Before marketers get all in a tizzy over the headline, let me clarify. First, I am a marketer, so I am not advocating putting me out of business. But, I think marketers would perform better if they repeated a single mantra while when building and executing a campaign:
“My job is to generate leads.”
Not:
“My job is to show how clever and hip I can be” or “My job is to produce stunning works of art that will win ‘Ad of the Year’”
The actions of branding, awareness, building a social media presence, engaging with the audience are all fine and necessary. But, the end game for marketers is quality lead generation — because no leads equal a dead business.
It’s no good to have a million twitter followers and beautiful glossy ads running in national magazines if these are simply to “build awareness” and are not part of a plan to inspire a certain percentage of people to contact you to buy something.
Lack of Formal Processes: How To Lose the Race Before it Starts
To get marketing on the right track, you need a map showing where you are trying to get to in the first place. If your business doesn’t have formalized lead generation and sales processes, you really don’t have that map and are cutting performance off at the knees.
Before anyone accuses me of stating the obvious, listen up: a RIDICULOUS 75% of marketers surveyed in 2013 by MarketingSherpa had NO formal guideline or process for generating and selling leads.
So what exactly are these 75 percenters marketing towards, and what are they doing with leads they happen to drum up it? Are they just winging it? It seems like it, and this is no way to run a revenue machine.
If I were brand new to a company and had to quickly work out a process, I would ask:
- What are we selling and at what price point so that we make a decent profit while the customer wins as well.
- Who exactly do we think is most likely to buy it?
- What is the offer that is going to get that prospect to call, email, or send in a form and therefore become a SALES LEAD, rather than just someone who admires us.
- How do we get this offer out there, and how do we best capture the return info (landing page, telemarketers, whatever).
- Once the lead is logged, who gets it and what do they do with it exactly? This needs to be spelled out! (nurturing, research/qualifying, lead scoring, USP, appointment setting, presentation collateral, closing strategies, quantification of results.)
Notice, I don’t separate marketing-specific functions from sales-specific ones here, because it helps see the big picture. Anyway, in reality you are taking your customer through ONE large process, composed of sub-processes involving multiple departments, which should all align and flow smoothly.
By laying out and controlling the process, you will enable your marketing folks to get a better grip on what they should be doing to move the selling process forward.
Dig Deep
It is surprising how much information you can get on your leads using both free tools like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. as well as paid ones like Marketo’s Leadspace.
One growing part of the lead generation and sales processes at many successful firms is data mining. Knowing what your leads are all about is the name of the game here, because this will clue you in to who they are, what their values are, and what are the buttons which most likely will trigger an order.
So driving high-quality leads to the funnel, one of the biggest issues most marketers have struggled with in the past (and a weakness most sales departments never forget to remind them about) can be accomplished with greater ease by digging deep into profiles and avatars and exploring connections and the data freely volunteered.
With privacy concerns cropping up, this data might be harder to get in the future, but right now smart lead generation staff are milking it and you should too.
Measure What You Are Doing
In an age of low-cost outlets such as social media, viral video and webinars, the potential reach of a business is larger than ever. While this should make it easier to generate sales leads, it also increases the risk of doing ineffective things while playing with all these “shiny new toys.”
This is why you have to measure what you are doing and the gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts versus dollars spent.
It is not impossible to determine the ROI of your social media efforts. Check out this article or this infographic from Quicksprout for some tips.
So, to sum up: marketing for the sake of being clever is quite dead. Marketing which is accountable to sales to drives leads and revenue is where it’s at!
Want to find out more or talk to me personally about improving your own marketing? Contact me here.
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