How Closed Loop Marketing Can Benefit Your Business

One of the most common pains in a company is found between the marketing and sales department. Marketing feels like all they do is deliver leads that are never followed up on - sales feels like the leads are not qualified enough to take action on. All while this endless circle is spinning, the CEO and CFO are concerned about how the company is going to achieve a higher ROI. Over the years, we have experienced this phenomenon with several of our clients, especially in the medical device industry where you often use your own sales team - bolstered with distributors and outside sales reps.

CRM has moved from just being customer relationship management to being a platform where companies can generate, qualify and nurture leads and market more efficiently through automated campaigns. This allows marketing teams to learn behaviors and how to optimize their marketing initiatives to reach desired goals.

Basically, every lead is created from a marketing initiative, meaning every lead and every dollar spent could be tied back to the very same initiative. With this knowledge, not only would you be able to gain valuable metrics and analytics to calculate your ROI, it also allows you to learn how your audience responds to various messages and helps you to communicate with your audience more efficiently. The good news is that there are tools and software to help marketers achieve these goals – the bad news is that not too many companies have implemented these tools or know how to optimize them.

The ever-evolving world of Social Media is a great place to start your lead generation.  In the beginning, everyone jumped on the bandwagon and set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account because everyone else did.  Now we are starting to hear things like “Social Media is not delivering results” or “we can’t measure ROI from social media.” Well, we agree that if you don’t have a strategy and know what you want your customers/prospects to do when they interact with your brand – then how are you going to measure success and ultimately your ROI? You have to measure Social Media in terms of business objectives to prove ROI.

If you already have a plan of how to move your visitors through the funnel and how to move them up the sales ladder – measuring success will come easy when you’re able to learn what triggers your audience by looking at what actions they took and when.  If you are looking to improve or begin your closed loop marketing process, then one way to qualify leads might be driving them from Social Media to a microsite, where they fill out an online form or survey. Based on the information you can classify or score your leads, and depending on where they are in the purchasing process you can customize the communication they will be receiving.Make sure you develop high quality landing pages to drive traffic to. To learn about what you need to do to ensure high-quality, effective landing pages, read "Landing Page Metrics and Success Measurements."

The best part is that you can further optimize and leverage on the initiatives that are working and cut out the ones that are not. No more guessing and waiting until the campaign is already over and done with. Healthcare is a great example where consumers seek information, guidance, and support online. As long as you provide those digital platforms, you can steer the visitor into taking action and get them into the loop.

Common components in a lead nurturing system are e-mail marketing, newsletters, promotions, blog posts, etc. – making sure to always include a call to action for the opportunity to move that prospect up the sales ladder.

At ParkerWhite, we believe in delivering integrated marketing campaigns with results that will not only achieve and exceed your goals, but also help you make more informed decisions on future campaigns.