Tips for successful Marketing Campaigns & Lead Generation
In this post we will be focussing on Marketing Campaigns & Lead Generation. This is part of series of posts on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) providing you best practices and tips to get the best out of your CRM initiative.
What are Marketing Campaigns?
Marketing Campaigns are initiatives that generate leads or prospects for your business. The Marketing Campaigns can be Inbound or Outbound.
Inbound Campaigns are the one in which prospects get in touch with you after getting influenced by your marketing activity. Some examples of inbound Marketing Campaigns are – Google Adwords, Email Marketing, Print Advertising etc.
Outbound marketing are the activities where you directly reach out to customer. For example telephonic calling, field sales etc
Challenges with Marketing Campaigns
What most marketing directors or head of marketing are clueless about (although they will never accept it) is the answer to the question – Which of my marketing campaigns are generating business for us? Considering the types of varied marketing activities it is nearly impossible to find Return on Investment (RoI) of each marketing campaign.
Which of my Dollar is giving me best returns?
A Marketing Campaign can be effectively tracked in a CRM software where you can plan, manage, and track the responses. While most CRM softwares can give you basic functionality of Marketing Campaigns and tracking the responses – the key lies in effective implementation and usage. Most CRM Software just help track the responses and capture leads – very few have integrated offering that links the lead creation to campaign execution. In such scenario only an experienced CRM consultant can help you win the CRM race.
Campaign Best Practices
The “Best Practices†of today will be “Common Practices†of tomorrow. You have to constantly reinvent for your business and find new strategies and tactics to win in the competitive market. However these are some of the best practices in Campaign Management:
Defining Campaign Goals
Campaigns usually have one of the following primary goals – Lead generation and Brand building. Lead generation campaigns include online marketing, email marketing, web seminars, industry conferences, trade shows. The lead generation campaigns directly generate new prospects. Secondly – Brand-building campaigns may not generate direct responses, however they help create awareness of your product, service or brand. Some of the examples of brand building campaigns include print advertisements, billboards, radio advertisements.
Whom to target in your campaign
There are three main groups to whom you can market – your existing customers, existing prospects and new leads. If you are building a database of customers and prospects in your CRM then you can use CRM contacts or leads reports to create target lists of customers for direct mail, email blasts, or other types of campaigns.
New leads can include anything from prospects acquired at a conference or a list of names that your company has purchased. These too can be entered in CRM and tracked.
Smart Segmentation – Highly Targeted Campaigns
There is no point in selling a high end luxury car to someone who does not even own a basic car. Smartly segmenting your prospect and customer database will help you run highly targeted campaigns. When capturing the information in CRM determine what criteria you typically use to segment your target lists. Common criteria include Geography, Title (for example, CFO, Director of Sales), Industry, Company size , and Installed products/services.
In our next post we will be talking about Lead tracking, Lead Rating and Lead Qualification. Wait for our next post.
