How to make digital marketing less frustrating

Marketing can be very frustrating. Especially for those with an analytical mindset.

Why?

Because it involves a high degree of uncertainty, complex human behavior and partially-observable information.

Marketing (especially for smaller, services-oriented companies) is way less deterministic than that of other disciplines like engineering, development, accounting, etc. This lack of determinism more closely aligned with the lack of determinism found in sales and people management.

Three main ways to make marketing less frustrating:

  1. Stop focusing on activities. Instead, focus on obtaining SRLs (Sales Ready Leads).
  2. Get the fluff out of your marketing.
  3. Start using data to help make better decisions.

As a business leader or sales person, you’re frustrated with your marketing more often than not. Here’s why:

It’s activity-focused, not goal-focused.

It’s that straightforward. But it’s not easy by any means.

Why?

Because in order for you to set a goal to induce change, you have to find a reasonable goal. If you don’t, you’ll just lower morale and you won’t make progress toward what you really care about. After having enough unreasonable goals imposed, goals will become meaningless and ignored. Ouch.

So what’s a reasonable goal for marketing?

In most businesses with a complex sale, it’s sales-ready leads.

The Ultimate Goal for Marketing – Sales-ready Leads

The ultimate goal for many companies with a complex sale is to focus on sales-ready leads (SRLs). An SRL can mean different things for different companies, but it usually means that (1) there’s some level of fit criteria met (2) the person has a need and (3) the person wants to speak with someone from your company.

Does your marketing team know how to obtain SRLs currently? Probably not, or else you probably wouldn’t be frustrated. Given that, you’re going to have to start with pre-SRL goals. Almost everything you do should be an effort to make progress toward SRLs.

Of course, SRLs aren’t the only reasonable goal to consider, it’s just a very important one if your sales team isn’t getting enough leads. If they are, some other good goals to consider include:

  1. increasing awareness of your company,
  2. supporting sales with sales enablement content,
  3. and growing opportunities within your existing customer base.

Pre-SRL goals for Marketing

Until you have a person identifying themselves as an SRL, there’s a lot of information you don’t have. You won’t know the person’s role, you may or may not know what company they work for, and you’ll have less information about the specifics of their need.

You could be 90% of the way there toward your ultimate goal of SRLs, but it’s hard to tell until you cross the threshold.

With that in mind, you want to form your goals around these leading necessary but insufficient pre-SRL goals:

  1. You have a solid digital marketing foundation to build on.
  2. You have a team identified with roles defined.
  3. You have one or more niche areas identified to experiment with.
  4. You’re attracting for the right topic(s).
  5. You’re attracting the right companies.
  6. You’re seeing solid engagement.

These goals are tailored for digital inbound/search marketing methods. If what I’m suggesting is a little fuzzy to you, feel free to reach out for a chat.

Getting buy-in from sales, marketing, and leadership on goals

If you don’t get buy-in, and instead impose goals, best of luck to you.

You need buy-in from marketing, sales, and leadership for this effort toward SRLs to stand a chance. You’re in the land of low probabilities already. Don’t make it harder. Sales, marketing, and leadership will have different perspectives on this, and that’s okay.

The exact timing of your goals aren’t super-critical, but you should still discuss rough target timeframes so that you’re all on the same page. Some aspects of timing will be out of your control because you have little to no control over market feedback and limited control over other business priorities that will pop up. Some of this may be a “fit it in when there’s time” effort for some of the team.

If you’ve got historical data to show why you believe a particular goal is reasonable, share it and talk it through.

The two most critical pieces to enabling buy-in are:

  1. It needs to be a team goal. You’ll see once you get started how important it is to have marketing, sales, and leadership marching in the same direction, with the same goal in mind. You can have occasional disagreements, but you can’t have resistance from one group because they aren’t pushing for the same goal as you are.
  2. You need a goal that you have a clue how to achieve at an implementation level. What I mean is, you have to have an idea of the actual gory steps to get from point A to point B. You won’t know with certainty that you’ll be able to get from point A to point B, but you should at least have a clue how to get there.

Stop focusing on the fluff

What’s the fluff?

If you work in a more serious technical / engineering / manufacturing environment, you know what I mean. It’s a lot of those things that make analytical minds cringe, such as:

  • Words that have no meaning or backing
  • Self-promotional blabbing
  • Vanity metrics like social media followers and likes
  • Faking excitement about something that isn’t actually that interesting

If you’re concerned about whether you’re dealing with fluff, ask yourself two questions:

  1. Is this authentic?
  2. Am I being empathetic to my customer’s needs and wants?

If your gut answers “no” or “not really” or “probably not”, you’ve probably got fluff. Knock it off.

Start gathering and analyzing data to make better decisions

If you’ve got an analytical mind, data can help you feel sane, even if you don’t always utilize it or agree with it (and that’s okay). Data is often there to inform you, not make the tough decisions for you.

You’re probably already gathering some data about your potential customers, including data from your website analytics and data in your CRM. The problems are:

  1. The tools are often not configured to capture the data you want and filter out the data you don’t.
  2. The data is dirty.
  3. You don’t know how to use the data that you’ve got to inform your decisions.

Take a step back from your data collection efforts. Think about how you will use each piece of information before you start collecting it. If you don’t, you’ll end up wasting time collecting unused data, and you won’t collect it consistently, which will create problems during analysis.

The data you want to capture is the data that you can pull patterns out of in order to influence your decisions. I’ll caution you that you’re probably going to be dealing with a pretty sparse data set, so statistical confidence will be low, and human judgment will be high, but at least it’s something to validate that you’re not being insane. It’s actually pretty cool what you can glean once you’re experienced enough at looking at this type of data.

A few examples (there are many more) of data to gather in your CRM and how to use it to influence your decision making:

  1. Trigger event – what caused the person to reach out to you in the first place?
    1. Use this information to inform your content.
    2. If the trigger event is observable as an outsider (e.g. a company of interest is recruiting for certain positions), you can also use the event to reach out to an existing contact to see if timing is right.
  2. Opportunity stage – how is the potential customer progressing through their buying journey?
    1. This helps you understand your opportunity pipeline.
    2. It helps sales keep track of where the potential customer is at.
    3. It Identifies areas for improvement (e.g. getting stuck at a particular stage).
  3. Company fit – how well is this company aligned with your ideal customer?
    1. This should be used as an indicator of LCV (Lifetime Customer Value). It enables slicing and dicing the good opps from the bad, which can be used as feedback in your marketing efforts.
    2. It can be used to influence how much sales effort to apply to a particular company or opportunity.
  4. Source path – how did the potential customer get to you in the first place?
    1. Can be used to inform future content.
    2. Can be used to inform where to spend more marketing effort and where to spend less.
    3. Can be used to help others at your company understand the value of their contributions at the company.

Next Steps

Ready to start making your marketing less frustrating?

If you want someone to help guide you along this journey, reach out for a chat if you’re in the tech (software / engineering / manufacturing) services world.

Yes, let’s chat

If you’re already getting enough sales-ready leads from your marketing team, but you’re still frustrated, see:

  1. How should marketing help you as a business owner
  2. How marketing can actually help salespeople
  3. How to align sales and marketing
  4. Actionable inbound sales tips – for your first meeting
  5. Which sales methods irritate customers most (and least)

In learning mode? You might find these useful:

There’s another way to make marketing less frustrating, but I didn’t cover it here because it requires more inward change than outward. That change is the acceptance that marketing is not deterministic like many other disciplines such as engineering and accounting. Why?

Because there is so much human behavior involved, partially-observable variables, market change, and nuance.

The good news is that it’s way more of an analytical process than it used to be, with all the data and tools available for the digital marketing world. Feel free to reach out or connect if you’d like to chat about this in more detail.