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Using Technology to Generate Leads for Your Business
If you aren’t using the advances in technology to help you market your business, you’re
ignoring a very important resource. There are a variety of affordable, technology-based
techniques that you can use to help your business reach a broader audience and that
can be leveraged to better reach your target clientele. These include automated
marketing services, search engine optimization, blogs and electronic newsletter
distribution.
Automated Marketing
Automated marketing covers a broad array of functions with a common theme: it’s all
about turning labor intensive manual tasks into something that is done automatically,
increasing efficiency in the process. Implementing automated marketing strategies cuts
costs, improves accuracy by eliminating the human error inherent in repetitive work and
can materially improve your rate of success by developing marketing approaches that
would be effectively impossible through any other means.
Marketing automation can be used to better identify business leads through a process
of prospect scoring—easily and quickly detecting and classifying likely targets for your
business. It can also be used as a means of creating nuanced points of direct and
indirect contact to help turn prospective customers into realized ones. In short,
automated marketing can be used as a full developed marketing schematic, from plan
development and management through execution.
Search Engine Optimization
In short, search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the technique of driving Internet
search traffic to your site through an understanding of the algorithms that guide results
for the major Web search engines (Google in particular). While the search engine
providers don’t release specifics about how their services work, consultants that
specialize in search engine optimization have developed a variety of tactics that can
help your websites and blogs to raise to the top of the search engine rankings.
Strategies involving specific types of content, links and key words, among other things,
can all help ensure that you have a competitive edge in driving potential customers to
your online vehicles.
Electronic Newsletters and Blogs
A form of direct e-mail marketing, electronic newsletters are sent, automatically, to an
entire list of subscribers. They will often contain news items of interest to your base of
existing and prospective customers as well as information about your products and
services. Properly executed, a newsletter can inform clients of promotions and sales
and will encourage a response through the inclusion of direct links to allow purchases
and further contact with company representatives. This can be a very effective way to
stay engaged with your clientele on a regular basis without resorting to more
traditional—and more costly—forms of indirect advertising.
A business blog is frequently used as a kind of electronic newsletter, minus the direct email component. A blog ordinarily includes targeted, “newsy” information of interest
and, combined with SEO tactics, can be effectively utilized to drive traffic to your
commercial website and to harvest leads for a direct mailing list.
The End Result
If you’re ignoring technology related strategies and techniques to market your business
and better pursue customer leads, you’re not using all of the tools at your disposal to
make your enterprise profitable. Contact an IT consultant to see how you can optimize
the use of technology for the benefit of your business.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_automation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing