Your Marketing Department

You need a marketing department. Marketing is a team sport – one person can’t do it all. There’s too much to do, too much to learn, and it changes too fast.

A great marketing team has these players: 

Strategist 

Strategists set the roadmap based on company goals, market conditions, and what matters to your ideal customer. They also understand how to measure and analyze what matters. We use Duct Tape Marketing as the core strategic guide for the work we do.

Technologist

The technologist understands web technologies, search engines, social media tools, and how to apply those to your business.

Content Writers | Wranglers | Graphics

Consistently creating content is hard. Consistently creating meaningful, valuable content is harder. Marketing is teaching people why they should buy from you, and your content staff is the link between the company and the prospect. 

Executioners

(No, not that kind!) These team members execute plans because stuff has to get done. Having plans is great, doing nothing with them is not. Your marketing execution staff is the engine that runs your programs and makes things happen. 

At Leading Results, we have these roles covered by full-time employees who know how to work together (and have been doing so for years). We track and train our staff on over 250 of the skill areas we need to be effective in marketing. You can build your own team and train for these roles – or, for faster results, you can use our team (generally at 70%-80% of the cost and hassle). 

 

We’ve Seen It Happen, Time and Again.

You have a great marketing person (or maybe two). One of them leaves, so you hire someone new – someone who stays for 18 to 24 months before they leave, too. And the cycle frustratingly repeats itself. It’s expensive to recruit and train and maddening to watch them go. It’s not that you’re difficult to work for – you have a great company and are a great place to work – it’s that there’s no career path for a marketing person to follow. They need a career path; you need a team. 

There are Lots of Tactics and Tech: It’s Hard to Stay Current

A lot of costs are associated with doing what you’ve always done. There’s the emotional toll of being frustrated, the financial cost of trying different marketing and sales tactics every month or two, the lost revenue (opportunity cost) of not closing sales because you don’t have the customer case studies and insight that tell marketing and sales what really matters to your customers. Finally, there’s lost time against your sales plan because leads are down, sales aren’t closing, and you lose time with every new vendor.

After you set your strategy and goals, it’s time to “get into the market” and build awareness and generate leads. The list of tactics to do so is long, so we group them into four buckets – and we work with our clients to ensure that activities are occurring in all the buckets: 

  1. Inbound marketing 
  2. Outbound marketing 
  3. Earned media 
  4. Referral marketing 

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the collection of tactics that help your prospects find you when they’re searching and learning. Key inbound marketing techniques include using a content strategy to attract and convert prospects, search engine optimization (SEO), customer review strategies, directory listings, and social media.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing tactics are more traditional and “interrupt-driven. Tactics include pay-per-click advertising on Google, Facebook, or other web channels, traditional advertising in media, tradeshows, email, direct mail, cold-calling, and programmatic/AI-driven advertising.

Earned Media

Earned media, while sometimes called public relations, is much more than press releases. Earned media also includes regular contributions to industry publications or blogs, community activities, and invitations for public speaking at conferences. 

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is about getting new business sent to you by people you know – customers, networking contacts, or established business partnerships. Referral marketing is unpredictable, but we help our clients develop systems and practices that establish referral marketing as a planned activity rather than an accidental occurrence

Marketing Ferris Wheel

The Technology is Always Changing, too

As your marketing department, we’ll take ownership of the technology necessary to make everything work. We prefer that our clients use HubSpot as we have thousands of hours of experience and cross-trained team members, but we also work with WordPress, Salesforce, Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, Shopify, woo-commerce, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Lead Pages, and more. Ultimatelyit’s not about the technology – it’s how you use it. 

Ready to improve your business? Contact us now.  

 

 

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