Top Performing marketers rank webinars as one of the two most profitable channels. (Gleanster, 2011).Webinars are particularly valuable for reinforcing your brand as a thought leader and source of relevant content. And you can generate especially well-qualified leads: Use a landing page and form that collects each participant’s name and email address when they sign up, and you’ll gain a new hot lead every time someone registers.

Expanding the reach and results of your webinars is great, but adding additional capabilities usually means extra work. What if… you could build all the creative elements, set up the surrounding email communications, AND manage your webinar, all using the same easy platform? (Hint: You can!)

Act-On Software integrates seamlessly with Cisco WebEx—widely recognized as the best webinar delivery platform in the industry— providing marketers a true end-to-end solution. You can send email event invitations, automatically update attendance lists, follow-up with attendees and non-attendees, and automatically update leads in Salesforce using one marketing solution.

“It’s easier to create and manage our webinars through the Act-On platform, as well as our invite and registrant list. There’s no need to even log into WebEx.”—Ben Jackson,
Director, Sales & Marketing, Voices.com

Want to see how easy it is? Watch this short, to-the-point video to see the whole process in less than five minutes…

Act-On Software allows marketers to manage all the essential aspects of a webinar before, during and after the event, from one automated and integrated marketing platform. Visit our website to learn more about how you can start using Act-On’s WebEx integration today!

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In B2B marketing, landing pages are often one of the first interactions a company has with a sales lead.  There are at least three reasons to direct visitors to a landing page instead of your home page. First, that prospect clicked that link for a reason. Use a landing page to deliver exactly what the prospect expected or hoped for, and your relationship is off to a great start. Landing pages also provide opportunities to test and optimize design, content, calls to action, and offers, which you probably don’t want to do on your home page. In addition, prospects and customers come in through different avenues; landing pages let you see where traffic and conversions come from, so you can refine and focus your ad dollars.

Wondering how you can get the most out of these targeted webpages? Here are six tips for what you can do (and what not to do) when creating landing pages:

1. Do: Design for a short attention span

The web’s a busy place, so make it easy for people to follow your message from the site where they found it to your landing page. Keep the message above the fold, use bulleted text and crisp, clean language. It’s important that your offer be completely on the page, with no scrolling required to find or follow it.

2. Don’t: Have other navigation

It’s a common mistake to link to other products or offers on a landing page. But additional links can dilute your messaging or distract from your call to action. Keep it simple and keep it focused. It’s also harder to measure the impact of your offer, messages, and page design when there’s more than one focus on a page.

3. Do: Make your offer compelling

Fulfill expectations and reinforce why the prospect clicked on that link to begin with. Make sure your content and offer grab attention and provide value.

4. Don’t: Ask too many questions

Landing pages are a great way to get more information about potential customers, but as with any new relationship, asking too many questions too quickly may seem like an invasion of privacy. If you’re using a form or survey, ask only for essentials like name and email at first. If the relationship continues, trust will build and you can ask more questions. If you build forms with conditional logic, you can show or hide data fields based on what users select for another field on that form.

5. Do: Test your ideas

Landing pages let marketers test concepts in ways that print ads and other traditional marketing can’t do. Try at least basic A/B split testing to find out which offers, graphics, surveys, buttons, etc. work best.

6. Don’t: Target everyone with your offer

Half the value of landing pages is that they let you serve self-selected prospects with very specific needs. Keep your offer focused to this target audience; don’t try to make it fit everyone. Getting traffic from people who don’t fit your target demographic won’t increase conversions.

Good landing pages give your customers-to-be the reasons and means to take the next step on the buyer’s journey. And they give you a powerful tool for understanding your prospective customers and your market, insight that can help convert clicks into sales. Try these six tips to make your landing pages a more productive tool in your integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns, and let us know how it goes.

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Recently, Act-On Software was proud to sponsor Target Marketing’s 7 Social Media Secrets That Make Good Direct Marketing Great webinar featuring Julie Perry, Vice President of Social Media at BLASTmedia.

Perry sees inbound and outbound efforts as weaving together to form an effective, integrated campaign. As an example, pushing a press release to the media is an outbound effort that leads to inbound traffic; if you augment this with effective social media strategies, you can greatly enhance results. In this lively, fast-paced webinar, Perry provided seven specific strategies to leverage social media to cross-promote and integrate inbound and outbound marketing efforts. Many of Perry’s strategies pair traditional outbound marketing techniques that push company messages out to prospects with inbound marketing that pulls potential customers in. Here are the seven social media secrets Perry presented:

7 Social Media Secrets for Marketers

1.  Entice Direct Mail Recipients to Connect with You Online

Offering direct mail recipients valuable content and a way to connect to your organization online can entice them to interact more with your brand. QR codes are one method of doing this, and Perry gave several examples of campaigns that have used QR codes to pull offline prospects into an online digital sales funnel

2.  Turn Email Blasts into Online Experiences

Send email marketing content that encourages recipients to engage with your brand more directly by giving them a way to get content they care about. Make it easy for them to opt-in to webinars, or download informational materials such as eBooks and white papers. Another strategy is to incorporate multimedia such as online polls or video. Perry showed how companies could use monthly blog summaries and contests to encourage email recipients to engage with them in the social media arena, which can become a lead nurturing strategy.

3.  Optimize your Press Releases for Search Engines

Press releases aren’t just for the media; make sure you’re optimizing your releases so they’re easily found in search. Perry offered specific tactics for optimizing online press releases and recommended media outreach tactics using social media platforms such as Twitter.

4.  Repurpose Outbound Content and Media Coverage for Inbound Marketing

Outbound direct mail, email content and press releases can all be repurposed for blog content and article marketing, both of which help search engine optimization (SEO). You can repurpose media coverage—both mainstream and new media—for leveraging via social media channels and search via your corporate blog. This leverages the power of influencers and third-party recommendations by repackaging them to hand back to your target market directly.

5.  Use Online Video and YouTube in Your Marketing Campaigns

While creating video and uploading it to YouTube (or other video sharing sites) is an outbound marketing tactic, optimizing that video content for search is an inbound marketing tactic that allows potential customers to discover your content. Maximize your YTO (YouTube Optimization) to take advantage of the fact that YouTube is now the #2 search engine in the world.

6.  Team Up with Twitter at Tradeshows

Having a booth or attending a tradeshow is an outbound effort. Complement this with using Twitter as an inbound tactic to enhance your networking at the show. Event hashtags are a great way to figure out who’s at an event and what they’re saying, so that you can join the conversation and plan opportunities to meet with leads and media. Building Twitter lists (even those marked as private) can help you monitor this conversation and start planning your trip, sometimes months in advance.

7.  Advertising (Online via Social Media Channels)

Advertising purchased on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can be enhanced utilizing an appropriate call-to-action (CTA) that lures potential customers into “liking” a brand page on Facebook, entering a contest, filling out a survey or watching a video. Perry gave specific examples of how this is done via YouTube Promoted Ads and CTA ads.

Incorporating social media into your overall marketing campaign can help your organization reach customers, generate sales leads, nurture those leads and eventually win new customers.

Act-On Software’s Twitter Prospector aids businesses in utilizing social media to find new audiences for your products and services. Learn more Act-On’s marketing automation platform by joining one of our weekly live demos or requesting a one-on-one demo.

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The Sales Lead Management Association recently announced its list of “50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management.” Nominees for this award included a diverse array of disciplines from marketing automation software to publishing. These power players have been recognized by their peers as multi-dimension sales and marketing experts.

For those with a knowledge of Act-On’s lead nurturing, lead qualification and scoring and other lead management tools, it should come as no surprise that two Act-On executives were included on this impressive list. Act-On Software CEO, Raghu Raghavan and CRO, Shawn Naggiar join other notable names including The Annuitas Group’s Carlos Hidalgo and Snap Selling author Jill Konrath.

“I am honored to be elected to this list, joining the company of so many respected members of the marketing and sales industry,” said Raghu. “This is an exciting time for Act-On Software as we just reached the 500th customer milestone and we have many more milestones to come. What we have accomplished in under two years of operation is remarkable, and we aren’t slowing down.”

Interested in putting Act-On Software’s sales lead management tools to work for your company? Sign up for a weekly marketing automation software demo or request a one-on-one demo.

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