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For both B2B and healthcare marketers, lead generation must be a multi-channel effort. Smart cross-channel marketing campaigns play to the strengths of each platform and then bring various tactics together to deliver one unified, cohesive message.
Do you want to get smarter about cross-channel optimization? Consider how these two popular marketing tools can be amplified and optimized across marketing channels.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers about your company’s area of expertise are a great way to build thought leadership and capture leads. But if you’re simply putting a whitepaper up on your website and waiting for the contacts to roll in, you’re doing your brand a disservice. To amplify your whitepaper’s impact, start with social media. Consider publishing excerpts of your white paper as educational long-format articles on LinkedIn, both via your own feed and through targeted LinkedIn groups, and link to a download of the complete piece at the end of each article. For some brands, Twitter, Facebook and even Pinterest can also be valuable places to share whitepaper content. Explore using insights from your white paper to create an infographic to share on Facebook or Pinterest, or creating Twitter Cards that to drive clicks and downloads of your content on that network.
Your company can further promote whitepaper content on a platform you own: the company blog. On this channel, try expanding on a few points you made in your white paper over the course of a series of posts, and again link back to the downloadable content.
While focusing on your own properties has its benefits, you may find that you need to reach outside of your immediate network to give your whitepaper the exposure it deserves. Consider partnering with a leading media outlet to run a targeted, email-based lead generation campaign, or work with a trade publication in your industry to secure publication for a condensed version of your whitepaper.
Across all of these tactics, ensure your message is consistent. Choose a few compelling thoughts from your whitepaper and then tailor them to work within the rules and limitations of each channel.
Event-Based Marketing
With live streaming tools like Periscope and Meerkat surging in popularity, everyone is buzzing about online events. But what if your brand is focused on in-person live events? Can you still tap into the potential of an online audience? You can, but you’ll have to be strategic to ensure content that was meant to be experienced live is appealing in an online context.
Consider creating a “highlights reel” video of your event for use on YouTube and your website. Instead of reposting this content in its original format on all your social channels, create optimized clips of various lengths and formats that take advantage of the strengths of each network.
If you handed out brochures or one-pagers at the event, share these as downloads on your site alongside video content. Introduce them with related blog posts. Adapt “snackable” versions of these materials into graphics for use on Facebook and Twitter and accompany them with short clips of the longer video you posted on YouTube.
On LinkedIn, share a recap of the event with your professional network or start a followup conversation about it in a LinkedIn group you moderate. Use insights gained from conversations you had there to write more about the current state of your industry.
Today, the opportunities for building an audience and sharing your company’s message are nearly endless. The key is to educate yourself about the strengths of each channel you choose and create a strategy that maximizes them.
Photo credit: David Terrar via Flickr Creative Commons
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Marketing can accomplish many things, from increasing brand recognition,to conveying company’s values. But in the end, marketing is measured chiefly by its impact on sales.
It can be difficult to prove marketing ROI, but some companies are ahead of the curve. Take a look at these superstar campaigns that draw a direct line connection between marketing and sales.
1) Xerox: Get Optimistic
In 2013, Xerox decided to take their B2B marketing in a new direction with a focus on how their clients had solved major business problems with Xerox. Through a partnership with Forbes, Xerox developed the “Chief Optimist” magazine, delivering high-quality print content directly to executives. By relying on the content in the magazine, sales professionals were able to develop deeper, more lasting relationships with leads. They were also able to create events around the “Get Optimistic” theme, where they hosted events featuring the editor of FastCompany for leads. According to AdAge, by giving the sales team access to this marketing material and engaging leads on a deeper level, the “Get Optimistic” campaign has generated more than 1,500 sales appointments and more the $1 billion in pipeline revenue.
2) Crowe Horwath
One of the largest public accounting, consulting and technology firms in the US, Crowe Horwath used a targeted content marketing campaign to chase leads by dissecting the Dodd-Frank bill and its repercussions on financial institutions. They targeted top-level prospects with 48 pieces of content in four different topic areas. By developing personalized, in-depth information specifically relevant to their audience, Crowe Horwath was able to solidify a 70% open rate for this content among its 778 top targets. While the intangible benefits of this campaign are still not certain, they obtained two engagements work $250,000.00 in revenue.
3) Keck Medicine of USC: “Beyond Exceptional Medicine”
When Movéo began our engagement with Keck Medicine of USC, the brand needed a way to convey the benefits of receiving care from an academic provider. We utilized vehicles including brand advertising, service line advertising and a campaign microsite to get this message in front of targeted stakeholders and drive demonstrable results. In the year after the campaign, monthly call volume increased 500%. Inpatient volumes increased 16% and outpatient volumes increased 10%.
Can you prove the ROI of your campaigns? How could your marketing department improve its impact on sales?
Photo credit: Bonnie Ann Cain-Wood via Flickr Creative Commons
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According to a study by Corporate Visions, only one in 10 companies consider their sales training and demand generation functions to be perfectly aligned. This is a startling problem, and it’s more than just revenue that gets lost.
Lead conversion suffers
61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales. However, at the average company, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. When the two departments aren’t communicating clearly, marketers misalign their actions with what sales needs to close the deal. As a result, leads get handed off too early, and the sales department wastes valuable time trying to convert them into customers. Those leads often become cold, or worse: they end up in the hands of your competitors.
Time and effort is wasted
60-70% of B2B content created is never used. Why? The most cited reason is because the topic is irrelevant to potential buyers. This is totally preventable. It simply requires that marketers capture insights from sales staff about conversations they’re having with prospects in the field. These insights can help marketers determine what content will resonate with potential buyers most and then develop assets accordingly. When conversations about content direction are skipped, the sales team is left with literature they don’t use, and marketers waste countless hours churning out material irrelevant to the needs of the customer.
The sales pipeline slows down
When there’s strong alignment between sales and marketing, the pipeline moves efficiently. More high quality leads come in, salespeople are able to close deals more quickly, and customers stay satisfied longer. Misalignment breeds just the opposite: lead volume decreases, the quality of leads drop, and salespeople have a more difficult time closing deals. In fact, 25% of marketers with integrated strategies that align with sales report that sales teams contact prospects within one day — but only 10% of marketers without integrated strategies report the same follow-up time.
How have you seen marketing/sales alignment change your business for the better — and how have you seen misalignment hold your organization back?
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When marketing and sales align, revenue grows and the pipeline moves more smoothly. Just ask the sales team at Kapost: when they get a request from a lead for more information, they send it down the line to the marketing team, who looks through their resources to see if they have any literature that addresses the lead’s needs. If they do, they send it along, and if they don’t, they create something new. The salesperson is able to quickly meet their lead’s needs and the sales cycle keeps moving.
Are you looking to see this kind of communication between your sales and marketing teams? Read on for our four best practices to align the two departments.
Service level agreements
If you want your two departments to stay accountable to each other, developing and signing a service level agreement (SLA) is essential. In this agreement, marketing agrees to generate a certain amount of leads at a certain level of quality while sales agrees to follow up with these leads quickly and with a certain, demonstrable level of impact. Draft one of these agreements at the beginning of an integrated sales and marketing campaign, and make sure that all goals and obligations are detailed and quantifiable to avoid confusion. You can always re-evaluate and reset expectations once your campaigns get going, but having benchmarks to strive for will help both departments stay on track.
Content alignment
Salespeople often complain of “marketing talk”—marketing content and messaging they deem irrelevant to the customers they talk to daily. Meanwhile, marketers worry about “salesy” language pushing potential customers away. But in order to align the two departments, content and language must be aligned. Encourage your marketing team to sit in on sales calls to get a feel for the language that customers respond to as well as the wants and needs that they identify over the phone. By understanding firsthand what customers need, marketers are able to create content that the sales team can use to bolster their efforts.
An effective lead handoff process
One of the biggest complaints the sales department has about marketing is that they hand off leads that are uninformed or unwilling to move forward in the buying cycle. This typically happens because those leads aren’t nurtured long enough or effectively enough before they are delegated to sales. Marketing must work to understand what kind of lead information is crucial for sales and then focus on capturing the insights that set the sales team up for success before the handoff takes place.
Continued feedback
The only way to really ensure that sales and marketing continue to flourish is to continually follow up with your counterparts in the other department and collectively evaluate performance. Set up weekly meetings in order to discuss how the two departments are working together, where you’re seeing problems, and what needs to be done to make alignment even tighter.
How are you ensuring that your department is staying aligned with sales goals, tactics and operations?
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All month, we’ve been discussing the importance of prioritizing communication between sales and marketing. The two departments can also collaborate on the development of reports for management, and they should.
Marketing and sales share a common goal
Ultimately, both marketing and sales are working to convert leads to clients and sales. You work to create a streamlined experience for your stakeholders, so why not work to streamline the way you document your performance as well?
When you combine your marketing and sales reports, they should tell one story. It’s the story of guiding your targets through the marketing/sales funnel and giving each lead what they need at every point in the process, whether that’s a digital marketing message or a call from a sales rep. Both departments will benefit from a document that clearly lays out these interactions, and shows what’s working and what can be improved at each stage.
Bringing marketing and sales reports together
As a marketing manager, you should work with key contacts in your company’s sales department to create these combined reports. They should be structured to show the journey from the first marketing contact to sales-qualified lead status and all the way through to the sale. Use data to chart the buying cycle and show where each marketing message and interaction built a relationship with a future customer.
Such a report demonstrates the ROI realized from individual marketing and sales activities as part of a continuum. It illustrates the close ties that successful marketing and sales efforts must have, and shows how a good working relationship between the departments contributes to revenue growth.
Once you’ve created these combined reports, it’s time to use them to start conversations between the sales and marketing teams about how you can better support each others’ efforts. Instead of limiting good communication to a meeting or the creation of a report, make it a habit.
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
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Sales and marketing alignment sounds great in theory, but what about in practice? Is it really achievable in the real world? To answer that question, let’s take a look at some of our recent work with our client, the Sparton Corporation.
A $400 million provider of design, engineering and contract manufacturing services, Sparton’s work involves manufacturing low volume, complex products in highly regulated industries. Our work with Sparton involved creating a marketing campaign to generate new leads, speed up the sales cycle, and increase revenue.
Initial conversations
In our initial conversations, it became clear that Sparton had no way of tracking their marketing efforts. When we first began working with them, they had no record of the data or metrics that illustrated how marketing impacted their bottom line. As a result, they had no idea if their marketing investment was truly paying off.
Because Sparton had never tracked their marketing efforts before, there wasn’t a lot of direct, historical marketing data to work with. However, there was other data that could be used, and most of it came from the sales team.
Sales data uncovers key points
We set up interviews with Sparton’s leadership team, marketing team, sales professionals and managers to gather qualitative data and insights that would inform our campaign.
As we worked with these different teams, we uncovered information that was to become a key part of our campaign. According to the sales staff, Sparton’s ability to excel at the development of complex machines and parts — including MRI devices, circuit boards, and products that allow for the highly complex process of wet testing in bioengineering — had helped them build a committed customer base. With this differentiator in mind, we developed “Conquering Complexity,” a multi-pronged campaign designed to fill Sparton’s pipeline with new leads and then educating and nurturing those leads before handing them off to sales.
Continued alignment breeds success
When the campaign launched, we worked with the sales team to integrate our marketing efforts with their existing CRM to give them seamless access to marketing leads and the deep intelligence we learned about them. Because our marketing efforts were directly tied to Sparton’s sales system, it became easy for the sales team to determine the source of a new lead, prospect or customer as well as to understand the impact of our various efforts. Sales staff could also tailor their outreach to leads on the basis of deep insights we generated about their behavior and interests.
Movéo delivered 3,381 leads for Sparton in the first nine months of the campaign. These leads represented $19 million in potential opportunities that were added to the Sparton sales pipeline.
Now, we’re using insights from these initial efforts — backed up from data from both marketing and sales — to improve future campaigns and deepen alignment between the two departments. We’re also continuing to fill the pipeline with better, more qualified leads and helping the Sparton sales team convert more of those initial 3,381 leads into customers.
For more on our work with Sparton, watch this space for our upcoming case study.
Have more questions in the meantime? Reach out at https://www.moveo.com/contact/
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Now that we’ve covered how sales and marketing can and should align, as well as explored how marketing tactics impact sales (and vice versa), it’s time for a more concrete discussion about how to align sales and marketing: not in theory, but in the real world, at your company.
At its core, aligning the two departments comes down to these four essential steps:
Establish common goals/KPIs
In pursuing any strategy, it’s important to ensure that you’ve got specific, measurable goals and KPIs upon which you can gauge the success of your efforts. Similarly, when beginning an alignment effort, you should work with sales leadership to determine what you’re trying to achieve and break that down into the performance indicators for both teams.
As part of this process, compile data from both sales and marketing teams in order to establish baselines and build a system for tracking progress.
Establish common language
Do sales and marketing team members agree on the definition of a sales qualified lead? Do you measure total revenue in the same way and have the same criteria for determining when a lead has gone cold? Establishing a common language and set of definitions helps teams avoid confusion and streamline the development of smart strategies that benefit both parties. By ensuring you’re all on the same page, you’ll not only have the same expectations of what will come from sales/marketing-aligned activities, but will also be better able to trade data, discuss outcomes and develop insights based on what’s happening in the other department.
Agree on responsibilities and set expectations
Sales and marketing teams often don’t understand each other: marketers are confused as to why the sales team can’t close in the leads they pass them, and the sales pros are frustrated by the cold or off-target prospects handed to them by the marketing team. Take the time to learn about these frustrations and reset expectations in both departments. By understanding what the other group needs, you’ll be able to set responsibilities and expectations to increase predictability, communication and profit.
Establish timelines
Set due dates to keep everyone in both departments accountable. By aligning timelines, you can be sure that the marketing team is targeting the right leads at the right times, and sales can stay abreast of what stage in the nurturing process leads are in. You can postpone or push up campaigns in accordance with the needs of the other department, and stay aligned with what’s going on in the other department’s world.
Let us know: have you put these four steps into practice at your company? What was the outcome?
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We’ve already discussed how sales and marketing impact each other from a broad perspective, but what does their relationship look like on a day-to-day basis? For today’s marketers, it’s essential to be able to communicate marketing goals and strategy to the sales department, but it’s also crucial to understand how daily marketing tactics influence what’s happening further down the funnel.
Today, we’re taking a look at the four marketing tactics that impact sales most directly and exploring how marketers can ensure that each of these tactics are optimized for sales success.
Content marketing
65% of sales representatives say they can’t find content to send to prospects. However, 90% of consumers find custom content useful — and considering that so much of the buying cycle happens before a prospect ever speaks to a sales representative, it’s essential to have a content marketing strategy that sets the sales team up for success.
To ensure your content marketing is optimized for an impact on sales, communicate with your sales team about what points of information they feel are most beneficial for prospects to encounter before they speak to someone directly. Use data and insights to target content toward prospects, nurture leads already in the sales funnel and re-engage cold leads (more on that later.)
SEO, SEM and PPC
Optimizing your online presence for search engines is crucial to increasing site visits, inbound leads and sales. The top spot on a Google search gets 36.4% of all clicks, so it’s clear that having a strong SEO strategy is what’s going to drive purchase-ready leads to your website and get them into the sales funnel. Using keyword analysis, you can even identify the intent behind keyword searches, allowing you to target and deliver leads with a high conversion potential to the sales team.
Thought leadership
Thought leadership is what defines content that is simply interesting from content that encourages leads to buy. By establishing your brand and its leadership as experts in your field, you build trust with potential customers and empower salespeople to leverage your brand’s differentiators in their negotiations.
When Movéo developed a thought leadership campaign for Mercy Health hospital system, we focused on differentiating them from their competitors and developing a brand persona that positioned their leaders as expert voices in the healthcare market. As a result, we were able to resonate with their key audience and grow brand awareness by 77% in 12 months. Read our case study on this project here.
Nurture marketing
Marketing efforts that nurture customers when they’re making a buying decision can have a significant impact on lead-to-close rates as well as the length of the sales cycle. By developing a nurture marketing strategy that reaches potential buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and supporting ongoing sales activity and re-activates cold leads, marketers can generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. How is that for an impact on sales?
Let us know: what marketing tactics impact your company’s sales most, and how do you maximize them?
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Marketing and sales managers need to work together to streamline communication between their departments. To improve communication at your organization, try pairing modern tech tools, such as a CRM program, with the more traditional approach of in-person meetings. Each tool has unique benefits:
CRM Integration
Your organization can use a CRM program to manage leads and current clients throughout your relationships with them. When your chosen CRM is fully integrated with both marketing and sales, it will help you seamlessly nurture prospects. This will help you ensure a smooth handoff of prospects from marketing to sales, and keep both teams informed throughout the process.
In-Person Meetings
Establish a regular schedule for meetings between sales and marketing. Key decision makers in each department should get together often to align strategy and review progress toward common goals. At longer intervals, gather the whole team. When sales and marketing team members are well-informed about each other’s work, they are better able to support each other. In-person meetings can foster a sense of connection between employees on both teams, encouraging collaboration.
Digital Communication
Digital communication tools can keep everyone in sales and marketing in the loop. In addition to email, project management programs can improve communication between sales and marketing. Use a project management program to lay out timelines for particular campaigns and display assigned tasks. These tools can provide an easy reference for employees to check in on team progress and needs at any time.
Has your company taken steps to improve communication between sales and marketing? Continue to visit our blog for the rest of the month to learn more about the importance of sales and marketing collaboration.
Photo Credit: David Terrar via Flickr Creative Commons
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Marketers need to keep track of many metrics, some of which relate directly to sales department success. In order to improve communication and collaboration between sales and marketing at your organization, it’s important to track these metrics:
Marketing Metric #1: Lead Source
In today’s multi-touch marketing environment, new leads can often be attributed to multiple sources. In order to collect meaningful lead source data, the marketing department should track a lead’s first and subsequent engagements and create a system for lead attribution. Sources of individual leads can be shared with the sales department in order to help them tailor pitches to each lead’s needs. Marketing can also use the aggregate data to refine marketing techniques and shape future campaigns.
Marketing Metric #2: Average Revenue Per Lead
Average revenue per lead tells your team how much each lead is worth. This number can be used as a basis to determine the allowable cost per lead for your marketing efforts. B2B businesses will tend to have a higher average revenue per lead than B2C businesses, but fewer leads.
Marketing Metric #3: Cost Per Lead
This metric tells your team whether marketing goals are being met in a cost-effective way. Equally important, measuring cost per lead helps make your marketing more predictable by telling your team how many leads you can aim to acquire for a given investment.
Marketing Metric #4: MQL/SQL Conversion
Working with both marketing and sales, determine how your company defines a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales qualified lead (SQL). Some marketing departments are over-eager to send leads to sales, and end up sharing leads too early in the process. Instead, leads should be sent to sales when they have proven to be serious prospects. Track the progression of MQLs to SQLs to understand how well your marketing funnel nurtures leads.
Sales and marketing are most productive and efficient when they work together. Once you’ve started tracking these key metrics, your team can also use them in important conversations with sales. Keep reading our posts this month to learn how to improve communications between marketing and sales.
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
