Company growth is a lot like playing a game of telephone. The larger your group, the more convoluted and tangled the original story gets. And the more your company grows (both in revenue and people), the more disconnected teams become, making it harder to collaborate cross-functionally. That said, growth doesn’t just touch your headcount or ROI, it impacts your customer experience too.

This article will define sales and marketing alignment and illustrate how (and why) it’s important. Plus, we’ll include tips and tricks to help you successfully align your sales and marketing teams — or at least corral them into a similar trajectory, making both marketing and sales strategies more effective and efficient.

What is sales and marketing alignment?

Today’s customer has high expectations — of design, products, services, and overall experience— and for good reason too. They have to wade through countless options, products, and services to find the right one that best fits their wants and needs. So it makes sense for them to maintain a rigid sense of discernibility and heavily weigh the pros and cons of companies they choose to do business with.

For companies large and small, the thought of this can be utterly daunting. After all, there’s only so much control you can have.

But that’s where sales and marketing alignment comes into play.

For all intents and purposes, sales and marketing alignment can be loosely defined as when marketing and sales teams share goals and work together to generate revenue.

While marketing and sales will still have distinct roles, aligning around the same goal ensures marketing and sales are communicating, guiding each other’s strategy and ultimately being more efficient.

Why is sales and marketing alignment important?

Aside from storing grain or water, silos aren’t good for much. Ultimately, silos prevent your sales and marketing teams from working together to achieve common goals — i.e. growing company revenue.

However, on a smaller scale, silos not only bottleneck workflows, but it hampers sales cycles, strategic goals become muddy, and sales teams aren’t able to make the most of the marketing leads, so your marketing team’s efforts get passed by the wayside and are underutilized.

At this point, it probably goes without saying that none of this is ideal.

Sales and marketing alignment helps prevent this. 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth, and 90% agree that when initiatives and messaging are aligned the customer experience is improved.

What are some other benefits of sales and marketing alignment?

• Better equipped sales teams — When your sales and marketing teams are truly aligned and chatting regularly, your sales reps will be better prepared with the marketing materials they need to get through to leads.
• Clearer understanding of your customers — Another benefit of alignment is that sales can give regular feedback about what problems their leads are looking to solve. This will give your marketing a team a better understanding of your customers and will lead to more specific and effective buyer personas.
• Improved employee engagement — When teams are aligned and communicating, people feel heard. Both your sales and marketing employees will know your company is listening to their expertise and values them, which leads to overall improved employee engagement and satisfaction.
• Less frustration all around — Teams who talk to each other will eventually figure out a good way to communicate and work together — decreasing frustrations, silos, and misunderstandings.
• More sales and faster sales — And of course, when your sales and marketing teams are operating efficiently together, you’ll be making more sales and doing so faster. That’s the number one benefit of a well-equipped sales team.

To align your sales and marketing teams, there are a few small steps you need to take and processes worth implementing to ensure both teams are on the same page and working effectively.

Sales alignment = Aligned marketing

We know that there are only so many hours in a day, so we’re going to give it to you straight: transparent and consistent communication is the key to ensuring a successful sales and inbound marketing alignment strategy.

White it seems fairly simple, sales and marketing alignment is still something many companies struggle to achieve. Without proper resources (i.e., manpower), clearly defined roles, and a clearly defined strategy for sales and marketing, it can be hard to get into a properly aligned groove.

But the cost of misalignment is too critical to ignore. When your sales and marketing teams aren’t working well together, you run the risk of missing out on leads, not knowing your customer base, slowing down your sales velocity, and burning out your teams.

That said, there are a few foundational steps necessary to help facilitate effective communication and boost alignment. Consider these first three points as your starting blocks. Once sales and marketing are aligned on the following, you can get started on the nitty-gritty.

Start by aligning the following:

• Sales and marketing goals — Sales and marketing have similar goals. However, the difference lies within the time it takes to achieve these goals. For example, sales teams are driven by meeting a monthly (or quarterly) quota, which requires fast-paced flexibility and readiness at a moment’s notice. Marketing goals are less frenetic in nature. They wind up being more long-term and methodical in comparison to their sales counterparts. To achieve a happy medium between sales and marketing, you’ll want to identify overlap in goals and make specific goals surrounding that overlap to ensure success.
• Sales and marketing roles — Sales and marketing cannot be siloed into their roles: there has to be common ground between the two departments. Sales need to stretch and flex the leads that marketing supplies. Whereas marketing needs to equip sales with easy-to-use resources or content collateral that empowers them to push through quotas quickly and easily.
• Software and process crossover — Different processes and software work better for sales, and the same goes for marketing. Where you can, bridge the gap between the two by using the same processes and technology.
• Determine the lead qualification and follow-up process — Marketing and sales should have a clearly defined process for how marketing-produced leads are qualified and distributed to the sales team to be nurtured and converted. Sales and marketing managers should agree on lead scoring criteria and designate which sales reps are responsible for following up with marketing-generated leads. Formalizing this in a written service level agreement (SLA) will help keep both teams aligned.
• Business segments and personas — Having defined buyer personas and target segments is critical to sales alignment. By identifying which industries, job titles, and demographics make up your target market, your marketing team will know what content to create, and your sales team will know how to organize their teams and develop email tracks to reach those segments.

Tips and tricks to successfully align sales and marketing

Now that we’ve tackled the high-level information needed to help you get the ball rolling let’s dive into the details.

1. Have the initial conversation — This is the moment to establish and chat about your common ground, inbound marketing goals, and so forth. Be sure to lay everything out on the table, identify overlap, identify potential weak spots, and establish processes to help prevent those weak spots from becoming a problem.
2. Set up a recurring, weekly alignment meeting — Regardless of how much time you and your coworkers take to conduct the meeting, use this time to talk about hiccups, project progress, and other updates. Doing so helps you and other team members reduce the chances of duplicating work and ensures you all stay on the same page.
3. Attend each other’s key meetings — The more informed, the better. It might be tedious and seem unimportant, but it can provide insight into future projects and reinforce the bond between teams.
4. Implement a content request process — Sales enablement content is where marketing and sales wind up overlapping the most. A content request and production process can help ensure goals are met, cut down on duplicate work, and reduce the workload on creative teams, so everyone wins.
5. Build and leverage templates — To prevent bottlenecks from popping up, create pre-designed and customizable templates for sales or marketing to utilize. That way, both sales, and marketing can keep cranking away at larger goals and projects — without dropping the ball on important yet small day-to-day tasks.
6. Organize resources in one location — Store sales enablement assets in one easy-to-find location. Assets can range from templates, one-pagers, and other sales collateral, to brand guidelines and locked images.
7. Create a content funnel — In an ideal world, you should be able to connect the dots between multiple pieces of content and create a content funnel. When aligning inbound marketing efforts and sales goals, be sure you are creating content for every stage of the funnel that tells a consistent story that develops as a lead moves through the funnel.
8. Keep communication channels open — As time goes on, sales and marketing alignment will need to evolve and grow to reflect the goals of your company. Be sure to maintain an open line of communication between departments to promote and facilitate the growth needed to lock in maximum success.

The impact of sales enablement on content — and vice versa

At this point, you’ve probably noticed that content is an overarching theme within this article. For sales and marketing alignment to be effective in practice (and not just theory), your content production also needs to be in alignment, on-brand, and consistent as well.

After all, content is a powerful tool for both sales and marketing teams. But unfortunately, it’s easy for one team (be it sales or marketing) to dictate what content gets produced when it gets completed, and how it gets done. Instead of permitting this to happen, banish content production and sales enablement bottlenecks with Marq. Marq is an easy-to-use brand enablement platform that empowers anyone to create on-brand content. In turn, sales teams can quickly create the sales enablement content they need to close deals, while your creative team can focus on large-scale inbound marketing efforts. So, everyone wins.

When used correctly, Facebook advertising can be an incredibly effective tool to boost sales. But before you can expect people to whip out their credit cards and buy out your inventory, you need to establish brand affinity. In this post, we’ll go over just a few of the best ways you can maintain your current following and attract new customers.

Related: 5 ways to grow your email marketing list with Facebook

1. Create captivating, on-brand creative

One of the most important tasks of a successful Facebook advertising campaign is to create ads that will catch the eye of target consumers—which can be difficult to achieve since there’s so much competition on the platform. Using alluring images and bright colors in your ads is a good start, but be careful. If you have 20 advertisements that all use different styles and colors, it’s unlikely that new customers will gain any familiarity with your brand. Instead, stick with brand colors whenever possible and always include your logo in the ad. You should also use the same principal font that’s on your site, and never use more than two fonts in one ad.

2. Use targeting filters and “Lookalike audiences” to find new fans

While remarketing campaigns are like shooting a fish in a barrel, finding new consumers who will have a genuine interest in your brand is a far more challenging task. Luckily, Facebook has a variety of unique targeting features that can help you refine your audience. Consider the demographics, behaviors and interests of your ideal customer and use that information to narrow your selection. For example, if you own a bridal shop and want to increase your wedding dress sales, you could target people who recently became engaged.

Facebook also has a unique feature called Lookalike audiences. With this tool, you can import a list of existing customers, and the platform’s algorithm will automatically identify new consumers who are likely to have an interest in your products or services. This can be an incredibly valuable tool for new brands looking to grow their fan base.

3. Establish a brand voice—and stick with it

To build strong brand affinity on Facebook, use ad copy that aligns with your unique brand voice. For example, if you own a mortgage firm and your brand voice is authoritative and professorial, then you don’t want to run ads that are filled with over-the-top puns and jokes. It’s also important to be consistent with your terminology. If your e-commerce company refers to buy-one-get-one-free sales as “BOGO,” this should be a consistent term in all your ads. If you have more than one person writing copy for your Facebook ads, create a style guide with tips and rules to follow.

When crafting your brand-consistent copy, be sure to write in a way that appeals to your target audience. Alongside the ad’s image or video, copy and headlines are important deciding factors in whether the consumer clicks your ad.

4. Advertise free content, too

Instead of focusing exclusively on advertisements that sell your products and services, promote free content that will spark an interest in your brand and help consumers see you as an industry authority. This is particularly wise when you’re marketing to new leads who’ve never heard of your company before. You want to offer some informative content that will warm up your leads—such as a free guide, video, blog post or infographic. Once the consumer has clicked through to your site, you can move them further down your marketing funnel by entering them into retargeting ads for other content offers or products.

Ready to make a social splash? Create an updated Facebook cover.

A friend of mine says she could not help but be swayed by what people were saying about the importance of social media for increasing sales. Some people kept rhapsodizing about how they were able to achieve rocket sales by establishing brand recognition and strengthening their brand’s presence in social networking sites.

So this friend opened an account on Facebook, created a blog, squeezed in a post here and there, and sent out newsletters to introduce her product—and generated no significant increase in sales at all. Why?

Related: 7 serious social media mistakes brands still make

The truth about the use of social networking sites

My own research shows that I should not rely on luck to sell my brand—not even when I use social networking sites. I cannot expect mere presence in social networking sites to work magic and automatically land me great sales.

How can I successfully market my brand in social media? How can I increase customer conversion rate?

I looked into case studies and marketing research. I read up on what the technical marketing experts had to say. Here’s what I found.

Put your brand where your target market is

Alex Chris is an author and Digital Marketing Consultant. He is an expert in Internet Marketing and SEO. He says that based on updated surveys, Facebook dominates the social media scene today. A massive 1.79 billion people actively use the site monthly.

Alex says that you have put your brand where your target market is. With 60% of people on the Internet using Facebook, there is no greater tool to promote your brand, find new customers and gain a loyal following.

He suggests that you create an optimized Facebook page, add friends to your personal Facebook page, and get as many “likes” as you can. He suggests putting a “like” box in your website. You have to put this “like” box in a conspicuous, readily accessible spot.

Create relevant content

Alex and a great number of other marketing specialists, say that it is not enough to create social presence. You have to create high-quality content for your followers. If you are able to do this effectively, you have a greater chance of turning your followers into constant website visitors, and eventually to customers.

Connect with your audience before selling your product

Kristen Matthews is a creative digital strategist. As an influencer marketing consultant, she has worked on a variety of case studies with innovative brands.

A Huggies case study highlights the need to create not just any content, but one that emotionally connects to your target market—even before you push your brand.

Speak, listen & respond to your audience

Brittany Berger heads the Content & PR Division of Mention.com. She says that when you send out newsletters as part of your marketing campaign, you speak directly to your target market.

Make your audience feel that you are listening to them. You create positive vibes when you respond as soon as you can to any queries or points that they want to clarify.

Do not be too promotional

When I create posts, I am representing a vision, specific objectives, and explicit principles. I am also creating awareness and recognition of my business brand.

I am not simply selling. I am informing and educating my audience.

If I become too promotional and focus exclusively on trying to sell my brand, people may see my posts as self-serving. I may lose my audience.

Online entrepreneur, writer, and founder of UpFuel.com Chris Guthrie agrees that you have to find the right blend of marketing and educational values. The right mix provides true value for your customers. It will also give you the opportunity to sell your brand.

Cater to your audience

I have a website on social media. I have a responsibility to my followers. I have to come up with content that has to do with my particular niche. I have to create posts that are engaging and useful to my audience.

If I want to maintain a loyal following, I have to go out of my way to share relevant posts in a variety of interesting ways that include written articles, videos, info graphics, images, and charts.

I want my followers to feel that they are important to me. If I send out e-mail, I have to respond to queries as soon as possible.

If I do not think my content through and create posts that do not offer anything substantial, I may end up hurting my business reputation instead of helping spark brand awareness.

In a nutshell: what to do

• To sell a product or service to people, build a strong social presence.
• Elicit interest. Build trust.
• Provide appealing and relevant content.
• Use storytelling effectively.
• Find out your audience needs and wants. Tell your story based on these.

When you are able to do these, you will be able to generate more traffic to your website. You will be able to create a bigger following. And you will be able to enjoy a higher conversion rate.

Ready to drive more leads with social media? Grab a copy of our free eBook: How to adapt your brand to social media

It’s been more than 10 years since eBooks became a bread-and-butter strategy for generating leads. So why isn’t every business making eBooks today? I’d wager that it’s because they don’t know how easy they are to make.

If you haven’t made a branded eBook before or in a long time, I wanted to share 9 reasons why you should seriously consider creating more eBooks for your business.

But first, let’s get some context.

In the marketing sense, eBooks (or electronic books) are informative, text-based documents presented in a digital format. They most often take the form of a PDF with 10 to 20 pages and resemble highly detailed blog posts.

EBooks burst onto the marketing scene in the early 2000s. Unlike major publishers who converted traditional books into digital formats to increase book sales, marketers had the idea to offer free eBooks in exchange for contact information. A new lead-gen tactic was born.

The secret sauce behind eBooks has everything to do with the marketer offering something of true value to the customer before the sales pitch or call-to-action. It’s like Costco’s buffet of free samples, or a 30-day free trial of Netflix.

In short, consumers crave value. If you want their business and their loyalty, you have to prove your value before they buy. So the question is, out of the panoply of digital marketing tactics, why should you invest your time and resources into eBooks?

Without further ado, here are 9 reasons why you should create more eBooks for your business.

1. Expand your upper-funnel with high-quality leads

EBooks are perfect for increasing the volume and quality of leads. Why? People are more willing to give up their contact info when they get something valuable in return. And if you’ve written it wisely, your eBook will also teach them how your product or service solves their pain point.

2. Increase your credibility

Consumers are constantly comparing you to the competition. Just like a best-selling author, multiple eBooks make you look like the thought leader in your field. And, as you write more eBooks, you’ll be forced to research and think critically, making you even more of an expert.

3. Return on your investment

In relation to the value you get out of them, eBooks are very easy to make—especially if you start with an eBook template. And once they are on your website, they can generate leads forever. Unlike other forms of content marketing like social media and most blog posts, eBooks retain their value long after they’re published.

4. If you have a blog, the hardest part is already over

Figuring out a subject for an eBook can be frustrating, but there’s an easy trick to it. Start with your most popular blog post, then dive deeper and add more detail to it. Or, consolidate a handful of similar blog posts into a comprehensive guide. There are lots of ways to repurpose and update your content for an eBook-reading audience.

5. Give your branding a boost

Most people won’t hesitate to read a 10-page eBook if it’s on a topic they already care about. This interest represents a perfect opportunity for you to give them a 5-minute sermon on your brand doctrine. This might not lead to a purchase straight away, but it plants an acorn of awareness that you can nurture with future marketing efforts.

6. Stand out from the crowd

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, your competitors are probably not writing eBooks, which means you can tap into that audience with first-mover advantages. It’s an open door leading to more market share. Beat them to it.

7. Engage your target audience

You already have their email. An eBook offers the perfect opportunity to start a conversation and get feedback. For example, you could create a survey and write an eBook about your discoveries and insights from the results. You could also interview current customers and quote them in the eBook.

8. Easily measure success

When each eBook is optimized with call-to-action links and has its own landing page, it’s easy to measure the impact on your business. Since content marketing ROI can often be hard to pin down, this can provide a valuable metric of success.

9. Making an eBook is easier than it sounds

If you have a blog and a good design tool, you are well on your way to making an eBook. Since people have short attention spans, err on the side of less text per page and use lots of great imagery to convey your message. Unsplash is a great place to find free images to fill out your pages.

Now that you know why it’s important to create more eBooks, it’s time to get started. Dive into the template selection in Lucidpress to get a head-start on your next lead-generating masterpiece.

Try Lucidpress today to create professional, compelling eBooks for your brand—no expert knowledge required.

Creating an ebook—especially for the purpose of generating leads—can be a critical marketing technique for your business. If you’re not a designer, this can be a truly daunting task. After all, not only do you have to create the content, you have to design the layout, choose fonts & color schemes, and tweak orientation.

Fortunately, it’s possible to create a professional and effective ebook, even without expert design skills. This can be done with the help of free ebook templates. Not sure where to begin your search? We’ve compiled five of our finest ebook templates which you can explore below.

Would you rather go straight to the source? Head over to our gallery of free ebook templates to see all your options.

1. Marketeer Business ebook

If you’d like to take a traditional approach, this business ebook template geared toward marketing is your best bet. With a traditional vertical design, and a 10-page pre-made layout, this template can be used to promote your products & services or engage your customers.

There’s no reason your business ebook needs to be boring. In fact, the inclusion of images on each page makes it easy to spice up the content. You can easily use stock images or upload your own. What more, you can test out different fonts & layouts in the easy-to-use Lucidpress editor.

Click on the image to see this template.

2. Boutique Lookbook

For creative businesses—including boutiques and salons—it’s important to bring a unique touch to each piece of content you create. This extends to ebooks, and it can be easily achieved with the Boutique Lookbook.

With a muted color scheme and full-feature image pages, you can use this template to create a lookbook, product catalog or seasonal spread. The vertical design makes it well-suited to any device: smartphones, tablets and e-readers. In addition, the bold black text against the light-colored background makes it easy to read.

Click on the image to see this template.

3. Colorblock Creative ebook

A grid-based layout is perfect for a variety of industries including architecture, photography and consulting. Even better, this modular layout means you can create a truly unique design. You don’t like how the blocks are laid out? No problem—with the Lucidpress editor, you can easily ‘snap’ each block into a new position.

Additionally, the use of elegant font styles, as well as a minimal color scheme, makes this ebook template easy on the eyes. The pops of blue color on each page also add a unique element without cluttering the layout.

Click on the image to see this template.

4. Lead Magnet ebook

Even Lucidpress (a company with its very own talented designers) uses templates to create quick & easy ebooks, one-pagers and more. In fact, this is the very template we use on much of our in-house content.

The gray & green color scheme can be changed to fit any brand. However, be sure to pick contrasting colors to ensure your content is legible to readers. You can even personalize each page; all contain a header & footer with a placeholder for company name, website and phone number.

Click on the image to see this template.

5. Global Photography ebook

A horizontally designed template can be love-it or hate-it for many readers. However, this particular template is great for immersive photography or other media-heavy topics.

You can create beautiful collages and even split your ebook into different sections. With 20 pre-made pages, you have plenty of space to feature your content. And, with the use of white space, you won’t have to worry about cluttering the pages or overstimulating your readers.

Click on the image to see this template.

Using ebooks to promote your business and attract new leads can be incredibly effective. However, the quality of that ebook will play a large role. Fortunately, even non-professionals can create truly stunning designs & layouts.

With the help of Lucidpress’s design software, you can create beautiful templates that rival even InDesign and Photoshop creations. You can then publish or save your ebook as a webpage, PDF, JPG and more. If you’re in need of some more inspiration, be sure to check out more ebook templates & layouts here.

Ready to wow your marketing leads with beautifully designed ebooks? Lucidpress will help your brand send the right message.

Regardless of your industry, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to gain and keep an audience’s attention online. You have mere seconds to capture their interest, so it’s critical that you create engaging content.

While we all understand the value of content marketing, how you develop your content is just as important as what you actually put out there. Providing consistent, interesting content will boost traffic, which will increase brand recognition, engagement and (eventually) sales.

But, how do you provide engaging content in a world where everyone is fighting for the attention of the consumer? Answer: Include visual assets in your content strategy. The human brain processes visual information quickly, and people remember more of what they see than what they read.

What is visual content?

Visual content is any piece of content that incorporates visuals or is primarily image-based. Visual content examples include video, infographics, photos, charts and GIFs.

Why create visual content?

We often say not to judge a book by its cover, but our brains are hardwired to do just that. It’s the reason why we ‘eat with our eyes’—we like when things look nice. The visuals that accompany your content are what viewers will see first, whether that content is an advertisement, the packaging of your products, your business card, a social media post or anything in between. Thus, these visuals are the first impression potential customers will get of your brand, and they’ll use them to decide whether your brand appeals to them or not.

To illustrate just how effective visuals are in attracting visitors, consider these statistics:

• In 2016, over 60% of B2B marketers and small businesses planned to increase investments in video marketing strategies. (CMI)
• On average, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without. (HubSpot)
• On average, Facebook posts with images receive 2.3x more engagement than posts without. (BuzzSumo)

Point is, visual design leaves an impression on visitors. You must learn how to use them wisely.

Beyond first impressions, the importance of visual stimulation doesn’t diminish. Once the eyes aren’t engaged anymore, the brain knows it’s time to move on. Digital marketers pay close attention to engagement metrics because they show how many consumers were driven to react or interact with the content. Of all the possible customers that were reached, those that engaged with the content were the ones that stayed from beginning to end. Visually stimulating content helps engagement because it compels users to continue watching, reading or experiencing the content.

Additionally, visually exciting content is much more memorable. When someone is stimulated with pleasing, compelling visuals, the brain has a much easier time paying attention and remembering the information it processes. You may encounter an online lead who doesn’t need your product or service yet, but in the future, they will. By visually stimulating them during their interactions with your brand, they’ll be more likely to recall you when the information is relevant. This also makes visually pleasing content more shareable, because the longer someone can recall it, the higher the likelihood of finding it relevant to a friend or family member.

How to make visually stimulating content

Visual stimulation has long been a primary concern for marketers. If the eyes are bored and unstimulated, then the brain will tug the viewer’s attention to something else. In the digital age, where consumers are exposed to several different brands and messages all at once, that “something else” is likely going to be a competing brand’s content. In other words, if your visuals don’t provide high levels of stimulation, then your online leads will be more likely to defect to a competitor.

All these reasons make a compelling argument for the relationship between visual stimulation and client retention, which might’ve started the wheels turning about how you can produce more visually stimulating content. Before those wheels drive you in the wrong direction, it’s important to look at how you should improve your visual content.

• Quality is paramount: As already mentioned, quality is a huge indicator for your brand. In your quest for more visually exciting content, pay close attention to the images and other visuals you use. Visuals are great, but bad or low-resolution visuals are not.

Source: Contemporary Communications

• Relevance follows quality: Like avoiding bad or low-quality images, you want to avoid visuals that aren’t relevant to the information being provided. In other words, don’t include visuals for the sake of adding visuals. (See: cats.) They should make sense and pertain to the content in question.
• Cover is crucial: We already know that people judge a book by its cover. Your initial visual should be the most compelling because users only spend a few seconds on a webpage before making the decision to stay or go.
• Over-stimulation is real: If there’s too much going on with too many visuals, the brain won’t be able to accurately process it all. Think of it like an action movie: while there are scenes with explosions, lasers and car chases, there are also slow scenes to develop the plot and its characters. Why? Because if the whole movie were action, we’d be overloaded and our brains would mentally withdraw us from the experience.
• Visuals carry the eye: Researchers have been studying the way the eye moves across a page for decades. By understanding eye tracking, marketers can ensure that the viewer’s eyes move logically across the page to pick up all the vital information. Images are one way to influence how someone’s eyes scan a page. We’re naturally drawn to images, so by placing them strategically, you can control where the eyes travel.

Types of visual content

In this post, let’s discuss how visual content like infographics and video can encourage your visitors to convert.

1. Create impact with the right typography

Unlike someone reading a book, visitors on a website don’t consume content from left to right then go down to the next line. In fact, virtually nothing happens in progression. Visitors will either go straight to what they need, or they’ll stop in their tracks if something more interesting catches their eye—like a 30% discount on another brand of detergent, for example.

Today’s designers are using typography to catch and keep visitors’ attention. The size, shape and placement of different fonts will enhance your message, and you can direct the focus where you want it most.

Consider the bold typography on this webpage. The cursive font complements the typewriter font, giving the site a vintage, personal feel. The use of color to emphasize certain words attracts the eye and sets a positive tone.

Source: Intechnic

2. Present data visually with infographics

Would you rather read through a bulky PDF filled with stats and long-winded sentences, or a colorful infographic which uses simple icons and text to display information? The choice is pretty obvious. Including a well-designed infographic in your blog post or webpage will persuade people to pause and see what you have to say.

But does it increase conversion? Here’s some compelling evidence:

• Images increase memory retention. People who hear information will only remember 10% of it three days later. But, if the information is paired with an image, they’re likely to remember 65% of it in the same timeframe. People will have an easier time reading and remembering an infographic detailing the health benefits of bananas than they would three paragraphs of text. And the more time visitors spend with your content, the more likely they are to convert.
• More shares lead to more exposure. According to NN Group, infographics are shared and liked on social media 3x more than any other type of content. Since people are more likely to share a post with an infographic, it helps you reach more people on social media faster.

3. Incorporate video

It’s estimated that adding video to a marketing email can improve click-through rates by a whopping 200-300%. Need more proof? Additional research indicates that 73% of adults in the U.S. are more likely to purchase a product or service after watching a video that explains what it is.

Videos can be used to evoke emotion, explain how your product or service works, or introduce your company. It helps potential customers put a face to your name, which makes your company more relatable. The keys are to keep it under 2 minutes (even 30 seconds might be ideal for certain social channels), optimize it for mobile, and ask a question or tease the content in the caption.

4. Create a gifographic

Speaking of using video, you can also upgrade a static infographic by incorporating animation. Gifographics are still relatively new, which means your content will stand out. While some marketers worry that gifographics might be difficult to make, it’s worth the effort to present your information in a way that’s more engaging and dynamic.

5. Use quality photos with text overlays

Using compelling photography is a strategy that should always be in your back pocket as a marketer. Images make content more interesting, and it’s easy to overlay a quote if you have a quality image to start with. Photos with quotes or callouts are super shareable and can gain traction on social media very quickly.

Using high-quality images is obviously important if you’re creating campaigns for Instagram, but it’s also effective on Twitter. Tweets with photos are 150% more likely to be retweeted than those without pictures. If you’re concerned about your ability to create shareable pictures on your own, don’t worry. Plenty of companies like Lucidpress have templates you can use to create clear, engaging visuals for your next post or status update.

6. Incorporate comics or memes

If you’re looking to bring a little humor into your marketing strategy, creating a comic or meme is one of the best ways to do it. Memes—like those tweeted by restaurant chain Denny’s—offer excellent social engagement if you do it right. Watch out, because you’ll have to take care to not overstep your brand. Comics are also easily recognizable. If humor isn’t part of your brand voice, comic-style fonts and formats lend themselves to a more lighthearted vibe and make it easier to explain complex products or topics.

7. Present information in a tool

Making content interactive is another way to engage with potential customers while demonstrating the value of your product or service. This runs the gamut from tools that help readers figure out which streaming services they want to bandwidth speed-test calculators.

The benefits here are two-fold: you can garner a lot of traffic on the main tool page itself, and you can also include smaller widget versions of the tool on other pages to inspire readers to act. Clickable graphics that link to your tool can also grab the attention of readers who are scanning another article or blog.

8. Develop a quiz or checklist

As a marketer, your job is to convert leads into sales. Use a visual quiz or checklist to help prospective customers figure out what they already have, which services they need, and how your product can get them to the next step.

You can also use interactive graphics to gather email addresses and create custom ad targeting. For example, if someone takes a home security quiz, they’ll likely be interested in follow-up information about how they can fill in the gaps to keep their family safe. Then you can provide that info and, eventually, lead them to a sale for a product to meet that need.

9. Go back to basics with charts and graphs

Charts and graphs are a quick and simple way to visualize information. They make complex information very easy to understand and are regularly shared because it saves other people the effort of creating a graphic to explain the original concept or statistic. Just make sure you don’t sacrifice clarity for style. If your reader is short on time, clear and direct charts are often the best way to go.

10. Leverage screenshots

If using screenshots in your content sounds easy, that’s because it is. Include screenshots to show client testimonials, create step-by-step tutorials, or introduce a new feature in your product. Screenshots provide clear context if you’re talking about something that people can customize (like a toolbar), making your point easier to understand.

11. Try flowcharts

A lot of online content deals with complex and sometimes confusing processes. In those cases, try simplifying concepts with a flowchart. Breaking down an idea will give your readers insight into the bigger picture—and where they fit into it. Don’t be intimidated by building a flowchart on your own. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you create clear, customized charts to take your ideas from start to finish.

Key takeaway

To keep up with other brands, it’s imperative to incorporate visual design into your marketing strategy. The key is to do it purposefully so that your content stands out from the rest. If done well, we’re confident you’ll see a great return on your efforts.

Okay, so you’ve recently made the conscious decision to focus more of your energy on creating content with the hope of collecting more leads.

As an avid devourer of content yourself, you’ve seen a ton of other brands leverage content to generate massive amounts of buzz for their companies.

You’ve heard the success stories and statistics. You know content marketing can drive in 3x as many leads as traditional marketing—and it costs businesses 62% less than traditional methods, too.

Related: 5 myths that devalue your content marketing strategy

So, you decide to give it a shot. You spend hours creating a number of insightful and informative blog posts that you know your target audience will find valuable. You post them on your site, sit back, and wait for the new customers to start rolling in.

But… nothing happens. Those blog posts? Nobody’s reading them. Or—and this might sting even worse—people are reading them, but it hasn’t made a lick of difference to the size of your customer base.

In either case, it can be incredibly disheartening to realize your efforts haven’t paid off as well as you thought they would. On top of that, figuring out where you went wrong can be rather difficult, which may lead you to throw in the towel on your content marketing initiatives before they even get off the ground.

Before you throw your hands up in resignation, though, let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons many content marketing campaigns fall short of their intended goals.

4 content marketing mistakes that may be costing you leads

Before we dive in, let’s admit that the true list of reasons a given content marketing campaign could fail is inexhaustible. Because so much goes into content marketing, Murphy’s Law can rear its ugly head at almost any given time, for many different reasons.

For our purposes, though, we’re going to discuss some of the overarching mistakes and problems that could sabotage your content marketing campaign before you even get started.

Not focusing on your true purpose

Presumably, your goal is to generate more leads (and eventually more sales) by publishing intriguing and informative content for your audience to devour.

But have you really thought about how creating such content will actually lead more people to purchase your product?

Source: 87 seconds

The only thing worse than seeing no increase in your visitor count is seeing an increase in your visitor count but no increase in your sales numbers.

As you begin creating content, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that your purpose is to create awesome content that leads your readers toward conversion. It can be easy to slip into a routine of churning out pieces of content that, while interesting and informative, simply don’t do anything to move your readers further along the buyer’s journey.

Solution:

Ask yourself the following question before you begin creating any piece of content:

How will this content benefit my reader and bring them closer to conversion?

It’s essential to keep in mind that content is not your product; it’s part of your marketing plan. [] While the content you create absolutely should provide value to readers, it should also provoke them to take action and engage further with your brand.

For individual pieces of content, you might aim to get your audience to sign up for a mailing list, follow your brand on social media, or share the article they’ve just read. Depending on the context, you might ask them to sign up for a demo of your product. While such calls-to-action are typically found at the end of a piece of content, they can also be placed within the content as appropriate.

Over a longer series of content, your goal is to build your readers’ understanding and curiosity about your brand and the services you provide. As this article from Copyblogger points out, you can use content to create “open loops” in your readers’ minds that essentially keep them wanting more—meaning they’ll look for ways to engage with your brand that ultimately may involve making a purchase.

Always remember that your main goal is to have them come away from your content closer to converting than they were before they read it.

Writing for a mass audience

As the old saying goes:

“If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one.”

Unfortunately, when getting started with your content initiatives, it’s tempting to create content that you believe will appeal to your entire consumer base at once. In doing so, you end up creating content that is either:

• So general that it doesn’t provide value to any individual audience members
• So packed with information that it completely overwhelms your audience

In either case, the result will almost certainly be the same: your potential customers will bounce from your content without taking the action you hoped they would.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, lovingly recreated in Lucidpress

Solution:

First things first, make sure you’ve developed a variety of personas to target. Find out as much as you can about the people who belong to these segments: their demographic and geographic data, their personality types, and their actions and behaviors as consumers.

Once you’ve defined and developed a number of customer personas, you can begin planning content intended for each of them (rather than using a “one-size-fits-all” approach).

While this means you’ll be creating more pieces of content, you’ll ensure each piece of content will resonate with its intended audience.

You can make sure the right content gets in front of the right person in a few ways:

• Categorizing posts on your blog by topic
• Implementing a search function on your site
• Allowing mailing list subscribers to choose which content they receive in your newsletter

Focusing on one content format

Typically, when most people hear the phrase “content marketing,” they automatically think about blogs.

But there are many, many more types of content out there for you to choose from.

Source: iPullRank, lovingly recreated in Lucidpress

Content marketing is the act of using content to market your brand. With that in mind, the following are just a handful of content types that you can leverage for marketing purposes:

• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Social media posts (see templates)
• eBooks (see templates)
• Infographics (see templates)

Simply put, sticking to one type of content is a good way to bore your audience. No matter how valuable your blog posts may be, your readers will likely get tired of them at some point if you don’t change things up a bit.

Solution:

Your first order of business is to determine which formats will best engage your audience.

Some individuals devour podcasts on a daily basis during their morning commute, while others would rather read an eBook while relaxing on their couch at night. Still others might not have the time to devote to these ventures and would prefer to get quick-hitting information via infographic.

As you do when figuring out what your audience wants to know, it’s also important to determine how they want to receive this information.

Even though you’re going to create content in a variety of formats, that doesn’t mean you need to create completely new content for each. In other words, you can repurpose content you’ve previously created and present it through a different format.

You’ll definitely want to tweak the content so it fits its new platform, but generally speaking, the meat of the content will remain the same. For example, when repurposing a blog post into an infographic, you’d typically include only the hard-hitting facts and statistics mentioned in the article (leaving out the “discussion” parts).

By repurposing your most successful content in a variety of formats, you can give the piece maximum exposure across the customer segment it was intended for.

Not following up (or through)

In the intro, we set up a hypothetical scenario in which a content marketer creates a handful of blog posts, publishes them, then sits back and waits for business to start booming… and it never happens.

A big mistake many marketers make when starting out with content is living by the old adage, “If you build it, they will come.”

It just doesn’t work that way. With over 2 million blog posts being published every day, the chances of new readers just happening upon your content are practically zero.

But, even assuming you do generate some traffic to your new content, you still haven’t succeeded yet, and you can still miss out on major opportunities. Another mistake beginner content marketers make is failing to engage with their audience members after they’ve reeled them in. They also miss out on the opportunity to not only nurture these individuals through the buyer’s journey, but to learn more about their needs.

Solution:

The solution here is two-pronged.

First, focus on promoting your content. There are a number of ways you can do this, including:

• Sharing links via social media, adding relevant hashtags to the post
• Posting links in appropriate online communities, such as Reddit or Quora
• Engaging with influencers and bloggers who write about your industry to see if they’d be interested in sharing your content

Once you’ve gained some visibility and have begun seeing audience members engage with your content, don’t let them go. If they’ve left a comment on your blog, keep the conversation going; if they’ve shared your content on social media, shoot them a quick “thank you”; if they seem to be looking for more information, give it to them!

Technically speaking, once your content has attracted a potential customer, it’s done its duty. But the work you put into this content will be for naught if you don’t follow up with the lead as soon as you possibly can.

Key takeaway

It’s no secret that content marketing can be an effective way to attract highly qualified leads that have a good chance of converting. This is, in large part, why 92% of companies view their content marketing efforts as a business asset.

But if done haphazardly, your content marketing efforts can lead to nothing but wasted time, energy and money.

Before you dive into your next content marketing campaign, keep in mind that the purpose is not just to create amazing content, but to create amazing content that ultimately leads your audience toward conversion.

Learn how Lucidpress can streamline your brand’s content marketing and keep your whole team on the same page.

If your real estate business is growing, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to reevaluate your marketing strategy. “Growing pains” are definitely real, and your agents will feel the squeeze as you try to scale your marketing efforts for larger audiences.

Related: Should you hire a real estate marketing agency?

When you find yourself at this point, it’s time to automate. Real estate marketing automation software will save agents time and help you reach and nurture leads more effectively. It handles many complex tasks that are either too difficult or time-consuming to do on your own. But like any software, it comes with serious considerations, such as cost and learning curve.

In this post, let’s go over what marketing automation is, how it can help your real estate business, and how to choose the right software for your brand.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the process of automating certain repetitive marketing tasks. It’s designed to support multiple channels, so your marketing efforts (and your brand) stay consistent across the board. Most marketing automation platforms support websites, emails, and social media.

Marketing automation use cases

Let’s go over a few examples. Here are some of the ways agents can use marketing automation software to work more efficiently.

Reduce cart abandonment. Imagine you sell products on your website. It could be branded merchandise, online courses, or real estate services.

Ideally, when someone adds an item to their cart, they will complete the transaction immediately—but, that’s not always the case. They may have been looking for more information, like shipping prices, before making their decision. Or, maybe they realized they can’t afford to pay today.

Either way, the result is an abandoned cart and lost sales.

Marketing automation software can help you capture this information and add this lead to your database. Then, you can target this lead with a follow-up email that encourages them to return to their cart and finish the sale. You could provide them with a discount, free shipping, or some other enticing offer. This email could be the key to persuading the buyer to complete the sale.

Nurture your blog subscribers. If you’re investing time and resources into content marketing, your goal is to engage an audience who may not be ready to buy today, but they will be in the future. Maintaining an active blog is a popular way to build an engaged audience of subscribers.

So, how do you move these people toward sales?

Real estate marketing automation can help agents set up email campaigns to nurture those blog subscribers. You can even divide your audience into segments and send them relevant, customized content—like local listings. Regular contact will keep your brand top-of-mind, so they think of you first when they need an agent.

Identify leads who are ready to buy. Sometimes, it’s hard to track all the leads in your system and prioritize the ones most ready to buy. You don’t want to miss a sales opportunity while it’s hot, so you decide to prioritize leads who’ve completed certain actions on your website.

But… which activities should you track, and how?

A good marketing automation program will provide reliable data on the actions that demonstrate high interest:

• Landing page visits (such as visiting your pricing page more than once)
• Email opens (like opening a demo email, but not clicking through)
• Lead scoring (assigning a number to a lead based on how many actions they’ve completed)

Based on this information, you can be confident that you’re reaching out to a real estate lead at the right time.

Benefits of marketing automation

Now that you understand what real estate marketing automation is and how it can be used, let’s review the benefits.

Marketing automation software saves time. Creating customized campaigns won’t take as long as it used to. Because your agents don’t have to spend time performing repetitive marketing tasks, they have more time to spend face-to-face with clients—closing more sales.

It makes your advertising more effective. Because marketing automation software uses data to make decisions, you can be more confident that your message is reaching the right people at the right time. From email automation to SMS messaging and mobile push notifications, this software streamlines a variety of marketing techniques, so agents can focus on getting the best results from each.

It makes marketing management easier. Before automation software, agents had to spend hours every week performing repetitive tasks and sifting through the data—introducing many chances for error. Now, a program can manage these things for you, and all you have to do is maintain and optimize your campaigns.

Lead gen best practices

If you’re interested in marketing automation for real estate, you’re probably already generating a fair number of leads. If not, you might want to get your lead generation efforts up and running first, so you can get the most out of your real estate automation software.

In either case, it’s never a bad idea to review lead gen best practices. What makes a good lead generating strategy?

Move leads down the funnel. Remember the classic customer conversion funnel? It describes the journey a buyer makes through the stages of awareness, interest, desire and action. For each stage in this funnel, you should have landing pages and content to match. For example:

Made in Lucidpress

When you have all these pieces in place—and you use clear calls-to-action to connect them—buyers will move seamlessly through the stages with fewer obstacles and objections. Marketing automation software can help you manage and deliver that content, so your leads don’t get lost or go cold.

Build your own email list. If you’re just starting out, it’s tempting to purchase email lists. But when you buy a list of addresses, you’re getting the same tired list that many other agents have used before you. Bottom line—it will never be as effective as the list you build yourself.

Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog and email newsletters. Put sign-up links on your website, blog and social media channels. Collect email addresses from clients and prospects you interact with, then add them to your email list. Offer incentives to sign up for your email (e.g. coupons, sweepstakes, listings info), and remind people about it both online and offline.

Because this list is targeted and unique to you, you’ll enjoy better open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Maintain brand consistency. It’s often said that a prospect requires 6 to 8 “touches” from your brand before they become a lead. These touches can come in the form of advertisements, listings, webpages, emails and social media posts—all different channels.

If your brand identity & messaging aren’t consistent, you risk losing and confusing your audience. That’s why brand management is so important. Make sure agents are all using the same brand assets (colors, logos, fonts) and messaging (voice, tone, offers). The consistency will help buyers recognize, remember and trust your brand.

Related: The complete real estate marketing guide

Which software do you need?

To figure out which real estate marketing automation software to use, you have to ask yourself a few questions. The answers will provide a rubric for evaluating all the options out there.

Am I using inbound or outbound marketing? Generally speaking, there are two types of marketing: inbound and outbound.

You can think of outbound as “push marketing,” where you push a message out into the world (e.g. advertisements) in hopes of attracting the right people to your brand. Outbound marketing includes:

• Print & broadcast advertisements
• Direct mail
• Paid social ads
• Paid search & display ads

Conversely, you can think of inbound as “pull marketing,” where you publish and distribute messages (e.g. web content) that interested buyers search for online. Inbound marketing includes:

• Blogging
• Organic social media
• Organic search
• Emails to your list

Which strategy do you use most often? In reality, most real estate brands will use a mixture of both. Outbound marketing is good for building initial brand awareness. Inbound marketing is good for driving qualified leads. Both can contribute to a healthy sales pipeline.

Determining what type of marketing you use the most can help you prioritize which automation software to consider. Some specialize in one or the other, and some cover both.

Which channels do I use (or want to use)? This question dives a little deeper than the last. Rather than thinking in broad categories, get specific about the marketing channels you want to automate.

Different software will specialize in different channels. Make a list of the channels that are “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves.” Your lists could include:

• Email
• Website actions
• Social media
• Content publishing
• SMS messaging
• Mobile push notifications

As you can see, the potential of real estate marketing automation goes far beyond email. But, not every agent will need all the bells and whistles. As management, it’s up to you to decide which features are most relevant for your agents. Then you can filter out the software that doesn’t meet your needs—or, perhaps, far exceeds them.

What tools do I need to integrate with? Chances are, you’re already using a slew of programs to manage your business. Marketing automation could replace some of those, but of course, not all. It’s important that your marketing automation software plays nicely with the other tools you’re using.

Linking your marketing automation software to other tools will increase its usefulness. They provide useful data your software can use to make decisions.

Examples of tools you could link to your marketing automation software:

• Salesforce (CRM)
• Microsoft Dynamic (CRM)
• Google Analytics (data)
• Kissmetrics (data)
• Facebook (social)
• LinkedIn (social)
• Eventbrite (events)

There are thousands of examples (just glance at Hubspot’s integrations page to get an idea!). Take a close look at which tools you could replace with marketing automation and which tools you’d need to integrate.

Related: Real estate marketing software that outperforms competitors like Imprev

Important evaluation criteria

It’s not just the software that you’re evaluating—there are other reasons to choose one program over another. Here are a couple of additional considerations.

Implementation and ramp-up. Setting up a new software is not an easy task, especially one as complex as marketing automation software. (Switching from one software to another can be even harder, as we learned here at Lucidpress when we switched from Hubspot to Marketo.)

Make sure you have a plan and a timeline for implementing the new software: importing data, connecting tools, adjusting code, and setting up initial campaigns.

Also think about the ramp-up. Which campaigns are absolutely necessary to get started? Which ones can you hold off or pause while you get up to speed?

There’s also adoption: Who needs to learn and use this software regularly? Make sure you have any training resources you need, and that all agents are on the same page.

Service and support. If something breaks or doesn’t work, who do you call? If you’re comfortable troubleshooting yourself—or if you have an IT person—you might not need additional support from your marketing automation provider.

But if you’re not, it’s worth asking about services and support. What’s included in your subscription? If your agents need more help or training, is there an extra cost associated with that? How responsive is their team? You can include all of these in your evaluation.

Marketing automation comparison chart

Now that you know what marketing automation is and how it could help grow your real estate business, it’s time to start evaluating providers. We’ve chosen a handful of software programs that are popular with real estate brands and compared them below.

View and download this table here.

To find out more about the 7 programs in our chart, visit their websites:

• Marketo
• Hubspot
• Imprev
• Oracle Eloqua
• Mindmatrix
• Infusionsoft
• Silverpop

You can use this as inspiration to create your own comparison chart in Lucidpress, Google Docs or Excel. This will help you keep track of the marketing automation software you research, so it’s easier to make your final decision.

Your brand matters. Learn how to protect and elevate your real estate brand in this branding essentials guidebook.

Marketing is getting tougher and tougher—there’s no doubting that.

With 41% of brands planning to significantly increase their marketing budgets this year, and customers becoming choosier than ever, you wouldn’t be alone if you’re exploring new techniques to get more out of your marketing cash.

Related: The complete real estate marketing guide

One strategy you should consider is SMS marketing, the process of sending short text messages to your ideal customers in an attempt to engage them with your campaign and get them to convert.

Even though average open rates for SMS messages beat email by a whopping 28%, your real estate company sells homes for a large price—unlike small-ticket items that can be purchased on a lunch break.

So, how can you make text message marketing your biggest driver of website traffic, leads and sales?

Here are the five steps you’ll need to build out your mobile real estate marketing strategy, as well as two brands who are already killing it with their text messages.

1. Determine who you want to contact

Just like any marketing strategy, you’ll need to base your mobile marketing campaign on buyer personas—a clearly defined document that lists details about your ideal customer.

For real estate companies selling student accommodation, that might include:

• People with less than $20,000 to spend
• Between the ages of 18 and 25
• No long-term commitments
• Currently living within 5 miles of the local college

Once you’ve got this to a T, you’re left with a bunch of shared interests. Use this information to find the people you want to target with your text messages.

2. Collect their information

The next step in your real estate text message marketing strategy is to collect the information of the people you’re targeting. You can do this by taking advantage of your other marketing strategies.

For example: why not run a Facebook ad, using the details you defined in your buyer persona, to encourage them to fill in a form? (You might need to offer an incentive to do this, such as a free ebook or a guide to purchasing a new home.)

But once you’ve got their information, don’t push the Send button just yet. You’ll need to have explicit permission from your prospect before sending an email, or you could land a hefty fine—and an unhappy buyer.

3. Choose an SMS marketing platform

While purchasing a new phone to send out your new messages is a great way to get started, it’s wise to invest in an SMS marketing platform from the outset.

That way, you can:

• Track various metrics after you send, including open and response rates
• Send SMS messages in bulk
• Personalize each message you’re sending
• View your strategy online, and share with other staff on your marketing team

Platforms like Text Local, Text Request and Textedly can help with this, just to name a few.

4. Select a text messaging schedule

Gotten to grips with your new software? Awesome! It’s time to make a start on your text messaging schedule.

You’ll want to put some thought into the time of day you’re messaging your potential buyers, and the day of the week they’re being delivered.

Why? Well, because texting your customer at 11pm could frustrate them—they’re likely to be asleep. However, sending an SMS message at 5pm could reach your customer when they’re on their daily commute with time to respond.

Find the perfect schedule by referring back to your buyer personas and filling out a daily routine for them.

Remember: You want to push your messages at times they’re unlikely to be busy—and have time to invest into their search for a new home.

5. Perfect your messages

Before rushing off and sending the first message that comes to your head, take some time to think about what you’re actually sending. You don’t want to send 10 messages only to find a spelling mistake, right?

Use key copywriting principles to make your sales messages as effective as possible, and focus on replicating your ideal customer’s language.

Going back to our example of student accommodation, this example:

“Ready to let your hair down at this years’ Homecoming? Make sure you’ve got somewhere safe to call home. Reply PARTY to find five local student dorms near Stamford from just $200/month.”

…would be much better than:

“With stunning high ceilings and low-interest mortgages, find student accommodation near Stamford to help with your studies. Reply YES to opt-in.”

Why? Because it’s avoiding the overused jargon that would push them away and making your real estate brand feel more relatable.

2 awesome examples of real estate companies using SMS marketing

Ready to make a start on your SMS marketing strategy and see tons of new leads roll in?

Here are two awesome examples of real estate companies nailing their text message marketing strategy to provide inspiration for your own.

1. “Text for more information”

Earlier, we listed collecting your potential buyer’s information as a key part of your SMS marketing strategy.

…But, what if you could collect their information by asking them to hand it over in a way that suits them?

This real estate company used this idea on one of their “for sale” signs, asking potential buyers to text a number for more information on the listing. It’s a fantastic way to personalize the texts you’re sending—and make sure you’re only focusing on people who are actually interested.

2. Asking for more information

Another fantastic way to engage your potential real estate buyers through text is to ask them for more information, based off the data you’ve already got from them—like this example:

But, why does this work so well?

Well, the prospect doesn’t feel like they’re being contacted by someone out of the blue. They’ve mentioned previous information that’s already been shared (the choice of neighborhood), while asking for more in a way that prompts a response.

Key takeaway

Once you’ve made a dent in SMS marketing for your real estate company, we’re confident you’ll soon see a boost in new inquiries about your properties.

However, don’t forget that it may take some time to see results from your text message marketing strategy. Collecting customer information and perfecting your message can take a while, but don’t give up—you’re almost there.

Your brand matters. Learn how to protect and elevate your real estate brand in this branding essentials guidebook.

Have you spent thousands of dollars on direct mail campaigns with no luck?

You shouldn’t chalk it up to failure just yet. Every great marketing campaign has a solid follow-up campaign behind it.

Sending out three months of direct mail, expecting a deal to happen, and giving up is not creating a business. It’s dabbling.

On average, it takes 12 touches for a deal to happen. However, 44% of people trying to get a deal under contract give up after the first follow-up.

Related: 5 best practices of highly effective direct mail marketing campaigns

I see a lot of real estate investors sending direct mail to find off-market deals. The biggest hurdle most have is that they spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a direct mail campaign without obtaining any leads. Then, they send out the same campaign again the following month with the same results.

This is when most people either quit sending direct mail or buy a new list to mail because the old list “wasn’t working.” Not getting any leads from mailing a list doesn’t mean that the list didn’t work—it just means the people you were mailing weren’t ready to sell. Direct mail marketing in real estate is all about timing.

To get a consistent pipeline of deals, you have to implement a great follow-up campaign. This article will walk you through how to set your follow-up strategy.

Following up across multiple channels

The strategy outlined below uses multiple channels to complement your direct mail campaign.

Don’t worry, it’s not going to cost you much more. In fact, it’s going to make those 12 touches a little less burdensome on your budget. Let’s dive in.

Build the right list for direct mail

The first step, of course, is to send out your direct mail. To get rolling with this, start by pulling the list that you’re going to mail.

You can use a list service company like ListSource to purchase a list of people to mail. The types of lists you should be targeting are problematic lists like:

• Probate
• Foreclosure
• Tax-delinquent
• Divorce
• Vacant house

Make sure that you’re filtering out people who have little to no equity. To do this, set your filters to include people with 60-100% equity in their property. This will give you enough breathing room to get the property at a discount.

The other criteria you need to meet is Last Sold Date. We’ve had people call us and say, “I just built this house for retirement three years ago. There’s no way I’m selling it.” Granted, this may not always be the case, but we set our Last Sold Date to 8 years ago or more.

Figure out your farm area

Figure out what your farm area will be starting out. Remember that you have a smaller budget, team, and amount of time as you build momentum. Your farm area will grow as your deal flow grows. Focus on mailing an area that you can comfortably mail consistently every month.

If you work in an office, figure out the radius you want to farm around your home and work. Starting out, we chose a 20-mile radius. The distance isn’t what’s important—it’s how long it takes you to get to the houses within this radius. You don’t want to miss deals because you’re spreading your leads out too far and can’t get to all your appointments quick enough.

We recommend keeping it within 45 minutes. This will give you time to schedule multiple appointments each day as you consistently mail homeowners over time and the lead volume increases.

There’s a cool trick on Free Map Tools that lets you drop a pin, set your desired radius, and get a list of all zip codes within that radius. With this, you can easily pick the zip codes for your farming area around your workplace and home.

Optimize your postcards

What you put on your postcards is up to you, and how postcards perform in each market varies. For our market, plain white postcards with a handwritten font perform the best. (When your prospect has a stack of ten postcards that look like ads and one that looks like a hand-written note, which do you think will stand out more to that person?)

Regardless of the design, make sure you include your company’s name along with your website. The people receiving these postcards will check to see that you’re a credible company before doing business with you. We put Breyer Home Buyers and www.eastatlhomebuyers.com on all our postcards to make it easy to find us online.

If you’re sending direct mail solely to people who are going through a divorce, then you can create a divorce landing page with a URL like www.yourcompany.com/divorce. This gives you the option to retarget visitors using Facebook Ads and Google AdWords. You can do this with any mailing list: tax-delinquent, vacant houses, foreclosures, etc.

Call recipients about your postcard

Your list provider can give you phone numbers for contacts within your farm area. If you keep them in an Excel spreadsheet, you can upload them into a dialer like MOJO. MOJO lets you call hundreds of people in a very condensed timeframe. For our business, we average 71 calls per hour. Of those 71 people, we reach around 30 per hour. We use virtual assistants to call for us, which saves our company significant amounts of money.

To use MOJO, you’ll need a Skype account. MOJO connects to Skype so you can make calls within the U.S. for free, even if you use a virtual assistant.

Remember that when you’re calling prospects to follow up on your direct mail, you should mention your company’s name and that you sent them a postcard. This will jog their memory and make it more likely that they’ll look at the postcard again.

Retarget prospects with Facebook

You can use Facebook and Google Ads to retarget your prospects. Retargeting is cheaper than marketing to cold prospects with these channels. And these prospects have already seen your direct mail, landed on your website, and received a call from you. When they see your ad and click on it, they’re more likely to convert, which provides you with a higher ROI.

The other benefit is that most of us are too busy to immediately respond to marketing. Maybe your prospects were taking their kids out to eat when they drove by the mailbox and got your postcard. Maybe they were waiting on a meeting to start when they looked up your website. Maybe they lost your postcard and couldn’t find you again. Regardless, retargeting helps you pop back up in front of your prospect when they need it most.

Send an SMS blast

There’s no replacing a phone call, but sending a text message is a great way to get in touch with people who don’t like talking on the phone. We use EZ Texting to follow up with people through text. We simply upload an Excel spreadsheet of our contacts, then blast the same message to the entire list.

We usually send out open-ended questions like “Have you sold your property yet?” But, there’s no magic message. The goal is to start a dialogue, so you can make an offer to buy their property.

We’ve gotten several properties under contract without ever speaking to the homeowners on the phone, by doing all the rapport-building and negotiation over text.

Leave voicemails on landlines

Tools like Sly Broadcast let you pre-record a voice message and send it to the phone numbers on your list. It’s important to note that this service only drops voicemails to landlines, not cell phones. Using this in conjunction with the text blast will make sure you’re touching all phone types.

MOJO Dialer also drops voicemails when you’re power-dialing, but the key difference is that you are actually calling someone and will have to speak with them if they answer. With Sly Broadcast, the phones don’t ring, but a voicemail shows up on their answering machine.

Schedule your follow-up campaign

When we’re planning our direct mail campaigns, we schedule the arrival date of those mail pieces—meaning that we know (within one day) when those mail pieces will be delivered. We usually have our mail dropped on Tuesday because our response rates are higher on Tuesday.

Here’s what our follow up campaign looks like:

• Week 1: Direct mail delivered on Tuesday
• Week 1: Begin Google AdWords and Facebook retargeting
• Week 2: Cold call prospects
• Week 3: Text prospects
• Week 4: Voicemail drop
• Week 5: Repeat mailing to the same list
• Week 6: Repeat cold calling to the same list
• Week 7: Repeat texts to the same list
• Week 8: Repeat voicemail drop to the same list

With retargeting, you set it up once and keep it running. We don’t stop the Facebook and AdWords campaigns. Your goal should be to contact each prospect with a phone call, a postcard, a text, and a voicemail drop each month.

Why you should always follow up

Homeowners usually aren’t ready to sell when you first reach out to them. Granted, sometimes we do get lucky and close a deal on the first mailing. But, it usually takes us at least three mailings to get a deal from a campaign.

If you label your direct mail campaign a failure because you haven’t gotten a deal right away, then you risk missing out on future leads and give yourself zero return on your investment.

If you look out over the year and set a goal for 5 deals to get the real estate investing ball rolling, you’ll create a marketing plan to reach that goal. However, if you keep changing your marketing strategy because you haven’t given yourself enough time to make it work, then you’ll never reach it.

Ready to create your own direct mail designs in minutes? Check out our direct mail postcard templates.

Or, learn more about the new direct mail features in Lucidpress and give it a test drive.

Marketers are getting inventive with their opt-in freebies, offering software, interactive quizzes, and entire video trainings in a bid to grow their email lists and generate interest for their products or services.

But in spite of all these creative possibilities, there’s still one type of lead magnet that hasn’t lost its rustic charm: the PDF download.

Related: Save time with these 5 amazing eBook templates for content marketers

It’s easy to see why. PDF content, such as ebooks & white papers, is cost-effective, easy to produce, and—believe it or not—still converts.

Did you think PDF downloads were dead?

Overthink Group did a study of HubSpot’s most popular lead magnet types in 2017, and eight of the top ten included PDF-type content—whether ebooks, how-to guides, slide presentations or templates.

Aside from ebooks, here are a few other PDF content types that are as popular as ever:

• Cheat sheets
• Checklists
• Case studies
• Industry reports
• Expert interviews
• Resource lists

All of these formats are easy to digest, offering new subscribers the instant gratification they seek. As a bonus, they’re less expensive and time-consuming to produce than a full-blown video course.

Today, on-brand lead magnets are easier to create than ever. With a desktop publishing tool like Lucidpress, you can start with an existing template or create your own using the drag-and-drop editor.

After you’ve created your lead magnet and a landing page to host it, it’s time to get some eyeballs on it. Here are nine ways to do just that.

Tell your audience about your latest free offer

Lead magnets make handy tools for building an email list, but they can also be shared with your existing audience to generate more buzz or segment email subscribers based on their interests. Incorporate your ebook into your full content strategy.

Your existing audience includes your clients or customers, social media followers, and current subscriber base. Ask them to check out your latest resource and to consider sharing it if they find it useful.

Don’t forget to link to your lead magnet in the following places:

• Social profiles
• Pinned tweets on Twitter
• Pinned Page posts on Facebook
• Facebook Page CTA button
• Gravatar profile
• Forum signatures

Feature it throughout your website

Your website can be your best promotional tool. By strategically placing opt-in forms and links to your free offer throughout your site, you can control which type of visitor sees your offer and when.

If you want to get a bit more creative, here are a few more ways you can showcase your lead magnet on your site:

• Link to your landing page from your website’s main navigation (e.g. “Free Stuff”).
• Create an attention-grabbing sidebar graphic and link it to your landing page.
• Announce your lead magnet using a floating notification bar.
• Experiment with slide-ins, welcome gates and lightbox popups.

Certain types of opt-in forms, such as those that obscure the content, can be frustrating for mobile users, so consider displaying a different type of form depending on the device a visitor is using.

Link to it in your email signature

How many emails do you send in a day—or a week?

Your email signature is prime real estate for promoting your latest offer.

Create a professional and eye-catching signature with a link to your landing page and a bit of text enticing your email recipients to click. Using a free email signature generator like WiseStamp, you can easily add a CTA to your sig:

Promote it via your blog

Indirect promotion of your lead magnet via your blog can be a more effective long-term strategy than repetitively plugging your free offer.

The bottom of every post is a logical place to include a call-to-action. For example, you might add a post-footer opt-in form or invite readers to visit your landing page.

You can also link to your freebie within the body of your posts when it makes sense contextually. Use an attention-grabbing callout box or try the subtle (but highly effective) two-step opt-in form, which doesn’t display a form until the user clicks on the link.

Whenever you publish a new post, notify your audience via social media and your email newsletter. You can expand your post’s reach with some additional promotion techniques:

• Share your posts in relevant online communities.
• Answer questions related to your industry on Quora, and include a link back to your article for people who want to learn more.
• Reach out to the other websites linked to in your posts.
• Comment on popular blog posts in your industry, and include a link back to your post when it makes sense to do so.

Link to it in your guest author bio

Guest posting is still one of the best ways to reach new audiences and generate powerful backlinks to your content. In exchange for a well-written article, many websites will let you include a call-to-action and a link to a landing page of your choice.

To help you narrow down which blogs are worth writing for, use free tools like SimilarWeb and Alexa to get estimations of a domain’s traffic, and the MozBar Chrome extension to compare the domain authority of guest post prospects.

If you plan to do a lot of guest posting, it’s worth investing in a keyword research tool to help you choose article topics that 1) are relevant, 2) people are searching for, and 3) the host website has a good shot at ranking for. This will boost the visibility of your guest articles and the quality of referral traffic to your landing page.

Share it in relevant online communities

There’s a group for every professional subject.

Online communities—Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Google+ communities, subreddits, public Slack channels, etc.—offer a place to get support from experts, develop business relationships, and share your latest work.

Instead of trying to be everywhere at once, you can get more mileage by choosing a small handful of high-quality groups and being active in them. Get to know the group culture and participate in the discussion before attempting to drop any links.

In many groups, self-promotion or links are not allowed, although some group admins have a weekly “show-and-tell” day as an exception to this rule.

If group admins seem strict about self-promotion, don’t automatically write it off as a bad group. Often, heavily moderated groups are higher quality—and they tend to relax the rules for members who regularly contribute to the community.

Drive traffic to it with Facebook ads

With Facebook ads, you can generate sign-ups right on Facebook or drive traffic to a page on your website, like Marketo is doing with this ad:

If you’re curious to know the average CPC, CTR and conversion rates for your industry so you can see how your Facebook campaigns stack up, check out this study by WordStream.

Repurpose it

Repackaging your lead magnet into other formats and distributing it across multiple platforms is an economical way to generate more interest and exposure.

For instance, you could share pointers from your ebook in the form of YouTube videos, SlideShares, Medium articles or social media graphics, with a link to the download page.

PDF content can also be repurposed into offline marketing collateral—such as brochures, booklets, newsletters and flyers—and distributed to prospects at networking events and trade shows. (Not to brag here, but Lucidpress can help you transform your digital creations into on-brand print collateral and even send them via direct mail.)

Once you’ve created your first lead magnet and begun to collect subscribers, try creating a few new offers and see what resonates best with your audience. By targeting your lead magnets to specific blog posts or types of website visitors, you can continue to grow conversions while offering individual prospects and customers the best possible experience.

Ready to wow your marketing leads with beautifully designed eBooks? Lucidpress will help your brand send the right message.

When you’re selling properties with a hefty price tag, attracting new customers isn’t the easiest thing in the world—especially since they’re only likely to buy if they’re actively looking for a new home.

Despite the fact that the number of leads generated for real estate companies has increased by 65% since 2016, the conversion rates of those leads are tanking. It’s not as easy to take a prospect from initial meeting to sale completion as it once was.

Related: 8 tips to get more responses to your email marketing

However, there’s one thing you can focus on to change the story: Email marketing. In an industry where high-ticket items are a huge investment, email marketing could be the perfect channel for you. That’s because consumers who purchase through email spend 138% more than those who don’t receive email offers, on average.

That’s right: By diving into the inbox of your potential clients, you’re etching your real estate brand in their mind. Then, when they’re ready to take the next step and purchase a new home, they’ll come to you—rather than the other way around.

If you fancy making that dream a reality, follow this guide to real estate email marketing.

How real estate companies can use email marketing

Are you ready to hit “send” on your emails and fire off a message to everyone who’s contacted your real estate company?

…That might not be the wisest idea.

There’s a whole list of things you need to do before sending an email marketing campaign, and here, we’ll cover a few of the major ones.

1. Collect information on potential customers

You can’t email people who might be interested in your properties if you don’t have their contact details. Sounds obvious, right? However, you don’t want to contribute to the 79% of marketing leads that never convert to sales.

So, start your real estate email marketing campaign by making sure you’re emailing the right people. You could attract potential clients (and convince them to handover their email address) by:

• Creating a free ebook on a relevant topic but asking for their email address in return.
• Asking people who’ve inquired about a property whether they’d be interested in receiving your newsletter.
• Running Facebook ads which ask target customers to fill in a form and receive a brochure via email.

Just take a look at this ebook, created by The Kingdom Real Estate, which helps to collect leads from their website:

Because the free ebook is gated and requires an email address to access, it’s a fantastic way to add warm leads to your email marketing funnel.

But, this step comes with a warning: Always make sure you’ve got permission to contact the person you’re emailing—especially if they’re located in the EU. You don’t want to land yourself a hefty fine for going against GDPR regulations.

2. Create a perfect subject line

When you’re sending an email, the subject line is almost—if not more—important than the email itself. Why? Because 47% of email recipients decide whether to open an email based on the subject line alone.

If you’re not crafting an interesting subject line that piques your audience’s attention, there’s a high chance your email will head straight to their virtual trashcan. Research has found that the best subject line:

• Contains 6 to 8 words (source)
• Includes the recipient’s first name (source)
• Has a sense of urgency (source)

Use these best practices when piecing together the tagline of your real estate email marketing campaigns before hitting send.

3. Write (or share) something valuable often

Think about the last time you opened an email in your inbox. (It doesn’t have to come from a real estate company.)

What made you open it?

Chances are, the message didn’t land in your trashcan because it contained something of value to you. Whether it contained a discount code for your favorite store or a free guide to something you’re struggling with, your customers are the same.

They’ll only open and respond to emails they get value from.

Your real estate business can use this concept by asking yourself, “What value am I providing in this message?” before hitting send on your latest campaign. That could be:

• A message to let them know about a discount on a property they’ve inquired about.
• A discount on realtor fees if they’re looking to sell their current home.
• A solution to one of their pain points.

In short: If you’re not giving value to your subscribers, think twice about sending it. You don’t want to be seen as the annoying company who constantly sends self-promotional messages. That’s only going to lead to an unsubscribe.

4. Analyze what’s working

You’ve built up the courage to hit “send” on your email after working hard to perfect the subject line and email copy. What happens next?

Well, like any new real estate marketing campaign, you’ll need to analyze whether your new strategy is working. It’s the only way to know whether it should play a key role in your marketing plan, going forward.

To do this, head to your email software and analyze key metrics like:

• Open rate. What percentage of people received your message and opened it?
• Click-through rate (CTR). Did many people click the link in your email?
• Response rate. How many people hit the “reply” button and started a conversation off the back of your newsletter?
• Conversion rate. How many people made a purchase as a result of your email?

Your goal here is to find a common denominator across high-performing emails and replicate that moving forward. For example, if the emails with the highest click-through rates contained emojis, build this into your set of email marketing best practices in the future.

Tools for real estate email marketing

Using the right tools will help you be more efficient and effective at your email marketing. To start, you will want to select an email marketing tool that can collect contact information, segment lists and schedule emails. For agents starting out with smaller lists, a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact will provide the basic functionality you need.

In addition to managing your email list, you will need a tool to help you design your emails and generate content for your email campaign. Lucidpress offers an easy-to-use design tool with social media templates, infographic templates and flyer templates to get you started. You can also design the entire email in Lucidpress with one of our email newsletter templates and use our ConstantContact integration to send your emails straight from Lucidpress. Or generate HTML code and paste it into any email provider of your choice.

Bonus: Free real estate email marketing template

Are you ready to put these tips into practice?

If you’re still hesitant, don’t worry. Writing email messages to your potential customers can feel daunting—which is why we’ve created a free email marketing template you can use to push subscribers back to your website.

Simply edit the capitalized text, add your own personal touches, and you’re good to go.

Subject line: ? NAME, here’s a free guide to BLOG POST TOPIC

Message:

Hey NAME,How’s it going?

Here at COMPANY, we’ve been working hard on RECENT ACTIVITY. In fact, we’ve listed X new properties this week! (That’s no easy feat.)

To top it off, we’ve just published a guide to BLOG POST TOPIC.

Including DETAIL #1, DETAIL #2 and DETAIL #3, it covers some of the most common issues we see with home-buyers-to-be.

Click here to give it a read: LINK

If you’ve got any questions, ideas or suggestions for this guide (or anything we talked about in it), drop me a line. I watch my emails like a hawk, and I’ve always got time to chat with you, NAME.

Best,YOUR NAME

Key takeaway

As you can see, email marketing is a fantastic way for real estate companies to generate more leads—and turn those people into paying customers through your email workflows.

By committing to a weekly newsletter or regularly sharing free value with your subscribers, there’s no reason why a few tweaks to your email marketing strategy couldn’t be the best thing you’ve done for your business lately.

(At least not when you’re using our templates.)

Your brand matters. Learn how to protect and elevate your real estate brand in this branding essentials guidebook.

Since 2008, real estate has gone up by an incredible 11.4% and created a fantastic opportunity for real estate agents to sell more clients.

Millennials will quickly become over a quarter of the real estate market, and only 1% of those millennials didn’t search online while looking for a house. Just one percent.

Related: How to handle inbound real estate leads

The internet has forever changed the way real estate agents get leads for their business, and you’re definitely behind the curve if you haven’t optimized your website for lead generation.

How do you generate real estate leads online? In this guide, you’ll learn various methods for obtaining quality leads online and the secret to converting your website into a real estate marketing machine.

Let’s get started.

1. Social media

If you’re not a frequent user of social media, it’s time you got started. Most people have a Facebook account, and many are active users on Instagram as well.

Instagram in particular is a fantastic avenue for sharing high-quality images and videos of properties and advertising your latest content (e.g. blogs & newsletters) effectively. By engaging with different channels each day and adding value to others, you’ll begin building a devoted following online.

Lots of real estate agents don’t do social media because they lack time for it. But with tools like Buffer and Hootsuite at your disposal, you only need an hour to set up a whole week’s worth of posts. All that’s left is checking the comment threads and responding whenever you have a few seconds throughout the week.

Read more about social media for real estate: How to build a social media campaign for real estate

2. Website

Source: Colorlib

If optimized properly, your website could be the foundation for attracting real estate leads online. It gives you the ability to provide value to your target market and help them engage with your brand.

Many real estate agents make mistakes in this area, and your website is not the place to describe your greatness in detail. Make your copy about how you’ll add value and better the lives of your customers.

An easy way to check whether your website is focused on your target market is to count how many times your site uses the word “we.” Customer-focused websites will use the word “you” more often.

3. Newsletter

See more newsletter templates from Lucidpress

It’s always a good idea to keep your name top-of-mind, and a newsletter is a great way to do so. Newsletters can share real estate news, recent listings, and tips to deal with typical homeowner struggles—like preparing your house for the winter.

A newsletter is especially useful if your leads live in urban areas. Cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago are massive and busy, so it’s easy to miss out on events if you’re not paying attention. It’s also an excellent opportunity to inform subscribers about the latest news and events in their area.

Read more about newsletters: 13 best newsletter design ideas to inspire you

4. Blog

Blogging is one of the most popular and effective ways to generate leads online. But like any lead-generating tool, it has to provide great value to your target market. A blog post about the staff holiday party is not going to get the leads you want.

The best information to share with your target market is actionable. This could include topics like making a down payment, picking a lender, listing their home, and working with a real estate agent.

Free advice will grow your influence and make you a valuable resource—so when someone needs to sell or buy a house, they’ll think of you first.

Read more about blogging for real estate: How to use content marketing in real estate

5. SEO

The first page of search results has only ten slots. 33% of the people searching will click on the first result. 18% will go a step further and click on the second result. The further down the page you go, the fewer clicks there are—only 4.4% click on the sixth result.

That’s why every business wants to be on top. The lower you are, the harder it gets to attract your target market’s clicks.

The ideal SEO strategy is about finding the best keywords (and phrases) to target, then using them deliberately in your content to attract the customers you want. SEO powerhouse Moz has lots of free resources and tools to help you get started.

6. Video

If seeing is believing, then showing off the fantastic features of your properties is a surefire way to win converts—and there’s no better way to do that than with video.

Videos empower your potential clients to take a guided tour of your properties. They’ll be engaged by your content, but more importantly, they’ll be motivated to reach out for more information.

A video is far more than just a slick way to show off a property. On average, an online video converts 33% of leads. If you want a more captivating way to connect with your target market, video marketing is a great way to increase interest in your properties.

Read more about video marketing for real estate: How to create stellar videos for real estate listings

7. Influencer marketing

Connecting with others in your industry is always wise, and doing it online makes it easier than ever. You can share and amplify each other’s work through social media and comment on posts each of you publish.

Influencer marketing takes this one step further. It starts by figuring out who your target market is—specifically. Then, you can find influencers who are popular among the folks you want to target. By partnering with these influencers on advertising campaigns, you can reach wider audiences and attract more people to your brand.

Read more about influencer marketing in real estate: 5 influencer marketing strategies for real estate

8. Mobile optimization

Industry professionals often spend tons of time and money making sure their website is professional and easy to use… then forget to check how it looks on a smartphone or tablet.

Mobile search has surpassed desktop search, so it’s more important than ever that your website works with mobile devices. (Google is going as far as penalizing sites that haven’t created mobile-friendly layouts.)

Make the switch. Not just to protect your website from Google, but to impress customers who encounter your brand exclusively via mobile device. Aim for the same goals as your regular website: clear copy, attractive design and intuitive function.

Want to go even further with mobile? Read more about using mobile text messaging for real estate: 5 steps to build out your real estate mobile text messaging strategy

9. Referrals

When you start off as a real estate agent (or in any field, really), you won’t have a network. So, it’s up to you to build one.

As you begin to deal with customers, don’t forget to ask for referrals. Encourage them to share your name with others—make it easy and worthwhile for them to do so. Whether it’s to their friends, family or coworkers, advertising by word-of-mouth is powerful. People are more likely to follow recommendations from people they know than an anonymous review online.

10. Retargeting

Although we covered social media all the way at the beginning of this guide, we left out one element that deserves its own section: retargeting via Facebook ads.

Facebook ads are not a popular method of advertising in real estate circles, despite how high the ROI can be. Here, retargeting simply means that people who have shown interest in your brand will see your ad again. This “interest” is measured by actions such as reading your blog posts, clicking on one of your ads, or even signing up for your newsletter.

Your conversion rate will improve if you target people who want what you’re selling. People who are actively interacting with your brand are more likely to buy than those just scrolling through their feeds. Retargeting keeps your brand top-of-mind for the folks who matter most.

Key takeaway

Leads don’t just magically appear in your inbox. You need a strong lead-generating strategy that helps you cultivate interest in your brand and set you apart from the competition. These tips should get you on the right track to generating real estate leads online.

Hungry to hear about the best marketing practices for real estate? Hop over to our real estate marketing guide for more ideas & inspiration.

Interactive marketing is a customer-oriented approach to marketing that engages the user and requires their participation. The most popular forms of interactive marketing content are polls, surveys, quizzes and games. This type of content can help you drive awareness, engage your audience, generate high-converting leads, convert to sales, or nurture brand loyalty.

Let’s take a look at the four types of interactive content that are most likely to bring you results.

Polls & surveys

Polls and surveys are probably the simplest and oldest form of interactive marketing. They’re a great way to get in touch with your audience, but despite their simplicity, you can use them in several different ways to help you build a genuine connection with your followers.

The easiest and most straightforward way to use polls and surveys is to ask your audience or customers for opinions about your product, service or content.

Source: Twitter

For example, many content creators run regular polls to inform their content creation strategy.

Source: Twitter

While many marketers use polls as part of their content creation process, it doesn’t have to be the only way to engage with your audience or customers.

You can use polls to obtain relevant statistics from your industry and later turn them into a valuable source of unique content that will boost your authority in the business field.

Source: Twitter

Of course, polls don’t have to be all work and no play — if your brand relies on aligning with your customer’s lifestyle, values and interests, you can always use entertaining content to nurture friendly relationships.

Source: Twitter

If you have any doubts on whether polls draw engagement, you can see the number of votes, likes and retweets in each screenshot. Even though the likes and retweets are often low, the number of people who voted in the polls is much higher, showing that polls really do engage your followers.

Incorporating polls in your content marketing strategy is pretty much a breeze — polls are a regular feature on both Facebook and Twitter, and it only takes a few clicks to create them.

Contests

Another well-known marketing strategy that still delivers amazing results is the gamification of various contests and challenges.

In terms of content marketing, challenges and photo/video contests are a great way to gather user-generated content that can later be used or repurposed for brand development.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably remember the famous ALS “Ice Bucket” challenge that managed to raise awareness about a rare neuron disease, engage 17 million participants, and collect $115 million in donations that led to a breakthrough in determining the cause of ALS.

Actors Henry Cavill & Amy Adams do the ALS challenge. Source: YouTube

The ALS awareness campaign challenged people to dump a bucket of ice over their head (or have another person do it to them). Then, participants nominated the next participant — the only way to opt-out of getting showered with ice was to donate money to the ALS Association.

Similarly, you can challenge your audience to a little photo or video contest with a unique hashtag on social media in exchange for a fitting reward. Of course, whatever the topic of the contest is, it has to align with your brand values and product. There’s not much point in organizing a photo challenge depicting the wonders of nature if you’re selling used car parts — but there are plenty of other challenges that would fit splendidly.

Source: National Geographic

In the end, your contest should neither be too easy nor too difficult. You want people to put some time into connecting with you in exchange for a prize or benefit that seems attainable and worthy of the work it requires. You don’t want to frustrate people or make them feel cheated.

A good challenge will bring out people’s natural curiosity and competitive spirit. The better you are at that, the greater your chances of going viral. If your contest is engaging, people will be eager to share it.

Quizzes

You’ve probably procrastinated by doing dozens of absurd quizzes with titles like “Tell us your favorite One Direction member and we’ll tell you which garlic bread you are.” Apart from being addictive and fun, quizzes can also be a great way to boost your content marketing and sell more. How?

Quizzes have high completion and click-to-conversion rates. They satisfy our need for introspection, self-confirmation, recognition and belonging — making them super clickable, convincing and shareable (qualities you definitely want in your marketing content).

For example, you can capture people’s attention by running a quiz on your website or social media, promising they’ll discover something about themselves (ideally, something relevant to your brand). The results they get can direct them towards a landing page or collect their email address in exchange.

But, don’t think that quizzes are only good for retailers and entertainment websites. This type of interactive content is also a great way to reach out to business clients. By identifying the unique challenges of your B2B buyers, you can create quizzes that offer them practical, customized solutions in the form of quiz results.

Interactive websites

Interactive websites engage and inspire your potential customers to explore content in a way regular blog posts don’t. Take, for example, this piece of sponsored content in The Washington Post.

Source: The Washington Post

The National Association of Realtors published an article with the goal of reaching their target market of first-time homebuyers. As the younger generation is more cautious and skeptical about purchasing real estate, realtor marketers knew they had to step up their game.

Source: The Washington Post

And the article itself does feel like a game, constantly requiring the reader’s attention and interaction. (For example, there’s an interactive infographic.) Content sections are intertwined with relevant survey questions about personal experiences, opinions and expectations.

Source: The Washington Post

Apart from reaching a skeptical audience with content that responds to their common complaints and questions, the survey was also a way to help realtors gather data about their ideal customer.

Source: The Washington Post

While interactive websites require extra work and time in development, that investment pays off. Try it on yourself — even if you’re not a first-time home buyer, did you feel compelled to check out the article anyway? Exactly. A great interactive website encourages visitors to explore, click and read(!) your content.

Key takeaway

As the digital sphere grows more personalized, interactive content is becoming the norm. Software developers are keeping up, providing marketers with tools that turn interactive content creation from a daunting task into a 10-minute routine.

If you decide to dedicate more time and resources to this type of content marketing, keep in mind the reward: more pageviews and more conversions. Why not give it a try?

Cold-calling prospective customers is only as effective as you make it. Meaning — you and your sales reps have to do some strategic legwork in order to make cold-calling work in your favor. And while it might be tempting to relegate cold-calling as an intimidating, outdated tactic, you wind up selling yourself short in doing so.

Related: 4 professional voicemail greeting tips to impress your prospects

Ultimately, cold-calling empowers sales reps to strike while the iron is hot and anticipate customer needs ahead of time — so your team connects with prospects well before your competitors do. That said, there’s a few steps you need to keep in mind before hitting the phones.

10 cold-calling tips from industry leaders

We’ve compiled ten cold-calling tips & tricks from various industry leaders to help you feel set up for success and close deals faster than you can say “transactional.”

Tip 1 – Do your research

“Don’t go into the call with the mindset that no sale equals failure — the pressure of that can make sales a daunting job. It takes between 5-12 calls to convert a cold prospect into a genuine opportunity, so don’t expect to get a yes straight away. Instead, do your research on the company and the contact you’re calling, set yourself an objective that will move the prospect closer to a sale, and figure out possible objections and how to overcome them. Above all, always remember that it’s not that the product is wrong, or that your pitch isn’t perfect, it’s likely that the time isn’t right for the customer to be making the purchase. You could have an entire day of people rejecting you, who are left with a good impression and who’ll be warm leads the next time you touch base. Try and think of a ‘no’ as a ‘not now’ so that there’s less dread when you pick up the phone.”

Ian Clark, Head of Americas (Sales), Frank Recruitment Group

Tip 2 — Lean on tactical approaches

“Winning at cold-calling is not about the tactic itself, but about your strategy. Picking up a phone and dialing for dollars is not a strategy; it’s a task. What most salespeople don’t get is that it can be done in a strategic and effective way (i.e. a method for prospecting that you can execute consistently). You can create a 6 x 6 x 6 prospecting program integrating email:

• Week 1: Voicemail with value #1
• Week 2: Email follow-up with value #1 messaging
• Week 3: Voicemail with value #2
• Week 4: Email follow-up with value #2 messaging
• Week 5: Voicemail with value #3
• Week 6: Email follow-up with value #3 messaging”

Victor Antonio, Founder, Sales Velocity Academy

Tip 3 — Send information prior to the call

“Send information by email. If possible, always send information before the phone call. This informs the prospect that you would like to have a phone conversation. After the phone call, send a follow-up email with the information that they requested.”

Albert Ho, Consultant, Healthcare Heroes

Tip 4 — Empathize with the customer

“To help a customer ‘see’ something they don’t understand, you have to find out what they relate to. When attempting to explain a complicated concept, someone must struggle. Either you (the sales rep) will struggle to explain a foreign idea to the listener, or the listener will labor to understand what you’re trying to communicate. If it’s the latter, most of the time the customer will just walk away.”

Tom Stanfill, CEO, ASLAN Training

Tip 5 — Ask questions

“Successful sales calls are not just about pitching your product or service. Top sales reps should use cold calls as a way to explore what is resonating with prospects and feed that into their sales process. During a cold call, reps typically ask four questions relating to the prospect’s pain source, qualification and value. One of the best ways to prepare for cold calls is by creating a battle card relating to these areas. This process can help train your sales team on how to prioritize one question over the other and pivot based on a prospect’s response.”

Roy Raanani, CEO, Chorus.ai

Tip 6 — Humility over hubris

“Remember the majority are satisfied and believe they have made a good decision with their current provider. Show humility – ‘I believe we can add…’ or ‘We may be able to…’ versus an overly confident sales approach.”

John Reid, President & CEO, JMReid Group

Tip 7 — Be yourself (not a robot)

“Stop sounding like a robot. At their core, people just want to feel heard, understood and acknowledged. If you’re reading off a script, the prospect can tell. If you’re nervous and stiff, the prospect can tell. If you’re trying to control the conversation or steer it a certain way that feels forced, the prospect can tell. The catch-22 here is that the only way to get better at not sounding so robotic is to actually make the calls — and to ensure you go out of your way to care while you make them.”

Nick Gonzalez, Commercial Real Estate Broker, Linville Team Partners

Tip 8 — Maintain perspective in spite of negativity

“It’s good to keep the following in mind before and during your dedicated cold-calling session:

• Remind yourself that the call recipient really can benefit from your product/service if they give it a chance. This is helpful during times when you get a lot of negative feedback on calls.
• If the recipient is rude, it is not a response to you personally, rather the effect of unrelated circumstances contributing to their state of mind. Don’t let defensive thoughts sink in to your head, just get on the next call quickly.
• Know how much each dial is worth to you. Know the ratio of calls it takes to make a sale, and put a dollar figure on each call attempt. For example, if it takes 50 calls to make a sale, then each call is worth 2% of your average sale. Linking each call to a dollar figure is very effective motivation during unproductive calling sessions.”

Chad Knibbe, Director of Investment Sales, Foresight Commercial Real Estate

Tip 9 — The first phone call isn’t everything

“Qualification. Not everyone will fit. Learn to say no to the prospect. Qualification vs. call-to-action. You have to qualify the meeting. However, as an SDR, there are only so many questions you can answer. On question number five from the prospect? Push for a meeting. You won’t always know all the answers right away.”

Radé Kemalova, Head of Internal Sales Development, CIENCE

Tip 10 — Respect their time (and yours)

“I teach all my agents to say the following phrase at the end of each call: ‘Okay! I have you down at 3 o’clock on Monday. I am setting this time aside for you, and I guarantee you that it will not be a waste of your time. I just want to make sure you’re going to be there because I don’t want to waste my time, either. Does that sound fair?’ It may sound pretty brash, but people appreciate that you are a busy individual and that your time is valuable!”

Sara Hornick, Executive Partner, Hudson Wealth Management

A solution for success

Keep in mind, success doesn’t happen overnight — it requires conscientiousness and deliberate effort from each and every team member. A winning cold-calling strategy is no different. In order to assure success and overcome objections in stride, sales reps need to read between the lines, hear the customer’s wants and needs, and apply each of our recommended cold-calling tips as they chat. By giving cold-calling the due diligence it deserves, sales teams can thrive, uncover new prospects, close deals, and earn repeat customers with ease. Learn more about sales enablement.

It’s estimated that 97% of all business calls go to voicemail. With such a low answer rate, should you even bother with making phone calls?

Yes!

And even though the typical voicemail response rate hovers between 4-6%, your odds of getting a response are higher than direct mail and web banner advertising combined.

So while it may be frustrating to leave voicemails all day long, a good sales pro knows sales calls are critical to managing their pipeline. Here are 11 pro tips to help you leave quality voicemails that get responses and boost conversions.

Keep it short

The sales experts at Ring Lead recommend keeping messages shorter than 30 seconds. This serves two purposes: it shows prospects that you value their time, and it enables you to make the most of your workday, so you can make more calls.

Timing is everything

Your goal as a sales pro is to connect with the right people with the right message at the right time. While you can’t control who will or won’t answer the phone, make your calls at the beginning or end of the day. 

Humans have a tendency to remember the first and last items (in a list) the most. This psychological concept, called Serial-Position Effect, can work to your advantage. Because most people listen to several voicemails at a time, being the first or last message in their inbox can give you a leg up on getting a response.

Make it mysterious

Building suspense is a great way to get callbacks. Simply leave your name, company name and phone number. This creates a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that prospects simply can’t resist.

Watch your tone

Keep your tone enthusiastic and energetic. People love to work with the best, and nothing conveys it better than a friendly and positive tone.

Have a legitimate reason for calling

Don’t leave a voicemail if you don’t have a reason to. Your prospects are busy people and calling to see how things are going makes you sound too pushy. If you’re not sure who you need to speak to at a particular company, send an email instead.

Create a (true) sense of urgency

We live in a deadline-driven world. If your company is running a promo that’s about to expire, include the deadline in the message. This works best when the deadline is sooner than later. That said, don’t make one up to hit your quota. If your prospect can’t make the imaginary deadline cited in the voicemail, you may lose the sale for good.

Use a script

The easiest way to get your calls done faster is to work from a script. While you can find a lot of great ones for free online, rewrite it so it sounds like the way you speak. Otherwise, you’ll sound stiff and forced. Practice makes perfect. Once you get a script that suits you, say it out loud a couple of times before you start your calls for the day.

Keep it casual

At the end of the day, people buy from people. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the B2B field making million-dollar deals or selling five-dollar widgets. Don’t fill your voicemails with stuffy language or corporate jargon. Pretend you’re talking to a friend.

Don’t try to sell them anything

Nothing makes people hit delete faster than someone trying to sell you something over voicemail. Sales is a process. Save your persuasion for when you get someone on the phone or in-person meetings. 

Practice SWIFT™

We know you want the sale. But the most effective sales happen when a prospect sees the benefit to them. There’s a great sales tactic called SWIFT™, which stands for: So, what’s in it for them? Communicate the benefits without pushing for the sale, and you’ll get a callback in no time.

Promise to follow-up

Any seasoned sales pro will tell you the money’s in the follow-up. Even though 80% of sales happen after five follow-ups to a meeting, 44% of reps give up after just one follow-up. That’s a lot of money left on the table. Persistence pays off. Tell your prospect when you’ll follow up in your voicemail.

How to Measure Success

Like everything else in sales, knowing your numbers is crucial to make sure you’re on track. Here’s how it breaks down with voicemails:

• Expect a 4-6% response rate on the first message. For every 100 calls, you should get between four and six callbacks. Anything above that means you’re doing something extraordinary — keep it up!
• The more you follow-up, the higher your response rate will be. Sales Hacker reports a higher callback rate than the industry standard (11% instead of 4-6%). However, they also did some digging and found that the more follow-up messages you leave, the higher your callback rate will be. Their numbers indicate that callback rates jump by 11% for each message you leave. So, first messages can expect 11% callbacks, second messages can expect 22%, and so on.
• You should be able to reach a live person in 8 attempts or less. It takes an average of eight touches to get a prospect to even talk to you. These touches include voicemail, email, social media, and more. If you’re able to get someone on the phone in less than five tries, you’re on fire!
• It’s all about the conversion rate. Since you’re not going to get many callbacks, the people who do call are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer. This means that your conversion rate will be pretty high. 

Key takeaways

In summary, here are the most important facts about leaving voicemails:

• The more messages you leave, the more likely you are to get a callback.
• Don’t try to sell on the voicemail itself.
• Keep your messages short (less than 30 seconds) and to the point.
• Always mention that you’ll follow-up (and do it).

Now that you know the ins and outs of how to leave quality voicemails, what are you waiting for? Pick up that phone!

Account-based marketing — also known as ABM — involves tailoring your marketing approach to a market of one. So, rather than leaning on old, homogenized, one-size-fits-all strategies, ABM strategies require personalized, custom-fit interactions with your prospects, which is where account-based marketing tools come into play.

To carry out a successful account-based marketing strategy, it’s crucial that you utilize tools and software designed specifically for ABM and/or abm companies. After all, it’s easy to try to make do with what you’ve got, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a winning ABM strategy.

Let’s take a look at what exactly account-based marketing is, how it can benefit your business, and which account-based marketing tools and software you should be considering.

What Is account-based marketing (ABM)?

As we mentioned above, account-based marketing is best described as a marketing strategy that’s tailor-made to reflect a prospect or target account. Everything — from marketing content to emails — must address and resonate with your prospect. This type of strategy empowers reps to directly address a prospect’s needs and pain points, boosting the chance of conversion and success.

Keep in mind, account-based marketing is best-suited for B2B companies. Typically, enterprise-level sales organizations execute ABM strategies in close partnership with marketers familiar with ABM. To support ABM efforts, there are specific account-based marketing tools that help you and your reps identify leads, address pain points, and fill the gaps accordingly.

The benefits of account-based marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing offers a range of benefits, especially to B2B companies and sales organizations. It’s not designed to replace your larger marketing efforts, but strategically adding it to your arsenal can help you land important, large accounts or connect with multiple buyers, empowering you to leverage existing accounts.

1. Stand out from the crowd — The more customized your content, the higher chance you have of standing out against your competitor’s outreach efforts that look and feel vanilla.
2. Focus on the individual needs of each account — Since ABM is so personalized to your target audience, this helps ensure that your marketing campaigns truly connect with the decision-makers within the prospective organization.
3. Quick and easily measure campaign success — Casting a wide net with your marketing makes it difficult to attribute your efforts directly to revenue gained. But when you target one specific account, it’s easier to connect revenue to your ABM marketing campaigns because you know the specific details that propelled the conversion.
4. Save time and money — ABM strategies enables marketers to narrow down their efforts, so they can identify true business value and avoid wasting time or effort. Dedicating parts of your marketing budget to ABM means you can secure a strong client base, along with loyal customers that earn you more money.
5. Shorten your sales cycle — Lead generation takes time. However, with ABM strategies, there’s very little to no need to conduct lead generation because you know who exactly you’re speaking to. So instead of spending time on leads that may or may not convert, you can focus on those that will.
6. Strengthen existing relationships — Account-based marketing gives you the opportunity to strengthen relationships with existing clients. Plus, it’s easier (and cheaper) to retain customers than have to chase new ones.

The best account-based marketing (ABM) tools and software

In order to create and implement a successful account-based marketing strategy, you need to have the right tools. ABM-specific software (also known as abm vendors) and account-based marketing tools, like Demandbase, help you generate new leads, manage multiple accounts effectively, and distribute marketing materials quickly.

Demandbase

Demandbase is a popular platform that’s built specifically for ABM strategies. The beauty of Demandbase is that you don’t have to leave the platform in order to access important pieces of information. And through Demandbase, you can easily target your prospective audience, engage quickly, measure success, and secure conversion.

Leadfeeder

Have you ever wondered who is visiting your website (and what they want)? Leadfeeder demystifies this question by showing you (thanks to a little help from Google Analytics) who has visited your website in the last 30 days.

Not only does this help your marketing and sales teams to identify new accounts to focus on, but it empowers you with names and other relevant information that makes an ABM strategy all the more powerful. In turn, you save time and energy by having to avoid conducting a manual, hands-on search and it enables reps to truly focus on accounts that want and need your services.

Leadfeeder is a step in the right direction when you need to get the ball rolling on leads or build a foundation for outreach. Plus, it helps you monitor target accounts with various integration capabilities, alerts, and retargeting efforts via LinkedIn, Slack, or email.

Jabmo

Jabmo is a marketing automation platform that serves personalized ads to known and anonymous buyers relative to your target accounts. It captures anonymous buyer activity and offers account-based IP advertising and website personalization. Other features include ad retargeting, analytics, sales enablement tools, as well as CRM and marketing automation integrations. You can even gain marketing insights down to the account level, including ads, retargeting, email, social and paid search.

With Jabmo, it’s easy to see which leads are most important — and which ones can get put on the back burner. More importantly, it’s built with global manufacturing in mind and helps these types of companies see the actuality of their marketing efforts instead of having to guess.

Lucidpress

Content is an important part of ABM. But it can be difficult to manage and create batches (or one-off pieces too) of unique content — especially when you need it personalized for multiple accounts. To prevent rogue content from arising from your sales team, Lucidpress levels the playing field through brand templating.

Lucidpress makes creating content easy and accessible for anyone, while also maintaining and ensuring brand consistency through its lockable (and customizable) brand templates. You’ve got a wide variety of professionally-designed, ready-to-go templates to choose from — flyers and newsletters or social media ads — so sales reps can get started quickly and make personalized, on-brand content. Plus, with help from the data automation feature, reps can quickly populate pre-existing CRM tidbits, reducing the chance of typos or other errors. And when it comes time to share the finished product, sales reps can print, email, or embed content however they see fit.

Ultimately, personalized content helps enhance your ABM — and Lucidpress makes incorporating that personalized step less complicated.

DataFox

With Oracle DataFox, you can easily search for prospects that are comparable to your existing customers. Here you’ll uncover valuable leads that are most likely to convert, so you can create targeted ABM efforts.

DataFox uses an AI extraction engine to gather data-level pieces of information. One extrapolated, the data is then double-checked by a QC team for accuracy and validity. Plus, DataFox has automatic updates, so you’ll always have up-to-date information — and it provides more than 70 firmographic data points and 68 types of signals.

Alternatively, if you’re overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options, you can easily filter based on company criteria or other identifiers, so you gain the transparency and insight you need to maintain a solid ABM strategy.

Owler

Owler alerts you to key events, related to your prospects and current accounts so that you stay in the loop and know when something important happens, giving you an opportunity to reach out and connect. Owler will auto populate a concise company profile, so your sales team doesn’t need to research accounts manually. And comparable to Google alerts or notifications on your phone, it sends you prospect-related push news and alerts, making it easy for you to reach out when the time is right. Owler also integrates with your CRM, providing you with a seamless connection between interfaces, while the daily snapshot offers news and updates on the companies that you follow.

Getting started with Owler is easy. And it’s even easier to customize your alerts or filters, so whether you’re looking to track leads from Salesforce and Hubspot or keep tabs on your most important accounts, you can easily sync Owler to get the job done.

ActiveDemand

ActiveDemand is designed specifically for ABM. It features behavioral segmentation, predictive personalization, behavioral retargeting, lead scoring and sales and marketing integration.The behavioral segmentation software aggregates data and automatically personalizes the engagement experience (based on the aggregated data) for each target account. Meanwhile, the predictive content targeting is based on the exact industries and language of your prospects, which enables ActiveDemand to serve up content that resonates with them and reflects their pain points or needs.

ActiveDemand touts a wide range of tools — in one platform, so marketers can create quick, simple, and easy ABM campaigns. So, for those looking to get their ABM strategies off the ground, ActiveDemand is a great resource and one-stop-shop.

Engagio

Like ActiveDemand, Engagio is another ABM vendor with supportive tools and functionalities to help you at all stages of your ABM strategy. With Engagio, marketers can easily generate lists of leads or review the performance of your campaigns. Engagio makes it easy to manage all facets of your campaign, so you can focus on targeting the right people while aligning your marketing team for the best omnichannel experience.

Leverage account-based marketing (ABM) tools

Account-based marketing is a useful approach to marketing for many B2B businesses. Having the right ABM tools makes it easy to save time and money while producing the results that you want. Automation, in particular, makes it much simpler to get the information you need and carry out ABM techniques to make the most of your accounts.

Elevate your ABM strategy with Lucidpress.

Today’s sales cycle is complicated regardless of the product or industry. And as a result, it’s increasingly more challenging for sales reps to create engaging experiences on the behalf of the customer.

Fortunately, sales teams and organizations have sales acceleration tools and processes on hand to boost and simplify their sales cycles. And ultimately, these types of tools and processes are designed to help sales reps have better sales conversations and close deals faster.

In this article, we’ll take a comprehensive look at the definition of sales acceleration and the tools your sales team needs to close more deals and win the hearts of customers.

What is sales acceleration?

Sales acceleration is a function of sales enablement — sales acceleration utilizes data and other statistical insights to lay the groundwork for sales reps so they can navigate sales cycles and funnels more efficiently and effectively. In turn, this boosts and “accelerates” the productivity of your sales team, and of course, this accelerates the revenue of your company.

One of the most essential factors in sales acceleration is sales enablement. Rather than monitor the overall activity of sales, sales acceleration (as well as enablement) instead shifts focus to building and nurturing relationships with buyers.

Because when sales reps build relationships with customers, they’re able to identify patterns and preferences — and then translate this information into tangible data, so your customers can then be documented accordingly within your CRM, so you can deliver the best, most tailored experience.

To make your sales acceleration strategy feasible, your sales team needs integrated technology solutions that are versatile, comprehensive, and effective.

Sales acceleration technologies

To make sales acceleration effective, you need technology and software that will help sales reps close deals at a faster-than-average pace. These types of solutions ideally should provide detailed insights that both the sales and marketing team can leverage to create memorable content and customer interactions. Plus, you want the software solutions to connect the insights with customer indicators (e.g. search results, queries, or demo requests) and use this to seal the deal.

When push comes to shove and you need to select the best acceleration platform for the job, be sure to consider the following:

• Email service — One of the most invaluable tools you have at your disposal is email, and email is a crucial component of sales acceleration and automation. It’s important to know that a majority of automation software today will provide an automatic email sending service. The service itself will automate campaigns that are based on predetermined events that act as a trigger. From there, you can track all levels of engagement, and strategies can also be built and elaborated on based on the success of email campaigns.
• Research tools — While the value of quantitative data should never be underestimated, qualitative information (like research findings and supportive articles) also has its place in space. Having access to qualitative data will arm sales reps with everything they need to prepare for productive communications.
• Quote-to-cash solutions — Quote-to-cash solutions help sales reps efficiently create sales quotes based on a pre-determined pricing structure or guideline. Having a quote-to-cash solution helps reps overcome any sales-related hurdles by showing them potential customer savings early on in the sales process, removing the risk factor for slower-moving customers.
• Real-time alerts — In today’s world, arming your sales reps with real-time alerts is essential. Having something as simple as this helps alert your reps to customer events as they happen, so they can make the most of the work hours in their day.
• Lead databases — Most companies collect data in a CRM system, but nowadays you have to dig as deep as possible in order to drive future lead generation. Lead databases can help bolster your CRM system and convert more customers. Plus, this type of sales acceleration software will qualify prospective customers based on your reps’ actual, tried-and-true criteria. So once the potential customer has gone through the qualification process, the data is then double-checked and filtered so that only the highest qualified leads remain.
• Content creation — No matter who your prospect is, you want your content to look and feel as though it’s custom-made to fit their wants and needs. So you’ll need a program or tech that provides customization (without going off-brand). Because whether the content is as simple as an infographic or long and detailed like an ebook, your reps need it to reflect the customer accurately.

What is the best sales acceleration solution for B2B & B2C industries?

Keep in mind, (with sales acceleration tactics) the faster your sales reps can establish a connection and build a relationship with a prospect, the quicker the sales journey will be, which can also increase the chances of a repeat customer.

At a granular level, what’s best for your business likely changes on a daily basis. However, from a high-level overview, it’s easy to see the overlap and recognize that, well, content is king as it helps bridge the gap between communication styles and preferences no matter if you’re B2B or B2C. Content helps you build trust and reinforce your authority.

So, when it comes to choosing the best solution that will absolutely work for both business to business and business to customer sales acceleration, you should always be looking toward content-based solutions.

The best sales acceleration software

Now we are going to look at some of the best solutions when it comes to sales acceleration software. On this list, you will find everything from CRM systems to sales enablement tools. While alone these tools are great, in the hands of an amazing sales and marketing team, the possible increase in sales figures is unimaginable.

Lead Connect

Lead Connect is a great piece of software as far as sales acceleration tools go. Lead Connect is a tool that unifies your LinkedIn workflow, and it allows you to produce leads from LinkedIn by automatically searching through the catalog of profiles. Using Lead Connect has been shown to increase productivity with sales reps as it generates warm prospects with ease.

Lucidpress

With over 7 million users, Lucidpress is a brand templating platform that empowers teams or individuals to easily create professional marketing content and sales enablement collateral. If you are looking for a solution to develop templates and customizable content (both for digital distribution or print), Lucidpress could be the right solution for you. While the concept is simple, the solution is beautiful — Lucidpress helps reduce pressure and work requests from your creative team and really gives your content a new lease of life.

ToutApp

Looking at an email tracking tool that helps sales reps nurture leads? Check out ToutApp. ToutApp provides users with real-time insight and data regarding the engagement of all email campaigns. ToutApp lets you know whether the email has been opened, deleted, clicked, or even marked as spam. This handy piece of software offers analysis on client calls, calendar events, and your CRM data — and can then be converted into raw data.

Groove

Groove helps you analyze all of your Salesforce data in one location. The great thing about Groove is compact and can be easily integrated with Gmail. So you don’t need to go anywhere but your inbox to access important information.

LeadSquared

LeadSquared takes your lead creation efforts and ensures that they won’t go to waste. The tech utilizes automation, customer relationship management (CRM) integration, and AI prediction data to help your reps make the most of the leads you’ve got. The LeadSquared software has a large suite of features, including lead tracking, nurturing, and lead management. So, if you’re looking to convert leads to sales quickly, look to LeadSquared to help you get on your way.

Xant Playbooks

Xant Playbooks is an AI-application that assists sales reps by increasing their efficiency through predictive analytics. The technology uses pattern analysis and walks sales reps through a pre-set group of custom strategies. From there, reps are able to gain insights that assist them in closing — the important sales cues of who, what, when, where, and why, allowing reps to engage customers more effectively and efficiently.

DataFox

When it comes to B2B selling, not all of the companies out there will fit your ideal customer profile — which is where DataFox comes into play. DataFox finds the best customer matches for your reps by leveraging artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning. DataFox searches a smattering of data sources to identify prospects that are most likely to respond to a sales rep’s outreach.

Sales acceleration: the wrap-up

Well, that was an ear-full, to say the least. But if there’s one thing takeaway you should glean, it’s that the right tools can make all the difference in ensuring the success of a sales acceleration strategy. So whether you need a brand templating platform to equalize the workload between teams (not to mention give your sales team the enablement collateral they need), or you’re in need of an AI solution to help you analyze leads, let our guide lead the way.

If you’re interested in learning more about sales automation and how it can help your sales team, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’re going to discuss what sales automation is, cover the benefits, and then go through some types of sales automation already out there. After that, we will take a brief look at the best tools (that already on the market) and how they might help your company.

Ultimately, by reading this article, you stand to learn how and why so many businesses use sales automation tools — and what it could mean to your business if implemented correctly.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is, in effect, any type of technology that reduces the amount of manual effort and time spent making sales. Typically, sales automation solutions include tech like software, artificial intelligence, and digital tools that are designed specifically to streamline production.

Ultimately, sales automation gives sales managers and reps more time to focus on building relationships with prospects or existing customers — which means reps can make more pitches in any given day.

Let’s get started.

The benefits of sales automation software

Sales automation benefits you and your team in a wide variety of ways. Here are some examples:

• Increases resource efficiency — Your sales team only has so much time to spend making sales. However, sales automation enables teams to allocate and distribute your existing resources more efficiently, so you can close more deals for each hour your team spends selling.
• Makes sales data more consistent — Ensuring the consistency of sales data across your organization can be challenging. Sales automation equips you with the right tools to reduce overhead obstacles and keep data consistent.
• Helps prevent prospective leads from falling through — Do you ever get the sense that you missed an opportunity to make a sale? With sales automation, you can cut down on that gnawing doubt and feel more confident that you’re leveraging every opportunity available.
• Improves your sales process — Guiding your prospects from initial interest to final sale can be tough: you need to take the right route. If you don’t, you risk the deal falling through and miss opportunities to upsell. Sales automation gives your sales process a boost by helping you and your team adhere to best practices.
• Enhance sales rep productivity — There’s only so much work that an individual sales rep can do in a day (no matter how energetic or motivated they might be). Sales automation tools cut down on time-consuming tasks and frees them up for other, more urgent priorities.
• Improves accuracy — Ideally, you want to know as much about your customers as possible before you start pitching. The more you know about which stage in the sales funnel they’re at, the more likely you’ll convert them into paying customers. Leverage the power of sales automation tracking tools, so you can get a handle on your customer’s needs and interests, making the sale more likely.
• Speeds up the design process — In the past, you and your reps had to create your marketing designs from scratch or Frankenstein together old assets from your creative team. But with tools like Lucidpress, you can whip up all kinds of marketing materials fast and then send them right into the relevant channel. Choose from a variety of templates and then start publishing your designs on flyers, social media, email, brochures, and your website.

The types of sales automation software

Sales automation has different working categories. Let’s get familiar with them so you can uncover how sales automation can help you.

Automated guidance

CRM software is excellent for managing contact and storing conversations and an overall great initial sales automation tool, but it doesn’t help when it comes to telling sales reps what to do or what steps to take next. That’s where automated guidance comes into play — if you research customer relationship management software, you’ll quickly come across the term “automated guidance.”

Automated guidance compiles and sorts all the data you collect about a customer and then tells sales reps when to reach out or move ahead with the next stage in the sale. It’s an easy, data-driven approach that helps to boost sales while also preventing customers from becoming disgruntled with your team as they navigate the sales process.

For example — say you want to maximize your lead management. This means you’ll have to create a spreadsheet that tells you when you last contacted a particular client to make sure that you don’t communicate with them again too soon. Prior to automated guidance, you’d have to do all of that by hand, increasing your chance of making mistakes and irritated customers. In the new world of automated guidance, though, that’s a thing of the past. The software does it all for your behind the scenes — making recommendations for what to do next, based on the best available data.

Lead management

Sales managers have to continually manage leads and distribute follow-ups across the sales team. That said, assigning leads is massively time-consuming — something that most managers would prefer to avoid.

Some sales automation tools have a workaround for this. Some tools have a trigger-feature that will automatically assign different leads to different reps based on certain criteria. You can create rules for practically any parameter you can think of (like geography, income, and gender): the opportunities for customization are enormous.

Take this as an example — so you’re managing a large group of estate agents and you know that one of your reps is very good at selling to people over fifty. You can set up a rule or trigger to forward all over-fifty clients to that particular sales agent.

Tools that automate communication

While artificial intelligence can’t yet replace the conversational skill of human sales representatives, there are still ways that it can help improve communication.

A lot of sales work involves relatively dull admin work in order to facilitate the initial pieces of a conversation that could (in theory) be done by a machine. For the most part, it consumes an employee’s time and makes them less productive.

But here again, sales automation offers a solution. You can use communication automation for the following:

• Automate voicemails, so sales reps can periodically drop voicemails into their client’s inboxes, sometimes without even having to initiate a dial tone.
• Create personalized email drip campaigns that continue in the background automatically until a prospect either blocks them or replies.
• Automate the distribution of marketing emails by scheduling their delivery (and sometimes optimizing it around the characteristics of individual customers).

Automated calling and data entry

Filling out forms on behalf of customers is time-consuming and dull. What’s more, it takes valuable time away from sales reps who could spend their time selling.

Data entry automation does the hard work for you and cuts down the amount of time it takes to, say, send a customer a pitch. Reps simply send out information to a customer without having to fill out forms —customer name, email address, or previous conversation points are already in the message.

Many companies also use one-click telephone calling. It’s a simple innovation that connects reps to customers with a single click, bypassing the need to dial manually, like on a regular telephone.

Automated reporting

Finding out how your team is performing is a data-intensive task — one that involves a lot of processing and analyzing when done by hand.

Fortunately, with sales automation tools, you can forgo the manual labor and conduct it quickly. These types of tools let you who is converting the most customers, how many calls they made, how many follow-ups there were, and so on. In turn, automated reporting tools can help you conduct sales forecasts based on current trends and see what tasks need to be tackled next.

Creating quotes and proposals

From time to time, customers will contact you directly for a quote or appraisal. The standard response is to cut and paste a quote document from your CRM, stuff it into an email, and send it off to your client.

That, however, is a time-consuming process. It’d be much easier if you could just do the whole lot in real-time within the CRM itself. Well, it turns out that you can.

Some CRMs let you integrate quotes with customer information and product details and then transfer this information to clients automatically. You can also set up system-checks that requires approval from senior management or legal teams prior to sales reps sending quotes off to customers.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring is a tool that managers utilize to identify the most promising prospects. It aggregates all the relevant data your company obtains about a customer and then uses it to rank customers in terms of how lucrative they might be for your company. That way you can dedicate your resources to the customers who are most likely to convert.

Sales automation tools and software

Here are some common sales automation software products and what they do:

• Expensify — Allows the sales team to track all of their expenses as they travel around in real-time and share these with the rest of the team,/p>
• CirrusInsight — Integrates CRM software like SalesForce with Gmail and Outlook, making customer correspondence and follow-up easier.
• IFTTT — A handy tool that helps you create programming statements like “if this, then that.” So, for instance, if a customer pings you on LinkedIn, you might tell it to send an alert to your CRM.
• Lucidpress — A smart tool and brand templating platform that empowers you and reps to create marketing materials quickly, and then share them in a variety of formats.
• Outreach.io — Automates workflow and reporting. Comes with voice dialer and SalesForce integration.
• PerfectLeads — A tool that lets you target any prospects you like by industry using any means you want, including Google Analytics and Optimizely.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, sales automation solutions are a powerful concept for sales managers and reps alike. Plus it’s vital for getting more productivity out of your team and takes a lot of the hassle out of working in sales. With sales automation tactics and tools, you can cut back on grunt work and let your team focus more on the things that they’re great at, improving not only efficiency but morale and employee retention too.

So, tell us, are you planning on using sales automation in your enterprise?

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All businesses need salespeople working for them who understand how to sell. But successful companies aren’t solely built on the back of talented sales reps — they also rely on competent sales managers too.

Sales management is the act of organizing a team of sales reps in a way that helps them create better bonds with customers and close more deals. Therefore, the job of the sales manager is to implement specific strategies that help the team attain or exceed the sales goals of the company.

Sales management strategies and tips

In theory, this all makes a lot of sense, but what does it mean in practice? What are these strategies that sales managers can implement to help their teams make more sales? If you find yourself asking these questions, take a minute to read through these sales manager tips.

Sales management strategy #1: set goals

Managing a sales team can be challenging. On occasion, individual self-interest can trump the thing that would benefit the group as a whole. It’s your job as a sales manager to put strategies in place that prevent this from happening.

One way to do it is to set a variety of goals — both at the individual and team level. You don’t necessarily have to set sales targets at an individual level if you don’t think that would be appropriate.

That said, you do have to create an incentive structure. Not only does this help your goals to generate revenue for the entire company, but it also motivates employees and boosts morale. Be sure that you communicate any goals with sales team members as individuals and as a whole. If appropriate, also discuss your incentive structure with senior management.

Sales management strategy #2: create commission structures that benefit the business

Incentives dominate the activities of your sales reps. Give them the right incentives, and they’ll work hard in the best interest of the company. Give them the wrong motives, and you can wind up with a problem on your hands.

For instance, many managers give commission to agents who attract new customers but don’t provide anything for those who make sales on existing accounts. Under these incentives, sales reps do everything they can to attract new customers but neglect those you already have.

Sales management strategy #3: give new hires a great onboarding experience

New people will join your sales team all the time. It’s vital that you onboard them in a way that is fair and communicates the company values. Onboarding should include information on how to use your systems and close deals with customers — this includes comprehensive training regarding legal processes, sales tools, and role parameters to ensure their maximum success.

Training new hires thoroughly and equipping them with all the necessary tools in order to close quickly empowers you to take things a step further. It is a good way of showing them that you care about their best interest and you want them to be prepared for their role in your company.

Sales management strategy #4: motivate reps

Making a sale isn’t always easy. Sales reps face considerable challenges, whether it’s days where they don’t make any sales at all or they endure frustrating conversations with demanding customers. The trick is to find out what motivates a particular sales rep and then use that as leverage to inspire and rally them behind the overarching sales goal.

Sales management strategy #5: modify the sales process

No sales process is perfect. Part of effective sales rep management is to root out problems in the sales process and then find solutions. One of the best ways of doing this is to go to members of your team and ask them where they feel there are friction points. You can also use reporting to test what works and what doesn’t, refining your sales funnels over time.

Sales management best practices

Now, let’s dive into the meat of it. Here’s how to be a good sales manager.

Recruit talented people

Rep turnover is high in the sales industry. Part of any sales management job is to find and hire new talented members of the team to replace those who move on.

But recruiting well can be tough! Sales managers can often find themselves short of staff with nobody ready and waiting to step in and fill the role.

Successful managers try to spend around an hour every day nurturing contacts with potential staff and creating leads, whether on LinkedIn, Indeed, or another platform. They try where possible to have a pipeline of people ready to join the team, should another member leave.

Catch issues — fast

Not all members of your sales team have the skills to perform the job correctly from day one. What makes a great sales manager is somebody who can shadow members of the team to catch issues before they become a problem. For instance, this process could include components like listening to salespeople’s calls or joining them for meetings with customers — and then talking with them post-meeting about what they felt went well or they could use help with.

Align with other departments

Your sales team doesn’t exist independent of other departments in the business. It’s vital that you “check-in” with other teams to ensure that they are on the right track and also promoting the company in a way that aligns with your goals. Priorities include things like ensuring that the sales team is acting in a way that is consistent with the brand, the company mission, and the financial priorities of the firm.

Conduct thorough reporting

Sales management is also about reporting — digging into the performance numbers to find areas that require improvement. Often you’ll find that you have a few star performers alongside a cluster of employees who are bringing the team average down. Your job is to find ways to incentivize those at the top to carry on doing what they’re doing, while finding out what’s going wrong with those at the bottom.

Sales managers also need to keep track of the progress that their team makes over time to ensure that they’re not backsliding. It’s critical to identify trends early on to ensure that standards don’t slip, and team members don’t miss sales opportunities.

Manage your time effectively

It’s all too easy for a sales manager to spend an entire day in the office putting out fires here, there, and everywhere — instead of performing their role. Where possible managers should avoid this.

The reason is that sales management is more than just reacting to problems on your team: it’s about putting strategies that will empower the team to succeed long-term.

While cloud-based messaging platforms are helpful for putting out immediate fires, they can also capsize your productivity. Be sure to utilize “away” functionalities whenever you can as to prevent folks from pinging you whenever there’s a fire. Not only does this empower your team to solve problems on their own, but it puts time back in your pocket. Additionally, block out time on your calendar as “busy” to help you get stuff done. Some managers set aside certain parts of the day where team members can talk to them. This system ensures that they only bring problems that they really can’t solve.

Sales management tools and resources

Fortunately, there are a lot of sales tools and resources out there for budding sales managers who want to master the art. Here are some examples:

• Sales management software. This software helps to manage all of your reps’ activities all in one place, speak with clients via live chat, and sync with CRM. Top sales management solutions include Pipedrive (which integrates with software like Google Maps and MailChimp), Salesforce, and Zoho CRM, which lets you track analytics and smoothen out your sales process.
• Personalized sales enablement content. A little bit of effort goes a long way, especially when it comes to sales enablement content. With brand templating platforms like Lucidpress, your sales team is able to quickly and easily make sales collateral — without compromising brand integrity.
• Sales Management Simplified by Mike Weinberg. This book teaches you how to avoid some of the common mistakes and pitfalls many sales managers make along the road to excellence.
• Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan. Jordan’s book is a practical guide on sales management, from the metrics you should track to how to enlarge and manage a bigger sales team. A must-read for anyone who leads a team of reps.

Conclusion

A good sales management strategy isn’t just crucial for the sales department, but also for the entire company. Strong sales build revenue, which, in turn, helps the company achieve its long term objectives.

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You can’t really have a webinar without an audience. And in order to get an audience, you need to employ proper marketing tactics — like an effective webinar email sequence. And in order to do that quickly, efficiently and at a relatively low cost, you could probably benefit from using a webinar email template.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Right! But, first things first.

Webinars for the new normal

Simply put: webinars level the playing field.

Those who attend webinars stand to benefit from unobstructed access to field experts and information that they may not have access to otherwise. On the other hand, those who host webinars gain insight into prospective customers or qualified leads.

Though, ultimately, during times like these where our new normal largely entails remote agendas and telecommunications, webinars empower attendees and hosts to connect, learn and keep moving forward.

So, all that said, hosts need to do a little more legwork than simply hosting a webinar. In other words, you need to create an email nurture campaign like you would for any other project.

So, what can you expect to learn or read about during this article? A few things, namely:

• What to include in a webinar invitation email, along with examples of a webinar announcement template.
• What to include in the webinar post-registration email, along with an example of a webinar post-registration email template.
• What to include in the webinar follow-up email, along with an example of a webinar follow-up email template.

A few webinar email template tips and tricks

Before we get the ball rolling, let’s tackle some “need to know” pieces of information. 

First, make sure your webinar slides are completed or in the very least in an approved rough draft form. Having a hard time getting the creative juices flowing? No worries, we’ve got you covered with our helpful article about how to create an effective webinar slide.

Ready to take things to the next level and write your emails? Great! Be sure to consider and include the following tidbits when crafting up your campaign:

• The What — Also known as your webinar title. 
• The When — The time and date that your webinar is slated to occur. Be sure to include the time zone and whether or not the webinar will start exactly at a certain time. Just remember you might have some stragglers popping in at the last minute!
• The Who — Your attendees need to know who is speaking at this webinar, of course! And don’t forget to include a note about your host or sponsors. 
• The Where and How — Here’s your opportunity to include a registration link or what have you. This also includes CTAs and other buttons or links, too.
• The Why — Make sure it’s clear to attendees why they should attend this webinar and what they stand to gain and learn.
• The Little Details — To reduce errant queries or emails, relay to attendees whether or not there are any required skills (needed to attend the event), speaker or host biographies, and whether or not there will be time for a Q&A at the end of the event.

Also, whatever you do, don’t forget to include a subject line! 

Now, onto the next section.

How to create a great webinar invitation email

How often do you get to make a second-first-impression? Kind of never. So, as you craft up your webinar invitation or announcement emails, remember to:

Keep it concise

Use whatever salutation you prefer, but remember to keep it simple, sender! Ultimately, you want your webinar invitation email to be concise, inviting and approachable.

Include helpful pieces of information

So, we just told you to keep your invitation email concise, but you don’t want to be too concise because then you could leave your audience hanging. Be sure to include relevant tidbits of information about the webinar, like the ones we mentioned in the tricks and tips section above. By not including this information, you run the risk of having low registrations or not having any at all. 

Provide extra context about your presenters

Now’s the time to introduce your webinar presenters and speakers. You’ll want to include bios, headshots and so forth. Doing so can help sway participants who might be on the fence about signing up.

Make it a little flashy

You don’t want to go too crazy, but you do want to give your webinar invite email a little pizazz. Components like gifs, eye-catching images or videos can add a little bit of flash without going totally off the rails. You can easily use our webinar invite template to get started. You can even put your own custom twist on the template and send it off to your marketing team to fill in the blanks — without having to stress about anyone going hog wild with fonts or images.

Leverage frequently asked questions

No matter how hard you try, you’re going to encounter opposition from prospective webinar attendees. So, do yourself a favor by addressing the skeptics with frequently asked questions. Not only does this help build rapport, but it nurtures a sense of relatability.

Use CTA buttons

Use CTAs to balance the copy and visual content. We recommend including one at the top (or middle) and at the very bottom of the email. And remember — stick to on-brand colors and fonts, otherwise you might visually confuse your reader!

Webinar invitation email template example

Get the word out with our webinar invitation template.

How to create a memorable post-registration email

Once someone registers for the webinar, the next step is to send out a post-registration email. This helps keep the chain of communication open and helps to ensure that the participant follows through and attends the webinar.

It’s worth noting that you should send a few invitation reminder emails out — such as the day before and day of the webinar. Remember you want to drive attendance, so you can, in turn, increase your chances of attaining qualified leads.

Confirm registration

Above all else, you want to make sure that you confirm their registration for the webinar. The Internet can be an unpredictable black hole and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Don’t let your participants think your webinar and their registration was one of them.

Ask a rhetorical question

You don’t want to create a false sense of insecurity or urgency, but you do want to remind the participant that they have something important to learn and gain by attending your webinar. Not only that but it also effectively sets you up to introduce your product after the webinar in your follow-up email.

Include links

For example, you can include links that allow the participant to add the event to their calendar, invite a friend or cancel just in case something comes up that prevents them from attending.

Post-registration email template example

Keep communication flowing with our post-registration email template.

How to create an excellent webinar follow-up email

Before you send out your webinar follow-up email, we suggest creating different recipient segments based on job titles or industries. This will help you custom-fit your follow-up email messaging based on your audience’s needs and ensure your email resonates with them — instead of falling flat.

Offer your appreciation

First and foremost, remember to thank your webinar attendees for taking the time out of their day to listen in. After all, everyone likes to feel appreciated!

Address their pain point

Webinars often wind up being a great source for MQLs. So without being too pushy or going overboard with a sales pitch, try gently addressing the pain point that your webinar sought to solve. From there, you can introduce your product or service and how it helps to clear up or abate the issue.

Provide a “replay” link

A replay link keeps your webinar top of mind for attendees — and should a registrant miss the webinar altogether, it ensures your presenter’s messages and information still reach your target audiences.

Webinar follow-up template example

Make your attendees feel valued and appreciated with a little help from our webinar follow-up template.

Let the good times roll

At the end of the day, webinars are extremely effective marketing and educational tools. However, keep in mind that most webinars have a 46% attendance rate, so no matter what you want to ensure that your webinar emails are on-point, on-brand and consistent. Unsure how to create a solid email sequence without succumbing to the Doomed Wall of Text? We got you — check out any of our free email newsletter templates to get started.

Also, if you have your own webinar email tips, we’d love to hear about them! So feel free to share ‘em with us.

For help with creating a beautiful, on-brand webinar, don’t miss our free webinar templates.

If a single picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth an entire book. Buying or selling a house in the digital age requires digging into the high-tech toolbox to reach your customers. A simple well-crafted video can function as a living billboard for real estate agents and home sellers alike.

Related: How to create stellar videos for real estate listings

Real estate video marketing is mapping previously uncharted territory for reaching customers looking to buy a house. YouTube isn’t just for watching funny cat videos. It’s also an effective avenue for quickly getting your message to a wider audience. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine (behind Google). This means a real estate agent who uses video to sell properties will draw in a much larger crowd than one who relies on marketing the old-fashioned way.

Selling real estate is all about getting visual. Prospective buyers want to tour a house before purchasing, so they can see how everything looks both inside and outside. Real estate videos can be their eyes and ears for anything from virtual tours of a house to neighborhood guides.

Guidelines for using video marketing in real estate

Making videos doesn’t require complex skills, thanks to the abundance of smartphone apps designed to streamline shooting and editing. Uploading those videos to a YouTube channel, Facebook page or another social media platform is equally simple.

A high-quality video can be a huge asset for turning a real estate listing into a sale. It lets your prospective buyers feel like they’re actually there on the property, taking a tour inside the house. They can tour each room and get a sense of features, space and other design elements.

Here are a few guidelines to consider while crafting a real estate video.

Be a storyteller

Everyone loves a good story, especially if it relates to them or their life experiences. Making a hard sell in a video won’t go over well. The important thing is to craft a story. To do that, you need to identify your target audience, then figure out what feelings and thoughts you want to evoke in them.

Are you selling starter homes for first-time buyers? Is your prospective buyer looking for a fixer-upper they can make their own? Does your target customer want to upgrade their lifestyle with a luxurious home? Understanding your audience will help you brainstorm the right visuals and script to evoke the desired reaction.

Make the house feel special

Most people who buy a house aren’t making a temporary purchase. They want to put down roots and have this place feel like home. Making it feel like a home should be your focus.

Use the video to show how this can be a place where someone can make memories. The video should create positive feelings and leave a lasting impression. A buyer should be able to visualize welcoming a new child, spending a holiday with the family, or having a movie night with their spouse within those walls.

Another goal is to showcase what makes the house unique. Emphasize key features that align with your prospective buyer’s interests or lifestyle. Highlight design elements that stand out rather than simply going from one room to another like you’re moving down a factory assembly line. []

Create your own blockbuster

Production quality means everything in shooting and editing a video. You don’t want to go the low-budget, B-movie route. You want to produce a blockbuster. Perception is reality in advertising.

It starts with investing in a high-quality camera and lighting props that will give your videos the professional look they need to stand out. Use appealing background music to set a comfortable mood. Music can pull viewers into the narrative and reinforce the message you want to leave with them.

Hook the prospective buyer

People have shorter attention spans in the digital age. They aren’t likely to sit through an online video lasting 15 to 20 minutes. That’s why it’s important to hook the viewer in the first few seconds. Keep the video short, but also be creative to persuade them not to click away.

If someone clicks on a video, chances are they either want a question answered, want to solve a problem, or want to be entertained. Your real estate video should be tailored to serve one or more of those purposes.

The bottom line is that people use the internet to search for homes. They will hit up Google, YouTube and Facebook to find what they are looking for. Your target audience is online, and you need to have media that will earn their trust and their business. Relevant video will draw people to your website and convince them to stick around.

End with a call-to-action

While putting together a slick-looking video is important, it shouldn’t be the end goal. A video serves the same purpose as a traditional open house. Leads should turn into sales. In other words, you want a prospective buyer to take the next step towards actually buying the house.

Plan out the next step you want them to take, and end your video with a call-to-action. It could be as simple as signing up for a newsletter or inviting them to an open house. Build on their initial interest, so they don’t forget about what you’re offering.

One way to do this is to incorporate digital designs that put your branding front and center. Lucidpress can help you create visually appealing designs—like fact sheets or flyers you’re your contact information—that you can edit into your video content.

Types of real estate videos

Video is a medium not a strategy, which means it can be used for a variety of use cases in every stage of the selling process. We’ll go over some common real estate video formats below.

Real estate listing video

The real estate listing video provides a virtual walkthrough of a property, so potential buyers can preview your home from the comfort of their couch. Listing videos can be as simple as a video tour of the home conducted by the real estate agent or can get creative with storytelling by showing what it’s like to live in the home and surrounding neighborhood. Learn more about creating your own real estate listing video in this post.

Real estate explainer video

An explainer video is, as it sounds, a video meant to explain something. This could be a video explaining the difference between two types of home loans, the role of a real estate agent or how to work with a mortgage broker. Explainer videos are frequently animated but feel free to keep graphics simple.

https://youtu.be/vz4D43XDnZw

Real estate how-to video

Similar to an explainer video, a real estate how-to video is informational. A how-to video should focus on providing detailed instructions on how to complete a single task. These videos are great for building brand trust and real estate agent recognition among first time home buyers who are learning about the real estate buying process for the first time.

Business card video

Every great real estate brokerage knows that the relationship between the real estate agent and the buyer or seller is critical to the success of a sale. Introductory videos help potential clients get to know an agent at a more personal level than a written business card or website profile.

Real estate branding video

A brand video introduces your brokerage’s brand in a way that is personable and unique. These videos are meant to build awareness of and affinity to your brand rather than sell houses directly. These videos can tell the story of the brand itself or provide educational or entertaining content that matches the brand’s values.

Real estate testimonial video

Testimonials are a great way to build trust with clients and the video format gives you the unique advantage of allowing former clients to speak directly to future ones. When creating a real estate testimonial video, remember to make the customer the hero of the story. Ask the customer about what they were trying to accomplish, any fears or concerns that they had and how your brokerage helped them achieve their goal.

Devise a marketing plan

A real estate video is only effective if your target audience can see it and knows where to find it. Recording a video and posting it on social media is only the first step. You need to post it at the right times and places to maximize its effectiveness, and you need to make it visible to search engines.

Schedule videos like a tweet or a blog post. Don’t be random about creating real estate videos, either. Make a series of videos that will entice people to keep returning to your website. One series could offer practical advice to homebuyers. Another series could do the same for sellers. You could have videos dedicated to showcasing a specific neighborhood. Experiment with content to see what your viewers respond to most.

Use sound SEO principles for each video you post. You want to make it as easy as possible for a potential buyer to find your listing. Optimize your video by tagging the right keywords and using a descriptive title. It follows the same principle as using a hashtag in a tweet. Using the right keywords will make your video content more visible through search. Learn more about creating a comprehensive real estate marketing plan.

Where to post real estate videos

Where a real estate video lives depends on the goal of the video. For example, an agent introduction video would live on the website next to the real estate agent’s profile and on the real estate agent’s personal social media accounts. A listing video would be embedded on the website, and it could also be shared on Instagram or Facebook. Branding videos work great on brokerage’s social media pages, home pages or about us pages or embedded in an email signature. Explainer and how-to videos can drive new traffic to your blog or YouTube account by optimizing them for keywords potential clients are searching for.

What can video marketing do for you?

Customers are more likely to come across your real estate business online than anywhere else. Making a good first impression is important, and real estate video marketing can achieve that goal.

With an effective real estate video marketing plan, you can do much more to set yourself and your business apart from the competition in three distinct ways:

• Showcase your local expertise. Homebuyers want to work with real estate agents who actually know a thing or two about a house and the surrounding neighborhood. Videos are an effective means for building credibility as an expert. You can anticipate several frequently asked questions and share relevant information about a particular neighborhood or market.
• Create a positive social media impression. Doing business with a real estate agent often comes down to what impression they leave with a potential buyer. Videos can help you look more professional and make customers more comfortable listing or buying a home with you. They will see you have the skills to get the job done right.
• Elevate your brand presence. Everyone wants to stand out from the crowd, right? Quality videos cut through the social media noise and give customers a reason to consider your real estate brand above all others. Things like a satisfied customer testimonial or a virtual house tour can make a world of difference in setting you apart from the competition.

Key takeaway

Videos are experiencing a surge in popularity in real estate marketing. They’re mobile-friendly and give customers a quick, simple way to digest important information. Video production and distribution should form a core element of your real estate marketing strategy. If you want to fast-track building up your brand, video marketing offers a great path to reach that destination.

Want more great tips on how to set up real estate marketing campaigns? Check out our comprehensive real estate marketing guide for ideas & inspiration.

Many of the current tactics used by tech marketers are falling short of leading to sales. But here’s the thing, there’s often not enough focus on strategy. If you’re finding that your team is great at digital marketing but doesn’t know much about traditional marketing, then you’ve got a problem.

Marketing in today’s world shouldn’t be traditional versus digital. Yes, your marketers need to know about SEO, email marketing, content marketing, etc., but they also need to have a foundation in marketing mix, messaging and the other good stuff that traditional marketing is founded on.

Tech marketing really isn’t that different from marketing for any other company in a different industry. It just takes a little translation to apply it to your business. So, we’ve found seven great strategies to help your team change the way you approach tech marketing, starting with the most fundamental elements of any marketing strategy.

1. Build a strong brand

Branding is one of the most important aspects when it comes to tech marketing. In fact, 60% of brands believe maintaining a strong brand is important when generating leads. It’s crucial for every business out there — your brand is what people will remember most about you. But remember, tech company branding isn’t just about logos and pretty designs; it’s about delivering your company’s mission in a concise way. It’s showing off your personality and telling people you live up to what you promise. With a strong brand, you’ll see a surge in new leads, customers and conversions.

Here’s where to start with renovating your brand:

• Set brand guidelines
• Offer your team a branding masterclass
• Provide branding resources
• Think beyond your website

When correctly implemented, your brand will establish credibility and trust with potential and current customers. Ultimately, a strong brand has a trickle-down effect, boosting your bottom line, employee morale and brand status.

2. Identify your target market

A crucial element to any tech marketing strategy is your audience. You cannot, I repeat, cannot have any marketing strategy, tactic, mission, product … anything without knowing and understanding your target market. Your target market answers fundamental questions that, in turn, influence almost everything you do in your company. Knowing and understanding specifics like what messages resonate with them or what channels will best connect you to them will pave the way for your tech marketing strategy.

Dive deep into the demographics: who your market is (age, ethnicity, gender), where they live, what industries they work in, what they care about, etc. If you don’t know these specifics, nothing else we say from here on out can help. You have to know who you’re creating a product or service for in order for it to work effectively.

As you begin to answer who your target market is, you can then move on to what channels they interact with most and then to what tactics you can use to deliver your message. Getting to know your target market and understanding how your product solves their problems will get you on the right path.

3. Create more effective content

The number of ads a single person may encounter in one day has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Breaking through that noise to strike a chord with a potential customer can be difficult. And not all of those ads are effective — a lot of them are simply background music that people scroll or swipe past. Sadly enough, 60% of consumers believe that branded content is totally useless. Oof.

Don’t be part of that 60%. Make a point to create more effective content. If you’re not sure whether or not your content is effective, try this simple test we’ve put together.

If you find that your content isn’t as effective as you hoped or assumed, or if you’re just wanting to learn more about how brand templating can help you grow your business, check out our free eBook: Brand templating: How creating more effective content gets results.

4. Host or attend live events

Because audiences are inundated with digital marketing and ads, it’s more important than ever to include face-to-face interactions. Many tech buyers want to get to know you personally in a way that only IRL interaction can provide, and hosting a live event can help. Additionally, integrating live events into your tech marketing efforts can do the following:

• Heighten brand awareness. Sometimes, the biggest challenge when you’re starting out is simply getting noticed. Live events help you showcase the “wow” factor of your product.
• Provide leads. If you’re a more seasoned business, generating leads face to face can be critical for you. Before attending the event, make sure to reach out to key prospects to drive attendance.
• Strengthen customer engagement. Live events can provide an informal, low-pressure environment where you meet and greet current customers. This strengthens your relationships with them, leading to customer loyalty and retention.
• Educate. Educational content and workshops are some of the most effective live event marketing solutions. Workshops can draw in current and potential customers.

Promote the event heavily on social media and stay active and engaged on your social platforms before and after the event.

5. Enable automation

To stay on top of contacting potential leads for your tech marketers, you’ll want to invest in tech marketing automation tools. Automated systems can collect leads, build a marketing pipeline, segment contacts, and market to them on a consistent basis. Marketing automation can help you nurture, qualify, and pass leads from your tech marketing team over to sales when they’re ready. This is an essential tool since pre-sales and sales cycles can last anywhere from weeks to months. Finding the right automation tool will depend on the size of your company, along with the target buyer and the nature of your product.

A few tools you can check out to get you started are ActiveCampaign, Marketo, Pardot, Oracle Eloqua or Mautic.

6. Include influencer marketing

A recent turn in digital marketing is the reliance on influencers to help promote services and products. Business leaders and decision makers are starting to turn to experts in their fields as they evaluate new technologies. A partnership with an influencer or two can help up your credibility and your social media reach.

If you’re like me, you can see the benefits of reaching out to an influencer to help market your product or service. I follow experts and sometimes non-experts to help me when it comes to buying just about anything these days. I’d rather not spend the time doing the research. So if someone else already has done it, then you bet I’m going to take their word for it and invest or buy whatever they’re promoting. My Amazon account can prove it.

Decision makers are beginning to rely more and more on others they trust (or just simply admire) to share their experiences with a solution, platform, product or service before they invest in it. This creates an incredible opportunity for you to leverage influences who already have a loyal following to help market to your target market.

7. Harness video content

Video content has become an extremely prevalent marketing tool for tech companies. Some people just don’t have the time to go through a product datasheet, but we all have a minute or two to watch an engaging, entertaining video about a valuable solution. Here are some areas to focus on when producing original content:

• Great stories. Focus on telling a compelling story. Walk your viewers through how you specifically helped a customer get from point A to point B. Make sure to keep things as simple as possible. You can get into specifics during a sales call later.
• Fun concepts. We know you’re in the tech industry, but that doesn’t mean your videos have to be technical too. Creating humorous videos will help you stand out from the crowd.
• Useful content. As you strive to be funny, don’t forget that your video should also be useful or educational. Your video could be anything from a tutorial or product demo to industry best practices.
• Testimonials. Client testimonials are a powerful tool in marketing. They give potential customers a moment to see a business similar to theirs finding a solution. “If it worked for them, maybe it’ll work for us,” is the mentality.

Whether you choose to implement one or all of these strategies, we know you’ll start to see a shift in your marketing approach overall, along with lead generation. Although simple, these strategies could equal that secret sauce you’ve been needing to change your tech marketing from meh to wow!

And don’t forget to grab our free, mini-ebook Brand Templating: How creating more effective content gets results.

Recipes are relatively easy to follow. They’re designed to be replicated and, to some degree, guarantee an element of success. Take chocolate chip cookies for example. They’re hard to screw up and generally liked by most folks.

The same concept applies to marketing. Certain marketing strategies, aka your chocolate chip cookies, are designed to succeed — but that doesn’t mean they work for everyone. As in: one size does not fit all.

Alternatively, you need to put a new, customer-friendly spin on your go-to recipes. AKA, swap out an egg substitute for those who don’t consume eggs, or maybe use a gluten-free flour for those who are allergic. Minor changes in your recipe can make a world of difference. And doing so can ensure your marketing campaigns actually move the needle and resonate with target audiences.

So, while we head out to the store to grab some cookie baking supplies, we’ll leave you to glean inspiration from some excellent marketing campaign examples.

11 examples of great marketing initiatives that move the needle

Interactive scoring quiz

Who worked on it: Plain writing team — Derek Gillette

What they did: “Schools will need to consider and prepare for things such as purchasing equipment, training instructors, getting board or executive level approval, and designing their course pathways……To assist, we designed a ‘Readiness Quiz’ to help educators understand where they were at in the process, including a downloadable guide at the end walking them step by step through the outstanding items.”

Why it was effective: “The quiz acted as a first step for prospects, giving them clarity, and then pointing them to the next best resources, such as course demos, presentations, equipment lists or an application. The results of the quiz were also fed back into the marketing database, making it easy for sales or field teams to follow-up in a meaningful way with prospects.”

Additional context: Readiness quiz

Customer affinities

Who worked on it: Cricket Depot — Content creators, content strategist and founder (Jeff Neal)

What they did: “To boost our conversion rate, we created ‘supplemental’ articles that complimented the roaches we sell. When we started, our content focused on the health benefits of crickets. This was decent content. But it attracted people who already knew they wanted crickets as feeders for the reptiles…. Instead, we pivoted our content strategy, and started writing care guides for popular reptiles like bearded dragons and leopard geckos.”

Why it was effective: “These care guides brought in a whole new group of people that were unaware they could buy crickets online. When they discovered our content, they then discovered they could buy from our store, which led to a very low 36% bounce rate, and a whopping 10% ecommerce conversion rate…..so content that indirectly helps our customers was a great way to quickly boost our conversion rates.”

Additional context:

Timely content

Who worked on it: Filter King — Writer

What they did: “Educating people on all things to do with the home offers us great leverage — reparation, improvements and safety. When Covid arrived, and it was evidence that it was here for the long ride, we created a Covid-centric marketing campaign. We wanted to educate people on how air filters are working to help in the battle against Covid. One huge noticable change due to Covid is how everyone is wearing a mask — Masks are basically air filters. So if you are to wear one while outside, why not ensure your home has high quality air filters to protect it from outside elements? Because, ultimately, you protect those indoors — your friends, family and loved ones. We sent one of our best writers to pull up the research and data of our air filters and to compile them into an educative, informative, and easy-to-read and understand blog post.”

Why it was effective: “It has taught us that when creating blog posts, we should concentrate on real world events and trends. If we want to get a larger response we need to be relevant.”

Additional context: “We sent the email with weekly blog posts — but the customer reaction was incomparable than emails before. We had a 39% open rate, with a 16% CTR!”

Mini product samples

Who worked on it: PLM  — Helena Gutierrez Alvarez

What they did: “We reached out to potential prospects over Linkedin and shared a microlearning series, similar to what you can see at our company page at Linkedin. After sending three pieces of microlearning content, we invited our prospects to a strategy session.”

Why it was effective: It got people in the door! And in the product.

Additional context: “We sent 200 messages over linkedin and got three new customers from this campaign, it was a great success.”

Who worked on it: Mountain View — Matthew Lally, founder of TheGiftYak

What they did: “Post-covid world we shifted content strategy to heavily favor work from home and remote working productivity. The team worked hard to analyze the customer behavior (both large enterprise businesses and small business owners) and the shift that was occurring in our organic and paid advertising data. This led to a lot of whitepaper and blog content, as well as heavy paid advertising investment shifts. We also helped the client spin up and launch a completely new product offering.”

Why it was effective: “It was a free version of an adjacent digital product and allowed us to further tap into our core markets at a very fast pace.”

Additional context: “Our growth didn’t index as high as e-commerce clients during this period, but we had to have seen 20-30% higher ROI than other B2B brands that failed to execute.”

Virtual concert

Who worked on it: Fortnite Team — written about in The Verge

What they did: “Travis Scott’s April (2020) concert in the metaverse of Fortnite’s Battle Royale was an ingenious spectacle that effectively allowed Scott to release his new track to over 12.3 million participants.”

Why it was effective: “The partnership was ingenious because it included an entire ecosystem of IRL and avatar merch, tons of PR buzz, and a stunning production value while everyone was under Covid stay-at-home orders thus bringing more people into Fortnite and Scott’s fanbase and setting an all-time record for Epic Games.”

Additional context:

User-generated content

Who worked on it: Premium Joy — Hassan Alnassir, founder and owner

What they did: “We ran an online contest through Gleam using our products as the prizes and the goal was collecting high quality user generated content (namely funny children videos) for marketing purposes…..Those selected contest videos will be utilized in a future blog post and YouTube video to promote our business (i.e., content marketing).”

Why it was effective: “The valuable $100+ contest prizes attracted several video submissions from customers out of which the best five were awarded.”

Augmented reality

Who worked on it: CocoSign — Caroline

What they did: “Asos — a famous British fashion and cosmetic brand launched an innovative feature for their mobile app. This feature is named ‘Virtual Catwalk’ and it utilizes Augmented Reality technology in order to work. Through it, users can point their smartphone towards any surface and watch the models walking in that set on their mobile as if they are in front of them. This feature enabled buyers to see Asos products in a better way. Increasing the interest of buyers and clarifying the product view, the organization could improve its online sales efficiently even in pandemic times.”

Why it was effective: “It is one of the best (indirect) marketing initiatives that has an element of surprise and curiosity alongside the power to educate buyers.”

Additional context: “Augmented reality helps virtually connect consumers with products and services without physically going to a retail store. Thus, it is a great marketing medium with consumers putting a high value on convenience. When they can test out products without leaving their homes, people are more likely to buy them online.” — Stephen Light, CMO of Nolah Mattress

Celebrity collaboration

Who worked on it: Just Eats — McCann Creative and Snoop Dog

What they did: “Equipped with a tagline you can’t help but hum, Just Eat has unleashed its secret weapon upon the festive season, leveraging the rapper’s popularity to draw attention to its food delivery service this Christmas…..The rapper first gave Just Eat the Snoop Dogg treatment back in May. Billed as ’this year’s biggest collaboration’’ the campaign saw Snoop jazz up its jingle – ’Did Somebody Say Just Eat?’ – doggystyle. Created by McCann, who won the newly-unified account back in 2018, the fresh tagline was a marked departure from the reign of Karmarama which focused on the ’magical world’ of Just Eat’s service.” — The Drum, Snoop Dogg fronts Just Eat’s festive ad spitting bars about fried chicken stockings

Why it was effective: “Globally, the Dutch-based business — which reportedly paid rap star Snoop Dogg £5.3million to front its summer ad campaign — racked up orders of 151.4-million in the quarter to the end of September.” — Metro UK, Business briefing: Rap boost — Snoop Dogg in Just Eat ad

Interactive video content

Who worked on it: Tate Law — Stanley Tate

What they did: “Tate Law is an organization that helps students with their student loan problems. We’ve helped manage $400 million worth of student loans so far. Last year, because of the pandemic we were forced to go 100% remote. This took a toll on our sales process and we were forced to rely on online channels only. Thanks to referrals and some online funnels we were able to bring qualified traffic to our homepage. But our conversion rates were quite low. After a lot of experimentation, we finally decided to settle on a video chatbot that would reply with pre-recorded videos of mine. It would eventually lead them to schedule a call with me. It was an instant hit. Our conversion improved by 654%.

Why it was effective: “It was a huge success because it respected our customers’ time. They were given hyper-specific information based on what they asked for. It was such a contrasting experience compared to an explainer video explaining the whole service.”

Additional context: “Many delighted customers said that the whole experience mimicked a live video call and gave a personal touch. It was a very efficient way to give them a feel of what kind of person I am and how I work. The best part — being a bot, it works 24/7/365!”

Digital PR

Who worked on it: NeoMam Studios

What they did: “World heritage sites exist in constant danger of degradation or destruction. From militants to motorists, earthquakes to urbanization, these meaningful landmarks face both human-made and natural threats.

UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger draws attention to sites at risk of losing the characteristics that make them special. By definition, these structures are significant to ‘all the peoples of the world……’ We worked with architects, Jelena Popovic and Keremcan Kirilmaz and industrial designer Erdem Batirbek to research and illustrate six of these legendary locations for the best online experience: a series of gif animations reconstructing each site from how it looks now to how it looked when first built.”

Why it was effective: Ultimately, they acquired 211 backlinks from unique domains due to this initiative. Additionally, “time doesn’t stand still. Human culture is built from moving parts. The way we define, preserve, and interact with sites of importance says as much about who we are as the monuments themselves.”

Holiday-focused campaign

Who worked on it: NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office

What they did: “With Halloween just around the corner, NASA has released its latest Galaxy of Horrors posters. Presented in the style of vintage horror movie advertisements, the new posters feature a “dead” galaxy, an explosive gamma ray burst caused by colliding stellar corpses, and ever-elusive dark matter; the posters are also available in Spanish.”

Why it was effective: “‘The poster art is a really fun way to imagine one of these happening,” said Racusin. “But I wouldn’t want to be those space travelers!’”

Additional context: “As fun and creative as all three posters are, they’re based on real phenomena. In a dead galaxy, new star birth has ceased and most remaining stars are the long-lived variety, which are small and red, giving the galaxy a crimson glow. Likewise, when dead stars collide, they sometimes create a gamma ray burst, or the brightest type of explosion in the universe. And while dark matter may sound like it’s right out of a Halloween tale, its gravity keeps stars inside galaxies and hold groups of galaxies together in clusters — yet scientists don’t know what this invisible stuff is made of.”

At the end of the day, the core commonality between all these marketing strategies is a memorable content experience. So, yes, while it may take extra time or creative energy to think outside the box and concoct a marketing initiative on par with any of the examples above, the long-term benefits outweigh the short term ones. Because to be memorable is to be reliable — and to be reliable, as an organization, gets you so much further than your competitors.

To learn more about how to deliver the extra 1% to your target audiences time and time again, check out our ebook.