How can the marketing department enhance its own value?

What value can a company's marketing department create for customers and the company? What is the "core product" you can provide? In response to these two questions, the author of this article, as a marketing industry practitioner, shares some of his experiences summarized from industry observations, hoping to help you sort out your work ideas in marketing and better understand the value of marketing work. Recommended for friends who are interested in marketing.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said: Don’t focus on making PPTs, attending meetings, or reviewing financial numbers. Instead, focus on improving your products.

I think this sentence also applies to marketers. Marketers should think about what kind of value you can create for customers and enterprises? What is your "core product" for creating value, such as generating high-quality customer leads for the sales department, such as improving user experience.

I would like to share a few observations on where companies should focus their marketing efforts over the next three quarters to help enhance the core value of marketers.

01

For many B2B companies, offline activities have always been an important channel for Demand Generation. What digital marketing should consider is not how to replace offline activities, but how to help offline activities achieve scale and amplify effects.

In the first quarter of this year, I tried an initiative and achieved tangible results in collecting leads. Both the number of leads and the quality of potential customers were very good. Millions of dollars of business opportunities were generated in a short period of time. How did I do it? That is to digitally display and attract investment in traditional offline exhibitions in popular vertical markets, and to achieve seamless online and offline connection and resource integration through offline sign-in, participation in activities and online lucky draws, thus realizing a closed marketing loop.

One phenomenon I have observed is that almost since last year, many brand owners, award organizers, agents, and Internet companies have been talking about the concept of omni-channel. This year, my marketing keyword is omni-channel growth . In other words, I will no longer talk about independent terms such as pure Digital marketing or Event marketing. They may have some differences in functions, but how to integrate resources has become the focus that marketing managers need to pay most attention to.

How can online exhibitions use digital channels to expand their voice and attract user retention and participation? Conversely, the promotion of digital channels requires offline activities and other tangible help to enhance user experience. Therefore, the two complement each other, and how to integrate them becomes the key to marketing success.

Another benefit of doing this is that within an enterprise, for businesses with similar business models, online and offline resources can be integrated to form a closed-loop marketing approach, and the process and KPI setting can be standardized. In the future, other exhibitions held within this business, or different exhibitions held by other business units, can be replicated, and marketing planning and execution can be completed by referring to the standard guidance manual, forming economies of scale, improving marketing efficiency, and constantly summarizing experiences and lessons in each marketing activity, and iterating and optimizing.

02

It is normal to be unable to obtain data for the second half of the marketing funnel. The marketing department should consider how to increase the possibility of generating business opportunities and improving return on investment.

On many occasions, I hear that one of the pain points of marketers is the inability to obtain data after the sales lead stage uploaded by sales personnel. Why is this data so important?

Because when we do big data marketing, we especially need data from the second half of the marketing funnel, such as whether this sales lead has been accepted by the salesperson? What is the customer's feedback after taking over? What products are they interested in? Has the project reached the establishment stage? How many business opportunities have been generated? When is it likely to sign a contract with us?

These very important information needs to be provided by sales and fed back to the market. After the market gets this data, it can be combined with the data at the front end of the marketing funnel to see the complete conversion chain of a single customer, such as when and through what channel they came into contact with our brand, and became interested, and participated in what brand activities, what behaviors they generated, and then after several sales visits, they were finally converted into customers with real purchase intentions. The clarity of the entire chain helps marketing personnel:

1. Generate more accurate user profiles and user insights to formulate marketing strategies
2. Conduct personalized marketing and use marketing technology to improve the efficiency of customer reach and incubation
3. Improve marketing results ROI

The data in the second half of the marketing funnel is too important for marketers to conduct data analysis and application. However, it is normal for sales to be unable to provide accurate information due to busy work or because it is not their KPI. Marketers need to accept reality and focus on how to increase their own value.

For example, how to demonstrate one's own professionalism to provide sales staff with more accurate and high-quality sales leads, how to provide sales staff with more content and marketing material support to increase their chances of winning orders when facing customers, how to tell a good brand story to enhance the brand image and status, which gives sales confidence and courage in front of customers, and how to improve customers' user experience on various digital channels such as websites, WeChat, and mini programs, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

These can all be given concrete examples, and data can be used to measure the results of marketing work, forming the basis for joint collaboration with sales.

03

Improving customer experience is the core of global growth

The long decision-making cycle of B2B and the complexity of decision-making factors are objective factors. From the time a customer begins to recognize a brand to the time they finally commit to it, it takes at least a month and up to a year. During this long conversion process, there are actually many things the marketing department can do, but the core is that all things should revolve around improving customer experience.

First of all, it is necessary to identify high-potential key customers. This can be done through a series of digital technical means, such as lead scoring (the prerequisite is the accumulation of historical data, so the quality of the database is very important, it is infrastructure, and it is what I have always emphasized). Once the key high-potential customers are locked in, it is necessary to collaborate well with sales to discuss how the marketing department can be customer-centric, focus on improving customer experience, and increase value to customers.

1. Continuously enhance the brand’s thought leadership.

The shaping of thought leadership is a long-term task. The marketing department needs to have a complete strategy and combine the company's innovative strategic initiatives, patented technologies, and product innovation and research and development to produce content that can influence the minds of customers and disseminate it persistently. The public relations, communication and marketing departments act as tools for information amplification. The key is persistence and perseverance.

2. Personalized marketing for key customers

Key customers need more personalized content to reach them, which will inevitably become a powerful means of incubating leads. Understand the industry the customer is in, what specific pain points he has, and what he needs most, and then use various content, live broadcasts, H5 interactions, offline event invitations, WeChat tweets, press releases and other different forms to influence him, so that he feels that you understand him and what you push to him is what you want him to see, rather than hard sales. Targeted content produces a better user experience, which increases the probability of a deal and is more likely to shorten the deal cycle.

3. Make good use of digital technology to improve user experience and service quality

For example, this year we added an automatic reply function on WeChat after users follow us. In the past, when customers had questions, they had to search on the website themselves or call our customer service center, but the service was usually slow and they did not receive timely service. By the time we received the customer's request, he might have unfollowed us.

The introduction of digital technology tools such as intelligent robots and automatic reply functions can break through the limitations of time and space, allowing customers to get responses as soon as possible. More in-depth consultations can be combined with the services of offline professional teams. From the user's perspective, this is better. The first robot reply is more like meeting the user's needs for timeliness and security, while the subsequent professional manual services bring a more personalized emotional experience and enhance customer loyalty.

04

To summarize the views of this article, in 2023, marketers should focus on: integrating online and offline marketing resources to form synergy and achieve all-round growth.

The marketing department should consider how to increase the value of its contribution to sales at every stage of customer conversion.

Improving customer experience is the core of global growth.

Specific method:

1. Continuously improve the brand's thought leadership
2. Carry out personalized marketing for key customers.
3. Make good use of digital technology to enhance user experience while improving service quality.

Author: Zhu Jingyu

Source: WeChat official account: "Jade Digital Marketing (ID: Jade_Digital)"