Dayna Rothman

The world of marketing, sales, and lead generation has plenty of jargon, so here's a glossary of terms to help you know what's what. Also, here is a round-up of eight incredibly useful free apps that help you with everything from evaluating your website for broken links and good search engine optimization (SEO) to determining how engaging your marketing emails are.

Email marketing helps create personalized relationships with buyers over time. Without a focus on a middle-of-the-funnel strategy, many of your leads dry up and never become customers. Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with leads already in your database. Send emails to your leads when you are launching a new product or service, promoting a new content asset, attending an event, and so on.

There is a lot of noise out there in today’s consumer's inbox. Your good reputation as a sender is critical to your e-mails actually making it into the inbox. The content of your e-mails is important too, of course, but marketers need to start paying attention to how their e-mails are being delivered as well. Here are some steps to take to ensure that your e-mails are being delivered to your recipients and not landing in a spam folder: Become a trusted sender: When your subscribers opt-in to receive your communications, make sure that you are clear about what he should expect.

Your sales team is a key part of your lead-generation strategy. The sales reps are the first human touch that your leads will have with your company, so make sure that your reps understand your messaging and know what content is available to help their sales efforts. Here are some best practices to consider when enabling your sales teams: Provide product and messaging training: As a marketer, you are constantly being tasked to create messaging around the company and any new product or service launches.

Due to the fast-moving technology landscape, best practices for marketing and lead generation change constantly. Keeping up with top lead-generation blogs is a great way to stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest new tips, strategies, and channels to try. Here are ten of the best. Ann Handley Created by Ann Handley, Marketing Prof’s chief content officer, Ann’s blog focuses on content, social media, and lead generation.

Using social media for lead generation is an absolute must, but the problem is that many marketers have no idea how to track a return on investment (ROI) of their efforts. How should you think about tracking ROI and what should you track? Check out this list of social media metrics to help you get started: Number of followers or friends: A good indicator of how your social channels are performing is your number of followers or friends.

Many applications and websites are available to test your lead generation techniques and strategies. From determining how to test a landing page, to seeing how your emails look on various devices, to seeing how well your website is optimized for keywords, free tools can help you do lots of things. Take a look at this list to learn about eight useful and free lead-generation applications: Marketo's Landing Page Split Calculator: Determine how many versions of a landing page you should create for your A/B test and how long the test should take to execute.

A critical part of developing a lead generation strategy that rocks is creating content to fuel your sales campaigns. But creating a content piece can be hard. Using an ebook as an example, here are the steps you need to take from idea to publication: Formulate your idea. What are you going to write about? Consider mapping your content to business priorities and industry hot topics, or simply ask your sales or customer service team what customers and prospects are talking about.

When you're getting started with lead generation, you should familiarize yourself with a variety of basic terms. Here is a glossary of some basic lead generation and sales terms and definitions for your reference: Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU): Prospects that are at the bottom of the sales funnel and nearing a purchase.