Old school vs. New School - Is your Marketing Mix Evolving?

I've been thinking a lot recently about my days as a Marketing Manager. Having to make daily decisions on where I should spend my money to get the most ROI. Only to report to my boss every quarter and try and explain any mediocre results I was having and the reasoning behind them. Mind you, back then the internet wasn't the tool it is today. Sure we used email and landing pages but social media for business wasn't in our marketing mix. Today, marketing managers are more savvy, they use technology and most are even experts in certain categories. However for the SMB marketing manager, their time can be focused on the day to day work which leaves little to no time to educate themselves on the most recent trends in advertising and marketing. So what is a marketing manager, working for a SMB to do? Most will hire outside help to manage chunks of their spend. Media buying here, creative over there, leaving Social Media and SEO to manage themselves or to push onto a junior coordinator to try and make sense of. Outside vendors tell you they can get you ranked the highest but from my experience you just keep spending and spending and never seem to get results you were promised.

So, with all this said - what is a marketing manager to do? Indeed in a world where everyone of us has to do more with less, most are doing what they can internally and outsourcing the rest. That's a fine strategy if you you have a big picture plan in mind and your vendors are delivering a holistic program that touches all the key points of your marketing program. Problem is, vendors work in silos and that's why most online marketing programs fail to deliver. Your SEO people aren't necessary the same one's doing your SMO. Your Google Adwords are being managed by someone else altogether. There was a time when you needed to work with specialists and the above would have been the way to go. However today there are far more advanced systems that can manage all the above and create a synergistic and holistic marketing program that generates results because it is being managed as one deliverable.

Recently I had the chance to work with a new client who was looking to do the following:
1. Increase Leads
2. Convert these leads into Customers
3. Retain their current client base

Not an easy task off the bat but something we could easily measure and provide concrete ROI for the customer.

So how did we do it? Easy.

Increasing the Traffic to Their Website and Getting New Leads

Using our software, we can drive traffic to our clients website.  Since September 2011, their website traffic has increased by 180%. Our software’s SEO Tools replaced their need to hire the external SEO expert who wasn’t producing the results they were looking for.  They can now find and track their most effective keywords, track inbound links, and diagnose and fix poorly ranking website pages.  Since October 2011, their visits due to organic search have increased by 133%.

Another key step in developing an effective inbound marketing strategy was starting their blog in order to attract leads with valuable content. Using our Blogging Tool, we can easily create posts and get SEO tips along the way.  We share the posts on all their social media channels with the social sharing icons.  We can track the blog to see which posts are generating the most traffic, leads, and ultimately customers.  “Blogging has been instantly successful for us.  Right now we are blogging twice a week religiously.  People are sharing our content"(Customer). They currently have over 20,000 subscribers to their blog.

Using our Lead Generation Tools, website visitors can move towards becoming customers.  All the lead data they generate with us is integrated with their CRM account.  The CRM integration makes marketing and sales alignment easy.  In the past year, their leads have increased by 288%.  Leads from referrals have increased by 200%

Using Email to Nurture Leads

Using our software’s Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation Tools allows us to warm up leads for our client's sales team with targeted content.  Personalized messages can be sent to leads based on their behavior using the Workflows app.  “Email marketing and lead nurturing helped us to build the relationships and trust we need in order to be recognized as experts in the business execution field" (Customer).

If you are an SMB Marketing Manager or are looking to have the same success noted above, please click here to contact me. I would love to discuss how I can be of service in optimizing your marketing planning and driving real success as in the above example.