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Marketing Automation: How to attract new customers?
Dieter Weisshaar • May 30, 2020
Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash
Building a sales pipeline has changed
The world of business to business marketing
has changed. A cool website, telesales or a booth on a fair is not good enough any longer. Mail catalogues or print collateral is outdated for more than a decade. The word of mouth recommendation is valuable but no scaling enough. Today, marketing leads are generated through a different marketing mix. Has your marketing plan changed already?
The new thing is agile content marketing. Members of a buying center do not gather information on fairs to create a shortlist on suppliers to decide on an investment any more. Decision makers and influencers are getting younger, but more important, they collect information on the internet and social media to prepare a decision. To get on these shortlists, your company needs to be present, attractive and convincing.
Step 1: Get found
Search engine optimization
Prospects should find your offering, therefore it is important that your website is found by keywords
which describe your offering best. Your teams need to define the keywords that would allow different target groups
to search for your offering. Your website needs SEO (search engine optimization) that means the keywords need to part of your content and the headlines.
Search engine advertisement
By promoting a number of landing pages through search engine advertisement
with content which is relevant for your target groups, you can get your website to the top ten of the search results. CxO landing pages have different content compared to the ones for the purchaser or technician.
The KPI for measuring your success
is the number of top ten search results of your website depending on your defined keywords. Keep in mind that no one will search for your company name first.
Step 2: Content matters - Digital Content Marketing
Simple ads are not good enough any longer. The click through rates (CTRs) will be low hence the campaign will be expensive. The user will search for interesting and relevant content
on his topic and the company who delivers best will get the click. Relevant content today is multilevel and depending on the target group (persona). Videos, white papers, customer reference stories or strategy papers are relevant content that will be found on a keyword search to initiate a click. Highly relevant content such as a market study may convince the user to leave his data
for a download.
On the download page there needs to be a next step offered, a call to action
to guide the user further. By offering a webinar, an event registration or other content you get the user closer to your offering. Obviously, the data left by the user needs to be collected in accordance with GDPR regulations. Using the user data you can stay connected with your prospect and provide regular updates.
Tip: forms need to be short to be successful - name, eMail, telephone number should be good enough
Step 3: Serve your contacts
By using great content in conjunction with Search Engine Optimization and Advertising you have collected contacts which need to be served. To maintain those contacts you need to have a regular drum beat of valuable insights and further relevant content to make them stay and engage. Two things are important:
1. Every interaction needs to be valuable
for your user
2. Every interaction has a next step, a call to action
There are great analytic tools
out there to measure what works and what did not work as well, e.g.
- Number of visitors - where is traffic coming from
- Bounce rate - was the content and user experience good enough
- Session duration - has the content being read
- Interactions - did user share or like your content
Agile Content Marketing means that the things you have tried (campaigns) are verified to adopt or change. Learning from things which have worked or haven't is important to improve over time.
Side remark: Brand and Reputation:
Your company is perceived by prospects and customers through your reputation. Obviously the offering, products and solutions are a big part of it, but there are more reputation drivers that matter:
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Vision & Leadership
- Work Environment
- Financial Performance
Your company reputation
needs to have a positive momentum. Employees, applicants, customers, prospects, business partners, investors are influenced by your reputation. Let customers and employees be your advocates for positive corporate citizenship. Nobody really wants to buy from a problem company.
News on the employee or social engagement will cause positive interactions on social media and support a great company culture and let your traffic grow.
Step 4: Scale and have fans - social media:
You need to have a presence on social media today. These
channels
will bring you more contacts and interactions than any other channel, plus, being active on social media will boost your ranking on search engines. Be present and share the great and relevant content here. Take advantage of your
employees and business partner
to distribute your posts to scale. Make it easy for your team to share the news by preparing tweets and posts for sharing.
Take social media as a
distribution channel, to complement the web, newsletters, search engines to direct traffic to your website. Use it as well to build a
community, that you can interact with quickly and cost efficient. The frequency on social media is higher, a post a day is normal.
Your social media team needs to be trained and enabled to react fast if a negative topic appears. Speed matters if you want to avoid that a negative post becomes a shitstorm.
Step 5: Marketing Leads turn into Sales Leads
At the end of your contact acquisition comes Lead Nurturing. The user has been guided through different interactions and consumed content on a topic, now it is time to reach out and qualify the lead. Figure out if the contact is a decision maker, influencer etc. and understand if there is a project, a budget and timeline. These are not the only criteria but it is important to rank the lead and turn the good ones to sales leads.
By qualifying the marketing to a sales lead you take the decision that you start the costy sales process. Hand it over from a marketing automation platform to the CRM system and get the sales process started.
A good marketing automation platform allows you to automate most of the steps, the analytics and the ranking. Follow up what the cost of a marketing or sales lead (cost per lead) have been. It can easily take 50 -250 Euro to have a marketing lead.
Step 6: Sales process
After the handover to sales the sales leads get further developed and turn into opportunities depending on your sales stage model. Cost per revenue and conversion rates are key figures to measure. The better your marketing process has worked the higher your closing rates in sales that saves sales costs. There are more factors you need to take into account such as sales skills, complexity of your offering, price points, value proposition, return on invest etc.. You can measure all of them, learn and adopt.
Summary:
Your Marketing Mix will become more digital and automated. A great marketing automation platform together with relevant content can achieve a lot. The traditional fairs, collaterals, events have their place but can be prepared and followed up much more efficiently.
Think of your target groups and buyer personas to create valuable content for all of them. Scale your contact base by using social media and search engines. The mechanics how many marketing leads will trigger how much sales leads, opportunities and deals will develop over time. Get it measured, adopt and learn to optimize. Never loose track on the cost per lead and revenue. That works with small and large budgets from SME to enterprises.
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