Make your message travel further!

What does 2014 have in store for your company and your marketing strategy? Recent research from multiple organisations shows that social media and blogging should be a key component of any of your plans. But this does not mean that email marketing should be ignored – far from it!

With such high levels of competition in so many different industries, how to get your voice heard and your product and services in the faces of your prospects is a real head scratcher.

We know that social media has caused content go ‘viral’ and brought fame and fortune to many individuals. A stand out example is ‘Charlie bit me’ which due to its popularity and sharing was the 6th highest viewed YouTube clip of all time with over 615 million views as of December 2013.

What would you do to get that level of exposure?

Now we at Profunnel are not saying that we expect companies to replicate the success of a dog chasing a heard of deer in Richmond Park using B2B or B2C services but we fully believe that you can maximise and eke out every last drop from your campaigns.

Firstly, the important thing to consider is the content that you plan to use. Planning is key and ensuring that you are delivering thought provoking material that captures the attention of your audience is important. The best marketing campaigns are the ones that get people talking and that are relevant to them. This may mean that you have different content for different prospects – what may resonate fantastically well with a Marketing Director may sink like a lead balloon with a Sales Director – each individual is motivated differently by different drivers, identifying these are crucial.

So you have your plans in place and are ready to deliver – you run a successful campaign and see good results but how could it be better? You want to be able to spread this message further but with minimal effort from yourselves. This is where sharing comes into play.

Firstly social sharing, as discussed above can create a huge buzz and really get people talking. Within the SalesFUSION platform you have the ability to launch and track social media and also give the sharing options on your emails and ecasts so that your prospects share your content on their timeline, wall or feed for their connections to then see. If we consider Facebook for a moment, the average number of friends people have is 130. This would mean an additional 130 people get the visibility of your content. If your content drives traffic to your site or prompts the prospect to make contact this is invaluable free marketing that can potentially lead to more business.

When we look at ‘Forward to a Friend’ within the emails, how often do you forward an email to someone that you know it would be of interest to?

Although it is not as often as many marketers would hope, it does happen. The benefits being you now have a new connection to engage with.  Unfortunately if your prospect clicks the ‘forward’ tab within outlook, Hotmail or any other email provider they may be using this is not registered within SalesFUSION and any clicks or opens that may occur will be registered to the original recipient, missing out on the opportunity to engage with a new prospect and also creating an unrealistic scoring profile. This is due to cross cookieing.

Profunnel's SalesFUSION software has the functionality to prevent this by creating a ‘Forward to a Friend’ link within the email – a call to action. The benefit is that this counts as a click and so you tag your original prospect but also the new one that receives the forwarded message.

How do you word this very important call to action though?

It all depends on your audience and what would make them tick. Examples include:

e.g. ‘Forward to Family’ or ‘Do you know someone that will benefit from this offer’

Profunnel would encourage testing via A/B testing within the system will allow you to establish how to get the most out of the functionality, whether it is the position of the call to action, the number of times you include the call to action or the wording.

We would love to discuss this further with you so feel free to contact us.

Karl
Account Manager

A* Content - The basics to seeing the return you deserve

The task of blogging is proving to be a daunting one. The biggest problem is what to write and making sure that it covers the basic requirements, it needs to be informative, interesting and that something that relevant. As I was thinking about this it made me realise that this is a topic to talk about!

One area that I focus on heavily in my role at Profunnel is content of campaigns and how you portray this message to get the return you deserve.

The content needs to be relevant to the people that are going to be reading your message. The need to identify the pain points that your audience feel on a regular basis is crucial and to really hammer the message home, here at Profunnel we encourage you to link back to a potential problem that your audience experience on a day to day basis in their life. By doing this you will quickly establish that you are aware of what your audience is going through and so they will be much more likely to engage with you in the long run. 

Once you have established the pain points what next? 

Your Call to Actions in the content need to be clear and stand out to make sure that your audience is crystal clear of what you want them to do. But how to do this without turning your audience off? There is always the more obvious direct instruction:

Download our whitepaper here

Find out how we can help you by reading our latest whitepaper – Fishing for Leads

However I have been reading a lot about getting your audience to think about a problem you are proposing and as such, to find out the answer they click through:

How can you get more Leads?

How can Profunnel increase the efficiency of you Lead Generation?

At this point there is no right or wrong answer as to how to portray you Call to Actions from the results we have seen, but for me personally I am more likely to engage with a question that is making me think rather than a direct instruction. What would work best for you? Put yourself in the mind-set of your audience.

One thing I would like to flag up however is that you have just spent all the time focusing on producing A* content but it needs to be relevant to the audience that you are targeting. 

The message that you send to a Managing Director of a company may need to be substantially different to the message that you send an IT Director or to a Marketing Executive within the same organisation. Moving away from different roles within the same industry, the message that you are sending to different industries may need to vary also. The content and design of your correspondence to a Design Company possibly will need to be different to that of a Fleet Management company for example.  As such understanding your audience is so crucial and without carefully planning your marketing campaigns and having a clear communication plan in place as to how and when you are going to contact your prospects, 

you will not see the return that you deserve. 

Here at Profunnel we strongly believe that a communication plan is a marketing teams bread and butter. Having a clear plan over a 3 month period of what you are sending, who you are sending to and when you will send it really helps to focus your efforts and prevents ad hoc campaigns that may not be as thought out as you may have wanted. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting and the success that Sungard saw from a zombie themed campaign really shows the potential. A great read if you haven’t already heard about this. Click here to read more.

This is something that we are passionate about here at Profunnel and we would love to discuss this more with you so please feel free to get in touch. 

Karl
Account Manager

Marketing Automation: Don't lose sight of the wood for the trees.

Keeping it Simple

With more and more companies adopting Marketing Automation solutions to replace repetitive and time consuming manual processes with a specially designed software solution, its often the case that end users get caught up in the complexity of what the systems can deliver and forget the big picture. Ultimately the purpose of this kind of solution is to help streamline the marketing department’s tasks, making it more scaleable and to help marry these activities with the objectives of the sales department – not to make things more difficult.

So here are Profunnel’s top tips to keep your marketing automation simple.

Understand the power of Exclusions:

For those new to marketing automation, an Exclusion List or exclusions are instructions that ensure that a specific segment or group of existing or prospective clients do not receive specific campaigns or responses based on their behaviour. For example, I’m unlikely to want to send the same offers to existing paying clients as my prospective customers. No brainer right?

But beyond this obvious exclusion, its worth considering a couple more noteworthy examples - sending webinar sign-ups more information on your upcoming webinar, or an e-brochure for those who have already downloaded said brochure is an exercise in futility. Once these obvious exclusions have been addressed, the temptation is to start getting super complicated and start excluding according to all sorts of complex metrics – trying to ensure prospects don’t get the same email twice, or excluding whole lists according to behaviour on specific triggers...the list is endless and our recommendation would be to leave this to the pro’s (e.g. your account manager )

Just remember, over-thinking or in this case over-excluding can create both unnecessary work and can impact long-term marketing strategies. Simple strategies are most effective unless you have dedicated resource to run your marketing automation platform full-time.

Don’t overdo your audience segmentation!

Segmenting prospects and customers is a hugely valuable strategy allowing you to deliver specific offerings to a targeted audience who need it the most. Some companies are happy to distinguish between clients and prospects and others create veritable libraries of different segments. For the majority, once again, the simpler the better.

What most marketers overlook when brainstorming a new and innovative way to segment their audience is that for every segment you may need to create landing pages, e-shots, call-to-actions and offers as well as tying all these into separate campaigns. These then all need refining and tweaking and you end up painting the golden gate bridge all over again. Creating compelling content for larger segments will not overburden your resource and will allow you to push on and actually ensure your campaigns are as effective as possible.

Big Picture

It’s crucial to remember that marketing automation platforms are there to help leverage existing sales and marketing capabilities, not as a tool to overburden and burn out all resources. Of course, there is a benefit in having dedicated resource from your platform in order to supply ad-hoc support or even take on a project on your behalf. However, for the majority keeping it simple is a surefire method of reaping the rewards of a marketing automation platform...don’t lose sight of the wood for the trees.

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How to move forward when the B2B sales environment changes

The B2B sales environment has changed drastically in recent years and marketing teams are now seeking out new ways to generate business in difficult economic times.

When money is tight, people are less inclined to buy, which can result in companies finding it difficult to reach potential prospects. Many organisations are now altering their sales and marketing tactics to reflect this change and many are choosing to integrate marketing automation systems into their strategy.

How can marketing automation help your business? By addressing situations such as decreased sales engagement, the lead generation technology allows marketing to turn cold prospects into warm prospects before passing these to sales - ensuring a more efficient and intelligent solution.

Why is it more successful? The importance of relationship building is not to be undervalued. By creating campaigns and nurturing leads, users are able to build relationships and develop trust with potential buyers, which in turn leads to more successful outcomes.

Marketing automation takes e-marketing to the next level and helps companies to adjust to the new sales environment. For more information on marketing automation solutions and how they can help your business visit www.profunnel.co.uk.