Gragg Blog

10 Tips for Online Lead Generation

Posted by admin on September 9, 2010  |  No Comments

Does your company need a better way to generate online leads? Here’s 10 helpful tips to get you started. (Courtesy of Conversation Marketing)

Leave a comment and tell us what you think works best.

1: Get a good toolset
You’re going to need a toolset that lets you manage e-mail lists, send progressive e-mails to those lists and practice good CRM, without driving you insane.

2: Use an online forms builder
If you’re on WordPress, use Gravity Forms. If you’re not on WordPress, use Wufoo or Google Docs. That way, you can edit your various information collection forms, check your data and make changes yourself.

3: Set up a workflow
This guides visitors to prospects to leads. Visitors sign up for your aWeber e-mail list using a simple 2-3 field form. That makes them prospects and then you build trust and demonstrate value. And they become leads when they decide to provide additional contact information.

4: Start small
Offer something in exchange for, say, a visitors name and e-mail address. This builds your prospect list. They aren’t leads, yet, but they will be.

5: Reach out
Make sure you let colleagues know about that webinar, or white paper, or whatever it is that you’re offering. Don’t be a pushy jerk about it – just send it along.
Spend a few minutes a day on Twitter reading, replying and contributing to your fellow tweeters.

6: Send them a little something special
Keep in touch with those prospects. Send them little gifts: Nuggets of wisdom they can really make use of. For example: a new whitepaper (or an old one!), a link to a great special offer one of your colleagues is providing, coupon codes for a product you’re recommending to clients.
Whatever it is, make sure they’ll really feel silly if they don’t open their e-mail, and then hear 2 weeks later what they missed.

7: Contact them weekly, watch your list
Contact your prospects weekly. Weekly. Just a hello, and a tidbit of useful information.
If you’re afraid of driving away prospects who feel they’re being spammed, watch the prospect list. Is it shrinking? No? Then you’re just fine. Keep going.

8: Be solicitous, not a solicitor
Don’t be a solicitor Be solicitous. When you contact your prospects, never, ever, ever, make a sales pitch. Instead of saying “Hire me today for great SEO!”
Try saying “If you have any questions about internet marketing, send me an e-mail. I’m always happy to answer, and I don’t charge for a quick question.”
Start inviting folks to ask questions, and they asked. Even better is discovering it was fun to answer, and that the folks you answer, more often than not, became clients.

9: Make it an upgrade
Make your prospects want to be part of The Inner Circle: those who graduate from prospects to leads. It should be an upgrade. You’ve already started giving them useful bits of information. Now, offer them really good stuff: A series of training videos. Admission to a monthly webinar. Or even admission to a monthly, free, Q&A session.

10: Make eye contact
When you write, make eye contact. Write to the prospect. Say “You”, not “People”. You’re talking to each person, individually – that’s how Internet copywriting and marketing works. Take advantage of it.

Keep at it
It takes some persistence. So keep at it. If you’ve got good stuff to offer, people will find you.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE at Conversation Marketing.

How a Holistic Approach to Advertising Will Work

Posted by admin on September 1, 2010  |  No Comments

All media has the potential to generate leads. The trick is to figure out what channels will work best for your campaign. At Gragg Advertising, we use a holistic approach to finding the right avenues for our clients to advertise in. Allocating the right amount of money to the right components of a campaign is critical, whether it be building a new website, producing commercials, pay-per-click campaigns and so on. The key is being able to measure what is working and what is not. We establish a plan from the beginning to create a campaign that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Watch this clip of CEO Greg Gragg and President Darryl Mattox describing how Gragg Advertising develops successful client campaigns.

How We’re Prepared for the Yahoo!/Bing Merger Will Affecting Advertisers

Posted by admin on August 27, 2010  |  No Comments

Later this fall, Bing and Yahoo should be finalizing their long planned merger, and search will begin to operate under Bing’s command.  The back-end organic transition was completed on August 24^th.  The goal of this merger is to deliver a higher quality user experience, draw traffic away from Google and begin to dominate the search market for both sponsored and organic listings.  Sponsored ad revenue is expected to boom in the next few years, and this joint effort could help sponsored to grow even more.

What does this mean for SEO and pay-per-click advertising ?

The recent merger between Yahoo and Bing will have certain implications for websites in regards to SEO.  Webmasters will want to analyze optimization efforts and see what has been done for in the past to ensure the end result is all their web pages indexed in Bing.  Are you currently indexed in Bing?  If not then you could be hindered by this merger. Bing has historically been a search engine that takes about 3 months to get indexed for new websites. The longer you wait to adapt, the longer your content will go unseen.

Pay-per-click advertising will see changes as well. Microsoft’s adCenter will be the operator for advertiser’s paid search campaigns, bringing with it all the settings known by current adCenter advertisers.  Those marketing with Bing and Yahoo will not be able to “cherry pick” prospects based on search engine: searcher from Yahoo vs. a searcher using Bing.  Both affiliate networks will remain available to online advertisers for content and display campaigns.  To the dismay of some, not all of the features that are available in Yahoo will remain after the merger is complete. For details and FAQ’s, visit the Yahoo blog links at the end of this post.  With any transition, there will be bumps in the road and unhappy customers.  The point of this merger is to bring a better user experience and compete with Google in the online advertising market.

How should we, as advertisers, prepare?  Presently, representatives are connecting with marketers about this shift and protocol.  Portals have been produced in a number of Yahoo advertising accounts to allow for the smooth integration of Bing and Yahoo campaigns, but not all.  The best thing to do now is to focus on the small changes important for a seamless transition. A number of settings like ad copy and text length differ between adCenter and Yahoo and need to be addressed before your ads are served up with half words and phrases.  Word variations that Yahoo adjusts for, such as misspellings, plurals etc., won’t be handled on adCenter.  For example, if a user is searching for “nursing schools” and enters “nursing scools,” Yahoo would have served ads based on “nursing school,” but adCenter will not.  Adding keywords such as “scool” and “nusring” to your campaigns in adCenter is important for success and campaign optimization.  Aside from keywords and text edits, reports that will not be available after the advertising transition should be collected before you make the switch.  However, as noted in the Yahoo transition blog, advertisers will have access certain information in their Yahoo accounts for an undefined period of time.  If there are reports or data from Yahoo you may want or need, start collecting them soon.

The effects of this merger have yet to be fully understood, but advertisers should expect to see higher traffic and more impressions with the combination of these two search giants.  Currently, most of paid search is spent in Google AdWords. This merger seeks to give the most used search engine a run for its money.  For some time, we won’t know how this merger will affect pay-per-click campaigns or search engine optimization and will need to strategize as information becomes available.  Until then, advertisers and searchers should hang-on and brace themselves for change.  Such is the life of an online marketer: change is inevitable, learn how to adapt.

For more information, check out these blogs:
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/08/23/exciting-news-from-bing-and-yahoo.aspx

http://www.product-reviews.net/2010/08/25/yahoo-bing-search-engine-merger-and-google-domination

http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/07/20/new-search-alliance-transition-updates-and-tips/

http://www.ysearchblog.com/

http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/07/06/preparing-for-the-transition-to-adcenter

Gragg Advertising Featured in the Kansas City Business Journal

Posted by admin on August 25, 2010  |  No Comments

After experiencing record growth in 2009 and the first half of 2010, Gragg Advertising is featured in this month’s Kansas City Business Journal. Below is a sample of what can be found in the Business Journal by Steve Vockrodt.

Gregory Gragg seems to have an almost fatalistic view of the rapid growth of his company, Gragg Advertising.
“If you don’t constantly innovate, you reach maturity,” Gragg said. “And maturity equals death.”
With that unenviable fate in mind, Gragg Advertising has avoided old age by establishing a framework in which strategic analytics are at the front and center of its approach, rather than being a tangent to a primary focus on creative.

Gragg admits he’s not a creative guy. He’s a number-cruncher who prefers an approach that answers the often elusive question of clients’ return on investment.

Not that the agency treats creative work as an afterthought, but Gragg said effective creative must go beyond capturing a consumer’s eye — it must cause the consumer to act or to buy something.

“The creative is actually better because what happens is you don’t create creative for creative’s sake,” Gragg said. “You create creative for the sake of your client. … We want to create creative that’s going to generate sales for our clients.”

The full article is available for Business Journal subscribers here.

More Calls Means More Starts

Posted by admin on August 20, 2010  |  No Comments

Contacting leads by phone is a staple of a college Admissions Department. It’s critical to have a one-on-one conversation with leads to make them convert. Why then are so few leads contacted by phone more than once by admissions representatives?

Lucky, in many Admissions offices across the country, enlightened directors are seeing past the challenges Admissions Representatives facein contacting leads by phone. The key? Persistence.

Repeated attempts to contact a lead are vital to insuring that he or she becomes a start. According to Leads360.com, “in a recent analysis of over 15 million sales leads, Leads360 discovered that making two calls versus just one increases the chances of contacting a lead by 87%. The same study revealed that a disappointing 50% of leads are never called a second time.”

Making multiple attempts to follow up with a lead can make all the difference in developing them into a start. Here are a few tips that might help make for a smooth second call.

1. Make a schedule for your calls to map out who’s been contacted, how many times and the date you last called.

2. Shorten the second call. If you left a voicemail on the first attempt or spoke briefly with the lead but needed to set up a second call, make sure you don’t repeat yourself. Be more direct with your message. If you leave a message, keep it shorter than the first message but remember to include your important selling points, name and phone number.

3. Persistence and politeness go a long way. Keep calling and project an air of respect and politeness through your voice.

Does your Admissions Department have a follow up strategy for calling leads? If not, perhaps it’s time to change your methods and see how many starts you can gain from making multiple call attempts.

Gragg Advertising offers focused on-site Admissions training to clients looking for a new recruitment strategy. Our expert can train your Admissions staff in today’s most proven and effective admissions strategies. Click here for more info.
Call Frequency on Lead Conversions

Strategic Partners

Posted by admin on August 18, 2010  |  No Comments

Have you ever considered that your advertising agency could be your biggest and best strategic partner? Stacy Scott, Account Service Manager with Gragg Advertising, explains how Gragg insures client success by partnering with our clients. We expand on the services of a traditional marketing agency and use that experience to partner with each of our clients one-on-one. By aligning our goals with the client’s, we insure the generation of leads and starts.

Find out more about how Gragg Advertising can partner with your company at www.get-results-now.com.

Bing Passes Yahoo Search Engine Market Share

Posted by admin on August 16, 2010  |  No Comments

Bing at 10.6% and then Yahoo at 6.5%. Here’s a sample of data over the past two years, including the latest from July:

Why’s Chitika Different?

In contrast to Chitika, most of the US rating services show that Yahoo is still ahead of Bing. For example, last month comScore reported that Yahoo was ahead of Bing by about 6 points of share; Hitwise had Yahoo ahead by about 4.5% of share. Nielsen had Bing behind Yahoo by only 0.3% of share, but that’s still much different than the 3.5 point lead over Yahoo that Chitika gives Bing.

One key differences is that the ratings services named generally measure activity at the search engines themselves, the number of searches happening at each of them. In contrast, Chitika is measuring how many visitors leave a search site and come to web sites in its network.

It could be that Yahoo remains having more searches at its site, as the major ratings services find, but that less of that traffic is “escaping” out of Yahoo and to third-party web sites such as those in Chitika’s network.

Indeed, it’s long been the case that many webmasters commonly report that they receive far more traffic from Google than the searches the ratings services report happening there — and far less from Yahoo. My own suspicion has been that Yahoo is very good at recycling people who search at Yahoo back into Yahoo’s own properties.

It could also be that some sites on the Chitika network are simply more successful in generating traffic from Bing that ordinary web sites, though I’d find that surprising as a major factor. Ads could have an impact. The traffic measured is for both paid and unpaid traffic from the search engines. So if some sites in the network are doing major advertising on Bing and not Yahoo, that might also contributed.

See Full Article: Chitika: Bing Passes Yahoo In Search Market Share

Three New Gragg Team Members Arrived in July

Posted by admin on August 12, 2010  |  No Comments

Gragg Advertising hired three new team members in July 2010.

Kenzie Crosby

Kenzie Crosby joined Gragg as a Marketing Coordinator. Kenzie has a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Adverting from Missouri State University. She earned a full-ride scholarship to college and graduated Magna Cum Laude. Kenzie’s specialty at Gragg will be in Account Service, where she interned in 2008. When not at work, Kenzie enjoys playing with her puppy, sitting poolside and cooking.

Mary Hull

Gragg welcomes Mary Hull, our new Pay-Per Lead Senior Interactive Analyst. Before Gragg, Mary worked at Embarq in Overland Park, Kansas. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Kansas and her specialty at Gragg is in PPL Analysis. Her favorite place to travel is the South Carolina beach. She also enjoys spending her free time with her two sons and creating various memory DVDs on her computer.

Steven Myers

Steven Myers is the newest Business Development Account Executive at Gragg Advertising. Steven most recently worked as Logistics Coordinator at Sprint in Overland Park, Kansas. His specialty at Gragg is focused on new business development and sales. Steven enjoys spending time with his family and is an avid sports fan. Among his favorite teams are The Kansas City Chiefs, the Kansas City Royals, Kansas State and The University of Kansas men’s basketball teams.

FAPSC Conference 2010 Recap

Posted by admin on August 10, 2010  |  No Comments

Gragg Advertising attended the annual Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools and Colleges (FAPSC) Conference in Hollywood, Florida July 12 through 16. The theme of this year’s conference was Fraternity of Leaders. The conference was attended by 460 career school professionals. Gragg CEO Greg Gragg and Business Development Director Lisa Olmedo were honored to have the opportunity to present “From Surfers to Students- Converting Internet Leads,” helping schools optimize their web presence to draw more leads.

“The conference was great,” Olmedo said. “It is definitely one of the best state conferences we attend.”

Other hot topics at FAPSC included Neg Reg, the government’s increasing attempts to further regulate the for-profit education industry.

Gragg Advertising is a leader in interactive lead generation. Find out more about what we provide at www.graggadv.com/products.

FAPSC is a state-wide organization representing more than 200 schools.

August Webinar: Connect, Contact, Convert – Working in Admissions

Posted by admin on August 6, 2010  |  No Comments

Join Gragg Advertising for our free monthly webinar, “Connect, Contact, Convert – Working in Admissions” as our experts look at the challenges and successes of Admissions teams today and tips to stand out and exceed recruitment goals.

Talk with experts Greg Gragg, Darryl Mattox and Lisa Olmedo on Friday, August 20^th, 2010 at 12:30 E.S.T. for training without leaving your office!

The webinar will focus on:

• Identifying opposing forces in the school industry
• Social networking presence
• Keys to survive in a changing market
• Top 10 rules for success

Have questions? Want to contribute content? Send Gragg Advertising your Admissions tips and questions before or during the webinar by following us on Twitter @GoWithGragg and Greg, Darryl and Lisa will answer them LIVE during the webinar!

Don’t Forget!

Gragg Advertising can answer your pressing Admissions and Marketing inquiries through Facebook! Become a fan and receive great industry news and updates from our experts!

Visit www.graggadv.com/webinars and sign up today!

For more information on our Webinars, contact Amanda Baechle at 1-800-610-3107 x 376 or visit our website at www.graggadv.com.