Saying you’re busy is an understatement. Different people are pulling you in a million different ways with dozens of different tasks. And they’re all urgent. Sometimes it feels like you’re always playing catchup.
Before you drown in a sea of work, you need to stop and think. How much of what you’re doing is actually accomplishing your marketing goals? Furthermore, do you even know what your goals are?
The only way you’re ever going to realize your full potential is to find your win. But that’s complicated. So let’s do this together.
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The Goal of Marketing
If you had to say that there is a single goal for your marketing team, what would that be?
To answer this question, don’t start off with brand awareness or lead generation. You’re looking too far down the rabbit hole. This is a face value question. It’s basic and true for every marketing department.
The basic goal of marketing is to generate revenue.
That’s good, but it’s only a starting point. We need to go from the general information above to very specific information about your organization. So let’s take it a step further.
How do marketers generate revenue? Simply put, marketers are able to generate revenue by building demand for their products and services.
Knowing that, it’s time to start thinking specifically about your organization. How can your organization create this demand?
This is different for a lot of companies.
On the one hand, some organizations are sales dominated. You have a sales department which controls the client conversation. On the other hand, you may not actually sell directly to the end user. You may sell through intermediaries or require more sales than a lead gen focus can sustain.
Looking deeper into how your company creates demand and facilitates the sales process will help you determine where to focus your marketing budget. You may find brand awareness or lead generation are the best investment of your marketing budget. But these aren’t mutually exclusive. Many organizations require time and effort in both categories.
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1. Brand Awareness
Every business needs their audience to know who they are. But if you want to build campaigns that help you win, you have to be specific and measurable. You can’t just say “I want to increase brand awareness.”
Blog: 3 Metrics to Help Measure Brand Awareness
You need to be specific in what you can do that will help you accomplish your brand awareness goals.
The best way to start is at the end, and then you can work your way backwards. In this case, increasing brand awareness is the end goal. Working your way back will help you find your specific win.
Here are a few examples of measurable brand awareness wins.
- Increase external media coverage by X% by Y date.
- Increase brand recall and/or brand recognition by X% by Y date.
- Increase direct website traffic by X% by Y date.
- Increase referral traffic by X% by Y date.
- Increase positive social media mentions by X% by Y date.
If you’ll notice, each example shows a measurable win. You have a specific amount or percentage and date that tells you helps you determine whether you are successful or not.. This also tells you exactly which metrics and tools you can use to measure your efforts.
Blog: 4 Important Lessons from Batman’s Branding Strategy
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2. Lead Generation
Like we established earlier, you need to look at how your business operates to determine your focus. Everyone needs brand awareness, but many organizations have small, niche audiences which can be hard to reach. You don’t need to cast a wide net. You need specific information about your audience to empower sales.
In this case, businesses need qualified leads who are interested in their product. This can smooth out sales calls and help sales start the right conversation at the right time.
What is a lead generation win?
Again, just like before, you need to start at the end and work backwards. You may find success in generating a specific number of leads, but these aren’t guaranteed to convert into sales. Some businesses will have to work further back to find a win that helps them build a positive ROI.
Blog: 4 Reasons Why Your Marketing Generated Leads Are Terrible
You need to keep working backwards until you find a win that can be tied to increasing revenue. This will be different according to how your company sells their products. This could be online, through dealerships, or directly through your sales team.
According to how you sell, you could pay attention to a number of metrics.
Let’s look at, for instance, how to find a win if you’re generating leads for a sales team to contact. Just because you’re generating leads doesn’t mean you’re showing a positive ROI for your efforts.
If you have a low conversion rate, you need to look back at your MQL to SQL ratio. This will help you understand how qualified your leads are. If you find a low MQL to SQL ratio, you can adjust your win to improving lead quality.
While you may not generate more leads, you will generate leads which are likely to actually convert into a sale. Focusing on lead quality will generate a higher ROI for your efforts.
Writing this out might look like: increase MQL to SQL ratio to X by Y date.
Finding your win is critical for every marketer. Your win will help you focus on affecting revenue growth for your business. But it isn’t static. As your business changes and you become more effective, you may need to change your win to focus on a new metric. Once you understand how you can best contribute to your company’s growth, you can focus your efforts and improve your ROI.
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