5 Strategies to Help Your Business Emerge Stronger After the Recession

Today, most high growth companies view their marketing organization as essential to achieving top line goals. Truly innovative businesses aren’t simply seeking to “weather the recession storm”. In fact, many are re-tooling their marketing and sales processes to emerge from the current downturn with an even stronger brand and share of the market.

Email clickthroughs and website visits are no longer the measure of marketing effectiveness. Instead, these firms are intently studying the economics of the sales and marketing funnel and meticulously pinpointing where improvements in conversion rates can reap the greatest payoff in top-line revenue growth.

The focus today is beyond the click, where leads turned over to sales pass through a series of gates on their road to becoming closed business. Optimizing the conversion rates – the rate at which sales leads pass through the gates from one stage to another – can have an enormous impact on the resulting revenue.

Simply increasing the flow of leads into the top of the funnel is not enough – and in fact may be unachievable in a down economy. Improving the rate at which current leads are qualified, correctly routed, accepted by sales, included in forecasts and ultimately closed becomes the new battleground in a business climate that forces organizations to do more with less.

But in an economic environment that has taken many potential buyers out of the market, how can marketers hope to get more responses from their existing database instead of chasing new lists of prospects?

By applying the following 5 strategies that incorporate more advanced marketing techniques. According to a recent report from Jupiter Research, marketers employing these tactics “are almost twice as likely to attain conversion rates of more than three percent, compared with others that do not.”

1. SEGMENTATION

The purpose for segmenting a market is to allow your marketing and sales program to focus on the subset of prospects that are “most likely” to purchase your offering. If done properly, this will help to insure the highest return for your marketing/sales expenditures.

Within your prospect database, determine what the compelling need is and who is most likely to experience that need. Your segmentation will be determined by a match between the need of the segment and your offer. Some “need” categories for segmentation include:

Reduction in expenses
Improved cash flow
Improved productivity
Improved manufacturing quality
Improved service delivery
Improved employee working conditions/benefits
Improvement in market share/competitive position

2. Personalization

The whole point of marketing is to build a relationship between a customer and a brand through which both derive benefit. It is a direct, one-on-one and mutual commercial exchange. For the customer, the brand is experienced at a very personal level.

That’s why marketing and sales communications need to involve personalization. To be clear, there are many communications tools that allow for personalization. But the point here is not to simply address segmented prospects by name, but to craft a unique message for the segment that speaks to their unique need and your equally unique offer. Remember these 3 keys to creating personalized messaging:

1.   Know the target of your communication
2.   Adjust when, where and how you communicate based on that knowledge
3.   Ensure that your message makes it via the right channels to its intended recipient

3. Testing

To some, testing is a process designed to: 1) make marketing more complex, 2) slow down production or 3) prove to that pigheaded boss that, yes, we really do know what already works. But, in fact, the true purpose of testing is to determine effectiveness.

Without testing, it is almost impossible to improve marketing efforts. What we are doing may work, but would something else work better? That is the question that cannot be answered without testing.

Here are five quick tips for testing:

1. Conduct multiple test marketing at the same time
2. Send to different people on the same list
3. Perform a reasonably-sized test to ensure a statistically valid response
4. Be ready to replace it
5. Continue monitoring the results

Remember, it is likely your competition may be testing and learning something that you have not discovered. Your perfectly good marketing program may be beaten by your competitor’s even better one.

4. Multi-Channel Campaigns

Multi-channel marketing has its roots in the age-old “media mix” concept, which reaches buyers at different times in different ways with a consistent message. The theory is that effective use of multiple media helped the brand become top of mind when the buyer was ready to make a purchasing decision.

Today, the number of channels available has blossomed with the growth of electronic and social media and the internet. This has prompted new marketing methods that produce integrated campaigns across multiple media channels sumultaneously.

The most successful campaigns focus on:

1.   Delivering messages over a variety of channels based on customer preference
2.   Establishing and building relationships
3.   Using what is known about the target to create a compelling offer

Customizing the message and delivering it in a format that the recipient is comfortable with is the key.

5. Event-Triggered Marketing

Trigger marketing relies on customer behavior to execute a response to a certain event or action. The method produces campaigns that are more precise, migrating from a product-centered view of the world to one that is more customer-centric.

Triggers generally fall into four categories:

1.   External—something happening in the financial industry, for example
2.   Customer life—job loss, marriage, retirement, or the birth of a child
3.   Behavioral—customer purchase, poor service experience, friend recommendations, and the like
4.   Communication—inquiry about a product upgrade, new service, etc.

Each represents a specific moment when the customer is both interested and engaged.

Today’s most successful campaigns use triggers to automatically initiate communication when customers take certain actions. This is done by establishing a set of business rules that act on pre-assigned criteria. For example, a target clicking on a specific link in an email demonstrates interest and triggers follow on communications to move them further along the buy cycle.

Using dynamic content, companies can deliver individualized, relevant communication to each customer based on their response to triggers. Like any marketing program, timing and relevancy are the keys to driving customer interest. Creating triggered-based marketing programs activated by customer actions adds to their relevancy and, ultimately, increases results.

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