Ready to learn Marketing & Customer Analytics Training? Browse courses like Increase Cross Selling and Upselling of Products and Services developed by industry thought leaders and Experfy in Harvard Innovation Lab.
Marketing Analytics is a fancy term for proactively measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. The goal is to find inefficiencies by challenging the assumption that a particular advertisement is economically effective at reaching and informing the desired audience.
Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of b2b marketing. It involves uncovering a line of communication with the decision-makers that can take action to purchase your product or service on behalf of their company or organization. There are more than 40 powerful lead generation tools you can use to help automate labor-intensive aspects of this process.
The real magic happens when you combine marketing analytics with lead generation.
Understanding How Sales Personnel Spend Time and Energy
There is no bigger data set than a rolodex containing all the known people in the universe – approximately 7.6 billion human beings. It’s the job of professional lead generators to filter the human population – helping to focus the sales team’s energy and effort. Thankfully, big data analysis has come a long way. Computer algorithms can help handle the load of removing distractions and isolating high-value targets.
As contact lists are pared down, it’s also critical to look at the performance of the sales team. How much time is being invested into each successful conversion? Are there trends that can be highlighted to help focus efforts to enhance efficiency?
There are entire consultancy firms dedicated to helping sales teams and lead generators better focus their efforts to identify and convert decision-makers. And the changes that are recommended can be simple.
For example, one firm shared how they realized that a specific word in the title of an executive changed the sales formula. The client was a company that sold data security hardware and software to large corporations. By analyzing the time to close metric with their recent sales history, they identified a dramatic reduction in time to closeif the executive’s title included “security”.
It might seem obvious, but without going back and analyzing actual sales data, alongside lead generation reports, this powerful observation would have gone unnoticed. As a result, the sales team prioritized reaching out to executives with security in their title. Sales skyrocketed – without hiring more sales executives or increasing marketing budgets.
Social Ads Provide Better Customization and Stronger Leads
Social media is something every lead generator uses to validate information and add context to data. And sophisticated data analysts are using social data in exciting ways. Instead of having a sales team member pick-up the phone and call someone you’ve verified on social media, use a social media ad to get the offer directly in front of the decision-maker.
This serves two purposes. First, it gets the prospect more familiar with the brand – when they do hear from you, they’ll have already seen the brand or product in a way that appears organic to them. Second, you can trigger motivated prospects to request a consultation or product demo.
Marketing analytics focus on discovering ad styles and channels that convert most effectively. Social media is a powerful tool for doubling down on the audiences that are most passionate about your product or service. Look-a-like marketing campaigns on social media allow you to have your chosen platform use their treasure-trove of data to target your ad at an audience that most closely mimics your existing fanbase.
This is powerful because it goes much deeper than simple demographic or corporate listing data. This dives deep into the likes and engagements that social media users undertake every time they open the app or visit the site.
Providing Context and Automation to a Labor-Intensive Process
By digging deep and finding more complete data, intelligent marketing decisions can be made. The plethora of advertising channels, from social to billboards, provide historical data that can be mined for inefficiencies and opportunities. Too many companies are keeping lead generation and marketing analysis separated – with separate teams and management.
It’s time for this to change. It’s time for data to become more available to decision-makers, within the context of past performance. And with advances in AI, there’s no reason that big data should intimidate corporate leaders.
