How the Emergence of Digital Local Affects Dental Labs in 2016 and Beyond

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

The philosophy behind dental lab marketing used to be relatively simple. Digital marketing strategies made sense to raise brand awareness, but to get people in your neighborhood, more traditional methods were most reliable. A print ad in a community magazine, sponsoring a local event, or even a telemarketing to get the people around you to pay attention to your products and services.

But increasingly, digital marketing seeks to compete with these traditional methods, creating local advertising possibilities that you should not ignore. As we move into 2016 and beyond, these digital marketing opportunities are becoming increasingly easy to access, meaning you should give them serious thought as a part of your budget in the new year. Let's discuss digital local marketing opportunities relevant to small businesses today.

Local Search

When Google first introduced its Pigeon algorithm update in 2014, it changed the game for local search optimization. Without boring you with the details, the update prioritized local results over national results as appropriate for search queries related to your business.

Today, search is ubiquitous among your audience. Especially thanks to the rise in mobile, a potential customer who is looking for a way to get your product or find out about your opening hours simply pulls up Google and types their query into the search bar. Do you know what shows up when they do?

As it turns out, the search engine actually lets you control the result to some degree, by allowing you to set up and optimize a My Business Profile. If you have not done so yet, you should make it a priority before 2016 or, at the very least, a New Year's Resolution. Potential customers will search for your dental lab, so you want to be sure you can be found easily.

Local Targeting Possibilities

But your opportunities to go local go beyond mere search optimization. Thanks to the in-depth targeting options of many digital channels, particularly on social media, you can now target very specific areas, neighborhoods, and even individual blocks with distinct advertising.

Facebook, for example, allows you to set targeting parameters for its ads to a specific zip code. Google, on the other hand, lets you engage in geo-targeting, even allowing marketers to target based on specific IP and household addresses. This hyper local targeting means you can be sure to reach your audience, no matter how geographically restricted it may be. 

Combining Digital with Traditional

Here, email marketing can come into play. If you use your digital ads as an opportunity to gather leads, or if you request email addresses from customers for post-sale nurturing opportunities, emails can be crucial tools to connect your initial ads and your customer experience. By allowing you to reach out to your target audience in a personalized way, it establishes your dental lab and brand as an important part of your customers' mindset and consideration point for future purchases.

How can email marketing become a part of your local marketing efforts? Contact us to learn more.

DLS Sponsors:   GuideMia.com  your turn key solution for implant treatment planning and surgical guides.

Online Marketing Ideas for Dental Labs: Bypass the Landing Page

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Dental Labs trying to generate leads digitally can be a complicated process. You need outlets like social networks or digital ads to promote your content, but that content generally only sends your audience to your landing page - where your users can sign up and become leads.

Those additional steps often mean that some of your potential leads drop off somewhere in the process, losing you potential leads. So here's an online marketing idea for your small business: bypass your landing page, and generate leads straight from your social efforts.

Social Media Lead Generation

It may sound like a pipe dream, particularly if you're used to the multi-step process we explained above. But in reality, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have realized the increasing number of marketers using a lead-generating inbound philosophy, and adjust their marketing opportunities accordingly.

As a result, you can generate leads directly using Facebook and Twitter ads, feeding them directly into your CRM for your nurturing efforts. Let's examine in more detail how the individual networks can help you generate your leads

1) Twitter Lead Generation Cards

Dental Labs that already advertise on Twitter, you likely know the 'cards' that the network offers to marketers. Essentially add-ons to your regular advertisements, they allow you to add additional, rich content to your sponsored tweet that exceeds the usual 140 character limit.

Typically, these cards are used for advertisements on which marketers seek to generate clicks to their website (and landing pages), because they allow marketers to add a visual image along with a descriptive link and even a call to action button, increasing the possibility for click-throughs.

As it turns out, Twitter offers similar cards specifically for lead generation. These cards also allow marketers to add an image and headline, but the call to action button is slightly different. You can entice your audience to 'sign up' or a similar lead-generating prompt.

Once a user clicks on the button, Twitter automatically draws their name and email information form their public profile, and shares it with the marketer. As a result, you can generate leads without your users ever having to leave the network.

Early studies of these lead generation cards have been overwhelmingly positive. One company saw their leads increase by more than 900%, along with a significantly lower cost per lead. Eliminating the extra step of sending users to a landing page where they can sign up means maximizing the amount of leads who land in your CRM.

Facebook's Lead Ads

For two years, Twitter's lead generation cards gave the network a significant advantage over its major competitor Facebook, which did not offer marketers a similar opportunity. That changed this summer, when Facebook began to offer its own version of lead ads.

The general concept is strikingly similar to its Twitter counterpart. By eliminating the extra step of sending users to a landing page, the network hopes to improve lead conversion rates and appeal to inbound marketers.

But the ads themselves are slightly different. Like Twitter, the network draws form a user's public profile information once they click the call to action button. But unlike Twitter, the options on Facebook extend beyond mere name and email; indeed, as is the case on a 'regular' landing page, you can ask for any information you'd like. Facebook automatically fills up the information it can find, and the user can individually fill in the rest right on the network.

Facebook major advantage over Twitter, of course, comes in its targeting opportunities. While the latter 'only' allows marketers to target based on geographic location and stated interest, Facebook options go further - from educational level and age all the way to list-based targeting and remarketing options.

In the end, both Facebook and Twitter offer intriguing advertising options that should simplify your lead generation efforts. And of course, the more information and leads you can bring into your CRM for nurturing, the more successful your business will be. To learn more about online marketing and lead generation, contact us.

DentalLabSupport.com  1-888-715-9099

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Any inbound marketing effort depends on effectively capturing leads. If you focus your energy on using your dental lab website to generate leads, you should be absolutely sure that the process you have in place maximizes your resources in capturing them as well as it possibly could. Over the next few weeks, we will look at the various factors that influence this process. Today, we'll begin with best practices for the core aspect of capturing leads on your website: the landing or conversion page.

Dental Lab landing pages, of course, are the pages to which your visitors navigate - from a social media post, email, or call to action button on your website - when they're ready to make the leap and become a lead. A variety of factors play into the success of this page, and we'll discuss all of them in the post below.

The Landing Page Content

As you can probably imagine, the content of your landing page can make or break its success in capturing leads. You want to be convincing enough about the value you can offer your visitors that they're compelled to fill out your form (more on that later) and become a lead, without being so pushy that they bounce off your page.

Another danger in writing your dental lab landing page content is to become too exhaustive; more quickly than you can anticipate, your well-intended copy can turn into a wall of text that no mobile user will read. Instead, keep it short, use bullet points and subheads where needed, focus on the benefits of signing up, and include plenty of visuals to keep your audience engaged.

One type of content is so successful, it deserves its own section:

Social Proof

Social proof on your landing page means testimonials of past users that your visitors can relate to and add credibility to your claims. You can add these testimonials as short paragraph or, even better, as videos that show your visitors the claims and success stories come from real customers.

Social proof from peers is so successful and important in capturing leads because it appeals allows you to verify your claim from an independent source. Of course, that also means you should be careful not to include testimonials that are so positive, they seem unbelievable. Instead, tell the story of your customers and include images at the very least to make them seem as real as possible. 

Attention Ratio

Web visitors are easily distracted, so including multiple opportunities for them to click or take action takes away their attention from what should be the main goal, which is to get them to fill out a form and become a lead.

So Gardner proposed the following idea, which has since been verified in multiple studies: the fewer opportunities you have for your users to do anything but fill out the form, the greater the chance they'll take the desired action. In other words, you should not include links to other pages, your social media profiles, or even your site's navigation on your landing page. Instead, the only way to take action for your visitors should be to fill out the lead conversion form, which is exactly what you want them to do.

The Conversion Form

Speaking of which: as you can imagine, your conversion form is a major factor in whether your visitors do or do not become leads. A wide range of factors go into creating an optimum conversion form that maximizes your lead capturing success. Stay tuned for a post that discusses this topic in more detail.

For more information please visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099.

How Effective Reporting Maximizes Conversions on Your Website

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Any experienced dental lab marketer knows: reporting is crucial to digital marketing success. Without it, you simply don't know which of your efforts was successful and the famous statement that "half of my advertising money is wasted, but I don't know which half" remains true.

Of course, reporting is crucial for inbound marketing as well. In fact, we'd argue that, if possible, it's even more crucial than other digital efforts. That's because effective reporting can maximize conversions on your website. In fact, here are three reports you can use your reports for conversion optimization.

1) Google Analytics Sources

Google Analytics should be a centerpiece in your reporting efforts. The search engine's internal solution allows you to track almost everything on your website, from the time spent on individual pages and incoming backlinks all the way to where your visitors come from.

That last part is where we want to focus on for the purposes on this post. You can use Google URL Builder to create unique URLs for each of your individual initiatives, allowing you to know exactly which of your efforts bring in visitors.

But you can go even further: set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics, and you can go beyond visits to analyze which of your visit sources drive the most conversion. Armed with this information, you can optimize your efforts and budget to focus on the sources that drive the most conversions.

2) Individual Channel Reports

Google Analytics offers you a big picture view of your digital marketing efforts. But of course, you are likely running several campaigns within the individual channels, from Facebook to Email, all aiming to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. To make sure your efforts within these channels are optimized for conversions, you should run regular reports for each channel.

Fortunately, that undertaking is easier than it sounds. Most social media networks now offer their own internal reporting tools, from Facebook Insights to Twitter Analytics, which allow you to delve into your individual efforts to see what works. For email marketing, you should always track open and click-through rates, as well as trends (such as send times and dates) that might affect these rates.

3) Sales Tracking

Finally, as you know, visit-to-lead conversion should never be your end goal. Converting your leads into customers is at least as, if not even more important to make sure your inbound marketing efforts are successful. Sales tracking enables you to make sure your leads are always on the right track to becoming customers.

For example, you could create a sales pipeline that enables you to follow your leads through the funnel. Setting up individual milestones like 'first meeting' and 'proposal,' allows you to assign likelihood metrics that the lead will turn into a customer to each step necessary for that conversion. As a result, you can closely track where each of your leads stand in the funnel, and how much it still takes to turn them into customers.

Reporting is a crucial tool in the box of any digital marketer. When optimizing your digital efforts for conversion, especially as a small business, you need to be sure that all of your efforts and budget are optimized to achieve that one goal. Fortunately, Google Analytics, individual channel reports, and sales tracking enable you to ensure just that, helping your business achieve lasting digital success.

How are you tracking your inbound marketing efforts and conversion optimization? Do you need help, or are you still looking for tools that help optimize your email marketing or sales tracking? In that case, contact us. We'd love to help your dental lab integrate an effective system that gets your conversion optimization on the right track.

Visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 for more information.

Dental Lab Email Marketing Best Practices: Avoid The Spam Folder

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

In what's become a popular series among our readers, we have been focusing some of our posts on email marketing best practices for dental laboratories in the recent past. In fact, we've covered the importance of a good subject line, the body content, and the best time and date to send your emails. But none of that matters if you don't make sure of one thing: that your email does not land in your recipients' spam folder.

Being marked as spam is any email marketer's greatest nightmare. It can happen automatically thanks to spam filters or manually by your audience, but the difference is minuscule - if it happens, your emails won't be read any longer. Even worse, senders who are frequently marked as spam get blacklisted by email clients, which might mean that your entire email campaign will be for the birds.

Naturally, you want to avoid that happening. So here are 3 best practices that ensure your email remains compliant with all spam rules and regulations.

1) Avoid Trigger Words

Most email clients now have automatic filters in place that redirect marketing emails to the spam folder without ever letting the user see them. These filters check for a variety of things, but trigger words are among their chief priority. These trigger words (and symbols) can range from "$$" to "guarantee," and including them in your headline often means certain death (or endless purgatory) for your email.

You can find a full list of current trigger words at this link. But don't use it as your guide; instead, you should simply ensure that your email subject lines and content doesn't sound like click bait, making empty promises and aimed only at drawing readers in.

2) Include a Physical Address

The CAN SPAM Act of 2000 is a law that oversees all email marketing and should guide all of your practices. Among many other things, it states that every marketing email should always include the physical address of the business from which it is sent, in order to allow the recipient an easy way to contact the company if need be.

Circumventing that rule means actually breaking the law, but it also means your email will likely end up in spam purgatory. That's why you should always include a physical address at the end of your email.

3) Include (and Maintain) Unsubscribe Option

Another stipulation of the CAN SPAM Act is that every marketing email should include an 'unsubscribe' option for users who choose not to receive any more information from the company in question. Of course, that unsubscribe button is mutually beneficial; if your readers don't want to hear from you, you should not attempt to keep communicating with them.

But what many marketers don't know is that maintaining your list of contacts who have unsubscribed is just as important as including the button in the first place. Send another email to someone who has already unsubscribed from a previous message, and they won't just unsubscribe again - they will mark your message as spam, which, as we explained above, can lead to a chain reaction that ultimately leaves you blacklisted. 

Landing in the spam folder is the worst thing that could happen to your email. To learn more about how CRMs can help you avoid that dreaded situation, contact us today!

Visit dentallabsupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 for more information.

Dental Lab Lead Nurturing

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Lead nurturing is an important part of any inbound a dental laboratories marketing efforts. After generating leads through the strategic use of content marketing and landing pages, you want to be sure that your leads actually turn into customers by providing them with regular messages that increasingly nudge them toward a sale. 

But of course, as is the case in any digital marketing initiatives, it's important to follow industry standards in order to be successful. So without further ado, here are 3 best practices that aid your lead nurturing efforts, with the help of CRM Software.

1) Segment and Target

A blanket nurturing strategy can be dangerous. Put simply, sending the same emails to every one of your leads risks annoying them with content that is not relevant to their individual needs. Instead, consider segmenting your leads into different groups, and targeting individual messages specifically to these groups.

Segmenting, of course, begins with a landing page that asks your audience for more than just their name or email address. While you need to keep your sign up forms relatively short, asking one or two distinguishing questions (such as their state of residence, their industry, or their job role) helps separate your contacts into distinct segments.

And once you set up that landing page, an effective CRM can do the rest. Now, you can set up targeted nurturing campaigns with emails directed only at the portions of your audience for which they are most relevant, ensuring a smooth experience for your leads and better chances or turning into customers.

2) Support with Content

You should also consider expanding your lead nurturing strategy beyond mere email marketing. While emails remain the lifeblood of any 'drip' campaign, what if you use them to promote content that is relevant to leads in a specific stage in the sales funnel?

Of course, this strategy can take some effort, as you will have to build content that relates to audiences who already know about you. But once you have this type of content, you can enrich your nurturing efforts by providing actual, valuable content rather than just a prompt to become your customer. It turns your emails into true nurturing efforts, rather than mere promotional messaging.

3) Time Strategically

Finally, you should pay serious attention to when you send out your emails. Individual studies vary on the optimal amount of emails you should send your audience per month, but most experts generally recommend a median between once and twice per week.

Finding the right balance in your email send frequency is crucial: if you don't send nurturing emails often enough, your contacts will forget about you or go with a competitor instead. But do it too often, and you will land in too many spam folders and unsubscribe lists to be effective.

If you're looking which exact send frequency can work for you, your CRM can help. In fact, you ran run reports on your open, click-through and unsubscribe percentages, which in turn helps you understand how your send frequency impacts these success metrics. Thankfully, most CRMs allow you to easily make changes to your automation workflows that ensure you get the most out of your email nurturing efforts.

Nurturing your leads to becoming customers can be incredibly valuable, especially considering its low cost and the high degree of automation available through customer relationship management software today. But even with this software, you want to be sure that you follow the above best practices.

By segmenting your leads and targeting your messages, supporting your emails with content, and implementing the right send frequency, your lead nurturing efforts will make a significant impact in garnering new customers. And if you're looking for a CRM that can help you throughout the process, contact us!  visit DentalLabSupport.com for more information or contact us by telephone 1-888-715-9099.

Flexibility with an outside agency

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Flexibility can have different meaning for different people in different situations. It’s more than just the capability of being bent or elastic. The same word is also often tailed with outsourced telemarketing, or even outsourcing in general. Because of it being such an ambiguous term, this question may have already surfaced your mind: just how flexible outsourced telemarketing can be?

Benefits of an outside Agency

• Adaptive to change and setbacks – Flexibility can be measured depending on the outsourced telemarketer’s capability to adapt to the fast shifting demands of your target prospects. More than just the cost-efficient advantage of outsourcing, a skilled outsourced telemarketing provider handles setbacks of the campaign effectively, allowing you to have the time and leisure to focus on your core business.

• Expertise – Experienced telemarketers practice their expertise just about every waking day. It wouldn’t be too hard to compare a trained in-house newbie to a veteran telemarketer. This sums up the possibility of you saving heaps of effort and number of staff to train, not to mention the added operation for you to work on.

• Follows new trends and approaches – While the new emerging approaches to B2B marketing is popularly utilized, outsourced telemarketing providers are also up to these challenges, continuing to implement its proven techniques while following to the new trends that optimizes the B2B marketing process.

In the end, flexibility of outsourced telemarketing depends on how the service is provided as well as your relationship with your provider. It doesn’t only take a flexible service for an outsourced telemarketing to work.

For More Information Contact DentalLabSupport.com - Info@dentallabsupport.com  1-888-715-9099

3 Adjustments that will Instantly Build Your Dental Lab's Online Presence

Dental lab marketers who ask the question "what can I do to help my business right now?" are often disappointed. Many strategies, from optimizing your website for search engines to building your social media presence, require dedication and resources, and often take months to bear fruit.

But fear not! As it turns out, you can do a few things that will help you market your business successfully without delay. So instead of wasting more of your valuable time, let's jump right in: here are 3 adjustments that will instantly build your online presence.

1) Write for the Web

Perhaps the single biggest issue dental lab owners face when beginning to market their products or services online is one of which they may not even be aware: adjusting their writing for the web.

Even if you have some experience writing text for local ads or newsletters, make no mistake: writing for the web is an entirely different animal. Just knowing that, and adjusting your writing accordingly, can instant improve your online presence.

As you probably know, Twitter has a character limit of 140 characters on all of its tweets. In fact, that may be the exact reason you've stayed away from the network! But what if we told you that you should treat your Facebook presence as if it had the same limit?

As it turns out, the text in your Facebook posts starts getting cut off after 90 characters depending on your readers' device of choice, so making sure you put the most important, convincing part of your message in those first 90 characters is absolutely crucial.

And that's just one example of the need to adjust your writing. Web users have little patience; they won't stick around to read a paragraph that's longer than 3 or 4 sentences and looks like a "wall of text" on their mobile device. By shortening your sentences and paragraphs, and directing them to "you" text rather than "I" statements, you ensure that a much greater percentage of your users read and share your text, and your online presence grows.

2) Quality over Quantity

Many dental lab owners mistakenly think that to be successful in the digital realm, they need to push out content as often as possible when in fact, the opposite is true. Yes, Google loves regular content updates, just as regular exposure on social media is important. But that doesn't mean you should emphasize the quantity over quality.

Again, take Facebook as an example. Thanks to its EdgeRank algorithm, the network only shows your posts to a portion of your "likes" who have engaged with past posts of yours. Because your audience is much more likely to engage with posts that it deems interesting and relevant, businesses focusing on quality content reach a much larger audience than those who simply push posts.

The same is true for Google. Increasingly, the search engine seeks out quality content to rank highly, determining its relevancy in a scoring algorithm that continuously updates itself to maximize user satisfaction. If your individual page updates aren't exciting enough for your users to interact with and share, you won't get to take advantage of potential exposure on the search engines.

3) Connect Your Efforts

Finally, you should absolutely encourage your offline consumers to visit your online presence, whether that presence is a website or a social media profile.

Asking for (honest) reviews, administering a survey, or even offering small rewards online that you can promote in your storefront all drives new users to your web. And if, once they're there, they discover the quality content you have developed with your newly-acquired web writing skills, they'll be likely to stick around and ensure that your online presence keeps growing.

BONUS: Capture Your Online Visitors

So if you're beginning to grow your online presence, what's next? Ideally, you should capture your visitors, encouraging them to give you their contact information become leads in exchange for your quality content. Then, you can begin to engage in targeted marketing campaigns which will increase your customer base and benefit everyone involved.

So if you need any help with making sure that your newly-grown online presence turns into actual revenue, contact dentallabsupport.com! We'd love to talk to you about our services and how it helps you move leads toward becoming customers.

10 WAYS TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR DENTAL LAB LEAD GENERATION EFFORTS

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of dentallabsupport.com

Dental lab lead generation seems to be a mystery to many lab marketers. Just do a search on the topic and you’ll find little that’s helpful.

In my opinion, there are two reasons for this. One – Dental Labs are searching for that one killer lead tactic that will mask all ills or, Two – Dental Labs fail to realize that successful B2B lead generation is made up of activities that are by nature very hard to quantify and pin down.

The latter then leads to plenty of articles spouting the virtues of practices such as inbound marketing and content marketing, but little hard advice on how to make any of it pay.

Here’s my take – the real problem lies in the fact that you don’t simply generate a lead today, you guide it.

You can no longer run an ad that say’s “hey, we’ve got what you’re looking for come and get it” and expect much. Once a prospect actually knows what they are looking for, they’re already looking for a price.

Nope, it’s a process that involves many components working together that just happen to culminate in “a lead or click,” but know this, that click isn’t the thing; it’s merely the vehicle. Don’t get caught in the trap of relying on that kind of measure to show you what’s working.

Proper lead generation – or lead guiding – goes more like this – 1) Hey, here’s the real problem you need to address, 2) hey, here are a couple ways you might start to think about that problem, 3) hey, here’s one specific way to solve that problem and maybe, just maybe, 4) hey, here’s why we might be the right one to help you fix that problem.

This kind of process comes to life in the combination of the right activities delivered at the right time in the customer’s journey. It takes a mindset of consistently calling to action while consistently offering to loop a prospect back into consuming more content.

Below are ten B2B lead generation practices that must be used in some combination to guide the act of building a steady stream of highly qualified leads. No matter if you run a marketing department tasked with generating leads or you’re an individual sales person trying fill the lead gap, this is your plan of action.

1) ANSWER FOCUSED BLOGGING

I know everyone tells you that you must be blogging today, but simply waking up on a Monday and deciding what to say is what leads to immediate blogging burnout. You must blog, but you must do it with intention.

Here’s the easiest way to do that. Go to your sent email folder and find a dozen or so questions you’ve answered from clients and prospective clients.

Now, turn each of those into blog posts.

Then, think about the questions your prospects might be asking or thinking before they ever consider your product or service as a possible solution.

For example, I was speaking to a group of Franchise print shops and asked them to tell me what questions a prospective customer might be asking at the earliest part of the their journey to find a print shop.

As you might have guessed most said things like – can I trust this shop, is there a print shop nearby, what should I print? But here’s the thing – there may be a few that are asking those kinds of question, but most are still asking – “How do I get more sales, how do I find more leads, how do I increase my conversion rates?”

The point is that to make blogging pay as a lead generation source you’ve first got to start answering those kinds of questions.

Dig up as many of those types of questions and put them on an editorial calendar for your blogging efforts for the next six months.

Once you get good at that you can turn a series of relevant posts into other forms of content such as videos and eBooks.

2) SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

Many B2B businesses are looking for a few dozen good clients, so I find it odd that they get sucked into the friends, likes and followers trap.

Social media as a lead generation tool is simply a really powerful way to build and nurture relationships. Stop using it as a broadcast tool and start thinking about influencing and adding value around 50 or 100 prospects.

Go to LinkedIn and leave all those industry and job title related groups you signed up for and find two or three groups where your actual prospects hang out and look for advice. Start asking and answering questions in these groups. Start building targeted prospect lists in these groups using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool.

Start building trusted relationships based on your expertise and your network, start referring others and connecting these people to the tools, answers and resources they need and you’ll start to generation the right leads in social media.

3) SEMINARS AND WEBINARS

For many B2B lead generation environments, the most effective tactic involves in person education through events like seminars and webinars.

When a prospect gets to see and hear that you provide valuable advice, that you seem like a nice enough sort and that you have an answer or two for the precise challenges they are struggling with at the moment, some instant magic can occur.

Never mind that from a content creation stand point the ongoing series you create can also be turned into a powerful trust building asset or even a product in itself.

Here are some examples created by DentalLabSupport.com Marketing Consultants Sal Radi & David H. Khalili.

Like so many of the tactics in this post, this one relies on integration and follow-up via one or more of the tactics listed here.

4) SPONSOR AND BE SPONSORED

We all want referrals, right? There’s no question that the best form of lead generation is the right kind of referral ushered to your door. And yet, few people actively promote this very form of lead generation – if it happens, it happens by accident.

I’ve built the bulk of my consulting and speaking business on the sponsor and be sponsored concept.

Here’s how it works.

Create an information rich, education focused eBook and/or webinar and reach out to other related businesses and ask them if they would like to cobrand the eBook or offer the webinar to their network free of charge.

Many know that they should be offering this kind of information, but haven’t gotten around to it so they will see your offer as a blessing and you’ll receive the benefit of essentially being referred to their entire network.

I’ve used this idea in tandem to great effect as well.

An organization will ask me to speak to their members and I’ll double up by allowing them to use an eBook I’ve created related to the topic. This way I reach the members in attendance, but I’ll also gain awareness throughout the group and give those that heard me speak deeper insight into how they could work with me.

But, you don’t have to stop there.

Go out and find someone else’s great eBook or webinar and arrange to cobrand that content as a lead generation magnet for yourself. One of the more popular lead capture options I have on my site is an eBook on Fee Based Selling written by my friends at FreshBooks.

Slideshare is a great site for finding people that might be great webinar guests and a search on Google for “yourtopic” filetype:pdf will turn up nothing but eBook related to the topics you choose.

5) SEQUENTIAL LEAD MAGNETS

I went fly fishing recently and I found this clear deep hole in the river where fish were actively rising to the top to eat. Things had been pretty slow to that point so I put some dry flies on and cast right on their noses.

Immediately my targeted fish rose, took a look and swam away. I kept at it, offering new casts and new flies and eventually after a number of presentations I would catch the fish.

Few things generate quality leads like a series of sequential offers that lead prospects deeper and deeper into your educational grip.

By setting up a process that by nature moves your prospect along, exposes them to increasingly valuable content and opportunities to get to know your approach better you set up relationship where it begins to feel as though you are working with a client as opposed to nurturing a lead.

You can accomplish this process through a sequential series of videos or even a series of checklists, each offering more pieces to the puzzle. One of the keys to this approach is that you sell the value of the series and set the expectation that your prospect is going on a journey of value.

6) SMALL BATCH DIRECT MAIL

I return once again to the idea of smaller is better. I know we all want to do that blast thing and have it rain leads, but the more personal you can get the better.

You will receive far greater results targeting 50 or 100 ideal prospects a month and reaching out with a personalized letter outlining one highly actionable idea than any other form of mass communication out there.

For example, imagine getting a personal letter that included a statement like this: “We’ve found over the years that our customers want to know how to generate more leads. We’ve also found that one of the most effective ways to actually do this is [fill in your killer tactic here]” If you would like to receive more tips like this or learn how to more fully employ this idea please visit our video series here [your URL].”

7) RELEVANT WARM CALLING

I would never advocate cold calling, although plenty of people still do it. The problem is that the notion of cold implies dumb calling. I still get calls today from people who start off by saying that they would like to come by and spend 30 minutes of my time learning what I do to see if there are any synergies.

First off, let me say that if you use the word synergies you probably aren’t going sell me anything, but further, let me say that it is nearly impossible to not know what my business does – heck, you wouldn’t have to work that hard to have my family medical history and some knowledge of my music and food choices, so no call should ever be cold.

Picking up the phone and connecting after thoroughly researching relevant and personalized discussion topics is how you create warm calls.

Let’s back up to the previous point concerning small batch direct mail. A powerful way to up the response of said small batch mail is to claim in that letter that you intend to call the recipient next Tuesday to talk about several more ways they can increase their sales.

Very affordable technology exists today that would let you know which of the letter recipients visited the link in your letter and might just be ready for a call. Most marketing automation tools such as those from Marketo, Infusionsoft and Salesforce incorporate this kind of technology.

You can begin to inject this idea into other lead generation elements as well. If you have a webinar sign up form start asking for phone numbers. You don’t have to make it mandatory, but try reaching out to a few that provide the number simply as a way to make sure they have what they need, offer to answer questions about the event or even send them a tool for note taking.

You don’t have to be a pest when you call people, in fact, don’t sell, just be useful. Even useful voice message follow ups will let people know you are human and aren’t going to hard sell anything.

Reaching out via the telephone in a useful manner will help build trust for your other lead generation initiatives.

8) SMART NETWORKING

My friend Derek Coburn has written a tremendous book on networking called –Networking Is Not Working. If you have not read it highly recommend.

Coburn debunks the value of the traditional meet and dump kind of networking that people tend to waste their time doing.

If you want to make networking pay you have to look at it as a tool for connecting others rather than getting connected.

Here’s the difference – instead of reaching into LinkedIn to see who you can connect with, reach into your existing network and find a handful of people that need to meet some shining stars in your network.

In fact, start looking to connect with more and more people who can help your connections instead of help you.

When you view networking as your opportunity to build bridges that help others – guess what happens – you become a lead magnet.

Yes this takes time and effort and it can be hard to quantify right off the bat, but building lead momentum isn’t for those who are afraid of work.

9) INTERVIEW IDEAL CLIENTS

I intentionally stayed away from the word podcast because so many people don’t want to be podcasters. Here’s the thing though, I don’t want you be a podcaster any more than I want you to be a blogger – but you absolutely must have a blog!

Here’s what I want you to do. Create a podcast so you can gain access to your ideal clients in a highly leveraged way.

If you want to work with CEOs of mid size manufacturing companies then create a show where you interview successful CEOs of mid size manufacturing companies who just happen to be happy to share their journey to success with your listeners.

Okay, maybe you don’t have any listeners, but your guests don’t need to know that and while you are building your following you’ll be getting some awesome content that helps you build authority in the space you work and just might land you in a conversation with a prime prospect.

Podcasting is not as complicated as it might sound and there are plenty of resources, such as The Podcast Answer Man, to help teach you what you need to know to turn this into a lead generation play.

10) PAID TRAFFIC

I’ve placed advertising as the final piece of the B2B lead generation list not because I don’t think it has much value, but because it’s so much more effective when you are doing many of the other elements prior to buying ads.

Ironically advertising is the easiest tactic – anyone with some cash can throw up ads and generate a few clicks and maybe even leads with very little effort. The only problem is that the leads are often uneducated and unqualified.

The way to create the highest quality leads is to invest in teaching them how to be ideal clients. When you employ many of the previous tactics you can use your advertising to drive prospects to any number of educational opportunities, such as video tips, webinars, eBooks, and, now that you have one, your podcast, knowing that the traffic you send to these elements will do the proper job of educating and ultimately selling.

Here’s some of my favorite plays for paid traffic

• Facebook look alike audiences – check out Jon Loomer’s great explanation of this fairly new Facebook advertising option
• Syndicated content – My get sponsored tactic above is a form of syndication but paid options such as Outbrain can be effective ways to get your owned media assets and content in from of targeted leads. Neil Patel of QuickSprout has agreat tutorial on Content Syndication
• Pay per click and retargeting – Check out Wordstream’s PPC Uninversity –  andAdSpringr

For more information please visit DentalLabSupport.com.