I spent a few days last week in a sales kickoff meeting. Hungry for qualified leads, the sales team was quite enthusiastic about how we would improve the company’s marketing efforts. Of course, I love this, but frankly, much of what I said seemed obvious. Then I realized, for whatever reason, sometimes marketers think too hard and overlook ways they can make easy but significant improvements.
This leads me to give you three (duh) ways to improve your marketing:
1) Make Your Sales Team Experts Through The Magic of Social Media
As a marketer, I tend not to like using people with sales and marketing titles as company experts. This means unless the topic is business strategies or international marketing, you probably won’t see me presenting at a conference. However, social media changes this bias. In the world of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, an expert is defined by the quality of their content.
Salespeople often aren’t given credit for being subject matter experts. Frankly, if they aren’t experts on your product or service, they aren’t worth having on the payroll.
The best way to make a salesperson an expert through social media is to lay down the ground rules, let them know what tools and mediums are available, then get out of their way. A good example of this is Paul Lancaster, who for three years was business development manager at GoGrid, an IAAS provider. I first found Paul when I started following IAAS experts on Twitter. He got my attention because his tweets went beyond simply retweeting company news releases and included industry news and trends. Paul also co-authors blogs and video blogs, and of course posts on Facebook. He became so well-versed in the IAAS world that a year ago he because manager of cloud ecosystem at GoGrid.
2) Give Prospects a Chance to Interact with You
Many B2B companies give their prospects few opportunities to show their interest. Outside of “download free trial” or “view a demo” buttons, websites often are missing call to actions (CTAs) that provide valuable information. This is akin to walking in the door of a store, having a clerk pick something off the shelf, and asking if you want to buy it even though you may not have looked at it. Isn’t a better in-store experience when you’ve looked at things that interest you, had someone there to answer your questions and then made a decision to buy?
Yes, you want the option to jump in at any time to try out the product/service, but what if the price point is $100K+ or there are multiple offerings? You may get prospects viewing your demo, along with your competitors, but outside of a form of contact information, you’ve learned nothing about them or their needs that will help close the deal.
If your company doesn’t have a healthy supply of assets created to be ingested at different stages of the sales cycle, you’re missing the chance to have your customers tell you what is important to them, while also learning more about your product/service.
Yes, it takes time to create a stable of case studies, white papers, briefs and videos. This is why several should be created at once. For example, a customer has agreed to a case study. Yay! Here’s what you will create:
- Word version of case study to be laid out as collateral, of course
- Slide version of case study for inclusion in sales deck when appropriate
- Video testimonial
- Blog or video interview blog
- Three-five slides of a use case for conference presentations
- Byline article about the problem addressed in the case study
- Media pitches to interview customer who has accomplished X, Y and Z by using your product/service
Your marketing automation efforts should also go beyond email campaigns. By implementing trigger campaigns, you will provide breadcrumbs in the form of related assets that lead down a path to a qualified lead and then a sale. Trigger campaigns can be defined as If/Then campaigns. If I respond to information about X download, then I’m offered Y download. If I download Y, then I’m offered Z. Soon, I’m contacted and asked if I’m interested in the product/service related to XYZ.
Just as the sales process is a series of yeses, marketing is a series of offers to engage.
3) Test Your E-Marketing
What? You say of course you test everything. Really? Then I’m willing to bet you are in the minority. Everyone SAYS they test thoroughly, but not really.
Here is a brief quiz to test your thoroughness:
- When was the last time you clicked on every link on your website, including those that link off the site, such as news clips?
- Have you tested your website and offering on multiple monitor sizes, with multiple connection speeds? Yes, there are still people on dial-up, but frankly my “super fast” cable line isn’t always super fast.
- Do you have Flash on your website? If so, why? Have you not heard of iPhones and iPads?
- Have you tested e-marketing that should pop to a landing page?
- Do you recheck your links after they’ve been shortened for Twitter? Does every article or infographic load as you expected?
If you answered yes to all these, congratulations. I have yet to find a perfect company. Take Zuora, which recently announced expansion into EMEA and a USD$36 million series D. I’ve recommended Zuora for years. It is one of the few companies I believe is close to being a sure thing for great success. Having said that, is it my job as a Zuora fan to tell the company there was a problem with its LinkedIn banner ad? Soon after its new funding was announced, I tried four times over four days to download a white paper advertised on LinkedIn. Each time, there was a problem with its landing page. If this happens with a company that is at the top of its marketing game, imagine what is happening elsewhere.
Clearly this is a short starter list and there are so many easy ways to improve marketing programs quickly. What are your other (duh) ways to improve marketing?
