If you want significant results from your sales efforts – and why else would you be reading this? — you need to shift to a modern marketing approach that draws people to you, gives them the confidence to do business with you, and that empowers you to track where they are in their buying journey. Outbound marketing techniques like advertising won’t cut it anymore. You need to attract customers to you by giving them content of value, as we describe here.
Modern marketing applies the digital tools we interact with every day to create and deliver the content people need, when they need it. Modern marketing attracts the kind of people who can become loyal customers. Seek these businesses and decision-makers through different channels – website, social media, email, and blog posts.
Let’s briefly look at some of the main elements that go into creating a robust modern marketing process.
Essentials of modern marketing
Align marketing and sales. Use the insights from your sales team to create the content that your buyers want to see. Marketers can then take that knowledge to create content and campaigns. Because of this synergy, the sellers will understand the content that’s been generated and be able to answer customer questions (who will of course want to learn more after reading your amazing tech guide or ebook).
Lead generation. Create the content that earns buyer trust and share it through various digital channels. If someone downloads your content, make sure they receive an email or are redirected to a thank-you page that offers more relevant content. Lead generation can be a time-consuming and complex set of tasks because it requires attention to what is resonating with customers and what isn’t worth the time to create. Empower your sales team with customer-facing materials that can be shared digitally or as leave-behinds after presentations. Your sellers are busy in meetings trying to land deals? Help them by creating templated emails that they can send to their prospects when you have a new offer to promote or educational resource to share.
Marketing automation. By automating your marketing processes, you get more done for the time invested. For instance, when a prospect fills out a form, they get an email suggest related content they may also be interested in.
Customer resource management. A CRM system tracks your customers’ behavior – what they buy, when they buy, and the prompts that led to the sale. A marketing partner can set up automated systems that send out content based on what a user clicked on. That CRM strategy can also bring your marketing and sales teams together. Both groups need to agree what makes a someone a qualified lead and what happens to that contact if he or she isn’t ready to buy. They both should have one platform to work from and add relevant information like the last time a sales rep reached out to the customer.
Trust a marketing team with experience
An overwhelming number of manufacturing marketers are investing in content creation to share their story. Outsourcing your modern marketing approach lets you focus on your daily operations while a dedicated team creates content, tracks its effectiveness, and builds a database of prospects and customers. This is likely why 64% of manufacturers outsource their content marketing efforts to experts.
Contact Forecast Sunny Marketing for help with developing a modern marketing plan that helps reach your business goals.