Sales are up. Your marketing campaigns have double-digit response rates. Your expenses came in under budget this year and the company is flourishing. Sounds like the perfect time to sit back and relax, enjoy your success.
Wrong.
It’s easy to get complacent when things are going right, but it’s even more important to continually challenge yourself and think critically about your business strategies.
Gilson experienced this firsthand with our holiday campaigns. Year after year the campaigns generated double-digit response rates. As marketers, we were ecstatic! But were our results generating new business? Was the return worth the investment? Were we targeting the right people and going after the right results?
After a careful analysis of our response rates and ROI, the decision was made to revamp our campaign strategy with a much more targeted approach. If your company is anything like ours, below are fives signs you might benefit from reinventing your marketing strategy in 2019.
1. Your sales team has grown complacent.
Nothing has a more direct impact on results than a sales team who’s lost their passion. As our campaigns became more and more popular with our B2B customers and our response rates kept on climbing, the sales team began to think of the campaigns as an added stress rather than an opportunity.
Taking a step back and refreshing your marketing strategy can refocus and reinvigorate your sales staff, resulting in greater, more intentional follow-up activity. We instated smaller, more targeted lists and a more specific call-to-action to help the sales team stay the course. The result was a smaller, more manageable, but also more profitable set of respondents with whom to follow up.
2. Your responses are up, but ROI is down.
A double-digit response rate is every marketer’s dream! But at what point do you need to peek behind the curtain and see who is responding to your campaign, and why?
During our analysis, we found that our highest response rates were from within some of our best, long-term customers. However, they weren’t necessarily able to fully engage with our call to action, which was geared toward generating new business.. This artificial inflation of our response rates was driving down our ROI.
Recognizing that there is value in marketing to our existing customers and rewarding them for their business, we decided to engage them in a customer retention campaign. This enabled our sales staff to more appropriately manage their time between nurturing new leads and managing existing account relationships.
3. Your business goals have changed.
When we embarked on our marketing journey nearly six years ago, our focus was on showcasing our breadth of services – from soup to nuts.
But now that our service offering was more established amongst our customers, it was time to double down and focus on our corporate growth goals. We were no longer interested in tallying response rates from multiple individuals within one organization. Instead, we were looking for a response from key stakeholders at organizations who not only visited a personalized landing page as a result of the campaign, but also went on to create a username, password, and complete a mini demonstration of our Mindwire® technology tool.
If we could earn even a fraction of the responses we did from our original campaigns with this new higher standard of activity, we would be ecstatic (and we were).
4. You know your audience better today than you did yesterday.
If you’ve been diligent about tracking your response rates and monitoring which customers engage with you on a regular basis, you’re on the right track towards generating more targeted messaging and yielding more qualified results. We were able to dissect our mailing list according to annual dollar volume trends with each company and identify the most qualified leads at each company to target..
5. Change is good.
Without a doubt, changing things up every now and again reinvigorates people at every level. When introducing a new campaign strategy, customers are forced out of their comfort zone and asked to engage with you in a more intentional way, instead of just going through the motions. Your sales staff are encouraged by having a more focused approach to follow-ups. And your business is sure to thrive as a result.
So before you kick back and relax as you enter into 2019, take a moment to do a little soul searching and see where you could improve your strategy. If you could use a second set of eyes or fresh perspective, give us a call for a complimentary consult and brainstorming session with your team.
