When Should Engineering Marketers Pass a Lead to Sales?
Find out how engineers answered the question: at what stage of your investigations into a new product or service do you prefer to engage with a vendor representative as opposed to conducting independent research?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
1, 000 engineers were asked: “At what stage of your investigations into a new product or service do you prefer to engage with a vendor representative as opposed to conducting independent research?”
The answers could be:
- At the beginning of the process to discover the potential solutions
- Later in the process when I need to dig deeper into a few possible solutions
- Near the end of the process, when I need pricing or delivery information
The question was asked to determine the right marketing approach, from sending engineers directly to sales to nurturing them through several touch points prior to passing on the lead.
Read on for the results.
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How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media to Grow Their Online Presence – for Free!
A large business with widespread consumer appeal can naturally expect organic social media growth in terms of followers and interaction: people already know your name, are interested in your brand and are looking for answers. In this case, you may spend more time interacting with customers and keeping up with questions than you do just promoting content.
But we were curious: does this mean that if you are a small business with fewer resources, or in an industry not known for an interest in social media, you should abandon all social media efforts?
The simple answer: No!
We don’t mean that you can sit back, do nothing and watch the Likes roll in. But after conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free.
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Which Social Media Sites Will Work Best for My Small Business?
The answer will vary based on your particular market, but we recommend starting with the “big 3”: Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Each platform allows you to interact with different audiences that when used together allows you to create a unique community of peers, prospects, clients, and more. The key to getting the most out of your efforts is to understand these differences and use them to your best advantage.
But first things, first. Before we get into the details, let’s talk strategy, because whether you’re a large or small business, you shouldn’t “do social media” for the sake of doing social media.
What is the goal of your social media? Is it to increase sales? Is it to build awareness of your business? In our test, we’re focusing on the latter.
The next step is to set expectations for the three different platforms and understand how all three will contribute to your unique community. Our test confirmed that we can:
- Use Twitter to build relationships with others in the same industry
- Use Facebook to build a solid base of interested fans
- Use Google+ to increase reach among those who may not be familiar with your business
Finally, figure out what content you are going to promote. Do you have original blog posts that others might find interesting? Can you share images of recently completed projects? Is your business part of a larger industry of which you can curate news to share with followers?
Once you understand your content, you can set up a schedule for finding, creating and publishing on each social media platform.
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So how does my small business use Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all at the same time, but in different ways?
Use Twitter to Build Relationships with Others in Your Industry
Even if your individual business is small, chances are it is part of a somewhat larger industry. And even if you are in an industry whose customers do not actively interact with you on social media, chances are your peers are ready and willing to “talk”. This is where Twitter can be of great benefit to you. You can use Twitter to build a business community which could lead to partnerships, referrals and even potential customers. If you can create this connection with your peers, then your content has as greater chance of being noticed by other businesses and shared among your industry and beyond. Here are three ways to help get you into the game:
1. Start following others in your industry. For example, if you have a painting company, follow others with “painting” in their name. At the very least, you may get some good sources of content from these companies, but they will most likely follow you back. Both you and your followers gain sources of content, and you gain new followers as well. Win-Win.
Our test: By following this simple step over the course of 12 months, we managed to organically grow followers for one client by 93%! By growing followers, we also grew impressions and interaction in a similar fashion, which means all of our content is now seen by a much larger audience.
2. Promote your original content via Twitter. Share it with those in your industry. Tweet at specific people to get noticed (think @ and #), and tweet often. Then, with those followers that you’ve recently gained, you will likely get likes and retweets from those in your industry. Once you break into the scene and share great content, others will notice and remember your name.
Our test: We began our content campaign in September, and by the end of the year we had already seen 80% growth in interactions, including mentions, retweets, favorites and replies. Keep in mind that we already had a working Twitter account before the campaign, but you can see when we changed tactics by the results in our chart. We saw similar results with all our clients, so believe that you, too, can see similar results with your Twitter account.
3. Interact! Retweeting and favoriting posts will gain recognition, and soon enough you’ll be part of your industry’s social media world. Once you’ve tapped into this network, your impressions are bound to increase exponentially.
Our test: We started this “interaction” campaign in November. As you can see, we grew our reach by 25% and more than doubled interaction in just two months!
This is only the beginning. By keeping up this cycle of following, promoting and interacting with those in your industry that care about the same topics as you do, you will see exponential results over time.
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Use Facebook to Build a Solid Base of Interested Fans
Unless you hired a firm that offered to grow your fans for 5 cents a Like (please tell us you didn’t do that!), chances are the majority of your followers are folks who are genuinely interested in you. These are valuable prospects and customers, because they already know your business and they care about your success. The most important types of posts for a small business are those directly related to your company. This includes images of recent projects, company news, products, etc. If you want to see interaction spike, including shares, impressions and reach, your best bet is to promote as many of these types of posts as you can. (Of course, we would never advocate 100% of your content be about you, 80% is a good target.)
Our test:In a study conducted with our signage company client, we posted three types of content over the course of a one-month period: projects/company news, original blog posts, and curated content/industry news. The same number of posts for each category were promoted at similar times of day for similar days of the week.
By far, the posts that got the most views and interactions were related to recent projects or company news. Original blog posts came in second, but only received 62% of the reach of “projects” posts. Curated content was least effective, only scoring 41% of the reach when compared to “projects” posts.
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Now we know what works best, but does this mean you should limit yourself to only one type of Facebook post? Of course not! It just means you can emphasize recent projects and company news, and intersperse this with curated content. Remember: Curated content is always important because it brings variety to your posting – people don’t want to only hear about you.
Use Google+ to Reach Those Who May Not Know Your Business
Google+ may not be the social media platform Google was hoping it would be. But you know what? That’s okay, because that means you do not have to split your efforts to grow multiple fan bases – stay focused on Facebook and Twitter. If you do have a decent following on Google+, that’s great. You can still post to it and receive clicks and interaction as you would with Facebook. But Google+ brings an added benefit – SEO! – that does not require you to have followers.
When you post to Google+, your posts then have a chance of showing up in a Google search, which can increase traffic to your site. When you post to Google+, you want to make sure you have clear and concise titles for posts, as well as descriptions that include relevant keywords. When people search for these keywords, they may be directed to your Google+ page, which could then lead them to your site.
While we spent the majority of our interactive efforts on Twitter and Facebook, we regularly shared our content on our Google+ page. By making sure our our titles and descriptions were targeted to a specific key concept, we found that our Google+ posts showed up in Google searches for those key concepts. This allowed us to reach yet another “community” – searchers who may not necessarily know our business but who are interested in our topic.
Make it a part of your routine to share to Google+ whenever you post to Facebook. It only takes an extra minute or less.
It is often difficult to show a direct correlation between social media marketing efforts and the bottom line, particularly for smaller businesses. But when social media is viewed from the right perspective – as means of building your community of peers, prospects and customers – it’s clear that it is an important tool for marketing a business, large or small. And while it may be harder for smaller businesses with a small following to earn followers and interaction, we’ve proven that it can be done by understanding and taking advantage of the strengths of each particular platform. By following these tips, you can grow your following, increase reach, and gain valuable interaction in just a few short months.
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Sales Renewal’s insight:
A large business with widespread consumer appeal can naturally expect organic social media growth in terms of followers and interaction: people already know your name, are interested in your brand and are looking for answers. In this case, you may spend more time interacting with customers and keeping up with questions than you do just promoting content.
But what about if you are a small business with fewer resources, or in an industry not known for an interest in social media? After conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free.
How Much are Your Sales Leads Really Worth?
Every day, marketing and sales professionals in thousands of companies make significant investments to acquire and develop sales leads. The ultimate objective is to grow revenues and profits by winning new customers.
Unfortunately, these investment decisions are often made without a clear and accurate understanding of how valuable leads actually are. When marketing and sales leaders don’t know the true value of their sales leads, they can invest too little and miss out on profitable new revenues, or they can invest too much and acquire customers that are unprofitable.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author believes determining the value of sales leads is a four-step process, which he explains and details.
In the post referenced here, he discusses the first two steps. In a subsequent post, he concludes with his last two steps.
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Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from November
Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.
Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month:
Marketing Strategy
- Don’t Let Silos Destroy the Customer Experience – 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.
- A Better Way to Calculate the ROI of Your Marketing Investment – Today, marketers have access to data that allows them to track an individual’s various interactions with a brand before their purchase and better understand what role each interaction played in the eventual sale. This approach is called “attribution modeling, ” and allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle so that they can improve their marketing ROI. Read more about this approach here.
SEO
- Google’s Natural Language Search Gets Smarter – If natural search traffic is important to you and you have not yet reevaluated your SEO strategy, this story makes it abundantly clear that now is the time to do so! Why? Because you are shooting yourself in the foot if you’re still focusing on traditional keywords instead of semantics.
- 9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google – With smart planning, small businesses can have a strong presence even with a limited budget. Taking advantage of online opportunities is key. Here are 9 ways to make sure your SEO efforts pay off, including adding customer reviews and ratings to each product you sell; using a variety of images and/or videos for each product; and building links to specific product pages instead of just your homepage or other high-level pages (a.k.a. deep-linking)
Content Marketing
- How to Market to Goldfish – Did you know that the average attention span has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015? And that is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, at 9 seconds. But all is not lost, as we are humans, not goldfish. Find out some of the keys for holding people’s attention in this article from Hubspot.
Social Media Marketing
- How Airlines are Using Social Media for Seat Selection – They call it “social seating.” By using your social media profiles, airlines will select who you sit next to on your next flight. The claim is that it will provide you with a better in-flight experience. What do you think?
Stay up-to-date with marketing news and advice for your business – Subscribe to our Best of Monthly Digest here.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.
Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month covering Content Marketing, SEO, Strategic Planning and Social Media.
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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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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Sharing the Rewards & Risks in JointSourcing Works: Client Revenue Goes Up and Costs Go Down
Given that Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing is truly one-of-a-kind-there are no other Marketing General Contractors that shares the risk and reward-it is not surprising that it requires a bit more explanation than the familiar, fee-for-service, single-marketing-strategy (like PR, inbound marketing, advertising, direct mail, tradeshows, …) approach every other agency takes.
But numbers have a way at cutting to the heart of a matter, so here are three simple charts that show that JointSourcing increases leads and revenue (bar graphs in the charts below) while decreasing the per lead or sale cost (line graphs below). Note: To ensure client confidentiality, all chart data is expressed as relative to their initial period.
Manufacturer Client Performance Over 2.5 Years
During the 2.5 years from 1Q13 through 2Q15, JointSourcing increased qualified leads by 380%, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 87% per year.
Because of JointSourcing’s increased productivity, while the client’s marketing budget did grow somewhat, it grew far, far slower than their leads did. As a result, JointSourcing decreased cost-per-lead by 74% (-42% CAGR).
Our strong, long-term relationship with Sales Renewal has been critical to Metro Sign & Awnings’ accelerating growth.
Because I wasn’t familiar with it when we first began almost 4 years ago, I was a little unsure of the JointSourcing “partnership, ” but I’m a big believer now.
Sales Renewal really treats the marketing of my business as if it were theirs – whether it’s going to bat for us with a vendor on their own or how proactive they are in analyzing and continuously optimizing our marketing.
This saves me time and allows me and my team to focus on sales. In fact, we have been getting so many leads that we are hiring more sales people to close all the new business.”
— Tom Dunn, Owner and VP of Sales & Marketing
eCommerce Client Performance Over 4 Years
During the 4 years 2010 to 2014, JointSourcing increased e-commerce sales by 170% (28% CAGR)
At the same time, JointSourcing decreased cost-per-sale by 33% (-7% CAGR).
Working with Sales Renewal is a real partnership, I know the floral business and Sales Renewal knows technology, marketing and sales.
I’ve been a small business owner for 26 years and I appreciate having someone who, thanks to its financial interest in my success, is almost as motivated as I am to grow my business.
— Helen Halloran, Owner
Different Levels of Marketing Investment Lead to Different Levels of Revenue Growth & Cost Savings
While from the accounting perspective marketing costs are considered an expense, an equally important way to view them is an investment: if you want your business to grow you have to invest in growing it. While the Concord Flower Shop has grown its web sales 28% per year while lowering its cost per sale 7% per year, Metro Sign & Awning has blown past even those impressive numbers, increasing its leads 87% per year and decreasing its cost per lead 42% per year.
These differences arise from the growth vs cost goals each business had which during the JointSourcing Blueprint, translated into the breadth and depth of their JointSourcing Solutions. Metro’s is more comprehensive and includes all of the important digital and real-world strategies for their business with each strategy nicely elaborated. The Concord Flower Shop’s JointSourcing Solution is focused just on online marketing and as you can see from the figure, invests about ¼ of what Metro does in marketing. It is this difference in budget, scope, resources and strategies that leads to their different growth & savings rates.
For a more detailed understanding of Sales Renewal’s unique JointSourcing Solution, please see these JointSourcing™ in Action case studies:
- JointSourcing: a Breakthrough Solution with Stellar Client Results – a more detailed explanation of JointSourcing’s results
- Collaboration Leads to New Strategies, Brand, Site, Marketing Programs and … a Blue Ribbon
- Sales Renewal Corp. Wins Battle Against Google Adwords on Behalf of Its Client Metro Sign & Awning
- How the Concord Flower Shop More Than Double Its Online Sales and was Ranked in the Top 1% of Local Businesses by Google
Find out if JointSourcing is right for your business
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Sales Renewal’s insight:
Given that Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing is truly one-of-a-kind-there are no other Marketing General Contractors that shares the risk and reward-it is not surprising that it requires a bit more explanation than the familiar, fee-for-service, single-marketing-strategy approach every other agency takes.
But numbers have a way at cutting to the heart of a matter, so here are three simple charts that show that JointSourcing increases leads and revenue (bar graphs in the charts below) while decreasing the per lead or sale cost (line graphs below). Note: To ensure client confidentiality, all chart data is expressed as relative to their initial period.
15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Generation Z
While many marketers still struggle to figure out the Millennials, a new generation-Generation Z-is growing up behind the scenes.
Members of Gen Z, born after 1995, are quite different than their Millennial counterparts, with their own set of expectations when interacting with companies.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
You might not realize it but more than 25% of Americans belong to Gen Z, and with 361, 00 babies born in the U.S. every day the segment is growing fast.
All of their 15 stats are interesting but we found these 2 to be the most intriguing … and scary:
- Millennials use 3 screens on average, Gen Zers use 5 (smartphone, TV, laptop, desktop, iPod/iPad)
- The average Gen Zer has the attention span of about 8 seconds.
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The Increasing Importance of Content Marketing in 2015
A new infographic from ExpressWriters nicely illustrates Content Marketing’s increasing importance to growing your sales and brand.
Some factoids we found particularly interesting:
Sales Renewal’s insight:
A new infographic from ExpressWriters nicely illustrates Content Marketing’s increasing importance to growing your sales and brand. Some factoids we found particularly interesing:
- Coca-Cola now spends more money creating content than on television advertising
- Marketers invest over 25% of their marketing budget on content
- 77% of marketers plan on increasing content production in 2015
- 61% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that shares custom content
- 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing
John Wanamaker Would Die for This: We Now Know Which Half is Which!
There is a popular saying which goes “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Over the years, I have heard many a CEO/CFO substitute the word “marketing” for “advertising” as they lament about all the money they are spending on brand awareness and demand creation with little demonstrable return on investment. But those days are over.”
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Thanks to analytics, trackable phone numbers, trackable emails and marketing automation software you can now know which half of your marketing budget is working and which half is not … and adjust your marketing activities and budget accordingly. The author provides a few interesting examples of the old and new ways of marketing.
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