Create and Implement a Marketing Strategy
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define the components of a marketing strategy.
- Identify ways Account Engagement can automate your marketing efforts.
Strategy Planning
Marketing strategy is a company’s long-term plan to reach prospective customers by understanding their needs. It’s a sustainable and focused plan to turn interested prospects into customers. And once you have your strategy in place, the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement tool can help you implement it.
Most companies, regardless of size, have a marketing strategy as part of their long-term goals for success. When formulating and building your strategy, it’s important to have representation from sales, marketing, product, and any other related team to ensure the most effective plan is produced.
First, identify key touchpoints and accounts to evaluate strategies that have worked in the past. Next, identify what success looks like (that is, ROI). Then define how and where you reach your prospects, identifying which channels (such as social media or email) can help you in your strategy creation. Also think about how to modify the strategy if changes to the economy, your business, or your potential prospects occur.
There are two main building blocks that are the foundation of any good marketing strategy: lead generation and lead nurturing. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can help with both.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the top of your sales funnel. Its main job is to bring your company to the attention of potential customers or prospects. This includes things like having a booth at specific events, email campaigns, social campaigns, and more. It’s not just about sourcing leads, but generating high-quality leads. Better leads typically yield more consistent business growth.
Potential customers look for a company they trust. As you plan your lead generation strategy, identify what potential customers might expect from you as a business and where they might interact with your business. Be willing to pivot as these changes are crucial to the success of your marketing strategy.
Account Engagement helps from the first touchpoint with tracking code. When visitors browse a website that has your tracking code on it, they leave behind traceable crumbs or cookies that are used to track the user’s activities while they navigate your website and interact with your marketing content.
A custom redirect tracks links such as banner ad clicks, links to your website or a third-party site, links on social media, and access to files hosted outside of Account Engagement. Link clicks appear as activity on a prospect’s record. Within custom redirects there are completion actions. Completion actions and page actions are excellent ways to automate processes. For example, you can apply page actions to any page that contains your tracking code and automate follow-ups on your marketing assets like forms.
Building that type of lead generation strategy takes time and effort, but it’s important groundwork for your overall marketing strategy. Better leads typically yield better and more consistent business growth through sales. And setting up a robust system for lead generation really helps with the next important building block of the marketing content strategy. Once you have the prospect’s attention, nurture that relationship to convert them to customers.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing refers to the specific steps or actions you take to help new relationships prosper. You’ve created a solid lead generation strategy, and now you have several high-quality leads that your sales team is working with. Lead nurturing is what keeps the lead’s attention and helps to deepen the relationship through meaningful conversations and communication.
Your lead nurturing strategy helps determine how best to cultivate these relationships with prospects. Some may want weekly emails, while others would rather exclusively connect via social media, and others would rather speak to you on the phone.
The most effective lead nurturing campaigns—known as engagement programs in Account Engagement—include customized built-in segmentation and create dynamic content so that customers always receive up-to-date, targeted communications.
Engagement Studio automates your lead nurturing campaigns and removes the process of tracking individual leads as they go through each stage in the cycle, including the hand-off of qualified leads to sales. Using the lead scoring and grading features, you can assign scores based on customer’s activities and engagement with your emails, website, and other content.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing tend to convert more high-quality leads that are ready for sales at a lower cost to the company. They also tend to have more sales reps making their quotas. Combining lead generation and lead nurturing is key to your company’s successful marketing strategy.
Implement Your Marketing Strategy
Now you’re ready to create your marketing strategy by combining your lead generation and lead nurturing strategies. Both lead generation and lead nurturing are ways of attracting and keeping prospects engaged on the way to converting them as customers.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps power your marketing strategy. It helps by automating tasks for you, reducing time spent re-creating marketing emails, searching for information on a prospect (potential lead), or following up with any lead. Account Engagement can help your company:
- Increase the efficacy of your marketing spend using campaigns and your connectors to reach more customers’ tracker domains.
- Maximize the ability to identify the right marketing tactics based on previous performance data, such as tracking spending and ROI to inform future choices.
- Iterate on and determine success based on data in your reports.
Now you’re ready to bring your brand to high-quality prospects’ attention. And with the help of Account Engagement, create targeted campaigns, then nurture those prospects to close.
