Many marketing pros tell us they are constantly struggling to keep their ships afloat while staying ahead of sales cycles. Perhaps you know you have great reps in your ranks, but you question whether your existing marketing strategy is maximizing your team’s sales funnel and allowing them to focus on converting, not fruitless searching for qualified leads. If you also fight to get the top brass of your organization on board with an integrated marketing system the whole company can get behind, perhaps it’s time to up your game and initiate a DEFCON 1-style marketing strategy.
By implementing the following 5 steps, you and your team can energize your inbound marketing methodology where it counts: on the front lines. These techniques will help you initiate an effective inbound marketing campaign and measure its success with precision so that you can get maximum results now while building great potential for increased long-term success.
How to Get Your Whole Organization on Board with a No-nonsense, Closed-Loop Inbound Marketing Strategy
That will build your brand without breaking your marketing bank.
1. Close the Loop
Job one is closing the loop between Marketing and Sales. Your sales reps must report back with real insights about the leads they get so you can determine which sources are the most reliable (and remunerative). When initiating your DEFCON-1 level inbound marketing campaign, closing this loop involves tracking leads with precision as they pass through the stages of your sales and marketing process. With top-notchmarketing analytics tools like those offered in HubSpot’s software, it’s easy to pick through complicated data, identify trends, analyze relative strengths among your many channels, and optimize those channels whose strengths are lacking. This way, you can divert your special forces to other tasks while your sales and marketing channels feed themselves with solid lead information and accurate feedback on closing rates.
2. Pool Your Resources
Did you know that 60% of respondents in a recent Price Waterhouse Cooper survey indicated that they regularly use social media platforms to discover and interact with brands and retailers? Is your message reaching its target audience across all your many channels, including social media? A victorious campaign is a concentrated effort that filters a single message or goal through your various marketing channels, maximizing the return on your marketing investment while giving your target market a clear idea of what’s on offer and how to grab it.
3. Circle the Wagons
Maybe you have a decent marketing budget but find your mission gets waylaid by excessive focus on the corporate level or reps who “go rogue” with diverse marketing techniques. It’s not surprising that focus on razor-specific campaigns get fuzzy and unfocused as you move up the corporate ladder within an organization. Yet a killer inbound marketing campaign that is well-executed by a trusted team of pros is enough to get everybody on board. Once you get everyone working toward a single goal, you will see increasing return on your inbound marketing investment.
4. Up Your Game
Maybe you think social media has no relevance for your particular market. The truth is, quality leads are quality leads – whether they come from personal relationships, referrals, or data captured by users interacting with your brand online. You need to sharpen your tools and get specific with the way you target emails, social media, and blog posts.
It takes courage to change your battlefield strategy, but once you start believing that fewer leads can actually generate more revenue you will stop wasting valuable resources and start increasing productivity for your sales team. Closed-loop marketing analytics removes the guesswork from the process of filtering through a huge wall of complicated data to reveal the valuable marketing qualified leads beneath.
5. Man Your Battlestations
The final step in the process of implementing a winning inbound marketing strategy is looking at the cold, hard facts. A huge part of analyzing the effectiveness of your current campaign while preparing to design even more successful ones in the future is dissecting campaign data and using what you find to make educated guesses about how to proceed. Analyzing specific metrics such as conversion rates, engagement by channel, and number of new leads will help you improve on your marketing strategy in the future while finding greater success in the short term.
CONCLUSION
According to a report from Industry Canada, Canadian consumers nearly doubled spending on Internet purchases of goods and services between 2005 and 2010. It is impossible for any company to thrive in the new cyber economy without inbound marketing expertise. A winning inbound marketing campaign means operating on multiple fronts under the leadership of a marketing manager with killer instincts and the most sophisticated weaponry available. By implementing the 5 steps of this DEFCON-1 inbound marketing campaign strategy, you and your team will see the greatest potential for powerful results and real revenue.
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