. Instead, they will choose areas of weakness where you haven’t defended yourself and exploit them to their own advantage. Little by little, they will swipe your customers, take your share, disrupt your markets, and watch in amusement as your resources are scattered fighting little distractions here and there. That’s what attackers do.

Now since this post is about market leadership, it’s only fitting that we should start with the basics. Before we talk about what a leader has to do, let’s cover off why market leadership is such a big deal to begin with. After all, if you don’t understand the value of the market leadership position, you won’t appreciate why it’s so important to fight to keep it.

WHY MARKET LEADERSHIP IS IMPORTANT.

The reason market leadership is important is not the revenue (although that is obviously very important). It isn’t the status of being the leader either (although it does help build an ego). The reason that leadership is important is because most customers prefer to buy from leaders. Of course, you’ll always get the fringe-dwellers that as some form of protest support the underdog but, on the whole, most customers prefer to deal with leaders.

So customers create market leaders. They perceive leaders to be better (otherwise why would they be leaders?) and they perceive leaders to be a safer purchase. People are like sheep. If the majority votes you the best, the majority must be right. So they buy from where everyone else buys, thus strengthening the leader’s position.

It is hard for a challenger brand to dislodge a market leader if the leader is actively defending territory. Time and resources have to be deployed to attack over a sustained period of time. Not all challengers are in the position to attack for long periods of time since it takes a significant amount of resources to be able to relentlessly pursue a leader. (It’s fun though.)

But leaders are not invincible. Some get arrogant and complacent, a bit too big for their boots. They get distracted by internal issues like changes to senior management, or fall victim to regulatory interference, and this offers challengers a timely opportunity to strike. Market leaders do slip to challenger position (and it’s a bit of a bumpy ride downwards). If that happens to you, you’ll have to switch strategies to become an attacker yourself.

ADVANTAGES ON THE SIDE OF THE MARKET LEADER.

Amongst the armory enjoyed by the leader are:

Greater resources to apply in defending a market territory.

Often leaders can outgun competitors on all fronts – outspending them in advertising, having bigger and more comprehensive distribution channels, enjoying higher brand profile, and more.

Time to defend.

Since no-one listens to advertising anymore, a challenger’s message can get lost. This gives the leader time to respond. A leader usually hears competitive messages before most of the market does and simply outspends the challenger.

Distribution Channels favor the Market Leader.

Shelf space is a valuable commodity, and the best positions favour the product that sells in the greatest volume. In other words, it favors the market leader. The same is true for distributors and third-party agents that need volume sales to earn commission.

Brand profile favors the Market Leader.

More people buy “known” brands than “unknown” ones since positive branding instills a perception of trust. Brand profile is important since it is the mechanism used by marketers to facilitate the selling process, and the mechanism used by consumers to reduce their purchase risk.

Creation of barriers to market entry favor the Market Leader.

There are numerous ways in which a Market Leader can make it hard for competitors, ranging from the use of legal instruments such as patent protection (common in the pharmaceutical and information technology industries) through creation of market barriers such as exclusive distribution contracts, exclusive supply contracts, restricted access to essential channels, market or government monopoly status or removal of experienced staff from the market.

Using an Existing Customer base favors the Market Leader.

Having a customer base is always a strategic advantage, especially if you are closely connected to them. An established customer has a relationship already with the brand, and has a level of confidence and trust in it that it will not have in an untried brand. Strategies can be deployed to “lock down” an existing customer base, such as contracting which is common in the telecommunication industry.

The size of the customer base favors the Market Leader.

Large customer bases enable you to use the size to your advantage. Size offers critical mass. Cost advantages come with scale, including the opportunity to amortize cost across large numbers. In addition, having a large customer base reduces risk. Those companies that depend on one or two key customers for their survival can find themselves in a risky position if one or both of those customers take their business elsewhere.

STRATEGIES MARKET LEADERS DEPLOY.

• A market leader always plays defense.
• They counter an attack with equal or greater force.
• They defend important markets.
• They remain vigilant in scanning for potential attackers. (This means they must assess the strength of every competitor and consider the support that an attacker might muster from allies.)
• They attack themselves before a competitor has the opportunity to attack them.

Being the leader is the advantageous position. Playing defense is a lot easier than attacking since you have a greater chance of winning. However there are key challenger brand advantages that the leader needs to take into account. These advantages include:

• The sympathy vote.
• The regulatory framework.
• Psychological advantages.
• Challenger Brands are not alone.
• Challenger brand believability.
• Market leader complacency.

To effectively negate a challenger brand’s competitive attacks, a market leader’s important territories need to be identified, defense plans laid, and strategies deployed, such as the creation of moving targets, securing fringes and niches, and pre-emptive strikes to contain competitive damage.

Fiona Mackenzie is a marketing strategist who works with businesses wanting to compete in the bricks-and-mortar world and in the online space. You’ll find her blog at http://www.fionamackenzie.com.au

MISTAKE #1: Relying on referrals. When you depend on referrals as your sole source of new business, you allow middlemen to control your flow of new clients. You may discover that whether you receive referrals has nothing to do with your knowledge, skill or experience. Instead, it may be based on your ability to return the referrals.

ADVICE: In addition to referrals, make sure your marketing program attracts inquiries directly from prospects. This allows you to manage your marketing program, rather than relying on third parties over which you have little or no control.

MISTAKE #2: Depending on media exposure. Without question, articles in the print media and inter-views on radio and television can help you attract new clients. But many lawyers rely on publicity as their entire marketing program. True, exposure can increase your credibility. But, often, exposure by itself isn’t enough. Lawyers routinely report, “We were very happy with the number of articles about our firm, but we didn’t get a single new client!” In addition to exposure, you need to interact with prospects.

ADVICE: Make sure your marketing program brings about interactions between you and your prospects, such as over the telephone or in person. Interaction is a critical step in the marketing process — and the step most law marketing programs overlook.

MISTAKE #3: Relying on networking groups as a primary source of new business. Networking is a time-consuming exercise in meeting prospects and cultivating referrals. And while networking may bear fruit, lawyers often underestimate the time required.

ADVICE: Pursue opportunities to meet and talk with genuine prospects, but don’t put networking above other marketing strategies.

MISTAKE #4: Competing on low price. When you lower your fee to attract new clients, (1) you undermine your credibility because clients conclude your services were not worth what they previously paid, (2) you attract clients who will leave you when competing lawyers offer fees lower than yours, (Clients who are loyal to the dollar are never loyal to you!) and (3) you’ll probably lose money because the cost of attracting a volume of new clients is often greater than the profit you can earn from those clients.

ADVICE: Instead of competing on price, compete on value. You’re better off being the most expensive lawyer in town and having prospects appreciate your knowledge than being the cheapest lawyer and having prospects question your skill.

MISTAKE #5: Delivering an incomplete marketing message. Many lawyers believe common marketing methods don’t work because those lawyers didn’t get the results they wanted. But usually the problem isn’t the marketing method, it’s the message. If your message lacks even one essential element, your efforts could fail.

An estate planning lawyer delivered a seminar to 84 prospective clients, yet no one came into his office for a free consultation. After I reviewed his presentation, we added less than five minutes of information to his program. At his next seminar, 10 of the 11 couples in attendance requested appointments.

ADVICE: Before you implement your marketing program, make sure you create a complete, competent marketing message. Without a powerful message, your marketing program is doomed.

MISTAKE #6: Not effectively reaching your target audience. A tax attorney who represents doctors before the IRS advertised his services in a weekly shopper newspaper distributed free to homes. Not surprisingly, he was disappointed with the response. Before running the ad, the lawyer could have saved his $2000 investment had he asked himself, “Will doctors look for a tax attorney in a free weekly newspaper?” I don’t know about doctors, but that’s certainly not where I would look.

ADVICE: Choose different methods that you believe will reach your prospects. Then test each method on a small scale before you invest serious dollars. This way you’ll know which method most effectively reaches your target audience and how well it attracts the clients you want.

MISTAKE #7: Making decisions by committee. The quality of a marketing decision is based on how long it takes to make the decision and how much the decision has been watered down by compromise. One person working alone has the potential to make good decisions. When two people work together things begin to bog down. And if you’re waiting for three people to agree — well, don’t hold your breath. Marketing is like football. Can you imagine how long it would take if the entire team offered their ideas and everyone had to agree before they could make the next play?

ADVICE: Choose one quarterback to direct your program. If you don’t get the results you want, change strategies or change quarterbacks. But don’t compound your quarterback’s problems by bringing in more people to help make decisions.

MISTAKE #8: Not taking the leadership position in your market. When prospects perceive you as the leader in your field, you have a substantial advantage over other lawyers. Yet, many marketing programs aren’t designed to seize this powerful, profitable position.

ADVICE: Look at your position in the marketplace. From your prospects’ point of view, is any lawyer clearly the leader in that category? If not, design your marketing program so you take control of your niche. If that niche is already dominated by other lawyers, create a new category for yourself. Then promote the category so prospects see you as first in that new area. One of my clients created a new category and successfully dominated his niche for five and one-half years, when he decided to pursue another area of law. You gain an extraordinary advantage when prospects perceive you as the leader.

MISTAKE #9: Not delivering your marketing message until prospects come into your office. Lawyers usually have no problem persuading prospects to hire their services once the prospect is in their office. But getting prospects through the door is another matter.

ADVICE: Develop materials you can send to prospective clients. Then create a marketing program that uses the print and broadcast media to attract inquiries from prospects who ask to receive your information. When prospects call your office, you respond by mailing your packet and adding their names to your mailing list. This allows you to put your marketing message into their hands regardless of their location, rather than waiting for them to come to your office. If your materials are powerful and persuasive, you’ll find that prospects call you and request appointments.

One of my lawyer clients received 426 calls from prospects after offering his materials on a radio talk show, over 500 calls after a mid-day television news interview, and another 400 calls after an article appeared in a local newspaper.

MISTAKE #10: Not marketing to your practice mailing list. Your mailing list is your own personal area of influence. It should contain the names of all your past clients, current clients, prospective clients and referral sources.

ADVICE: Make sure you mail your newsletter at least monthly. And don’t think that you must make your newsletter an 8- or 16-page treatise. A simple educational letter of even one or two pages works fine. Your newsletter’s size is not nearly as important as how often you mail it and the value of the information you present.

MISTAKE #11: Taking marketing shortcuts. Lawyers who achieve success often trim back their marketing programs hoping to save money by eliminating the bells and whistles. What they often don’t realize is that many of the so-called “bells and whistles” are not bells and whistles at all. They are the essential components that make their programs work.

An attorney hired me to refresh his marketing message, which had grown stale. When we kicked off his new program, he attracted 247 prospects to five seminars, an average of 49 people at each program. His calendar filled up almost overnight. After six months, he took his marketing in house and started cutting corners. Within 90 days, his results were as dismal as they had been before he called me.

ADVICE: When you shortcut your marketing on the front end, you slash the number of new clients on the back end. If you want to streamline your marketing and determine if any steps might not be needed, start slowly and track results. Be careful not to cut away steps responsible for your success.

MISTAKE #12: Not making marketing a priority. For most lawyers, practicing law is their highest priority. When they get busy, they often reduce their marketing efforts because they need that time to work on their clients’ behalf. They operate under the false hope that their momentum will attract new business long into the future. But when they cut their marketing efforts, they actually shift their marketing into neutral. As a result, inertia takes over and things slowly coast to a standstill.

ADVICE: Make marketing a priority for you or someone in your office. Or hire an outside consultant so you make sure the work gets done. Don’t turn your marketing on and off like a light switch. Keep your program in gear so you always attract an ongoing flow of new clients.

MISTAKE #13: Writing an intricate marketing plan that becomes impossible to carry out. Many marketing plans look like jigsaw puzzles with dozens — or even hundreds — of pieces. And while the plans might work, most lawyers and their staffs don’t have the hours needed to carry out the plans.

ADVICE: Make sure your marketing plan is built on simple steps that have proved to be effective and efficient. In my 33 years in marketing, the most profitable, efficient and effective method I’ve found is my method of Education-Based Marketing.

MISTAKE #14: Never completing — and therefore never implementing — your marketing plan. Many lawyers get so caught up in gathering facts that they never stop designing their plan. They collect data, add more steps, collect more data, revise their plan, collect more data….

ADVICE: Implement your plan at the earliest possible moment. A poor marketing plan that is up and running is far more profitable than the “perfect plan” that never gets off your hard drive.

MISTAKE #15: Delaying your marketing program until your cash flow improves. More often than not, lawyers who use this reason never start marketing because they aren’t aware that their logic is backwards: Their cash flow won’t improve until they start their marketing program.

ADVICE: Maintaining an effective marketing program is the most important investment you can make. Why pay for an office and staff if you don’t have enough business to justify the overhead? Start your marketing program now so you have an ongoing flow of new clients.

MISTAKE #16: Carrying out a marketing program that does not achieve the five essential steps for success. Your marketing program must (1) establish your credibility, (2) identify how you’re different from other lawyers, (3) generate interactions between you and your prospects, (4) gain your prospect’s commitment, and (5) maintain your client’s loyalty. Programs that don’t achieve all five steps will fail.

ADVICE: Any time you evaluate a marketing opportunity, consider how well that method will accomplish these steps.

MISTAKE #17: Promoting your services. When you promote your services, you take on the role of a salesperson hawking his wares. This method, called selling-based marketing, undermines your credibility and causes prospects to question whether they can trust you.

ADVICE: Instead of promoting your services, promote your knowledge by educating prospects. Education-Based Marketing gives prospects what they want, information and advice, and removes what they don’t want, a sales pitch. It attracts prospects who come to you because of your knowledge, skill, judgment and experience.

Trey Ryder specializes in Education-Based Marketing For Lawyers. The American Marketing Association featured his Ryder Method of Education-Based Marketing on the front page of its national publication, Marketing News. He offers lawyers three free articles by e-mail: 17 Fatal Marketing Mistakes Lawyers Make, 7 Secrets of Dignified Marketing for Lawyers, and 11 Brochure Mistakes Lawyers Make. To receive these articles, send your name and e-mail address to trey@treyryder.com and ask for his free e-mail packet of articles. Also, you’re invited to visit his Lawyer Marketing Advisor at http://www.treyryder.com.

In the quest to increase results from marketing, companies tend to focus on tactics. They worry about creating a better brochure, upgrading the website, or running a new ad campaign. However, often the greatest leaps in marketing effectiveness come from focusing on how it all ties together. Here are three steps for business leaders to improve their marketing effectiveness by fine-tuning their marketing processes.

1. Know what you need.

Marketing’s main job is to feed the sales force with nice, warm leads. Step one towards better marketing is to understand how much and what kind of food they need.

The “how much” is easily answered using basic math. Start with your sales goals and work backward. You’ll need to answer the following questions:

* What is our annual new business revenue goal?
* How many new customers does this represent?
* What percentage of qualified opportunities do we actually close?
* What percentage of leads actually become qualified opportunities?

Using this information, you can determine how many new inquiries your marketing must generate in order for the sales team to meet their goals. For example, let’s say your annual new business revenue goal is $10M; your average deal size is $100,000; your sales people generally close 50% of the qualified opportunities presented to them; and 5% of your inquiries become qualified opportunities. A quick run around the calculator tells us that your marketing efforts need to generate 4000 leads for the sales team.

With this information in hand, marketing planning becomes much more focused. Every activity in the plan should in some way contribute to generating inquiries and developing leads. If you can’t trace a program or activity to this result, don’t spend the money.

2. Match your marketing process to the buying process.

Unless you are selling an impulse item, the decision to purchase your product or service is based on a series of small decisions. Marketing helps to facilitate, and hopefully accelerate, the decision process by making the right information available to the prospect at the right time and from the right source.

It is critical to understand the entire process your customers go through while deciding to buy your product or service. Typically companies have a good understanding of what goes on after an opportunity has been identified, but few spend the time to understand the front end of the process.

A typical buying process could go something like this. The prospect:

a) Becomes aware that he or she has a need
b) Identifies options – often a list of vendors that offer a solution
c) Researches the various solutions
d) Creates a “long list” and issues an RFP
e) Creates a “shortlist”
f) Invites vendors for demos
g) Checks references
h) Negotiates
i) Purchases

Information needs are different at each point in the process. A successful marketing program matches these needs. It allows the company to create awareness among the target prospects by engaging them in a flow of communication that helps navigate their way through the buying process. A marketing program that fails to meet the buyer’s needs at each step of the process won’t deliver as many qualified leads.

3. Get your sales and marketing people on the same page

It is truly astonishing how many companies suffer from a fundamental disconnection between sales and marketing. Here’s a sure sign that your company has that problem. Ask the question “which marketing programs result in revenue?” You’ll likely hear marketing people complain that the sales team doesn’t follow up on leads and won’t track them. And, you’ll hear sales people say that marketing’s leads are worthless. You can’t get an answer because no one knows.

Disconnected sales and marketing efforts result in burned leads, wasted efforts, lengthy sales cycles, and low revenue. It is well worth the effort to develop a cross-functional team.

One of the easiest and most effective places to start with is to develop a common definition of the word “lead”. If you gathered your sales and marketing teams together and ask everyone for their definition, you’ll likely find the sales team has a very different view than your marketing team. (Don’t be surprised if you get different answers within the sales and marketing staffs as well.) Now work together to establish a common definition. Use this definition to guide marketing in developing leads before handing them off to sales.

These steps are a good start toward making your marketing initiatives more effective. Of course, there is much more you can do to tighten the process so that your efforts produce greater results; but by taking these three steps you’ll be well on your way.

© Tatum Marketing 2007

Susan Pascal Tatum, co-founder and president of Tatum Marketing, is a recognized expert in business-to-business internet marketing [http://tatummarketing.com/services/]. She helps software, information technology and BtoB firms achieve greater online marketing results. She is a popular author and speaker, regularly publishes internet marketing strategies and actionable tips on the site’s blog. Visit for a copy Technology Marketing 2008.

As a VP of marketing, Director of marketing, or sales executive you are well aware that even the best-planned marketing efforts can fail, and thorny economic times have only compounded the aggravation. You’ve been strained to cut your marketing expenditures significantly at the same time you’re expected to accomplish more.

This white paper introduces the fundamentals of running marketing programs efficiently and with the highest possible ROI, using not only a creative, but also an analytical approach to direct response marketing that is impossible without marketing automation – a primary support system for any successful marketing campaign. The technology-driven process, in conjunction with a preferred-by-marketers intuitive process, will enable you to tightly interweave your marketing and sales programs and, as a result, realize a positive return from your limited marketing resources.

Nurturing customer loyalty

Your current customers can be your best future customers, as well as your best sales reps. Satisfied customers will bring you many referrals, and as you might well know, a lead that comes from a customer referral is the one that your sales team will close faster and with higher a rate of probability, because your customer already made a great deal of effort to pre-sell the referred prospects.

Growing through referrals

If you have not developed a well-managed referral program for your customers – and any other partners that want do get into business with you and become a free agent that is paid commissions for referrals – you are losing a great opportunity for organic growth.

Consider this example:

Company ABC is a B2B service company with about 500 current customers, and the average annual sales per customer is $20,000, which generates $10,000,000 in annual sales.
Your annual advertising budget is 1% of the revenue ($100,000). As we all know, the majority of it is usually spent on campaigns that bring modest results, in the hope of discovering winning advertising venues – which become even harder with competition trying to get over the hump in this economical downturn.

Your company has been growing at a 10% rate annually, slowly but surely, but now the growth starts declining, and it is forecasted to be down 5% this year, with the same marketing expenditure (and even more hassling that your marketing and sales team has to get through).

Now imagine that you decided to monetize the connections of your customers. You can ask for a favor and a few will return. But you don’t want random single referrals – you want to get bombarded with pre-sold prospects who will take less than average time to close. Wouldn’t that be a marketing and sales paradise?

Welcome to paradise

Let’s imagine that you designed a customer referral program and offered a 10% commission to be paid as a result of each referral that converted into a paid customer.

Let’s assume that 50% of your customers signed up for your referral program, but only 50% of those customers actually refer paying prospects on a regular basis – that brings you 125 new sales a month.

Now do the math:

500 customers x 50% x50% = 125 customer referrals per month
125 referrals/month x 12 months x $20,000 per sale = $30,000,000/yr
$30M – 10% commission = $27M in new business

As you can see, your next year’s revenue will be $37,000,000 instead of $10,000,000, and your company growth rate now is 370% versus the forecasted -5%.

Developing the strategy and the process management system

You liked the math, and now you are ready to jump in and get it done, right?

Do you have a system to manage hundreds of referral partners? You probably don’t have the tools in place for a successful execution of the program. Are you planning to do it intuitively and manually?

Unless you have a proper structure, along with the necessary processes and technology to measure your success, you cannot execute your partnership programs properly.

That’s why you need to automate your marketing processes, and ideally you need to hire a marketing company that will design, automate, and market the program for you – and charge affordable rates.

Costs of marketing automation and campaign execution

How much do you think it would cost you to invest in a program that brings you millions of dollars of additional sales? Would $100,000 be the right number? Maybe, but it drastically exceeds the limits of
your existing marketing budget.

But the good news is that right now a direct response marketing company with established processes, a proven framework, and the right automation tools can get it all done for you in few weeks – for $10,000, or less.

Integrated marketing versus task-based marketing

Prior to using our solutions, for many of our clients, “marketing” was a series of isolated tasks – but from a sales point of view, selling is a coherent process. Task-based marketing can often fail because, at its core, it doesn’t help to commence a dialogue that a salesperson can bring to closure.

Test before investing

With the proper tools in place, now you can conduct formal tests of each marketing idea, collateral piece, and message to get the best performing tactics. No tests should be done manually because the necessary sampling size is prohibitively large.

The numbers game

Without proper metrics, marketers that rely blindly on an intuitive approach don’t have the tools to measure their success, and duplicate it in other programs.

Creativity and analysis have to go hand in hand. But proper analysis of a number of variables cannot be done manually. Tracking systems for both success and failure, and easy tools to analyze the elements that affected the result, have to be integrated and reflect the company’s objectives. Therefore few out-of-the box software packages for different purposes (such as campaign management, affiliate scripts, Google Adwords integration, and others) might not necessarily be the best solution for your company because it will require quite a bit of integration effort and maintenance resources.

A credible marketing service provider will not only be able to consult with you on the most suitable solution, but also implement it and run the campaigns on your behalf, during the learning phase while your marketing team is getting familiarized with the program.

The benefits of overall marketing automation

Through the use of a database, marketing automation enables you to learn – in depth – about your prospects’ and partners’ behavior, along with the decision making process and variables that influence it. It allows you to automate communication processes and maintain relationships electronically.

The results:
Better-organized sales and marketing processes.
Superior customer retention.
A consolidated view of your customer and lead base.
Better lead qualification and retention.
Higher return on sales force and customer support technology investment.
Higher marketing ROI.
Better tracking capability.
A better platform for making marketing and sales decisions.

Which translates to:
Reduced operational costs.
Reduced marketing expenditure.
Increased revenue.

Marketing automation doesn’t just link marketing with sales – it helps marketing drive sales.

What you can achieve with the right marketing automation technology

SalesAnual will help you to improve your response rates and boost the revenues from your marketing efforts. We offer you the ability to easily manage sophisticated, timely, personalized customer communication strategies. Built specifically to meet the needs of key members of the marketing process, our product will provide comprehensive data management, campaign management, and advanced customer analytics in one integrated, easy-to-use solution.

Marketing campaign management

Marketing campaign management is easy with with our product. Through a single application, you can effectively plan your marketing spend, manage all your initiatives and campaigns, and analyze performance and results.

Market segmentation

Our product helps you create targeted campaigns by segmenting your audience based on attributes such as demographics or product interest, and then send specific messages and offers for each group. You will have the ability to easily add contacts and leads to lists right from within campaigns.

Campaign analysis

Our system is designed to simplify ABC (split) testing. You can track, analyze, and optimize multiple campaigns such as on-line marketing and telemarketing. It will also allow you to analyze and optimize other campaigns such as trade shows, direct mail, advertising, and promotions, so that all marketing efforts are focused on the most effective campaigns.

Campaign testing

ABC tests are typically conducted to determine which version or elements of advertising materials are helping the performance of the campaign. ABC tests dramatically challenge the assumptions that marketers and company executives may have about the best way to design a campaign or collateral piece. The automated functionality also enables you to solve conflicts between marketing and management.

While ABC testing typically applies to on-line adverting, we can build your system around a repetitive test process for all media, so it enables you to test Web pages, advertising copy, telemarketing scripts, e-mail messages, newsletter content and layout, and so on.

Testing yields the most valuable results only when the tests are conducted repeatedly; therefore efficient ABC testing is impossible without full automation of the test process. This is a key advantage of the SalesAnnual system.

Our software can create an “ABC test winners” table where all of the best advertising items will be stored. Each record provides statistics, upon which every new marketing effort in the same category will be measured.

Revenue tracking

Our product will help you identify the marketing activities that generate the most sales revenue by directly tying every sales dollar back to its campaign source. Campaign managers can analyze detailed analytics to track revenue, and measure campaign success.

Express follow-ups

Our product helps you to easily determine which prospects require follow-up contact after a campaign, and define the appropriate actions.

List management

You can import and export campaign lists in multiple data formats from and to various marketing vendors. With SalesAnnual List Management, you can also create targeted, effective marketing campaigns with list management tools for segmenting, exporting, and analyzing lead lists.

List creation

This module enables you to create customer or prospect lists by selecting any combination of contact and customer information.

Data exporting

This module helps you to easily export your lists to outside suppliers and manage the results with SalesAnnual’s campaign management features.

Data importing

The module allows you to quickly import sales leads from offline sources such as trade shows, seminars, and direct mail; matching group and campaign; eliminating manual data entry.
It also enables you to import leads provided in bulk by a specific referral partner as a result of a specific campaign. You can also map and segment any information you need to manage.

Detailed reporting

This module allows you to analyze lists and contacts to identify trends, and to optimize marketing campaigns.

Lead management

This module allows you to track incoming prospect inquiries that respond to particular campaigns, and automatically route qualified leads to the right people, enabling sales reps to get instant access to the latest prospects – and business opportunities are never lost.

Online lead capture

This module allows you to automate lead generation by capturing leads from your customers’ website, directly into our system, and automatically send a personalized response based on information supplied by the customer.

Lead search and merge

This module ensures that reps can easily identify prior interactions with a lead before following up. You can easily merge leads, contacts, and accounts – and remove duplicates – for efficient lead management.

Lead tracking

This module monitors leads end-to-end – from creation to conversion – with capabilities that include automatic date/time stamping, campaign or lead source tracking (vendor, campaign, and partner), lead status changes, and lead activity management.

Channel partner program management

With our system you can easily manage various channel partner categories such as affiliates, referral partners, and resellers – and create efficient, automated relationships with them.

Affiliate program management

Our affiliate program management functionality is designed to manage your channel partners who mostly operate on the Web, and therefore the tracking system reflects the way traffic is sent to you website. Affiliates typically use your on-line marketing tools, such as text links, ad banners, video clips, podcasts, webcasts, as well as text documents such as articles, press-releases, white papers, and case studies.

Referral program management

Our referral program management functionality is designed to manage your channel partners that deliver leads in a less organized manner – in a verbal or written form for example.

Reseller program management

Our reseller program management functionality is designed to manage your Value Added Resellers (VARs), that engage in the sales and marketing of your product. Typically they bundle your product and services with those of their own company, and market to their existing client base.

Channel partner compensation management

Our lead tracking and payment management solution gives you an extensive reporting system that will put you at ease, because your team – and your partners – can always access the latest data about their account and lead performance.

Contract management

Our system allows you to store the contracts signed with each partner and see the compensation due to each partner. The numbers are presented in % and $ value accordingly the agreement with a particular partner, as well as revenue generated to date since the partner signed up.

Reporting

Our flexible reporting solution gives you the ability to choose a report template or to customize reports according to your partners’ needs. The status of leads is reported as qualified, unqualified, dead, and so on, and you can easily send reports to your partners on a regular schedule.

Security controls

Our security controls and permissions capability allows your partners to access the sales leads in their own territories, or those provided by them. You can also manually share specific sales leads with any user you choose.

Automatic lead routing

Our product makes lead management easy by setting up queues and assignment rules to automatically route qualified leads to the right distributor (sales organization that is located in a country where a company has no inside sales capabilities) based on customized business rules, and track the status of every lead in your partner marketing channel. Your referral partners will get instant access to the latest prospects, and leads are never dropped or lost.

Email prospecting and tracking

Our system empowers your resellers and referral partners to send personalized, template-based, e-mail messages to prospects in large numbers, and to easily track all responses from one centralized lead management system.

Lead acceptance

Our system enables comprehensive tracking and accountability so you always know your lead status, in real time.

Targeted messages

Our system allows you to create specific messages and publish them to each individual channel partner.

Document management system

Our system provides a central repository of all the documents and communications your channel partners will need to support their sales and marketing efforts. Your partners will have continuous access to all of your up-to-date documents (product brochures, presentations, and support documents) from anywhere in the world, so they can respond to customer information requests quickly and easily.

Search

Our comprehensive search capability allows your partners to quickly find relevant information, view documents, and even send them as attachments to their prospects, directly from the search results.

Secure records management

Our security rules and custom folders allow managers to organize documents and communications based on partner type, department, or any other criteria with limited access for the intended viewer only. Document management is secure and customized.

Second-tier referral program

Our system enables you to track not only every sale from each of your 1st-tier partners, but also each sale made by the partners that were acquired through your first-tier affiliates or referral partners.
Compensation is calculated according to your agreements.

Co-marketing program management

Our system enables your partners to submit marketing requests for co-marketing programs, if you choose. Requests are automatically compared and deducted from the partner budget. You can manage partner claims for funds requests by analyzing each claim compared to the allocated budget for each partner. Claims can be documented with a proof of performance.
For all financial and non-financial transactions, partners submit claims with proof of performance. Documents and uploaded materials are integrated with the marketing programs.

Special promotion for partners

With our system, you can make your partner Web portal “stickier” and increase partner adoption, by creating and communicating rebates and promotions for the partners. We provide rebate guidelines and best practices to help channel managers design and launch winning programs.
Your partners will have the ability to submit special pricing requests for the competitive deals on which they are working.

Search marketing management

Our system enables you to gain complete visibility and control over your search engine marketing campaigns-from keyword selection to closed deal. It allows you to put your marketing dollars to work with keywords that deliver the best results. You will can see exactly which leads were generated by each search engine marketing program.

Email marketing management

Our product has feature-rich functionality that helps you use a wide range of professionally designed templates for e-mailers and newsletters. One of our unique features gives you an easy way of creating landing page templates that match customized e-mail template and content.

Email tracking

Our system makes it easy to evaluate the success of e-mail campaigns with integrated response tracking and easy monitoring of key campaign metrics. You can easily identify which e-mail campaign generates the most:

Open emails (what recipients, when, how many times)
Bouncebacks
Click throughs
Leads
Closed deals
Unsubscribes

Our system gives you the ability to assign a specific identification to each affiliate or referral partners’ outbound email or telemarketing campaign sent via your system. Every incoming lead will be assigned to the appropriate partner and will be reported in the statistics on partners’ performance, accumulated compensation, and payment schedules.

Personalization

Key features include:
Content editing supports a high degree of reusability and easy customization – push a button to insert a variable, “IF” statement, HTML template, and more.
Personalize messages using conditional content and data.
Default to standard content (such as “Dear Customer”) when conditions are not met.
Personalize subject lines.
Embed redirect URLs and attachments into e-mail messages.
Integrate with your favorite content editor, easily.
Flexible opt-in/opt-out support.
Viral marketing support – track and understand the value of customers who forward your messages, extending the return of those communications.
Rich re-marketing and wave campaign support via easy-to-create follow-up communications based on an individual’s response or lack of response.
CAN-SPAM compliant.

New dashboards and reporting functionality

With our new dashboard and customizable reporting functionality you will have instant access to the real-time data and analysis you need to run your business. Dashboards pull it all together, providing instant access to a consolidated, real-time view of your sales data.

Real-time dashboards

Dashboards give you an at-a-glance overview of the current status of your business, with benchmarks and critical metrics from sales, marketing, service, and more. One-click data refreshment ensures that your marketers are always working with the most up-to-date information.

Custom report formulas and highlighting
Multiple mathematical formulas are preprogrammed into the system to aggregate and perform calculations on raw data within the system. You no longer need to export your data to spreadsheets for detailed calculations.

Outbound sales campaign management

The module makes it easy for your telemarketers to create and test telemarketing scripts, as well as ABC test e-mail follow-ups that are automatically sent to the leads generated by each outbound sales campaign.

By default, unless customized, our system automatically sends three follow-ups to “non-responding” leads after which the system can automatically move them to the Dead category, which eliminates manual work.

Media buying and production management

We deliver a fast, powerful, and complete system that includes media buying, production, and result tracking, all designed with direct marketers in mind. Our system provides quick and easy access to information, and lets you track each campaign down to its tiniest details, because marketers and users need all the answers:

Which spots ads are profitable?
Which media is the most profitable?
Which creative is the best suitable for each particular media?
Which URL works best?
Which days of the week, month, and parts of the day work better for each media?
What is the cost per order for each media?
What is the cost per inquiry for each media?
What is the cost per lead for each media?
What is the ROI for each media?
Which call centers are the most effective?

Our system keeps everyone in sync and up-to-date because direct marketing is a complex process involving media buyers, scriptwriters, copywriters, designers, producers, call centers, accounting,
budgets… as well as innumerable sign-offs by clients and management.

Media buying

Print ads in newspapers, 30-second spots on prime-time television, banner ads on websites – each can be considered a media buy. Managing your media is easy with our fully automated system.

Features:
Short-form.
Long-form.
Spot and network buys.
Direct mail.
E-mail.
Inserts and circulars.
Display advertisements.
Cable and broadcast.

Production management

Our system helps you traffic and manage jobs, work orders, and schedules.

Note: Please note, some functionality is not available with the basic package and is only sold to clients that order 50+ seats, or is included as part of customization consulting. Please specify your requirements and we will provide you with a quick quote.

Conclusion

In the new state of the economy, your motto as a marketer should be “efficient marketing made simple with less;” at least ours is. Our programs and technologies will give your marketing department the ability to take greater ownership of leads, as well as customer and partner relationships, which keeps the cost per interaction as low as possible while guaranteeing greater marketing performance.

This means you can continually improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts rather than potentially repeat what hasn’t worked. Marketing automation – and a well-selected marketing firm – will make your marketing programs more successful and remove discrepancies between your marketing objectives and your execution capabilities.

The result… your company generates more qualified leads at a lower cost per sale, and this helps your sales team achieve a higher closing ratio.

About SalesAnnual

SalesAnnual is the premier provider of marketing campaign development and automation programs for advertisers, marketers, and publishers, specializing in delivering high-quality leads and maximizing the results of customer acquisition.

Contact us to get started: salesannual.com/contact-us/

Adam Smith.
Business Development Manager at SalesAnnual (http://www.SalesAnnual.com), a leader in referral program design, automation and promotion. It’s a direct response marketing company that will double your sales in no time. We’ll bombard you with referrals and new sales leads and sell for you while you sleep.