Branding & Strategy

Tie it all together.

The future of smart marketing.

A typical marketing funnel places heavy influence and investment on awareness tactics (direct mail, batch and blast emails, advertising, etc.) with very little follow through and hardly any tracking of leads once they’ve been touched by an awareness campaign. You have no idea which tactic drove a lead to purchase, how long it took or if they have become a fan and are referring your brand to other customers.

In closed-loop marketing, leads are tracked throughout the buying process and tactics are strategically designed to support each phase of the buying process: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase and Loyalty.

For example, your website assists leads after they have become aware of your brand. It helps them in the consideration and often the purchase part of their buying process. If they bookmark your site, it could assist in their brand loyalty, and if you have done some web marketing, it could also help with their awareness. But what happens to the lead once it has left your site? How do you know if a web hit made it to a sales rep? If you have a web form, who receives the notification and is there a consistent follow up process in place?

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is pre-planned follow through with prospective and current customers. It is essential to what is called a “closed loop” marketing funnel. Once a lead has given you their contact information, they should be communicated with in a relevant, personal and targeted way. If someone has already purchased, wouldn’t you communicate with them differently than you would to someone who’s never heard of you?

What this means from a tactical perspective is understanding your leads and their buying cycle, designing marketing tactics to move leads through the funnel, developing targeted and relevant content and retaining leads after they purchase in order to increase referrals and brand loyalty.

This sales funnel can translate for most any B2B and B2C marketing programs. In order to get your marketing to align with this philosophy, you first should audit your marketing tactics and decide where they fit. The next step is to identify the holes and fill them with smart, technologically sound, reasonably-maintained solutions that are scaled for your business.

Get in touch to learn how this approach can increase your conversions and actually track your ROI.