During a recession you not only have to compete against your regular competitors, you must also fight the most dreaded enemy of all—no decision! During tough economic times the only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have to work twice as hard to close the same amount of business as before. Therefore, you must ramp up your campaign management efforts accordingly.
RFM and data mining help you find a subset of your customers that are most likely to react/respond to your marketing campaigns (personalized emails/microsites, direct mails, call center, etc.). By targeting ONLY those likely to respond, you achieve about the same response/sales at a fraction of the cost.
Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management and Data Miner solutions provide the tools you need to survive and even flourish in the current economy. No data miners on staff? Simple RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) can help you increase response rates and overall campaign performance. The notion is those that bought most recently, purchase more frequently, and have spent the most, are your best prospects for future marketing campaigns.
If you're a B2B marketer, Aprimo Lead Manager (LM) can automate the nuturing and scoring of your prospects until they qualify for "Lead" status. At that point, LM can automatically assign and route the leads to the appropriate sales person. With Aprimo, no leads escape your sales funnel. More to come on all of these topics soon!
Ah, Marketing......
We are in the inviable position of creating the voice of our company to the world!
We are also here to serve a growing list of internal customers. And, I would say, without reservation, that our most important customer is the Sales team. They look to us to provide leads and to grow the sales funnel. They look to us to provide and manage their collateral. They ask for help with PowerPoint presentations, ask us to edit RFP's, and to remind them of upcoming events.
How can we better help our lonely comrades in the field?
OK, let's talk about the sales funnel? What can we do to grow it:
Leads.....good, strong, highly-qualified leads.
How do we find them? By using search engine optimization, by utilizing and optimizing social media, by building connections with prospects.
How do we get the leads to Sales in an efficient and effective manner?
By connecting directly to their salesforce automation system, so that we can funnel contacts and information quickly, efficiently, and to the right people.
Wow. I just read this great article on the effectiveness of Social Media specifically Facebook and it made me realize the vast possibilities for my organization. Take a minute to read
Facebook's frighteningly impressive ad potential and see what I mean. I realize this article is geared more for the B2C then the B2B but I think that is changing even as we speak.
Yes, social media marketing is one piece of the pie, yet tying it to specific offline activity is key. As a marketer responsible for Lead Generation, it is one thing to get alot of leads but it is quite another to actually have the majority of those leads be highly qualified. My goal is to create a healthy sales funnel and consequent sales pipeline. Now, with lead scoring every lead you receive can be a high quality lead. So, when will we initiate trigger marketing based on where someone goes on our Facebook or website? Now is the answer!
What is cool is the ability to send a person a highly personal communique which then links out to a specific microsite or purl. They get to then be engaged with marketing content relevant to them and all the while we are scoring them on thier behavior and determining our next line of communication. Kind of like predicitive modeling. Yes, digital marketing has taken on a whole new life and it is time to join the fun but don't just jump in, be deliberate, methodical and open to change. Make sure your technology for karketing is the best... meaning use a robust, easy to use marketing software tool. We use
Aprimo Marketing Studio and love it. What do you use?
When I network with most marketing professionals these days, there is a lot of discussion about how to effectively populate the sales funnel. Conventional wisdom includes such initiatives as telemarketing, online advertising, cold calling, email blasts, webinars, tradeshows, etc. But, with all the messages that are hitting people today (over 2000 every day), we're all figuring out ways to "stop the clutter." So, how do we effectively get our messages out?
Look at supplementing your outbound marketing initiatives with inbound techniques, so that your potential customers come looking for you! Build organic search with key words, get your thought leaders out on the social media sites and get them talking about what they know best. Build an online reputation that draws in your prospects.
How do you and your company balance inbound and outbound initiatives? What's working, what isn't?
It's the same old story we have been telling every week:
Your resources are shrinking every day, yet Sales is asking for more and better prospects in the sales funnel. You're trying to stretch your collateral out to last through the end of the year, and you're trying desperately to show ROI in marketing post campaign.
You have one more event this year, and are getting a lot of pressure to cancel, since ROI is so difficult to measure.
So, do you go to the event, deplete your tiny budget even more, taking the chance that nothing good will come of it but the stories from Sales about late night escapades???
Turn to
Aprimo Marketing Studio, silly!!
Stick a banner ad on the conference website, and watch the click-throughs to your landing page. Push out those emails to the pre-conference attendee list, and watch them show up in real time to your site. And, manage your conference activities and expenditures down to the penny by utilizing online management software.
Go ahead, go to the event. Just be sure to manage your activities, your collateral, your campaigns and your demand generation efforts online, then go Twitter about it!!!
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