What’s the best way to make your marketing dollars go farther, faster?
Many businesses have recently budgeted for their CRM programs. Now, of course, they need to put those budgets to work. That begins by identifying the best capabilities and tools that will take their marketing program to the next level. Accordingly, many of our customers ask us: “What’s our competition doing with CRM, and how will it threaten our existence?”
Here are five of the hottest marketing project trends we’re seeing:
- Make marketing social: Facebook has an estimated 1 billion users (including over 40% of the U.S. population). Twitter, meanwhile, sports more than 500 million registered users. So here’s a no-brainer: businesses must overlay social business capabilities onto their existing marketing processes, to find new ways of managing the brand and stoking demand.
- Feed leads via field service: Many companies with field service teams, especially in the high-tech industry, have begun using these teams to catalog all of the products (from their company, as well as its competitors) in use at any given business. This enables the marketing team to feed the sales pipeline with new leads, not just for upgrading the company’s own products, but also to replace competitors’ products.
- Create leaner marketing: Large businesses (especially) sometimes face unnecessary, overlapping marketing spending, thanks to M&A activity or organic growth. Creating a consolidated customer view can help identify and eliminate any overlapping customer communications.
- Send leads to boot camp: Marketing programs must “leave no lead behind,” but at the same time, not bother salespeople with leads that don’t pass muster. Those twin requirements are driving more businesses to create better lead management programs. Start by identifying exactly what the sales team requires. Next, focus marketing on gathering leads, and nurturing them until they meet the sales team’s quality threshold.
- Listen to customers: Marketing isn’t a one-way endeavor. In the age of social networks, more than ever, companies must pursue two-way communications with customers. Start by listening to customers, for example by tying your company’s Facebook and Twitter pages into Salesforce, or investing in a social discovery platform such as Radian6.
Define Your Next, Best Step
With those trends in mind, what’s the best way to advance your particular marketing program? First, stay current with what’s possible — and currently being pursued by the competition — to help you understand how you might want to push your marketing program in new directions.
Of course, that’s more of a top-down perspective. Accordingly, you’ll be well-served by also asking: “What’s the single best next step that will take our marketing program to the next level?”
To answer that question, understand where your marketing program currently excels, and where it needs work. On that front, Innoveer’s marketing assessment workshop will review your current program’s capabilities, in each of the five marketing effectiveness best-practice domains:
By analyzing your marketing program’s current capabilities in each of those five areas, Innoveer identifies which areas need the most improving. Apply that information to build an action plan for delivering maximum marketing capabilities and value as quickly as possible.
Learn More
Want to build a more effective CRM program by identifying the next, best step for your marketing, sales or service program? Begin by benchmarking your current program against the best practices we’ve assembled through our experience with more than 1,200 CRM projects. Once you’ve identified what to improve, then find the best tools and technology for the job.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Faith Goble.
