Is your marketing process full of dogma?
You’ve got a great product, great team, and you’ve read and implemented a lot of sound marketing practices, but for some reason you’re not getting traction and you’re seeing a negative ROI from your marketing spend. What’s going on? In my experience, I see 3 common elements with many companies marketing programs. Are you committing any of these sins?
- You’re expecting a silver bullet.
- You’re relying on outbound marketing
- You’re relying on inbound marketing
- It assumes that prospects know they have a problem.
- It catches them late in the buying cycle and you’re likely in a price bake off.
- It is often inconsistent in supplying leads. Google’s algorithms can change and you’re dead in the water.
- Lead generation: Outbound marketing to get attention (cold emails, cold calls, paid ads etc).
- Lead conversion: Add to marketing automation nurture list and send emails to relevant content that will interest the leads that were generated from outbound. Also, CRM retargeting works wonders.
- Lead reactivation: (if a lead goes stale): CRM retargeting to direct them to white papers, case studies.
- Closing: salesperson.
There is no silver bullet in marketing or sales. Cold calling, cold emails, PPC, SEO, CRO and many of the other buzzwords and acronyms are tools and tactics. Each tool might solve a specific part of your marketing puzzle, but if you’re not using them in a cohesive strategy you’re throwing #@#! at a wall and hoping it sticks.
If your business relies on exclusively outbound marketing to generate sales, you’re going to struggle. Not only is outbound quite costly (especially if salespeople are involved), but it is truly pay for play. The moment you stop paying for outbound, whether that means sales salaries, or paid advertising, it stops. Plus outbound ignores the fact that prospects are going to be looking for information before your sales team even calls them.
Inbound marketing is also not going to work in isolation. The biggest problem with inbound is 3 fold
Inbound marketing is a great concept, and is something that every business should put a lot of thought into, but if you believe that inbound marketing will deliver all of the leads you need, you’re sadly mistaken. Inbound marketing does work, but it doesn’t work the way that most marketers are lead to believe. In my opinion, the best results come from using inbound marketing to convert leads that have been created by outbound marketing.
The solution: use both. So how would you do it? Here’s a good workflow that I implement with my clients and inside my own businesses.
As you can see, this approach is multi-channel and multi-touch, but it pulls in both aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. The end result is that it adds a systematic element to sales and it hits clients in multiple mediums.
The challenge: Sales-Marketing Alignment.
This process works well, but only if you’ve got sales and marketing alignment and most companies struggle with this. The most common problem is sales teams that operate in isolation and disregard the fact that customers will do online research on their own.
The great thing about the approach above is that it creates a crucial symbiotic relationship with marketing and sales. I’m a firm believer that salespeople need to be trained in marketing, and marketers should spend some time on the sales floor because it creates a strong appreciation of each other’s roles. What marketing strategies have you found most effective? Please comment below.