Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
In today’s business landscape, your limited marketing dollars have to work harder than ever and understanding the impact marketing has on revenue is imperative.
While calculating return on investment has never been easy, there are new ways to approach your marketing programs to enable meaningful measurement and truly understand the relationships between your marketing spend and sales results.
The role of marketing is to identify leads for sales team follow-up. In many companies, these two organizations work in silos, one not clear about the activities of the other. Even without formal alignment, marketing and sales need to share information as the basis for how marketing programs should perform. When marketing understands the revenue target and greatest opportunities for account growth, marketing programs can be better tailored to meet your company’s goals in those areas.
If you don’t know exactly how many leads your marketing generates, look at how leads come to your organization. Are you able to identify the source? If not, start tracking how they found you. You may have marketing automation systems in place to help you do this. If not, you can still take action.
This can be as simple as asking callers how they heard of you and keeping track on a piece of paper. It may also be a custom, trackable URL placed in an e-mail campaign.
Remember that measurement just for the sake of numbers isn’t necessarily valuable. But, if measurement data from one channel is used to inform decisions for how to use other channels, you’ll create a well-oiled marketing machine with multiple points for measurement and evaluation.
You start to understand which customers are coming from where, what they want next and how much it will cost you to get them there. We call that unified marketing.
To have something to measure, you need to ask your customers to do something. Many companies forget this, instead putting their emphasis on the marketing message and brand story without giving readers the chance to react.
In short, marketing materials without calls to action are a wasted opportunity.
Each contact with a prospect or customer should give a clear and meaningful way to engage with you. You should include a way to tangibly measure action and understand how it affects your business objectives.
Rather than measuring outputs like website hits or e-mail open rates, go one step further and look for ways to create more tangible and specific outcomes.
A great number of your leads won’t be ready to purchase at the first opportunity. Rather than asking for a direct interaction, give them the opportunity to engage in a more preliminary way. Offer them resources that demonstrate the problems your product/service will help solve. Tracking how they engage with that content can arm your sales force with meaningful information for follow-up sales calls.
For prospects and customers, re-think the use of your site’s home page. Using e-mail or social channels to drive people to your site makes it easier for them to get specific content.
Build campaign-based microsites or landing pages. Give your customers the type of page content they’re expecting, plus a tangible action for you to track. From here, you can make deeper decisions.
For example, folks coming from an e-mail to the page who then signed up for a video demo will receive a phone call from your sales team. Folks coming from the same e-mail but who didn’t sign up for the video will receive another e-mail.
When you show up in the media, instead of simply looking at the number of impressions an article received, look at the related actions. Provide a link within the article to a specific web page so you can see how many people visited the page and what they did when they got there.
Include related content on the page, then track how many people are reading which content and where in the site they go next. Use this information as you decide on content ideas for future media opportunities and content for your other marketing channels.
The call to action on many sell sheets is an 800 number to contact sales. Remember, not all prospects are ready to buy. For those who aren’t, consider pointing them to a video product demo or e-calculator to help them determine how much money they could save by purchasing your product or service.
By giving them resources to educate them on your product, you’re warming up the sale. Maximize your digital channels to enhance the performance of a print piece beyond the number of people who called the 800 number.
Using one channel well for action and measurement will undoubtedly help your business. However, unifying all of your channels will strengthen each one individually and the collective whole.
If the idea of a unified channel strategy feels like biting off more than you can chew, identify your most valuable channels and start there. Create a strategy where, over time, all of your channels will be working in harmony and data from one channel will inform what happens with the others.
Once you start making small changes, you’ll be amazed at the results.
