The New Mandate for Marketers: Drive Revenue Growth
The digital era in marketing has arrived. To reach potential buyers online, marketers must implement a strong digital marketing strategy with the goal of driving revenue growth in mind. If this sounds difficult, don’t worry—below, we’ll list the three key steps to building a marketing strategy that increases sales and drives revenue growth.
Step 1: Grab Attention
On any given day, buyers receive upwards of thousands of marketing messages, all competing for their attention. As a marketer, your job is to cut through all of that noise—and advertising is the best way to accomplish this. In this section, we will weigh the positives and negatives of two different types of advertising: traditional and intention-based.
Traditional advertising shows a pre-formatted ad to a target audience through some form of media. The idea is that through repeated exposure, potential buyers will gain familiarity with your brand. When the time comes to purchase, you will be at the top of their list. However, with this form of advertising, it’s not very likely that your ad will happen to catch them at the exact moment that they’re ready to purchase.
On the other hand, intention-based advertising does catch users in the exact moment that they’re searching for answers. This type of advertising is used on websites like Google and YouTube. As users research a solution to their problem, they come across an advertisement for your product. This method is highly effective at reaching motivated buyers.
Both of these ad types have their benefits and drawbacks. Traditional advertising is not as effective at reaching buyers in the moment, but you can target audiences more specifically. Intention-based advertising does not offer the same precision in terms of targeting audiences, but you’re more likely to catch buyers at the right moment. An effective advertising strategy uses both of these formats to grab potential buyers’ attention.
Step 2: Acquire
So, you have their attention. Your advertising did its job—your potential buyers have either clicked on your ad or remembered to search for your company when they were ready to seriously consider purchasing. Now what?
They’re taken to a landing page where they are prompted to fill out a contact information form in exchange for access to a useful piece of content. This form is what converts a user from a click to a lead. Once they’ve shared their information with you, they’ve shown their interest in your product and you now have direct access to their inboxes.
However, just because a user clicks on your ad doesn’t mean they will fill out the contact information form. There are several reasons why clicks don’t always convert to leads. If your landing page is confusing and not optimized for mobile devices, users might get overwhelmed and leave. If the content they find is not what they’re looking for, they’ll leave. If the contact information form is too long, they’ll leave. The list goes on. These are examples of the things you should keep in mind when designing your landing page.
Your job is to focus on conversions, not clicks. As you can see, a high click rate doesn’t mean anything if those clicks are not converting to leads—which brings us to our next point.
Step 3: Convert
Once your leads start rolling in—after they’ve downloaded your content and shared their names and email addresses with you—you have to start separating the promising leads from the rest. This process enables you to focus on the leads that are more likely to convert to sales and minimize the time wasted on leads that are actively running away from sales.
To get the most out of your leads, we recommend separating them into the following three buckets:
| Bucket 1 | These are exactly the right leads we want. Send them the next nurture email so they are on the content experience path we designed for them. |
| Bucket 2 | These are not the right leads—we know that. Let them download their white paper and…the workflow stops there. |
| Bucket 3 | We don’t know whether they should be in Bucket 1 or 2, because we don’t have definitive information. |
Not all leads are willing to share their personal information to gain access to content. Some are worried about receiving a barrage of irrelevant marketing emails that will clog their inbox, so they use fake information to protect their true identities. These are the kinds of leads that go into Bucket 2.
On the other hand, some leads might be vague about their information, writing just “VP” or “manager” to describe their role. This doesn’t provide us with enough information to market to them effectively—we need to know what department they serve. To get the most out of these Bucket 3 leads, you should automate strategies to encourage them to further self-identify.
Using this method, you ensure that you’re not wasting valuable time and resources on leads that are unlikely to convert. Instead, you can devote more of your energy to the leads in Buckets 1 and 3. This will increase your conversion rate.
Content That Converts
The foundation of this entire strategy is your content. Your content is what your potential buyers want to see—ultimately, it’s what motivates them to share their contact information and start on the path toward purchasing. This means that your content must be valuable enough to potential buyers that it is worth sharing their personal information.
But creating this level of compelling content is expensive, especially if your goal is to target multiple buyer personas with in-depth content. At a minimum, you’ll need three full-time employees to accomplish this, which is a huge cost for most marketing budgets.
Instead of hiring in-house, use a subscription-based service for content creation, like SOMAmetrics’ Creative Content River.™ A subscription provides you with high-quality content while saving you time and money, so you can focus on building your competitive marketing strategy instead. In today’s world of rapid digital transformation, it’s more important than ever to
To read more about creating content that converts, download this white paper.