While there’s certainly no ‘one-size-fits-all’ answer to channel marketing, our team whole-heartedly believes that the principle of joined-up marketing is the right direction.
Similar to siloed systems in an end-user’s operation, your individual marketing systems – and campaigns – can’t reach their full potential if they’re not linked to each other, as well as the broader initiatives and goals of the business.
If your email marketing and web platforms aren’t linked, for example, how can you tell who in your mailing list is also interacting with your website? In the case of specific campaigns, if you’re running a fibre campaign, and not linking those marketing emails to a recent case study on a successful fibre deployment that’s available on your website, then you’re missing a trick!
Better data
Once your marketing channels are all linked together, you’ve got a much more accurate bird’s-eye-view of all your initiatives and their performance.
This is ideal when focusing on volume lead generation at events, for example, as data captured at the event can be automatically migrated into campaign workflows. This ensures leads are nurtured in with relevant, product-specific emails.
As leads interact with those nurture emails, you can start identifying the contacts most likely to lead to a sale. That might be based on all the other interactions they have with your website, social media posts, or landing pages.
Having all that information within one platform then makes it far easier to equate what’s been invested in those events to tangible leads and new customers!
Automating workflows
Growing your business leads to more work to complete than hours in the workday. As your team grows, marketing teams have to wear multiple hats, managing social channels, campaigns and events.
Not only can this lead to staff burn-out and drops in morale, but creativity takes time and mental space. Having marketers rushing to complete tasks won’t deliver the most creative and engaging campaigns.
Automating your marketing workflows saves time for your team, improves morale, and ensures your leads get the content they want to see in a timely manner.
Going back to that fibre campaign I mentioned, if a lead reads an email and clicks a link to learn more about the benefits of fibre for a specific vertical, you could set your workflow to send them templated emails that provide more vertical-specific content periodically.
In turn, your business becomes perceived as more of a trusted advisor than simply trying to sell something, building trust and credibility between you and your next potential customer.
The templated workflow emails could even include personalisation too, so the emails are addressed to the person rather than a generic ‘hello’! This helps increase engagement, as it gives the impression of a person sending the email rather than a bot.
However, these automated workflows require a solid CRM platform, and as a HubSpot Platinum Partner, you can guess who we tend to recommend.
There are plenty of alternatives available, and any marketing agency worth their salt should be able to work with whatever CRM is already in use if the functionality is there.
The best ROI
When the broader goals of the business inform your marketing efforts, you can make your resources work harder. Consider the fibre upsell campaign again – you want to remove as many steps in the sales cycle as possible, to make the prospect’s journey to becoming a customer as smooth as possible.
Linking appropriate case studies in emails is one way. Adding a call to action on that same email – such as sending clickers directly to a page linked to a salesperson’s calendar – makes it far easier for the conversation to start.
Even mentioning a recent awards win could be the difference between a potential customer making contact or not. All your marketing initiatives need to work together to deliver the best return on investment.
The challenges the channel faces are nothing new – but you can break through them by making your marketing work harder than it already is. Delivering a higher level of engagement with prospects will ultimately lead to more sales!