You need leads – like yesterday – and your salespeople are baying for them louder than a pack of well-rested huskies.
And not just any old leads. They want well-targeted, qualified and sales-ready leads. Leads that will generate revenue.
Now more than ever before you need a killer marketing campaign to create new business campaign success.
But just before you have a knee-jerk reaction that sends an email to everyone on your database it’s worth taking a step back.
Read on to take your campaign idea through this simple checklist that will help maximise your new business marketing efforts and deliver the success your business deserves.
1. A clear objective
When you set off on a journey it’s very rare that you don’t know your destination. Same goes for a marketing campaign. Setting SMART objectives for new business campaign success upfront means you will know how it measured up to expectations.
2. Sales and marketing alignment
The best campaigns have involvement and input from both sales and marketing. Sales involvement means follow up of any leads is more enthusiastic and effective. It also means they’ll know the key messages because they will have had a hand in creating them. It’s your campaign Dream Team!
3. It’s all about the data
Have you got a good prospect pool of data for your new business campaign? Success may hinge on having a well segmented dataset that is receptive to your campaign. Spend some time profiling your data and segmenting according to your own criteria e.g. company size, job title, industry, previous contact with your company. Tempting as it is to mail the maximum number of people, try to make your campaign highly relevant and offer valuable content to a smaller, focused group.
4. What does success look like?
Tracking activity and being able to show campaign metrics requires having having clear KPIs, the right reporting and measurement tools in place, from the outset. It means you can learn from experience, repeating campaigns that work and avoiding those that don’t quite deliver.
5. Resource and investment
Who is going to deliver the tactics of the campaign and manage things day to day? Do you need to bring in external specialists to manage any aspect, for example web developers or designers, content writers or SEO experts? Map out your campaign and cost it, taking account of in-house resource that could help.
6. Inspiring, original, valuable content
Do you have content that people will want to read? That they will find valuable? That will help them do their jobs and might just make them look good too.
It’s not about you – so think about the needs of your clients, their pain points, industry trends they may be interested in. What do they want to know about and how can you help them out?
7. Call to action
What do you want your prospects to do once you’ve share content, emailed them, taken them on a journey through your web pages? Is it clear cut and obvious? Tell them what the next step is. Make that button big and bold and obvious. Don’t leave them with a limp ‘find out more’ or ‘call us.’
8. What are the campaign touchpoints?
Map out the journey that you want to take your customer on. Consider where they may be in the buying cycle, the best channels to reach them and the best times to contact. It’s all about putting the customer at the centre of things and yourself in their shoes.
9. Lead follow up
Once those leads come flooding in it’s the job of sales to pick up the baton – right? Wrong. Marketing is responsible for more of the sales cycle than ever before, nurturing leads to the point of being sales ready. This may involve using a marketing automation tool to help make this process highly personalised, water-tight and tracked through every step. Or it could be a more manual process with alerts to incite engagement along the sales cycle. The important thing is continuing the dialogue once it’s been started and taking it to a profitable conclusion.
So that
’s the basics – but if you want to read more about creating successful new business campaigns we’ve pulled together some additional sources below that’ll help. If you’re looking for more help with marketing your business just give us a call (0203 137 3343).
NB If generating more leads through your website is a priority, you’ll find more food for thought in our post “How to do B2B keyword research and increase leads in 2017″.
Sources:
Advice on gathering prospect data:
-
How to collect data without scaring your prospects – September, 2015
-
How to build a targeted B2B prospect list – November, 2012
Useful steer on setting goals based on industry benchmarks:
-
Direct Media Response Rate, CPA and ROI Benchmarks – April, 2015
-
The Statistics Behind B2B Social Media Marketing – Business2Community.com – August, 2012
-
11 Stats that Offer Evidence of the Resurgence of Direct Mail Marketing, Salestaff.com – March, 2015
-
16 Surprising B2B Lead Generation Statistics, Captera – April, 2014
-
B2B lead conversion rates, PropelGrowth.com – publish date not available.
Helpful articles about content, calls-to-action and landing pages:
-
Don’t know what to blog about? Let HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator think of ideas for you.
-
3 Landing Page Best Practices Debunked, Optimizely -December, 2015
-
B2B Marketing Calls-to-Action: Best Practices by Channel, SnapApp.com – July, 2016
-
31 Call-to-Action Examples You Can’t Help But Click, Hubspot – March, 2016 –
To help shape the right marketing mix and the customer journey:
-
What Are The Best Converting Channels for B2B Organisations In 2015?, Strategic-IC – publish date not available.
-
The B2B Marketing Mix: Direct Mail Campaigns, Pardot.com – January, 2016
-
3 Surprising LinkedIn Stats All B2B Marketers Should Know, Business2Community – June, 2015
-
The Hottest B2B Prospecting Strategies for 2016, Technology Advice – February, 2016
Relating to resource and investment, here’s a good piece on making DM feel high-end:
How to Make Your Direct Mail Feel High-End Without Breaking the Budget, IWCO.com – October, 2015
Lead nurturing reads:
-
The Definitive Guide To Lead Nurturing, Marketo – publish date not available.
-
11 Must-Try Lead Nurturing Campaigns, Pardot – March, 2015
-
50 B2B Lead Generation Ideas from the Experts, Optimizely Blog
Image credit: Boris Stefanik on Unsplash.com
You’ll find more New Business Marketing advice in our Quick Guide: How to Create Ace New Business Marketing.