The three “M” s to success: Marketing, Marketing and Marketing

Marketing is at the heart of driving business growth. Marketing activities can affect your business both short-term and long term. Short-term activities are familiar: advertising, specific campaigns from paid social media activities, email marketing or event marketing, usually provide short-lasting immediate results.

Other marketing activities that affect your brand awareness and brand image will produce long-term results. These usually are more organic channels, such as regular, continuous social media presence, the SEO of your website and blog posts. Such marketing activities are harder to relate to a hard, quantifiable monetary return on investment.

These longer term, sustained efforts are just as important, if not more important, than the short-term investments, as they ultimately determine how your organization is perceived by the market.

In this article, we discuss why it is crucial to invest in both short-term and long-term marketing activities, as well as what are the benefits of each type of marketing activities.

Educate your customers so they understand your unique proposition

Many successful companies such as Apple or Nvidia strongly base the sales of new products around the education of the consumer. In the Tech industry, updates and innovative solutions will be new for the prospects; the clients need to be educated on the solution to even find the need for the product. The news or updates you have, are the education you give to your customers. This is your direct voice to the customer. And your communication strategy needs to be focused around informing your customers about you through various channels: social media, email marketing or alternative channels.

Aligning your communications and marketing strategy gives you the power of educating your prospects and customers. Cloudsuppliers is happy to talk to you about how to build this alignment.

In recent years the cold calling success decreased to only around 10% (Social media HQ, 2018). With the rise of professional social media channels, such as LinkedIn, many businesses choose to invest in social media campaigns rather than phone bills for international calls. By re-allocating of cold calling budgets and directing them towards the marketing campaigns on social media, more people can be reached in a more effective way.

Moreover, decision-makers and decision influencers can be approached directly, instead of starting at the very beginning with the gatekeepers.

Social media ad campaigns will allow you to reach specific and niche targeted people. Want the decision-makers of a particular company to see advertisements for your product? Want to test if your product gains interest in the country you have not operated in yet? Want to target a specific industry? In B2B, this is usually achieved via LinkedIn or Facebook targeted ads. Cloudsuppliers can help you do that!

Who are you talking to? Understand your customer

Marketing campaigns are also crucial sources of data. The campaigns feed your business with information that will be used to better understand your customer.

This allows you to not only become better at telling your story to that specific audience, but also to understand your customer’s needs better, and adjust your future upgrades and innovations according to it.

The data can be of different types, based on the channel it was collected from. Not only can you test the types of campaigns and channels that your customer base interacts with the most, but you can also have a clearer picture about who your audience is: what is their age, what is their profession, what are their roles and interests.

How to get more leads: the funnel!

Marketing usually fills the top of the sales funnel. But marketing can also strongly influence the middle of the funnel with retargeting and educating the prospect. Companies that incorporate both – top and middle of the funnel marketing campaigns, most of the time have a higher closed-won ratio than those who only use the top of the funnel marketing.

Long term-marketing activities such as brand awareness are important, as they will increase your lead generation and your profits over time, where short-time activities will support your business with generating many leads in a short period not leaving much residual value afterwards.

Both types of activities working hand in hand to allow you to reach the peak of efficient marketing growth. There is always space to grow your profits, regardless of the size and volume of your organization.

Cloudsuppliers are ready to help.