3 Easy Ways to Boost ROI in Digital Marketing
Moving your business into the 21st century of marketing is a big leap for any business that has found success with traditional marketing and sales strategies. In many ways, what worked in the 20th century won’t work in the 21st.
In How to Transition from Traditional Sales to Digital Marketing we discussed the challenges faced by businesses putting their toes in the water of digital marketing like search marketing.
In 3 Musts for Sales Teams to Win with Digital Marketing, we outlined 3 key crucial ingredients to success when your online marketing efforts must provide quality sales leads for your sales team.
As you begin to experiment with marketing online, then driving real sales leads to your sales team through your website, the costs can accelerate quickly, the sales team may be slow to adopt new tactics and seeing the return on investment may be difficult.
Potential customers that find your business online require fundamentally different handling than prospects that are met at a trade show, through networking or even cold calling. They are typically at a different stage in their buying process and desire to be communicated with in different ways.
One way to appreciate this difference is to understand that at least some prospects that find your website first truly do not want to talk to anyone at your company. They want to do business with you but, they want to do it electronically. Does your site and your process enable them to get all the information a customer needs to know before making a purchase easily online?
Whatever the process, we tend to have a short term view of new sales leads. We’re trying to hit our monthly or quarterly sales goals and our attention gravitates to those that will buy now. That’s usually a small percentage of the leads. What happens to the rest? Here are 3 easy ways to boost ROI in digital marketing.
Lead Nurturing
Typically less than 50% of leads are in “purchase mode” when they first contact a business. Many are just beginning the process of learning about options.
Sales teams tend to see all leads as the same and treat them the same. This means those that aren’t in purchase mode can be scared off by aggressive sales tactics and sales people aren’t always as patient or “nurturing” over the long haul as the prospect might need or want.
For this reason, a simple email marketing program that “touches” these leads once a month or once a week can boost sales by 50 to 75%!
If you typically close 200 out of 1000 leads, that leaves 800 that didn’t buy. If those 800 go on an automated email campaign that simply keeps your brand in front of them, you should expect to see the same 20% of those close over time. That’s an additional 120 customers or a 60% increase in sales over the course of a few weeks or months.
And best of all, creating a campaign to accomplish this isn’t nearly as difficult as it seems!
Content CurationIn all things digital, the name of the game is content. From blogs to whitepapers and ebooks to video, if you’re marketing online, you know you need content. But your organization may not be geared for content creation. Plus the experts and consultants you talk to are either too expensive or just don’t get your customers and your business.
By curating content that’s already online, you can add value to your digital marketing programs more quickly and affordably and often turn a weakness into a great strength!
Content marketing is all about providing informative, educational and entertaining resources to your audience that helps them better understand their own challenges, the options for addressing them and the value of your company’s solution. This is best done without talking about yourself, your business or your solution at all. This approach brands you as a trusted resource and expert without running off prospects that are still early in the process.
Ask yourself what a potential customer that has a problem your company can help with would type into the Google search bar when they first become aware of the problem and begin looking for information to better understand it.
Then perform that search yourself. Odds are you’ll find a lot of content available on trade association sites, media sites, Youtube, etc.
You can link to these resources in your marketing! Link to it in blogs, emails, etc.
Obviously, you want to avoid using content created by your competitors. This is perfectly legal and ethical. You’re promoting this content and the creators won’t mind that at all.
By leveraging content that already exists, you’ll be able to move forward with your overall digital marketing objectives and learn what truly speaks to your customers before you begin to make large investments of time and money in creating content yourself.
Lead Scoring
As your content marketing and lead nurturing efforts take off, you’ll have more leads to manage and will be able to focus sales people on the most highly qualified sales opportunities while those that aren’t yet in purchase mode learn what they need to learn online.
This requires a means of identifying which leads need sales attention and which aren’t ready. Developing an objective method to do this will make things efficient and make the most of your valuable sales resources.
Identify specific actions that prospects take that indicate “sales readiness”. Having various “Calls to Action” they can choose from on your website and in all your marketing lets them “self identify”. Downloading an ebook might indicate a prospect is in the learning phase while a signing up for a Free Trial or Requesting a Quote indicates they’re moving into purchase mode.
Email Marketing and CRM solutions can track which call to action a lead responded to, which email they opened and which content the read or watched.
Add this information to any demographic information you have such as employees, revenue, title or other more industry specific information you collect and you’ll be able to separate the buyers from the tire kickers.
Keep it as simple as you can initially. Identify the minimum “score” a lead should have in order to be handed off to sales. This might be simply that they responded to more than one of your emails.
Often the most important balance to strike is between the quality of the lead, their “score”, and the demand for more leads by the sales team. Let the sales team be part of setting the bar and adjust often.
By nurturing leads, curating content and score leads for sales, you’ll attract more prospects to your business, communicate with them appropriately and super-charge your sales team by feeding them the most high quality sales opportunities.
Category: Financials Marketing
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For me, the real challenge is: “a means of identifying which leads need sales attention and which aren’t ready.” I do see all leads as the same but am now rethinking. It is becoming obvious I need a more sophisticated strategy to develop leads to the buying stage.
I like the minimum score idea! And Im sure we can benefit from learning more about the tire kickers and those ready to pull the trigger to buy.