Six Marketing Metrics to Impress Your Boss

lead generation strategy

 

Let’s face it, we’re all accountable to our bosses. As a marketing professional, you want to look good in the eyes of your boss, right? Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to figure out what the boss expects or how to build credibility. Fortunately, the following six marketing metrics can help you crack that code as well as provide you with the insights you need to do an even better job.

  • Customer Acquisition Costs – How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? This number is important! In order to determine customer acquisition costs, add up all sales and marketing costs for a given time period (month, quarter, or year) including advertising, overhead, salaries, bonuses, and commissions. Now, determine how many customers were acquired during that same time period. Divide your costs by the number of customers to come up with your customer acquisition cost.
  • The Marketing Percentage of Customer Acquisition Costs – How much of your marketing budget goes toward customer acquisition costs? Deduct sales from the equation and express marketing’s portion as a percentage. Once you have a baseline, you can watch the percentage for signals. For example, if your percentage increases or decreases dramatically, you may want to investigate.
  • Length of Time Required to Recoup Customer Acquisition Costs – In other words, how long until your newly acquired customer becomes profitable? For example, if it costs you $100 to acquire a new customer to a fitness center and the customer signs up for a $20 per month plan, it will take at least five full months before you recoup your costs. From that point forward, the customer will become profitable.
  • Customer Lifetime ValueHow much is each customer worth over time? For example, if the typical fitness center customer stays for an average of five years and spends $1,000 per year, the customer lifetime value would be $5,000 less acquisition costs. However, some customers will cancel which affects the entire customer pool’s CLV. To account for this, divide your initial figure by your customer churn rate. You can take this even further, and impress your boss even more, by calculating the ratio between customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs. If you have a high customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio, this means that you have a higher return on your sales and marketing investments.
  • Number of Customers Directly Acquired by Marketing – This metric and the next one can be used to show your boss how many customers the marketing department was responsible for acquiring or nurturing. While you may have a friendly, or not-so-friendly, rivalry with the sales department, marketing is often undervalued. By showing your boss exactly how many customers your team has brought in, your department may get more respect. If this metric increases, it means that marketing is driving more sales or that the sales team has become less effective at prospecting.
  • Number of Customers Nurtured by Marketing – This metric shows the number of customers that your department helped at any point in the process. For example, the sales team may have been responsible for originating a lead; however, if that lead requests additional information by signing up for an autoresponder series, the marketing department becomes involved and helps nurture that lead from that point forward. Again, your department should be recognized for its contributions. If this metric increases, it means that marketing is influencing more leads.

Your boss may not know exactly what he or she expects as far as key marketing performance metrics go. By presenting these six marketing metrics, you can give your boss significant insights into your team’s productivity.

Lead Generation: Tips for Staying on Target

lead generation strategyEach year Beloit College publishes its annual College Mindset List detailing the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of incoming freshmen. It’s an eye-opener that reveals profound differences in the lives of the latest generation. For example, the class of 2016 has never needed an actual airline “ticket” and they prefer to watch television on anything but an actual TV set. To them, the Sistine Chapel has always been clean and bright.

What a difference a few years makes. While the College Mindset List is an interesting read, it provides professors with cultural context. It also has implications as far as lead generation goes. While you may not be targeting college students, all markets change, making it important to revisit your “ideal customer profile” frequently and modify it as needed.

Identifying your ideal customer is crucial. This allows you to target your marketing materials to the right people and ensure that your messages resonate with them. It also helps you understand and take advantage of opportunities. Here’s how to identify your ideal customer:

  • Create a list of five to ten of your best customers. Write down the qualities that make them your best customers. For example, do they have large budgets, are they profitable, do they send lots of referrals your way, or are they a joy to do business with?
  • Do the same for your five to ten worst customers. Write down the qualities that make them undesirable?
  • Analyze each group to see what qualities they have in common. In some cases, you may find that a single “persona” describes each group as a whole. Several personas may appear.
  • Classify the various customers by SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes detailing industry type, number of employees, annual revenue, and so on.
  • Identify why these customers chose to do business with your company. For example, was there a change that prompted them to switch providers? New regulations that required an investment in products like yours?
  • After looking at what each customer has in common within both groups, you should see distinct differences between your best and worst customers. Focusing on acquiring new customers with the same qualities as your best customers is a sure-fire way to attract more of the same and fewer of those with less desirable qualities.

Creating ideal customer profiles is an important initial step in any marketing endeavor, but marketers often fail to revisit their profiles and adjust as needed. Imagine marketing to this year’s crop of incoming college freshmen using the same messages you just used a few years ago. Not only could your products and services be irrelevant, the media that you use to deliver those messages could be completely wrong. Just a few years ago, social media was in its infancy. Today it’s the go-to destination for reaching many markets. Tomorrow may be a completely different story.

Not only must you continually revisit and refine your ideal customer, marketing messages, and marketing channels, it’s important to look for signs that your target market has shifted. For example, are your customers extremely loyal? As they age and their lifestyles change, they may still be attracted to your brand. However, the same ads that appealed to them as 20-somethings won’t be quite as appealing when they’re in their 30s and 40s. It’s important to recognize changes related to loyalty so that you can continue giving your most loyal customers a reason to return while attracting more of the same at the same time.

Lead generation is an ongoing process that requires your constant attention. Markets can change in as little as a few months, making it crucial that your campaigns reflect those changes.

Using Big Data to Enhance Internet Marketing Campaigns

Marketing strategy based on actionable intelligence from big dataBig data is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. Today’s business intelligence tools make mining massive databases for information a fairly simple process for end-users. In fact, business intelligence can be integrated into lead generation forms and used to standardize and clean the data – all in the blink of an eye. It gets even better. The leads can be segmented based on data and performance measured, monitored, and analyzed. As a big data-based Internet marketing campaign continues, it becomes possible to score leads based on quality and conversions. Thus, future leads can be prioritized or ignored based on reliable, performance-based metrics.

Using big data in Internet marketing campaigns begins at the lead capture point of the process. With traditional online lead generation strategies, marketers require leads to fill out a form and provide specific information in order to receive a free report, white paper, eBook, or other incentive. While most Internet users are accustomed to filling out basic forms with their names and email addresses, they balk at longer, more intrusive forms.

If you’re targeting business leads, you may want detailed data from each prospect such as the prospect’s job role (and, thus, the likelihood of being a decision maker), the size of the firm, number of employees, annual revenues, and other information. This information is helpful in determining if the firm is a good fit for your product or service. Using detailed information allows you to segment leads based on the company’s size, the prospect’s job role, the type of information requested, and so on.

However, a CEO searching for information contained in your white paper, online video series, newsletter, or other downloadable product may feel the effort isn’t worth the informational incentive. By integrating big data at the lead capture point, you can tap into external databases that match user supplied information with larger databases containing additional details.

For example, your lead capture form might require the individual’s name and job role as well as the company’s name. Technology exists that can cross-reference the company’s name to business databases that contain the firmographic data you require. Your prospects no longer need to fill out long forms, and you receive valuable data that you can use to segment and prioritize leads based on company data retrieved from external databases.

These big data technologies can also deliver standardized data as well as verify contact information. For example, individuals may be inclined to enter fake phone numbers in an attempt to avoid phone calls. Others may inadvertently transpose numbers in an address. Database service providers use technologies that can detect and correct errors like these using a process known as data “hygiene.”

Scoring leads is another benefit of using big data and business intelligence in your marketing campaigns. For example, analytical tools and reports can reveal which types and categories of leads actually convert. Depending on how far you want to take it, you can also include cost per lead, revenue per lead, and other metrics and compare results by segment. Using business intelligence, analytics, and input from your sales team allows you to rank leads based on quality. You can scorecards to identify the hottest leads for your sales team as well as discard leads that are likely to lead to nowhere or cost too much to pursue based on historical information.

By tapping into big data at the point of lead generation online, you can get the information you need without overly imposing on your prospects. Business intelligence tools allow you to clean, standardize, segment, and prioritize leads based on scorecards.

Content Marketing – Overcoming Common Challenges

Planning content marketing strategyAt first glance, content marketing sound easy, doesn’t it? After all, how hard is it to write a quick blog post and paste a link to it on Facebook or Twitter? Anyone who has dabbled in content marketing knows the truth: content marketing is challenging.

Some of the more common content marketing challenges can be broken down into just a handful of categories:

  • Generating relevant content
  • Timing content delivery to reach leads at the appropriate time in the buying process
  • Segmenting leads
  • Lack of resources

Generating and Creating Relevant Content
Content marketing requires a clear strategy and an understanding of what your leads are interested in. One of the first steps in any content marketing strategy is to identify several “personas.” This helps you to visualize the people you are targeting and get a deeper understanding of their own challenges, problems, desires, and interests.

Once you know who your personas are and their interests, the key is to focus on publishing optimized inbound resources that both capture their attention and provide useful, relevant information. While you may be full of great ideas for blog posts and targeted web content development, the next challenge involves getting it done. This is where it may make sense to bring in external writers or marketing consultants to create targeted content. Otherwise, other priorities may distract you from creating a continuous stream of relevant content or even finding worthwhile information to share via social networks.

Content Timing / Delivery
What if you have plenty of content available or a few in-house writers who can quickly generate content as needed? The next challenge involves delivering the right content to the right person at the right point in the buying cycle. For example, someone who is just beginning to research widgets may find articles about the benefits of widgets relevant and compelling. Meanwhile, someone further in the buying process already knows about the benefits and may be more interested in learning about the differences between solar-powered widgets, hybrid widgets, and battery-operated widgets. It’s helpful to map out the buying cycle of your products and services and create content that aligns with each major stage.

Creating Content for Segmented Markets
Prospects, leads, and existing customers will be in various stages of the sales funnel, making it important to segment communications based on where they are in the buying process. Not only that, they will be interested in different products and services or match different personas. In order to send the most relevant content possible, it’s vital to segment your prospects, leads, and existing customers as much as possible. For example, your “soccer moms” will have different interests, needs, and communications preferences than CEOs.

Once segmented, you’re back to the content creation and timing challenges mentioned earlier. However, once segmented, it becomes easier to create high quality, relevant content that guides prospects toward a buying decision.

Limited Resources
Finally, one of the biggest challenges of content marketing is this: getting it done with limited resources. For smaller companies, the sales and marketing team may already be stretched thin with little time or money to spare. While you may see the value of launching a content marketing campaign, having limited resources is a legitimate concern that could derail even the best of plans. It’s not uncommon for marketing personnel to find themselves supporting customers more often than expected, especially when marketing is responsible for interacting with customers on social media sites. To overcome this challenge, it’s smart to segment social media responsibilities as well. Train several customer service representatives in the art of providing customer service via social networks and allow your marketing team to focus on strategy and content development.

Lead generation and content marketing are important endeavors. It may be advantageous to work with marketing consultants to ensure that your inbound marketing efforts pay off.

Content Marketing – Maximize Your Content by Repurposing It

Content marketing efficiency requires repurposing contentAs you likely know, creating marketing content is both time-consuming and costly. However, your marketing content doesn’t need to be a one-shot deal, and you do not need to create a new piece of content every single time you want to send out engaging material. Consider repurposing your marketing materials for different marketing segments or uses. Use these strategies to get the most out of your existing content marketing materials.

Turn an Article into a Podcast
If you regularly write and submit articles to article marketing sites, consider creating a podcast version of your articles. Using podcast software is relatively simple, and it allows you to reach an audience that might not visit article marketing websites. You can even post your podcasts on iTunes.

Record Your Speaking Engagements
Whether you’ve been asked to give the commencement address at an Ivy League college or will be speaking briefly at your local chamber of commerce mixer, make sure to record it in both video and audio. From there, you can post online video segments of the speech on YouTube or on your website as well as use it as part of an email campaign. The audio only version could be converted into a podcast just as you would do with an article.

If you typed your speech, consider reformatting it. Depending on the length of the speech and subject matter, you might be able to create a single article, a series of articles, or even a longer piece such as a white paper. If you didn’t type it, have it transcribed and the repurpose it as needed. In fact, it’s often useful to include a transcribed version with your online video.

Repurpose PowerPoint Presentations and Webinars
You’ve spent days preparing a PowerPoint presentation about your products and services, and it was a huge success. Why not reuse it? Post it on SlideShare or use the speaker notes as the basis for a series of blog posts or articles. A single slide could be an interesting email message or Facebook status update.

Webinars often incorporate PowerPoint presentations, but they can serve another purpose. Use the questions and answers section to create a FAQs page for your website.

Reuse Client Testimonials
Whether your client testimonials are video-based or text-based, the words of your clients are powerful. While you may have originally used the client testimonials on your website, you can also use them in case studies, white papers, and brochures. If you have client testimonial videos, you can either transcribe the text for use in your new content marketing materials or you could use a QR code to add an interactive element into printed pieces (thus driving offline prospects to your website).

Reuse White Papers and Case Studies
White papers and case studies aren’t cheap to produce, yet they often contain sections that can be used elsewhere. For example, white papers often outline a problem before moving into the details of your solution. Can you convert that section into a blog post or article? It might need a little tweaking to get the tone right, but the bulk of the work has already been done. Similarly, you could reuse the section about your solution in other marketing materials including in case studies, brochures, and newsletters.

Statistics found within your white papers and case studies can also be converted into “Fact Sheets” or used in blogs and articles.

Share Media Coverage
Was the CEO of the company recently featured in the newspaper, magazine, or television show? Sharing links to media coverage is a great way to share your expertise and build credibility with leads. The same is true of bylined articles that key people in your organization have written and published in trade journals. These communications can also serve as a less aggressive way to touch base with leads.

These are but a few of the many ways to repurpose marketing materials. How will you repurpose yours?

Webinar Content Marketing Tips

webinar in marketing consulting office setting

 

Thinking about holding a webinar as part of your overall content marketing strategies? Webinars are a terrific tool for getting in front of a large number of interested prospects. However, there’s more involved than launching webinar software and speaking into a microphone on your computer. Use these tips when planning your first webinar.

  • Understand the webinar’s purpose – Many first-time webinar hosts make the mistake of approaching free webinars as platforms to pitch their products and services. While a short pitch near the end is generally acceptable and expected, avoid turning the entire presentation into a sales pitch. Make sure your presentation is useful, informative, and valuable to attendees. Otherwise, they’ll flee and you’ll be speaking to an empty audience.
  • Understand the audience – Who do you want to attend the webinar? What are their needs and problems? How can you help them? For example, if you know that you want to reach technically challenged CEOs, this understanding will drive everything from the title of the webinar and its content to how you advertise it – and more. Using personas is one way to understand and attract prospects.
  • Promote your webinar – Once you understand who you want to reach and what your webinar will cover, it’s vital to spread the word. Use email campaigns, blogs, social media, your website, and your sales team to spread the word.
  • Make every slide count – Whether you’ve carefully scripted the webinar from scratch or are repurposing material from an earlier presentation you’ve held, realize that your audience is paying to participate with their time and/or money. Unlike a live presentation where it would be rude to get up and walk out in the middle of a presentation, Webinar participants can exit the webinar with a click of the mouse button.
  • Encourage interactions – Webinar software often includes chat channels where participants can interact with one another as well as ask questions of you. This is a great way to build camaraderie and maintain momentum. It can also alert you to areas of confusion or interest. If the software doesn’t include such a feature, use Twitter with a hashtag. In fact, using Twitter could expand your reach and arouse curiosity among your participants’ followers.
  • Consider creating a second tier for interested prospects – Your initial webinar should go light on the selling. However, some prospects will be genuinely interested in learning more about your solution. Consider holding a second seminar, or series of seminars, for these prospects. These will likely attract a smaller audience. However, the audience will consist of quality leads who want to learn more about your offer.
  • Don’t do it alone – While technology makes it possible to host a webinar virtually anywhere, make sure you have a support team to handle technical issues, troubleshoot log-in problems, monitor conversations via the chat channel or Twitter hashtag, answer questions, and so on. This way, the entire webinar won’t be interrupted just because one user can’t hear your voice.
  • Archive your webinar – Though your webinar may have initially been a live event, it still has value long after its conclusion. Make sure to post an archived version of all of your webinars on your website or on social sharing sites such as YouTube for future prospects.
  • Repurpose webinar content – In addition to posting a video of your webinar on your website and YouTube, think about how else you might reuse the material discussed. Ideas include creating an eBook or special report based on the material, a series of blog posts, and podcasts. You can also use the questions and answers session for inspiration for future blog posts, articles, reports, and webinars.

When approached correctly, webinars are a fantastic form of content marketing. A single webinar can get you in front of a large audience both during the event and long after.

Content Marketing: Measuring Results

Measuring tape to evaluate content marketing resultsLike other forms of marketing, it’s important to understand how your content marketing efforts are working and where improvements can be made. This means you must actively measure results. Measuring results is an involved process with numerous considerations. Here’s what you need to know.

Set and Understand Goals for Your Content Marketing Campaigns
Each piece of content you create, whether it’s a detailed white paper or a series of social media posts, should have a goal. Not only do goals give your content creators purpose and direction, they give you something to measure. For example, if the goal is to drive sales, you can measure the results of the content marketing campaign by looking at metrics related to sales such as number of leads and conversion rates.

Aligning Performance Metrics to Job Roles
For many marketers, it’s tempting to measure results across the entire campaign. While you certainly need to understand how well your content marketing campaign is working overall, it’s also helpful to understand it from various perspectives including at the content creator, manager, and executive levels.

For example, content creators need metrics that provide them with relevant feedback so that they understand which types of content are working and which ones are not. Metrics such as page views, bounce rates, social media shares, keywords, and visitor demographics help content creators identify popular content and content that should be tweaked or avoided in the future. While managers are interested in popularity, they tend to be more interested in metrics that reveal conversation rates, lead quality, and cost per lead. Executives need an even higher level view focused on customer lifetime value and the bottom line. They don’t care how many eyeballs viewed a blog post; they want to know if the blog’s return on investment makes sense.

Using Analytics Tools
Whether you invest in a content marketing solution that includes detailed analytics and tracking tools or use a free service such as Google Analytics, it’s important to regularly evaluate your content’s performance with analytics and tracking tools. Analytics can tell you where traffic is coming from, which content is most popular, what keywords people use to find your site, and more – but only if you’re willing to look.

Identifying and Leveraging What Works
Content marketing is a huge field with numerous opportunities. While it may be tempting to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it’s smarter to find out what’s working and do more of that. At the same time, do less of what’s not working. For example, if your blog has a high conversion rate and generates a high return on investment, it makes sense to do more blogging. Similarly, if your article marketing efforts generate traffic but few sales, you may want to do less of that or reevaluate your strategy.

Understanding What Type of Content Appeals to Customers – and When
Customers have different needs depending on where they are in the sales cycle. For example, customers who are just beginning to think about buying a new product or service will need different content than those who are close to making a buying decision. For example, a customer thinking about buying a new kitchen appliance may want to learn about the latest technologies, energy efficiency, and whether rebates are available while a customer who’s ready to buy will be more interested in product-specific content.

Likewise, customers who have made a purchase will need different content such as instruction manuals, tutorials, and tips for getting the most out of their purchase. Content marketing is not necessarily over once the sale has been made. In fact, these same customers can act as champions for your brand by interacting on your blog’s comment pages, posting product reviews, or sharing their experiences on Facebook.

By setting goals, aligning performance with job roles, and using analytics tools, you can identify what’s working and what’s not.

Content Marketing – Converting Website Visitors to Leads

Website optimization or SEO drives slae sleads to your WebsiteYou have a website and plenty of visitors arrive; however, few of those website visitors convert. Successful websites use content to attract the right visitors and prompt them to convert. If you’re looking for higher conversions and higher quality leads, it pays to create and optimize content. For example, did you know that content creators are nearly 30 percent more successful at converting organic website traffic into leads than non-content creators?

The Importance of Engaging and Nurturing Prospects
What does creating content mean? It means that creating a website with basic pages about your company and its offer isn’t enough. You need to regularly create relevant, optimized, and engaging content in order to attract high quality prospects and convert them.

Engaging prospects is a must if you want to pique their interest, educate and inform, and earn their trust. If you do this well, you are positioning your solution for success. Publishing engaging content is the first step, but again, it’s not a matter of publishing it and forgetting about it. You’ll need to move from engaging to nurturing your leads. This means segmenting leads and providing them with targeted content in a convenient, accessible manner.

For example, if you publish a whitepaper on a topic your prospect is interested in and require an email opt-in as part of the whitepaper download process, you can then send relevant, engaging content through a series of email messages that build on topics and needs explored in the whitepaper. These messages would be specific to those who have downloaded the whitepaper. If the whitepaper is about online data backup systems, then your email series would need to be relevant to online data backup systems and not about portable hard disk drives or tape backup systems.

Content Marketing Options
The options available for engaging prospects with content are numerous and include everything from blog posts, online videos, whitepapers, newsletters, email marketing, and webinars to social media, podcasting, and more. Whether you pick one channel or several, it’s important to keep your content relevant and informative.

Other content marketing tips include:

  • Maintain a steady pace. While it’s difficult to generate thousands of pieces of content at once, it’s realistic to do so one piece at a time.
  • Use analytics. From Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to bit.ly links, numerous tools are available that can quickly reveal which content resonates the most with prospects.
  • Act on analytical insights. If you’ve discovered that each time you post to Facebook, you receive a flood of high quality traffic, act on that and make sure to post regularly on Facebook. Similarly, if you’ve discovered that some types of posts convert better than others, create more posts like the successful ones and fewer like the not-so-successful ones.
  • Look at what’s popular elsewhere for inspiration. Are how-to tutorials doing well on other sites such as YouTube or Slideshare? If so, posting a how-to tutorial of your own could be a good choice.
  • Learn which keywords your prospects use to find companies like yours. Whether you intend to use paid search or not, paid search keyword tools (which are typically free) can help you gain a deeper understanding of which keywords your prospects use to find companies, products, and services like yours.
  • Take advantage of social sharing sites. Did you recently give a presentation to a small group? Leverage that presentation by posting it on your website, on YouTube, and on Slideshare – and any other social sharing sites that are appropriate – and reach a larger audience.
  • Use social media. Create a Facebook business page and use it to interact with your audience. Encourage conversations by asking engaging questions. Take a long-term approach, post engaging content, and include calls-to-action without being overly aggressive or pushy.

No matter what type of content you create and how you get it in front of your prospects, the goal is to engage, inform, and nurture.

How are you using content to convert leads? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

 

Content Marketing … Tips to Get Started

Content marketing attarcts qualified leads as part of an effective inbound marketing strategyContent marketing is a marketing process that involves communicating with customers and prospects using various forms of content such as articles, videos, white papers, blog posts, and other materials. Though it is a form of marketing, content marketing is a soft-sell. When done correctly, it attracts, engages, and educates customers and prospects all while gently guiding them to a desired action such as forming a favorable opinion of your brand or a buying decision.

Because it’s such a vast undertaking, many would-be content marketers become paralyzed by the prospect of generating massive amounts of content. Others strive for perfection, and thus, nothing is ever distributed. Put these notions out of your mind, and jump in! Below are some tips to get started.

  1. Determine what you want to accomplish with content marketing. Are you simply trying to generate traffic to your website or do you want your content marketing to engage and inform prospects? Who are you trying to reach? Before you generate any content, you absolutely need to know what you want to accomplish, who you are trying to reach, and what you want them to ultimately do.
  2. Identify how your product or service solves problems your prospects have. Once you’ve identified your goals and your audience, consider your prospects’ challenges and how your product or services solve their problems. Your content marketing plan must address their problems and needs and position your company as an authority that can help. Content marketing is not about bragging about how wonderful your product or service is; it’s about helping your prospects.
  3. Choose a platform. It’s tempting to want to do it all – blog, article marketing, newsletters, white papers, videos, email marketing, social media, and so on – but it’s also overwhelming. If you’re just starting out, it’s smart to start with one platform and then build your content marketing strategy from there.
  4. Create a content plan. Once you’ve decided on an initial platform, what type of content should you create? How often? Come up with a plan and create a content calendar. If you’ve decided to start a company blog, create a plan for the next three to six months. Create a list of categories and topics to blog about, leaving some flexibility to keep the blog posts topical. At this point, you don’t need to be overly specific. For example, if your blog is about cars, you could plan on blogging about fuel efficiency topics on Tuesdays, performance tuning on Fridays, and preventative maintenance on Saturdays.
  5. Generate content. Having a plan is one thing, executing it is another. You have several options as far as generating content goes including using existing staff, hiring an agency, using freelance writers, using a video production company, and so on. The choices you make will depend on the level of in-house talent you have (and their availability to contribute), the size of your company, the size of your budget, and other factors. Whether you do create content in-house or use an external source, make sure that one person is assigned to ensure consistency.
  6. Monitor performance and revise your content strategy as needed. Because you know what you want to accomplish (tip one), you can measure the performance of your efforts. For example, if your goal is to increase your website’s conversion rate, monitor relevant metrics to determine if your content marketing is having the desired effect. Keep an eye on which types of content are most and least effective, and revise your content plan as needed.

Finally, once your initial foray into content marketing has proven successful, consider adding a new platform to the mix.

Internet Marketing: CRM, Marketing Tactics and IT Alignment

Internet marketing and sales strategyInternet marketing continues to evolve, becoming both more viable and more complex. Customer relationship management software (CRM) has become a must due to the complexity. It plays an important role at all stages of the sales funnel. With a solid CRM system in place, your Internet sales and marketing teams can more effectively manage contacts whether they’re in the engage, convert, or nurture stage. Where the sales funnel was once the realm of the sales and marketing team, today’s Internet marketing strategies require a robust CRM solution – and IT involvement.

To add to the complexity of CRM and the Internet sales funnel in general, social media has emerged as a major channel for customer service, tech support, sales, and marketing alike. Integrating social media into your Internet marketing CRM program allows everyone to see the larger picture. For example, is a contact complaining about your service? Is she raving about your products? Has a contact expressed a need that your company can fill? By tapping into these channels, your sales, marketing, customer service, and tech support teams can respond appropriately.

Opinions vary on the best approach to CRM with some Internet marketing experts favoring a single, shared database for both marketing and sales and others preferring separate databases to ensure that leads are managed properly according to where they are in the Internet sales funnel. Other experts advocate using marketing automation software to first clean up the sales funnel data before importing it into CRM software.

Can a single CRM solution handle everything your Internet sales and marketing teams need? The answer varies from company to company. In most cases, sales and marketing need to work with the same data and contacts; however, they tend to interact with that data differently.

Integrated CRM solutions that include marketing automation and email marketing software may be the optimal choice by allowing sales and marketing to access shared data without duplication or conflicts. For example, with an integrated Internet marketing CRM platform, when an email subscriber unsubscribes from an email marketing campaign the contact will be removed from the mailing list and relevant information appended to the contact’s record.

No matter which option makes the most sense for your Internet marketing strategy, one thing is clear: you need IT support. With multiple databases, automation software, and lead sources (such as cold calling, opt-in lists, special events, and social media channels), managing the sales funnel requires software and systems that perform to their fullest potential.

While many Internet marketing platforms are offered as “software as a service” and imply that minimal IT intervention will be required, aligning marketing with IT is essential. While installation, updates, and support tasks may be minimal with cloud-based Internet sales solutions, IT should be involved in selecting the solution to make sure it is compatible with existing systems along with the company’s security and privacy policies. If your CRM solution includes social media information from contacts based in European Union countries, stricter privacy regulations may apply.

By including IT in the Internet sales and CRM conversation, you’ll benefit from a broader perspective that extends beyond the sales funnel and better aligns with the organization’s objectives. In addition, IT professionals tend to have more experience in purchasing software. Thus, they may be better equipped to evaluate the terms and conditions and negotiate the contract.

No matter which CRM solution you use to nurture prospects through the sales funnel, stronger Internet sales require alignment between your Internet marketing, sales, and IT teams.