There are two types of ways to market – intelligent and old-school. Old-school businesses spend a lot of money on hope. Spending money on billboards, magazine ads, direct mail or any other form of advertising is typically guesswork. They don’t know what the ROI is or what the pipeline looks like from spending so much energy and money on these channels.
Intelligent marketing is based on a different strategy. Before any of these types of marketing are introduced, there is a specific process set up to capture what the buyer is doing. It is feedback. And today, feedback is real-time and based on systems which inform your sales team of what is happening in a growing pipeline.
Your buyers are inundated with messages. They are busy. One strategy is to overwhelm and annoy them with pure volume. This damages your brand and positions you as highly disruptive and selling.
An intelligent approach is to provide specific steps which can be measured and tracked by systems that informs your sales team of when and how to engage. The key is recognizing what kind of feedback your prospects are providing. Here are a few that can serve part of your strategies:
- Engagement with content. You might create initial interest for a busy person to look your way. Then the real test occurs. Is your message something that is valuable and resonates? Does it provide value for their lives or is it just noise? Real value engages a person to dive deeper and consume more. You can measure interest by the duration and frequency of engagement with valuable content.
- Research. The breadth of research you prospects explore is a high indicator of interest and feedback. Discovering who you are, what you offer and what others say is part of this picture. This can be part of the feedback which helps your sales team to make a key call or dialogue around a relevant point of activity.
- Frequency. The consistency and frequency of response to page visits, content consumption and call-to-action responses build a picture of your relevance in someone’s life. It’s rare to hit someone with the right offer at the right time. Frequency can serve to help you see what happens over time and how your brand and value are impacting a person’s world.
With feedback, there are strategies which can be built to follow up appropriately. Unfortunately, most organizations choose to be random in their approach to their own detriment. It’s wasteful and damaging to the sales engagement. Choose better.
If you built your marketing strategies on feedback and action, what would it look like?
