Anyone can place an order for an ad, but only Entrepreneurs with their eye on the bottom line and Fortune 500 companies understand the value of a solid marketing plan.
The Fortune 500 have mountains of cash to throw around, so they can pound their offerings into your head and tell you that they sell “moments of pleasure” until you believe it, even if you don’t understand how drinking cola is a moment of pleasure more so than an ice cream cone or a sunrise.
Small and medium-sized business owners, on the other hand, need to be very smart with their marketing budgets. They need to focus on what is working and keep doing that until it doesn’t work anymore.
That’s where a marketing plan comes in. Those business owners who don’t have clear marketing plans find that their marketing tends to be reactive and only when they are running short on cash, or falling short of their goals do they launch a campaign to try to fix the problem. The trouble is, the campaigns they come up with are really just “Hail Mary” passes. The odds of catching the pass in the end-zone is slim, but there is a big reward if it pays off. It’s a big, risky gamble.
Marketing campaigns are actually the farthest thing from a risky bet against the odds
Running a business is a risk, but Entrepreneurs mitigate the risk with knowledge. They don’t risk everything on the roll of the dice or the toss of a ball.
Marketing campaigns are well thought out methods of attracting prospects and a process that clearly states what happens next. This is important because it keeps your employees on the same page and it helps them deliver identical experiences to every prospect. This makes it easy on your employees and it solidifies your brand in the minds of your prospects.
Most B2B companies rely on sales teams as the primary method for reaching out to the market, but they can only do so much in a day and they tire quickly when faced with the insurmountable task of finding needles in hay stacks.
Marketing campaigns alleviate this by including everyone in the organization in the most important focus of the business: making sales!
Think of this Web Campaign:
You use pay-per-click to bring in prospects to your website. Your website has information that the prospects can download which helps educate them on your offerings. They fill out a form in order to download the information. A junior salesperson or a telemarketer calls the prospect to see if they require any additional information and to feel them out as to their time to purchase without selling them anything. You continue to send them emails to keep in touch with them over the coming weeks. You track their visits to your website and see what they are looking at. You may even send them additional information based upon what they are viewing on your website. When they are ready to buy, they contact the sales department and the sales rep closes the sale.
In this scenario did you notice that the sales rep never had to spend an inordinate amount of time on this prospect? The customer, using your website, was able to educate himself on your product or service because the marketing campaign was designed to enable him to do it.
The net result of this marketing campaign is:
- The website was utilized the way a website is supposed to be used. A website is not a brochure.
- The salespeople get to focus on what they do best. Close! When salespeople spend all day closing prospects instead of prospecting, they get very excited because salespeople love making money! We have found that the salespeople in a scenario like this get better and better at closing because they are getting a lot more positive reinforcement than they were previously and that equates to a positive, “I can sell anyone” attitude.
- You know how many prospects you will need to attract in order to reach your goals.
- You can measure the effectiveness of the campaign.
We can help you develop Marketing Campaigns that not only give you a strong return on investment, they also give you valuable information about your customers: who they are, what they want, how they buy, and what they need in order to educate them.
