General Article

It’s All in Your Head: Easy Ways to Stay Positive and Boost Your Business

I did a lot of things over the past few years to grow and expand my business, including working for the lifestyle I want, defining my ideal clients and taking care of my physical and mental health.

Part of my mental healthcare included maintaining a positive mindset and it really made a huge difference. It cleared my head and allowed me to really focus on my business. Here are the four things I did to create a constant source of positive energy.

1. No News!

My first rule was no news, no radio and no reading the newspaper. That meant not flipping on the radio in the car. It meant not turning on the TV – even for two seconds – because it seemed like I’d always hear bad news. It’s amazing how I always manage to hear about the top news items anyway.

2. Positive Programs and Music

I made sure that I had a lot of positive audio programs and music. This can be any kind of spiritual teacher, guru, coach, leader or author who resonates with you. Buy their audio books or seminars and put them in your iPod or on your computer; rent them from the library and listen to the CDs in your car. Positive, uplifting music is good too. I, myself, like music that includes chanting, affirmations and stuff that’s just fun and fancy-free. We all have music that puts us in a good mood – so use whatever works for you.

3. Positive People

I decided I only wanted positive people around me. That meant I needed to not hang out with some of my family and friends. I worked hard to avoid energy vampires – those people who are so negative they just suck the life right out of you. To be honest, for a while I went into kind of a little cocoon. I needed to reconnect with my family and myself and be very purposeful about who I was spending my time with. Also, I attended retreats and conferences that were in a positive, spiritual realm. If that doesn’t work for you, find something related to a hobby. For example, if you’re into genealogy or you’re a stamp collector – whatever gives you energy – put yourself in those environments.

4. Community Connection

I made sure I was connected to community. This is a really big one because we tend to isolate ourselves. As entrepreneurs with our own businesses – most of us in our own homes – it’s very easy to isolate. So, find some like-minded groups, like a book club, spiritual group or volunteer activity, and attend regularly.

Taking care of oneself physically and mentally – and keeping a positive mindset – is a great way to keep yourself in the game. You’ll be amazed at the renewed motivation you have for doing the things that are not your core passion, but will make your business grow. Working from a cup overflowing helps you float through cold calls, accounting, filing, networking or any other activity that is critical to success but not always top on your list. Once the negativity is gone and you’ve got positive energy on your side, anything is possible.…

How to Leverage Marketing Automation in a Hi-Tech Start-Up

Marketing Automation focuses on lead generation with targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and services and nurture leads from first interest through to sale.

Commonly used in business-to-business (B2B) or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process as defined by a customer relationship management (CRM) program.

Setting it up

Firtsly you need to configure your website to collect registration information which you can score in your Matrketing Automation program. Score thresholds need to be approximated to distinguish between those leads that are worth following and ones that should go into a nurturing program for further qualification.

If a lead meets the score threshold just by filling out the registration form it should be immediately exported into your CRM. If not, then a ‘leadflow’ should be used to ‘nurture’ the lead with multi-touch email campaigns until it has accrued enough points to be exported to your CRM as a ‘pre-qualified’ lead.

Points can be attributed to a nurtured lead when they open or click-through from an email or visit high-value pages on your website (e.g. a pricing page).

When you’re dealing with high volumes of leads a quantitative and dispassionate means of assessment is far more efficient than qualitative judgments made by different members of your sales team.

Marketing Automation and your CRM

Once a lead is in your CRM, then what?

If you’re using a Sales and Marketing CRM system, leads can be automatically assigned to sales reps depending on their location, industry sector or whatever parameter is right for you. ‘Views’ can be assigned for each rep that lists these pre-qualified leads. Once visible to reps, these leads can be moved into their respective Open Lead queue for further qualification. If the lead is interested but not ready to buy, they can be pushed back into a leadflow for further nurturing.

If your automation and CRM systems are properly aligned they can assist sales reps during their qualification process by presenting essential lead information right inside the CRM including lead score, latest activity levels and recent behaviours (pages visited, emails opened etc), giving your rep insight into hoe engaged the prospect is.

As your team grows you’ll need to keep on top of your lead scoring thresholds so that reps don’t starve. High score thresholds might stop a few sales reps getting swamped with leads (or only focusing on the best quality leads), but once you have the manpower there is nothing better than real salespeople qualifying real prospects.

One final tip is to ensure that all leads, whatever quality, are eventually exported into your CRM. Even though they may be disqualified by your marketing automation system, their behaviour can continue to be tracked and scored. You may want to periodically trawl through these disqualified leads to find out if any are responding to email campaigns or visiting your website. If they have accrued the right level of points, albeit very late, it may be worth reaching out to them.

Like marketing stats? Marketing automation tools all have powerful reporting features to compliment the good work you’re doing with web analytics software and your CRM, enabling you to track, monitor and manage visitors to your web site.…

How To Build A Mailing List For Your Business

Building a mailing list is one of the most important aspects of building and growing your business online. Most marketers online will tell you that the money is in your email list. Building a mailing list is a matter of some simple steps that you can take and build a list of customers interested in the services and products of your business. I will present some simple ideas that can be easily implemented.

Make an offer of something of value of interest for signing up. Providing your website or blog followers with a special E Book that is of interest to your readers in exchange for their email address when they sign up. You set up your email marketing software to send the E Book when they have confirmed their name and email after signing up.

Create interesting and valuable video and upload the video to sites such as YouTube. This is a great way to generate leads by having a link to your sign up page on your video channel profile. You can add a link in your video as well. This is one of the easiest ways as millions of people watch videos on You Tube and other Video Sites. There is an enormous audience for video. Using something as simple as a slide show presentation draws interested viewers.

Sign up for Google Alerts and Forums in your business niche. You can comment on these blogs and forums to build back links and get follow backs to your website or blog to where your sign up form for your list is.

Sign up to the social networking sites such as Facebook. You can publish your information and articles of interest and get link backs to your website and blog.

Using marketing automation software is the best way to build your business fast online. It is very necessary to acquire a good quality email software with auto responder to automatically deliver your products of interest for sign up and to create automated followup letters for your product sales.

For more information on list building with marketing automation software go here.…

Door Hanger Printing is Useful in a Marketing Campaign

Door hanger printing is an effective component of marketing campaign. It is well suited to a personal business like a homely eating joint. If you look around, you will find that a few restaurants are promoting their joint through door hangers in competent manner and are getting good response. This idea is well suited for small enterprises and helps to improve their businesses.

The focus is on the message that you give in the door hangers. This is the way to impress customers and it requires expertise of some class. The script has to be professionally written to highlight significant features of the business so that customers find it appropriate to the subject. The message should be clear enough to enhance the confidence of customers to try the product or a service.

As a store owner, you must give due consideration to the creation of a door hanger. The vital thing is the message in it, which is the key of achievement. Messages that you convey should be to the point, clear and genuine. Door hangers are most economic to produce and bring direct customers for the business.

You have to make arrangement to hang them by moving around your locality. It is not thrown away like the ordinary pamphlet, which we are given in stores. People read door hangers normally and come to know a product or a service. It is therefore compulsory to produce door hangers attractive and significant to draw attention of the people.

That is why this is regarded as an efficient marketing tool. The door hanger is often targeted to impress a certain section of people or a community who share common interest being in the same locality. The local promotion is increased by using door hangers. Local sales are backbones of any business organization and improving local relation strengthens it.

A properly managed door hanger marketing plan is able to reap rich fruits for your sales income in a very limited time. The effective message communication is done nearly cent percent in the door hanger printing and retail store owners profit from this simple tool of marketing.…

Benefits of Marketing Automation Software for Your Lead Generation Team

We all want to see a fitting return to the investment we put into our marketing and B2B lead generation campaigns. Marketing automation provides the modern-day business with the means to increase effectiveness and cut down running costs at a time when day-to-day costs are running higher and higher and marketing strategies become seemingly more complex by the day.

To reach your audience you need to boost activities across the board. Marketing automation programmes can help companies of any size and stature to change the way they operate in a marketing and advertising landscape that changes at a constant rate. It streamlines your focus and gives your B2B lead generation team all the tools to target your key audience and utilize strategies to reach them effectively.

Traditionally you would look towards word of mouth, trade shows and traditional advertising to reach your prospects. The time has come to integrate these methods with a modern approach to target specific industries and individuals.

There are a number of key benefits to installing marketing automation systems within your organisation.

For one you will see a rise in productivity. Your staff will be able to launch campaigns within a much quicker time frame due to the negation of repetitive tasks that were the norm with traditional marketing campaign planning.

You’ll be able to change your approach on a day-to-day basis, based on the mood of the marketplace. The enhanced flexibility is a joy compared to the set hard and fast routines of past marketing campaigns. Costs will also be reduced as you streamline your approach after a faster and in-depth analysis of differing methods.

Marketing automation software that is being released on the market today is highly intelligent and provides valuable information about what type of targets are working and why. You will be in a better position to make the right decisions from the beginning of campaigns in future as a result. The previously mentioned flexibility also allows for an instant and quick fix to any current problems.

This increased intelligence provides your b2b lead generation team with the necessary tools to tweak your output so that it is entirely personal to its recipient. Studies have concluded that you are more likely to see a response and shorten conversion and sales rates should you personalize your initial approach. If you get that first contact right you can ensure a better relationship that you can nurture.…

How to Effectively Implement Demand Generation Process

With all the B2B marketers these days focusing on revenue, customer centricity, content marketing and marketing automation as part of their strategies, it seems that they have the perfect mix of components to build and administer modern demand generation programs. However, in spite of all the efforts, modern B2B demand generation tends to fall apart in execution. It’s been estimated that nearly 70% of the demand-generation efforts fail to target the ideal customer, and technology marketers also report an average opportunity pipeline contribution at mere 27%. Successful demand generation execution needs bringing together of human resources, process, content and technology and getting these elements to work in harmony. This will align the buyer education with the different stages of lead qualification process. This will help coordinate the efforts of the marketing and sales team members while facilitating seamless tracking and hand-offs between the technologies systems.

Now, if you want to provide a value added first rated buyer experience while at the same time optimize the lead to revenue conversion you need to approach the entire concept as a clinical process and adopt a new design ethic referred to as demand process stewardship. So now the question arises that despite all the right intentions and efforts why we often fail to make the best use of the demand generation process. There are few fundamental barriers that stand in the way of optimizing the process to achieve maximum success.

Lack of organization in demand generation process

The objective of B2B demand generation should be to enable and augment the lead to revenue process. Yet most of the sales and marketing people fail to organize around this goal due to lack of coordination. Instead of rationalizing marketing and sales roles in terms of how they should contribute to the process jointly, it is more important to organize according to communication channels, such as email marketing or PR, or to the other activities such as events or campaigns.

In most of the cases, companies focus on campaign structure that is promotional and short-term,and fail to consider the perpetual nature of buying processes. Instead they should re-devise their marketing efforts, consider their role in lead engagement, nurturing and converse on and identify the team that will lead the demand process stewardship efforts.

Lack of proper understanding of demand generation process and inadequate training

In order to run a process successfully, one needs to understand and manage the operational dynamics of the process and deliver leadership that is completely goal B2B marketers are not sufficiently trained to perform these tasks satisfactorily. Most marketers’ experiences are communication facing and center around messaging and sales enablement. Also, failure to address the revenue performance and metrics required to optimize demand-process flows can render the entire process ineffective.

Evaluating the performance of demand generation procedure

Assessing the performance of the managed process on regular basis is vital. You should be aware of whether you have been able to achieve the desired outcome or not. Any marketing executive in the consumer arena will agree that finding success with marketing programs means achieving the target, that making the desired amount of sales. Yet B2B marketing and sales people continue to use activity based metrics to evaluate the demand generation process, rarely mulling over the flexibility of and correlation between the programs and their revenue outcomes. And more often than not companies are found to be reluctant to risk the compensation on the revenue performance of the efforts.

Conclusion

Therefore B2B marketers should step up to facilitate efficient demand generation process. Before over investing in new technology and content, they should take a moment to examine their efforts and channelise them properly to remove these fundamental barriers and attain their goals.…

Marketing Automation Today

The world of marketing is complex enough; add to it the intricacies of its activities and the tremendous amount of data involved, the whole thing is simply astounding. With the advent of advance automation technology, the monotonous tasks are greatly reduced with the help of intelligent software. Marketing Automation endeavours to greatly improve productivity and efficiency. First and foremost it automatically handles the tedious tasks that normally drain marketing personnel. Marketing covers a wide range of components that it seems just humanly impossible to maintain a high level of efficiency over a long period of time. Marketing Automation is designed to address the issue of flagging competence; and aims only to improve the effectiveness of every activity to ensure the sustainability of a healthy business organization.

For an organization to envision growth and stability, it has to invest in marketing its products or services. They implement these by aggressively coming up with ideas of different marketing strategies and marketing campaigns. The result is a scary combination of huge amount of data and terrifying tasks. It is where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation will sort out the necessary data for detailed assimilation. Then it will make an elaborate profile on the potential clients and initially categorizing them by priority.

Marketing Automation is also heavily used in launching marketing campaigns through the web. It is such a very powerful tool in using the internet media as launching pad of these marketing activities. It is widely used to bring about adequate consciousness regarding the products or services of a particular company. These are implemented by making use of the email technology or taking advantage of the popularity of the social media. There are softwares that are designed to automatically send a valuable advertisement through an email and some even invade social media sites for a greater marketing access for the users. This scheme for sure increases the market range of these products or services.

Marketing automation will be of great use if you intend to increase your sales revenues. The ease to which you will achieve your goals will dramatically influence the growth of your organization. Marketing is such a competitive field; the most astute wins. With the use of this automation, you can amplify your marketing strategies which will apparently result an astonishing success.

Marketing automation is also capable of deriving a detailed analysis on the trend and tendencies of the potential and current clients. They can formulate a practical idea based on the given information and therefore craft an effective marketing plan. This is such a great help for the marketing personnel. Thorough information is a very potent tool in the field and will determine the success of the sales team.

There are so many softwares now that amplify the principles of marketing automation. Some of it are considerably expensive. You have to be able to identify your specific needs before you consider subscribing to any of these softwares. Migrating to an automation system is not an easy task by itself. Make sure to choose which ones will address your requirements and could easily integrate their automation structure to your current.…