Reclaim Your Business Growth With Better Marketing Surge

Grow your business with better marketing surge is in continuation of the article on make the most of marketing in business.

Marketing and sales are two sides of the business development like the two sides of a coin. Marketing and sales must be aligned with your customers and their experiences in order for your business to be successful. There is no way for you to know who your customers are, how to approach them, how to present your products to them, or what they think about your business in the early stages. Sales and marketing could indeed help you in answering such questions.

The five key areas of marketing

The ultimate goal of marketing is to generate business and thus revenue. Marketing activities are organised into five key areas to accomplish this.

They are as follows:

Market intelligence Gathering information about market trends such as who is buying what, how, and when, as well as your industry trends and what the market is saying about your field

Branding and communication Consistently placing products/services in the marketplace and messaging prospects based on an internally agreed-upon set of promises.

Customer information Gathering information and feedback from your customers and prospects

Marketing initiatives Creating and managing market focused initiatives, as well as carrying out specific strategies and campaigns.  Individual marketing activities such as email campaigns are examples of such initiatives. Once launched, marketing will reach out to the market using information gathered from the three areas mentioned above. They continue to spread messaging, awareness, and start generating leads.

Lead creation  Sales receive qualified leads from marketing initiatives and converts into deals.

The four key areas, namely market intelligence, customer information, branding and communication and marketing initiatives are the base for creating leads successfully. Marketing must allocate time to these areas. If ignored any of them, the results will be less effective.

Marketing relies on intelligence from a variety of sources as well as feedback from campaigns to constantly refine its approach. Finally, it is considered as under performance of marketing if it does not going to drive leads, whether indirectly or directly.

Distinctions and interconnection

You must acknowledge the distinct and interconnected nature of sales and marketing, as well as how effective marketing works and what it requires to operate at its peak performance.

For the growth of the business, marketing and sales need to collaborate with each other. They have shared goals, for example generating leads. They need to define individual accountability. While marketing concentrates on strategies, and policy matters to support sales, the latter concentrates on individual opportunities for quick closures of deals. Sales people face customers and prospects constantly, while marketing people provide them support for ultimate deal closure.

“In the simplest of terms, marketing is building awareness of your organization and brand to potential customers. Sales is turning that viewership into a profit, by converting those potential customers into actual ones. To dive deeper into the difference between sales and marketing, here are some key takeaways.”- US Chamber of Commerce

Marketing communicates with entire marketplace available for the company to make them aware of company business to drive marketing qualified leads (MQL), and pass on to sales for converting them into sales qualified leads (SQL) and ultimately close the deals. Marketing nurtures marketplace and takes longer time to produce MQLs compared to SQLs.

The goal of marketing campaigns is to raise awareness in order to generate leads. If a prospect has expressed interest and requested more information, that is a clear opportunity to pass such a lead to sales. The latter can convert such lead to the deal with the assistance of a subject matter expert.

Marketing must deliver on time.

The desire to enter the market ahead of the competition creates a tension for marketing between ‘doing it right’ and ‘delivering on time’. ‘Doing it right’ may not always result in ‘delivering on time’. Marketing efforts take time and money. However, in the end, the goal must take precedence over perfection, and marketing must deliver on time.

Marketing is becoming more interested in and involved in monitoring performance. Make certain that your marketing team is focused and eager to contribute to business goals, and that they do not object to the concept of metrics and goals.

The key is to set goals, communicate them, create measures to ensure they are met, and check them on a regular basis.

Examples of goals and metrics look like this.

Goals and metrics
Goals	Metrics	Comparison/measuring
Market  intelligence assessment   Include industry trends, competitor activities	Monthly       Provided on time with useful, actionable insights	Compare with previous monthly report   Assess where you stand in comparison vis-a-vis competitors
Leads  and conversions	A goal of 10 leads  per month and at least 1 conversion	Compare how many leads generated and converted against the set goal and conversions

You can add as many goals and metrics as you deem fit and compare the results to know the progress of your business. From marketing point of view an interest expressed by a prospect is a lead.  Marketing copes with buyers who are undecided about purchasing, whereas sales with buyers who are certain they will purchase.

Marketing needs to get prospects’ attention

Buyers conduct extensive online research and also consult with friends and family after identifying their need before initiating purchase. Marketing must involve your company in the purchaser research process.

Marketing needs to devise ways to message prospects to raise awareness of your solutions or products. When prospects take a decision to buy, your company should be on their list.

Campaigns from marketing must concentrate on creating awareness at various points. These can range from the prospect having a hazy idea of his need to being ready to engage with someone from your side. So that the prospect can evaluates and decide whether to continue his journey with you.

Ability of marketing lies in creating quality content to present to prospects so that they can respond, and also to recognise when the time is right to hand over the lead to sales.