Imagine you connect with an expert who offers you recommendations to improve your marketing initiatives. Then, they provide their plan to tackle each of these initiatives one by one on your behalf.
For many enterprise-level companies, that may seem like the norm. For those of you, like me, who often feel like a one-man marketing band, that probably sounds like nirvana. Fortunately, nirvana is a very near reality nowadays, thanks to the growing demand for “do it for me marketing” (DIFM) and the marketing technology providers that offer it.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from DIY, DIFM leans on outside marketing experts to handle the tactical campaign execution and reporting, while you focus on program strategy and content creation.
I’ve recently implemented the DIFM approach and it’s helped me keep my head out of the marketing weeds and strengthen operations elsewhere. Here are just a few ways it can benefit you too.
Gain Specialized Talent Without the Pains of Recruiting
One of the biggest challenges for any business — especially small businesses — is recruiting and retaining high-quality employees. On your “never enough” budget, you need to onboard capable, committed talent across the necessary areas of sales, operations and logistics. In a world where half of U.S. small businesses still don’t have a website, this means a full-fledged marketing team gets chalked up as a luxury and investing in a consultant to manage your marketing becomes even more unrealistic.
However, implementing marketing technology that offers managed service support can kill two birds with one stone. Essentially, this provides you with a team of experts who understand marketing and can use technology to make the most of your strategy.
After researching potential vendors, I reached out to marketing automation provider Salesfusion, as their platform had the features I was looking for, and most importantly, the company had a team of experts to run the system for me — true DIFM marketing at work.
Initially, I was concerned about cost. However, I quickly realized if our messaging could reach one viable prospect and interest them in what our company has to offer, we would have our ROI.
Integrating Salesfusion’s team of experts was seamless too. We agreed to meet monthly to discuss our goals and objectives, allowing me to think strategically, while their team drove the day-to-day tactics.
Empower Your Sales Team While Increasing Accountability
Here, I began to realize another benefit of working with a team of experts: if you don’t have a marketing background, you can learn a great deal working alongside people that do. From lead nurture campaigns to A/B testing, they can walk you through the need-to-knows of marketing automation and the steps needed to pump more qualified leads into your pipeline.
And you’re not simply driving more qualified leads, you’re delivering leads with a detailed record of behaviors you can monitor in the technology. Having this information allows your sales team to better personalize follow ups to prospects.
Better reporting also can increase internal accountability for sales. This becomes an even larger necessity if you rely on an independent rep model. When your reps are splitting time with different companies and different products, it’s hard to ensure you’re getting their “A” game, particularly if you’re organized using a scramble of spreadsheets like we were.
Now, all of our data lives in one location, meaning our sales reps can easily create a defined cadence for their leads. And by providing lead tracking and behavior reports, you can help increase rep accountability by raising your own awareness and allowing you to have more informed conversations around sales performance.
From my experience, those conversations can drive some really satisfactory results. In fact, within a few weeks of launching our first marketing campaign, the information we gathered about a set of target prospects enabled our sales team to create five new opportunities worth $1M. The success directly resulted from strengthening our marketing efforts and having better conversations with sales.
Find Out What Message Matters Most
These conversations between you and your sales team, along with the performance metrics marketing technology and a third-party marketing team provides, can also drive an even more important conversation: is your message resonating? Often, your go-to-market message may strike a powerful chord with your employees, but you have no real way of knowing if your prospects follow suit.
Now, you can review which emails had the most success, which content offers generated the most engagement and more, leading you to refine your messaging to what your prospects truly care about.
If you’re struggling to take that data and make it actionable, you have a marketing specialist there to help. Ultimately, this creates a constant state of monitoring, analysis and refinement, paving the way to greater marketing and sales success.
Scott Costanzo is president of Cataract Steel.