Your Marketing Department needs Help for 2015

Some reports have marketers spending $135 billion in 2015 on digital marketing collateral, producing a combined volume of 73% more content than this year. With so much more content about to flood the Internet – and your mail box – marketers need to cut through the noise to generate revenue. Here’s how you can keep ahead of your competition, by treating your Marketing Department just like your Sales team. Just as they build up a picture of the right prospect, the right value proposition, and how to answer their pain, your marketers can use the same techniques to define what your branding and messaging should be to both your existing customer base and to your prospecting avenues next year. Here are three steering devices to sharpen the conversation between your marketing and sales teams, to ensure that the right message is in the right person’s eye-line when they need it. Describe Customer Identities Talk with your sales reps (and customers) to identify exactly who your different target customers are and what they’re looking for. How did the sales process move, what questions did they ask, and how long did it take to get through the decision making process, and how was the decision reached? You have answers to how your sales process works, but you may not have crystalized how that happened for the different corporate personas your customers represent. Once you know that your sales solution is not as ‘one-size-fits-all’ as you thought, you are breaking the code down to simple statements that your customers were attracted to. The Marketing department will welcome the opportunity to re-shape several, different, simple statements, instead of trying to find different angles of one simple Value Statement. Now, you can find the way of delivering the right content at the right time. Chart Your Marketing Sled Run Just as your sales department is accustomed to their own funnel, your marketers should be aware of their own conveyor belt – the way prospects move from awareness to sales, and beyond. People don’t move in a straight line from “top of the funnel” to “bottom of the funnel” anymore. They meander, compare prices, read reviews, check out social media, etc. So, what kind of platforms and media are they using to comparison shop? We have called our Funnel the Sled Run, because it may be fast from beginning to end, but it also has many twists and turns. It is only researching how your customers progress from introduction to sale. You will come to understand the strengths and shortcomings of your current content. From there, you can deploy content resources where their impact will be greatest. Create Strategic Campaigns With a Customer ID’s in mind and a ‘lead sled run’ based on data, you can create tailored campaigns with different content elements to ensure engaging customers at the right time. Whether it is by press release, blog post, email campaign, or social network updates to bring people to your businesses’ site, with value-added content and offers to nurture your customers and capture the information you need to maintain interest, and show your expertise. By treating your marketing department as you expect from your sales specialists, you are helping them do a better job aimed directly at the people you need to expand your business. An added benefit is that your Sales department will feel that Marketing is on their side, and they can count on informative marketing arriving at their prospect’s attention that will aid in the sales process as they move closer to conversion. Your Marketers will know the impact of marketing expenditure, and be able not only access the huge market in the coming year, but to dominate it in your niche.