Imagine a world where your Sales and Marketing teams exist in total harmony, working together and using data generated in their activities to produce even better marketing and sales qualified leads, not to mention customers. Sound too good to possibly ever be true?
Well, there is a process that can help get you one step closer – and that's closed loop marketing.
What is Closed Loop Marketing?
In a nutshell, closed loop marketing is a process of boosting your Marketing team's efficacy, and your marketing, using data-driven actions. This data is generated by closed loop reporting. The Sales and Marketing teams communicate with one another, and Sales shares the outcome of the leads passed to them, so that Marketing is able to determine their best and worst lead sources.
What Are the Benefits of Adopting Closed Loop Reporting?
Deciding to practice closed loop marketing offers your business several benefits, among them:
- It allows you a complete view of your customers, thanks to integrated Inbound Sales and marketing functions.
- It helps reduce costs, because the data gathered highlights which channels are delivering the greatest ROI, and helps you allocate your marketing budget more efficiently.
- It facilitates better lead management, which means you can spot areas when leads didn't convert, and why, and take action to change them.
- It becomes possible to use the data gathered to help you improve your customers' experiences and overall satisfaction.
Upping Your Game with Closed Loop Marketing & Reporting
Step 1: Keep It Simple to Start
While there are many different models you could call upon when undertaking your closed loop reporting, it's best to keep things simple and elect for a one which is known as the first touch attribution model. This will help you pinpoint the original source of a lead and how they found your website. Once you've identified the sources of the strongest leads, you can begin focusing on those channels with renewed zeal.
Step 2: Dig Deep and Understand Your Audience
Closed loop reporting, and ultimately closed loop marketing, helps provide you with the tools you need to gain insight into your audience in a whole new way. So use them! Your goal should be to dig deeper into the nature of your buyer personas, so you can target your marketing efforts with greater accuracy.
Step 3: Set Up SMART and Realistic Goals
Based on the data gathered through your reporting, you can focus on setting goals according to SMART principles that will ensure you have clearly defined your marketing's purpose. You can target areas that aren't working, or those that are, and focus on enhancing and improving them.
Step 4: Analyse Your Data and Plan to Succeed
Setting SMART goals is one thing, but in order to set yourself and your marketing on the road to success, you will need to analyse your data carefully to glean everything you need to develop a plan to succeed. Use your data to make predictions on the future, and to help you spend your marketing budget well.
Step 5: Set Up Tracking Codes on Your Website Pages and Subdomain
If any of your site pages and subdomains don't have a tracking codes on them, the loop needed to ensure your reporting factors in the necessary information to help you improve your marketing is broken.
Step 6: Link Your Visitors' Online Session Information with Their Lead Information
Before becoming a lead by filling in a form on your website, visitors to your site often do a bit of browsing that leads up to their conversion to a lead. You're going to want to make sure you associate this browsing activity with the lead information you receive from them. Because this is a technical task, many marketers struggle to complete it, often abandoning it entirely. Rather invest in an integrated system or solution that can track this for you.
Step 7: Ensure Your Team is Properly Closing Leads
This is an important one. Your team needs to be closing leads fastidiously and diligently, and following through every step of the conversion and qualifying processes. A massive part of achieving this means aligning your marketing and sales teams using a good SLA that keeps them on track with shared goals and pre-agreed responsibilities and committed targets. Use your SLA as a contract between your teams outlining how leads will be handled, and what they are responsible for in each stage of the conversion and nurturing processes.
Using closed loop marketing is the best way to gain in-depth insight into your marketing, it's efficacy and the various areas you could mark for improvement and closer analysis. So if you haven't implemented it yet, perhaps it's time to have a look at how you can benefit from the advantages of a closed loop marketing and reporting system.
