Tying a market plan to a sales & the management team

Here are some thoughts on how a demand creation (marketing) plan can be tied to what sales need to see and hear. With some inspiration from luminaries like Steve Jobs......

Follow your GUT...there is no one way to do this but here are a few suggestions!

Ask for a meeting with the CEO & VP of Sales. and present him/her with an "operating strategy" proposal in form of a ppt presentation. If the CEO agrees with your strategy, ask him to present your proposal formally to the entire management team. The proposal could consist of:

a. Get inputs from the sales plan
   i. Present sales numbers
   ii. Present customers
   iii. Future customers (target sectors)
   iv. Strengths and weaknesses in current sales force
   v. Corrective actions to be taken to assure success of your program
   vi. Sales budget for next year
   vii. Sales projections for next year

b. Work on a Business & Marketing Development Plan that includes
    i. What we need
    ii. How much it will cost
    iii. What resources do we need
    iv. Where to locate those resources
    v. Communications Strategy or Plan

c.  Present a plan that includes the following and also promise regular communications 
    i. Presentation in the form of slides (ppt)
    ii Put together some highlights - interesting leads
                                                      - potential wins through this media
                                                      - challenges to the use of this data
     iii Some takeaways from this - clear next steps on how to proceed, buy-ins & feedback
                                                       
d. Every end of the month, call a general sales/marketing meeting to impart an action plan for followup to the troops in the field and at headquarters.

e. Put in place a sales monitoring/tracking mechanism for monthly CEO staff meeting review. This will be in the form of dashboards/reports for various stakeholders as to what they would like to see in their reports (views).
Refer my Blog - http://www.tiny9.com/u/measure_success
Hope some of these ideas appeal to folks and are easily implementable. Any comments/suggestions are welcome.

6 reasons social media can grow your business that is cost effective

I was looking at various companies that develop marketing programs for their clients that are cost effective and can be launched with with little effort. By far the Hubspot tools comes out a winner and very effective to develop one's strategy & measure lead conversion.

Here are 6 things that will help grow your business:

1. Quick to Start. You could launch a Landing page today or get a blog going in a few days.
2. Low Cost. You can get started in social media and blogging for very little or no money. They are among the most cost-effective methods of reaching your audience.
3. Instant Interactivity. Both blogs and social media can give you nearly instant market feedback - good or bad. We get all kinds of feedback through the comments on our blog; people also leave reviews and other comments for us on other tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media channels.
4. It's the Search Engines, Silly. Surveys indicate that 90% or more of people begin their purchasing process in search engines. Blogs and social media make it more likely that your prospects will find you online when they search.
5. Inbound Marketing. If you read our blog, you know that we're big fans of inbound marketing at HubSpot. Outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail, cold email blasts (not targeted emails that speaks to you), TV and print ads - all the things that buyers tend to block out more and more.  Social media and blogs are essential inbound marketing tools.
6. First Mover Advantage. For blogs and social media, there is an advantage to moving first. If you don't jump into the conversation, your competitors will (if they have not already) and then you're fighting an uphill battle to become influential in these online conversations. Start now to claim that first-mover advantage.

How are you using social media today? Learn how you can build a successful inbound marketing strategy that combines social media, blogging, lead conversion, and marketing analytics.

Think about some of these compelling reasons for developing your marketing strategy using social media!

How do you measure the success of your marketing plan?

Here are some essential thoughts that come again & again while I talk with potential clients on measure of success of marketing plan. Here are some guidelines -

Organic Search 
Goal: Get found on the first page
ToDoList: a. Investigate the "right" keywords for your business
                  b. Keep your key phrases short
                  c. Make each landing page unique
                  d. Try blogging using the same "keywords"
                  e. Try setting up in "inbound" links
What to measure: search rankings, keyword grades and blog grading

Blogging
Statistics - B2B site with blogging; generates 67% more hits
                   B2C site with blogging; generates 88% more hits
Goal: To get more hits that are measurable
ToDoList: a. Blog content must be for and about your customers
                 b. Blog an article that you may have done for your customer
                 c. Ideas for content - answer industry FAQs, comment on industry news
                     or local events
                 d. Integrate blog site with Social media for redistribution/following etc.
What to measure: Comments on blogs, blog grades and redistribution
                               Re-distrbutor of your content could lead to being a
                               potential customer!

Landing page design guidelines
Goal: To make the more readable and find it easy to navigate for the "potential" customer
ToDoList: Position atleast 2 CTA (call-to-action) per landing page
                  Ideas - Ask our expert or Live chat
                  Request for a free consult and quote
                  Put up something for the visitor to download like whitepapers, case studies or
                  best practices type of documents.
What to measure:(On-site)  # of landing pages, total page views, total form submissions
                               & total conversion rates and also do some trending graphs!


Develop a "lead" nurturing portfolio
Goal: Many of your "potential" customers are sometime still semi-qualified;
           So they need more nurturing for conversion
ToDoList:   Ideas - Send targeted email to potential customer with something that will  
                   add value
                   Add to a "leads" database for further reference and nurture
What to measure: (Off-site)  a. Offers whitepapers, webinars
                                                b. Referring websites
                                                c. Inbound link campaigns
                                                d. Link placements (industry websites)
                                                e. PPC campaign - weekly, monthly etc.

A new "paradigm" for marketing & demand creation

A marketing campaign needs to be holistic in its approach and scope.

Traditionally, companies have been indulging in marketing campaigns that involve an inside sales team cold calling potential leads by using lists or names/numbers collected at road shows or events in which they participate. Some also use outsourced sales teams to do the cold calls and after some qualification setup appointments from a potential list.

Research shows that the conversion rates by these methods are probably 1:50 or 1:60 per conversion to prospect. The odds are more scattered in the case of technology based services businesses where they have no core product or technology to sell. Yes, technology partnerships help but the odds are trending against it in the current economic climate.

Amidst such a trend, a new marketing philosophy is emerging especially among technology and services intensive companies.This trend involves leveraging ones website, content, social media and other marketing tools like email, webinars, blogs etc.

The idea is to develop a holistic marketing methodology which encompasses three components -

Get found, Convert, Analyze and then pursue prospects in a way that maximizes the conversion of prospect to a paid (one time) project or retainer.

Getting found

This component would involve creating an Internet based market presence through:

• Creation of website with content using keywords (SEO optimized) relevant to the service/technology being pitched.

• Creation of landing pages with offers and calls to action

• Creation of SEO program & associated PPC Campaign management (if needed)

• Creation of blogging infrastructure by key players detailing company's accomplishments (completed projects), technology trends and industry specific pain-points that have been solved

• Provisioning the blog content to be either peer commented, shared (via social media) or tweeted (via twitter)

Convert

This component would involve creating a lead nurturing program based on:

• Putting together tools to capture potential leads information from phase 1
• Developing a robust lead segmentation strategy and
• Implementing a call to action program via email campaign or targeted marketing of how you add value to engage & qualify the lead further
  

Analyze

This component would include setting up a lead management & monitoring program:

• Implement tools/metrics to analyze the leads developed through phase 2 (convert)
• Analyze the specific leads and develop a targeted campaign for each qualified lead to conversion.
• Setup and use market analytic s to study customer conversion trends and further fine tune targeting/messaging as per target vertical.
• Creation of various dashboards/reports targeted for specific audience (at various levels) within the organization

This three phased approach if implemented correctly will lead to a significant justification of the marketing ROI and impact on current revenue of the company.

Based on my observation, some specific revenue impacting activities that can be done immediately in your case would be the following:

1. Developing landing pages for the services offered in the various verticals you operate
2. Developing some content & blogs that use the above keywords so they come up in the search more often and highlight capabilities of the company - Content should consist of case studies with customer pain-points (you solved), solutions and technologies used in developing these solutions
3. Make your website more active by consistent blogging by the project leads/lead architects on the various current projects.
4. Design the blog site with the effective usage of sidebars, post (article area) and comments/responses - Ex. This would enable company effectively engage the curious as well as the informed customer.
5. Develop whitepapers, solution briefs that can be used as "give-away" as part of the offers.
6. Put some real customer testimonials be it text or videos (like things partners & customers want to say about us)
7. Place a link for customer information collecting page or sidebar with offer
8. Place an insert of some customer logos (in a ticker tape format), similar to business affiliates
   

Some of these activities will directly enable you to build the basics for developing component 1 further and enable components 2 and 3 to follow as we implement various parts of a "demand creation" solution.