How To Evaluate Your Marketing System

 Evaluate Your Marketing System
Simply put you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you haven’t seen a sales and marketing system that was designed in the last few years, chances are you don’t know what you are missing because you haven’t seen how good it can be. You don’t realize the scope of the advancements made in technology that have pretty much redefined the daily activities of a digital marketer. You haven’t seen the first-hand effects of what automation can do to your internal processes. The problems it can solve. The time it can save. So when you reflect on your current system and tell me everything is fine, I do tend to wonder. What standard is your answer based on? But perhaps you are right. Perhaps fine is all it needs to be for you. But again, I simply think that’s because you don’t truly understand how much easier I can make your life. And how much better at your job we can make you seem. Simply put, you need good technology and an effective plan. So it is in this light that I’d like to take some time to explore how to properly evaluate the effectiveness of your existing system. 

Modern Tech

First, you must begin with foundational technology. Modern marketing activities cannot be done in a vacuum. You need toolsets for all types of different activities: information storage, activity tracking, content creation, and promotion. To win online you have to create a helpful and intuitive user experience that allows your viewers to easily find the content they want and ask the question they need answered. Without the proper combination of tools, these things are impossible. But with the appropriate toolsets and necessary buildout, you can create a funnel of new business, both by developing new customers from digital sources and by serving all of your leads regardless of origin better through the buyer’s journey.

There are a lot of different toolsets you can use for your marketing efforts. But to me, it’s important to have as many of your tools under one roof as possible. That is partly why our agency has embraced HubSpot for so long. We understand the value of data. The more information we can collect on our leads, the better we understand them. The better we can communicate with them. The better we can provide a solution tailored to their needs. There are a few other companies that try to compete like Marketo, Pardot, and Infusionsoft, but I’m yet to find that any of those even come close to HubSpot’s power of toolsets and ease of use. Right now, they are just far and away the best product on the market, and it appears the gap is only widening.

System Buildout

So now that we’ve covered the technical needs, we have to talk about the system buildout. While HubSpot is in itself a very powerful set of tools, it doesn’t provide a magic wand. You have to use the tools to get the value out of them. So that’s why it is so important to spend time developing your marketing system, and that’s often where we come in. As an agency, it is our job to help our clients get the most out of their toolsets and digital marketing efforts. We evaluate the systems you have in place to identify areas for improvement and alignment. If you have nothing in place currently, the job is clear. We need to design and implement a system to attract, convert, and nurture leads. And for those of you that do have some toolsets and/or marketing assets in place, our challenge is to help you guys better connect all the dots, so your marketing efforts carry more weight.

The most common issues I see when reviewing an opportunity’s marketing portal is a lack of segmentation and automation, as well as a general lack of understanding about how all these elements are supposed to work together. The guiding theory behind these strategies is that if we continue to send helpful information tailored to the background and interest of the lead, we’ll either be able to nurture them until the timing is right for a sales opportunity, or the lead will eventually qualify themselves out of the process. That helps progress each lead that is a potential opportunity while also removing the unqualified leads that would have otherwise wasted your team’s time.

So yes, automation can be the bee’s knees when it comes to digital marketing, but you can’t build effective automation without list segmentation and lead intelligence. And a good place to start is by ensuring every one of your new leads is designated as the appropriate persona. (For those new to the game, a persona is marketing lingo for your type of customer.) In order for you to ensure that you are sending people the most relevant content, you have to be able to properly identify leads in order to get them into the right bucket. One strategy we use is to make sure that we include a required persona qualifying question on the first form anyone fills out. So whether a lead converts at the top of the marketing funnel by downloading an ebook or at the bottom by scheduling time directly onto my calendar, they will designate their own persona by answering our question “What role describes you best?” from a dropdown list of provided answers. That ensures every lead is designated as the right persona from their initial conversion and thus will be entered into the appropriate workflow with content tailored to speak to their specific challenges and pain points.

 

I realize we have discussed a lot of different tools and strategies, but you don’t need to feel overwhelmed because everything I have mentioned so far is that it can be preconceived and set up to run without your direct management. Now we always encourage your internal team to keep an eye on things, but the daily activity can and will be supported by automation to ensure that every lead will be effectively nurtured until they qualify themselves out or become ready for sales. That is the true beauty of the digital growth system’s we help implement for clients. If you’d like to learn about these modern system or would like me to take a look at your processes and assets, please feel free to reach out to me and set up some time to chat.

HubSpot Website Design Impact Award Winner