It’s that time of year again so make the most of the holiday season downtime by planning your company’s strategic marketing list for 2015. Be sure to check it twice!

Marketing managers, business owners, and CMOs of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are always looking for ways to find new business and increase sales. It’s important to explore new methods of developing lead intelligence in order to do so.

Digital technologies

It’s common knowledge that digital technologies are quickly replacing traditional sales and marketing methods. It’s in SMBs’ best interests to keep current on all the online marketing tools available today.

Top 3 lead generators
We’ve found that companies utilizing specific sales-enabling automation tools enjoy increased lead generation, conversion and sales.

The most effective lead gen tools have proven to be:

1. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation enables companies to effectively market their services and/or products online across multiple channels. These can include email, social media, websites etc. Marketing automation provides your company powerful tools to attract, convert, and nurture leads all under a single platform. The best value offered is the capability of measuring ROI of all your digital marketing campaigns to optimize every marketing dollar spent.

Benefits

enables you to improve your overall email marketing efforts
better targeting of prospects
convert and nurture leads
can easily measure financial effectiveness of each marketing program
social media monitoring
improves customer communication
powerful analytics

HubSpot, Marketo and Infusionsoft are highly successful online marketers that should be checked out for their innovative lead generation expertise.

2. CRM software

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a tool every company with sales people needs to have. Nowadays, it’s simply a way of doing business. CRM software provides an organized method of managing a company's interactions with current and future customers.

CRM utilizes various technologies to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.

Benefits include:

lead intelligence, lead history, lead monitoring
sales pipeline forecasting
enhanced sales rep activities and ease of monitoring them
organizational-level data sharing

Check out SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zoho CRM for more information.

3. Live chat

Live chat, or live support, is a web service that enables companies to communicate with their website visitors in real time, at their convenience. The beauty of live chat is that your company provides a real person to immediately engage with your clients or customers, to provide support and information, instantly.

Benefits include:

improved sales leads
increased efficiency as live chat reps can handle multiple chats simultaneously
ability to deal with pain points at the source and turn them into sales opportunities

Check out SnapEngage and other such live chat apps

Awesome tools rule
The integration and application of web technologies have been proven to increase lead generation, conversion, and overall growth of businesses.

These digital tools will help you gain the edge over your competition, boost the power of your company’s website, grow your business and, ultimately, increase your company’s bottom line.