Businesses require a strong marketing strategy to help them grow. With a marketing strategy in place businesses can create brand awareness, reach out to their customers, present their products or services and help potential customers to convert. But just having a marketing strategy is not enough. You also need to take into consideration the various marketing technologies you want to use to implement your plan. Here is where the marketing engine comes into play. Marketing engine includes all of your marketing activities.
Various marketing activities like content marketing, PPC, Public relations, SEO, lead generation etc. makes this engine work. The tools that are available to marketers to implement and measure their activities like CRMs, website, analytics, research etc. form the components of this engine. The combination of these activities and tools is what gives results to help your business grow.
Here is how you can start building your marketing engine:
Determine Your Goals
The first step would be to have all your goals in place. Setting goals will determine in which direction your marketing efforts are headed. Goals enable you to measure all your results that you aim to achieve through your marketing activities. It will make sure that you do not stray away from your intended path.
It is important to spend some time to set your goals before you start building your marketing engine. The goals you set up should be specific, measurable and time-based. If you are unable to measure your goals after you implement your marketing strategy, then you won’t know the progress you made. Make sure to determine your goals so you have a thorough understanding of what results you expect to get from your campaigns.
Define Your Target Customers
Who you market to is an important aspect of your marketing activities. You need to think about user intent before planning any of your marketing strategies. Insights on your buyer’s interests, preferences, needs, pain points are crucial when you are developing your strategies. Do an in-depth research of your target customers and form buyer personas. These personas will be the representation of your target customer.
Knowing who your buyer’s will help you form any marketing strategies like content marketing, inbound marketing and more. Based on the preferences of your audience you can create personalized content and messaging to target them. Your marketing efforts should be personalized as per the needs of your audience. This will help your customers to trust in you and build long-term relationships with your brand. It will also be easy for your sales team to nurture leads and push them further down the funnel and convert them.
Research Top Keywords for Your Business
Keywords are search queries that your audiences use to get information on different topics. Having a keyword list in place is important for your marketing strategies. They are useful in improving the organic ranking of your website. This can help you reach your prospects whenever they look for the type of products or services you offer. Spend time on researching the most relevant keywords for your business. There are a number of tools like Google Keyword Planner, Serpstat, SEMrush etc. to help you plan your keywords.
Competitive Research
To build a marketing engine you will also need to take a look at your competitors. Competitive research can help you see your competitor’s marketing efforts, website, keywords, content and more. This is the type of information you can leverage for your own business. Take a look at all the keywords your competitors are using and their rankings. This will be useful to create your own keyword list.
By researching your competitors, you can gain insights on what type of content is appreciated by your target customers. You can also analyse their customer’s journey and how they nurture and covert their customers. This information can help you in your own marketing plans and give you an idea on how to interact with your customers. It also gives you an in-depth knowledge about your target customers. With these insights you can understand the interests, pain points and preferences of your customers. You do not have to copy exactly what your competitors are doing, but you can take inspiration from it and use that in your own marketing plans.
Along with planning and researching, you also need to think about the type of technologies or tools you will need to streamline all of your marketing or sales related activities. Here are some tools that you can utilize to make your marketing efforts more efficient.
Building Your Website
A website is an integral part of your business. This is where most of your business is done. Visitors come to your website to know more about your brand and what you have to offer. A good website can help you convert your visitors into customers. Websites should be user friendly to make it easy for your audiences to navigate. Create landing pages that are appealing to your users so that they can convert. Include CTAs to help them navigate to different parts of your website for more information.
Website is important to your content strategy as you can post different types of content like blogs, case studies, testimonials, eBooks and more to engage your users. Use website tools that can help you easily modify your web pages, post content, create landing pages and more. Tools like WordPress works best for small to medium businesses as it helps them create a website easily.
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Customer Relationship Management System
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a tool for managing your company’s interaction with customers and prospects. This system helps you to efficiently communicate with your customers and helps you build a long-term relationship with them. Through CRM you can stay connected with your customers and track every interaction you have had with them. As a company grows manually handling all contacts can become difficult. With a CRM system you can store and update contact easily. You can also track which stage they are in their buyer’s journey.
A CRM system can be useful to all aspects of business, like sales, marketing, customer service to better manage and interact with people to drive success. CRM makes it easier to access and share data, collaborate and improve productivity. Marketing and sales teams are able to share information and track the status of prospects. They can also know which marketing or sales efforts brought a particular lead. Tracking customer interactions can be useful as sales reps can know the last communication they had with a particular prospect. Then they can continue reaching out to them.
Marketing Automation
The technology that manages various marketing processes across channels automatically is called marketing automation. It is used by businesses to target customers with automated messages through emails, social media, website and more. You can create messages that are automatically sent based on the triggers you have set up. Automation saves employees for monotonous and tedious tasks of sending these messages to each lead. This way employees are free to work on other important tasks.
With automation you can ensure that no lead is missed out. You can create follow up messages that can be sent to leads in a timely manner. This is especially useful in email marketing campaigns. Emails are used by most businesses to communicate with their leads and customers on a regular basis. Workflows can be set up to save the time and efforts of a sales rep. Setting up these workflows will ensure that emails are sent out automatically along with follow ups based on the trigger action. Automation can improve your sales and marketing efforts. It can save time and resources and generate more revenue for your business.
Lead Nurturing Workflows
The process of delivering automated messaging or content to nurture your leads and convert them into customers is called lead nurturing workflow. This type of messaging is highly personalized and tailored as per the needs of potential customers. The content you provide to your leads should be aimed at educating them. Before setting up the workflow identify your goals for this workflow. Take a look at all the contacts you want to send emails to. Create or choose personalized email sequences and plan the time gap between each email.
The benefit of setting up such workflows is that you will ensure all contacts in the list have received the emails. It also helps with the efficient management of time. Once the workflows are automated there is no need for manually sending emails.
A/B Testing
In an A/B testing process you can compare two or more versions of a webpage, email, CTA, ad copies or any other attributes to see which performs better. This is especially useful in your marketing or advertising campaigns. You can test different versions of landing pages that you add in your campaign so that you can see which one is giving best results. In a landing page you can experiment with fonts, color palettes, layout and more. Testing these various elements of a landing page can help you choose the best aspects that generate positive results.
Email copies can also be tested, and you can create two versions of an email. You can test various elements like CTA buttons, subject line, images and more to see which has more open rate. The version that has the most engagement is the one you can continue using. Similarly, it enables you to test ad copies to see which one has the most clicks. A/B testing can help you improve different elements of your marketing campaigns to make it more successful. It shows you what your audience prefers and finds appealing.
Landing Pages
A landing page is an important aspect of your website. It is the page where you users end up after clicking on the link in your marketing or advertising campaigns. Landing page is where your users have the potential to convert. Hence, you need to ensure that your landing pages are optimized. Create an appealing layout for your landing page. Make sure to include a CTA button so that your user is guided to take the intended action. Including too many CTAs can confuse the user and they might end up leaving.
For instance, if you are running ads for a particular product. Once the user clicks on the ad, he/she will end up on the product page. The product page should offer relevant information to users and provide a CTA button that takes them to the cart. To ensure the performance of the landing page keep monitoring the bounce rate. This will show you if users are taking the desired actions. Also, monitor the speed of the landing page, because if your landing page is taking time to load, it will encourage users to exit. Constantly improving the performance of your landing pages is important to your conversion rate.
Call to Action
A CTA or call to action is a phrase or a button that has a hyperlink embedded in it which provides the users with additional information. CTAs are an important aspect of various marketing and advertising campaigns. These are used in blog content so that your users can navigate to other pages of your website. They are also used in emails, social media posts, ads and any other form of content to guide the users to your website. After clicking on a CTA button, the user will end up on a desired landing page.
CTAs should be strong and appealing. They should intrigue a user into taking a specific action. Colors and fonts used to design a CTA button should reflect your brand image. With the help of CTAs you can drive users to take the desired actions.
Lead Qualification Process, Lead Scoring
The lead qualification process helps you determine whether a prospect has the potential to convert into a long-term customer. It is important to gather data and insights to successfully qualify your leads. To determine the quality of a lead you can look at their customer journey. This process helps you identify the leads and convert them into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).
A lead is a visitor who has shown interest in your content and has some knowledge about your products or services. A marketing qualified lead is someone who has engaged with your company and could be a potential customer when nurtured. For example, this lead may have downloaded some form of gated content or signed up for a newsletter and is continuing to visit your website for more content. The marketing team will research this lead and then hand it over to the sales team. When a lead is ready to talk to the sales team then he/she is qualified as a SQL.
The process to move a lead from an MQL to an SQL is called lead scoring. It is different for different companies. Lead scoring processes assign values as numerical “points” to each lead. These values are based on a variety of attributes that you might set for your business. For example, you might assign 6 points to a lead who has downloaded a template form your website. Based on these scores the sales and marketing teams can prioritize these leads, nurture them further and finally convert them.
Sales Enablement
The sales enablement process provides your sales team with the resources they need to successfully close deals. The resources can be in the form of tools, content, and information on your products or services. This process requires the collaboration of both marketing and sales teams. Marketing reps can provide content and information to the sales reps. Content can be in the form of blogs, videos, case studies and more. Sales reps can then leverage this content to support their interactions with potential customers.
Sales teams can also communicate with marketing teams when they require any type of content to nurture their leads. The sales enablement strategy is often tailored as per the individual requirements of the sales teams. This can develop your sales team to accurately target potential customers and have successful interaction with them that can help them convert.
Web Analytics
Analytics is an important part of any business. Data is important to measure the success of your website. With website analytics you can determine the performance of your website. Google Analytics is a great tool to track your website performance. With this tool you can see the amount of traffic coming to your website. You can also gain insights on their demographics and behavior. Channel reports can help you determine which marketing efforts got the most traffic. Based on this you can gauge the success of your campaigns.
Another area where Google Analytics is important is tracking your landing pages. Landing pages are key to any of your marketing or advertising campaigns. After clicking on the links, you provided in any of your ads or content, the users will end up on a particular landing page on your website. These landing pages are what drive conversion. Hence, you need to make sure that they are functioning well. Google Analytics provides you with information on the performance of these landing pages. You can track the bounce rate, which is the number of users who left your website without taking any action. If a landing page has a high bounce rate it means that people are not engaging with the content. You can then improve your pages to provide a great user experience.
With analytics you can also track completed goals and conversions on your website. Knowing the performance of your website is crucial. Based on these insights you can further improve the performance of your website which will help your business grow.
To Summarize
A marketing engine helps a business maintain communication with its audience by providing them with valuable and relevant content. It can help you implement your marketing plan that helps your business grow. If you are starting out with building your marketing engine then these steps can help you get started in the right direction.
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