In part one of our “Back to basics” blog series, we explored marketing best practices, including five strategies you can start implementing today. In part two, we’ll evaluate how marketers can help their sales counterparts generate leads and grow the business. 

As marketers, we know our ultimate goal is business growth. Brand exposure, thought leadership, and social traction all feed your brand awareness, which ultimately leads to sales, but what we’re truly after is finding the people that would be interested in purchasing our products or services and creating experiences that encourage them to buy.  

Reminding ourselves of the foundations of marketing can refocus our efforts. Lead generation is arguably the most important responsibility of a marketing team, so follow these practices to reach higher goals and produce more revenue for your organization. 

Deploy cross-channel – and eventually, omnichannel – marketing solutions 

As our CEO Dennis Self said, while “omnichannel marketing” is a buzzword, no MarTech platform today offers true omnichannel capabilities. 

“Simply put, ‘omni’ means all; if there is any limit to the number of channels that are available to the brand, it’s actually multichannel marketing.” – Dennis Self 

While omnichannel marketing isn’t quite a reality yet, cross-channel marketing is and it’s crucial to your lead generation strategy as you prepare for omnichannel marketing in the future. That way you are addressing the entire customer journey and delivering engaging and seamless experiences, instead of focusing on channel-centric tactics. 

Because the customer journey is no longer linear, it’s critical for brands to have many touchpoints with consumers along their buying journey. A MarTech solution that enables you to create campaigns once and launch them across channels will help improve productivity for your team and free them up to focus on other tasks and strategic opportunities.  

But any cross-channel marketing platform is only as powerful as the insights it provides on your audience. Does the solution span the entire customer journey, enabling you to have multiple touchpoints? Does it provide data that both sales and marketing can leverage? Is it helping you drive leads down the sales funnel? 

Marketers must have powerful analytics capabilities to identify consumer interests, track the many touchpoints they have with your brand, and reveal opportunities for engagement. By deploying tools that enable you to launch campaigns, monitor their progress in real-time, and optimize your messaging based on feedback or engagements you have, you’ll create a powerful marketing strategy that generates leads for the sales team. 

Optimize your lead scoring

Although lead generation is a top priority for any marketer, a staggering 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales. This could be because of any number of reasons: the leads are too top-of-funnel, they’re not in an active buying cycle, the “wrong” leads are being passed to the sales team, and so much more. (Our “Marketing & Sales: Two Teams, One Goal” ideapaper shares more insights.)

One solution to this is better lead scoring. If salespeople understand who the high-priority leads are, they can prioritize them and help drive them down the sales funnel. The best lead scoring models incorporate behavioral and demographic or firmographic scoring.

It’s no longer enough to assume that because someone downloads a report or opens an email, they’re a valid lead. In fact, email marketing metrics like open rates are becoming even more difficult to track because of Apple iOS 15, and shouldn’t be relied on moving forward. Instead, consider developing a scoring method based on personas and content type. For example, senior decision-makers should receive more points than a junior team member or an analyst. Similarly, actionable guides or Total Cost of Ownership calculators should be rated higher than a blog post. 

As you adjust your lead scoring model, ensure you constantly reassess it to ensure it’s aligning with your target buyers. Feedback from the sales team can help optimize this. By creating an opportunity for information sharing back-and-forth, you’ll be more closely aligned with the sales team’s needs, and be able to better support the revenue goals of your organization.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Acoustic’s solutions can enable you to attract and convert leads, reach out to us today.