If you're selling a service — whether as an individual contractor, or as a small agency — you may find yourself spending a bit too much time seeking out new clients.
What you really want to do, is have your clients come to you.
You need a lead generation strategy.
Depending on your target audience, and the services you're offering, this could take a number of different forms.
The way to do this is to set up inbound marketing systems that funnel leads continually toward your business.
The secret to succeeding with this approach is measurement.
You need measurable data. Then, you can create and refine your plan of action based on what that data tells you.
There are multiple inbound channels you can use — email, PDF ebooks and whitepapers, even social media — and there's software available that can help you track each channel.
A recent article from MarTech Today explains the process in detail.
Marketers are expected to focus on the bottom line, and measurement is key to accomplishing that.
A lot of startups get sloppy and charge head-first into execution without focusing on the foundations of marketing and analytics.
Execution is important, but it must be built on the foundation of a solid strategy.
The most efficient way to execute marketing campaigns is by setting up your goals and tracking elements first.
Connecting the systems for successful tracking
It’s essential to set up your systems so that you’re able to measure every aspect of your marketing program. First, you must determine what your big systems are.
Next, focus on the website and setting up the tracking code from the marketing automation tool and Google Analytics.
(There are also other analytics tools like Kissmetrics, Mix Panel and Heap Analytics).
This will allow you to track the traffic and visitors coming from your marketing programs.
Then, using a tool like Google Tag Manager will allow you to track all of your pixels for any online advertising.
Building campaigns that scale for good
Now that you have all of your systems set up, it is time for you to develop the execution machine.
Your pipeline goal for the year is a good place to start when creating demand generation campaigns.
Here are some examples of channels to use:
- Website
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Blog
- Trade shows
- Native advertising (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google AdWords)
- Webinars
- Industry advertising groups
Measuring the ROI of your marketing campaigns
Now that you have your programs created, you are ready to measure the efficacy of your programs.
How do you go about measuring the ROI?
Let’s start with an even spread attribution model, in which equal credit is given to all campaigns that touched the lead.
This will help us understand which channels were most effective across the board in influencing deals.
When it comes to the largest influence, you find that events and email marketing paid the bills this year.
Now let’s look back at the events and marketing channels to determine the campaigns with the highest conversion rates and volumes.
The campaigns with the highest conversion rates include the fall conferences and the breakfast series, along with the winter e-book.
Looking at it this way helps you understand how each campaign contributed to the final deal size by measuring the conversion rates at the campaign level.
Data is the asset that allows you to win big in your marketing campaigns.
You can check out the full article over at MarTech Today.
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