When you look at businesses as a whole, the majority share one goal and one associated challenge; generating high-quality leads. Attracting new customers and retaining their attention through to purchase is a fundamental challenge for brands all across the globe. Fortunately, marketing automation is here to streamline and accelerate this process. According to a recent survey from HubSpot, 78% of media planners are utilising marketing automation, with 26% of the companies who aren’t, are planning on doing so. In the same report, 43% of marketers agree that automation has been the most effective trend for their organization’s growth.

Let’s find out why…

What is Marketing Automation?

By definition, marketing automation is the utilisation of software and technology to simplify or automate a variety of activities. 

Marketing automation is purposefully designed to help take the strain off your internal resources by automating monotonous marketing tasks. In addition to providing various shortcuts in completing time-consuming tasks, these marketing automation tools can also support you in providing more personalised experiences for your customers. 

Many people assume that the term ‘marketing automation’ is the same as ‘email automation’ but that isn’t quite true. Although marketing automation does encompass automated communications via email, it also does much more. Modern marketing automation tech harnesses the full power and potential of data to influence your leads through their buyer’s journey. Something that even big businesses still struggle with to this day. 

With the right marketing automation software (something we’ll cover more in-depth later), your business can save time, improve its organisation and convert more leads into paying customers. A big game changer for big and smaller businesses in both B2B and B2C markets. 

How does Marketing Automation work?

So how does it work? Well, we all have those evergrowing lists of manual, repetitive and sometimes tedious tasks. These tasks are often relatively straightforward, but time-consuming, a resource that us marketers are already pretty short on. Marketing automation helps to remove these distractions from our to-do lists and enables us to focus on bigger impact initiatives. 

Whilst marketing automation strategies will be different for every organisation, many of them will share some similar steps. 

A marketing automation strategy is typically constructed of the following:

• Landing pages
• Chaflows/chatbots
• Email marketing

In addition to these lead nurturing tactics, there are often various other small tasks going on in the background. From automatically generating meetings and reminders to sending follow-up communications. All of which will have the potential to save your business time.

Whilst your automation strategy might start small, it will evolve into a sophisticated process that encourages your users to take action when they are ready to do so. Modern marketing is all about providing value to your prospects because over time, this value will be reciprocated in the form of a purchase. 

One thing to bear in mind is that marketing automation is not a function you should set up and forget about. This is a common myth that unfortunately many believe. In order for your marketing automation strategy to generate the best results, it requires consistent monitoring and development. You must remember that automation is here to support your marketing, not do it all for you. 

Marketing Automation vs Customer Relationship Management

Although CRM platforms and marketing automation may seem similar at first, they both serve a unique set of purposes. This may or may not be completely new information to you but it’s important that we differentiate the two. Obviously, we cannot speak for all CRMs or all automation tools so bear in mind we’re speaking generically. 

So a Customer Relationship Management system helps businesses store, monitor and easily track communications with their leads and customers. A CRM is a go-to platform for collecting and connecting data from your leads and customers, whilst keeping it accessible to people across an organisation. Most CRMs are primarily sales-focused, with a key emphasis on the buyer stages that precede becoming an MQL (marketing-qualified lead).

The main purpose of a CRM is to improve the overall customer experience and increase sales, something that is shared with marketing automation. 

Although the two tools may share similar objectives, they predominantly target two segments of users; non-sales ready and sales-ready. As we’ve outlined already, your CRM will focus on the leads who have been qualified by your sales team and are sales-ready. Marketing automation on the other hand will focus on those users who are yet to enter or are in the early stages of their buyer’s journey ie. non-sales ready.

Marketing automation software or tools are designed to let you track and influence a prospect’s ‘top-of-the-funnel’ actions. From submitting a form or opening an email, your marketing automation strategy can help organise and schedule the next action until a goal is achieved. 

Today, many CRMs, like the HubSpot CRM have already integrated marketing automation tools within their systems, helping you unlock the full potential of both tools.

Top Benefits of Implementing Marketing Automation

Now that we’ve successfully explored what exactly marketing automation is, now we can walk you through some of the benefits of implementing these tools yourself. 

Building Valuable Relationships

Modern digital marketing is all about building and nurturing long-lasting relationships with your prospects, leads and customers. Marketing automation empowers businesses like yours to create and deploy a customer-centric strategy that is hyper-personalised. 

With automated marketing, your business can send the right messages to the right pool of users at the right time, improving the relevancy of your content. A recent survey suggests that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer customised and relevant experiences. 

Remember marketing automation shouldn’t just be about what it can do for your business, but how it can support your customers. Your prospects, leads and customers are likely inundated with content, most of which they don’t want. Marketing automation helps you address your audience’s needs, challenges and goals and communicate messages that are aligned with this. 

Effective Lead Nurturing

With marketing automation, you can set up actions and workflows that trigger once a user has met certain criteria or taken a specific action.

All too often we hear brands complain about cart abandonment or lost activity. With marketing automation, providing you have the right credentials, you can send hyper-personalised messages that can influence the close of the sale. This would work best for impulse or smaller purchases. 

For more elongated buyer journeys, marketing automation can handle your sales follow-ups for you. Nurturing your leads can be a challenging and time-consuming process, but the result will be worth the wait. According to recent research, 50% of qualified leads are not yet ready to buy, making a lead nurturing programme even more crucial. 

With automation, you can create and send non-disruptive content to your contacts that help edge them closer to purchase, or booking a consultation for example. There are various tools at your disposal; whether that be email, website personalisation or re-targeting. All of these tactics can work cohesively to facilitate your inbound marketing strategy.    

Analysing the Buyer’s Journey

With marketing automation, you can unlock an entirely new perspective that can help you understand your customers and their buyer’s journey. By utilising marketing automation technology, you’ll be collecting more data that will enable your business to make smarter decisions. Even decisions that are away from marketing. 

This tech will empower your brand to effortlessly embrace ‘big data’. Depending on your tool of choice, many platforms will enable you to review data and analytics all from one place. They are a comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and forecasting consumer behaviour, again, something that will direct your decision-making. 

In addition to simply reviewing the analytics, with many marketing automation tools you can create your own A/B or split tests to discover optimal channels and content. Supporting your business to fully comprehend how your sales and marketing initiatives are influencing your brand’s bottom line. 

Aligning Marketing & Sales

It’s so secret that in the majority of businesses, particularly in big business, marketing and sales teams don’t often see eye to eye. This misalignment is commonly caused by outdated or broken processes that essentially stop these teams from communicating properly. With marketing automation collaboration is key, your teams will be compelled to re-align their goals in order to create the strongest strategy.

Your sales team can provide highly valuable insights into customers’ needs and wants at different stages throughout their buying journey. With the help of those insights, you can create targeted content for prospects that aims to offer education or solutions to their questions and challenges. By joining forces, marketing and sales can provide information that attracts leads, increases conversions, and delight your customers.

Improving Your ROI

This one sort of goes without saying. If marketing automation can help achieve all of the above, it’ll undoubtedly have an impact on your business’s return on investment. Automation technology can help your teams manage and communicate with their leads more efficiently. This will over time bolster conversion rates and increase your company’s revenue. 

Marketing Automation at Loop Digital

At Loop Digital we love to utilise new and emerging technologies and marketing automation is a great example. We’ve been able to unlock the full potential of our marketing by leveraging the power of automation. Our multifaceted team have the skills and knowledge to deliver powerful marketing strategies and exceptional results. 

For more information about how your business can benefit from marketing automation get in touch with our wonderful team today.

The post Introducing The Power of Marketing Automation appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

Whilst this traditional method may still work fine for some businesses, it’s important to note that many an opportunity can be missed working this way. Your business can achieve so much more when these two teams work as one, working towards shared goals and objectives. 

What is Smarketing?

The hybrid term ‘Smarketing’ often refers to the alignment between your sales and marketing teams. This alignment is achieved by creating synchronised goals as well as maintaining frequent and direct communication. This business strategy relies upon the cooperation of your marketing and sales teams to create an integrated approach. 

The purpose of the smarketing strategy is to improve the organisational structure and design as businesses continue to increase the percentage of leads that stem from organic and inbound marketing tactics. 

It’s a well-known fact that in some businesses there are prominent divisions that exist between these two departments and are quick to blame one another for their shortcomings. So rather than finger-pointing, smarketing helps these two teams to work towards common goals, supporting one another. 

Why is Smarketing Important?

Ultimately, smarketing can help your business succeed, achieve better results and reach optimal efficiency. Both marketing and sales teams have unique perspectives in any business, when shared, they have the ability to create a more targeted and effective approach to driving new business. 

The way consumers make purchases has changed. Salespeople used to be solely responsible for providing prospects with information. Nowadays customers like to do most of their own research on their own terms. A wealth of information can be found about almost every product and service offering, made easily accessible online. The developments in consumer behaviour have made strategies like inbound marketing so effective.

In modern-day marketing, marketers have to gain a much more thorough understanding of their target market to ensure that their message is communicated effectively. To ensure these messages resonate with the desired audience, marketers require unique insights about their typical buyers. 

Whilst these insights can be derived from all sorts of market research, ultimately it’s your sales departments that will understand your customers best, often having front-line interactions with prospects. Sales personnel will over time learn what influences or dissuades sales, the pain points, challenges and ambitions of the customers that approach your business. This data, or insights, will be paramount to the shaping of your overall marketing strategy and the messaging used throughout your content. 

Equally, your sales department can learn an abundance of information from your marketing team too. Marketers tend to be data-centric, constantly collecting new information about potential leads and using it to optimise their campaigns. Your salespeople can use these insights to learn about consumer behaviour and develop their own approach to how they conduct sales. 

Since your marketing and sales departments have so much to teach each other, you should now begin to see the importance of aligning these teams. 

The Benefits of Smarketing

Improve business efficiency

The success of your smarketing strategies depends on the alignment of your sales and marketing teams. This alignment particularly applies to working towards the same aims and objectives for the business. A strong understanding of the critical role each team plays will help your whole business operate more efficiently. 

Better customer experiences

We’ve all experienced a sub-standard customer experience before. Whether it’s a misplaced order or a late refund, it can become increasingly more frustrating having been passed around from one department to the next. 

By maintaining a strong line of communication between the two teams, they’ll be able to exchange important bits of information about the customer. On a larger scale, this leads to a stronger understanding of the target marketing and unlocks an opportunity to deliver a more engaging and consistent experience. 

Increase Your Return on Investment

With improved communication across your sales and marketing departments, your sales team can gain insights into the online behaviour of their leads. These insights will support your sales team to improve the relevance and personalise communication. This will help them provide a customer experience that hits each of the user’s touchpoints, building trust and improving the likelihood of closing the sale.

With this, marketing will gain a stronger understanding of where their best leads come from, learning which types of leads are most likely to convert into valuable customers. Your marketing team will then have the ability to allocate their time and resources to areas that will maximise their ROI.

5-Easy Steps to Creating Your Smarketing Strategy

Your smarketing strategy’s effectiveness will depend on a number of key factors, of which mutual understanding and consistent communication will be paramount. Aside from the steps below, your teams should be knowledgeable about their business, their role and their target market. 

Assess Where You Are & Set Goals

Do you know how well your two teams are working collaboratively already? If not, it could be worthwhile evaluating the relationship between the two departments to establish which areas or processes need improving. It could be that the link between the two teams requires a complete overhaul which could take time, but the payoff will be worth it. Consider exploring how often your teams meet, what information is shared, and how do the two normally communicate. 

Once you’ve got a good idea about how your teams interact with one another you can get to work on how your smarketing strategy will perform going forward. One key way to track your progress is to set collaborative goals. These goals, as with all things marketing, should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely). Your SMART goals should be based on building your cross-departmental relationship. 

A Collaborative SLA

After establishing your baseline and some reasonable goals, the next critical step is to empower each team to hold each other accountable for operational efficiency. An SLA or service level agreement can support your business by documenting the expectations and responsibilities of all parties involved. 

To avoid things becoming too complex or vague, we recommend creating a point-based SLA with simple and explicit commitments. This will ensure that each team feel they have their own assurances and mitigates the risk of standards slipping once the initial novelty of the process wears off. Your SLAs may include your shared SMART goals or mutually agreed-upon KPIs. Formalising these details in writing will support the long-term success of your smarketing strategy. 

Communication is key!

In all relationships, business or personal, effective communication is vital. To maintain this crucial communication between your sales and marketing teams, it’s a great idea to hold regular smarketing catch-ups on a weekly basis. This will enable them both the opportunity to discuss important developments and reporting. 

Any sizable changes within the departments or the actions each team carry out should be effectively communicated to ensure consistency across the business. Remember your marketing and sales teams can learn so much from one another, ensure that this opportunity is utilised! Consider creating a monthly agenda so that your meeting structure is organised, for example:

• Week 1: Persona Development and Shared Insights
• Week 2: Upcoming Promotional Deals
• Week 3: Customer Expectations
• Week 4: Marketing and Sales Strategy Development

Monitoring & Reporting Performance

Data should be at the centre of every strategic decision your business makes. Ultimately its this data that will help you understand the performance of your marketing and sales efforts, exploring your business successes and equally, your failures because they do happen! 

Your sales and marketing teams should have easy access to the data they need, more crucial than this, however, is the source of these data sets. Your teams should always have visibility on the same sources of data, that way you won’t get discrepancies. 

Tools such as a CRM, or Customer Relationship Management system can help ensure the seamlessness and reliability of your data sources. From there, you can begin to evaluate your KPIs and goals in collaboration, exploring what is or isn’t working. Again, most importantly here, this isn’t an opportunity to play the blame game, after all, you should be going after a shared goal, to grow your business. You may be surprised about the ideas that can come from your contrary team. 

Closed-Loop Reporting

Leap-frogging from the previous point. Your sales and marketing team must have visibility of the other’s actions, goals and progress. By reporting in a closed loop, marketing will have a stronger ability to send information to sales, and sales will be able to provide feedback off the back of recent marketing activity. 

You may need to consider things such as lead sources, lead quality scores and other attribution metrics for this. Doing so will empower your sales and marketing teams to strategically plan for the future, focusing on what drives the strongest results. 

Summary

Smarketing is a systematic change that will impact your business in its entirety, if implemented and managed correctly you should start to see improvements over time. Naturally, it will take some time for everyone to get on board and adapt so don’t expect any overnight changes. As with most things marketing, your smarketing strategy will also evolve and grow as your business does.

Inbound Marketing at Loop Digital 

Loop Digital is an inbound marketing agency, we believe in providing value to prospects, leads, and customers to earn sales. We do this with the support of our Smarketing strategy alongside CRM’s and other tools. If you’re looking to align your marketing and sales teams, why not get in touch with our friendly team.

The post What is Smarketing? appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

What is a CRM?

A CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a system or software that enables marketers, sales and service team members to nurture relationships with customers. CRMs are commonly used by businesses to support everyday management too, improving efficiency and time management. 

Customer relationship management systems have been around for the last 3 decades and have shown no sign of going away any time soon, in fact, quite the contrary. The CRM market is now the largest in the software industry, these programmes have demonstrated value for businesses who require real-time user data. 91% of businesses with over 10 employees now utilise CRM technology. Historically, only the market giants would have had access to this level of tech due to the significant cost they once were. 

These evolved CRMs empower businesses, big and small, to drive growth which in turn generates stronger profits. The software itself commonly caters for your sales, service and marketing personnel, whilst some still perceive this technology as an advanced address book, it’s simply so much more than that. CRMs empower these teams to build relationships more effectively and provide the best customer experience, from the research phase and beyond the purchase. 

What Does a CRM Do?

A CRM is responsible for the gathering of user interactions across all channels in one place. This aggregated data enhances a business’s visibility into customer activity as well as illustrate new opportunities to influence your users along their buyer’s journey. 

Compiling multiple data streams into one place is often a challenging and time-consuming task. CRMs provide a central place where businesses can store, manage and analyse user data. By gaining this valuable insight into your user’s data you can more efficiently and accurately nurture relationships. 

In addition to providing visibility into user activity, CRMs often harness the capabilities of automating a number of laborious tasks. Another great example of how these systems can greatly improve a business’s efficiency. 

Once upon a time, tracking user interactions would have commonly been recorded by the bare minimum, perhaps in a spreadsheet or, believe it or not, pen and paper… gasp! But now more and more businesses are supersizing, scaling and growing it only makes sense that this process had to evolve. CRMs are purpose-built for consolidating data in one place, usually, the types of data are as follows:

1. Contact Information
2. Website Activity (if cookies are used)
3. Communication History 
4. Customer and Client History

Besides alleviating data management challenges, CRMs support your business to standardise your sales, marketing and service processes. Creating a number of roadmaps or workflows highlighting the right actions to perform at the right time. 

Modern custom management systems have become so much than just storing data though. Advanced programmes have now become the one-stop shop for all business activities. Enabling marketers to schedule marketing activity from automated emails to publishing social media posts. For sales, they empower salespeople to create comprehensive pipelines, score leads and keep a full record of customer interactions. Finally, for service, they equip you with ticketing systems and the tools for customer feedback and referrals. 

With all of these powerful hubs working together you can ensure your entire team, across departments, are always on the same page. From a customer perspective, this makes them feel they have a working relationship with one company as opposed to a collection of different people. Everyone on your team can gain a thorough understanding of each user’s unique needs, challenges, history and so much more. 

How Do CRMs Work?

Customer Relationship Management platforms compute considerably complex data and actions all in the background. CRMs track the actions of all of your prospects, leads and customers across social platforms, email and website channels too. Your CRM silently collects user information to support you with guiding them through the buyer’s journey using either automatic actions or manual communication.  

At its core, a CRM supports your business with workflow management. Its key functions help your business build relationships with customers pre and post-sales. Depending on your business’s configuration, your CRM can be integrated with a number of other key tools. Helping you further coordinate your actions and streamline your own processes. 

The Benefits of a CRM

There are numerous benefits to having a CRM system, for both you as a business, as well as your end consumer. We couldn’t possibly outline every advantage but here’s our top pick.

Sales, Service & Marketing Alignment

One of the key benefits of a customer relationship management system is that it enables your business to manage centralised data. There has long been a problematic relationship between sales, marketing and service departments for a variety of different reasons. One pain point that is prominent, is a lack of visibility and information from team to team. 

CRMs eliminate the need to go through endless paper trails and email threads to find the answers you’re looking for. Over time, you’ll collectively create comprehensive user profiles within the platform, enhancing the accessibility of historical information. 

On the other side, CRMs cannot be managed solely by the system itself. Your customer relationship platform will require the union of your key departments, each sharing unique data and insights about your customers. For your CRM to work effectively and maximise your return on investment, cross-departmental alignment is a must!

Customer & Client Retainment

With a customer relationship management system, you’ll have the tools to improve and enhance the overall customer experience. Boosting satisfaction, retention and service. 

By aggregating all of your customer or client data in one place you can quickly establish who your highest revenue-generating and most engaged customers are. Due to the way CRMs compile historical user data, you’ll have the ability to tailor communications based upon customer behaviour. Over time, you may begin to see trends in your data that can unveil new opportunities for you to generate conversions for your business. 

Aside from being a powerful tool to generate new customers. Having this crucial insight into customer behaviour can support you to generate a plan to retain at-risk customers or reward your brand advocates. 

Better Visibility & Organisation

Time and time again we have heard numerous horror stories that have been a result of poor business organisation. To be truthful, it happens to the best of us. 

Alongside this, as marketers, salespeople and service team members, we all feel much more confident when we know what to expect. A single source of truth enables you to establish trends and then make more accurate forecasts based upon these findings. Your teams can learn great things from historical and present data. The analytics make use of insights derived from big data to anticipate future customer behaviour. Empowering you to mitigate failures and risks to ultimately craft the perfect end-to-end user experience.

Increased Efficiency

Choosing to implement a CRM strategy into your business will undoubtedly save time on daily, weekly and monthly time drains. With the integrated automation tools and workflows, you can provide engagement and consistency for customers with significantly less input. Whilst we are in no way suggesting that CRMs are instinctive enough to work without your intervention, these platforms are renowned for their time-saving abilities. 

Implementing these automated processes can take time initially and will likely evolve over time. But when you consider the longevity of your business’s success, it’s a no-brainer. 

Who Should Use a CRM?

Well today, any business seeking to maintain a relationship with their customers can benefit from a CRM system. Customer relationship management can bring advantages to the whole spectrum of brands of all sizes. However, they can work better and stronger for the following:

B2B Businesses

Business to business brands often have the need to effectively track leads and customers across longer sales cycles. These businesses are commonly of a fair size, small-to-medium enterprises that require a solution to effectively manage a gradually increasing number of tasks. 

Due to the nature of how we conduct B2B research and how purchasing decisions are made within these markets, these cycles are much longer. Often this is due to the larger cost associated with the purchase which requires consultancy or authorisation from other parties in the business. Your CRM can help manage this journey, keeping track of all activities and communication in one place. In addition to this, it will improve the visibility into if or when you’re lead is likely to close.  

Considered-Purchase B2C Businesses

A considered purchase within a B2C market is commonly something of significant value, similar to the above. A considered purchase is just that, a purchase that has to be considered before a decision can be made. This consideration period tends to also be longer, with ongoing research and ‘shopping around ‘ going on too. 

Take the purchasing journey of a new car, it’s unlikely anyone will be sold immediately on a new vehicle without having seen it before or previously conducted research. These decisions take time to come to fruition. As mentioned above, a CRM can empower your team to keep track of your customer’s needs and enhance their purchasing experience, a make or break it moment for a considerable sale.

Customer Relationship Management at Loop Digital 

Loop Digital is an inbound marketing agency, we believe in providing value to prospects, leads, and customers to earn sales. With a heavy reliance on content, we combine our high-quality deliverables with a streamlined and expertly managed user experience.

With the right management, your business can achieve consistent and sustainable growth with this platform. It can be easy to be overwhelmed by the number of features available. As a dedicated and passionate agency, we’re here to ensure you get the most out of your investment. Interested? Why not get in touch with our friendly team.

The post What is a CRM? Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

There are many reasons for this, one of the biggest being the rise in inbound marketing strategies. Cold calling is an outbound approach, it interrupts users with information they commonly have no interest in. Whereas inbound marketing attracts a person organically with valuable information that they’re actively seeking.

What is Cold Outreach?

Cold outreach, also known as outbound marketing, involves a call or visit to someone they weren’t expecting and the purpose is to sell goods or services. While the salesperson may have the best intentions, this approach often feels like an interruption or nuisance.

There is no guarantee the person or business is interested in what’s on offer. Even if the person is a qualified lead, when the salesperson reaches out to them, they may not be at the right stage in the buyer’s journey either which is often the key to securing a purchase.

Why Should You Switch to Inbound?

An inbound marketing strategy encompasses a variety of tactics. Inbound marketers utilise content marketing, SEO, and social media to build brand awareness and attract high-quality leads. Every lead generated through inbound marketing is organic, so you need smart tactics rather than big budgets.

Rather than directly generating leads, the goal should be to increase visibility and provide valuable content, so potential buyers reach out to you. This strategy is much easier to measure than cold outreach approaches as you can track where visitors land on your site and the actions they take.

Alternative Lead Generation Techniques That Work

1. SEO
2. Content Marketing
3. Email
4. Social Media
5. Ads

SEO

Optimising your website for search engines helps users discover it. During the research stage of the buyer’s journey, people input search terms into Google hoping to find relevant, valuable content. With an effective SEO strategy and keyword research, you can learn the terms your target audience is searching for and optimise your site pages to rank at the top of those SERPs.

For your inbound marketing strategy to work, you need to target the right specific phrases and keywords. These terms must be related to your product or services. You should also optimise for searches where a user is trying to solve a problem they have that you can help with. Implementing this correctly ensures your content organically appears on results pages – the higher you are on the page, the more likely they are to click.

SEO ensures your content reaches interested people. These are your target audience who are more likely to make a purchase. However, alongside an SEO strategy, you need a content marketing approach that publishes valuable and relevant content regularly.

Content Marketing

Content marketing and SEO work in tandem to deliver results. As a marketer, you should be producing content that educates, entertains, and welcomes visitors that click through to your website. This content needs to be optimised for SEO, so the relevant people click on the result. With the right content marketing strategy for your business and industry, you can attract high-quality leads, increase conversions, and develop your brand awareness.

Often, the first search will be a user trying to identify if they have a problem or a need. At this stage in the buyer’s journey, you need content that helps them overcome this challenge. If they read content that’s trying to sell them your products or services, they will bounce off the page as it isn’t relevant to them. However, with the right content, you can guide them through the buyer’s journey towards making a purchase.

Email

Inbound marketers have three main goals: attract, engage, and delight. They want to attract relevant prospects, engage with them to build long-lasting relationships so they convert, and delight them with a positive experience they will share with friends and family. Email newsletters are the perfect way to engage with prospects and guide them towards a conversion.

Email marketing complements your inbound strategy as you can automate messages and introduce a comprehensive workflow. For example, as a B2C marketer, you can ensure you send the right message at the right time, such as a new offer 30 days after an initial purchase. Email automation is also an effective tool for B2B marketers as you can repurpose content. Doing so improves the reach and traffic of a blog post, which increases the visibility of the business as well.

Social Media

Social media plays a big role in building brand awareness. It also helps you create a community amongst your customers that organically attract prospects and leads. Marketers can promote fresh content on multiple social media channels to drive engagement, clicks, and interactions. 

Analysing who follows your business, and on which channel, also teaches you about your buyers. You can use this information to create an ideal customer that informs your entire inbound marketing strategy. Marketers should also interact with their followers. Whether you’re a B2B company posting on LinkedIn or a B2C brand sending out tweets, you can build a community that increases visibility and trustworthiness.

Ads

While inbound marketing focuses on organic results, inbound ads can play a massive role. As part of your inbound marketing strategy, the ads must match search intent. This means your ads will appear for users who are interested and form a part of the buyer’s journey. Content promotion isn’t the same as cold outreach, which still has a place in marketing in 2021. 

Research where your target audience is searching. This could be on Facebook, Google search results, or another social media channel. Targeting relevant ads to the right location and users will increase your likelihood of attracting high-quality leads, rather than purchasing ads that will only be seen by people who aren’t interested.

Should I Stop Cold Outreach Completely?

Creative content is now leveraged by 82% of marketers, which has risen by 70% compared to 2020. With more and more people investing in inbound marketing, you mustn’t get left behind. Inbound tactics are a sustainable and cost-effective way to generate relevant leads while building brand awareness and visibility, and demonstrates your authority and thought leadership.

41% of marketers highlighted that inbound marketing delivers a measurable ROI. One of the problems with cold outreach is it can be hard to identify if it’s achieving results. If through your analysis you can see cold calling, and other outreach methods, are securing sales, you should continue these approaches. However, inbound marketing is the future, so any cold outbound methods should be implemented alongside it.

Loop Digital Inbound Marketing

Loop Digital is a digital marketing agency specialising in inbound marketing. Our experienced delivery team has the knowledge and abilities to improve your digital strategy, from creative content to marketing automation. Discover an inbound marketing approach tailored to your goals, get in touch with our friendly team today.

The post How-to Generate Leads Without Cold Calling appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

I’m certainly not pig-headed enough to think “I know it all already”, and so absolutely knew that I would get value out of this if I put the time in. But with the standard role I have and an increased workload at the start of this year, I’ll admit that initially, I found the thought of committing to 5-6 hours of “homework” per week daunting!

Let’s cut to the chase – I’m so pleased I made this time in my diary each week. Lead by Dan Tyre – who is engaging, knowledgeable, and an absolute force in the industry – the time spent with Dan and my Lions teammates has proven to be very well spent, as I’ve been able to learn from other experienced people and it’s given a new perspective on my approach to growing our business.

Following on from our sessions, and having successfully graduated(!), I’d like to share with you my experience and some key takeaways that I believe to be relevant for sales and marketing professionals in 2021. Some you’ll know, and some you’ll kick yourself for not doing already – I definitely did!

Research Your Prospect

Having worked in sales for 15 years, I have always put some research into a company before I try and make contact – however, there’s a number of options to consider before attempting to make contact with anyone:

– Have you looked at the company profile on LinkedIn to understand any recent news that may affect your approach?

– Have you looked at a personal profile within the company to understand their process and what matters to them?

– Do you understand the persona of the person you’ll be speaking to? Crystal Knows is a fantastic tool for getting an overview of personality types.

– Have you genuinely reviewed their website, for instance, to understand the areas of their business and if they are aiming to grow their company?

This is far more than the “I’ve found the right person, let’s call them” approach – this is making sure that you’ve got some solid information about a business before even connecting with them. Then, it’s time to understand how your proposition can help them to potentially meet their goals – which leads nicely to…

Stop Selling – Start Helping

Gone are the days of ABC (“Always Be Closing), you need to be ABH, “Always Be Helping”. At Loop Digital, we have adopted the “inbound methodology” as part of our process across the business. From a sales perspective I have never liked the overly pushy salesperson approach, believing more so that if our service and solution is helpful in achieving a company or person’s goals and I have helped that business along the way to find a solution that can work, people will buy from me – rather than me selling to them.

The key is to offer help throughout the process – putting a prospect’s needs before your own. Sometimes the fit isn’t quite right – no problem, we investigated it together and agreed amicably to not take things further. Sometimes there’s an interest, but no budget – no problem, there’s free resources and solutions I can point you towards to help!

The key is providing value throughout the process, however long that may be – it may not be a win for a salesperson immediately, but helping people will win more opportunities for you than pushy selling will.

Sometimes, It’s Best Just To Be Quiet

Long ago, the best piece of early advice I received in sales was “shut up”. Simple, blunt, and a bit rude(!), but it’s a fair point – if you’re talking you’re not listening. If you’re not listening, you can’t understand your prospect’s requirements.

Listen to people – let them talk about their role, their challenges, and what’s stopping them from growing their business. By truly understanding these points, you can quickly understand whether you can help them and find the right solution for them.

Oh – and if you do also join the Bootcamp in future – be prepared to practice “The Pause” between your statements…

The Power Of Video – Why Didn’t I Do This Before?

Personalised videos, in emails, to companies that you know you can help. Simple, right?

Engagement with video is going through the roof right now, and with everyone sending standard text emails, it’s easy to join the crowd and send the same type of emails that people click on and delete without reading them. Email is still valuable, but everyone wants to stand out, right?

Video means the recipient can see you, you can share ideas to help someone, and you can start build a rapport too if you have done research before filming. For me is proving to be a great way of making contact with and helping people currently.

So much so, I have invested in new lighting and headphones – if I’m going to do this, I’ll do it right!

Use Technology To Help You

There’s a lot of companies that do use a CRM, but not to its full potential – some companies still use an excel sheet to understand their sales pipelines also.

What about tools to assist your sales, marketing, and service teams? There’s plenty available, but here are a few to consider –

– Hubspot CRM – we’re biased, but there’s so much to this tool that we want to recommend it. The CRM itself is free and always will be, and depending on your needs there’s numerous additional solutions to support your internal teams – maximizing efficiency and making their roles easier to manage, whilst providing a tangible ROI to your business.

– Crystal Knows – a personality profiling tool, using Tony Robbins DISC profiling platform.

– Vidyard – video platform – for prospecting, how to videos, social posts, etc.

To summarise the past 8 weeks have been challenging, informative, time-consuming, and motivating. I’ve learnt new skills whilst refining others too, and I can already see the positive results of putting some of those new processes into practice.

For those unfamiliar with Hubspot, it is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies to attract visitors, convert leads and close customers. It does this by bringing together a variety of functionalities and allowing marketing and sales departments to manage all their activities in one place. As a Hubspot partner, we work alongside Hubspot and are confident of taking time to understand your goals and combining effective marketing with powerful software solutions to drive your business forward.

To take the next step with your business growth, please book some time with me at your convenience here.

The post From Cub to Full-Grown Lion – Top Tips From The HubSpot Sales Bootcamp appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.