High Performance Marketing
The key to high performance is to focus on building depth in a select few areas of excellence while leaving no vulnerabilities in other areas. You want your company to stand out for its ability to perform at a higher level than anyone else—this level of specialization is a key factor that will encourage buyers to work with you. At the same time, you don’t want to neglect all of the other functions that are important to your business.
Take marketing, for example. Marketing is a process that includes several unique and correlated functions that must be performed at a high level to ensure success. Below, we will discuss how you can optimize these areas to achieve your high performance marketing goals.
1 – Targeting
Targeting is all about finding the right buyers for your company. You’re looking for your niche—the people who are most likely to purchase your product.
Successful companies target a narrow market full of prospects that are more likely to purchase their product. On the surface, casting a wide net that covers more people might seem like a good idea. More people should mean more sales, right? In reality, this approach means that you will spend more of your limited marketing budget on reaching less motivated buyers, on average. It’s more effective to focus on likely buyers in the first place.
By targeting the right market, you can tailor your marketing messages on a more individualized level. Since today’s buyers are looking for individually tailored solutions, this will make your company stand out as a potential vendor.
2 – Messaging
The next step is to communicate what your company can offer to your target market. Since you’ve focused on a motivated target market, your messaging will be more effective at communicating your company’s value directly to the potential buyer.
Your messaging must distill your company’s value proposition into an easy-to-understand format. It must be able to communicate this value in a variety of media and across platforms to reach customers where they’re searching online.
To start, you should identify your value proposition in your own words. Then, refine that value proposition to emphasize the key points you want buyers to consider as they encounter your product. Here is a nice blog that describes the process in some detail to make your value proposition stand out.
3 – Captivating
Catching a prospect’s attention is no easy feat. Every day, consumers are faced with thousands of marketing messages, most of which they automatically tune out. Your job is to captivate potential buyers, even if they’ve never heard of you before—you must break through the noise and catch their attention.
This step is all about creating compelling advertising. Your messages should be eye-catching, unique, and tailored to the unique interests of your prospect. Ensure that your messaging is valuable by speaking to the individual pain points your prospects face. It’s not easy to produce high-quality advertising, but it will make a world of difference when it comes to reaching your target market.
4 – Acquiring
Now that you’ve captured the interest of your prospects, it’s time to convert that interest into leads. Your advertising should have led them to low-barrier content that demonstrates the value you provide to their company. The next step is to drive them to long-form content that is even more valuable, to the point that they’re willing to share their contact information to access it. Once you have their contact information, you’ve successfully acquired a lead and you can begin the next step—converting them to sales.
5 – Converting
The final step of the marketing process is to convert these leads into Conversation Ready Leads (CRLs)—leads that want to talk to sales. Your marketing efforts should produce a steady stream of CRLs for the sales team to work with. This process involves nurturing your prospects, which can include targeted email campaigns, behavior automation, and social proof to encourage leads to seriously consider purchasing.
Choosing Trusted Partners for High Performance Marketing
So far, we’ve introduced 5 essential steps to reaching your high performance marketing goals. Seeing the tasks required at each step, it might seem like you’ll need to hire quite a few employees to accomplish everything. However, this approach is costly.
To maximize your company’s growth rate, you should focus on delivering your strategic differentiator—whether that’s in the realm of sales, marketing, or something else—and leave everything else in the hands of trusted partners. Your partners should deliver their strategic differentiators. This way, you can focus on developing the functions that are the most important to your success, while ensuring that all other functions are still in good hands. This is how you can achieve your high performance marketing goals, without committing to the cost of a full-time team.
To read more about how to reach your high performance marketing goals, download this playbook.