The marketing department has long been labeled the department to always spend money, unable to prove whether what they’re doing is effective. In turn, the sales department is left to wonder what business the marketing department is actually bringing in? In a previous career, that blended sales and marketing, I was exposed to exactly this situation. We’d purchase newspaper and magazine ads, design and distribute brochures, write editorial for publications, send out email blasts to our database, sometimes even send out snail mail (ugh!), all of the typical outbound marketing techniques you can possibly think of. We never really knew exactly how well any of our efforts worked. Now, six years on I have witnessed the industry evolve and it’s so exciting to me to see how much sales and marketing technology has advanced and how much it revolutionizes the marketing function and allows for better synergy between the teams.
Sales and marketing technology is, without doubt, something every business that deals in B2B sales should be investing in and here’s two big reasons why:
1. You can analyze EVERYTHING!
By running your marketing campaigns through your marketing software you can track everything. For example, here are just some of the things you can track:
Social media posts
- Figure out the best time of day to share blog posts across all of your different social media channels.
- Define which social media channels bring in the most interactions with your buyer persona. For example, with LinkedIn groups, you can see which posts aren’t delivering any interactions. Once you’ve tried a variety of tactics to get likes, comments and shares and you realize you still get nothing, you know with confidence that it’s time to leave that particular group and find another, more suited one that hopefully your buyer personas are virtually hanging out in.
Blog articles
- Figure out the best time of day to publish a blog post.
- Define the type of language in your blog posts or social sharing phrases that gets the better response from your buyer personas.
- See what topics are getting more reactions.
Emails
- Decipher what day of the week and time of day are best to send emails to your buyer personas.
- What type of subject lines get the most open rates.
- What type of emails get the most click-through rates.
Landing pages
- Which landing pages are getting the most form submissions?
- What layout seems to work best for your industry and for your buyer personas?
Keywords
- You can see which ones are being searched for most, which ones you can target to increase visitation to your website and which ones you shouldn’t even bother with.
Leads and potential leads
- You can view a person’s journey from when they start as visitor, to when the convert into a marketing qualified lead, to a sales qualified lead and finally into a customer.
Workflows
- You can see which lead nurture emails are getting the best open rate, click-through rate etc, see which ones aren’t performing as well. You can see where leads are getting stuck or dropping out of your funnel. This allows you to fine tune your emails and adjust your funnel for optimal results.
There’s so much more you can do with the right technology. You can experiment to see what tactics work best for your buyer personas and you can collect all that crucial data to continuously sharpen your marketing campaigns so that they turn into slick lead generation machines.
2. You can build up customer, and potential customer, profiles
By understanding your current customers you can then tailor your products or services to what they want. As you know, upselling or cross-selling to an existing customer requires far less resources than trying to bring in a whole new customer.
By collecting data of your potential customers (leads) once they start to interact with your business either via your website, a social media post, a blog post etc, You can track:
- Where a lead has come from to get your website.
- What pages they’ve visited.
- How long they’ve been on each page.
- What free content they’ve downloaded from your website.
- What social posts they’ve clicked on and interacted with and so much more.
All of this valuable information gives your sales people a head start. They’ve already begun to get to know their leads and they haven’t even picked up the phone to talk to them yet.
Every business should be taking advantage of what’s on offer in the market now. From budget to enterprise level sales and marketing software, there is something out there to fit any businesses’ B2B marketing needs. As a marketer or business owner, all you have to do is invest the time to find the right software, incorporate it into your business and watch what a positive difference it makes.
If you’re interested in understanding how your current B2B marketing is performing and how you can build a lean, mean, lead generation machine, download our free B2B Marketing Health Check tool.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: The Role Of Technology In Sales And Marketing
More Sales & Marketing articles from Business 2 Community:
- Build Trust In Marketing With the Right Influencers
- 5 Storytelling Lessons From Game Of Thrones
- Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Integrating e-Signature Into The B2B Sales Cycle
- PPC Vs Inbound Marketing – Which One Works Best?
- Why Is Customer Experience Now an IT Problem? (Part 1)
