Top 10+ Ways to Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

What is Attraction Marketing And How Can It Set Your Business Apart

September 23, 2022/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

Attraction marketing is the culmination of your marketing efforts to draw customers to you and your brand. As with any marketing strategy, attraction marketing focuses on setting your brand apart from your competitors by making your company attractive to potential buyers. This is accomplished through developing your brand marketing strategy by evaluating your marketing goals, evaluating how your are performing, and adjusting your plan using metrics.

Attraction Marketing Strategy and Story

Attraction marketing is all about making your brand more attractive to your buyer personas as well as attracting them to you through inbound marketing. The two work hand-in-hand and should be a pillar of your marketing efforts, and it all begins with your attraction marketing strategy or strategies as the case may be — there is no one “right” way to market your brand but there are many tried and true ways to do it.

Strategy alone, however, doesn’t necessarily flow through to your customers but your story does and storybranding is how to give your brand an enduring and lasting impression on your clients. Be careful though, as storybranding and storytelling are two different animals.

Get Found and Be Seen

Your brand story sets up the foundation for who you are and what you do and, if done right, will be the thing that your buyers admire as they meander through your sales funnel. Of course, all of that magnificent storybranding will be for naught without a quality website and some killer SEO which is exactly why you need to shore up your website: to be seen.

We’re talking, of course, about your internet presence and how it affects your attraction marketing campaigns. The gateway to your brand story and to your attraction marketing as a whole goes through your website which may very well be your most valuable sales asset. Most importantly, it puts you on a level playing field with your competition through the necessary exposure of the internet.

Getting folks to that site comes down to search engine optimization which spans both organic and pay per click by optimizing your website for greater results. While SEO is an intrinsic tool to have, the quality of the content you provide on your site is what keeps buyers there and hooks them in to your sales process.

Want to learn more about how to create quality content? Read this article on how to create content for each sale funnel stage.

Thought Leadership

Possibly one of the most useful parts of attraction marketing for your business is that you become the thought leader in your industry. Buyers as well as industry leaders will turn to your brand to help solve their problems as you make them more aware of the issues they face.

Thought leadership though is more than simply having quality content and making that content relevant to your target audience. It deals with the entire suite of broadcasting your brand, who you are, and what you know about your industry and the solutions you have available across many different avenues. Social media, trade shows, marketing metrics, and lead nurturing all make up vital pieces of your thought leadership toolset.

More than that, the importance of thought leadership for your brand is to continue to set yourself up on a higher plane than the rest of your competition by delivering what you already know and conveying it in a way that attracts people to you.

Lead Nurturing Throughout the Buyer’s Journey

Once you’ve got a lead whether from a trade show, through your inbound marketing, or through social media, it’s time to nurture them through your sales process and guide them through their own buyer journey.

While there are many ways to nurture leads, keying in on how your specific buyer responds to different stimuli is necessary for landing sales. Tactics including drip emails, lead nurturing campaigns, and remarketing are all tools that should be part of your lead nurturing tool box. Additionally, towards the end of your buyer’s journey, your sales and marketing staffs should be on the same page for sales-ready leads.

Finally, you’ll need a way to evaluate your marketing efforts. Inbound marketing software, analytics, and metrics can certainly help, but having a strong OODA loop within your organization will aid in making decisions. Remember, it all starts with data.

The Nitty Gritty: Why Attraction Marketing?

The question you’re undoubtedly asking is why attraction marketing is useful to your business which is a very valid one. Think of attraction marketing as the magnet that draws customers to your brand at large. The deeper aspects of attraction marketing such as your content, thought leadership, and brand story make your brand something that sticks with them.

How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

August 26, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

One of the biggest benefits of online marketing is that it allows you to collect valuable data about your customers as well as your target audience in general. It also gives you a chance to pinpoint what is and isn’t working as far as your marketing efforts are concerned. However, collecting all this data is useless if you don’t leverage it to your benefit. In fact, the information you have can help to inspire creative ideas to help craft great marketing campaigns.

How Data Can Spark Creativity

Data doesn’t just help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t, it can help drive creative decisions that allow you to create great marketing campaigns. A good example of this is Netflix. Everyone knows that Netflix has an absolute treasure trove of behavioural data from their subscribers. They leverage this data to inform the content that they produce.

For example, many critics were bewildered when they gave Adam Sandler a huge four-movie deal. Saying that his movies are panned across the board is putting it mildly, after all. However, according to their data, his older films were streamed an absurd amount. They knew that even if critics didn’t like his films, their subscribers certainly did — and that’s why they signed him to produce Netflix-exclusive films.

Netflix will often look at subscriber viewing habits and look at where they overlap to find a niche that they can fill with their original content. For example, the popularity of older series on Netflix has often resulted in revivals, such as Fuller House and Arrested Development.

Another good example is Equifax. Using their data, they realized that the average person’s credit score depended heavily on how old they were. They used this data to create a great marketing campaign that provided tailored benefits information to people at different stages of their lives.

How to Incorporate Email Marketing into B2B Campaigns

How To Use Your Data To Inform Your Creative Marketing Campaigns

How you use your data to influence your creativity and create great marketing campaigns depends heavily on the specifics of your business. However, the following are a few basic ways data can help you connect to your audience on a more emotional level when creating new marketing campaigns:

Learn what your audience connects with

Look at how your audience engaged with previous campaigns. By looking at what worked and what didn’t work, you can figure out exactly how your audience was able to engage with you on an emotional level. For example, maybe certain types of content posted on social media were commented on and shared much more than other types of content. This will give you a better idea of what your audience is looking for, which can give you better direction on how to reach your audience on a more personal level during future campaigns.
Learn what your audience’s needs are

You can figure out what your audience wants by analyzing certain sets of data. For example, you can compare two PPC ads promoting the same product in two different ways. You can then use the conversion rates of both ads. The ad that converts more leads is probably presenting a solution that fulfils a need that your audience has more effectively than the other. This information can be used to reach your audience more successfully with future ads.
Continually improve your campaign

Once you launch a new campaign, don’t just stay the course if it’s obvious something isn’t working. You should continually track the results of your campaign based on your specific goals. The data you gather can help you figure out whether your creative decisions are having an impact on your audience or not. If they aren’t, you can make adjustments even as your campaign is ongoing.

When building new marketing campaigns, make sure that you make use of the data that you have. Your data can be the difference between creating great marketing campaigns and failed marketing campaigns.

Understanding Consumer Expectations Around Omnichannel Approach

May 23, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

There are many ways to engage with potential customers these days, from social media to mobile and more. While it’s important that you establish a presence on different channels so that you can reach your target audience, it’s also important that you create a seamless experience. This is known as an omnichannel approach. An omnichannel approach allows customers to engage with a brand no matter what platform they’re on or what device they’re using, whether online or in-store.

What Is An Omnichannel Approach?

The idea of the omnichannel approach is that consumers are no longer on a buyer’s journey that is strictly linear. For example, they may begin their journey by searching for a product and reading up on it by checking out your blog. But then they may check out some customer reviews by taking a look at your social media pages. Then, they may sign up to your email newsletter, where you may continue to nurture them. They may read these newsletters on their smartphone even though they had been engaging with your brand on their computer.

Finally, they may choose to go to your physical location in order to make a purchase instead of buying online. This is an example of how a customer can make use of multiple platforms and devices to go through their buyer’s journey.

Read Our Article About Types Of Advertisement Opportunities For Popular Streaming Services

Omnichannel Vs Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel refers to the ability to engage with customers on various channels. For example, if customers can reach you on social media, a live chat feature, a phone number, or an email address, then that’s multichannel marketing. The omnichannel experience allows customers to do the same thing — but there’s one big difference. With omnichannel marketing, all of those channels are connected to create a singular experience.

For example, say a customer emails you with a question and you answer it. The customer does some more research, then engages again on your website’s live chat. The person they’re engaging with will have access to the information that was exchanged via email. As a result, the customer won’t have to repeat questions or information that they already gave.

Essentially, omnichannel marketing ensures a seamless experience across all channels.

What Does It Mean To Take An Omnichannel Approach?

You’re no longer in charge of laying out the journey for your buyers. Consumers demand control over their own buyer’s journey, which means that you have to take an omnichannel approach in order to give them this freedom. There are several ways to do this:

Know your audience

Develop buyer personas so that you understand your customer’s needs and pain points. By doing so, you’ll be able to address those pain points across all channels. It will also make it easier to identify your customers’ buying patterns, which you can leverage throughout your marketing efforts.

Have an omnichannel presence

Don’t just focus on one marketing channel. Set up a website with a regularly updated blog. Establish a presence on several social media platforms that you know your target audience uses. Engage in email marketing. Ensure your online efforts are mobile-friendly. Use pay-per-click advertising. Don’t ignore traditional marketing methods, such as TV or newspaper ads. Make it easy to be found no matter what channel your audience is using.

Make sure your branding is consistent

It’s extremely important that your branding is consistent on all channels. This means that you need to have the same message, the same tone, and even the same style. Otherwise, your audience may get confused about who you are and what you represent.

Be easy to contact

Present several options for contacting you where ever your audience is. For example, respond to comments left on your social media pages, provide an email address and phone number on your website, allow mobile users to just click on your phone number on your site, and submit your NAP (name, address, and phone number) to local online inventories, and more. You might even want to implement a live chat into your website.

Meet consumers at every stage of their journey

Make sure that consumers can advance through their buyer’s journey no matter what platform they’re on. This means having content that’s suitable for every stage of the buyer’s journey on all of your channels so that you can meet their needs and nurture them through their current stage in no matter where they are.

The Benefits Of Omnichannel Marketing

Implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy may take some extra work, initially, but it’s well worth the effort. With that in mind, the following are some of the primary benefits of omnichannel marketing:

Create a seamless customer journey

Arguably the biggest advantage of omnichannel marketing is the fact that it results in a seamless customer journey. Customers will be able to pick up where they left off on any channel, making it easy to nurture them through the sales funnel. Additionally, there will be fewer roadblocks to conversion, resulting in fewer lost customers.

Increase your brand loyalty

Using omnichannel marketing improves the customer experience. It does this by providing a seamless and consistent experience across all channels. As a result, the needs of your customers are met at every stage of their journey. The better their experience is, the more loyalty they’ll have for your brand.

Better insights into customer behaviour

Because all of your channels will be unified under an omnichannel strategy, it will be easier to collect and organize customer data. For example, you’ll have no problem measuring how each channel contributes to certain marketing goals. As a result, you’ll be able to make better adjustments to improve your marketing efforts.

Improve your brand recall

A major component of successful omnichannel marketing is consistency. By ensuring that your branding efforts are consistent across all channels, you’ll strengthen your brand identity. As a result, customers will have a stronger sense of brand recall. This means customers will think of your brand when they have needs or challenges that your products or services address.

Generate more long-term revenue

All of the previous benefits, from the improved customer experience and customer insight to the increase in brand recall and loyalty, will result in more revenue. Essentially, omnichannel marketing can help you improve your long-term profits.

Consumers have more options than ever before, which means that they have much higher expectations when it comes to their buying experiences. As a result, you should take an omnichannel approach in order to establish a seamless experience over multiple channels, making it easy for them to engage with your brand no matter where they are on their buyer’s journey.

Brand Marketing Strategy: Community and Advocacy

May 13, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Most companies will have a brand marketing strategy. A great way to use a strategy is to work with the community and advocacy. Having advocates and engaging with community will help your brand grow. Advocates are customers, employees, fans, and influencers. Brand advocates are dedicated fans whom the company should build closer relationships with. The best way to advertise is through word of mouth and advocates in the community will do that.

When it comes to social media, it is important to engage, grow and leverage the audience. Some ways to grow your social media audience include providing an incentive (gift card), reaching out to the offline community, asking the right questions, and finding people who are advocating your brand already. Engaging your social media community can include having a welcoming environment, timely responses, and reciprocity. Make sure to monitor your community space.

How Brands Market To the Different Generations

Engagement with Influencers and Advocates

Engaging with influencers and advocates can bring value. The influencers are bloggers, speakers, and authors. A good idea is to invite these people to an event. Influencers and advocates are the ones spreading information about your company through word of mouth. When building a brand advocacy program, it is important to have program goals, criteria for selection, a plan for onboarding and a continued engagement plan. With an advocacy program, it is important to remember the 3 R’s: relevance, reach and resonance. With an employee advocacy program, it is important that both employees and high up exec people post and share company content on social media.

Growing Community Across Social Media

Social media platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Snap Chat.

Twitter is for using hash tags, monitoring keywords, hosting events and having chats.
Facebook is for having interactions (comments), and using events to create buzz.
LinkedIn is for creating groups, and posting content related to business.
Instagram is for visuals, finding community, engagement, and boosting brand visibility.
YouTube is for collaboration, anonymous comments, healthy debates and connecting with viewers.
Snap Chat is for having a unique snap code, ghost codes and direct engagement (reaction snaps to followers).

Each social media platform is unique and has its own purpose.

Measuring ROI

Metrics for ROI are community growth, engagement and brand love. Quality over quantity. You can use the spot check method and randomly select a few followers and look at their profiles to see what kinds of people are following your company. Engagement can include the number of likes for a post. Brand love is positive testimonials from third party blog posts.

Paying attention to your community is important. By reaching out and engaging with advocates, will help your brand. Reaching out and engaging in all the social media platforms will help as well. The more you put into getting your brand out there, the more your brand will grow. You can have a very successful brand marketing strategy. Community and advocacy are two ways to help your strategy.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

October 22, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

A website redesign is the perfect time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy into the site’s very fabric. In fact, your entire website needs to be optimized and focused on furthering your inbound marketing efforts. It is an investment that will pay off in higher conversions and increased sales.

Is Your Current Website Giving You What You Need?

You are in business to make money. Your website exists to market your business. Its design needs to further your need to make money. If your current website design is not doing that, it isn’t giving you what you need.

Here are some things to expect from your website:

The design should remain up to date.
You should be able to measure ROI easily.
You should have updated metrics available at all time.
The website should totally support your marketing efforts.
The website should drive conversions and build your lead database.

If your current design isn’t giving you these benefits, it’s time to invest in a new design, one that will give you these benefits and many more.

20 Tips To Improve Your Website Redesign Process

Every aspect of your website redesign should feed into your inbound marketing strategy. The strategy and marketing funnel needs to be integrated into the site’s very fabric. To make this type of design work, you need a platform that is growth-driven and you need a web team that can make updates on a regular basis.

What are the Advantages of an Inbound Marketing Website?

Your business will benefit in many ways when your inbound marketing strategy becomes what drives your website design.

The website will be the basis of your 24/7 marketing funnel. Your website is where you drive traffic to, host your content, convert visitors to leads, and gather marketing data. That is why your inbound marketing strategy must drive your website design.
Your website will educate leads early in their buyer’s journey. Buyers these days do a lot of research before making purchases. You want your website to be a rich source of information so the buyer will continuously visit during their journey.
You will see every increasing improvement in design and performance. Why wait for your next website redesign to update your website? It should happen at least once a month as you make changes to meet marketing goals and fix problems.
You can prove ROI with incremental improvements. Website updates cannot just involve aesthetics. They must include and revolve around marketing changes. With each change, you can measure your ROI quite easily.
Your website can help nurture leads. The more you educate a lead, the more likely that person is to make a purchase. Your website must offer clear pathways through the buyer’s journey to help him or her reach a decision point.

If you want to take your marketing to the next level, it is time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy with your website design. Once you have the basics in place, you will see steady improvements in your marketing efforts. And that makes it all worth it.

This article is on Data Captive as well.

Want more resources on how to redesign your website? Click here!

Telling Your Brand Story To Baby Boomers

October 18, 2021/in Articles, Brand Development, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

The only thing in the world that is constant is change, and not many changes in recent history can compare to the way baby boomers have redefined how we approach everything in life, marketing and spending included. The baby boomer generation controls 70% of disposable income in the United States, and represent 44% of the US population. That is a considerable market share and one that you can tap into by telling your brand story in a way that appeals specifically to this generation.

The Importance of Experience

How your customers think is influenced by their unique life story, current circumstances, environment, and worldview. It is also influenced by their experience and the wisdom they have gained as they have progressed through life. Your brand story needs to take these elements into account and reflect the knowledge, experience, and interests of this age group. Your brand story needs to use language in a way that celebrates this wealth of life experience.

However, just as importantly, your brand storytelling must reflect on the role that this wealth of experience plays in the changing buying habits of the Baby Boomer generation. Worldviews change as you age and gain new information and perspectives. These changing views reflect in how this customer segment process information, and how they make decisions about products and services.

Life becomes more about relationships, developing positive relationships in particular, rather than categories. Family, friends, and nostalgia, play a significant role in the decision-making process. Choices are not black and white and are more likely to be emotionally led.

Check out this similar article about Brand Storytelling

Changes in Storytelling Style

When considering how to tell your brand story to Baby Boomers, you also need to recognize that the changes are not just emotional, but also physical. As the brain ages and its functions change, you must adapt your storytelling to communicate efficiently with this generation. While the younger brain wants unambiguous, precise details and facts, the brain of this generation is more intuitive and emotionally led. It is also more attuned to sensory images, meaning that your storytelling needs to use words in a multi-sensory manner to create these pictures.

Metaphors are an essential part of this creative process. They aid in the brain’s comprehension of a subject and help to make it more vivid. If you cannot paint pictures with words and metaphors, you risk losing the customer’s focus and interest in your story.

Luckily for you as the storyteller, the Baby Boomer generation as a whole loves stories. So, the stronger the story, the more likely you are to attract Baby Boomers to your brand. However, your stories need to be emotionally charged. If it just contains line after line of facts and statistics, it will quickly lose its appeal. As with any customer segment, good writing, detailed characters, and engaging content also remain essential to reaching the Baby Boomer generation.

Improve Your Marketing Strategy By Asking These 4 Questions

August 5, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu – The Art of War

Often in business, we feel like we’re on a good marketing strategy. But, as we move further away from when that strategy was defined, we’re really just going through the motions. Activities are being completed, but we lose sight of why we are doing them and what they are supposed to accomplish. In addition, there can be changes in the marketplace, competitor’s messaging, consumer concerns, and even the methods of communication.

8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business

Most companies review their strategies at year-end, but the best businesses are updating and improving their strategy more often than annually. By more frequently updating your marketing strategies and refocusing your activities, you will stay on track, get through all of the noise and reach your audience.

How about a summer strategy tune up?

Make sure that you’re staying on track to achieve your goals. Ask yourself these four questions:

Does your media mix properly address the ever-changing ways your target audience consumes information?
Is your messaging strategy corresponding with your current competitive advantages?
Does your social media have a strong strategy that echoes your brand yet reaches beyond?
Are there measurements to track whether or not your tactics are executing your strategy?

Stevens & Tate is a full-service advertising agency specializing in strategic creative thinking. Contact our team to discuss your marketing strategy today.

How To Develop A Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

June 28, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Do you have a favorite sport? Maybe it’s something popular like football or hockey. Perhaps a more dignified pastime such as golf or horse racing better suits your style. Whatever your preference may be, do you ever wonder how your favorite athletes (hopefully!) win more than they lose? Most likely they are playing with a strategy. It may seem obvious, but strategy – even in a sport like racing – is essential to victory.

The same is true for your business website. Without a strategy, your website will fall behind the competition. Don’t let this happen! Many companies fall into the trap of creating a website for nothing more than an “online presence.” With inbound marketing, websites can do so much more than they could 20 years ago. With inbound marketing, businesses are seeing more online traffic that results in more customers and sales. But without a strategy, even inbound marketing has its limits.

Read More About The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing benefits from a well-developed strategy. There are three aspects to creating a well-developed inbound marketing strategy.

1. Create website goals

What do you want your website to do for your customer? That’s the main question that should be asked before a website is developed. Without a clear goal, a website could be published without having any significant benefit to the owner or the visitor. If a website generates most of its sales after visitors view a product information page, the goal of the website should be to create more product information pages, increase traffic to these pages, and streamline the ability to go from product information to product purchase. Inbound marketing benefits from having a website with clearly defined goals. If you are wondering about your website, try having a friend or colleague take a look at it. Ask them if they felt your website had clearly defined goals. Once you’ve determined you have the right goals in mind, it’s time you ask yourself if you have the right person in mind.

2. Create a Persona

Creating a persona is a powerful way for a business to better understand its customers. Without a persona, businesses have an incomplete idea of who to market to. So what is a persona? A Persona is the ‘ideal’ customer that a business wants to reach out to. Personas are defined by many things – ethnicity, location, motivation – but what they all have in common is that they help shape the strategy used by a company to achieve its goal.

Read more on Why Buyer Personas Are So Important

By creating a strategy with a specific end-user in mind, we are better able to understand what their problems are and how we can help make their lives easier. Don’t get too attached to your persona though! You will likely find that you may need to update them as you gain more insights on your customers. You may even considering adding an additional persona. Once you have your persona or personas created, you can move on to the next step.

3. Get to know your persona

Now that you have a persona, ask yourself, how well do you know him or her? It may seem like knowing a pretend person’s upbringing and background is a little silly, but it can go a long way with customer satisfaction. By constructing your persona’s life story, you are better able to understand their motivation, needs, and desired outcome in life. If your persona is looking for a product that satisfies a long-term need but your business only sells products for immediate use, you’ve just gained valuable insight. You’ve recognized a need your typical customer has as well as an opportunity for your company to grow. By using information gathered from our personas, we can update and adapt our company strategy to best fit our customer needs.

Download A Free Template For Developing Personas

Just like in all sports, strategies continue to adapt as they encounter new problems and opportunities. You will likely find that a strategy created today might not work for you a year from now. That’s okay! Revisiting your goals, updating your persona’s attributes, changing their background and desired outcomes; these are all essential to a successful business. Just remember, inbound marketing benefits strongly from a well thought out strategy. How do you think your company’s online strategy is? If you’d like a free consultation, please check out the link below.

Baby Boomers Represent A Wealth Of Opportunities For Homebuying

Marketing Real Estate to Baby Boomers

June 15, 2021/in Directors, Homebuilder Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Debbie Szwast

Gen Y may have surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest share of the home buying population, but Boomers age 51 to 69 still have significant influence and buying power. According to the National Association of REALTORS®, these “older” buyers have built up equity and are twice as likely to purchase a $500,000-plus home than a Millennial. This is why you should be marketing real estate to Baby Boomers.

Boomers fall into two categories—younger who were born between 1955 and 1964, and older who were born between 1946 and 1954. Combined, they make up the largest segment of home sellers and account for 39% percent of the nation’s homebuyers. Most are married but few have children living at home. They are suburbanites—half live in the ‘burbs while less than 12% choose the city. They purchased now because it was “the right time”—affordability, financing and home availability all ranked low on their reasons to buy. Read more

What Is The Difference? – CRM vs. Marketing Automation Strategy

May 7, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

Building a relationship with each customer is essential in today’s business world. Without that relationship, you simply aren’t going to have the sales needed to remain profitable. That is why both CRM (customer relationship marketing) and marketing automation strategies focus on building that relationship.

Understanding how these strategies and systems complement one another helps businesses market and sell to their target audiences effectively.

The Critical Customer Relationship

Even with so much being done online these days, customers still want a relationship with the companies they do business with. They want to feel that a company understands their needs and that the company will address them.

How a business addresses the critical customer relationship will mark its success or its failure. Companies need to build and nurture this relationship. They do this by collecting critical data that helps them address their customers’ needs and challenges.

Learn More: How to Create Content for Each Sale Funnel Stage

The Top of the Sales Funnel

The strategies you use at the top of the sales funnel are going to be different from the strategies you use at the bottom. And these strategy approaches define the differences between CRM and marketing automation strategies.

At the top of the sales funnel, you are capturing leads wherever they come from. They can be people with a casual interest in your product or they can be seriously in the market and just starting the research process. The problem is, there is no real way to know which category the lead falls into. This is where marketing automation and nurturing comes into play.

With marketing automation, your strategies are capturing key pieces of information and using them to nurture a lead further into the sales funnel. This could include contact information like name, email address, phone number, company name, and company size; number of visits to the website and which pages are of particular interest, or which premiums they choose.

Each piece of information gathered about a lead brings critical insight into where they are in the sales cycle. Downloading details about a particular product, for example, is a sign of interest in that product or, at least, that product group. This can trigger the marketing automation system to send targeted emails or special offers.

The Bottom of the Sales Funnel

At a designated point in the sales funnel, a lead moves from the marketing side to the sales side. This is when the data gathered indicates the lead is moving towards making a purchase decision. This is where the CRM system comes into play.

That data gathered in a CRM allows your sales force to nurture the lead into closing the sale. It offers a picture of what the customer wants and their history with the company. Your sales team can use it to schedule calls with the lead or to set dates for follow-up.

The good news these days is that there are a growing number of systems which offer both types of functionality. That way, you can leverage both CRM and marketing automation strategies without worry about one system getting out of sync.