Business Growth Development Consultant

Drip campaigns; lead nurturing, multi-channel and multi-touch marketing automation

There is nothing more time consuming and off putting than either getting too close too quickly or spending time following up on leads with prospects that are just not ready to buy yet.

Spending time with current or potential customers that are in no position to make a decision is not a great use of your company’s valuable selling assets. Instead they should be focusing their time on leads which are ready to start looking seriously at what you are offering and don’t require “converting” because they are already aligned with your model as shown by your marketing and their continued interest, so it’s just a question of details.

Right now either businesses are spending a ton of marketing desperately trying to generate leads any which way they can or they’ve stopped marketing all together.

Either way its not going to be good for your business, but there are ways to get your message to market that are low cost and performance based and that is the only place where you should be spending time and money right now.

Pay-Per-Click / Pay-Per-Lead – Only serve adverts in areas that you can compete and satisfy (especially if you’re a local business) and use the Google optimizer to pay only for conversions (lead that take action) not just leads.

Philip Kotler speaks about the evolving importance of marketing and how its moved from being just a process or department inside a business to an encompassing glue that binds many of the traditional and disparate parts of a business internally to its chosen audiences, partners and markets.

If you are considering running a marketing campaign and you may also be changing your telephone number, moving address or updating any other information around the same time, then please think carefully before you do or you may be incurring a lot of unnecessary cost and customer confusion.

I’ve now had two customers and suppliers over the last month that have had a ton of marketing material printed up, only to find out that the telephone number they thought they had purchased was allocated elsewhere.

I’m not a religious devote myself but I do see lessons and teachings in everything that we can all learn something from.

Easter celebrations are the modern day equivalents of a Pagan festival.

While most people both religious and non-religious celebrate the coming of spring, it is the religious folk that celebrate Jesus’s resurrection during a feast which comes at the end of Lent, a period of fasting and patience.

The general symbolic story of the death of the son (sun) on a cross (the constellation of the southern cross) and his rebirth, overcoming the powers of darkness, is a story that echoes from the ancient world where there are plenty of parallels to be drawn and rival resurrected saviours.

This evening I stumbled across what I could only describe as a bombshell for the so called “professional marketing” world.

You see there are just far too many businesses trying to out do one another using overly creative marketing produced by these vary same companies and all they end up with is more confusion and empty pockets.

If these so called “marketing professional” were any good at what they did they would be able to use their own marketing skills to win new business right ? WRONG!

Well, I’m not going to say much here except that today I received a piece of outbound marketing from none other than…..GOOGLE.  Yes one of the worlds biggest online inbound marketing forces and they are sending me an outbound marketing piece to promote Adsense.

Why are they doing this ? Well, not everybody is online, nor are they online all of the time and good outbound marketing still works well if done properly and it helps to create a true closed loop environment.

Right now the whole world seems to be running for the hills into the digital sales and marketing inbound yonder, which is no surprise given the “possibilities” that lay ahead.  However many are running blind, taking with them what they have always done into the same digital space which will lead to further confusion if their “other” sales and marketing strategies were or are still ineffective.

A new medium does not translate into success if your message and market just don’t match.  What and where your market is and where it goes to look for sources of information will be important to where and how you should start marketing your products or services.

Following up with customers and interested prospects is an area that probably most marketers are actually poor at, as everybody is trying to avoid annoying people on their database.

What I think it really comes down to though is not having enough value to offer your customers or prospects in exchange for making contact other than just trying to push them along towards a sale.

For some time now I’ve been extending my own social media activity, slowly. When you don’t have lots of staff and massive budgets and you are focused on helping your customer its a tough thing to do and get right. You know what it should look like but creating and engaging amongst everything else you are doing is a tall order indeed.

Just being in a position to “listen” or watch the conversations unfold can be very eye opening and you begin to get a feel for what people are saying, doing and why.

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing is about “metrics” or building a return on investment “ROI” which helps you to describe the relationship between costs and the return achieved in either leads or profit generated.

One of the reasons that stops businesses from measuring their marketing effectiveness is they believe its too early in the process to start when creating or developing their new marketing channel and its especially so with the internet or web marketing because the technology feels so new for many businesses.

I don’t know about you but I’ve noticed that whenever the subjects of Marketing and Sales come up it’s like watching the front row of a horror film at it’s most gruesome part of the show. Just the words on their own are enough to spin people into a frenzy of anger, even when the topic is essential to not just every businesses or organisation but to each and everyone one of us in our daily lives. Connecting and creating friendships, relationships and valuable partnerships is what makes the world go around and we all sell and market in some shape or form, whether we know it or not.

Ok it’s Friday so here’s a nice idea to end the week.  If you’ve heard of the Mad Men series then you’ll love this idea (if not why not!).  Jump along to MadMenYourself and get a stylised version of your marketing Mad Men self.  What do you think eh ?

p.s. the music on the site is groovy man!

What Are Strategic Marketing Consultants ?

Well as part of a strategic marketing consultancy I thought I should answer this question.

Having a strategy is an important part of developing a businesses and working out where you are going. Your marketing strategy is the route you will take to create customers and generate sales and therefore profits for the business.

Your marketing strategy not only states your goals, objectives and describes your routes to market but it also pulls together all of the different channels and media that can be used and ensures a consistent approach that connects, engages and converts customers which can be measured, tracked and modified for improvement.

Does Twitter Business Marketing Work ? – Yes, Even For Me!

First of all take it from me, once a sceptic (few years back now), that the twitter machine can and does open up new avenues, contacts and enquiries REAL fast and of a very high quality and relevancy.

Why ? Well your twitter channel is a micro version of a blog and allows you to find, follow and communicate with people in a “micro” way.  Its power is in the real time nature that these communications take place and how connections are made.  It’s a bit like an instant messenger and a chat room and bookmarker rolled into one.