Part 3: Better Marketing with Closed-Loop Marketing
This is the 4 of a 5 blog series on closed-loop marketing.
"Closed-loop marketing enables us to do better marketing"
Closed-loop reporting is one of the most powerful tools that online marketers have at our disposal. Not only does it allow us to demonstrate the work’s value to our bosses, organizations and clients, but it also enables us to do better marketing.
Once you understand what marketing activities are generating leads, customers and revenue, you can double down on what’s working, and cut out what’s not. At the end of the day, marketing is about generating revenue. A good marketing team should be like a money generating machine - you put a dollar in and you get two dollars out (or at least $1.25).
Focus on the right channels & offers
Closed-loop marketing directs your attention to the most powerful conversion events and channels. By looking at the sources and offers that traditionally brought in new customers for your organization, you will be able to identify the behavior you need to engage in to qualify leads and push them down the sales funnel.
New Customers
Deliver clearer results to your boss
The data you can gather thanks to closed-loop marketing will also help you build your authority and support the decisions you make in front of your boss. It shows that your strategy is driven by evidence and doesn’t rely on abstract theories or assumptions. That will also help you build powerful marketing presentations for company-wide meetings or when jumping in comarketing partnerships.
Gain insights about your target audience
By gaining a 360-degree view of your sales cycle — looking at an user’s first visit to your website, browsing through their activities and identifying their last conversion event--you collect insights about the ideal prospect. This information can help you build a target persona.
Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.
Shorten your sales cycle
By learning more about your leads and targeting them with smarter communication, you decrease the amount of time that it takes them to convert into customers. If a prospect with specific characteristics (e.g., a B2B company, with 100 employees, located in Northern America) follows a certain trajectory of actions to turn into a customer, then you can take that path and apply it to a larger segment of that demographic profile.
As an example, let’s explore the lead intelligence of a company that became a customer.
We see that initially the prospect became interested in our ebook “101 Awesome Marketing Quotes.” A few days after they downloaded that ebook and converted into a lead, they visited our pricing page. That behavior, combined with the customer’s demographics data, could dictate our behavior-based communications with similar type of companies. In other words, we can encourage new leads of this type to visit our pricing page and get some information on HubSpot’s plans.
Closed-loop marketing also enables you to achieve alignment between sales and marketing and define the operations between the two departments. Here are some of the other benefits emerging from the integration between your marketing software and CRM solutions:
Sales Assignment Rules
The type of campaign, lead grade or conversion event—all insights coming from your marketing system--can trigger workflows in your CRM system.
Lead Scoring
Once you mark a sale as “closed won” in your CRM, you can work backwards to assign point values to the lead’s demographics or specific actions taken on your website.
Lead Nurturing
As a result of your lead scoring mechanism, you will easily identify leads with low lead grades. Send them to a lead nurturing campaign rather than a sales person.
Custom Lead Scoring
You can also customize the way you assign high grades to your leads. For instance, a grade could be boosted if the lead converted multiple times on your website.
Setting Monetary Goals
Tying your marketing software to your CRM system also allows you to set a campaign goal with a dollar sign on it. Trade shows are a great example of the need for setting monetary goals.
Set the right goals and expectations
By knowing precisely what your visitor-to-lead and lead-to-customer conversion rates have been historically, you can set the right goals and expectations in the future. To ensure that you are moving in the right direction, you can also compare your current performance to last month’s and create a daily or a monthly leads waterfall.
Wondering how to build a daily leads waterfall graph? First, set a goal for the total number of leads. It might be a month or a quarter, but start with your sales goals and your conversion rates. For instance, if 5% of your leads become customers and you need 7 new customers next month, then you need 140 leads next month to hit your goal.
Then, take the total number of leads (in this case, 140), divide by the number of sales reps you have and the number of days in the month to identify a goal for the number of leads you need to provide each sales rep with each day. Now you just have to create the daily leads waterfall graph, with the x-axis representing the day of the month, and the y-axis - the percentage of the leads goal you have attained.
If you are using marketing software many will create this graph for you automatically using either a custom goal that you can set, the last month, the month a year ago, or a 3-month average as the goal you track against.
Keep your cost per lead low
As we already mentioned, closed-loop gives you insights on your most powerful inbound marketing offers and enables you to set realistic goals for both marketing and sales. These two factors are key in determining how you are going to spend your marketing budget and they dictate where your marketing dollars will go into.
For instance, if you were looking to host a trade show, you can easily decide on the type of offer you are going to promote at the event. You have already identified what content helps you convert more leads into customers, now you just have to think of a creative way to present it in front of your audience.
Similarly, you can do paid advertising efficiently. Just take the ideal lead demographic information that you discovered thanks to connecting your marketing software to your CRM, combine that with your best performing offers, and you will be sure to attract some new sales without wasting money.
If you want to dig even deeper download the eBook
Here's the series:
• How Closed-Loop Marketing Works
• How to Set-Up Closed-Loop Marketing
• Better Marketing with Closed-Loop Marketing << you just read this