Written by: Deb Gooha
About the author: Chief Marketing Officer Fintech | Ex Marketing, Brand & Alliance Head National Payments Corporation of India
What makes sense now, the upper funnel should be the focus of most marketing teams in the coming months. Marketers have to keep tracking the trends throughout the customer journey and digital marketers may have to focus more on the organizational sales and marketing strategy and not just on, dull brand, product or service marketing calendar initiatives.
The sales objective is to pursue quality leads and the marketing objective is to generate leads that sales can later qualify and pursue, in turn, the marketing team need to innovate new way and solutions which works for the sales lead management funnelling.
Although, it is important for marketing and sales teams to find new solutions, most leads are drawn on the website through inbound marketing, campaign techniques directed to the corporate website. More than half of the surveyed B2B marketers stated that website traffic was their highest KPI, which makes sense in view of the prevailing market conditions globally. The marketing challenge here is to get the customer’s attention in the shortest possible time frame, by creating a seamless inbound digital marketing campaign. In February, we conducted our annual marketing survey and while a lot has changed since then, the results still provide important insight into the current state. With digital marketing shooting up the ladder substantially in all most all global markets, it is one trend which will shape the geo-specific marketing strategy for the rest of 2020 for all most all organization going forward.
While many of us, at leadership stage may need to navigate the post-crisis stabilization phase, I believe that apart from generating tons of branded product and solution-specific marketing message. One should look at providing valuable insight into challenges faced by customers, while doing business now, which will get the right attention of prospects in the market place.
Creating the whole marketing strategy around the customer problem statement, business pain point will get the TG curious and drive the positive business impact with your brand, product or service offering related to the problem statement or the pain point is the shortest way to get attention in a crisis situation. In order to stay relevant and generate traction for the brand, product or service offerings in a hyperactive, competitive market place, one needs to take the customer business pain point trends in these trying times to successfully address it through brand, product or service offerings of your business as the core marketing strategy in both the short – term as well as the long – term. In the long term, marketers should covey the ease of adoption the brand, product or service which ultimately improve the customer’s journey to come out of these trying time as success stories to win business confidence.
How to deal with clients and interested parties. While it is critical to get seen and heard, marketers need to team up with their PR colleagues in order to align the type of client engagement that is appropriate. A reduction in today’s marketing presence might decimate the sales pipeline and seriously harm the potential sales prospect until the end of the crisis. Pushing thinly veiled posts and creating value that can help clients solve current challenges is key to getting your desired eyeballs. If shoppers are unaware of your product or brand’s marketing efforts, they will be less likely to make big buying decisions.
With people spending unprecedented amounts of time working from home, it’s appropriate to use social media and other digital channels to reach out. It is vital to bear in mind that traditionally, digital and social media have been effective in generating quality leads for the sales organization. Even though revenues are declining, many digital advertising platforms users are as active as ever. Many of them are still active even though revenue is declining and many of their users still use social media. Targeted, geo-specific digital marketing will help develop potential prospects that will provide lasting benefits once the economy recovers. It will also provide long – term, brand recall benefits to your business when the economy recovers.
Now, it is time to get all out and find out where your potential customers are and how to reach them. Everyone in the sales and marketing team to discuss and make a list of leads from professional and personal networks. Make marketing and sales organizations get through the physical selling process and adopt the new normal of treating the client over digital conversations.
If sales and marketing teams plan to achieve business goals during difficult times, it has to be a coordinated effort, one thing which hopefully will benefit this exercise is more and more consumers are now online. The most promising news for companies is now focusing on retention, and the market trends show like most businesses have already done up for the loss for FY2020.
The challenge now is with the selling (Sales) and demand generation team (Marketing), which should look at how to attract buyers to their needs as the COVID 19 environment gets more and more stable and changing. This is perhaps the time where you have to be mindful of which strategies are most effective and which are not, and where they’re most relevant to your business.
