Kansas City SEO and SEM

I hope this summer is treating you well! I have a treat for you regarding web lead tracking and email marketing nurturing. In the last two months I’ve been working with interesting software services. One in particular does what every marketer wants; track web campaigns to users’ contact details and streamlines communications through email marketing and lead nurturing. I’m working with a conservative budget, so these solutions are working for a small to medium size company. The final piece I’m working on is tying the phone leads, to the web leads and associating these different buckets at a campaign level, without massaging data and being a spreadsheet jockey. Understand keeping the costs down is essential to staying within budget when building the tracking architecture. If money and time wasn’t an issue, I’d be using Eloqua. The tracking architecture I’m implementing and will be discussing; is still in a testing phase; does not integrate with a CRM using an API and it does not require IT resources to implement. It’s the easy button for lead tracking and nurturing.

Many of my clients use Google Analytics for tracking lead conversions and sales. But what Google Analytics won’t give you is the name of the person submitting their contact details on a per campaign level. Google finds this a violation of privacy and I understand this reasoning. Many times, clients want to know the name of the lead which came in through a pay-per-click campaign so they can nurture the lead. As marketers we know that giving a contextual experience is the difference between acquiring a customer and pissing them off.

I’ve been working with a web lead tracking solution; HubSpot. HubSpot gives you what Google Analytics will not; first name, last name, email, phone number and anything else you want to know tied to a specific campaign. Within minutes you’re able to generate standard and custom fields to create a web form. Once you’re happy with the form, you cut and paste the JavaScript code into your web page and/or blog post and your done. It’s that easy and it works.

Some kicking features about HubSpot:

Once a lead comes in through a form, the lead details are sent to an email or alias. The cool thing; if a lead has a Twitter, Linkedin or any other public social media profiles these profile links are presented in the lead details. Let’s take a moment and think about how this could change your sales experience. Imagine if a sale person could browse a potential customer’ social media profiles before making that sales call? You know the potential client is interested, but now you know they love cats. Mind you, I don’t recommend the sale person disclosing they’ve researched the client’s public social media profiles, but in conversation, the sales representative could mention how much he/she loves cats.

If a lead submits their information and then goes back to your website or blog, you are sent an alert; “Anne Haynes one of your leads is back on the website.” Now you have the creepy factor and can call them right away and answer any questions they might have about your business. I’ve experienced this before with sales people and while I don’t like it, if a lead continues to visit the website, it’s a sign they’re interested. And all this information is tracked in the lead details.

If a lead comes in through one form campaign, you can create lead nurturing campaigns and send automatic emails through timed intervals. This features changes how marketers approach campaigns; sure it’s easy to create a form, cut and paste it into a web page and generate leads through pay-per-click, but managing the experience using automatic emails after a lead shows and interest, this creates a need for communication architectures. And it can become complex. For an example, I will use SEOINC because I use to work there many years ago and they have increased their product offering to include pay-per-click and social media marketing. Now imagine I’m a potential client and I submit my information through the website with a form powered by HubSpot. The SEOINC folks created a nurturing campaign which kicks off an automated email regarding their pay-per-click product offering 20 days after I submit my information the first time. 20 days after the pay-per-click email I receive another automatic email about their social media product offering. It’s all done without you being involved, it happens automatically, so the communication architecture must be designed ahead of time.

HubSpot has API integration with Salesforce and the company will work with you if you have an in house custom CRM solution.

HubSpot features that need some work:

When a lead submits his/her information wrong in a validated field, the user goes to a generic looking validation form. You are not able to apply CSS to the validation form – Yet!

The automatic emails do not have the ability to cut and paste HTML, so the design is limited. However, I’ve been told by my HubSpot consultant this feature is coming out within the next two weeks.

If you’ve built a nurturing program and the lead converts and signs up for other product offers all at once, you must turn off the nurturing program for that lead. This is a process that you want to enforce any way to know your lead to conversion ratio.

Summary:

So far, I really like HubSpot because it’s easy and takes the pain out of reporting. In my opinion, a marketer’s time should be spent optimizing campaigns and not sorting exported spreadsheet data. Don’t get me wrong, I know we need the reporting, but with HubSpot the data doesn’t need cleaning up.

Since I’ve been working with HubSpot there isn’t one person that doesn’t mention SEO to me; critiquing our current ranking with brand only terms, trying to sell the idea of hosting our blog using their blog service. I was raised to know installing blog software on a server gives the search value to the domain where it is housed. I don’t recommend outsourcing your blog using HubSpot. But it’s really good tying contact details to a campaign. There is also a UTM link generator, so you can micro manage your landing page performance and other web activities.

There is more to come as I continue down this process, but know my goal is to tie the phone leads to the web leads and when I get that going on, you will be the first to know!

Are you using a software service that does what HubSpot can do? I’m interested in knowing your solutions

This is an awesome video on how Google’s Ad Auction works and why landing pages, CTR and relevancy are so important!