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.

A buyer persona is a representation of your various buyers and influencers. Basically, who is buying your product or service? Understanding these buyer definitions is critical not only to your content creation, but to your lead generation efforts as a whole. A persona uses data to help everyone that is creating content to focus on a tangible representation of a buyer, versus a nebulous, formless one.

Visual design is an important component to creating an email that converts. What is good visual design? You want to not only include compelling images, but also make sure that your email is formatted properly. When an email comes into an inbox, a subscriber has to turn on the images so that they come through. The good news is that 55 percent of consumers surveyed by The Relevancy Group say that they turn on images in the emails they receive.

If you have a social strategy for lead generation (which you absolutely should), you need a social media tracking tool so you can measure and analyze your social interactions. Social media tracking tools enable you to listen and respond to customer and prospect interactions on all of your social channels. Through deep analytics and reporting, social media tracking tools can help you engage with your audience and provide them with relevant content based on their actions.

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.