For many Marketing organizations, the primary task is creating and acquiring Net New Customers.  This entails being able to generate inquiries and engagement that will produce qualified opportunities that result in sales – faster and less expensively.   To accomplish this task, you must be well versed in the insights from your demand generation and customer journey data.   Top that off with the expectation that marketers can and will track the effectiveness of Marketing strategies and tactics.

Accomplishing this task and meeting the expectations requires honing in on the data that will help you determine which strategies and tactics are having the biggest impact on finding, keeping and growing the value of customers most cost-effectively. Armed with this data, you can confidently recommend which programs should be funded and implemented. And on the flip side you can recommend terminating programs that didn’t perform or meet their performance targets.  

Four Action Steps to Creating Qualified Opportunities Cost Effectively

While there’s is a great deal of buzz around Account-based marketing, many of the concepts have been in play by B2B marketers for decades.  When we’re asked to quickly assess the state of B2B demand generation and account-based marketing tactics and where there might be potential opportunities for budget modifications, we recommend starting with these four steps:

1. Focused vs. General. Personas and segmentation are Marketing 101. Therefore, one of the first best practices is to focus your marketing messages on informing, persuading and reminding a well-targeted group of prospects and customers on the value and benefits of your products and services.

Action Steps:

• Review your messaging platform and brand promise.
• Make sure you have focused messaging for specific accounts and targets.
• Check the alignment between your content and website with your company’s brand promise.  
• Examine your list of key words. These should provide insight into your areas of focus.

2. Effective Customer-Centric Tools. Content for the sake of content is wasted time, energy and money.  

Action Step:

• Every piece of content should match with some point on the customer’s journey.  Sit down with your partners in the field (for example – sales, customer services, field marketing) and ask them to identify which content assets have been the most instrumental in successful connecting with and engaging customers and where in the process these assets are used.  Create a content asset matrix.

Events are one of the most expensive investments of time, energy, and money for any company. We’ve heard this line many times, “we need to be there.” Why?  If you haven’t been able to produce conversations at or from an event you’ve attended more than once, either figure out what to fix or eliminate it.  

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 Action Step: It’s hard to expect a favorable return if you don’t do your pre-work and post-work: send pre-show communication that focus on a reason for customers and prospects to see you at the event. If you don’t have an event checklist, here’s one you can use as a starting point. Follow up quickly with post-show mailings and phone calls. 

3. Repurpose to Ring Out Costs.  Case studies can become articles.  White papers are the seeds of blog posts.  User conferences present opportunities for video.  When you frame your content around the needs and problems of your customers you create opportunities to repurpose the content.  Repackaging becomes a form of repurposing.  

Action Step: For every content asset you create, as part of the creative brief, consider at least 3 potential ways each content asset can be repurposed and what touch point (package) it needs to be delivered in through which channel and when. 

4. Invest in Better. It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about doing better.  The only way to know what is better is to set performance targets for all marketing objectives and programs and track results.  One area where Best-in-Class marketers excel is in setting performance targets. 

Action Step: Hone our Performance Excellence skills.

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