Good marketers aren’t born — they’re made. More specifically, they’re made by how well they generate leads, keep them organized, and nurture them through their pipeline. Customer conversion is job one as a marketer, and you can only do that if you have a suite of tools in your arsenal that will make it easy to be successful.
Don’t be scared, now — this high level of organization might be foreign to you, but you don’t have to feel like you’re on your own. There are plenty of highly efficient methods for marketing productivity. Whether it’s process management, lead tracking, or other types of tools, these methods for supercharging your strategy will help you unlock the top tier of your digital marketing performance.
Adopt a Culture of Organization to Win
Organizing leads isn’t analog anymore. A briefcase brimming with loose business cards doesn’t cut it — the digital world means that there is are tools that can improve your ability to track and organize your sales leads. Even the simplest of spreadsheets, designed in Excel or even Google Docs in just a few minutes, can make it easier to track the development of your leads across days, weeks, or even months.
A simple lead tracking system like this can cut hours off your day, and help reduce cost. Being organized means you’ll never miss out on a hot lead because you overlooked it or forgot to follow up, and that means fewer missed opportunities. At the same time, simple spreadsheets are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getting your marketing strategies organized.
You Need to Be Efficient, Too
Yes, using a lead tracker in the form of a spreadsheet is a serious upgrade. At the same time, there’s more you can do to supercharge your marketing efforts — in this case, you’ll need something with more power than just a spreadsheet. What you need is a lead management system that provides data management options so that you can analyze trends in an integrated manner.
Resources such as these are potentially game-changing. If you’re working on your own as a marketer they’re particularly helpful, as you might not have the resources a larger company might have at their disposal. Yet if you’re part of a marketing team, this data is even more beneficial. Managers and supervisors especially love the options that management systems provide when it comes to managing marketing processes across an entire team.
Be Customer-focused in Management
Organization and efficiency are key if you’re developing a strategy for managing your leads. At the same time, you need to also ensure that any tools or techniques you have at play are focused on consumers.
Marketing that’s not properly focused on your target consumer leads to data mismanagement.
Instead of using this valuable data for crafting a targeted marketing campaign, for instance, many organizations and individual marketers simply use this data to analyze trends.
That’s why big data, or predictive analytics as it’s sometimes called, is so valuable. You can certainly generate some pretty-looking sales reports without relying on big data analytics, but you’re making a major misstep by not applying predictive analysis to this data in order to locate specific prospects that are likely to have highly targeted needs that you can satisfy.
Embrace Fully-Integrated Solutions
This summarizes what we’ve discussed so far.
We’ve talked about using predictive analytics to create marketing campaigns that are highly consumer-focused, leveraging techniques for sales process management to provide higher levels of efficiency, and how a simple lead tracking spreadsheet can help organize your marketing efforts.
Taken individually these facets are all powerful, but combining them together can multiply that power exponentially. That is, of course, unless you’re bogged down by trying to navigate a number of different solutions. At that point, you risk wasting more time and energy than it’s worth because there’s no possible way to integrate these functions together.
What you need to do is to find a solution that provides all-in-one services. Lead management platforms that integrate all three of these facets together make it much easier to manage marketing campaigns, especially large or complex ones. The number of consumer relationship management suites on the open market are innumerable, of course; it will take some time before you can explore enough of these to decide which will be right for you. However, there’s almost a guarantee that one of these tools will provide you the support you need to organize leads and analyze data trends efficiently.
Your CRM Suite is Essential
A common refrain when it comes to using a consumer relationship management system is that the costs associated with such a suite of tools are simply too high. At first blush, this can certainly be true — many of these suites are on a subscription plan, representing an additional monthly fee at which many marketers may balk. This is especially true when it comes to smaller marketing companies or individuals.
Yet the truth is that as expensive as it may seem to you, the costs of not having such a sophisticated suite of tools at your disposal could be debilitating. As we discussed, you can only do so much with a rudimentary spreadsheet program without running into issues with lack of data. This means that the services these toolsets provide have a value that can far exceed their cost. In other words, you may not be able to afford to do without these tools in the long run!
Author: Benjamin Shepardson is the founder of NoStop Writing Service, a Key West-based content agency specializing in delivering personalized experiences. With an extensive digital career dating back to before social media and WordPress, Ben personally works with clients to craft a content strategy that will scale and grow their business. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
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