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3 Considerations for Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla soldier with thumbs up and sign that says Going Guerilla PROSAR.

We deal with a lot of small and medium sized businesses, and many are looking for the magic rocket that will quickly propel them to recognition, fame and fortune. They’ve heard of some fantastic event or promotion that made a start-up company a household name and driven 500% growth, and they want that. Who wouldn’t? Here are three important questions to ask when considering guerilla marketing.

 

How Does it Fit Into Your Marketing Plan?

Unfortunately, creating an Internet meme or popular guerilla marketing tactic is not likely; and not a realistic goal on its own. I certainly don’t underestimate the potential power of such a tactic, but the chance of being successful is remote… really, really remote. Before you start playing the marketing lottery, I suggest you invest in a good strategic plan. It sounds boring in comparison to a viral video or flash event, but it will focus your marketing efforts on tactics that will steadily move your company forward.

The advantage of a plan is that, well, its planned. It takes into consideration your current position, resources, your goals and where you want the company to be down the road. Growing your business successfully relies on planning your route to get there, and a strong brand [For more on Branding, check out: I Have a Website, Why Do I Need Branding?; Is Your Brand Relevant?] with structured marketing will accelerate that. True, some wild guerilla marketing would add an octane boost, but without the plan and marketing foundation, you might find yourself out of gas and coasting to the side of the road just as fast.

The benefits of a good marketing plan are numerous:

  • Build or support your brand
  • Clearly communicate what you stand for
  • Expand your market
  • Engage new audiences
  • Support sales goals
  • Improve the user-experience of dealing with your organization
  • Strengthen relationships with customers and leads
  • Provide measurable results to keep you on track

These are all important aspects in building a strong marketing foundation for your company. They allow you to project a professional image and provide targeted, clear communication to engage with your audience. They help customers to feel good about dealing with you and prompts referrals. They position your organization for growth and stability. And, they just might deliver a run-away successful tactic in the process.

 

How Much Can You Invest in Guerilla Marketing?

It may seem like success just happens miraculously, and all it took was a simple video. That can happen, but when it does it is a fluke. And, since no strategy is built around it, it is quickly forgotten when the next wave of cool videos and memes flow along the Internet current. Hard to ride the wave if you aren’t prepared for it.

On the other hand, companies have wasted large budgets on carefully crafted, wittily worded, and slickly sequenced videos and “impromptu” events that have gone no where. So budget alone does not determine the likelihood of success. Other than luck, the most important aspects are strategy and understanding. Strategy is main thrust of this article; understanding relates to your audience, social and societal considerations, the chosen media and communication. It’s a lot to understand and requires a team to gather the intelligence, decipher its relevance, integrate this knowledge and align it with your strategy and goals, design, develop and implement the magical event/video/meme that goes viral. Fortunately, both strategy and understanding are inherent in a good marketing plan.

It is a significant commitment of people, process and time, so don’t waste resources on trying to develop the rocket that will propel your brand to stardom, until you have your growth planned and a marketing strategy to get you there. It’s certainly possible that one of your planned and measured tactics designed to move you further along your structured marketing plan may go viral. And it makes sense to try to create such a tactic — as long as it is part of comprehensive plan and budget.

 

Besides Popularity, What is the Goal?

So, how would you leverage the popularity garnered from a run-away viral hit? Would it dovetail into your existing plan, or would you need new online workflows (landing pages, forms email campaigns, etc.), sales team strategy, PR campaigns, etc., to take advantage of this boost. If you’re fortunate enough to find success, don’t let it plummet away from you.

Be ready to respond promptly and positively. Popularity is wonderful, but usually fleeting. You’ll need to connect it strategically to your brand, processes and sales pipeline to successfully sustain your growth efforts. Again, it’s that boring plan that truly propels you to success, otherwise you simply have a really cool video that everyone watched for three days.

Planning is the key to business and marketing success. The better prepared you are, the more in-tune you are with your audience, media and environment in which you play, the more likely you will succeed. This gives you a strong foundation for sustainable growth, and makes it even more likely that a guerilla marketing tactic could work for you. But if it doesn’t, your organization is still progressing towards achieving its goals.

Guerilla soldier with thumbs up and sign that says Going Guerilla PROSAR.

Photo Credit: MichealJay/gettyimages.com

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3 Considerations for Finding Better Blog Topics

Above view of business man working place. Cup of coffee, laptop, notebook and pen. Business, education or blogging concept.

Whether you’re just starting your company website or you’ve been in the game for a while, it’s no secret that blogging has become a central component of content marketing. And, the reason why it’s become so prevalent is because frequent and regular company blogging can significantly increase your page ranking. In today’s rich information world, however, simply maintaining an up-to-date blog is no longer enough. To attract and retain clients your blogs should be written in an engaging and meaningful style; they need to stand out and be deemed worthy of reading. After all, pretty much all your competitors are writing blogs too.

So, when it comes to writing blogs for your organization what’s the secret? How do you factor in both quantity and quality?

To get the most out of your blogs, to rank high on searches and convert more leads into sales, here are three important considerations

1. Get a vision for how you want to house your blogs

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing yourself or you’ve hired a team of experts. Before coming up with topics you should be prepared to ask yourself what you want in your blog and to do some research. If you’re stuck on this, go see what your competitors’ and others in your field are doing, you need to see what they already have that could appeal to your audience. This will help you see how you can make your blog page and content unique and more attractive. No matter what stage you’re in, if you’re in the midst of changing or revamping your blog page, aesthetics also plays a huge role in strengthening and building customer loyalty. Once you’ve come up with a good vision of how you want to structure and design your blog page, only then should you start fleshing out blog topics.

2. Find topics by looking within your company, and your staff

Your blog page should serve as an informative, interesting, and even enjoyable, user’s guide. Every aspect and angle of your service or product can be explored in ways that make them relevant and meaningful to your audience. Your blogs should be written in such a way that it clearly explains and showcases all the great qualities that your organization has to offer. And, what better way to pinpoint all the unique aspects of your company than to at look at your staff for guidance? Your employees reflect all the different units that make up your company. From first-hand experience, they typically know what benefits your service/product has to offer and how the organization meets clients’ needs on a day-to-day basis.

Ask your team questions like:

What are some frequently asked questions from our clients?

How do we enrich the lives of our clients?

What’s a memorable conversation that you’ve had with a client or supplier?

There are additional benefits in talking to your staff: it will not only help you choose some hot topics for your blog, this in-house communication will also increase your overall knowledge about your clients.

3. Go to the heart of your company – the clients

The secret of some the most successful company blogs is that they’ve managed to get into the mindset of their clients. Every communicator appreciates the need to know their audience! Reading your blog may be a potential client’s first impression of your company, so be conscious of starting a relationship and be prepared to carry on a conversation. The key to choosing informative and engaging blog topics that speak to your clients is to pick up on typical buyer cues. This will help you hone in on specific company messages to promote within your blog. You can also get a better idea of who your company’s clients are and flesh out their personas. With this information you can  connect more personally with your audience through your blogs, making it more likely to get referrals.

Writing company blogs regularly and effectively can seem like an onerous task. However, with proper planning of blog topics, it will prove to be an extremely rewarding marketing tool. Put in the time and effort in a strategic fashion, and it will surely pay off! If you are producing relevant and readable material, you can define your brand as a trustworthy and valued online resource; and that is something that your audience will appreciate.

Whether you’ve chosen to write blogs yourself or to hire a specialized marketing team, these are simple in-house tactics that will help as you strategize your blog topics. Read more on how to convert your topics into blogs so that they take advantage of blogging tactics like SEO and link building in “Blogging for Qualified SEO,” “Content Creation for Link Building,” and specific writing strategies in,  “Good Content is FRUITFUL: Your 8-Point Checklist to Writing Content Worth Reading.”

image credit: Dutko / gettyimages

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Improve Conversions with Dynamic Landing Pages

dynamic landing page examle

Website landing pages are important members of the sales team. They serve information to visitors that “arrive” (by link from a home page or an ad) and contain a “call to action” directing visitors to behave a certain way.

 

The next level of website landing pages are now here, thanks to SharpSpring, our automated marketing partner.

 

Dynamic landing pages, created within SharpSpring, offer improved conversion by customizing the website visitor’s experience. Simply put, you can existing lead data captured in SharpSpring to build web pages that display different text, images and calls to action based on individual lead attributes and interests. 

 

Create One Page That Adapts to Different Visitors

 

In the past, creating a dynamic web experience required complex programming and layout. Testing of different layouts added to the complexity and difficulty.

 

Now you can set up one landing page that adapts to any number of user profiles. Simply create dynamic rules based on specific visitor profiles so users only see content that’s tailored to their specific attributes. Once your rules are in place, click on the individual landing page elements – text, images, headers, videos – and select which content should appear for which user types, without any programming.

 

Dynamic landing pages are a high-converting method that can help you get a lot more out of any campaign. Your leads will be far more likely to engage with you, and ultimately make a purchase, if your webpages address specific things they’ve done, places they’ve been, and things they like. You’re making their entire web experience personal.

 

For example, if a travel agency wants to improve its conversion rates, it can use dynamic landing pages to offer its clients new travel ideas based on the places they’ve already visited. That same landing page can be used for any client who has previously traveled with the agency (or even new clients, if they’ve provided any relevant information on their previous travels). By creating a rule based on “preferred type of destination,” the agency can set the page to display exactly the right destination content for each visitor.

 

If a client has visited the Rocky Mountains, one may assume he/she has a preference for visiting mountainous destinations. So when the client revisits the travel agency’s website, the main landing page could display an offer for another similar trip. In this case — how about the Alps?

 

dynamic landing pages example

 

Truly Leverage Your Data

 

Another way you can leverage your data is by basing the dynamic content (that a given lead will see) on his/her lead score. Lead scores are awarded and accumulated in SharpSpring based on visitor’s behaviour at your website. You can create a single landing page page that will display one of multiple possible options depending on whether a lead is above or below a specified lead score threshold. For example, you can set it so that new visitors with lower lead scores will see an option to download an ebook acquainting them with your product or service. For previous visitors whose lead scores match or exceed the specified lead score threshold, the same page can display a demo offer or testimonials for your product or service. The principle behind this is that those with higher lead scores are further along in a buying decision and should see content that is relevant to a making a final purchase.

 

This is all based on the data that SharpSpring has collected on your leads over time, allowing you to take full advantage of that data and truly personalize your campaigns.

 

Dynamic landing pages are available now and another great reason to add automated marketing to your website.

 

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Content Creation for Link Building

I’ve spoken about blogging for qualified SEO before, and blogging is an important part of increasing the traffic to your site. However, simply generating the content isn’t enough to be ranking in search. On top of the creation, you have to integrate the content into your website. A simple way to do this is link building.

Abstract geometric polygonal structure, 3d illustration pattern background
credit: gl0ck / gettyimages

Benefits of Link Building

Link building basically means linking your content internally among your own pages. While it’s important not to go overboard— Google will penalize you for putting in too many links, as it realizes you’re trying to trick its algorithm— placing links in relevant portions of your website helps their ranking and drives leads deeper into your website, reading more of your material and, as a result, qualifying themselves.

When you combine link building with a visitor tracking system such as SharpSpring, you gain valuable insight to your website traffic almost impossible to gain without link building.

 

Content Creation Strategy

Link building needs to be a part of your overall sales strategy. Since the primary purpose of producing content is to drive sales, it’s important you work link building into all your online content. This covers your blog posts, along with social media and even the text on your website.

A good link building strategy will holistically address how links fit in everywhere your website, outside of pushing links to social media and inter-linking blog posts. It sets up content management as part of your overall marketing efforts, which, in turn, helps keep you constantly up to date.

 

Maintenance

Now here comes the tricky part— finding time. While the initial effort to do a strategy might be a daunting effort, the resulting maintenance doesn’t have to be. It’s more a case of being aware that it will continue to be part of your link building process.

As you generate content, establish how and when links will be shared, and develop a system where you regularly review what content you want to promote within your website. Depending on how quickly you generate content, you could be looking at reviews every month or every six. Whatever you decide, make sure you use the time to take an inventory of what you’ve produced, how it supports your sales, and adjusting as necessary.

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5 Reasons to Use Content Marketing

PROSAR content marketing graphic on blackboard

Content Generation and Content Marketing are current buzzwords and part of a leading marketing trend, but the concept has been around since the dawn of commerce. Content marketing is simply using information strategically to communicate with your market. What has changed since the first messaging merchants is the complexity and scope of that communication and its delivery. So buzzwords or not, a more focused and strategic approach to getting your message out is now critical.

Here are five reasons why you should be taking a structured approach to your content marketing.

 

1. Myriad Touchpoints

The ad guys in Mad Men had it comparatively easy; they could focus on a killer ad campaign knowing that a high percentage of their market would absorb their newspaper, TV and radio ads. Since the halcyon days when a campaign brainstorming required a brain-numbing amount of whisky, the Internet has given the information and communication world a whole new environment. This new landscape is vast, cluttered and omnipresent.

A minority of small companies are treating their websites as strategic communication hubs (unfortunately most are still virtual brochures with a link to their dormant Facebook page). And even if you are paying attention to your website, simply keeping it up-to-date isn’t sufficient. Blogs, online communities, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+… there are myriad touchpoints where your existing and potential market could connect with you. A strategic content marketing plan will determine which are best for your company and what needs to be done to properly support them.

 

2. Consumers Want More Info

The Internet has empowered consumers like never before. They now expect to easily find online all required info about any product or service, as well as reviews, user comments, instructions, how-to videos… in essence they want it all and they want it now. A strategic plan helps you to determine how you can most effectively provide that information in a compelling way.

Early advertising guru David Ogilvy understood the importance of content marketing. He maintained that “the more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” Ogilvy helped the industry to appreciate the value of understanding your market and providing the right information in an appropriate manner. And even in those simpler times, this Mad Man realized that “Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.” The fact that the communications and marketing world has become all the more complex underlines the importance of Ogilvy’s insight.

 

3. Open Lines of Communication

In addition to providing you with countless ways to connect with your market, social media and blogs also enable a two-way communication. This may seem daunting but it can be an incredible opportunity. A dialogue with consumers is a direct means to learn from your market and gather valuable information.

Ensure that the bulk of information about your organization online is under corporate stewardship.

 

4. Your Brand is Linked to Your Content

While you are putting good content out there, it is important to also listen to what is being said about you. Scanning the web for mentions and responding swiftly and appropriately has become an important aspect of brand stewardship. Whether you are thanking someone for kind words or a helpful suggestion, or addressing a misperception or mistake; dealing with it publicly and honestly helps you earn loyalty.

Essentially, it all reflects on you (or your organization if you really don’t want to take this personally). I believe that a company’s brand is now formed as much by the unofficial and/or unpaid content online as it is by the paid media and carefully crafted PR. Online, everyone hears you scream — the Internet hears everything said about your company and saves it for anyone to read. Your brand is living 24/7 online and you are probably unaware as to how it’s doing.

 

5. Much of the Content Online is Crap

This proliferation of information on the Internet has bred a lot of poorly researched, badly written and pathetically self-serving crap. (Yes, yes, there is also a ton of really good content, but when you research a purchase online, what percentage of the information is both helpful and well-written?)  So users need to sift through the garbage to find what they are looking for. If you’re churning out less than stellar material, you could be doing more harm than good and actually tarnish your brand.

Conversely, if you are actually producing relevant and readable material, you can help to define your brand as trustworthy and a valued online resource. This positioning moves you a whole lot closer to a buying relationship.

Writing compelling content is not easy, heck, just writing good informative content is challenging. With professional guidance, a strategic plan determines what content you should be producing, what you should be writing, what your staff can do, and what professional marketers/writers should create for you, as well as a schedule to make sure it actually happens. And this structured process makes it much easier to deliver good content.

What would you add to my list of reasons to approach content marketing in a professional manner?

Photo Credit: Getty Images : Cacaroot

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Blogging for Qualified SEO

man typing on keyboard with ideas floating around his head

SEO is important for any business, but determining how to best improve it can be a tricky task. One easy way to improve your website, short of an SEO audit and a website revamp, is to regularly blog. Regular blogging gives prospects a reason to return to your website, and can improve your ranking— so long as you purposefully plan your content. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your blogging.

man typing on keyboard with ideas floating around his head
credit: Federico Caputo / getty images

1. Set a goal and a strategy

Start with your end goal in mind. In a sentence or two (or less!) you should be able to explain exactly what your blogging strategy is supposed to accomplish. How is this content helping reach your business objectives? Talk with your team and do what you can together to ensure the goal is as clear as possible. No piece of content should be random or lacking purpose, even if it’s a short blog. Really examine your sales process to determine how you can use blogging to support it, and how you want to drive people through your funnel.

 

2. Make sure the pieces support the goal

Higher ranking SEO might get more people to your website, but that isn’t as important as getting the right people to your website. If you’re blogging just for the sake of it, without putting your sales goal to the forefront, your SEO efforts won’t provide as much return as they could. Have benchmarks and review points in place to adjust your blogging strategy, and make sure to review every piece so it does the best job it can.

 

3. Use inbound marketing techniques to further your sales

Once you’ve written the content that gets more qualified buyers to your site, you have to continue nurturing them along your sales funnel. If you’ve properly set up goals, you should know where to drive your leads for the next stage of the buying process. Setting up CTAs is the easiest way to do this, but depending on your overreaching content strategy, you could use individual blog posts in a multitude of ways.

 

4. Continue improving the rest of your online presence

Blogging is only one part of a content strategy, which, ideally, covers everything you produce— from website pages to social media posts. While blogging can generate an improvement, you need to make sure all of your content strategy is optimized to drive qualified leads to your sales team. You can do this yourself or hire an external agency, freeing up your resources to work on further nurturing those sales instead of trying to keep up to the constantly-moving target that is SEO.

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Manage Sales Costs With Marketing

Paying Travel Expenses

Sales calls fact – it’s damn hard to get in to see anybody these days.

 

I recently spoke to a business owner about sales travel. He replied that his sales people were travelling less these days. It’s hard to get suspects and prospects to commit to appointments. Past customers are not interested in the latest and greatest unless they actually need something. Factor in the high cost of travel and the sales’ regular road trips are often not viable.

 

Paying Travel Expenses
Gettyimages/ Ridofranz

Willie Loman would die an early death in today’s markets.

 

Still, business relies on a constant supply of new customers and new business. Although the specifics vary by business and industry, the cost of acquiring new customers is multiple times the cost of retaining customers. There are resources and costs required in both efforts.

 

Business owners and sales managers have a dilemma. How to manage resources effectively between acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers?

 

Marketing can help with managing the costs of both obtaining new customers and keeping existing ones.

 

In many cases, a majority of sales come from existing customers. The satisfaction of existing customers and ongoing “staying in touch” are obviously very important in retaining customers.

 

Focus on acquiring new customers is equally important in keeping the sales pipeline full and fuelling company growth.

 

Marketing Qualified Leads

 

One aspect of marketing is to cast a wide net for new business opportunities.

 

Marketing can do much of the ”leg work” of qualifying leads before the expense of sales people are required. Marketing can reach many in an instant, much faster than even your speediest inside sales star or your heartiest cold caller.

 

The Internet has made marketing more focused and effective by allowing for very specific targeting, yet on a broad scale.

 

Marketing can filter the wide catch of prospects into those that you actually have a chance of doing business with. Filters like company size, geo location, and simple questions determining needs can qualify prospects before assigning to sales.

 

Marketing to Existing Customers

 

Another aspect of marketing is retaining existing customers and loyalty.

 

There is a lot of work to satisfying customers and showing the appreciation that you really care about them. It’s delicate staying in touch with people while respecting their reluctance to talk to sales people when not they are not in shopping mode. Sales people often feel they are banging their heads against a wall.

 

The Internet plays a large role in marketing effectiveness. Engagement is the key and in today’s world often public. The public nature of social media, reviews, and commentary is well serviced by the marketing dept. This takes some of the heat off of sales staff in not getting mired down in trying to do everything for existing customers.

 

Marketing techniques and marketing automation service existing customers until they are ready for sales assistance. Again, “leg work” is provided until valuable sales people need to get involved.

 

Managing Sales Costs

 

Having marketing help manage sales costs can make a big difference in profits:

 

  • Marketing can bring down the costs of acquiring new customers by qualifying suspects into prospects. Marketing qualified leads can be passed on to sales. Sales can then do what they are hired to do – work with legitimate prospects and close them.

 

  • Marketing can bring down the costs of customer retention by delivering consistent messaging and managing customer engagement. Satisfied customers become repeat customers. The lifetime value of repeat customers should not be underestimated.

 

Managing sales costs in today’s markets is a challenge. Marketing can help by doing the “leg work” of getting your message out in the widest distribution possible. Marketing qualifies the interest generated to ensure precious sales staff only focus on potential opportunities. Marketing maintains the message that your customers are important and your organization is always a part of the conversation.

 

 

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The ABCs of SEO: A Project Manager’s Perspective

To say that there is a lot to know about SEO is quite an understatement. For not only is there a great deal of knowledge, skill and experience required to be truly competent at planning and managing SEO campaigns, but the rules keep changing. Google is constantly changing the landscape, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, but each new algorithm can drastically influence the effectiveness of your efforts. Mastering SEO is like going to school, and the class never ends.

That being said — and acknowledging upfront my ignorance to the wild inner-workings of Google’s algorithms and how to tame them — this article deals with a top-level approach to SEO.

Whether you work for an agency, a small enterprise, an international conglomerate, or a non-profit organization, SEO is one of the tools you use to improve your online presence. If it isn’t, it should be. Virtually every organization these days benefits from a strong online presence, and SEO is an integral part of the online marketing mix. But what do you know about SEO and are you confident in how to approach it? Hiring knowledgeable people is an excellent first step, but you still need to be able to manage these people, as well as your company’s expectations.

We’ll start with a quick clarification, SEO can include the following tactics:

– Organic: Writing strategic content (web pages, blogs, white papers, social media, etc.) to help your website rank higher in searches.

– PPC (Pay Per Click): Paying Google (and other search engines) for keywords and ads to drive interested traffic to your website.

– Advertising: Paying other websites and online publications for banners and other online ads to drive interested traffic to your website.

[NB  Paid efforts can also be referred to as Search Engine Marketing or SEM.]

Here are three important criteria for project managers when considering SEO. Your staff, contract workers or agency should be able to explain and address each of these areas to your satisfaction.

 

Accountability

First and foremost is getting results. So what do you need to provide I order for your SEO efforts to be successful? Your agency, or inside team need guidance and information to direct their strategy and tactics. Consider the specific campaign objectives, areas of focus, targeted markets (demographic, geographic, industry), content, keywords and budget.

Then, what should you expect from your agency or staff? They will quantify your objectives (how many leads, submissions, page views, clicks, etc. are required to meet your objectives), perform keyword research and assessment, create/edit targeted content, design/write ads, create an implementation plan, provide ongoing monitoring and reports with recommendations. Working as a team, you will constantly refine and add to the tactics and work closer to your objectives.

Note that SEO is not a quick fix. Attracting new traffic with content is essential and long-term, but may take months to have a measurable effect. Even PPC and ads, which can generate traffic quickly, typically take some time to consistently drive the right audience to your website. Moving the new web traffic through your funnel, or nurturing the desired behaviour (e.g. register for a course, ask for a quote), is also a process that takes time to prefect.

 

Benefits

A marketing rule of thumb is that no-one does anything with receiving some form of benefit. It may more altruistic than “What’s in it for me?,” but there needs to be some form of gratification or reward to encourage action.

Consider how your targeted markets will benefit from engaging with you and articulate that clearly and in a compelling manner. Look at each action you would like your new web traffic to take (e.g. clicking through to website, clicking on a CTA/banner, signing up for your blog or e-newsletter, asking for a quote) and provide some incentive to help them along the path.

 

Congruency

Some see the ultimate objective of SEO to drive more traffic to your website; of course, it’s more sophisticated than that. Increasing traffic is a step towards developing business, so certainly it is important, but you need to attract the key audiences that fit your ideal personas. So, if you’re an organization that is focused on serving parents of elementary school kids, you’ll only be successful if a good portion of that new web traffic fits that demographic.

Beyond the audience you attract, your SEO initiatives must represent, and ideally promote, your brand (which should already take into consideration your mission vision, etc.). Organic, PPC or advertising all revolve around content. Ensure that the tone, vocabulary and information presented all embrace your organizational brand and culture. Even if one of those parents mentioned above does not click through to your website, you’ve had an awareness and branding opportunity to positively position your organization in their mind; maybe next time they will click through.

And, of course, your SEO efforts need to flow with any other marketing and advertising campaigns your organization is running. Not just from a brand perspective, even theme. You may be able to increase the effectiveness by leveraging the theme from an existing campaign.

What would you add to this list of important criteria for a project manager to consider when employing SEO? Add your thoughts to comments below.

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Sharpspring and CASL Compliance

Letter with barbed wire.

Building a Prospect List With CASL

Marketing automation is a useful tool in any business, but it becomes more important with Canada’s Anti-Spam Laws (CASL). In order to be CASL compliant, companies must provide evidence of compliance in the form of opt-ins and records of transactions in order to establish the communication to their prospects is consensual. This can be difficult to manage, require constant updating, and can drain resources away from other facets of your business. It can also make your website less effective, because you’re not holistically tracking your customer base.

However, with tools like SharpSpring, you can determine worthwhile leads, use forms to opt-in, track lead behaviour, and use lists to qualify leads. SharpSpring also automates the tracking of who has opted in and not, and has options to track purchases.

Letter with barbed wire.
credit: s576/ getty images

Forms

Forms are, by far, the strongest SharpSpring tool for CASL compliance. By including an opt-in on all gated content, you increase your odds of receiving permission to send email communication.

All opt-ins can then be stored in a separate list (more on lists later), meaning you never have to worry about sending communication to somebody who has not opted in.

Using forms also allows you to capture emails and get a barometer for who is seeking out your content, giving you better audience data and allowing you to improve your future campaigns.

 

Track Lead Behaviour

If somebody doesn’t check the opt-in box, that doesn’t mean the contact is useless. You can proceed to track how much they use your site, what pages they visit, and see if they’re worth manually calling (something not covered under CASL), or transferring them to an “opt-in” list after they’ve made a purchase from you (at which point, there is implied consent).

SharpSpring allows you to both set a lead score based on behaviour, and has an option to trigger workflows that notify your salespeople when a lead has done actions that your company has deemed important. Both of these features allow you to use methods other than email campaigns to further your sales efforts, making CASL less of a concern.

 

Lists

Arguably one of SharpSpring’s more powerful features, lists allow you to segment all contacts by criteria you determine. Not only can you separate those who have opted in versus those who haven’t, but you can create rules-based lists that adapt according to lead score or user behaviour.

The previous two features (forms and tracking lead behaviour) are critical in helping you build lists. While the most obvious uses for lists is creating email campaigns, lists can also be used to qualify prospects. By assigning lead score points based on pages visited, number of return visits to the site, and number of forms filled in, a sales team can establish which leads are qualified and ready to make a purchase. Instead of following up with every lead, salespeople can limit themselves to following up on leads who are more likely to produce a return on the investment of selling to them.

 

Overall

Automated marketing is a vital tool to maintain CASL compliance. In order to best cover your legal bases, it makes sense to purchase a tool such as SharpSpring and work with a partner to best establish how you can advance your business without relying on random email marketing.