Back to basics – what’s marketing really about, and what can it deliver?
We’re not the kind of company that’s going to bluff you with “guaranteed MQLs”, “creating a £1million sales pipeline, or any of the other business development approaches you’ve heard 1000 times. For us marketing is a about delivering relevant, engaging and regular content, and adding some value to your target prospects’ day.
Marketing is the midfield
We’re also strong believers that effective marketing is a team effort. The clash between sales and marketing has been done to death, but for us it’s a simple concept to grasp. We’re not promising the sales team PO’s or open goals, we’re going to act as the midfield – we’ll create some chances and interest, and continue doing that over and over again. We don’t expect sales to win a new £50k order based on the fact someone has watched a demo video.
What we advocate is relevant, engaging and regular content that reflects your business in a valuable way to your customers and prospects, and earns trusted relationships with them.
So what’s our approach to creating this relevant, engaging and regular content to keep your customers wanting more, and getting your prospects over the hurdle to working with you? It boils down to 10 steps across 3 main areas.
Pitch and prep – getting the ducks in a row
- We work with you to identify marketing priorities and key themes/solutions you want to push.
- We’ll help you pitch your vendors for MDF to support digital marketing campaigns, data acquisition, sales incentives and events. We also help you get the sales and technical teams onside with the campaigns to avoid disconnect, and get everyone working towards the same goal – more new business.
- When a campaign is approved, we’ll generate leads for that vendor’s solutions. Your business messaging and brand will be at the forefront of the campaign – we believe it’s vital not to simply regurgitate vendor content. But we’ll strike a balance between your brand and the vendor’s solution to create compelling messages for your prospects and customers to demonstrate how you’ll make their working life simpler, less painful, and more cost effective.
- Build the foundations. We’ll prepare the prospect data – we’ll define with you who your main target market is, and we have a GDPR-compliant tool that builds the dataset best suited to your business, and you’ll become the owners of that data. We’ll also set up your instance of the email sending platform from which your sales team can easily access the data for follow-up purposes. As part of this we’ll set you up with all you need to be GDPR compliant.
Into action – lift-off
- Generate leads – to us the concept of hundreds of acronyms such as MQLs, SALs, SQLs, LTN and so on is fine, but the main goal of marketing is to pique interest in the appropriate people that can influence a sale. Marketing alone isn’t going to get IT directors waving purchase orders in your face, but we see our role as building a brand, delivering consistent and useful content to help people in their daily work, and to either begin generating a buying decision, or at the very least to put your business at the forefront of people’s minds when that time comes.
- Execute the campaign – we don’t call one click or open on an email, or a share on social media a lead. But for someone to read a couple of useful blogs followed by a short and non-pushy connection request on LinkedIn by its author is some mindshare points. Reading several blogs and watching a video may suggest something is on their mind. Responding to a follow-up email or downloading some mid-funnel content such as a whitepaper may mean there’s a project cooking. It’s about monitoring what people are doing, how they respond to your campaigns, and gradually building a relationship with them.
Review, critique and repeat
- Review regularly, and monitor, tweak, adjust, repeat and run until the campaign is completed.
- Review the campaign, continue the follow-ups and nurturing, and then we collate proof of performance to your vendor, have a call with them to review and feedback, and submit the MDF claim on your behalf.
- When you get paid by the vendor, we get paid.
- Repeat with the same vendor and other vendors, all the while building your business brand and value within the end users you’d like to be selling to.
Get started
Give us a chance with a free vendor campaign, and we’ll show you what we can do. And as a final reminder – it costs you nothing, and adds value to your sales team and your vendors, and contributes to new and upsell business. What’s not to love?
