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How to Get More Inbound Leads into Your CRM (Part 3)

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So, you’ve decided that generating more inbound leads is a top priority for next year’s marketing plan. And, you’ve also determined that a major focus of your efforts will be expanding your company’s visibility in the search results.

This post is the right one for you. In it, I’ll share some practical tips for getting started with organic search marketing.

Why Search Engines Exist

Some business owners mistakenly think that simply having a website will make their companies “get found’ on the search engines. Still others assume that visibility is only achieved by investing thousands in pay-per-click advertising. Such assumptions are incorrect.

To get your business found online, you must first understand why search engines exist. Let’s start with a few obvious truths. Search engines generally strive to fulfill the following goals:

  1. Create structure in an otherwise unstructured Internet environment
  2. Help searchers find exactly what they’re looking for
  3. Build trust and loyalty with searchers
  4. Earn a profit & satisfy shareholders

By achieving the first goal of structuring web content, search engines are able to present information to users in a more digestible format. In doing so, they can then create long-term synergies with consumers, which enables unique monetization opportunities (through freemium or paid services, subscription models, and advertising placements).

With all of this in mind, how does your company’s online presence help search engines achieve its goals?

The Elements of an Organic Search Strategy

So, how do you help search engines achieve their goals, thereby increasing your own visibility?

Start with a well-structured site – An old car with flat tires and a busted engine won’t take you very far down the road. Likewise, a slow, poorly crafted website won’t serve as a good foundation for your marketing efforts. Invest time to identify which content management systems provide the best mix of back-end functionality without sacrificing front-end user experience. From your standpoint, you want a site that makes it easy to publish content (without having to pay a developer all the time). From the end-user’s perspective, the site should look good on all devices (including smartphones), offer convenient menus and sitemaps, load quickly (aim for one to two seconds), and use logical URL and metadata structures.

Be helpful – What is in your brain that other people can benefit from? You likely spend much of your day educating customers. Unfortunately, a verbal conversation or an email exchange only benefits the intended recipient. By publishing your knowledge online, you’re able to magnify the impact of your expertise. In doing so, you’ll help many people at once – and improve your chances of establishing trust.

Commit to a schedule – Being helpful once is a good start. However, to maximize your online reach, you’ll need to consistently share useful information online. Of course, the more often you produce content, the more online real estate you claim. In addition, you also show search engines that your website is serious about serving its niche. By committing to a content schedule, search engines become more familiar with your site and, in return, are more likely to recommend the content you produce.

Build credibility & awareness – Producing good content is an important first step. But, it will only get you so far. You need someone to vouch for you (other than yourself). Think about the last time you interviewed for a job. You submitted your application, sent your resume, and then went through an interview. Somewhere in this process, the prospective employer likely asked for references. The same is true for your website. Search engines appreciate the effort you’ve made to build a great website and engaging content. However, they need unbiased proof that you’re credible. To foster credibility, look for ways to build organic links to your site. In addition, asking customers to leave online reviews is a worthwhile effort.

Low-Hanging Fruit

If you already have a decent website, building useful content and inbound links might be the best place to start. You can always enhance the look and feel of your site in a future iteration. However, if your website is clunky and inaccessible to your content team, you may be better served by focusing on a makeover.

Either way, look for small victories and stay committed to continuously enhancing your online presence. The search engines – and their users (your future customers) – will thank you.

link to part 2

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.

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7 Ways to Show Your Customers Appreciation

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The holidays are a time of joy and giving, making them the perfect time to show your customers just how much you appreciate them. Spread a little holiday cheer with these ideas.

  1. Send Them Free Money

This is an especially useful way to get people to shop with you if they have been inactive for a while. Send everyone a free $10 or $25 gift card that they can use, without having to spend anything over the amount of the gift card. Let them know it’s because you appreciate their business in the past – and you wanted to give them a little something to say thanks for the holidays. You can do this via mail or email – whichever you feel is most appropriate for your business and customer base.

  1. Offer a Free Gift with Purchase

If you’re in a niche that’s popular over the holiday season and you know customers will be shopping with you to cover your gift-giving needs for others, offer a small free gift with purchase. Or, offer multiple gifts, allowing them to get a larger gift depending on how much they spend. This tells them you appreciate them because you’re willing to give them a little something extra for investing their money with you.

  1. Host an Event for Your Best Customers

It doesn’t have to be a holiday party, but if you can, host an event and invite your most valuable and loyal customers, making sure they know it’s exclusive. If you’re in ecommerce and can’t coordinate with customers who are located all over the country or the world, you could easily host a live webinar event where you provide an exclusive discount and product or service giveaway for attendees.

  1. Provide Value-Added Products or Services

Listen to what your customers are asking for, or think about products and services that complement your own. For instance, if you’re a massage therapist, connect with another local business that offers natural body care products.

  1. Give Referrals

If you’re in the B2B market, offer your customers referrals. Send your leads a personalized letters with a testimonial from you. Then, send a copy of that testimonial to your customer. Arrange for them to meet so you can get the initial exchange going. This shows your clients you really mean business when you say you are focused on helping them.

  1. Loyalty Program? Surprise Everyone with Bonus Points

Much like giving your customers free money, simply load everyone’s loyalty accounts with random amounts of points. Shop Your Way Rewards does this regularly for customers. You can do the same thing rewarding your most loyal customers with higher bonus point values.

  1. Give Charitable Gifts

Reach out to your customers and let them know you’re interested in making a contribution to a charity of their choice in their honor. As an alternative, you can give them a memorable charitable gift. Use a service like Oxfam Gifts to buy gifts in bulk – a grove full of trees, a hive full of bees, a tribe of goats, cows, chickens, or sheep, and name them after your clients.

If you want to take the concept a little further, also offer a surprise for your customer’s birthday, wedding anniversary, or other holidays. Better yet, create your own Customer Appreciation Day to spread the love throughout the year.

 

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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In Conversation With Erin Mathie and Ramon Ray

 

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Ramon Ray from Smart Hustle Magazine and Erin Mathie from Business Made Simple joined forces in a recent YouTube Live event for a candid, informative discussion on “5 Ways to Improve your Business Organization and Increase Sales.” Ray and Mathie discussed some of the challenges all business owners face when it comes to the fundamentals of staying organized.

Ramon Ray: I struggle with organization, Erin. What do you mean by organization when it comes to running a small business?

Erin Mathie: Organization is a process, and there are many different phases of organization. At Business Made Simple, we run a lot of events. If you’ve ever run an event before, you know there are so many moving pieces, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. Often, a customer ends up in a space where they are getting a lot of leads at an event, but because things can be chaotic during the event, they aren’t always following up with those leads.

Ramon Ray: How does one address an undefined process?

Erin Mathie: Looking at processes and defining them into small executable steps is a huge starting point for any business organization. A CRM software platform like Insightly tracks who’s in charge of a project, who’s following up on a lead, and what communication has happened to date is critical.

Ramon Ray: Why do you think it’s so hard for organizations to be organized?

Erin Mathie: A business organization is a kind of a living, breathing organism. It’s always evolving and changing, so we need to make constant adjustments. Even as a one-person business, it is never too early to start figuring out logical processes and start to organize them. If you wait until the growth has already happened, it’s going to come back and bite you hard.

The biggest struggle happens because businesses can grow too fast. Sometimes we think if we can just get in a certain number of leads then all problems would be solved. Or, if we could just close that big sale all problems would be solved. But what really happens is when businesses start to grow and see some success, it starts to clog up their systems. Then suddenly a business owner is realizing that they don’t really have a defined on-boarding process for new clients and things start falling through the cracks.

Ramon Ray: How much does the human dimension come into play in being organized?

Erin Mathie: Sometimes the most difficult hurdle to overcome is trying to figure out the human part. The first piece is to show people what’s in it for them. Employees might ask, “why are you making me track all these calls that I make?” Showing them what’s in it for them when, for example, they can pull up and look at a report that will show them here’s your hottest prospects to call, or here’s the last time you talked to this person. This is a critical first big step.

Ramon Ray: So, you don’t have to be the center point of information if you have a proper organizational plan?

Erin Mathie: Sometimes there’s kind of a double-edged sword where some bosses are thinking this is great, everybody comes to me because I’ve got all the information. The other side of that is that the boss can’t get their own stuff done because they’re constantly interrupted by people knocking on the door. You should really seek out avenues to empower other people or else your business can never grow.

Ramon Ray: Give us some of the tools and best practices you use in your business with clients to help you operate as a more organized company.

I use Insightly CRM, which I love. It’s the CRM platform I recommend most often, especially for service-based businesses. It’s great not only for managing customer relationships, but also for hooking to platforms such as QuickBooks. I love being able to connect to these types of applications and have them tied to one another.

Ramon Ray: Erin, can you provide any tips to prevent process paralysis when implementing processes or when trying to be organized?

Erin Mathie: That’s a fantastic question. I think some people think about developing processes like they’re going to be running a nuclear power plant. What I really recommend is that you put together bigger chunks of your processes and then dive into the details so you can put in all those little pieces on a to-do list.

For example, if you had a task that says ‘set up your expo booth’, but then in the details of that task, you can put in things like ‘here’s how we want the table set up’, and ‘don’t use the yellow tablecloth’, and ‘here’s where you can find the hooks to hang up the banner’. All those specifics can be included more in the details, and they don’t have to be set up as individual tasks that somebody would have to check off a list.

Ramon Ray: Erin,  if a business owner says to you that they definitely want to take some steps to try to be more organized, where can they start on their own for today?

Erin Mathie: Where I would suggest a business owner starts is to look at where the pain points are. If the pain points lie in client nurturing, for example, then think about figuring out a way to do that. Maybe that’s through developing a MailChimp campaign that can demonstrate appreciation without having to take a lot of time. Or if a pain point is event management, plan out exactly what should happen for events, when it should happen, who should do it, and how it should be done–and then test it out. Once that time is freed up, roll that process into the next pain point and start freeing up some more time for you.

Listen to the full conversation between Ramon Ray and Erin Mathie on YouTube.

 

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Are You Leveraging Your CRM Reports?

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Your CRM does a lot for you – manages contacts, manages projects, integrates with a number of other cloud-based services to simplify your workflow. One often overlooked feature is built-in reports. Knowing how to use the options at your disposal to their greatest potential can give your business just the edge it needs.

Custom Reporting: Legacy Reports

If you don’t need a lot of customized reporting tools, the legacy reports are a good place to start. These include configurable reports based on activities and opportunities, and display information in basic graph form. Legacy reports include:

  • Opportunity Category Breakdown Report
  • Reasons for Losing Opportunities Report
  • Opportunity Pipeline Stage Distribution Report
  • Opportunity Funnel Analysis
  • Opportunities by Responsible User Report
  • Opportunities by Organization Report
  • Opportunities by Custom Field Report
  • Total Incoming Opportunities Report
  • Value of Opportunities Won Report
  • Completed Tasks and Events Report

With these reports, you can:

  • Easily locate the number of opportunities each salesperson is creating – making it easier to reward your most active salespeople.
  • Determine which salesperson closed the most deals in the last month
  • Examine reasons why your company is losing business
  • Determine your most valuable clients and see how much they are contributing to your overall revenue
  • Find the most and the least satisfied customers, to reach out to them directly with a highly targeted marketing campaign to breed customer loyalty.
  • See which user(s) completed the most tasks
  • And more…

Custom Reporting: Advanced Reports

You can create your own custom reports using our intuitive drag-and-drop user interface. Start with one of the report templates to save time and keep things organized, and then rely on advanced Boolean logic filters to create reports based on the criteria you designate. You can include summaries on rows of calculations, making it easy to leave notes for anyone else who may be viewing the report.

With a paid plan, you can enable report scheduling and smart alerts – send an alert to the appropriate person if a certain criteria is met, such as an opportunity over $X entering the pipeline.

You can export your reports to Microsoft Excel print hard copies for distribution. Though our advanced reports don’t include graphs yet, they will soon. In the meantime, it’s possible to export the data into other graphing tools, such as Excel or Microsoft BI.

Advanced report options allow you to go beyond what the legacy reports have to offer, so you can share information with management and even your clients, if necessary. When you have the report scheduling feature, you can automatically send reports at regularly scheduled intervals, for easy comparison over time.

Is your business making use of these reports? If so, what have you noticed? It’s easier to keep track of what’s going on in the business overall, and to share information with the employees who need it. If you’re not using these reports, you’re wasting time sorting through the information, or acting without it.

Take a few minutes to explore Insightly’s reporting features, and you may be surprised at what you find. Let us know how you’re making the advanced reports work for you.

 

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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How to Avoid Holiday Mayhem: 5 Tips and Tricks

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Everyone gets frazzled around the holidays and it’s really easy for things to slip through the cracks. Instead of stressing over every last detail and running around unorganized, use these tips to get ahead and save yourself unnecessary stress.

Get Started Early

Spend the months ahead of the holidays doing what you can to be ready for them. Think about end of year reporting, plan your content and other assets for holiday marketing, coordinate client meetings… whatever you can get done ahead of time. Make a plan of action and stick to it. Give yourself and your staff ample time to work on each task a bit at a time, so there’s no risk of falling behind on the tasks that must be done over the course of the regular work day.

Rotate Everyone’s Schedules to Account for Time Off

Even though your office will more than likely be closed for the holidays, it’s likely that employees will also want to take time off before and after Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s to spend time with their family and friends. Obviously, the entire company can’t take the same days off if everything is to run smoothly. Meet with the team in September or October and discuss policies about requesting time off. Make sure there’s a deadline for requests, so you can see who’s taking time off and when, to ensure their normal responsibilities are taken care of while they are away.

When an employee takes time off, ask that they use an autoresponder to alert any clients and provide contact information for someone else on the team who is aware of the account, so if there are any issues that cannot wait until the employee returns, customer service doesn’t suffer.

Prepare Your Customer Service Team Ahead of Time

This is especially important if you’re in the ecommerce business and you’re selling products that are given as gifts for the holidays. Sales will no doubt go up, and as they do, your customer service team may get overwhelmed with requests for assistance with ordering/purchasing, returns and exchanges, gift receipts, billing, and troubleshooting issues. Make sure they are up to date with everything they need to know to quickly and efficiently solve any problems customers may run into. If the customer service team doesn’t have the information they need, they cannot effectively assist customers, which negatively affects their experience. Considering 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day after a bad experience, and customer retention is more cost effective than customer acquisition, a well-prepared support team is essential.

Relax with a Holiday Party

Everyone is subject to stress through the holidays, and work isn’t the only source. Before the office closes for the holidays, invite all the employees and their families to a relaxed, casual, holiday party event. It gives everyone a chance to unwind and bond on a personal level, without the stress of what’s going on in the office. Plus, you can celebrate a job well done in preparation for the time off.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

Managers often feel like they have to do everything – and with the amount of stuff that must get done early to keep stress level down, it’s going to take everyone. Delegate tasks to everyone accordingly, to ensure the job gets done, and no one has too much to do at once.

Most importantly, remember to breathe, take time to relax after work, and get enough sleep. It’s hectic for everyone, and it will be over much faster than it feels like in the heat of a stressful moment.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Join Us on Facebook Live for a Peek Into What’s New for 2017

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Join us for our next Facebook Live event on Thursday, December 15th at 11am, PST. You’ll hear directly from Insightly’s VP of Engineering, Raju Menon, and VP of Product, Maria Thomas. Raju and Maria will share their insights on our major feature releases in 2016 plus the features you can expect to see in the coming year. Follow us on our Insightly Facebook page to receive an alert when we’re streaming live on Tuesday, December 13th. If you can’t join us live, you can come back later watch an archived version on our Facebook page. 

 

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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