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Most digital marketing campaigns — SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), display advertising, and others — fail to validate conversions. This puts an extra burden on the sales force, reducing productivity and close rates. Adding a validation process into your campaigns will make your sales team much more efficient.

What Is Lead Validation? 

Lead validation is the process of reviewing conversions to separate true sales leads from other types of inquiries.

A typical digital marketing campaign tracks conversions. When a person clicks on your link in Google organic search results, an SEO conversion is recorded. When someone phones your office using a phone number displayed on your Bing Ad, a PPC conversion is recorded. At the end of the month, a report is generated showing how many conversions were recorded. Sales and marketing personnel review these reports and make decisions about whether to ramp up or scale back campaigns and how to adjust them for better results.

The big problem: Many conversions are not sales leads.
A conversion could be a sales opportunity — or it could be a customer service inquiry, a misdialed phone number, a personal call, spam, or one of a hundred other things.

Failure to Validate = Failure to Generate More Leads
If you think this is a minor issue or a marketing nuance, think again. Our lead validation experience has revealed something surprising: As many as 45% of all conversions are NOT sales leads. 
Two bad things happen when all conversions are lumped together:

1. Companies are unable to accurately evaluate the performance of their digital campaigns. They may overestimate the level of success and continue to invest in campaigns that are not working nearly as well as perceived.

2. Companies are thwarted in their goal to improve the lead generating power of their campaigns, because their tactical decisions are based on misleading data.

From the salesperson’s point of view, these are very unhappy consequences. Not only does the stream (trickle?) of leads from digital marketing campaigns remain consistently modest, but also the salesperson may have to spend valuable time following up on non-leads rather than working on the real ones.

How Lead Validation Helps the Sales Effort
Lead validation is laborious but worth the effort. To validate leads, someone must listen to every phone inquiry and read every form inquiry — website contact forms and so on. 
The validator or validation team separates legitimate sales leads from everything else, and passes them along to the sales team as quickly as possible. This simple action has three big benefits:

1. Sales management becomes aware of leads quickly, while they are still hot.  Taking special action on high-quality leads increases the opportunity to close them quickly.
2. Sales personnel are no longer sidetracked following up on non-leads.
3. Sales management can listen to and evaluate recorded phone inquiries, gaining the ability to continuously improve internal systems for handling leads and non-leads.

How Lead Validation Generates More Leads
When leads are validated, digital marketing campaign reporting becomes more transparent and accurate. Managers see how many leads their campaigns are producing, not merely a vague number of conversions. This level of precision enables them to make better strategic and tactical decisions, both of which result in continually improving lead generation.

Strategically, companies accurately know if their campaigns are producing leads — and then can do something. Let’s look at a simplified example.

If a company saw (without validation) that every month its SEO campaign yielded 500 conversions and its PPC campaign yielded 300, it would invest more heavily in SEO. However, if the company saw (with validation) that SEO yielded 500 conversions and 100 leads, and PPC yielded 300 conversions and 200 leads, its investment decision would be to put more into PPC. Over a year’s time, this better decision produces 1,200 more leads — maybe more.

Actually, “maybe more” should be “definitely more,” since validation enables companies to continuously improve campaigns. In our hypothetical PPC campaign , let’s assume the company has set up accurate call tracking. Now it can do more than merely identify leads — it can also determine what specific PPC ad generated the lead, what time of day it was generated, what keywords were used, and more. This granular lead data tells PPC campaign specialists which ads work, what times of day are best to display ads, and which keywords generate the most leads. As the campaign progresses, it gets smarter — generating more leads more efficiently.

Very few companies validate leads, which is unfortunate but understandable. Validation is tedious, time-consuming and never ending. But interestingly, very few companies rave about the quality and quantity of their online leads, and very few feel they are getting the most out of their digital marketing investment. Why? Validation is the missing element. Add it to your marketing and sales strategies and reap the benefits from your more focused marketing and sales teams.

Who else would like to have an extremely popular, well-read, shared-like-crazy blog?
I’m thinking most bloggers worth their weight would shout “Yes, yes, YES!” in a heartbeat!
But here’s the catch.

It requires a little work.  You know the kind.
The roll-up-your-sleeves kind.  And, (here’s the kicker), you have to blog consistently.  I’m talking several times a week. In the beginning, I would even say more.  Try every single day.

You can do it, but . . .
Much more than a tad of inspiration and motivation is involved.  You can’t just blog when you feel like it.  Nope. Doesn’t work.  There’s just simply no way your blog can become well-known and on the forefront of reader’s minds without some regular meat for them to devour.  And that means writing on a consistent basis.
Not what you wanted to hear?
Sorry, Promise!
I do know how you you feel.  While I’m passionate about blogging and putting content out there that will benefit my readers and cause them to think, some days I don’t feel like writing. Or feel inspired. Or anything of the sort.  THAT’s when I pull out my own advice and take it!


Quick and Easy Motivational Tips:

• Remember why you are writing in the first place.  You know, your area of expertise.  Go back to the beginning and tell folks why you do what you do.  What you love about it, how you can help them, and what you’ve learned along the way.  Surely, those are some of your favorite topics?  Stay in your ball park.  Write about what you know and you just can’t go wrong. 

• Visualize your ideal reader. You know who they are.  You know why they read your blog.  So, put that content hungry reader in your mind and give them what they want.  It’s an easy way to motivate yourself if you take the focus off of you and put it on them.  Bring kthem into the story and give them something they can’t get anywhere else.  A conversation with you.

• Create a schedule. I know. I rebel too.  Schedules can make me seem like I am stifling my creativity.  But, guess what?  It’s actually forcing me to make the time for my creativity.  Doesn’t that resonate with you better?  Make the time and see what happens!

• Keep a notebook or pad handy. How many of your most brilliant blog post ideas have shown up in the strangest places? The car, the drug store line, while feeding your cat, you name it.  They usually show up at the most inconvenient moments! How many do you remember?  Get in the habit of writing them down as soon as you can and before it you it, blog ideas will be so plentiful you’ll start to think you are an idea machine! Can I also say that those spontaneous ideas are usually some of the BEST? Trust me.

• Keep taking action. Here’s one of my personal favorite quotes from the late Conrad Hilton:  “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” The point? Keep going, be consistent, and the results will show up!

Great blogs are  usually the results of a blogger’s good habits.  Consistent habits.  The popular bloggers know that already.

Writing an article for article marketing submissions is relatively easy. If your capability to churn out articles is halfway decent it should be easy enough to write an article on any topic, and then submit it to article directories. Are you still with me?..
Good!

How would you feel with a surefire copywriting recipe that will help you get more clicks, more exposure, and ultimately more sales for your article marketing efforts? I’m sure that most of you would part with some good money to find out the “secret” to doing exactly that. Guess what, the information is freely available to you on the Internet.
To save you from having to dig and poke around the Web to getting all clued up I have compiled this post. It will help you to increase your article marketing efforts with a few simple tweaks…

Recommended Post: 7 Effective Tips To Make Traffic Building A Lot Easier

The 5 essential ingredients to article marketing success

If you want to really supercharge your efforts then you need to pay close attention to the following “ingredients.”

1. Your title: What does the title promise the reader?
If you fail to deliver on your initial promise you readers will simply click away because they get bored. They will feel cheated, since you never delivered on your initial promise. It also helps to use good copywriting practices when you are looking for increased click-through rates.

2. The lead-in: The article lead-in, also called an introduction needs to prep the reader for what is to come. Are you promising them a good deal for a product? If so, make it sound interesting to prompt them to read on. Web readers don’t have a long attention span. In fact, they tire real fast, and you only have a few seconds to catch their attention, or they will be gone forever.

3. The meat: The article meat is where the main action is; the tips and tricks you promised them in the title, or the secrets, the bargain deals and what not. This is where you can really impress your readers with some meaty information, and blow them away by over-delivering on your copy.

4. The bridge: Your bridge is the copy that ties your meat to your resource box. Before you encourage your readers to click on your links you want to make sure that they are once again reminded about the promises you made to them within the article and then show them where to go to fulfill that promise.

5. Resource box: Much has been written about writing the perfect resource box for your articles. In my own experience I have found that making this part of the actual content will get you more clicks than if you were to separate it. The resource box must be targeted to prompt the reader to click out from your article before he/she leaves the site. Once again, this is the place where you use your writing and copyediting skills like a master ninja. It’s the last chance you get to leave a lasting impression.

So you are almost done reading this article and I hope you understand, now give me some time and head over to 'Let Your Thoughts Be Read Through Blogs'  This will help you enough.