By Bill McGinnis
Let’s get to it, here are the 4 Steps:
Know your buyer
Marketing effectiveness begins with the customer. You have to know your audience if you want to communicate effectively. You also need to know, which Accounts most critical to each step of the buying process, which person in each organization is critical and which resources your buyers consume at each stage of the buying process. You already have the data…you just need to put it together in a meaningful way, aligning your marketing communications accordingly. Here’s how:
The Contact Roles on your Opportunities tell us what type of Accounts buy your products and who at those Accounts drove the decisions.
Analyzing Eloqua and Google Analytics data not only proves which campaigns created and accelerated the sales cycle, but also which specific activities and assets created and accelerated the sales cycle.
Upgrade your data
Now that you know who your buyers are and which content they engage with at each step of the buying process, we can benchmark your current data quality and implement the specific processes that will drive the biggest returns. You must have complete and accurate data on the right influencers and buyers within the right accounts to drive great results.
Here are the 6 categories of data quality you need analyzed:
After analyzing, you can now enrich, append and otherwise add data to fill in the holes and increase the size of your database.
Fine tune your nurturing
Nurturing campaigns are about effectively influencing your buyer’s positive and negative perceptions about purchasing your products at the right times during the buying process.
Steps:
- Identify which segments and at what buying stages additional nurturing is needed
- Identify enhancements to your nurture programs based on your segmentation strategy
- Identify the touch points that will be most effective, leverage the knowledge of the interactions that your most profitable customers have engaged with
- Ensure that all of your nurture campaigns are working together effectively and that you’re not over or under communicating with your audience
A fine-tuned campaign is like a fine-tuned engine fueled by quality data.
Optimize
The amount of revenue that your marketing programs are influencing by is the ultimate metric to help marketers understand what is working and what is not. . However, you still need to track other short-term metrics because you can’t wait for months to judge the success of your programs when your sales cycles take months, or longer, to close.
You need to know more about who you’re influencing and whether or not it’s making a difference to pipeline. Are you generating influence with the people that really matter? Which accounts are engaging with your nurturing content? Are your nurturing efforts improving the velocity and contract value of deals as they progress through the pipeline?
There is a common theme to each step, sub-step and the overall methodology: Data
Data drives decisions, it tells us where to start and how to take the next step. It tells us who we should be targeting and if we hit the bullseye. It triggers communications; it tells us if we are on the right path and where to steer if we are not.
How are you driving towards peak performance in your marketing strategy?
Go to www.sojournsolutions.com/data and get started.
Before your competition does.
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