How Closed-Loop Marketing Helps Convert Leads To Customers

Closed-loop marketing sounds like a fancy way to reel in customers, but it’s far from being the new-fangled way of doing business and attracting new customers to your brand. In fact closed-loop online marketing has been used and refined for over a decade by some of the world’s top companies. But what makes it so different?

Unlike traditional open-loop marketing, closed-loop marketing connects marketers to their leads by allowing marketers to track their every step through their sales funnel. Additionally, marketers can see not only what channels are working but how their working and how well their websites are being leveraged to generate sales leads.

Website Central

With closed-loop marketing, your website becomes the centralized hub of all of your content and marketing efforts. While it is most certainly not the only source for potential leads and customers to find your brand, it’s where your marketing efforts drive them and where they become leads.

You’re likely already familiar with online marketing, and like most marketers, you’ve probably dabbled here and there in social media, paid ads, or something of the sort in an effort to get more exposure to your company. And while these efforts have a place in a closed-loop, the goal of inbound marketing is to attract visitors to your content, allow them to browse and absorb it, then become a lead.

All of this starts with a stellar website and easy-to-navigate workflows by which prospective leads can easily meander the path through your expertise.

Landing & Lead Lift Off

Once you’ve attracted visitors to your site and they’ve had an opportunity to browse your content, you need a way for them to enter in to the sales cycle. This is where quality, visually appealing landing pages enter into the closed-loop and allow website visitors to voluntarily make themselves into a lead. From there, blast off!

Landing pages are a great starting point for closed-loop marketing, but they are just the beginning of the inbound sales cycle. Once a lead is generated, your marketing and sales team will be able to coordinate with one another to see what online sources are working the best and which ones produce the most results. Also, as a lead, your prospective customer has entered into a series of automated workflows by which they are gradually coerced and warmed-up to your brand and your strategies.

Learn more about how inbound marketing plays a role in closed loop marketing.

Closing the Loop: Leads to Sales

Marketing automation shouldn’t be taken for granted, and the human element of sales and marketing should not be eliminated from your processes simply because you’ve entered into a closed marketing loop. While automation and workflows can make your life easier and lessen the need and dependance on human-driven interaction, it still doesn’t take the place of humanity.

The beauty of closed-loop marketing is the ability for marketers to personalize communication and workflows to individual leads depending on their referral source, age, and position within their own companies. (Data that can be harvested during the lead-generation process.) Without fail, though, your sales team will intervene at a point when your leads have been nurtured and are considered qualified and ready for sales. At that point, it’s time for your sales team to hit a home run and close the loop by closing the sale.

The Shift to a Closed Loop

Closed-loop marketing isn’t rocket science, but to an experienced open-loop marketer it might as well be. Making the shift from traditional marketing and sales to the closed loop, at this day in age anyway, requires a shift towards a more automated online tool to track a users’ experience through a given workflow and sales funnel.

Of course, all of it can be made simpler with marketing automation software to make those integrations more seamless and easier to visualize. Sometimes, though, getting the right folks to make that move can be difficult, but finding the right team of people dedicated to helping your firm close the loop is paramount and will go a long way to integrating your sales and marketing efforts.

Ask us for a demonstration on how marketing automation can help your closed loop marketing efforts.