If I Ran Your Marketing

The following is a letter that I composed recently for a client. All the names have been changed, but the points and processes are valid for most modest corporations in particular those that sell services that need a lengthy sales cycle.

Dear Client,

I have definitely enjoyed working with your marketing and advertising manager and studying about your organization. As we talked about, I wanted to share with you a more complete view of your organization and where, if I was operating marketing full time, I would be driving you to go.

Appropriate now, your company is seeking at advertising and marketing as an event (or series of events) as opposed to a method. And it wants to be a process that includes all aspects of the corporation. From when you reach a prospect the pretty initially time until that consumer recommends you to his preferred friend, raving about your firm, marketing and advertising should be involved in each and every step of the process.

Correct now, you have had your advertising manager focused on the front end of that procedure - lead generation. But her understanding of it, as it has been practiced by your organization has been to continually get new many people to sell to. And this is a highly costly way to produce leads for a product and service that has a lengthy sales cycle.

You have a fairly total list of all the corporations in your major markets that fit your ideal consumer profile. Yes, there are a couple of new ones out there, but most are recognized to you. What you do not have is accurate contact and role data. And that is where I would be focusing the telemarketing team on. Get to know the ideal people, roles and emails, and get permission to market to them by way of e-mail. You get that permission by having something of value to offer them - educational seminars/webinars whitepapers 1-on-1 delivers. You are working on some of these, but we can make them more value oriented and less product-focused.

Then, we market to names we know with offers that speak to the complications they have just about every day and want to solve. The important to performing this successfully is to do it consistently. Only 20%-25% of the consumers you e-mail will ever open the e-mail, so we have to have to write subject lines and headlines for the 75%-80% that don't open it. And we need to reach them on a monthly basis - not with the similar type of give every month - but with varied delivers: Newsletters, seminars, provides, surveys, and a lot more.

More than time, these nurture prospects will convert to ones that want to actively engage in a buying method. They will see you as source of useful expertise and reach out when they have a predicament that you have said you know how to solve.

In order to be able to do this kind of marketing, your marketing and advertising staff wants to have an understanding of the problems you solve and the benefits your customers get from working with your goods and services. This means I would have them visiting with shoppers, interviewing your sales team and item managers, and I would also have them going on sales calls with your sales team so they see what the "real world" is like.

When a prospect decides to engage with the sales team, the marketing method should certainly continue in a new way, along side the sales method. Your sales team wants to be setting the expectation that they will be asking for, and expecting, referrals to other providers that can use your services (due to the fact they are going to be so pleased), and they really should be setting the expectation that any consumer, at any time, can be made use of as a reference. This is why you are going to make confident they are satisfied.

Your marketing team should also stay engaged, due to the fact at some point in the purchasing method, if the prospect decides they are not ready to obtain but (and by but, I mean within a six month window), that prospect should go back to marketing and advertising for ongoing nurture advertising and get in touch with. You do not want costly sales individuals producing calls that basically say "are you prepared to buy but?" when there are much less pricey alternatives.

Once a prospect decides to grow to be a consumer, there should be a process of welcoming them. A new consumer kit of sorts that welcomes them to your customer family. It does not have to be elaborate, but it must have a welcome letter, get in touch with info and a summary of the causes they purchased and the objectives you are going to aid them accomplish. Depending on the size of the client, you could even do some thing like put the overall project program on a tablet pc and deliver it to them as component of the kickoff.

And by way of the sales method and into the customer kickoff, your team need to be reinforcing the notion that you will ask them for referrals. At the kickoff, it is a fantastic time to ask them to begin thinking about who they can refer you to.

Once the project has hit completion, you should really have a outcomes evaluation scheduled with them for six months later. That is a fantastic time to restate their goals for them and measure how you are helping them to achieve them. And when you are performing a fantastic job (as I know you do) then it is also a good time to get quotes to use on your internet internet site and in your advertising and marketing materials.

With your existing prospects, I would have advertising and marketing taking an active role. We want to leverage those relationships for referrals, testimonials and further sales. Your customers need to have to have normal contact in the form of both a consumer oriented newsletter - about their certain product, and about you - and some form of an in-person or web based monthly user group that assists to create a community. Those user groups are outstanding opportunities to introduce further merchandise and services and solicit referrals and quotes. We also want to be confident to identify the evangelist buyers in the group - those that will actively refer you, and make certain we are giving them tools to aid promote you to other people they know.

Underlying all of this are three further tactics - a broader content strategy, a internet advertising method and an alliance referral method. The content material strategy is how you speak about yourself on your website. Each formally in the "standard" content material and informally by way of a weblog and other social media tools. This is exactly where being close to your consumers and interviewing them and surveying them becomes so valuable considering that you want as much of that content as feasible to be in the customer's vocabulary.

The internet marketing method leverages your content for Search engine optimization purposes - writing about what persons are searching for and using PPC advertising that also attracts the exact same type of looking.

The alliance technique is exactly where your sales team and management contribute the most to marketing and advertising. The important is locating solid referral type partners where you both serve the identical perfect customer segment with complimentary items or services. If your team is spending their time identifying, nurturing and engaging those relationships, they will be developing a steady stream of self-generated leads that keep them busy lengthy term.

Lastly, this requirements to be supported by systems employed by both sales and advertising and marketing - a properly defined CRM program and procedure for rating prospect and a decent e-mail marketing and tracking technique that tracks not only open rates, but ultimately, can tie together the history of what prospects have received, what they responded to and how they responded.

The 1 area I certainly would not spend time on appropriate now is your branding. You have a wonderful name and a fine graphical layout in your collateral. There are some adjustments we can make to get additional advertising and marketing leverage from some things, but overall, that is in great shape.

I hope you have identified this valuable. It is a lot of function, and the initially time you do a number of of these points, it will take time to get it proper. And bear in mind, you don't have to do it all at once either.

Type regards,

Dan