One of the top questions clients ask us about digital marketing campaigns is how to turn leads into sales.
But what they really want is to understand how to knit together all of their marketing & digital tools and resources – the CRM, website, email marketing, social media accounts, PR, events, tradeshows and other marketing efforts – in order to maximize lead conversion. How do you make it all work?
Digital marketing – also referred to as eMarketing and online marketing – is typically campaign-driven. Effective e-campaign development includes clearly defining your target niche, your messaging, the content and its delivery.
Developing an e-campaign that nurtures a lead and initiates or continues the conversation with the prospect is part art and part science.
Here are 4 Tips for an Effective Digital Marketing Campaign:
- Exhibiting at an Event? Get an Early Start
Brands spend a great deal of money exhibiting and attending shows, and efforts should focus on beginning the conversation long before the show or conference begins. Why? Because lead nurturing works best when it starts pre-show.
At many shows, exhibitors can purchase a list of registered attendees before the show. Too often, these are overlooked – or resources aren’t available to mine the lists. But they are a gold mine for digital campaigns.
Use the pre-show period to establish brand awareness and thought leadership. With eMarketing and automation platforms, these potential leads can be nurtured early, providing valuable data to the sales team tasked with touching these leads.
- Develop a Pipeline of Customer-Driven Content
Content makes the world – or, at least the internet – go round. The best sales content, of course, is something the prospect not only wants to read, but urgently needs to read. It grabs their attention and moves them further along the sales process.
The content chosen for an eMarketing campaign can vary widely. Its selection can depend on the channels being used (e.g., email marketing, print or digital advertising, social media) and the types of content favored by the target audience (e.g., video, case studies or white papers, newsletters, long-form).
The content pipeline should be as deep, rich and varied as possible. Too many campaigns fail when the have a limited amount of content to share or use the wrong type of content for the audience (e.g., a podcast instead of a video, or a newsletter instead of a case study).
- Feed & Track the Lead
Once upon a time, tracking a lead through the sales process – especially a B2B lead – was a hit or miss proposition. With CRMs such as Salesforce, Hubspot and others, those days are largely over. Marketing and sales teams can easily identify what people are clicking on and downloading, what they are reading, where they are spending their time, and how they are progressing through the sales funnel
With some client campaigns, we employ cloned landing pages or UTMs. These feature (or link to) the same content, but each boasts a unique web address used in a specific ad – print or digital – in order to track the effectiveness of ad buys, content, sources and more.
In digital advertising, social media and email marketing campaigns, it is important to make full use of tagged links (UTMs) to track where a lead arrived from, where they’re going, and what they’re doing.
- Analyze Results – and Act on Them
With today’s automation, not only will you be able to track the lead’s progress through your sales funnel, but you can also understand exactly what it is about your brand that has caught their interest – whether a brochure, case study, landing page, video testimonial or some other piece of content relevant to them.
More data lets you tweak the digital campaign to improve outcomes. And – just as important – it allows you to track ROI and determine the value of sales and marketing resources.
A well-thought-out digital marketing campaign coupled with a sales automation platform is one of the most effective tools for improving qualified B2B lead gen efforts.
Want to learn more about developing winning digital marketing campaigns? Contact Brandwidth Solutions today.
Brandwidth Solutions serves the healthcare, life sciences, technology, and contract pharma industries. We work with companies that want to make the most of their marketing – who want their marketing empowered to help drive leads – and ultimately sales. If you want to move your product or service forward in a smart way, we want to work with you. Call us at 215.997.8575.
