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?
There are many different perspectives and philosophies on persona development. This makes sense, as they’re the most critical element of creating messaging and informing Message Maps™…then identifying and developing content aligned with the buy cycle…and ultimately validating the various components of a true buyer engagement strategy. In the end, persona development should be defined by how it’ll be used – in terms of purpose and context that will drive messaging, and ultimately content strategy. Other marketers will use it more as a “playbook” of all possible or available buyer insights. I’m not saying either is right or wrong, but it’s why we’ve created a new category called Engagement Personas™.
Although many marketers focus on increasing the number of leads, quite often marketers should be in fact aiming to have fewer leads. The key is that this smaller number of leads are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), who are genuine sales prospects, instead of people who are curious but have no intent to buy.
Recent studies indicate that financial advisors expect continued strong demand for their services in the next year. Russell Investments third-quarter Financial Professional Outlook indicated that Advisors remain bullish about the capital markets looking out over the next three years.
Source: Russell Investments
However, they worry about investors’ emotional response to market events that could harm their businesses and their clients’ well-being, The Russell Investments study showed market volatility to be the most common topic initiated by clients. A Fidelity Advisor Investment Pulse Survey showed similar results.
“When investors make emotional decisions, they decrease the odds of reaching their financial goals,” said John Hailer, chief executive officer of Natixis Global Asset Management in the Americas and Asia.
How can financial advisors set reasonable expectations with challenges like volatility and low-interest rates?…how can they take the emotion out of investor conversations to set realistic goals and stick to them?
Every company will have different ways of measuring a qualified lead, yet there is a set of factors that you can use to map into a lead-scoring model. Many marketing automation solutions, such as Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, ShaprSpring, and others, have built-in lead scoring algorithms and pass this information into a CRM system like Salesforce and SugarCRM.
These scores can be set up to deliver marketing-qualified leads based on certain criteria and scores, helping sales teams accept the leads (Sales Accepted Leads) and focus their energies on the top prospects.
Marketing Automation and CRM are both important. We use Sharpspring technology for our small business retainer services to deliver inbound marketing programs and integrated marketing. Sharpspring includes an integrated CRM as well as API hooks into leading CRMs so it is great for small businesses. The life of the lead is a great way to see the flow of the lead through time and the lead scoring approach helps sales focus immediately on the top inbound leads.
I received these statistics in a recent email and I thought they were worth sharing further with some comments. I am adding some implications as I see them below each one:
A whopping 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
Marketing automation isn’t just about efficiency; it’s a powerful tool for driving revenue growth. While there are numerous operational benefits, the ultimate goal is to increase your bottom line. Here are some ways marketing automation platforms – along with your campaigns and programs – can boost revenue performance:
In today’s digital-first world, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest online marketing trends. However, for businesses with complex sales cycles and targeted audiences, a well-rounded approach that combines traditional and digital marketing can yield significant results.