Every B2B technology business wants to be on the crest of the digital wave but with so many players in this highly competitive arena, this could be more challenging than you think. A proven way to ensure your marketing efforts are yielding positive returns and translating into sales is to embrace closed-loop marketing.
Tech company employees are traditionally adept at number crunching and data analysis and so, they are among the most natural adopters of this approach, which closes the loop between audience data, marketing processes and sales. This type of intelligence marketing relies on analysing audience data feeding into campaigns and tracking the performance thereof, with the view to improving the overall performance and sales numbers.
While the first step of closed-loop marketing is boosting web traffic by increasing your propensity to get found, converting visits into leads is crucial. Only then can you really begin to garner valuable information and only at this point does the true value of closed-loop marketing really kick in.
Lead generation is not rocket science: it can be achieved by utilising a range of optimised landing pages featuring forms to capture leads’ details in return for a piece of valued content. From this point on both sales and marketing can begin tracking this individual’s activity and start to “close the loop”.
Closing the loop from a marketing perspective
Once a lead has been closed, the marketing team will be able to analyse how effective each marketing campaign has been. They will not only be able to report on how many people have viewed a campaign but how many leads, prospects and sales they have generated. This allows marketing to state precisely what the ROI of each campaign is and what the cost of customer acquisition has been.
The power of the “closed loop” does not end here, however. Marketing will be able to refine and improve campaigns based on the journey that their customer has taken from visitor to customer, and thus be able reduce the cost of customer acquisition (COCA) further.
Closing the loop from a sales perspective
As soon as a web visitor becomes lead, the marketing engine will start to gather information on this lead. The sales team will immediately be able to look at every conversion event, which, in turn, will help them determine how they can position sales calls to address the specific needs of individual prospects. Using a tool such as HubSpot, which integrates with a sales CRM system, allows this information to be gathered in a familiar environment like Salesforce.
Building this intelligence up and only contacting prospects when they have been suitably nurtured by marketing through the sales pipeline means that sales cycles will be reduced. Sales will no longer waste time on unqualified leads and will start having smart and informed sales calls.
Closing the marketing – sales loop is a win-win situation. Traditionally, having sales and marketing working together in a fully integrated way has been a pipe dream. Increased performance across the board is now a reality. Who would not want their sales and marketing team aligned, obtaining and retaining more customers at significantly reduced costs?
Image: iStock photo
Tags: Analytics, Closed loop marketing, Closing sales
