How Marketing Boosts Sales
Marketing in general, targets the audience they wish to sell to, and develops content and material assets to potential customers to get leads and or sales. Marketing involves a lot of research on their products/services, and the people who use them, and the product/service competition to find out how they compare, in order to price and make objection comments to drive sales. This marketing research is used to develop marketing strategies that will drive their sales team to better success. Modern marketing uses electronic media to drive inbound sales leads and consumers through various electronic channels to help the public make informed choices about their products, because research shows that is how buying trends now operate.
Salesmen say it takes an average of 7 touchpoints to get a sale. Modern digital marketing offers more of these sales points without more effort from the sales team. It empowers the customer to make their own informed decisions without the pressure of old school salesmen tactics.
Traditional marketing was mainly math and science based and marketers were typically MBAs. Today's marketing uses research, analytical & budgeting skills, but requires resourcefulness, psychology, and creative abilities.
This combination is rare to find in 1 person, and larger companies generally have entire marketing departments that delegate each task, and larger marketing agencies sometimes have each marketer work on a handful of client accounts, in order to balance the work load.
Modern marketing often uses a hybrid of traditional marketing such as mailers and cold calling, in addition to electronic marketing such as ecommerce, social media platforms, pay per click advertising, content marketing, educational marketing, email and text marketing, in addition to websites, landing pages & SEO to boost brand awareness, brand trust and ultimately, more leads for higher sales revenue!
What Does a Modern Marketer Do?
Modern Marketing does a lot of research to create buyer personas to better target customers, landing pages that offer free or discounted products or services in exchange for email addresses that are then used in email marketing campaigns, loyalty discounts, and that tracks consumers on their websites to know what step they are on in their buying process they are on, why they have not checked out yet, or if they are gaining information or price shopping, so that these emails can be catered specifically to that buying stage.
Modern Marketers segment audiences into psychographically profiled categories so their landing pages, ads, and emails etc. target the right potential buyers, because this content caters to the concerns of that particular population.
Social media marketers drive social media engagement through content marketing and engaging other accounts, forming electronic relationships with their social media audience to boost their social media presence in their audience's & potential audience's feed. They constantly experiment with, and study patterns in algorithms that effect how accounts get to be more popular (get more engagement) on each social media platform. They also test which niches, products and services do better on each platform. These platforms include their website, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia, Quora, etc. and live streaming channels like Tubi and Hulu, and if marketing to younger customers, SnapChat, IGTV, TikTok, & Twitch.
Some social media marketers produce and curate their own content, others post content that other creators produce and only do the research, analytics and posting calendars.
Some social media marketers are well versed in Pay Per Click advertising as well, and setting bid amounts for ad placement on google and social media platforms.
Content marketers create content or curate it from graphic designers, writers, photographers, web designers, video producers, (websites, landing pages, blogs, emails, photos, memes, graphics, gifs, and videos to cater to various audiences and niches in order to gain attention, brand awareness and brand trust, and even ad click through and conversion rates.
Graphic designers tend to design the traditional content, that is often used as part of the online branding process, and content, such as logos, signage, presentation booklets, slide shows, tradeshow booths, business cards, catalogs, letter head, brand compliance signatures, thank you letters, card mailers, & product guides etc.
Efficient social media marketers & content marketers test their content, such as topics, subject lines, images and video intros to see what buyers respond more positively to.
Marketing Automation is a way to centralize digital marketing efforts, manage leads & customers, create automated social media post calendars across multiple platforms, automated drip email campaigns & even send text message alerts, using 1 software dashboard.
Digital marketers may also create a lead scoring system to know which leads are worth pursuing and what type of sales/marketing nurturing they need. Some sales may need personalized emails, invitations or even calls.
Marketing saves the sales team a lot of time in prospecting leads, by making sure the leads are already interested. If done well, it may even show them what the lead's hangups are on the purchase so that the sales person knows what angle to work during their pitch.
Marketing Funnels & Flywheels
Marketing saves the sales team a lot of time in prospecting leads, by making sure the leads are already interested. If done well, it may even show them what the lead's hangups are on the purchase so that the sales person knows what angle to work during their pitch.
Up until 5 years ago, digital marketing was based on the paradigm of the funnel. Modern marketing utilizes the best marketing, which is word of mouth, and digital word of mouth is exponential!
Research shows that no matter what type of learner a buyer is, a majority of consumers, even business consumers, research what they buy. They want details, information, reviews etc. However, each buyer gets their information gets their info in various formats and on their favorite platform. Some love white papers, some love videos, some want to hear case studies, some just want to sift through photos and descriptions.
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By covering as many digital avenues as possible, marketers not only plant a multitude of opportunities to find and be educated about your product/service, which also increases your SEO, and therefore, your brand awareness!
By covering as many digital avenues as possible, marketers not only plant a multitude of opportunities to find and be educated about your product/service, whichalso increases your SEO, and therefore, your brand awareness!
The flywheel concept is the new theory of marketing that harness the power of the inbound marketing funnel, with the email cadences in the nurturing phase, but also the word of mouth concepts through social media in the advocacy phase.
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Successful E-Commerce merketing involves knowing SEO, Ad Placement and how to use keywords, writing amazing product or service descriptions, and know how to position ads, and work within a budget and learning how to list items for sale on a website, Google, Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, or Distributor's website etc. It involves researching competition pricing, and descriptions, and how yours is different, and testing which photos, videos and descriptions are getting more views, conversion rates, and positive reviews. Some even install AI chat bots that will engage customers live.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (How your products/services are found on search engines such as Google Chrome, Opera and Firefox web browsers also a marketing tactic that is absolutely necessary and most often, web designers do not know how to do it or even how to delegate what to do in order to achieve it.
B2B vs B2C Marketing
B2B and B2C marketing are both H2H (Human to Human) They are very similar. Today's shoppers, whether they are individuals or business owners, research products, and trust product reviews and want to know product features, and see demo videos.
Whether marketing B2B or B2C, online content is key. Most people are visual learners, they need to see & read about what they are buying. Word of mouth is the best way to market, and online produces word of mouth by harvesting digital reviews for you, for the masses to see.
The Ultimate Guide to B2B sales boasts that 74% of B2B buyers conduct about half of their total research online before they make an offline purchase. Humans in general are more likely to buy from brands that have a high presences online because it creates more brand trust. A brand that is online has accountability because people can review their company, products and customer service.
Ultimately, a consumer (even a business consumer) wants to know
how you can solve their problem, and that is what modern marketing does - it educates the buyer on the product/services/business on their own time. The buyer does it on their own time often prior to deciding to even speak with a sales person. By the time they have an appointment with a sales person, they are a warm or hot lead!
Marketing Success Measurements
When your business is new to digital marketing, your progress may seem slow, because its success is not initially measured by revenue increases. For the first year, the marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPI)s for companies who are not utilizing PPC ads, should be focused on brand awareness metrics.
Your marketing manager should be give you monthly brand awareness reports after all of your social media platforms are branded, and blogging, video channel, and content calendars have begun posting, (typically after the first 3 months). These reports will be from statistics on social media platform, post, & website visits, follows, views, view times, saves, shares, likes, comments, messages & form fill outs (engagement statistics). They can also report which keywords people searched to find your website & what your website is ranking in the search for those keywords.
The longer your marketing efforts are implemented, the more successful they will be, and will generally follow a similar result pattern to the chart below as time goes on.
After email campaigns have been set up, and automated, open rates, click through rates, and view times, website visits can then be added to KPIs. After SEO has had at least a year to be established, every year your brand awareness will continue to increase through word of mouth and reviews. Then, revenue can be a KPI.
The Ideal Modern Marketing Team
(Mid to Large Company)
If you are a large business with a lower marketing budget, it is difficult to find all of the above skill and knowledge set in 1 person. I am one of the unicorns. However, depending on your business goals, there may not be enough hours in the day to accomplish all that is required by that 1 person to have to maximize your business's marketing efforts.
Ideally, you will want a marketing plan that also includes marketing expansion in the future. Marketing teams that have designated tasks are way more efficient and produce more revenue quicker! Below is an example of a well laid out marketing department. As companies grow, their marketing departments also grow. (For Example, Sweetwater, started out with a very small marketing department and now has this layout with multiple specialists under each department now in the last 5 years of their growth!).
Marketing is a long term commitment and it takes patience and the understanding of vanity metrics to measure increases in brand awareness. The companies that do not understand the above time, effort, and funds required to implement a 360 degree strategy that results in excellent brand awareness & brand trust, are the ones who go through single graphic design "marketer" like socks, because they are only looking at short term revenue goals. This should only be a short term marketing goal if you are running PPC ads or SM platform ads. It take some companies years to realize that allocating more funds to the marketing department, or hiring freelancers to do some of the content creation overflow, allows more time for implementing the strategy. It may also take years for a company to be able to afford these 360 degree plans, and they need to start with smaller goals. However, smaller goals, result in smaller results, and slower results in achieving long term goals..