Seven Ways to Use Print Marketing to Win More Business
Don’t overlook printed materials when you plan your marketing budgets. Printed media can reach customers in a way that online media can’t.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Print, tradeshows, live events – all traditional marketing activities that are still highly relevant today.
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A Better Way to Set Your Marketing Budget
The best way to develop a marketing budget is to treat that budget as if it’s an investment — something that delivers an expected, quantified return over time. In order to build a strong business case around this concept, a marketer must understand the dynamics of their funnel. Take a deep dive into how new potential customers enter in the top of the funnel, how much you need to invest to find those prospects and help them move through the revenue cycle …
With this model in place, marketers can run scenarios that show how the budget translates into more leads, opportunities, and wins down the funnel. (They can also quantify the impact budget cuts will have.) At most companies, any significant investment must be supported by a business case that shows it will deliver a “hurdle rate”, or minimum rate of return. If you can make that case, the CFO generally approves it. Of course, some types of activities — demand generation comes to mind — are easier to tie to ROI than others, such as brand-building or PR. But no matter what the activity, make “worst case”, “expected case”, and “best case” assumptions to show the range of possible outcomes.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author does a nice job explaining some of the ways to do a marketing investment analysis, and even makes a plea to treat marketing just like other business investments, even capital spending (are you listening FASB?)
We ourselves have tried to contribute to this change in mindset, for example, we’ve presented real-life data that shows the more you invest in marketing, the more your leads increase and costs per sale or lead decrease to larger growth (here).
We even offer a quick, low-cost service, a Marketing Investment Analysis, that will help you figure out what a rationale marketing investment in your business should be.
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Introducing the new Google+
Sales Renewal’s insight:
A complete redesign, putting Collections and Communities front and center. Have you used the new Google+? We like the streamlined look and content that seems more accessible. Let us know your thoughts!
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Don’t Let Silos Destroy the Customer Experience
Every company has silos. They separate people from each other and from information – and generally speaking, the bigger the company, the bigger the silos. They can exist along regional, country,
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Integrated marketing is critical for a good customer experience. It means breaking down silos not only between individual marketing tactics, but across product lines, between marketing and sales, and with upper management, too.
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A Better Way to Calculate the ROI of Your Marketing Investment
“Marketers have access to data [today] that allows them to track individuals’ various interactions with a brand before their purchase, and better understand what role each interaction … played in the eventual sale.
This approach, called “attribution modeling, ” allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle, and understand its role in the revenues that ultimately result.
Developing an attribution model is a gradual process. You can’t get there all at once. There are four key stages in the journey:”
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The authors lay out an excellent road map, but like most things in life, the devil is in the details. Sales Renewal, as Growth Spurt readers know, focuses on small businesses and the details are particularly devilish for them since they don’t have the technical & financial resources of the big boys.
Almost all small businesses rely on Google Analytics (GA) for the authors’ Step 1 because it’s free and will tell them what marketing activity to credit for bringing the visitor to the site (ad click, natural search, etc), which pages they clicked through, and whether in the end they converted into a lead or sale. The challenge small businesses face therefore isn’t “data in different databases” but the limits of GA.
For example, imagine a visitor who comes to a site by clicking an online ad, clicks thru pages 1, 2 & 3 and then purchases something. So using a simple attribution model, you might think GA will credit the ad campaign for the sale. It turns out, however, that it does not: if takes more than 30 minutes for them to click from page 2 to page 3, GA loses track and considers the page 3 click to be an entirely new session. GA will report 2 different visitors (the first who came from the ad, the second who magically started out on page 3) and so does not attribute the sale to the ad click.
Sales Renewal’s business model (sharing the risk & reward) makes us very big believers in ROI-focused marketing but it’s a very challenging thing to do, especially for small businesses. That’s one of the reasons, for instance, that we’ve been developing our SR Analytics system for 6 years.
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How to Market to Goldfish: What Decreasing Attention Spans Mean for Marketers [Infographic]
Discover the facts about the shortening human attention span and what we, as marketers, can do to combat it.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
You got us at goldfish. But it’s good to know that there are ways to capture the attention of prospects and customers just long enough to take notice of you.
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How to Leverage the True Potential of Landing Pages
In this article you will learn how to create high-converting landing pages that will encourage your prospects to take action every time.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
How do you know how much content is enough for an effective landing page? Here is some good advice on what to consider in terms of content and style when creating a landing page that converts.
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Hearts on Twitter
Stars move over, hearts take their place on Twitter.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Apparently, stars were confusing Twitter users. (“At times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.”)
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How to Pick the Best Booth Location at Exhibitions
Your stall location has a very strong impact on your ability to drive traffic to your booth and collect exhibition leads. Pick it carefully!
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Not all trade shows and exhibitions offer the opportunity to select your location, but if you are provided that option, these are some good tips.
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11 Downright Spooky Email Marketing Stats
We all have our fears: Heights. Spiders. That horrifying clown from the movie It. But nothing scares today’s marketers quite as much as cold, hard data. That’s right – there are numbers out there…
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Scary, maybe, but these 11 statistics also point the way to opportunities to get it right. Boooo!
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