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Unfortunately, the dot com era spawned some mis-perceptions of marketing. The benefits of marketing spend to build awareness of new internet brands were measured in “eyeballs” rather than revenue. Due to massive overspending with limited returns, that very brief model died with the 90’s. During these economic times, we’re all looking to do more with less. Emarketing Technology enables savvy marketers to generate demand more cost-effectively than traditional methods like advertising or direct mail. When powerful eMarketing is blended with traditional tools, it’s possible to accelerate revenue while actually reducing overall marketing spending.
Outsourcing greatly facilitates the speed, cost-effectiveness, and results from eMarketing implementations. Companies are learning to outsource functions once relegated to internal IT or marketing departments to not “re-invent the wheel" and to add specialized focus. It’s natural to transfer these activities to eMarketing outsourcing specialists who can help you integrate the right technologies and processes into your marketing mix. Following are 10 tips to help you get “more with less” from your marketing investment.
10. Re-Focus your brand position. Have you “bottled the magic?” Before investing in marketing, it’s critical to identify the target audiences having the greatest needs for your offerings and how you satisfy their key “pain points” in a meaningful and compelling way. Ensure on-line branding is consistent with overall messaging to add focus and consistency to your communications.
9. Narrow your audience and think in 3D. Most direct mail is trashed. Focus on your very best prospects, learn about their real pain points and needs, and create highly customized and integrated programs to reach them directly. Communicate with fewer, more qualified prospects on a more consistent basis. Three dimensional programs work far better than traditional direct marketing when properly designed. After you narrow your audience down to the best 50-200 prospects and validate your list, design something really creative to get their attention. 80% of your mailed packages will be opened out of curiosity. Add personal URL micro-sites to tailor follow-up messages and see when prospects follow up to time your response.
8. Find the right alliance partners. Develop relationships with firms having complementary products and services targeting the same audiences. You can save costs and increase efficiencies by sharing and co-marketing to each other’s internal lists, plan joint events and seminars, and co-market and co-sell to prospects and customers together. It’s important to establish processes for working the relationship along with an action plan, incentives, and specific people in each partner company to continually focus activities and monitor outputs.
7. Make your website the hub of all marketing activity. Is your website more than a 1-way billboard of brochure-ware? You must understand your audiences and provide desired content in 3 clicks or less. Your website should facilitate 2-way dialogs with prospective customers to develop and deepen relationships. Build an online offer chain that moves prospects through the sales cycle, as much as possible, without sales force intervention until the lead is sufficiently qualified to warrant their attention. Visitor behavior must be tracked to continuously improve the experience and better target marketing campaigns with audience needs.
6. Drive leads and revenue with Internet search engines. Is your website a billboard in the woods? Will prospects find it? Search engines are used by 85% of on-line users to research products & services. Identify a broad set of keywords based on how qualified prospects search for products and services like yours. It’s important to know which keywords target prospects use and when your website is displayed on the first page of search results. An on-line web visibility comparison between you and your competitors across targeted keywords and search engines is required to understand where you need to focus efforts. On-line descriptions and ads also need to promote click-through traffic to your site. If you are not focusing on this area, you may be missing a significant opportunity to open a cost-effective new channel to generate qualified leads into your sales pipeline.
5. Industry portal sponsorships. Industry association websites may offer sponsorship opportunities as a preferred provider or content expert. This allows you to sponsor a section that will reach your target audiences and demonstrate thought leadership. You’ll gain:
§ Credibility
§ Leads of content readers, and
§ Tools to observe readers’ on-line behavior.
4. Leverage existing email blasts. Look for existing industry newsletters with similar target audiences. You can typically place a 70-100 word text ad in the newsletter with links to your website. Ensure you create a separate landing page on your website with a registration form to capture and measure incoming leads from the campaign.
3. Start your Permission Marketing Newsletter. Have you begun to build on-line communities? Use internal, partner, and acquired lists for the initial distribution. Always have an easy opt-in / opt-out process and add a sign-up icon on each page of your website. Create content of real value to periodically communicate to your prospects and customers. This helps you stay top-of-mind until they next have a need for your product or service. You can easily outsource the entire process of email distribution and behavior tracking very cost-effectively. The data you obtain on user behavior will be invaluable in moving prospects through the selling cycle.
2. Go Digital! Do you have digital versions of your marketing collateral, case studies, and whitepapers on your website? Simple downloadable PDF files will save printing, storage, and distribution costs. Prospects will be able to access the information they want when they want it, adding an element of pre-qualification on-line. Register web visitors in exchange for providing information, so you will be able to monitor and rank the relevance of your content and the behavior of prospects accessing it.
1. Establish a simple tracking system. Do you know what you’re getting from your marketing investment? Can you run simple reports to summarize prospects by lead source and their stage in the sales pipeline? Costly CRM systems can be unnecessary overkill. Ensure you are covering the basics first! This can be done with simple contact management tools and Excel Pivot Tables to analyze the sales & marketing results. Be sure to record lead source as the data comes in to enable downstream tracking. Sales and marketing must jointly design and own the lead management process for it to be effective. Accelerate revenue by making the earlier elements of the sales cycle more efficient, such as the lead qualification, or information transfer steps.
Today marketing needs to operate with reduced budgets while tracking revenue production and ROI. Smart use of technology and outsourcing makes this possible. Emarketing tools facilitate building relationships with customers and generating new prospects more efficiently than traditional methods while measuring what is working at the end of the day. The above techniques can be outsourced to quality eMarketing outsourcing specialists having the expertise and focus required to effectively integrate eMarketing techniques to accelerate revenue with limited budgets.
Written by: Alan Gonsenhauser
Published: December 10, 2002
