A tasty blend of effective content marketing and demand generation can be the way to any potential prospect’s heart within the world of B2B marketing.
With the right preparation, ingredients and serving portions, your target market will keep coming back for another helping and it will keep your pipeline nourished.
Follow this recipe to cook up the perfect demand generation dish and deliver a piping hot performance that your boss will have to give a 5* review.
Cleanliness
Don’t enter the kitchen without clean hands…or in this case: data.
This is a must if you want to minimise a drain on your time and resources and want to nurture your prospects efficiently. A lack of data integrity has the potential to skew your figures when you’re analysing data sets too. Run your data through the ringer to find duplicate contacts, leads and accounts, those you do find can be removed from your campaign. Also, be sure to check your records for global unsubscribes.
Managing your data is a must if you want to maximise your marketing efforts. Wasting your time and energy on lousy data can make you miss hot leads that could have converted.
Too Many Creative Cooks (Can) Spoil the Broth…
Of course it’s great when your team’s creative juices are flowing, but it’s important to keep a degree of control to ensure you are avoiding ‘samey’ content and it is actually contributing to team and company goals.
A large part of this is reporting on similar metrics; it is always a good idea to make sure everyone is using the same data sources, filters and formats. This will provide a unified view of your contribution to overall performance, reduce requests for more specific reports and, most importantly, gain insight into what works to improve future campaigns and enrich your pipeline.
- Step 1 – Integrate fresh data into your CRM or marketing automation platform.
- Step 2 – Liaise with key stakeholders to gather the best assets and agree on a strategy.
- Step 3 – Timing is everything. Set times for delivery, review and sharing on your content marketing calendar.
- Step 4 – Review on a larger scale every quarter and make tweaks to your recipe where necessary.
The results? Enjoy an ongoing increase in measurement effectiveness and watch your sales soar!
Marketing and Sales Sundae
Sales and marketing will always have subtly different objectives, but the two should always work in unison to drive overall company performance. If they go together like bangers and mash, you should find your marketing-to-sales process will become seamless; with marketers able to ‘cook up’ better qualified leads, passing them to sales to deliver exceptional customer service. This will improve sales productivity and should reflect well when you analyse ROI.
First, get sales and marketing around the table to establish agreements that you can both meet and will deliver for potential new customers. It’s imperative that lead generation strategies dovetail.
Next, take the taste test by ensuring leads are being qualified properly – who are you designing the menu for and will they enjoy it? This will help sales engage more effectively with potential clients.
And last of all, do some reporting on your new pipeline. You’ll want to know that your approach is working to avoid being shunned at the dinner table.
This is what it takes to get everything ready for the lunchtime rush. Read part two to deliver a three course banquet of content success.
