Optify Lead Generation Blog

Search Engine Ranking: A Step-By-Step Guide

Posted by @Scott Fasser on February 26th, 2010

This game plan is built for B2B companies who want to attain a high search engine ranking for specific keyword terms that fit their business niche and customer need. This approach is not suited for dynamic sites, e-commerce plays or highly competitive generic terms like music, beer and ipods.

Search Engine Ranking

Search Engine Ranking Game Plan:

  • Select a target keyword phrase
  • Determine what content to build for it
  • Create the content and optimize the page
  • Update internal links and sitemaps
  • Syndicate content to friendly sources for early links
  • Determine high relevance sites for link acquisition
  • Monitor rank, visits and leads from keyword phrase over time

Step One – Select the Target Keyword Phrase (s)

Keyword selection is based on business relevance, volume, competitiveness and ability to create content to support the ranking and linking necessary. We’ve provided some tips on selecting keywords in our post titled “7 steps to build your keyword list“.

The keyword application in Optify gives you the power to research keyword variations, volume, competitiveness and rank. Use the keyword application to save the focus keyword phrase (s) to your keyword tracking list.

Step Two – Determine What Content to Build for the Keyword

You have three main objectives in building the content to support your keywords:

  • Create content that will meet the expectations of someone searching on that keyword term. The question to ask yourself is, would someone searching for this keyword term be looking for the content I’m posting? If the answer is no, you likely will have a harder time attaining and maintaining your keyword position as you’ll have a higher bounce rate.
  • Create content that is a compelling spin on your business so that when a new visitor finds this page, it moves them towards contacting you for a business relationship.
  • Create content that search engines will understand and index with strong ranking signals.
  • Create content that other sites will find useful and want to syndicate and link back to your page.

Examples of excellent content to build:

  • A whitepaper on Best Practices. Whitepapers are bigger and more in-depth and can serve as both search engine content as well as a carrot for filling out a contact form.
  • A how to article on the topic that explains how using your products/services solves a problem related to the target keyword.
  • A comparison of products related to the target keyword. End users are always searching for reviews, comparisons and brand vs. brand information. Building a page that positively highlights your product/service against core competitors enables you to both position yourself well and gain search traffic from the target keyword.
  • A list. 10 steps to success, 5 factors to consider, etc. are excellent ways to build content, are highly consumable and easier to syndicate through newsletters and blog posts.

Step Three – Create the Content and Optimize the Page

Determine first where the content will reside on your site. This decision impacts several elements including:

  • Page URL
  • Top level, footer and site map navigation and linking
  • Who is involved in publishing the content (if different sections of your site are managed by different content platforms and/or teams)
  • How users access the content
  • How search engines find and consume the content

Once the content is created, build the page with the keyword phrase in the following areas:

  • URL
  • Title Tag
  • <H1> Headline
  • <H2> Headline at least once
  • In the body content at least twice
  • Alt text for images

Step Four- Update Internal Links and Sitemaps

Now that you have built your excellent content into a highly optimized page, it is time to build the internal links to that content from important parts of the site. A couple of considerations:

  • Use the target keyword in the anchor text for the link wherever possible – “Click Here” works well for conversion encouragement, but doesn’t tell the engines anything about the link. “Learn more about <keyword phrase>” Is always a good link structure if you have space as is just the <keyword phrase> itself.
  • Try and build the link into a summary piece of content like a description of the article in addition to the site footer or navigation.
  • Use a title tag in the link. This is an element that shows up as a tool tip when you rollover the link so it adds context and accessibility to the link – especially if you can’t bring yourself to put the keywords in the anchor text. The link with a title tag looks something like this for the keyword <Python>: <a title=”Free Python book for experienced programmers” href=”http://diveintopython.org/”>Dive Into Python</a>

For core pieces of content, consider putting the link to the content into your top or second level navigation, sitemap.html, sitemap.xml and footer. These are normally elements that are on all pages of your site so it quickly generates many links into this piece of content.

Step Five – Syndicate Content to Friendly Sources

Now that your content is built, pages set-up and internal links established, it’s time to promote the content externally through syndication.  The goal is to start building inbound links that go directly to the new piece of content (instead of linking into homepage of site).

The very first steps are:

  • Promote the content through your newsletter to your customers
  • Post a blog entry about the content and link to it
  • Announce the content through Twitter using the keyword in the tweet
  • Announce the content through Facebook and LinkedIn to your networks. Also, have everyone on your team do the same through their networks
  • Post a note in personal blogs and point back to the content
  • Reach out to your partners and friends with the idea of getting links into the site. If someone is interested, give them the code for the link itself (with keywords, title and link back URL)
  • Create a press release about the content. Publish the press release to your site and push the release out to PRWire or some other service that offers an SEO level
  • Use the press release as an entre’ to follow-up with editors, writers and bloggers who are following your space
  • Tweak the content to be in the form of an article and publish to an article database like www.ezinearticles.com or www.docstoc.com.

Step Six – Determine High Relevancy Sites for Link Acquisition

Once you have exhausted the friendly sources of links, it’s time to go after links that are outside of your current portfolio that are keyword phrase and/or content specific. Here’s an easy way to find those sites:

  • Go to www.google.com
  • Type in your keyword phrase
  • See who shows up for it – don’t be afraid to go deep
  • Look for non-competitors who have written an article about the subject and approach them with your service, product, story.

See where your competitors are getting links. Here’s how:

  • Go to www.yahoo.com
  • Type in “site:www.<your competitor>.com”
  • Click on the inlinks button
  • On the show InLinks dropdown, select Except from this Domain
  • This gives you a list of inbound links to that domain that you can peruse for relevant sites to engage for links

Step Seven – Tracking Search Engine Rank, Visits and Leads over Time

Optify provides the tracking for your search engine ranking, visits and leads within the software. Just make sure that your focus keyword is in the Keyword Application list to capture your ranking vs your competitors as well as visits and leads against the term.

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Steal Search Engine Traffic and Leads From Your Competition

Posted by @Chris Rodde on February 22nd, 2010

Imagine if anytime somebody searched on your competitor’s brand name, your website showed in the search results, giving you a chance to catch a potential customer that might have never looked beyond your competitor. Follow the steps below to gain search engine traffic and leads from your competitors by creating and optimizing a few pages on your website to target your competitor’s brand names. We’ll also show you below how to attract web searchers who type in comparison searches such as “Windows vs. Apple”.

Catch Search Engine Traffic and Leads

Serve Comparison Shoppers

In order to rank in the search engines when someone does a “Windows vs. Apple” type search, create a web page that compares your brand and/or product offering to those of your competitors—let’s call this a “product matrix” page. This page should compare the features and benefits of your company or products to those of your competitors. Not only will this content be beneficial to prospective customers who would like to know how your offering stacks up, but this will also serve as great SEO content. Create at least one product matrix page that includes at least three to five of your competitors in the title tag, url and page headline (or <H1> tags).

Attract Your Competitor’s Search Engine Traffic and Leads

To rank on one of your competitors brand or product names, create a single competitor matrix page for each competitor or product name. Then link to this page from appropriate pages on your website using the competitor’s brand name as the anchor text on the link. From this page, you should also link back to your main product matrix page. These single competitor or single product comparison pages should attract traffic searching on your competitor’s brand or product name(s).

In addition to the more permanent product matrix pages above, you can include competitive terms legitimately in blog posts that discuss the benefits of your product over your competitors. Again, whenever you mention your competitor’s brand or product names, link to your matrix page. Also include your matrix pages in .html and .xml sitemaps.

Some Words of Caution…

When it comes to including competitive brand terms on your website as part of your overall SEO strategy, be sure not to hide any of this information. When site designers include competitive brand terms in meta tags without visible context, this is dangerous because doing so can be perceived by search engines to be site spam. When discovered, the search engines will penalize you and eliminate you from search results.

Off-site SEO Strategies to Boost Your Search Rank Further

To improve your rank on your competitor’s names, you should ensure that your product matrix pages are linked to from other sites on the web besides your own. The easiest way to build links from other sites is to post your product matrix content on sites such as Docstoc and SlideShare–just upload your content to these sites and link back to your website.

Turn to social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to evaluate your competitors and make comparisons. Find a competitor’s site on Wikipedia and link that entry to your competitive matrix. Or simply ask webmasters and bloggers that are friendly to your company to link to your matrix pages with the appropriate anchor text. None of these last strategies have a tremendous amount of “link juice,” that is strong link power, but all of them will open your site up to a wider audience.

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7 Steps to Build Your Keyword List

Posted by @Chris Rodde on February 10th, 2010

Search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with creating a keyword list of phrase terms that people are actually using to search for your product or service. You should think of your keyword list as a portfolio of terms with some diversity.

keyword list

All of the keywords should be relevant to your business so that the quality of visitors coming to your site from that search term is good–the more relevant a keyword is to your business and product offering, the more qualified leads you’ll get from this traffic. The diversity in your list is achieved by having terms that vary from weaker to strongest along a spectrum of competitiveness and varying volumes (from low/long tail to high/head terms). Diversity also comes from having a range of keywords and categories of keywords themselves.

The Difference Between SEO and SEM Keyword Research

Keyword research for search engine optimization (organic or free search) and search engine marketing (paid search efforts) should be different. SEM keyword lists tend to be much larger with specific emphasis around the creation of the campaign structure in bidding systems like Google Adwords.

SEO terms, on the other hand, must be more focused because each phrase needs to be supported with content on the site as well as links (inbound and on-site). To target a keyword in SEM, you simply need to start bidding on it. To target a keyword in SEO, the effort is generally greater, so your target keyword list is likely to be smaller.

7 Steps to Build Your Keyword List

  1. Look first at your own site: To get started,think about the current content of your site and what search terms this content will support, through organic search. Optify makes this easy by allowing you to simply enter the URL of your website into our keyword suggestion tool and we’ll produce a list of relevant keywords based on the content we find on your website.  Remember to include all of your brand terms—and don’t forget to include the major misspellings of your brand names.
  2. Look at the keywords your competitors target. Your competitor’s websites will contain other content and keyword terms that you might not think of. Again, Optify makes this simple… enter your competitor’s URL into our keyword suggestion tool, and voila, you’ll have more keywords.
  3. Look at your current organic search visitors. How are people finding you today? The keywords that people are using to find your website today may give you a sense of which types of keywords are working for you and can help focus your thinking.
  4. Brainstorm: Get a few of your employees in front of a whiteboard and brainstorm keywords that you think are relevant to your business.
  5. Expand. Aggregate the list you have thus far and then expand it by creating derivatives of those phrases. For example for the keyword term “banner advertisements” you can add “optimizing banner advertisements”, “designing banner advertisements” and “building great banner advertisements”.
  6. Refine. Cull keywords from the list that are not relevant to your business. To decide what to cut, ask yourself the question, “would someone searching on this keyword term be looking for what our company has to offer?” If the answer is no, then cut the keyword, and focus your efforts elsewhere.
  7. Enter your keyword list into Optify. Entering your keyword list into Optify is simple–just import it. (Or if you’ve used our keyword suggestion tool, just add the words with one click that we suggest.) If you enter your keyword list in Optify, we’ll tell you where you rank in the search engines on each keyword term and where stand vs. your competition.  We’ll also give you suggestion on how to optimize your pages to get more traffic from the keyword terms you’ve selected.
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Lead Scores: How To Qualify Leads Automatically

Posted by @Scott Fasser on February 2nd, 2010

Update:
We are hosting a Lead Scoring webinar on Friday, March 5th. Feel free to join.
Optify Best Practices: Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring

Many sales organizations have in place a means to judge and value their website visitors and business leads. But often much of the lead scoring criteria boils down to simply identifying these visitors and leads as “hot,” “warm,” or “cold” prospects. These days you can do better than that; there are many offerings in the marketplace today, including Optify, which provide you with lead scores that are much more direct, less vague, and ultimately more helpful.

Finding Common Ground Through Lead Scores

A key aspect of lead scoring is that scores give marketing and sales a way to gain common ground when discussing the quality of leads. Instead of discussing these things in vague terms, you can focus on real numbers linked to specific lead attributes important to your business.

Purpose of Scoring Visitors and Leads

When leads are effectively prioritized, sales teams have an effective way to decide on what leads to pursue. On the marketing end, lead scoring gives marketing a great way to quantify the value of leads from paid campaigns. Lead scoring helps to segment visitors and leads geographically, by level of interest, and by identifying what content areas on websites interests particular groups.

Optimize Your Sales Efforts by Scoring Leads AND Visitors

Lead scoring is particularly useful in those instances when a site has a high volume of visitors and leads. Use lead scoring to prioritize call activities for sales teams. With Optify you can easily segment leads into those who your sales group should contact directly and others who should be nurtured as ongoing prospects.

In cases with low lead volumes, scoring visitors (as opposed to leads) can enlarge your lead pool by identifying site visitors who are keenly interested in your product or service. In other cases, with large sales teams and large lead pools, lead scoring does wonders to effectively segment visitors and leads by the vertical industry they represent, geography, or product line they are interested in.

Lead Scoring: Recommendations from the Trenches

Lead scoring represents a new way for sales and marketing teams to use leads and we recommend that sales and marketing teams work together to best use this data. With a large enough organization we recommend assigning an individual to track ideas and update scores to account for criteria like site visitors who look at more than one page on your website or visit more than once. We also recommend incorporating target companies into the scores as well as geographically relevant leads, if you are geographically focused. We advise our clients to only update or add scores when there is clarity and agreement across departments as to goals. Lead scoring is a great way to start drilling down and examining high quality visitors and leads to see behavior patterns that will help to tune lead scores and ultimately improve the quality of leads pursued.

Optify Lead Scoring

Optify lead scoring is a key element of our online marketing platform. To create lead scores, we start by examining website behavior: where have visitors come from, how long do they spend on the site, and what specific areas of the site they visit? With a database of past behavior we incorporate information on past visits.

We also utilize research into which company a visitor represents and what city and state they are based in (based on their IP address). Beyond this critical information, our robust database also shows what size a company the visitor works for and what vertical industry they are a part of. When visitors enter information in an online website form, lead scoring tools also parse this visitor-supplied information. A visitor may enter his or her name, title, and company as well as contact information. Lead scoring can select from this data and assign related scores. A sales organization might, for example, assign a lower score to those contacts who have Hotmail or Gmail accounts and all this feeds into lead scores.

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What’s New: Dashboard Alerts, Sizzling Lead Details

Posted by @Uri Bar-Joseph on January 29th, 2010

 
We’re super excited to announce new features to delight you and generate leads! Here are the highlights:
 

Alerts on Dashboard

Alerts on your Dashboard

We’ve added an Alerts section on the Dashboard. When you set up a custom Alert using the Alerts application, you’ll see Alerts on the Dashboard. You can also have your Alerts delivered by email, and change your options at any time. Click the Alerts application to customize your Alerts and delivery settings.

Company Detail to Close More Deals

The Lead Detail page is where your customers are: you can see the data we’ve collected for you about the Leads and Visitors to your website. We’ve made major enhancements to Lead Detail with a new widget containing Company Information. We’ve also added an Overview pane at the top of the page to you can get your information at a glance.

The Overview pane displays the Optify score for the Lead. You can also see the Lead’s visits to your website. Some of this information was displayed in the Traffic pane in earlier versions. The Company pane lists valuable information about the company associated with the lead of visitor, so you can act on it.

In some cases we don’t know the Company information for a Lead, so we’ll show you a screen with our best guesses for the company’s website and a box where you can enter the URL. Once you’ve entered this information, it will be used for all future visits from this company, and it will also be available to other users of your Optify account.



Keyword Alerts

Targeted Keyword Alerts

Earlier this year we announced the release of our new Alerts application. We’ve now added even more functionality including Keyword Alerts! The Keyword tab in Alerts lets you create custom Alerts that will notify you of important changes to your keyword rankings. For example, you can create an Alert that will tell you if your ranking has improved or if it has overtaken the ranking of one of your competitors. As with previous Alerts, you can specify that the Alerts be sent to your Dashboard or sent directly to you in email.

Alerts are in addition to the Daily Email, your personalized summary of Visitors and Leads on your website. You can customize Daily Email from the Settings page.

Feedback

We love your feedback! If you have anything to suggest or want to talk to us, please contact us via email on support@optify.net
 

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LinkedIn Networking for Lead Generation: 5 tips

Posted by @Scott Fasser on January 27th, 2010

After you’ve optimized your LinkedIn profile, it’s time to make the most of the Linkedin networking. The next few tips will help you maximize your LinkedIn network for lead generation.

1. Find your clients and add them to your LinkedIn network

This gives your client another method of contacting you, leaving with them the option of contacting you in a way that’s convenient for them. Additionally, the larger your network is, the more likely you’ll be able to gain introductions to potential clients. Plus, should a contact leave and work for another company, you’ll be able to better track them and possibly sell your business to them at their new organization.Linkedin Networking

2. Begin cold calling with an introduction using your LinkedIn profile

Use your LinkedIn network to try and gain introductions to potential customers. They can look at your LinkedIn profile to learn more about your company than they might during a cold call. When they see you in the context of your network, it will make you seem more personable instead of just a random salesperson.

3. Join groups related to your industry and actively participate

Think of groups on LinkedIn like you might an industry association. You can establish new contacts, expand your network and gain new clients.

4. Answer questions in the Q&A section to establish yourself as expert and enhance your brand

People are increasingly using social networks to find answers to their questions. By answering questions in LinkedIn’s Q&A section on a consistent basis, you can establish yourself as an expert that people rely on. This helps build trust and ultimately, businesses are looking for partners they can rely on. When you answer a question, people can click on the link to your LinkedIn profile, learn more about you and your company, and request a connection with you.

5. Use the new Twitter integration to update your status

Instead of trying to update your status separately at various social networks, you can now streamline your updates on Twitter and LinkedIn. Once you connect your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, updating Twitter automatically updates your LinkedIn profile. Keeping up your status helps contacts know that you’re active and relevant in your industry, further providing validity to your credentials.

As you can see, spending time on LinkedIn can have a powerful impact on your brand and lead generation efforts. Don’t get overwhelmed by this list. By spending just 5-10 minutes a day on the social network, you can really boost your LinkedIn profile, which in turn can boost your sales.

Be sure to check out Optify’s company profile on LinkedIn and connect with our staff’s profiles!

Any other tips on how to maximize your LinkedIn network? Share them with us.

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Social Business Networking: Optimize LinkedIn for your Company

Posted by @Scott Fasser on January 26th, 2010

For online B2B marketers, LinkedIn is one of the most valuable tools on the web. You should think of your Company’s LinkedIn Profile as having just as much importance as a page on your website and is the key to social business networking. You can leverage the authority of the Linkedin site to capture additional web traffic & leads that you otherwise wouldn’t reach. Here’s a comprehensive set of tasks you’ll want to complete in order to maximize LinkedIn for your company.social business networking

1. Encourage Your Employees to Join LinkedIn and To Link To Each Other

The key to building out your company’s LinkedIn network is to ensure that everyone is participating. By getting your employees to join and link to each other, you’ll grow your company’s network exponentially. This will give your salespeople greater leverage when they search LinkedIn for contact points to key customer targets.

2. Create a LinkedIn company profile

If you haven’t created a company profile on LinkedIn, do so. Having a LinkedIn profile for your company will allow prospective customers to see who they might know at your company when they are investigating whether they want to work with you or not–giving them visibility into who they can connect with might help close sales faster.

3. Include targeted keywords in your company’s profile

Because LinkedIn is an established and authoritative site, profiles on the site can often rank well quickly for searches. Adding keywords connected to the industry you work in can help your LinkedIn profile be established with those keyword landscapes on the search engines.

4. Personalize your LinkedIn Profile URL

Since you can decide what your URL looks like for your LinkedIn company profile, be sure to choose one that reflects your name or company name. Make sure your url in LinkedIn is personalized to your name or business name for both SEO and branding benefits.

5. Set your public profile to full view

When you sign into LinkedIn, you see a dashboard for your experience on LinkedIn. This is different from the public profile people see when they view your LinkedIn profile. You can control how much is displayed on your public profile. Choose “Full View” to display more content. The more unique content you choose to display, the less duplicate content you share with other profiles on LinkedIn. There’s also more content for the search engines to index and place in their rankings.

6. Link to your profile

Show the search engines how important your LinkedIn profile is by linking to it. This will help ensure that your LinkedIn profile will show up in the search engines when someone searched on your company name and other important keywords. Make sure you link to it from sites that don’t put the “nofollow” tag on outbound links. This means that simply linking from other social networks, which often employ the tag, won’t work. Instead, link from your site, your personal page, article sites, and any directories that allow you to place multiple links.

7. Using Wordpress? Install the Wordpress app for LinkedIn

This application pulls in posts from your Wordpress blog. This really adds value to your LinkedIn profile by providing even more content that distinguishes it from other profiles on the network. And while anyone can put keywords on their profile and make claims about their knowledge and experience, providing blog content that shows off your knowledge is proof that your profile is true.

8. Create unique anchor text for links

When you add links to your profile, you see a menu to classify the link. Choose “Other.” It gives you the option to add your own anchor text. These links are “nofollow,” meaning they won’t influence the sites they point to. However, by creating your own anchor text, it differentiates your LinkedIn profile from all the others – especially all the ones not using unique anchor text.

After you’ve optimized your profile, it’s time to make the most of the social networking aspects of LinkedIn. See our next post Linkedin Networking for tips on how to do that.

Any other ideas on how to maximize your LinkedIn profile? Share them with us.

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Respond in Real Time To Web Leads

Posted by @Chris Rodde on January 25th, 2010

Real-Time Leads From Real-Time Marketing

In the online world, the last year has been all about the buzz of Twitter. The essence of Twitter is a tool for the acceleration of information transfer—direct sharing, in real time, of information from one person or company to followers who have chosen to receive it.

There is a reason Twitter has been so popular: People want information in real time and Twitter and related tools provide a direct way to access it. Marketers have taken notice of the new rush of data; real-time marketing and real-time leads have arrived and are based upon using the most current information about customers and prospects and the most current events. Our platform here at Optify allows you to take information generated in real time, monitor it in helpful ways, and respond to it with unprecedented speed.

Real time leads

Search Engines Working in Real Time

Last year, in response to the growth of Twitter and other real-time information feeds, search engines finally began to give us easy, searchable access to the new burst of fresh information. Google, Yahoo, and Bing now all provide search results that show information created in real time. In late 2009 Google, for one, announced new features to bring search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.

The emergence of real time information and tools to access it has enabled people to gain new insights that they previously could not. And marketers are now using real time information in business-altering means such as using new insight to respond to website visitors and real time leads.

Managing Real-Time Marketing Efforts

Real-time marketing means promoting your company and content using real-time communication channels and responding to prospects and customers when appropriate—when they are thinking about your company. In this new world, Optify is a key element in your real-time marketing arsenal, giving you the tools you need to reach customers using the latest, effective means.

The Optify Dashboard

The Optify Dashboard is your central control station to monitor incoming traffic and it allows you to see just who is on your site. Optify’s Dashboard provides a real-time feed of your website’s visitors and leads. You can use this to gain insights into who is on your website and to follow up rapidly with important visitors. The Dashboard Website Feed tool shows you the company name of visitors, how they arrived at your website, a lead score, and how recently they were on your site.

Expand Your Lead Pool by 10x Using Lead Intelligence

You’ve done the work to create a compelling reason for people to fill out your contact us form by offering whitepapers, free demos, etc. But what about the 95% of the web visitors who don’t fill out your form? Who are these people and how do you reach them? We show you exactly who’s on your website in real-time. You can see what companies are on your site, where they’re located and how often they visit. We also show you when your customers, partners, or competitors visit so you can respond at the right time, with the right message.

Optify Alerts To the Rescue

Optify Alerts provide sales teams with real-time information about who to call next. Alerts let you create and save customized notifications for tracking visitors and leads. With Optify you can set up an Alert to notify you when leads or visitors to your website meet certain custom criteria. You can use our simple rules-based system to notify you when a particular prospect or member of a group of target companies visits your site, when someone visits a certain number of pages, or returns to your site multiple times. Real-time alerts help you respond to customers and prospects at the right time–when your product or service is on the top of their mind.

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What’s New in Optify: Search, New Lead Scoring Rules, Smarter Form Integration

Posted by @Uri Bar-Joseph on January 16th, 2010

We’re super excited to let you know about new features of the latest release! Here are a few highlights:


Search your data

Instead of scrolling down the page to find what you’re looking for in Keywords or Lead Intelligence, you can use the new search box in either of these apps to easily find what you’re looking for. Just start typing the search term! The list filters automatically as you type. To return to the original list, click X in the right side of the box.

Smarter Forms and Salesforce.com Integration

Many of our customers use Salesforce.com web-to-lead. We work seamlessly with those forms. Now Optify can now collect data from non-Salesforce.com forms and to make the data available to your Salesforce.com account.

New Rules for Lead Scoring and Alerts

To give you more control over your data, we’ve added several options to the rule builders in key places in Optify. This gives you a lot of power to control how you score your leads. We’ve added options including “Does not match,” “Does not start with,” and “Does not end with” to the list of criteria for creating lead scores. We’ve also added a Yes / No option for visitors so you can add to the score or “Is a Lead” and “Has filled in a form.” The rules can be used for both Alerts and Lead Scoring. And we’ve added “Starts With” and “Ends With” criteria to the rule builder for URL fields. With these new rules, you have tremendous power to customize rules to meet your needs.

Feedback

We love your feedback! If you have anything to suggest or want to talk to us, please contact us via email on support@optify.net.

 

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Social Media for Business: Six Tips

Posted by @Chris Rodde on January 14th, 2010

Social media is a tool you can use to leverage your brand, company, or service and find, connect with and nurture customers and prospects. If you are just getting started check our out introductory guide to social media marketing. Or read on to discover six key points to consider when you jump into marketing in the new sphere of social media for business.

social media for business

Social media for business tip one: Create buzz

Buzz is all about riding the current wave of media—and creating buzz means adopting the latest media to promote your message. Today this means leveraging social media and participant-created websites like Facebook and Twitter. You can create buzz by building a legitimate social media voice and developing authority and influence within your community. With this foundation, when you announce something or share a new idea, people will listen.

Tip two: Join the conversation

With the recent expansion in social media, a greater level of corporate transparency has arrived. The success of consumer opinion sites like Yelp and Get Satisfaction demonstrate that individuals and their experiences matter and hold sway over other consumers. While some companies have not yet embraced this new transparency and remain rooted in past practices, many are jumping in and joining the conversations that involve them. Take the first steps to engage in the conversation and learn more about how your brand or product fits into the social media space.

Tip three: Work with, not against your customers

Social media for business means listening to what is being said about your product or company. An abundance of monitoring tools allow you to keep a proverbial finger on the pulse. The days of trying to cover up or ignore opinions are over; today loud voices and strong opinions are worth listening and responding to. Working with customers means listening to what they are saying and reaching out in direct or unique ways to address concerns. In a world of co-creation, it pays to get your customers involved instead of ignoring them.

Tip four: Generate traffic by providing links

Optimizing your use of social media increases the probability that people will pass along your message, product or website through online social networks. Your message will be disseminated to new and diverse crowds and bring new visitors to you. Ensure that your profiles within the social media networks link to your website and that you provide appropriate links to relevant content when you comment within forums. Make sure you are only one click away.

Tip Five: Generate leads by winning over influencers

To win new customers, win over the influencers in your community. In every industry, in every social network there are people at the center of the conversation. If this isn’t you, win these people over by engaging with them. Build a direct relationship and let them try your product. If you win them over, these influencers will pitch your company and products online on your behalf in subtle and not so subtle ways. With their blessing, qualified leads will start to come your way.

Tip Six: Create content to build your reputation

Real time information is now critical to make a company relevant, part of the online conversation, and connected to customers. There are certain kinds of content that naturally spread in social media for business. (Just think of the last YouTube video link you were sent.) It does not matter what industry you are in and products you sell, there is always a relevant content that you can create to reach your audience. Content can be as simple as timely blog posts or as involved as short documentary videos. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.

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