I recently joined fellow marketing colleagues at a meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the ANA B2B Committee in Chicago. The focus of this meeting was on lead generation, and we enjoyed brainstorming solutions to the customer acquisition problems marketers face every day.
While we discussed a variety of topics, many conversations were driven by two core questions marketers are looking to solve:
1. How do I figure out who I should be targeting for lead gen?
This question seems to be driven by a fundamental misalignment between sales and marketing.
In many organizations, these two teams have separate goals, and there isn’t a strong organizational connection between the two groups.
As marketers, we need to do a better job of recognizing the importance of providing the right tools to help sales close business. While sales enablement might not be the sexiest part of marketing, we still need to look at what we can do to bring in the right people—companies and contacts—to win business.
Marketers should take advantage of predictive analytics to better understand who their clients are so that they can apply those learnings to their outbound acquisition programs.
2. How do I reach, track, and engage more potential clients?
There is a lot of data out there, and determining how to use it effectively to engage—and ultimately convert—your audience can be overwhelming.
Marketers should be less focused on figuring out how to make an individual channel successful and instead turn their attention to how to drive known marketable records into their sales or marketing pipelines.
Test specific content and channels with the person in mind. Leverage known data, analytics, and a multichannel approach to understand the media mix that will be most successful in converting prospects so you can structure tests and campaigns with more confidence. This will prove to be successful over time when compared to testing channel by channel.
Next week we’ll be at The ANA 2019 Data & Measurement Conference Presented by Google. The Speedeon Data team is looking forward to chatting about leveraging data and predictive analytics to drive marketing results—hope to see you there!
