Is marketing technology running your business into the ground or are you using marketing technology to gain new ground?

Making marketing work

There’s:

• Digital marketing
• Social media
• SEO (how your site gets found by the search engines)
• Pay-per-click ads on Google and social sites like Facebook (and then figuring out what’s working and what’s not and what to change by understanding all the analytical tools)
• Video (which is becoming more important every day – and it requires technical expertise)
• Email marketing (also driven by technology)
• Events like seminars and tradeshows that need technology to be successful.
• Public relations programs

Content

And then there’s all the content you have to create to support these marketing tactics:

• Blogs
• Premium offers
• Ebooks
• Videos
• Guides
• Webinars
• White papers

The content is important because your customers are trying to research and learn before they talk to a salesperson.

We can ... can you?

So, to market and build your sales pipeline effectively, you need to have a lot of talents on your staff:

• Web development
• Graphics
• video editing
• Writers
• Analysts who understand digital tools and SEO
• Someone who knows how to create marketing programs and make all this stuff work together

At Leading Results, we have a staff of 10 employees with varied skill sets, and when we dug into it, we discovered that there are about 200 separate skills you need to market effectively – that is, creating content and then using technology to promote and track it.

What to do, what to do ...

If you don’t have the right staff and skills to create the content and run the technology, it’s running you into the ground. And if the staff and skills aren’t there, you have to make a choice:

• Ignore it all, keep doing what you’re doing, and hope for the best
• Build the staff and use the technology and skills to gain ground on your competition (but be prepared for an 18- to 24-month investment)
• Get an agency that already knows this stuff and understands your typical customer buying process to support you

A good example of how option (c) can work for you is how we work with one of our clients: a technology firm we’ve been working with for 4 years. They have a one-person marketing team responsible for the ongoing marketing and services to their current clients. We do the rest for them.

What’s the rest? Target market research and discovery, long-form content creation, blogging, SEO, webinar support, ongoing website and marketing automation (HubSpot) management, social media, email marketing, and more.

In the last three years, they’ve seen web traffic increase 250% a year each year and they’ve closed over $2,000,000 in new business directly attributable to the leads we’ve generated through programs we’ve run and content we’ve created.

As an agency, we’re all about figuring out what works best for our clients to help attract their profitable customers, and then doing the right things on a consistent basis for them, within the budget they can afford. For us, it’s about keeping an eye on the long-term vision, doing the short-term work, and thinking ahead for our clients so they can stay focused on their business and not worry about finding new customers down the road.

When you step back and look at the marketing automation landscape, you can be intimidated and hopelessly lost or you can resolve to do something different and grab a competitive advantage over every other company that wishes things could just be simpler. Once you decide to do something different, it’s just a build-or-buy decision.

If you decide to buy the expertise (in the form of an agency), I hope you’ll give us a call.