Posts related to Demand Generation, Lead Generation and Buyer Engagement
Content Marketing: A Cornerstone for Complex Product and Service Sales
Content marketing is a crucial strategy for businesses selling complex products and services. By providing valuable information and insights at various stages of the buyer’s journey, content can significantly enhance your marketing and sales efforts, driving revenue growth and building customer loyalty. But how do you compete with content today?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach that aligns marketing and sales teams to target specific high-value accounts and drive revenue growth. By orchestrating coordinated campaigns across multiple channels, ABM enables businesses to build stronger relationships, increase customer engagement, and improve sales efficiency. Stop using “Marketing-generated” with ABM. ABM is a team effort between marketing and sales.
A typical priority in revenue growth transformation and Revenue Architecture design is getting to the next level of Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement effectiveness. Quite often, companies come to us with what they perceive as a “marketing execution” issue. When we dig a little deeper in a Diagnostic, it often becomes clear that while there are always improvement opportunity in the mechanics of marketing execution, core issues often revolve around a broader view of buyer engagement strategy.
For better demand generation performance, it is helpful to validate your buyer engagement strategy by answering these 3 central questions and following these 9 best practices:
To engage advisors, you are using various communications tools/media channels roughly based on their ability to help you target your audience, but you may not have a good feel for their effectiveness. And perhaps there isn’t a cadence to your ‘touches’, that is, a systematic communications plan with some frequency to maximize impact. Further, you may not have a feel for your Revenue Funnel and budgets.
This is an indication that you have not:
To build a metrics-driven advisor engagement strategy, the first step is to connect your business model / budgets with your goals. The next step is to build a good understanding of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or measurable values that will show the progress of your business goals. Examples include:
Second, create a high-impact, results-focused marketing plan, choosing tools and media channels in the context of:
It’s advisable to test and recalibrate your plan and media mix over time. Testing will help to determine the optimal number of impressions or touch points that should be factored into your plan before you begin to see significantly diminishing returns. Testing is also essential to understanding what tactics, messages, content, formats and media are most effective AND cost-efficient.
Start small by using a few key metrics that are easy to track using your marketing automation / CRM; then build from there, ultimately incorporating predictive and other data-driven business intelligence.
To give your plan a real litmus test, consider reverse engineering your Revenue Funnel and do the “funnel math”: From impressions and leads created at the top-of-funnel all the way through to revenue and ROI at the bottom-of-funnel.
At a high level, there are three steps:
Taking the Revenue Funnel Metrics approach further, consider the alignment and integration of your Marketing and Sales teams in a ‘closed-loop’ revenue architecture (See related post.) Optimally marketing / sales will:
Bottom line: a closed-loop revenue architecture and metrics-driven methodology will help you measure and optimize a high performance advisor engagement strategy.
Do you have the right foundation for advisor engagement?
We break down the resources and systems that asset management firms need for effective advisor engagement into four categories:
These four resource categories make up what we call a “revenue system”. They form the foundation for advisor engagement and sustainable revenue execution. These resources need to be in place at a sufficient level of maturity to enable revenue teams to attract, nurture, deepen and expand advisor relationships and convert asset management sales. Yet few asset management firms have the right mix of capabilities across these categories. Brand channels and communications, messaging and voice are often not competitively distinguished and consistently communicated. The organization and talent approach is often siloed, creating disjointed advisor engagement for self-directed advisors and revenue processes are not “closed-loop” where marketing activities and programs are tracked through sales, informing what’s working and how to re-shape program tactics. Finally, technology systems are often not fully integrated, thereby resulting in poor data quality and less-than-ideal automation effectiveness.
Today’s advisor lifecycle experience is fluid and self-directed. Messages and experiences must be consistently delivered across marketing and sales. Leaders recognize that marketing and sales teams come together to manage non-linear advisor journeys. So, what are the resources required for an effective revenue system?
We break down resources into a checklist of four systems categories for world-class advisor engagement.
Brand
Pervasive experiences, impressions and visual communications that reinforce a differentiated position.
People
Organization and talent that bring a holistic understanding of the integrated front office and teamwork.
Processes
A continuous closed-loop process that eliminates “marketing” and “sales” language in favor of a revenue-focused approach and process.
Technology
Marketing and technology stack that includes applications for marketing, sales and data management.