4 Key Areas To Creating More Demand Through Marketing

Whether charting your business through the a business crisis or generally planning to increase demand for your products and services, marketing has to play an integral part in your process moving forward. Businesses often get lost in discussions around marketing and far too often I see the focus being placed on tactical, so-called ‘magic bullet’, isolated marketing initiatives, or sales pushes. Generating demand from marketing within a business is much more of a holistic approach, planned and delivered over a longer time frame. However, it is typically the interplay of 4 areas in my experience of Brand Awareness, Inbound/Outbound Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Client Retention that creates success. Failure to recognize these risks producing the “wobbly table” scenario as I call it. We’ve all been there – trying to balance drinks on a table that has one leg shorter than the others. You are just waiting for the moment when your guest pushes down too hard on their side of the table causing a full glass of red wine to fall into their lap! Anyway, enough of my long since passed disastrous dating history, you get the picture. Even without such a scenario, marketing departments can often find themselves lurching from one of these 4 areas to the next as they chase how to increase demand for their company’s offerings. Demand generation is your platform for success and like any table, it needs to be supported equally at all 4 corners. By inference, the 4 legs of Brand Awareness, Inbound/Outbound Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Client Retention provide that stability for great marketing practice.

Brand awareness for the non-marketers in your business:

Creating Brand Awareness if often a difficult concept to understand and equally for you to qualify or show a return on investment for. However, in terms of tangible activities to report out on, consideration should be given to having a managed PR program (not just internal created throwaway press releases).

Strong social media presence. Good clear thought leadership within the business, Developed buyer personas and a clearly defined, business-wide segmentation process. Ongoing product and service development. Defined brand identity or the story behind your business. Inbound / Outbound Marketing Depending on your business the outbound portion of your marketing mix will vary (certainly for B2C, parts of the outbound mix are likely to be much less of a consideration than in B2B). The key though is striking sufficient balance between both inbound (pull) and outbound (push) processes relevant to your target markets. Even in a B2B environment, inbound marketing (and creating the content to support it) should be playing the more significant part of your team’s weekly activity. Irrespective of the current pandemic, people tend to spend more time researching on the internet for products and services than they do physically attending exhibitions, seminars, or events. Ultimately though it depends on your audience and how best to reach them – practicing channel agnosticism (and apportioning the appropriate channel budget) is the key.Making your company easy to do business with (on everything except price negotiation that is) Alan Purvis - MD Mettler Toledo SafelineThis rings true today as it did when I was part of Alans senior leadership team. With this in mind, consider focusing your marketing mix onBuilding a content marketing strategy that utilizes video, eBooks, technical guides, and white papers about the key industry problems your products and services solve. Such content can be readily consumed (and appropriately gated) and helps build customer understanding and maintain ongoing dialogue before sales teams become involvedIf you provide solutions globally, then translating your website (and its downloadable content) into your target markets own language is a must – its surprising that some global brands still don’t do thisTargeted Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as optimizing the users experience (UX) of your websiteInvesting in a good marketing automation system and the support needed to maximize the ROI from itCreating and using blogs to promote thought leadership and content at a time and place your customers are ready to consume itDefining lead scoring criteria and developing lead nurturing programsMaking clear, visible, and reportable KPI’s – that each internal stakeholder can own.Sales EnablementIt sounds a little obvious but Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales organization with the information, content, and tools to help them sell more effectively. The foundation of sales enablement is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process in a way consistent with the brand story and messaging utilized elsewhere across the business.Sales Enablement is also more than just having the right content - sales enablement is about onboarding and continuous learning programs, utilizing already created content and taking ownership and implementation of the sales coaching strategy deployed within the business. If sales and marketing aren’t on the same page then your buying funnel isn’t working effectively and you are probably missing opportunities.On a practical note, sales teams need to help create the stories behind the sales tools and user best practices. Sales teams are more likely to use these tools if they have a stake in the creation process. By using a salespersons business relationship and intermate customer knowledge, much deeper insight can be built into the types of customer problems your product and services can solve.Client / Customer RetentionWhy is this important? Well, customer retention increases your customers lifetime value and boosts your revenue. It also helps you build amazing relationships with your customers. They trust you with their money when they buy your product or service and you give them value in exchange in terms of increasing performance, reducing costs, or protecting/enhancing their brand or reputation. It’s a win-win and both sides should feel they have gained a disproportionate value from the exchange. Marketing functions can help retain your customers by supporting the business toDeliver excellent customer service at each of the touchpoints in your organizationBuilding opportunities for joint customer marketing activities to occurSupporting and creating in-person events, exclusive offers, and promoting services only available to loyal customersCreating products and services you can up-sell or cross-sell to keep your portfolio dynamic and relevant for your customer’s needs.For more information or to discuss in depth how I can bring my experience in marketing and business into your organization please feel free to contact me directly via InMail on LinkedIn or below: -Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 7519 152952Other articles to consider reviewing includehttps://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-mature-your-marketing-when-comes-automation-jonathan/