This should be a golden age of marketing.
More channels and tools exist to reach, persuade and gain customers than ever before. A new channel – social media, mobile, the Internet of Things, etc. — is added seemingly every year. Thousands of companies now offer some flavor of marketing technology in dozens of categories. Many studies have shown that companies that market more grow faster.
But the result of this upheaval for many marketers is a feeling of innovation overload. They are constantly bombarded with conflicting claims from vendors. They understandably don’t even know what all of those dozens of channels and types of martech do, let alone how to use them to produce optimal results.
The Bullseye Marketing FrameworkSM is my response to this challenge.
The Framework offers a path through the woods – a way for companies to launch, improve and scale marketing programs to generate as many leads and opportunities as quickly and inexpensively as possible — to succeed at marketing and as a consequence grow faster.
I represent the Bullseye Marketing Framework with this image:
In this case simple is good. Simple is needed to cut through the tremendous amount of conversation and clutter.
The revenue gold is found in the center of the Bullseye where a company more fully exploits its existing assets such as its current customers, website traffic and email lists. These assets exist now, can be taken advantage of quickly, and often cost little to exploit. But it’s the rare company that is taking full advantage of them.
In the second ring are search marketing programs that get the company in front of new customers who are looking right now to buy what they sell. This is an excellent audience to present their offerings to, but more expensive and not as cost effective as those center circle opportunities.
In the outer ring of the Bullseye are programs to build general awareness of the company and its offerings among potential customers, most of whom, though, aren’t actually looking to buy right now. These long-term programs include content marketing, social media marketing, and display ads. If asked, many people would actually define marketing as these various advertising and promotion programs. And in the long run they can be very valuable in building the company’s brand and generating many high quality, inbound leads. However, they usually involve considerable effort and budget and can take one to two years to show significant results. Senior management teams and companies new to marketing often grow impatient long before then and pull the plug after several months, walking away saying, “We knew marketing doesn’t work.”
By starting with the center of the Bullseye marketers can produce measurable improvements in a company’s pipeline and revenue, building confidence in the marketing program with senior management, and then move out to the second and third rings which usually cost far more and take longer to produce results.
Let’s take a look at the seven specific opportunities in Phase 1, the center of the Bullseye:
- Talk to your customers, listen, understand them better, and improve the products and services that you’re offering. This is perhaps the most profound mission of marketing. In many of these conversations short term needs will also be uncovered, including new, unsolicited sales opportunities.
- Sell more to your current customers: It’s estimated that it costs 5-25 times more to close a new account than to sell more to an existing one.
- Improve your website: Your website is, by far, your most important marketing tool. You need to make sure that the visitors to it are have an optimal experience, getting the right messages, and seeing the right calls to action.
- Website conversion experience: It’s much faster, easier and cheaper to get more of the people currently visiting your site to fulfill a particular call to action than to increase the amount of traffic to your site. Improved conversion experiences can inexpensively increase website leads by 50-100% or more – and that means that not only the number of leads has increased but the cost per lead has dropped a corresponding amount.
- Email marketing to your house list: McKinsey estimates that email marketing is 40X more effective than social media.
- Remarketing: Showing ads to the people who already have visited your website is one of the most cost-effective ways to boost sales
- Align marketing and sales: When sales and marketing are aligned sales costs go down and revenue goes up. When they are poorly aligned qualified leads are dropped and opportunities are lost.
It is precisely these low-cost, high-value, center of the Bullseye programs that are often overlooked as companies attempt to grow revenues and land new customers. Many of these can be implemented relatively quickly, with little cost, and produce measurable results in just a few months. It would be a fool’s mission to try to do the programs in Phases 2 and 3 without getting this foundation in order first.
Of course, some companies have mature, multi-channel programs that are already producing measurable revenue results by seizing opportunities in all three Bullseye phases. That’s great! That’s the ultimate goal. But for companies that aren’t there – probably 90% of small and mid-sized companies, and a few enterprises — the Bullseye Marketing Framework provides a path to join the marketing elite.
What if you’re impatient? Could a company undertake all three Bullseye phases at once? Sure, if they have the executive commitment, budget, team and knowledge to do so. But companies that don’t have all of that already will find greater success by starting in the center, demonstrating results, building confidence, and then moving on to the second, and then third rings.
Even when using the Bullseye Marketing Framework companies will need to intelligently prioritize opportunities. For example, if your customers aren’t on social media then even when you turn your attention to Phase 3 you won’t want to put efforts there.
The Bullseye Marketing Framework provides a way for marketers and executives to navigate a path through the dense forest of marketing and demand generation opportunities, to tune out the siren song of thousands of vendors and maximize their revenue growth.
This post tells you what I think companies should do. How the Phase 1, 2 and 3 programs are implemented are critical to their success and that is the topic of a book that I am writing.
(c) Copyright 2017, Louis Gudema. All rights reserved.
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