What it takes to best execute your marketing programs and to ensure their best success–next chapter. Read part 6 below!
This series of articles should help you get an understanding of how to leverage the huge, mostly still untapped potential of valuable leads for your sales force–and also show you how to do it in the right way to grow your business.
In Part 5, we talked about many questions that you should ask yourself and answer yourself in order to develop the best marketing strategy (see https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=3103).
Once you have found your strategy, you can go deeper and concretely into the planning of tactics, their implementation, and their execution, which should reflect your findings from the strategy. This is one of the most important challenges, yet it is much underestimated. There are still many things done wrong here.
First of all, keep in mind that you must design your campaigns and programs from a customer perspective. What is the value that you are adding for the customer? What is the uniqueness and the differentiator that makes your offering compelling for a customer? How would you feel if you received your own message from another company that wanted to sell you something? How are your customers behaving and how are they thinking?
Another mistake that is often made: mixing various messages and offers up in programs. Don’t do this. Marketers tend to want to pack too many different things into one program and to accomplish everything at once. That doesn´t work because it is confusing for the customer and blurs what you really want to accomplish.
So, design the elements of your program carefully:
- What exactly do you want to accomplish? Define a clear goal. Is it lead generation–if so, what kind of leads? Is it branding? Is it about showing your company´s expertise, or building trust and confidence, or driving customers to your website and increasing traffic (presuming you have a good website, of course)? Do you want to generate new leads or new prospects, respectively, or do you want to hard-sell anything to existing customers?
- What channel do you want to support? Is it direct sales, or indirect/distibution sales? In each case, the approach will be different.
- What kind of leads do you want to generate: leads for the top, for the middle, or for the bottom of the sales funnel?
- What is your message? The message must be short enough, must be very clear, and must not be confusing.
- What is your offer? The offer needs to be compelling and needs to add value.
- What are the vehicles you want to use in the marketing mix and which are best suited for your programs, respectively? Direct E-mail, online advertising, social media, events like webinars, local seminars, trade shows, or exhibitions, etc.? How can you best use various vehicles in an integrated way for your campaign?
- What is the reach that you are getting with your campaign? How can you increase your reach? For example, should you use external sources, such as business newsletters, for your promotion?
- What target groups do you want to address? Select them from your CRM system or from your database or define them from the media data in the external sources that you want to use.
- Define your landing pages.
- Define lead entry and coding in the database.
- Ensure proper lead follow up either through an automated CRM process or through Inside Sales (preferred).
- Define your KPIs (key performance indicators): for example, reach, open rates, click-through rates, number of responses, kind of responses, status in the sales funnel, follow up and kind of follow up, conversion rates from lead to opportunity and from opportunity to order, cost, and ROI (return on investment).
Still interested? Stay tuned for more about leads and the Sales and Marketing Funnel to come soon in Part 7….
Feel free to contact the author directly to dicuss this topic in more detail: jwflossmann@globalmarcomm.com
In parts 1-5 of this series of articles, we talked about the conflict between sales and marketing, the need for integration, how to integrate the leads into the sales funnel, generating leads for the different stages of the sales funnel, and developing a lead generation strategy for growing your business.
You can find parts 1-5 on our GF&Z website:
- Part 1: https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2850
- Part 2: https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2937
- Part 3: https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2992
- Part 4: https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=3045
- Part 5: https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=3103
or in my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwflossmann/
Josef W. Flossmann, EMEA Managing Director and Senior Consultant at Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide Marketing Consultancy
Contact GF&Z at solutions@globalmarcomm.comm (www.globalmarcomm.com ) or the author directly at jwflossmann@globalmarcomm.com in order to discuss.