Beyond Inbound… Long Live Closed Loop Marketing

Inbound is great, but it has had it’s day…. and even with inbound strategies, the bulk of activity and spend is actually outbound. The reality? Businesses need both inbound and outbound. For B2B and Account Based Marketing, this should be managed across a single revenue (marketing-sales) value chain. We call this integrated program approach a Closed Loop Marketing Architecture … and it works!

What is a Closed Loop Marketing Architecture?

Closed Loop Marketing is a continuous process to deliver tailored omni-channel experiences that engage customers and drive conversions. By ‘closing the loop’, teams align around the end-to-end customer lifecycle and campaigns can be measured for total revenue impact . The Closed Loop Marketing Architecture (CLMA) describes the critical elements and flow of modern marketing and sales campaigns. The CLMA is a single architecture and process across marketing and sales.

There are six steps and five underlying systems you need:

Six Steps to Define the Experience, Launch Campaigns and Close Deals

1) Analysis. Identify trends across the customer lifecycle. Produce behavioral and predictive insights by reviewing data,performance and metrics.

2) Insights: Develop and enhance customer profiles incorporating personas, segmentation and key value metrics to drive audience strategies.

3) Opportunities: Prioritize opportunities and mobilize resources to develop and plan marketing and sales programs.

4) Campaigns: Create and launch omni-channel campaigns to deliver relevant experiences and communications throughout the customer lifecycle.

5) Engagement: Deliver experiences that engage customers  and capture intents, context,actions and behaviors across all channels and systems.

6) Conversions: Orchestrate leads,prospects and customers through the marketing-sales funnel responding to customer behaviors and key performance indicators.

Five Underlying Systems to Optimize Campaigns and Manage Sales

1) Omni-Channel: Engage an optimal mix of paid,owned and earned media through digital, direct and indirect channels to control and deliver customer experiences and interactions across the customer lifecycle.

2) Marketing Automation: Configure and integrate campaigns using business rules to engage audience segments.Optimize conversions, nurture, qualify and score leads to generate sales ready opportunities.

3) Salesforce Automation: Enable sales effectiveness with tools, intelligence, assets and services that track and manage customer contacts, accounts, opportunities and service interactions.

4) Business Intelligence: Engage tools, applications and methodologies to develop and run queries,create reports, dashboards and data visualizations that enable predictive analytics and informed decision making.

5) Data Management: Collect, store, index and harmonize internal, external,current and historic customer data to enable a 360 degree customer view, business intelligence and relevant communications.

Note: Many of these systems capabilities can be enabled through just a few platforms. For example some Marketing Automation solutions have many of these capabilities built in. The more complex your environment and data, the more attention is needed on the technology platform strategy.

Good luck and good [closed loop] marketing and selling!

Get your copy of the CLMA at www.revenuearchitects.com/clma