One of the most important knowledge for any business owner is that – effective networking is necessary to help keep your sales funnel filled at all times. Networking is part of your lead gen system. You do not want to be hit with unplanned fallow months, as this is costly and can take your business down.

To be a good networker, it starts by being genuine and authentic to build trust and relationships. You can achieve this by being a valuable resource to others with suggestions, ideas and ability to send referrals to other people. This will enable you to not have to constantly chase clients for new business. A referral system that includes marketing needs to be solidly in place to receive high quality referrals regularly.

One important tip after a networking event is to follow up with a short email to your new contacts and to add them to your LinkedIn network. I’ve been using LinkedIn for several years to connect to people I meet and I’ve worked with over the years. I now have over 600 LinkedIn contacts and have used it successfully to obtain several corporate marketing contracts in finance and technology.

Vancouver is Mostly Small Business  

Why is this important? 98% of ALL businesses in Vancouver are small business, as defined as businesses with fewer than 50 employees (PDF). In 2010, “there were approximately 391,700 small businesses operating in British Columbia, accounting for 98 per cent of all businesses in the province. Micro-businesses, those with fewer than five employees, comprised about 82 per cent of all small businesses”. (Western Economic Diversification Canada.) Therefore, the need for an effective sales lead referral system cannot be understated for the survival of 98% of ALL businesses in Vancouver.

To develop successful referral partners, ask what will it take for someone to know, like and trust you enough to send you a gift of qualified referrals? To deepen these referral relationships, think about what you need to be more likeable and trustworthy. Trust factor is built by providing great service, having integrity and holding high business standards. You also need to be able to effectively communicate the benefits of why your business is better or different than your competition.

To learn more about Vancouver networking events for prospects, get our Free Sales Leads Secret report.

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That means you can enter contacts you have met at networking events to invite them to your own events with MailChimp quickly and for free if you have less than 2000 contacts. By having an opt-in which is part of your site (such as on the right), you’ll also be able to grow your list. Then you’re able to invite your list to your events with MailChimp. And you’ll be able to see the results of your email campaign, which includes the rate open and how you it performed against industry standards. The open rate below for the Beauty Night Charity Art Fundraiser invitation is 45%, which indicates that many recipients know the email sender about donations and vendor tables.

If the click-through rate is low, there are 6 tips for improving the success of your emails to increase click-throughs.

Tip 1: Use Plain Text
Only use plain text with no fancy backgrounds, colors or cute little graphics. You want black words on a white background. Anything else is to hard to read and cannot be properly handled by some emails.

Tip 2: Use A Maximum of 60 Characters Per Line
Don’t type all the way across the page as it’s to hard to read. Plus, some emails will automatically break the line off at 65 to 70 characters anyways. This can really ruin the readability of your email if you haven’t formatted it correctly in the first place.

Tip 3: Use Short Sentences
Look at the sentences in this email and you’ll notice they are all relatively short. This makes them much easier to read on your screen. Whenever possible, break up your sentences. This makes it easier for someone to read your message.

Tip 4: Use Short Paragraphs
The rule of thumb is four short sentences. Anything more is to hard to read and causes the reader to delete your message without even reading it. Leaving “white space” in between sentences actually helps the “flow” of the message. It’s easier on the eye and increases the consumption of your message.

Tip 5: Do Not Use All CAPS
There are several reasons for not using all caps in your email:

• All caps is considered shouting at your reader.
• All caps can make it difficult for reading.
• Many of the email filters will bounce emails that use excessive caps.

You’ll increase your odds of your emails getting through to your reader. And you’ll make it easier for your readers to read once they get it by eliminating all caps.

Tip 6: Keep Your Email As Short As Possible
There is a major difference when writing emails for personal and business purposes. If you are sending emails for business, you want people to read them. Most of the people reading emails will not read them out of love for you. You must make it compelling to read  with good headlines and make it easy to read. The Internet has created a group of people with very short attention spans. If it’s not compelling, short and easy, they’ll just delete your email.

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As a Vancouver marketing consultant, I specialize in content marketing to generate leads with marketing materials and email campaigns to drive leads to your sales funnel. Recently, I came across an interesting article about how content marketing has evolved through five stages: 1) online brochure, 2) publishing, 3) promotion, 4) engagement and finally 5) marketing automation.

With an online brochure, your site includes all the details about you and your business to create a solid presence, along with an opt-in to capture email contact leads. Visitors will sign up for your opt-in box on your site for the following free “bribes” to get their contact information:

• Ebook or report
• Webinar or teleseminar
• Software trials
• Audio or video interviews
• Tools like calculators or spreadsheets
• Products like blog themes and screen savers
• Access to a private membership site
• Initial consultation as an upsell to paid services

After a visitor opts-in, there is a series of autoresponder messages aka as drip marketing or lead nurturing emails, to build trust and a relationship with your subscribers and to enable you to start making offers to your list.

With blog publishing, your site is now more than an online brochure and is a publishing platform with news, announcements, commentaries and thought leadership articles. Once you’re publishing, you can promote your posts with email marketing. The next stage of the content marketing evolution is visitor engagement, where you actively making useful connections through social media.

Marketing Automation – The Final Evolution

The final evolution of content marketing is marketing automation, which allows you to manage leads from their first visit through to the end of the sales process with integrated systems like HubSpot, Salesforce, Eloqua and Marketo. Read more about lead generation in the marketing in Vancouver post.

If you’re using marketing automation software such as Eloqua, it is designed to close the loop for marketing and sales teams. This enables your marketing team to effectively pass qualified leads through your auto-synched CRM, to your sales team. Features include:

• Contact management
• Email marketing
• List management and segmentation
• Automated lead nurture marketing
• Website Integration
• Campaign planning
• Workflow automation
• Reports on open and click-through rates
• Preloaded templates

Read the entire five stages of content marketing evolution to marketing automation article at Business to Community.

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Social media and blogging has a significant reach and should be included as part of your marketing: 60 percent of consumers researching products though multiple online sources learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites in the third quarter of 2011. Social networking sites — like Facebook or Google+, as well as blogs reach 80 percent of American Internet users, according to The Nielsen Company and its social media affiliate, NM Incite. The top tips for social media branding include: finding communities, connecting with influencers and sharing meaningful content, as well as leveraging traditional media exposure.

Find Communities and Causes
If you’re starting out with social media, tap in to existing communities, compliment, and contribute. Identify the network hubs where people are and draw them toward you by being social. That will help you get your brand core values and characters recognized in social media channels. Also, by connecting to causes that resonate with your organization and its culture will further your social media branding.

Connect with Online Influencers
As you search for your target audience in social media, identify with online influencers in those communities and get on their respective radars by leaving comments on their Facebook posts and retweeting their content. You can also email influencers to introduce yourself, after you understand how you add value to their online conversation. This will also enable you to expose yourself to their audiences.

Share Useful and Meaningful Content
To enhance your social media brand, publish meaningful content that adds value to the reader’s experience. By publishing useful information that people will want to comment and share with their own audiences, this positions you as an expert in your industry. This will also lead to higher rankings from search engines like Google with backlinks to your own blog and site for more information.

Social Media Branding Example
What’s next? With web 3.0, we’ve moved beyond the internet as a global vehicle of communications, due to the overwhelming amount of information online. As social media is now a widely adopted part of marketing, we’re seeing greater localization and regional trends for the arts. An example of social media branding is Artistrun Collective. It’s part of the Vancouver art community by sharing Facebook art events in Vancouver, reaches out to centres of influences and connects with cause-related marketing. Finally, it leverages the annual Culture Days event, a pan-Canadian participation involving artists and the public, which is promoted through national media sponsorships. It was included as a line up of art events in the Globe & Mail for the inaugural 2010 Culture Days.

Leveraging Culture Days for Social Media Exposure
This year’s Culture Days 2012, Liza Lee (Culture Days 2010 and Culture Days 2011 Artistrun Collective artist) will follow up with Brent Ray Fraser’s on his latest live performance – a sculptural painting with 500 bras to raise awareness and funding for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Brent was also one of the Culture Days 2010 artists for Artist Collective, an exhibit with 60 8″ x 8″ paintings with 20 artists. The artist interview will be available end of September for Culture Days 2012, just in time for the October Breast Cancer Awareness month. In addition to Brent’s latest interview, there will be a past interview with Bob Garlick (lead artist for the Culture Days 2010 “Craftivism Art Show”) with Brent Ray Fraser at Silo Studio talking about his prolific painting practice.

Learn more about social media branding at http://artistruncollective.org/culture-days-2012-2/.

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I’ve updated my banner to Liza J Lee & Associates to enable me to work with associates on internet marketing and other projects. It also allows me greater options on the types of projects too, including the art event with an invitation below at a gorgeous 7,700 square foot winery with tasting bar. Art and wine make a fine pairing!

Exciting Live Painting Competition from Golden Brush Art!

Produced by Golden Brush Art, this unique contest consists of four teams. Each team includes two artists with different styles setting their differences aside and combining their skills, strokes and colors to complete a painting on a chosen theme. And they only have 80 minutes to do it!

What is the theme? Summer Love! The masterpieces are then viewed and voted by the audience who will choose the winning team. The colorful results will also be auctioned off, along with paintings from previous competitions.

Location: Vancouver Urban Winery  
Address: 55 Dunlevy Avenue, Vancouver, BC
Date: August 23, 2012
Doors Open: 6:30 pm
Painting At: 7:30 pm
Tickets: $15 Presale. $20 at the Door.
Website: www.GoldenBrushArt.com

Look for the Golden Brush Art Sponsors Table at the Event 

I’ll be at the Golden Brush Art Sponsors table with web designer Randy Dueck of www.RandyDueck.com, to encourage guests to enter to win prizes. Randy will be giving away two web packages for lead generation, valued $259 each.

Golden Brush Art is Looking for Sponsors

Golden Brush Art is looking for cash and in-kind sponsorships, gift certificates and prizes from local companies to help cross promote one another:

“Our mission is to create an amazing Arts reality television series spreading Arts and Culture to every major city starting with Vancouver, British Columbia. We are doing this by recording our live art competitions and inviting the public to come and see our competitions where we showcase local artistic talent through collaborative art. We promote teamwork and creation through our shows.”

To learn more about Golden Brush Art sponsorships, click here.

Vancouver Urban Winery at 55 Dunlevy Avenue

…is a Vancouver commercial urban winery, with a tasting bar equipped with 36 taps, in the historic Railtown district. You can select from rotating wine-on-tap choices from British Columbia and international vintners at the 7.3-metre-long bar made of Douglas fir. The 7,700-square-foot Gastown establishment is turning heads with its FreshTAP, an original wine-on-tap system and subsidiary that packages wine for wineries entering the emerging wine-on-tap market.

Haven’t been down to the Vancouver Urban Winery yet? Here’s your chance at the Live Painting Competition from Golden Brush Art on August 23, where art and wine make a perfect pairing! You can RSVP me at Liza@Lizajlee.com. Or feel free to email me back about any questions you may have. I hope to see you at this unique Vancouver event.

Interviews With Golden Brush Artists for Summer Love

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Marketing in Vancouver has changed as the internet has made it possible for your prospects to research vendors, analysts and social media websites to understand the available choices and their own preferences. By the time a prospect picks up the phone to call you, they’ve probably made their buying decision, based on information provided by you, your competitors, and authority research sites.

To be able to effectively communicate to your prospects, marketing automation is required to stay on top of how customers buy today – to automatically manage the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound marketing messages, in response to your prospects inbound actions and online behaviors.

To provide the right content and timing, you need to be able to respond specifically to each prospect in the buying process with marketing automation tools. This includes creating, nurturing, and managing the buying interest in your products and services through campaign management, lead management, marketing analysis, and data management. For this post, we’ll focus on lead nurturing systems.

Nurturing Your Leads on the Marketing and Sales Funnel

Lead nurturing is a very powerful way to stay engaged with future potential buyers. This includes drip marketing, the strategy of sending a steady stream of automated messages, which can be email auto-responders in order to educate, stay top-of-mind and possibly persuade your prospects to stay engaged with you. The result is that lead nurturing can build a preference for your services or products, long before your prospects are ready to call you.

By sending automated email messages to your prospects, you can establish a preference for your solutions, while at the same time understanding your buyer’s timing. However, this is only possible if your lead nurturing systems deliver content that is of high value and interest to your prospects and you have their permission to stay in contact with them with a lead capture form.

Marketing in Vancouver is changing as managing marketing campaigns, nurturing leads, and passing leads to sales can now being automated. For more information on lead nurturing systems, visit our marketing automation page.

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In the last post, I included some tips for Vancouver SEO keywords to attract the right traffic for your business. With the latest concerns about Google Panda and Google Penguin, I researched what Google Webmaster Central had to say. The latest Google algorithms are aimed at helping people find high-quality sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content. To find out what is a high-quality site, it’s best to check directly on Google Webmaster Central. You’ll see it is based more on meeting the content needs of human readers and less on ranking well for search engines:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Back linking from quality websites

So rather than worry about Google SEO algorithms, focus on where your prospects will find you online. It’s a best practice to get back links from sites where there’s an actual audience that might see your link and click on it directly to visit. Then you’ll be building the type of links Google wants to reward. High quality links provide good value for your visitors to get more information about your business. This gives them an incentive to call you or opt-into your form for more information, which is lead generation. Therefore, focus on local SEO and local directory listings first as these are becoming more valuable as 20 percent of all search queries are local and one in ten searches are mobile.

Top free local SEO Vancouver directories:  

http://www.google.com/places/

http://www.bing.com/local/

http://www.yelp.ca/vancouver

http://www.hotfrog.ca/

http://www.canpages.ca/

http://www.canadianbusinessdirectory.ca/

http://360.yellowpages.ca/en/advertising-solutions/lead-generation-marketing#page-container

http://www.local.com/

http://www.vancouverwebsearch.com/

http://www.vancouverbusinessnetworking.com/

http://411.ca/ovpages/0001/?campaignId=FRGOOG_LGIM1&gclid=CNDjoM2g2bACFYcZQgod3n7X2g

http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/biz/

Tips about local listings

With local listings, consistency is key. Make sure your business name, address, phone numbers, description, website address are used consistently. Also, list your business address and phone number on your website to add trustworthiness and to improve the usefulness of your website, which will help you improve your local search rankings. And finally, local SEO and local listings are only a part of the entire internet marketing for your small business. There are other strategies to consider, such as social media, email marketing, webinars, white papers and marketing automation for lead generation. Learn more at: http://www.lizajlee.com/marketing-automation-for-lead-generation/.

Need to stay on top of your business?

If local SEO and local directory submissions are too much to handle on top of your busy schedule, consider outsourcing. Here are top outsourcing resources, starting at very low prices!

www.iWriter.com for the best freelance writers starting at $1.26 per article

www.Fiverr.com pay only $5 per task

www.99designs.com host a design contest and have dozens of designs to choose from

www.123employee.com hire a VA from the Philippines for an average of $5

www.oDesk.com for remote and freelance contractors

www.elance.com instant access to professional freelancers

www.guru.com find freelancers for hire

For more information about local SEO Vancouver listings, read our marketing in Vancouver post.

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I’ve been reviewing Eloqua as marketing automation for enterprises, designed to close the loop for marketing and sales. This platform integrates campaign execution, testing, measurement, prospect profiling, and lead nurturing – allowing you to get new customers. Its mandate is to “Target, Engage, Align and Optimize leads to ensure that no opportunity falls through the cracks and leads are routed efficiently to sales reps, driving faster conversion for increased revenues”.

Eloqua helps bridge sales and marketing, with marketing tools to execute simple campaigns such as single marketing offers or complex multi-channel campaigns, such as event and campaign management, lead scoring and nurturing and passing qualified leads to sales. The following is a summary of some of the most common basic features in Eloqua.

What about Marketing Automation for Vancouver Small Businesses? 

For small businesses, there are email systems with some marketing automation systems that are more affordable, but can still provide powerful functions and insights. Marketing automation helps you discover leads through digital clues: with behavioral data to quickly understanding a contact’s campaign history and activity, and  summarizes his or her activity within the CRM system. Leads are generated from your website, organic SEO, pay-per-click, lead capture forms, as well as offline marketing activities, such as tradeshows and networking, then tracked, analyzed and reported.

Automating Your Lead Generation

Marketing automation includes a high-level and four-step process between marketing and sales on Eloqua and other similar software:

1. Inbound leads, both email and phone are generally funneled to content such as a webinar or whitepaper, with a lead capture form where data is synched to a CRM system.

2. Lead scoring tools that rank prospects based on key attributes from the “Digital Body Language”, such as level of engagement, demographics and stage in the buying process.

3. Outbound phone leads are inputted into a CRM system through list sourcing and marketing and sales offline initiatives.

4. Then sales-ready leads are assigned to sales reps for appointments, while non-sales-ready leads go through an auto-responder email series with relevant, targeted and consistent communications for nurturing.

For more information, visit our lead generation page.

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To attract the optimal traffic and convert leads on your website or blog, you’ll need to incorporate SEO and copywriting into your selected webpages or blog posts. SEO is the active practice of optimizing your site by improving internal and external aspects to increase the traffic that your site receives from search engines. Without the right keywords for SEO and internet marketing, you will not attract the right organic traffic to your website or blog. But by choosing the right keywords, you can engage and convert your visitors into prospects. SEO is one of several methods for a sustainable lead generation system.

Choose the Right SEO Keywords

First you’ll need to choose the right keywords for organic or free search traffic. So make sure you have your main keywords on your chosen webpages. Each page should be around 300 words. You should place your page’s main keywords in the first and last 25 words on that page. To find keywords Google associates with your main keywords, here are two methods:

1. Use the tilde “~” command to find associated phrases in Google. Just type into Google search: ~your keyword phrase. (Replace “your keyword phrase with your actual keyword phrase.) Variations will be highlighted in bold print in the Google search.
2. Or visit Google Insight at www.google.com/insights/search/ and type in your selected keyword and URL. You’ll see a list of the top 10 associated keyword searches from Google for the last 90 days.

Optimize Your Best Content

Once you have your desired keyword phrases, you’ll need to select your best 10 webpages or blog posts to optimize to attract relevant and targeted traffic to grow your business. And each page or blog post should contain only one set of SEO keywords. You cannot mix your SEO keyword phrases or you will not get any or good search engines results.

To learn more about SEO Vancouver keywords and leads, get our Free Sales Leads Secret report.

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Social media is a great way to promote your skills and talent for contract leads for creative people. Globe & Mail interviewed me about using Facebook and social media as a way to network for a new jobs and contracts for marketing, communications and creative work. Here’s the link to my Globe & Mail interview using Vancouver social media channels:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/work/rsum-as-profile-how-to-social-network-your-way-to-a-new-job/article1690612/

Another tip about leveraging social media is to find Twitter handles for marketing, communications and creative work in your location, as well as following their Twitter handles for even more resources. That way you can learn about opportunities before your competition. Here are 10 Twitter examples for marketing, communications and creative work in Vancouver:

@FreshGigsca? FreshGigs.ca is Canada’s #1 Jobsite for Pre-Screened Marketing & Creative Professionals.

@smartsavvy? We find high calibre marketing, sales, communications, and creative professionals with proven track records and in-demand skills for companies who need them.

@BestJobsInVan? Follow me for the best communications, design, marketing, PR jobs and internships in Vancouver!

@Jobsprout? Where smart people meet smart careers (includes marketing, sales and social media).

@smeivancouver ?A chapter of Sales & Marketing Executives International, the worldwide professional association for sales & marketing.

@bcama? Official twitter account for BC Chapter of American Marketing Association. We provide the BC marketing community with valuable programming and events.

@AllianceArts?We represent over 350 member organizations from across the artistic disciplines in BC.

@vancvr ?Open directory for Vancouver creatives of all types. Designers, web developers, writers, photographers, videographers and everyone in between.

@604freelancers? Vancouver Freelance Camp is a place to discuss and explore the different approaches to running a successful freelance business / service company.

@Lizajlee And of course, you can follow me and check out who I’m following, which includes the above Twitter handles and more at www.Twitter.com/Lizajlee.

To learn more about Vancouver social media tips to get leads, get our Free Sales Leads Secret report.

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Since hosting the first networking event for The Art Party Facebook Group, friends have suggested that I become a “political leader” for The Art Party. I think it’s partly that The Art Party name reminds them of political party names, such as The Green Party and The Work Less Party. It was not my intention to become a voice for the arts, but I can say that I know many people in the arts have been demoralized from the severe funding cuts in the last few years. This has unfortunately resulted in some long-time arts organizations closing their doors. Vancouver was already known as the “No Fun Zone” due to strict bylaws and the funding cuts to the arts has made it even less fun.

Don’t politicians realize that a vibrant community is dependent on supporting the arts in Vancouver?

Social Networking in the Arts for Community Engagement

Equally disturbing is the recent findings published from the Vancouver Foundation: people from all walks of life see growing isolation in Metro Vancouver, within neighbours, neighbourhoods and communities. The result of a growing civic malaise and indifference to one another is less engagement in the life of our community. That beyond a handful of family and friends, the survey reveals that many Vancouverites feel a lack of connection to other people that make up our community. Here’s a link to the findings: www.vancouverfoundationstories.ca/story.php?recordID=327.

Just a thought. If more funding became available for the arts, would this help solve the growing isolation problem in Metro Vancouver?

As a social media experiment, we invited The Art Party Facebook Group Members to a live networking event at the Waldorf: http://www.facebook.com/events/326828254044348/ where we had nearly 100 yes. I received over 20 compliments from emails and Facebook comments about how much the guests loved The Art Party networking event at The Waldorf and wanting to attend future events. We  attracted over 50 attendees for our first event, even with the Canucks versus Kings hockey game on that night. However, a few guests were still able to keep up with the game on the giant Tiki-tron in the Tiki Room. I also heard repeatedly from attendees they believed The Art Party networking events will get even better over time. And the Waldorf staff welcomed The Art Party back for more events. Therefore, we’re planning the next Facebook Vancouver social networking event this summer. Stay tuned…

Meanwhile, here are a few of the reasons why Facebook can help you successfully promote your events too.

Social Networking and its Evolution  

Social networking leads to face-to-face networking as humans are by nature social creatures. I recently met well-known speaker Leonard Brody, Co-CEO of Now Public on the future state of the internet at his leadership talk at the Vancouver Hotel. He said the next evolution on social media is the need for “smaller spaces for social engagement”. I revealed to him that we created The Art Party Facebook Group to funnel our Facebook Friends who support the arts in Vancouver into a “smaller space” for social networking. And shortly after that meeting, I planned our first networking event for The Art Party.

In addition to the feedback from the first networking event, I also received a few positive emails about my new Timeline design on  www.facebook.com/lizajleevancouver. It’s a really nice and clean design that meets the strict rules about Facebook Fan pages, while making the most of branding. I will soon have a free report about Facebook timeline branding and how to leverage it for other online assets. Then, I can create an opt-in page for my Facebook Vancouver Page after visitors click on Like. This will help me grow my email subscribers. Finally, I will test out Facebook Ads to my friends and friends of friends on Facebook.

My latest interest in Facebook ads is the result of meeting Alfredo Tan, Head of Facebook Marketing Canada at an SMEI event for sales and marketing professionals at the Pan Pacific Hotel. Here’s what he had to say: ”Facebook Ads allows you to advertise to the right people based on their real interests.”

I also discovered you can even target people who are friends with people who already “Like” your Page. This social context will show up around the ad, as a type of “endorsement”. A study from Nielsen shows that on average, people are 68% more likely to remember seeing an ad with social context (endorsement) than without, twice as likely to remember the ad’s message and four times as likely to purchase. For now, read on below on how you can plan and promote your own Facebook event with a few friends.

How to Plan Your Own Facebook Social Networking Event

You can plan your own social networking events by talking to a few of your trusted Facebook Friends to create a joint event. You would all agree to invite friends to the event and share in the work and costs. Then talk to a venue that can provide the space for free, as they can make money from the food and beverages.

To learn more Facebook Vancouver networking for leads, opt-in to your upper right.

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Although Vancouver is not as large as Toronto, there are still some award-winning agencies representing some of the top brands in Canada. I have worked at a few of the top agencies for internet marketing contracts such as Blast Radius, Open Road Communications and JWT, as well as with agencies on the client side such as RETHINK, Graphically Speaking, Habaneros and JWT.

Although JWT is one of the largest ad agencies in North America, it only has a small regional office in Vancouver for a few clients with locations in Vancouver as Toronto is the main office for Canada. JWT and Blast Radius are part of the WPP conglomerate. JWT in Vancouver shares an office with another WPP owned agency, Hill & Knowlton for PR. WPP is the world’s largest communications services group, employing 158,000 people, working in 2,500 offices in 107 countries. WPP is Wire and Plastic Products plc founded in 1971 as a manufacturer of wire shopping baskets.

Volunteer in Your Industry for Networking Events for Contract Leads 

Many of the top agencies, recruiters and media companies also support NABS (National Advertising Benevolent Society). When I was working on contract at JWT, I discovered NABS. Today, I volunteer for NABS West by promoting its fundraising events through Twitter and Facebook. Volunteering for an industry organization is a good source for potential sales leads.

Top Vancouver Digital Agencies and Ad Agencies:

To learn more about volunteering for leads, get our Free Sales Leads Secret report.

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Did you know MailChimp is free if you have under 2000 contacts? That means you can enter contacts you have met at networking events and invite them to your own Vancouver events to try it out. Here’s the email message I sent out to over 900 contacts and MailChimp tracks the open rate. In this case, it was 40%, well over the industry standard for internet marketing, which tells me the initial email deployment was successful. The main reason is the headline as it is personally invites the reader to an event.

You’re Invited to Our First Networking Event 

You’re invited to our first networking event for The Art Party on Wednesday, April 18, 2012 (8pm to 10pm) at the historic Tiki Room, Waldorf Hotel. Recently renovated, the room features Edgar “the father of black velvet” Leeteg paintings, palm trees and a delightful flickering “twilight sky” for a Polynesian evening atmosphere.

What is The Art Party Facebook Group?

I co-founded The Art Party Facebook Group in 2010 and it has grown to over 750 members. The Facebook Group The Art Party allows us to funnel our Facebook Friends into a “smaller space” for social networking and promotions as Members who support the arts in Vancouver.

The next few years of social networking will be about increased interaction and engagement with prospects and customers, including promotions and face-to-face networking. Relationships are at the centre of social networking and networking events.

The Art Party Networking Event at the Waldorf

Date:  Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Time:  8pm to 10pm (Free cover)
Space:  Gorgeous Tiki Room, with night skies and palm trees
Costs:  Most appetizers are $7 each and drink specials are $4 each
Location: 1489 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC
Buses:  #135 SFU or the #20 Victoria bus
Driving:  Plenty of parking behind the Waldorf Hotel

Space is limited to 100 guests at the Tiki Room! First come, first serve.

RSVP@TheArtParty.org by April 15, 2012 if you’re going so we can let the hotel know.

Or you can also click on “going” on our Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/events/326828254044348/

We hope to see you networking at The Art Party on April 18!

With warmest regards,

Liza Lee

Here’s the screenshot of the Vancouver email marketing example so you can see that the open rate is 39%:

To learn more about online marketing and email marketing, get our Free Sales Leads Secret report.

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One of the key areas to review immediately is whether or not you have an established referral system. It’s also important to have more than one referral partner to keep your business stable with multiple sources of opportunities. If you don’t have referral partners yet, then networking can help you connect to those individuals. It takes time to develop referral partners, but it is part of your lead generation system. Therefore, I reviewed “Sue Clement’s Success Formula for How to Get More Referrals”. Sue lives in Vancouver, BC and has been a marketing referral coach. Here is a summary of her advice below.

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Remove your prospects barriers to switching services by offering a free one-hour consultation on the phone. This can lead to increasing your chances to acquiring a new client. This helps your prospect sample your service and develops the “know-like-trust” factor in the sales process. However, free service offers are not just for solo consultants, and can work with businesses with employees as part of their lead generation program. This is particularly effective to “steal” market share from your competitors – by enabling your prospects to “try out” your services without costs. And this also removes their risks to switching from their existing vendors to your services. A great example of this is how Telus and Shaw provide one month of free service to switch as an incentive.

Free Audits are Highly Effective for Businesses with Recurring Services

One example I have is IT companies with managed services. The IT firm offered a free technology audit and report for identifying systems risk for viruses, downtime, spam, spyware, pop-ups. I was asked to improve the copywriting. I included a clearly stated value to ensure their offer would be taken seriously: “Try Out a Free IT Security Audit – Value $1,000”. An IT company can afford to offer a $1000 free audit as their business model is based on recurring monthly service fees. Also the offer had a time-limited end date to create urgency for the prospect to take action.

You can use traditional cold-calling to a targeted prospect list to promote your free offer. Or use the latest social media to promote your free audits on your Facebook welcome page as a banner ad. By emailing your contacts or asking your Facebook friends to Like your Facebook Page, this will help grow your Facebook fans too.

I also recommended the owner of the IT company to include terms and conditions to weed out non-prospects with the following: “For businesses with 25 to 100 employees in Metro Vancouver”. By adding the pre-qualifying statement in their free audit offer, this reduced his client acquisition cost significantly. But that’s not all…

Vancouver Promotions Example of a Continuous Referral System 

You’re probably curious about the headline “Turn Silver into Gold with a Sales Leads System”. I suggested the free audit offers be professionally designed and printed as “expensive-looking” certificates, signed by the President and numbered. These printed certificates were handed out to targeted prospects at networking events and to referral partners. The numbering ensured accurate tracking and commission payouts to referral partners. The owner was thrilled to implement this lead generation advice. Recently, I discovered his business has tripled in size in two years!

This system of promoting free audits through referrals can work for many different  service industries: from marketing, bookkeeping, building maintenance, financial planning, marketing to onsite corporate massage days – for any business with recurring service fees. First, you need to remove the risk of switching services for your prospects with a free audit so they can sample your service. Then increase your prospecting reach by leveraging an affiliate system for ongoing referrals. To learn more about social networking to find referral partners, opt-in below to get access now.

To learn more about Vancouver promotions for prospects, get our Free Sales Leads Secret report.

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