Automated Lead Management - Inbound & Mobile Marketing — Use Inbound & Mobile Marketing to Create Leads for Your Business

The Time Has Come to Dump Your Old Website

March 7, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

Forrester Research last week reported that: Americans are buying online and they are buying a lot.

Some of the report's interesting findings include:

   * 53 percent of Americans made an online purchase in 2011.
   * 58 percent are expected to make an online purchase in 2016.
   * People believe they get the best deals when shopping online.
   * Tablet devices like the iPad have spurred online impulse buying.

These stats should get you to think about your e-commerce efforts–and perhaps plan a redesign! NOW

And there is more. Most likely your old website isn't designed to take advantage of any inbound marketing strategies and inbound marketing delivers more leads and customers at a lower cost.

If you read my post from a days ago, you can see that

The average cost per lead for outbound marketing was $346 while the average cost per lead for inbound generate leads is $135
SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound sourced leads have a 1.7% close rate.
Technology, communications & media, retail & wholesale, education,and professional services & consulting, found blogging was highly effective.

Here are some stats from the 2012 State of Inbound Marketing from Hubspot.
An well-organized, attractive website, with a back-end that functions seamlessly, captures leads and has a shopping cart that makes the purchasing process as easy and intuitive as possible will do wonders for your bottom line.

Years ago, building a quality e-commerce website was a highly expensive proposition. But today, your business can use any number of open-source platforms to build a complex, yet relatively inexpensive e-commerce site.

We Can help. Schedule a Free Appointment Today by Clicking HERE or CALL 415-729-4450

Our clients have good things to say, read them here

Financial Advisors and Other Professional Service Firms Need to Use Inbound Marketing

March 5, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

Inbound marketing costs less and gets more clients than outbound marketing including TV, Radio, PPC and other forms of outbound marketing.

Which means that implementing an inbound marketing strategy for your professional services firm not only save money but gets more clients.

Bottomline, generating leads and customers using inbound marketing cost less and is more effective.

No words needed, just look at the charts. The firms that are using inbound marketing are paying less per lead overall.

The same firms that use inbound marketing pay less per lead accross all media.

This is important because many financial advisors, lawyers and other professional service firms focus the majority of their marketing dollars on less effective media.

I'm not saying this media doesn't work but most have inherent disadvantages beyond price. For example as you can see from the chart, inbound marketing like seo, blogging and social media simply costs less.

Here are the reasons your firm should move from outbound to implement inbound marketing;

Outbound marketing is one shot marketing. Outbound marketing requires continued investment just to keep the marketing process moving.
PPC ads and direct mail require ongoing not only to craft messages but just to keep the message in fornt of consumers.

As opposed to inbound marketing that uses great seo, blogging and social media marketing which once published remains in the marketing domain.

Inbound marketing creates higher qualified leads. Hubspot looked at a sample of over 150 businesses using closed-loop marketing analytics (related to inbound marketing), and found the median lead-to-close rate of each business by the lead source. the data showed that:

seo leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound sourced leads have a 1.7% close rate.
seo leads are eight times more likely to close into customers than outbound leads.
Leads from inbound links (referrals) are five times more likely to become customers than outbound leads.

The meaning of these stats is simple SEO leads and inbound links (referrals) convert better period.

Combine the data with the fact that when I talk to my clients they don't have a regular automated marketing system inbound marketing makes more and more sense.

So, if you are in the professional services, financial advisor, lawyer (tv ad's for lawyers really), accountant, doctor or indian chief, it's time to invest in inbound marketing.

Schedule some time to talk about your needs by clicking on my Tungle.me link, it doesn't cost anything to talk.

Filed Under: Marketing

Traditional Advertising Works Great …

March 4, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

Like this graphic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: advertising, business, inbound marketing, Lead generation

Financial Advisor – How to Use Inbound Marketing to Sell Muni Bonds

March 2, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

I am writing this post because my visitor statistics indicate that I have some visitors to my site from a major financial firm and they have visited consistently over the last few days. So I'm writing to i serve them, I want to demonstrate the logic of using inbound marketing to finding clients for a financial services practice.

Almost no inbound marketer would do this (actually demonstrate how to ) but in this post and the next, I intend to disclose how I would sell muni bonds using inbound marketing. The reason most inbound marketers wouldn't do this is becasue they don't want to give away secrets but I say, give the secrets away.

So, this is how I would sell muni bonds using inbound marketing and more importantly with already compliance approved materials.

But before I demonstrate how I would use inbound marketing to find muni sales let's review the meaning of inbound marketing.

\What is Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is simply defined as attracting clients by providing SOLUTIONS to problems. So the important aspect in inbound marketing is to understand the needs of your prospect, what are their problems and burning desires, and find educational material that meets those needs.

Why Inbound Marketing for generating leads.

It about the numbers, a recent study by Hubspot show that inbound marketing is more effective than any other method for finding leads at a lower cost. Here are the stats

Cost of Lead Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

So obviously the cost of generating leads using Inbound marketing is lower than other ways of generating leads and despite not having stats today, I contend the quality is better as well.

Using Inbound Marketing to Sell Muni Bonds

So this is the 1st part of a two part post about how I would use inbound marketing for selling muni bonds (using preapproved compliance materials) are as follows

Clearly define your prospect. In other words, who would buy muni bonds and why would they buy them. How old are the typical buyer, are they male or female? And mostly importantly what is the pressing problem they are trying to solve.
After you have clearly defined the prospect, clearly understand what words they use to lsolve the problem For example, lets say that a client is interested in a safe place for some of their money, they may serarch on "safe investments". So as I look through my compliance approved material,

Lastly in this post I would sort through complaince materials looking for material that focused on "safe investments" I would look for materials that I could post that used they keyword term "safe investments". Thats how I would sort through my approved materials.

That's the beginning process, define your prospect and find materials that reflect the search terms they use to meet their need. The entire process of inbound marketing is about educating and I content that is the job (basically) of a financial advisor.

The next post is simple but crucial so look for it. Bottom line, this process works for anyone in the expert industry including financial advisers.

Dedicated to your success..

Dwight Miller

P.S. I am open to talking about this strategy, schedule a meeting using the button on the right (Tungle.me) and if you found this 1st post useful liek it on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Tungle.me to talk and look for the next post in a day or two.

Filed Under: Marketing

How to Customize Your Social Updates for Facebook and Twitter

February 24, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

How to Customize Your Social Updates for Facebook and Twitter

Like every aspect of inbound marketing, social media is constantly evolving. Once upon a time, when marketing on Twitter and Facebook was in its infancy, auto-uploading the same posts to both platforms was considered acceptable and efficient. For the savvy inbound marketer, those days are over. While efficiency is important, it should never be at the expense of quality content and relevant social media posts. Twitter and Facebook speak a different language — what your audience looks for on one is not the same as what they look for on the other.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: hubspot, inbound marketing, Inbound News, Lead generation, Marketing

Be an Expert in Your Market.. Know Them, Create a Persona

February 2, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

Want to be an Expert in Your Market

Know them, If you want to be an expert one of the first things you must do is "KNOW THEM" and by them I mean your prospect(s).

TO BE AN EXPERT YOU MUST KNOW THEM

This is an important part of being an expert because if you remember from the last post, expert publish. Experts also have to have a specific area of focus or a niche and not every per son in the wolrd is either interested or able to buy everything. This is very important.

Understanding your prospect is the most important aspect of publishing. You have to understand the who, what and why of your client.

CREATE A PERSONA

One of the best ways to understand your prospect is to create a persona(s) for your business. A persona describe ingreat detail the who, what and why of your prospect(s).

Your written persona(s) provide the picture of who you are publishing too. When you start to write a blog post, you refer to your persona, if I create a video I use my persona to ensure I'm speaking the right language to that prospect.

In this post, my persona typically is a services professional, in business for 10+ years, earns a minimum of 100k, has and has two kids. That's the demographic information, but I go further. I also have a sense of their why's. What I mean is I understand why they may be interested in working with me. They more often then not spend their time delivering their service and not focusing on marketing. My customer understand that the reason they become an expert is to generate leads automatically.

So, that is my persona. You may have more then one persona because you may have multiple prospects. Not matter what having a persona(s) makes the process of publishing easier because if provides a focus for who you are publishing too.

To help with the process of creating a persona for your prospects, I've attached a persona worksheet to help focus the creation of your persona. Download it free (no registration needed) but I woould love to hear your comments about is usefullness to you.

Dedicated to your success

P.S. I create my persona and attach a picture of what I believe my persona looks like. That helps with the publishing process. Download the Persona Worksheet Here

How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me…. Be an Expert

Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing

Become an Expert In Your Market and Explode Your Leads Flow.

January 29, 2012 By Dwight Miller Leave a Comment

Don't Cold Call Me, Be An Expert is important today in business because your suspects and prospects have become searchers. They search to solve the problems in their lives an they search to find their fun. Your customers are searching and they are searching for expertise.

Experts like Brenden Burchard, Frank Kern, T Harv Eker and other experts publish regularly and have earned millions of dollars from their expertise and celebrity.

Being an expert is all about publishing these days. Think about everyone you know that is perceived as expert, they all publish and publish regularly. The really famous, write books and work hard to get their books on best seller lists, they then leverage the book into all types of media opportunities that increase their perceived expertise and celebrity (I'll talk about the importance of celebrity in a later posts).

But even if you don't want to be a national celebrity and expert, cultivating expertise and local celebrity is important to your business. Experts (real and perceived) get more attention, people are more inclined to listen to their advice, pay attention to their opinions and want them to talk at all types of events. So cultivating expertise and celebrity is important to your business.

And in today's world being an expert could not be easier because publishing could not be easier.

The difficulty of publishing in the past is that the media was limited. Basically, there was television, newspapers, books and not much else. But today there is all types of publishing media including blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and all of the other publishing media and that is why publishing is easy there is a lot more media to publish on and they are generally free to use.

So , if there is more media, the way to become an expert is to publish and to publish in all types of media.

In todays world the best way to be considered an expert is to publish great content on every media. White papers, videos, PowerPoint presentations and webinars posted on a variety of media, focused on your area of expertise that solves your clients problems and indexed by Google, will allow your clients to find you when they are searching for problems.

Social media also increases the perception of expertise. Using Twitter and other social media increases the preception of expertise.

They will find your published work in volume and because you have published great content that solves their issues or tells them how to start to deal with their issues will help them see you as an expert and increase their interest in buying your service.

Filed Under: Inbound Marketing, Marketing Tagged With: Facebook, inbound marketing, Lead generation, social media, Twitter, youtube

What exactly is Social Media Search engine optimization?

December 1, 2011 By Dwight Miller 1 Comment

What exactly is Social Media Search engine optimization?

In instances past, search engine optimization (aka Search engine optimization) and social media would not have already been employed in the same sentence. Soon after all, seo comprises strategies developed to help increase one's look engine rank placement and social media web sites, like Facebook, allow you to hook up along with your buddies or consumers inside a "social" way.

However, recent modifications by each Google and Bing allow it to be crystal clear that these major search engines are looking to social media sites as being a technique to validate the good quality from the content found on websites. Those that make the grade are being rewarded with enhanced research engine rankings… even in "regular" look.

Although you will find some differences in the way Google and Bing are working with information and facts from social media web-sites to adjust their indexes, there are many similarities. The search engines are searching in the "authority" with the account holder and placing a lot more significance on any hyperlinks posted on websites like Twitter and Facebook.

Although the links themselves could be "no follow" hyperlinks, that isn't stopping the search engines like google from adjusting the indexes and growing the lookup engine rank placement for your internet pages they stage to. In reality, some have stated that it appears as though "retweets" will be the new form of linkbuilding.

Each Google and Bing are looking in the frequency that a particular hyperlink is posted (or re-posted) on the social media sites and are also spending consideration to who's doing the posting. In case your links are being posted by an individual or company that is deemed to become an authority from the search engines like google, the associated internet web page may see a boost in its investigation engine ranking.

This improvement validates what several marketing and advertising specialists have thought for more than a year now; Social media's significance is expanding within the eyes from the search engines and this trend will most likely carry on. It's nicely known that Google locations a premium on related content and good quality sites and pages so it need to occur as no shock that they're tracking the quantity of individuals who liked your content properly enough to reveal it with others.

Those that would like to make the most of these new look engine trends are encouraged to create it as uncomplicated as doable for others to share their content or the hyperlinks they contain. Including a "retweet" operate to your web-site or weblog, for instance, can significantly improve the probability that your content material is going to be shared by your guests by way of Twitter.

Filed Under: Marketing

How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me…. Be an Expert

November 11, 2011 By Dwight Miller 6 Comments

How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me, was one of my most popular posts. It seems as if many financial advisors and other service professionals, spend afternoons and evenings dialing for dollars, hoping they can reach someone interested in buying a muni-bond or some other product..

Cold Calling – Blast from my past.

I remember when I was in the insurance business. Every night from 6pm until as late as 10pm, I was cold calling prospects from a cold call list, hoping to talk to someone.

Once in a blue moon, I'd get a live person on the phone, a person that was willing to listen to what I had to say and sometimes I lucked up and that person would actually buy from me.

But I realized the cold calling hope is NOT a business strategy!!

Just think, I was dialing for dollars, but that was 25 years ago and people had land-lines at home and at least I had a chance of talking to someone.

But today th world is vastly different, many people today don't have land lines and they have all kinds of ways to prevent from getting cold calls including the "Do not call list:".

As more and more people move to cells phones and don't have home phones it seems almost ludicrious to spend night after night, interuppting folks dinner or kids bed time, hoping that they you will get someone on the phone and sometimes even get a hit.

A Better Strategy Become an Expert and Attract Prospects to Your

A few years ago, after I lost all of my money in a franchise I bought, I was helping turn a friends business around. He was losing about $100k on a $1.5 million dollar computer business. Things were bad and he didn;t have the tools to fix the problem. I came in to be the GM and help out.

We didn't have a marketing budget to speak of, so we decided to be a expert in the network managed service business. We had to identify the challenges our prospects faced and educate them about how managed services could help fix their challenge and ask them to do business with us because we where the expert in the field.

We converted his business from a hope we find prospects business to a expert service business with more clients than capacity.

We Even Turned OFF the Lead Flow for a while.

Since we had no marketing budget, we decided the best strategy was to create content that helped potential clients understand the advantages to having a managed service contract and paying for the service in advance. Long story short, we became experts.

Beginning of an Inbound Marketing Expert.

That was my introduction to Inbound Marketing. Helping solve customers problems by creating and promoting content. Valuable, interesting content that helps or educates a client about how to fix something or do something better and then making an offer.

That is part of what Inbound Marketing is, creating optimized content, promoting thaqt content on every web channel and tracking the results. That's the gist of Inbound Marketing.

By creating valuable content, when our client looks to solve a probem using a search engine like Google, they find your content everywhere in every format, audio, video qnd text and that multitude of content makes your business look like the expert your are.

So start to think about using Inbound Marketing in your financial practice. Start thinking about how your services can help solve a clients problem, if your an FA, your clients may want to;

Grow their investments with little risk
Protect their savings from inflation and erosion
Save for Kids college

These are just some of the problems and in my next post, I 'll talk more about what I mean and show examples.

So, start thinking about becoming an expert that solves your clients problems, create valuable content and Don't Cold Call Me.

Next post, How to create valuable content, some examples and more..

Filed Under: Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

Automated Lead Management - Inbound & Mobile Marketing

The Time Has Come to Dump Your Old Website

We Can help. Schedule a Free Appointment Today by Clicking HERE or CALL 415-729-4450

Financial Advisors and Other Professional Service Firms Need to Use Inbound Marketing

Traditional Advertising Works Great …

Financial Advisor – How to Use Inbound Marketing to Sell Muni Bonds

\What is Inbound Marketing

Why Inbound Marketing for generating leads.

Using Inbound Marketing to Sell Muni Bonds

How to Customize Your Social Updates for Facebook and Twitter

How to Customize Your Social Updates for Facebook and Twitter

Be an Expert in Your Market.. Know Them, Create a Persona

TO BE AN EXPERT YOU MUST KNOW THEM

CREATE A PERSONA

What exactly is Social Media Search engine optimization?

How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me…. Be an Expert

Cold Calling – Blast from my past.

A Better Strategy Become an Expert and Attract Prospects to Your

Tungle.me

+Dwight Miller

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