Do you have a closed loop between marketing and sales? If not, you might be leaving revenue on the table for someone else to collect.
What is Closed loop marketing? Basically it describes a system in which your sales team and your marketing team work together using the data marketing gets from its analysis to qualify leads and generate higher quality leads. It holds both groups accountable for follow up, and gets them to align their goals.
Here are the four steps of the process, as explained by the software and marketing company Hubspot:
Step 1. You Have a Visitor
Your website gets a visitor, and a cookie tracks their actions and allows your sales and marketing teams to trace them to their original source, whether they arrived at your site via social media, a web search, or by simply typing in your URL.
This lets you know how different marketing efforts are doing and adjust accordingly. If you make your website the hub of all your inbound marketing efforts, you’ve begun to close the loop.
You should also create a tracking URL for every marketing campaign directing traffic to your site, in order to get a better grasp on where visitors are coming from.
Step 2. The Visitor Becomes a Browser
The visitors are at your site, and you’ve determined what brought them there. Now you need to track their behavior. See what pages they visit on your site. Figure out what gets them from point A to point B.
Knowing this helps you connect your leads with their original marketing source. Your best bet is getting some software that helps you do this.
Step 3. The Browser Becomes a Lead
If you want to turn these visits into sales, you’ll first need to make these visitors into leads.
To do this, send your incoming web traffic to landing pages in order to collect more information about people visiting your sites. A landing page with a submission form/lead-capture form can get you their contact information: name, address, e-mail.
It’s important to find out where your visitors are coming from, but also to learn who they are.
Step 4. Closing the Loop
Which marketing effort brought you the most customers? With closed loop marketing, you can figure that out, and decide how to improve on those efforts (and which ones you want to jettison).
You’ll need to look at all the leads your salespeople have closed and connect them back to the original marketing campaign. You can keep track using a Customer Relationship Management System, or — for smaller businesses — a spreadsheet.
The benefits here go beyond just more sales. You’ll get a better insight into who your audience is both online and offline, have a better understanding of what your sales and marketing goals should be and have the ability to make decisions with more confidence.
IQnection can help you better understand your marketing goals with a complimentary marketing roadmap consultation. This session will help you plan a marketing strategy, learn about your competition, and more.
Once you have a strategy in place, you can start to think about how to close the loop between your marketing and sales team.
