Whether you’re at the helm of a family-owned brick-and-mortar business in Philadelphia or the Marketing Director of a worldwide corporation, it’s essential not only to develop relevant marketing initiatives that reflect your brand but also to identify exactly from which of your marketing channels customers find their way to your company. By being able to both launch engaging marketing efforts and analyze how that traffic got to your company website, you not only affirm the value of your marketing campaigns but also gain invaluable insight into how and where to invest your marketing dollars to experience a consistent Return on Investment. How do you achieve this successfully?
Enter a digital marketing service that has expertise in Closed Loop Marketing.
CLM is a strategic, purposeful marketing process that enables you to collect data about your new, established, and potential customers’ buying behaviors and histories and then immediately analyze that data to fine-tune your current marketing plan and/or orchestrate laser-focused, highly-targeted new marketing materials based upon that data garnered. To implement correctly and embrace fully, CLM requires the expertise of a digital marketing agency that not only has the creative skills to design and implement goosebump-inflicting marketing campaigns but also has the analytical abilities to identify where you’re getting the most bang for your marketing buck. While it’s easy to immediately notice if your blogs get lots of comments and questions from potential and already-satisfied customers, the behind-the-scenes essential data is not so transparent. By being able to identify which video on your website was viewed, if the entire video was watched, and how many times it was viewed, or which PDF file was opened and what e-book was downloaded, you’ll be able to understand which marketing channels are working, which ones aren’t, and which parts of your marketing campaign need to be refined to be even more impactful. By deciding to market your business this way (instead of randomly shooting in the dark and trying whatever marketing strategy you happen to think might be effective), you are “closing the loop” and “making the connection” not only between your innovative, brainstorming marketing team and your sales force but also between your company and your customers. As a result, your company’s sales team can confidently understand how your marketing decisions deliver desired outcomes. Over time, with ongoing CLM, you’ll be able to streamline your marketing efforts so successfully that every creative piece you launch will be engaging, informative, and effective and you’ll no longer be shooting arbitrarily in the dark.
While it offers tons of benefits and while you’ll experience a true ROI, closed-loop marketing does require two tools to help you strategically map the path from your marketing activities to sales. Although both of these tools have their purposes, they effectively work with each other to create the best outcome. One without the other is not effective. When one of your sales specialists closes a new deal, he/she can designate that new business as “won” in one of your tools (the Customer Relationship Management software); that action will immediately trigger an update in your other tool (the marketing analytics software). Then voila! you’ll be able to go back and discover from which marketing channel this new customer first came to your company.
A CRM system synchronizes the activities of three key teams at your company: your sales team, your marketing team, and your customer support team. This tool can further support your business through selling, fulfillment, and identifying and rewarding loyal customers. Some of the most commonly-used CRMs include SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and SugarCRM.
This tool not only maintains a record of your marketing data but also makes it actionable. It gives you the information you need to optimize your marketing campaigns, enable lead conversions, and reveal results. One of the most commonly Marketing Software used today is HubSpot.
Most business owners and Marketing Directors are so bombarded already with lots of projects and people vying for their time and attention, that they either haven’t found the energy to learn about closed-loop reporting or found it too difficult to implement. To market your business or your employer’s business most effectively, however, you must be able to link every lead, every customer, and every dollar straight back to the marketing initiative that created them. Here are the four steps to a successful CLM:
The visitor is at the entry point of your CLM and a Cookie is set on his/her referral source. You’ll be able to identify through which channel that visitor happened upon your site.
Once you’ve attracted both new and repeat visitors to your website and identified how they found their way to you, you must track what they do when they get to your website.
To monetize the traffic on your website, you want your visitors to become qualified leads for your sales team; this happens when they complete a form on one of your website’s landing pages.
Here you’ll be able to see which one of your marketing channels contributed the most to turning visitors into new customers or repeat customers. Through CLM, you’ll be able to identify the specific marketing activities that bring in the most revenue for you.
Phew.
While there is no doubt that CLM gives you the specific data that you can use to make truly informed marketing decisions, it’s a lot to manage. That’s where the expertise of a digital marketing agency can help.
19th-century marketing guru and founder of Philadelphia’s first department store, John Wanamaker once confessed, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” While 21st-century business owners and Marketing Directors today can easily relate, today’s digital, high-tech marketing agencies can (finally) “close the loop” for you between your marketing efforts and your company’s revenue. Here are some benefits of working with a marketing agency that has expertise in CLM; a state-of-the-art marketing agency can:
While there are lots of ways to market your company’s products and services if you’re not decisively identifying which of those specific marketing efforts are producing which specific results, you’ll end up overlooking opportunities, spending money where it’s not effective, and reaching everyone but your perfect target audience every time you launch a new marketing campaign.