Marketing I/O

Driving Marketing Success

Getting the most from your marketing starts with aligning goals, strategy, and budget with the appropriate tactics and tools. In our experience, however, most organizations tend to manage marketing at a tactical level, thus the proverbial tail that wags the dog. As a result, business initiatives fall short, and the ability to tie budget to pipeline becomes a pipedream.

Do you have an inbound strategy? What are you doing for outbound? Is your CRM system organized by segments such as customers, prospects, partners, etc.? Are you using CRM and marketing automation tools to drive campaigns?  Finally, do you have full transparency of campaigns and how they flow through the funnel and convert to sales?

If you said yes to these questions, congratulations. You need not read any further. Consider yourself a marketing rockstar.

However, given the complexity of marketing campaigns and automation tools, it is difficult to orchestrate the many different moving parts, especially when you have multiple products and services targeting different personas and market segments. To successfully generate leads and secure opportunities, organizations must be both strategic and tactical. Failure to do so, as Nucleus Research reports, results in 30 percent of salespeople wasting time pursuing improperly qualified leads.

Marketing Automation and CRM Integration is Key

Oftentimes an organization’s content strategy and respective campaigns are misaligned with their business goals. Subsequently, there is little or no connection between marketing and sales. Within marketing, CRM and automation tools are typically managed in silos if they are even managed at all.

“Eighty-five percent of companies that buy CRM software to automate sales do not pick the right tools because they fail to define business objectives or to develop processes for meeting objectives.” – Gartner

Having supported hundreds of campaigns, Springboard understands the process and your desire to achieve marketing nirvana. The illustration below – Marketing I/O – offers a framework to understand the flow between your business and marketing objectives. It also provides a snapshot of the tools and tactics needed, and how they can be organized to support inbound and outbound engagement.

“Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.” – The Annuitas Group

POSE Methodology

Most campaigns start with the creation of an ebook, blog post, or landing page that promotes a webinar or white paper gated behind a submission form. Each of these tactics are excellent ways to engage new and existing customers. However, without an overall marketing strategy and the right tools in place to track engagement, you will be hard-pressed to fully understand the impact of these activities.

Springboard’s POSE methodology – paid, owned, social and earned – provides a way for organizations to identify the activities and channels needed within their respective marketing mix. Once identified, a content strategy can be developed along with an editorial calendar that will drive the campaigns and timeline.

The Right Tools & Process

According to a survey by Ascend2, a research and marketing company, for 61% of companies, the lack of an effective strategy is a significant barrier to conversion rate optimization success.”

Most organizations embrace CRM and marketing automation tools prematurely. They often deploy software without clarity on the overall business and marketing strategy. As a result, one-off campaigns perpetuate chaos within these systems, stifle engagement, and most importantly impede the flow of valuable leads and sales opportunities.

Insights & Analytics

In their Marketing Technology Trends Survey, Ascend2 cites that sixty percent of marketing technology systems remain only marginally integrated or not integrated at all.

When configured properly, CRM and marketing automation tools can equip organizations with valuable insights and analytics. These metrics can track the journey of a customer or prospect from the source of their interest via an inbound or outbound campaign, to the type of content they viewed, and even the webinars they participated in.

According to VB Insight, 80% organizations using marketing automation tools saw their number of leads increase and 77% saw the number of conversions increase.

This enables organizations to track customer engagement from the top of the funnel to conversion and effectively manage their pipeline. Having visibility also allows you to understand the impact of your marketing return on investment and exactly how it is driving business opportunities.

Free Marketing I/O Report Card

Do you want to learn how to improve your marketing spend and achieve more quantifiable and tangible results? Find out how your CRM and marketing automation tools can be optimized to improve marketing return on investment.