How To Focus On Your Marketing Plan
I started writing this article a month ago but became sidetracked when I realized that marketing plans were as unavoidable (and as important) as Death and Taxes. And while we all try to avoid these topics, the best way to deal with them is straight on. The best approach to dealing with uncertainty is to be prepared and to have a plan.
If you haven’t started, you’re already late. It’s that time of year for creating your marketing plan. Having crafted a few myself, I am writing this article to share my experiences and tips on what has worked and what didn’t.
Marketing, Death and Taxes
So Marketing may not be as unavoidable as death and taxes, but lately it is becoming harder and harder to escape. As a marketing professional, I am not proud of our reputation as SPAM-ers. It seems as if the lower our outbound marketing response rates get, the greater the number of emails, phone calls, pop-up ads and other interruptions we throw at our weary populace.
As a consumer, I’m fed up. I refuse to answer cold calls at work or home. I can only watch TV shows on my DVR. If I’m forced to watch live TV like the news or sports, I pause it for 20 minutes so I can fast forward through the commercials or I multi-task and catch up on email or surf the web during commercials.
Enjoy A Demand Funnel Cocktail
I was recently asked by the good folks over at Focus to participate in an exciting project and the first edition of the “Book of Funnels“. The challenge was this: put all your thoughts on the marketing and sales funnel into one page and use a picture to tell your story.
I have to admit that this project was a lot of fun. At the time, I was leading a large online demand generation program and had some thoughts about the state of the marketing and sales funnel. And I agree with Craig Rosenberg at Focus, that “every organization should make the effort to depict its revenue funnel on one page. It serves as the basis for your sales and marketing strategy.”
Why Is Search…So…Darn…Hard?!
If you’re in digital marketing, you know what I mean just reading the title. You’re sitting at your desk and the email lands in your inbox with a thud: someone important in your company just did a search in a major search engine on a keyword they thought was important and your paid search ad didn’t show up.
You’ve explained it all before, maybe even 100 times. But the bottom line: search is really hard. Hard to explain. Hard to execute effectively without blowing through your whole marketing budget. So I am copying below the response I have cut and pasted into more emails than I can count. The answers are more relevant to paid search (Pay-Per-Click or PPC) but the keyword points can apply to organic (Search Engine Optimization or SEO) search as well.
Be A Hero: Choose Appointment Setting for Your Next Campaign
With all of the discussion on marketing and sales alignment, I thought it made sense to bring in a sales perspective and guidance to the site. The following guest post is another important topic for sales and comes from my colleague, Rob Krekstein.
Telemarketing services are continuing to grow in popularity, due to the low cost and high ROI; however, the difficulty lies in which telemarketing tactic to utilize. In my 20 years of sales and telemarketing experience I have implemented all different types of telemarketing tactics and found that appointment setting provides high value for multiple reasons.
5 Sales Closing Techniques
With all of the discussion on marketing and sales, I thought it made sense to bring in a sales perspective and guidance to the site. The following excerpt is certainly important to sales and comes from my colleague, Rob Krekstein. This post also appeared recently in B2C Marketing Insider.
I have been a student of selling and sales management for more than twenty years, and I have used a grand total of five “closes” during that time. You must always remember that at some point in every sales discussion, you must “ASK” for the business. Here are brief descriptions of these five closes:
The New Marketing Accountability
The most popular posts on B2B Marketing Insider over the last few weeks have a common theme: accountability and The Role of B2B Marketing . You can review both How To Align Marketing With Sales and Marketing Leads: Quality Vs. Quantity for more detail on the emerging need for marketing to drive real sales and to quantify efforts.
Late last week, I responded to a post by my new friend Adam Needles, VP Marketing of Left Brain Marketing. In “Revising Our Demand Generation Definition as B2B Marketers” Adam does an excellent job of thoroughly putting a call to action out to all marketers that demand generation needs to be end-to-end. He also asks us to be accountable to results. I told him that I almost stood up and clapped. I was so excited, I thought I should recount my response here.
How To Align Marketing With Sales
This is arguably the single most important topic for marketing: how to align with sales. If you are asking if we need to align with sales, go find a new profession. If you think marketing is much more important than sales, update your resume. If you think marketing objectives are about something other than sales, then it’s time to start networking.
Five years into my early sales career, I realized that I was a mildly successful sales person mainly because I focused on relationships, not selling. And…Marketing needed lots of help. So I followed my frustration into a marketing career and have never looked back. In this post I will provide some of the latest thinking along with my own thoughts on how to better align marketing with sales.
Integrate Social Media Into Your Marketing Mix
As a results-oriented marketer you want to only deploy your precious time and budget into marketing programs that work. At the same time, you know that social media has changed the marketing landscape: shouting to prospects with endless email offers may produce leads but you’re worried about the longer term implications to your market.
You may have heard that social media can improve not only your more traditional tactics but also allows you to engage with your prospects sooner in the buying cycle. It may even allow you to identify those influential network hubs whose recommendations can mean big referral business for you. So how do you incorporate social media into the marketing mix?
The 4 Cs of Social Media
Social media is a paradox: it is the physical representation of a revolution in the way consumers obtain (and create) information. At the same time, it is just another marketing channel. The reason I believe marketers are so confused about social media is because of this paradox.
And the reaction of many is to rush into the technology. This misses the point, of course, since social media is about customer relationships and not really about the technology at all. In the past, I have written about the challenges of Social Media and The Brand, the power of Integrating Social Media and Search and asked Why Do You Tweet? Social Media And Your Personal Brand. So I thought it was best to identify a clear framework for marketers to use to create successful social media strategies.
