sales

What Is a CRM and Where to Get Started

May 30, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

CRM may be an acronym you’ve heard floating around before – but what is it? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, basically it’s how you can keep track of data on past, present, and potential future customers and log interactions with them whether it’s through, emails, phone calls, mailings and so on.

Why would you want to have that information? With information like that you can manage how to regain former customers, retain customers, and gain new ones. You’re probably starting to see that a CRM is an integral tool for sales and marketing for businesses and in fact it is.

You could start a CRM system by collecting and entering customer and potential customer information into something like an excel sheet but that can become tedious work that wouldn’t be very helpful in the long run. Fortunately, there are a ton of CRM systems out there that can help.

There are a few helpful things to keep in mind when picking out a CRM:

Is It Automated?

As in does it integrate with any platforms you are already using such as your email and social media? This is useful because it will save you or your employees time from having to manually enter every bit of customer information on your own.

Is It Mobile?

Can you access your customer relation information on the fly? This is helpful when you meet a new prospective customer and want to get them in the system right away or access all the information about a customer out in the field without having to log into your computer.

Is It Usable?

A major factor to consider: is the program easy to use for you and your employees? A big reason for businesses leaving their CRM to the way side is not knowing how it functions.

However, searching through all of the CRM options out there can be overwhelming in of itself. I’ve picked a few of some of the best ones out there to get you started.

SalesforceIQ CRM

One of Salesforce IQ’s features is the automatic collection of customer data such as emails, calendar events, and smartphone calls so you can spend more time focusing on the client and less time on data entry. You can also share information with other employees in order to collaborate when communicating with customers. It also creates reports to keep you on track and focused on the most promising sales. It’s mobile so you can work from anywhere and streamline your workflow.

Prosperworks

If you use G Suite then Prosperworks might be the best option for you. It was made for G Suite and seamlessly integrates with G Suite’s apps such as Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Inbox and Gmail and automatically syncs collected information from these apps. It will also remind you when you are not following your schedule to follow up with customers or potential customers. And whenever you update your Google contact information, it will roll over to your CRM.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot has a great dashboard to gain visibility into what’s going on in your CRM to keep everything organized. You can also swiftly sort customers by a number of filters to keep track of what’s happening. Hubspot also syncs information across several platforms for email, social media, and phone calls. One of the best things about this platform is that it’s free!

Do you use a CRM platform? If so – which one? What are some of the benefits and pitfalls you’ve experienced with a CRM platform? Let us know in the comments.

Do B2B Companies Really Need Digital Marketing?

June 20, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Have you ever said your business-to-business (B2B) company doesn’t need digital marketing, that it’s only something business-to-consumer (B2C) needs? If you have, unfortunately you’re not alone. You’ve probably offered reasons like your customers know who you are, or your buyers already know what they want and don’t need to look online. Or perhaps even the classic “that’s why we pay sales reps”. Without debating the merits of those statements, here’s something else you might want to consider. According to an Accenture study, 94% of B2B buyers conduct online research at some point in the buying process (p4). So if that alone is not enough, here are 3 more reasons.

Buyers control the Buying Process

Image Source: Hubspot
Buyers have the means and resources available to conduct extensive research before they contact a sales representative and this is exactly what they do. You can see above, business-to-business buyers turn first to Search and then to company websites as they begin the buyer’s journey. Your company needs to be there and be ready for this.

Buyers Don’t Trust Sales Reps

We know that may come as a surprise to many of you, but it’s true. In fact, according to the Hubspot Sales Perception Survey Q1 2016, less than 7% of buyers find information from people in sales business units to be very trustworthy. So now what? According to a study by Blue Nile Research, buyers turn to customer reviews and case studies, instead. Your company needs to have an effective and comprehensive plan in place to ensure your potential buyers find a compelling story that demonstrates your expertise, experience and results.

Image Source: Louis Foong
Data Source: Blue Nile

B2B Buyers Don’t Work In A Vacuum

If you believe there is only ONE person making the buying decision, then frankly, you’re being naïve. Even the owner and sole employee of a company are subject to outside stimuli. This person has gatekeepers that will try to block access and he or she will have influencers that, well, have an influence whether they know it or not. This person has friends, customers and suppliers to talk with He or she may even have a significant other that has nothing to do with the business but who supports the same cause or charity that your company does. The point is that many people have access to the decision maker and, consciously or not, often contribute in some way. Through proper research, experience and analytics, you can identify and reach these targets using the appropriate channels.

Image courtesy of StratoServe

What it all Means? B2B Companies Need Digital Marketing

It’s fairly simple, really. It comes down to the fact that B2B buyers are people. So, it should be no surprise that their decisions follow a very similar journey as an individual consumer making any significant purchase. The touch points along the journey may vary depending on the product or service, but you can be certain the buyer is conducting research online, searching for solutions and then, a brand that might provide it. The buyer will look at your competitors’ websites. Make sure your website is found, as well. Customer reviews, data sheets, and blogs will be read. Social Media will be scrutinized. If you have a sound strategy, consistent messaging across platforms, and you provide information that saves time and money, your chances of securing a potential customer increase. If you don’t have these things….well, do you really need us to say it? Of course, these are not the only reasons, so let us know your top three. We’d love to hear from you!

Image Source: MediaFly
Data Source: Forrester

If you would like to talk about your challenges, and how we can help, please call us. We’re sure you’ll be glad you did.

See “Green” with Google Analytics

May 1, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Google Analytics (GA) is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. GA can track visitors from all sources, including search engines, social networks, direct visits, and referring sites. GA offers an incredible amount of insight into your website’s visitor activity. In fact, many people who use GA don’t fully utilize all the functionality within it. Here are a few ways you can use GA to grow sales and increase return on investment (ROI).

Utilize Customer Segments

One way you can use GA to be more effective is to utilize customer segments. This will help you gain better insights on the different segments for better marketing while helping you save more money and increase your overall ROI. For example, maybe you want to see the percentage at which mobile vs. non-mobile visitors convert between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Or, maybe you want to see how organic search visitors compare to paid search visitors. It is easier to compare and contrast different groups when you can see them side-by-side.

Pay Attention to Your Mobile Users

iPhones and iPads and Droids….Oh my! As technology has continued to advance, the days of visitors strictly coming to a website via their desktop are long gone. More and more visitors today are coming from some sort of mobile device. Do you have a significant portion of visitors coming from a mobile device? If so, are they using smartphones or tablets? Do they convert as well as non-mobile users? These are just some of the questions you will be able to answer by utilizing GA. Something as simple as just adding a mobile theme can be helpful, but proactively and regularly addressing problem areas can incrementally improve conversion rates over time.

Set-Up Event Tracking

Event tracking allows you to see all kinds of interesting moments that do not end up at a thank you or confirmation page with its own URL. For example, if you know that people who download a white paper are three times more likely to convert, you can adjust your promotions and more prominently feature your white papers on your site. Understanding what information prospects are seeking & clicking will significantly help you when it comes to optimizing the user experience.

Create and Use Custom Reports

By taking advantage of custom reporting you have the ability to create, save, and edit to get a specific view of your data. Jumping back and forth between several reports to see data that you might think would be visible within a single report can be frustrating and stressful. GA’s custom reporting can help you to alleviate some of that stress. Creating custom reports is quick and easy, and it will help you save time and money while making it easier to share with decision makers.

Determine the Source of Traffic

Determining from where and why people are coming to your site in the first place is invaluable information. Referrals may be one of the ways people are getting to your site. You could be surprised at the amount of traffic you are getting from a few websites. Search could be another way you are receiving traffic. If Search drives a significant portion of your data, keyword reports are an invaluable source of data. Campaigns are yet another way people could be arriving at your site. If you’ve been properly tagging your outbound emails, paid search efforts, etc., they will show up here. This will give you a quick place to compare all campaigns against each other. It is extremely important to identify the sources & mediums that are sending the most relevant traffic. In other words, know which prospects are converting the most.

Conclusion

GA can be an extremely useful tool when it comes to tracking your visitor activity and using the data gathered to help increase conversions. The ideas mentioned above are only a few of the ways you can benefit from utilizing GA to its full potential. There are many other ways that GA can help you to increase conversions and improve ROI.

To learn more about how GA can help you increase conversions and improve ROI, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

How Email Marketing Can Generate Sales

March 20, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Email marketing plays a major role in any digital marketing strategy. According to a Forrester report, repeat customers tend to be more heavily influenced by email. Email allows you to reach out to customers, gain increased visibility with prospects, or share your latest news and promotions. When done correctly, email marketing platforms bring together a host of tools that drive more leads, sales, & revenue.

Build Awareness

Email marketing is more than just sending out a generic email and hoping that prospects read it and respond. In order to build awareness through email marketing, it is crucial that you send out email communications with your customized brand, look, and feel. Including your colors, logo, contact information, and social networks will help entice prospects to not only read but also click within your email communications. The integration of social media within your email communications will help you build awareness as well. Integrating social media will allow you to publish emails straight to your social networks after you send. It will also give your readers the option to share with their friends and followers which will expand your reach and visibility.

Increase Engagement

One of the best ways to increase engagement through email marketing is to segment your lists to target prospects with tailored content. Segmenting your lists will allow you to create the perfect message for your group of customers. Email testing, optimization, and response tracking will also help to increase the engagement of your email campaigns. There are several different components that you can test within your emails. These include: subject line, day of the week, time of day, layout of the email, etc. Testing, optimizing, and tracking will help you to identify and analyze what works best so that you can make improvements which will help increase engagement.

Automate Email Campaigns

Auto-responders are a great way to automate your email campaigns. Automation helps businesses drive revenue by converting more leads into customers. It will allow you to follow up and reach out automatically based on your readers’ actions or important dates, and gives you the ability to send more personalized messages with less time and hassle.

Summary

Email marketing can be a great way to reach out to customers and gain increased visibility with prospects. Following best practices and using everything at your disposal are crucial to a successful email marketing campaign. Using the tools explained above to build awareness, increase engagement, and automate your email campaigns will help you generate leads and gain more sales opportunities.

If you would like to learn more about how Email Marketing can help your business drive sales, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

PPC Just Makes “Cents”

February 20, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertising is an effective way to market your company that also brings measurable value to you. PPC advertising creates a great amount of exposure and visibility. This makes it an efficient and cost effective way to increase leads, generate sales, and maximize your return on investment. Search engines like Google and Bing allow businesses and individuals to buy listings in their search results. These listings appear along with the natural, non-paid search results. These ads are then sold in an auction. You will be able to control your bid and what you want to pay for a click on the ad. The higher your bid, the better chance you have at ranking number 1 in the sponsored results. But, what exactly can you do to increase sales by using PPC advertising? Let’s take a look at a few basic steps that will help you do just that.

Choosing High Quality, Relevant Keywords

Choosing the right keywords is vital to your PPC campaigns. If you don’t have relevant keywords that are going to resonate with your target audience, then your ad rank, quality score, and your overall PPC campaign will be affected. It is important to develop an extensive keyword list. Keyword research is what is going to enable you to define the keywords used by your target audience to find your products or services. This also allows you to cover numerous possibilities without utilizing the “broad match” function, which is likely to prove more expensive due to the poor audience targeting of this method. Negative keywords are also important to ensure you are not paying for traffic which is of no value to you. Negative keywords are the keywords you specify that shouldn’t be included in the search engine results pages which show your ad. Using multiple match types is also beneficial to a successful PPC campaign. Google AdWords offers “Broad Match”, “Phrase Match”, and exact match for the keywords selected for your ads. Using the proper match type is critical to achieving the targeted traffic you are looking for. Although broad match may deliver high traffic volumes, this choice should be avoided in favor of “phrase match” and “exact match,” which are more precise and will bring more targeted traffic to your website.

Create Relevant Ad Copy with a Clear Call-To-Action

Most PPC advertising platforms require that you write a couple short descriptive phrases about your product or service. It is extremely important that you make sure your grammar, spelling, and overall language is correct and appropriate for your audience. You must also verify that your language adheres to the rules enforced by the Pay per Click service. Get specific! Entice the reader and tell them why they should click on your ad. The better your ad copy, the better your quality score will be. The better your quality score, the less you will pay per click and the higher your ad rank will be. The higher your ad rank, the better chance you will generate more conversions and increase sales.

Improve Landing Page Experience

The landing page associated with your keyword advertisement is just as important as your advertisement itself. The web page associated with your keyword advertisement has to be 100% relevant to the ads offered if you are going to obtain reasonable conversion rates. In general, the typical business web page is often too generic to offer high relevancy to the specific ad. Also, general web pages often have too many distractions to achieve reasonable success at converting PPC advertisements. The objective of the landing page, ideally, is to convert the visitor on the page. However, at times in the sales process, additional information is required. If this is the case, developing a multiple page sales funnel to obtain the desired conversion should be considered. A well constructed and relevant landing page is often the deciding factor as to whether or not a user converts.

Summing It Up

In summary, PPC advertising is an efficient and cost effective way to monitor performance and stay ahead of the competition. It will also help you gain greater exposure and visibility to generate leads and increase sales. Adhering to the three basic steps listed above will put you that much closer to developing and maintaining a successful PPC campaign. Thus, it will help you to drive more traffic, generate more conversions, and increase sales.

If you would like to learn more about how PPC Advertising can help your business drive sales, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

“The 4 D’s of Web Design” to Help Drive Sales

January 9, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Web Design is arguably the most important aspect of internet marketing. “A recent study found that 48% of online shoppers viewed a branded website as the most trustworthy source of information.”Although Search Engine Optimization is often referred to as the foundation of it all, without a website the implementation of SEO or any other internet marketing component would be pointless. With that being said, a good web design can help businesses drive sales and increase their overall return on investment. It’s 2013 for God’s sake!!! That means it’s time to ditch the websites that read like brochures and start creating websites that are going to attract, engage, and convert your target audience. So, what does an exceptional web design look like? Here is what I like to call “The 4 D’s of Design” to help you create the right website to meet your company’s needs and drive sales for your business:

1) DECISION. The first thing you need to do is decide what your brand, look, and feel should look like. Collaborate with your peers and colleagues and figure out what would be best for your organization. Remember, your website is an extension of your company so make sure it reflects as such.

2) DEFINITION. It’s also important that you define yourself as an organization. Meaning, make sure your company has a documented and unified mission, vision, and purpose. It is important that your website conveys who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you can help your target audience.

3) DIRECTION. The user experience is one of the most important aspects of any good web design. If the user is not comfortable with their experience on the site, then they are most likely going to bounce. Make sure that your visitors are able to navigate through your site and find exactly what they are looking for in a timely matter. The key to a good website is the right combination of fluidity, simplicity, and creativity.

4) DIFFERENTIATION. There are many organizations out there who believe they have great websites. However, their site isn’t really saying or doing anything that their competitors haven’t already said or done. In order to attract and retain more visitors, it is important that your organization differentiates itself from the competition. What gives you that competitive edge? Understand what sets you apart from your competitors, and then make the most of it.

Once you have a solid website in place, you can then begin to explore additional internet marketing components. The “4 D’s of Design” are by no means all it takes to create a good website. However, by adhering to these four basic steps it will point you in the right direction toward helping your business drive more sales.

If you would like to learn more about how web design can help your business drive sales, please leave us a comment below or call our office at 610-743-5602.