Everyone talks about it.... few do it.
By now most marketers know the value of a truly integrated marketing approach. The ROI is proven, every analyst, agency and consultant says it's key, and nearly every marketer is "striving" to execute on it. Why then are so few marketers actually doing it well ?
A lack of budget, resources, and measurable analytics are all common answers.
So if it's hard to get more budget and resources without measurable analytics, what can a smart marketer do?
One answer is to cost effectively build a unified contact history profile on each prospect record. Then over time, look at the prospects that are now clients (or about to become clients) and discover key trends in outbound and inbound communications. However, simply recording the number of "touches" is not nearly enough and can actually lead to some counter productive assumptions.
The timing and quality of the touch is what should be looked at. Knowing what prompted a quicker response and acceleration down the funnel is far more important than simply knowing the average number of touches. Is this more difficult to determine, yes. But does the ROI on discovering that pan out -- the answer is almost always yes when it comes to long sales cycles on complex offerings or on those that have diminishing differentiation.
A simple and efficient way to do this is to have tags on your website that recognize exactly who is checking you out and what pages they are viewing. If you see that the visitor checks out a key page like your pricing page and you can trigger a timely email message, the likelihood of seeing a repeat visit to your website and acceleration of interest goes up considerably more than if you didn't apply that automated trigger.
If you can automatically blend your website activity with your email, social, PPC, search, telesales, direct mail, print, and other marketing channels, all you need are some assumptions and the ability to apply rules-based triggers. Then, over time take a look at your assumptions and to use a military term ... adjust fire. The key here is to not have to do this in a manual fashion. Adjustment must be quick and easy to implement, so make sure you work with a solution capable of doing that. Being able to apply custom grading to the assumptions and triggers also helps.
Before you know it, you'll see more and better quality prospects percolating down the funnel to sales -- which in turn will get you the budget and resources you need to continually test your assumptions and refine your "touch" strategy.
As long as you systematically test and refine your assumptions, the side effects will be accelerated sales cycles, a less distracted sales team, better forecasts, fewer lost opportunities, and significantly improved marketing ROI.
