B2B Marketing Company | Lead Generation Agency- Digitalzone

Should marketing’s goal be to acquire more customers or have more engaged customers?

That completely depends on your company’s strategy and the strategy is determined by the business’ objectives. As a marketing department, your goals MUST align with business objectives. Often times, we see misalignment here. The overall business objectives and strategy may be to engage and upsell existing customers, yet marketing is focused on capturing demand. Therefore, expectations and strategy must be clearly communicated and agreed upon. This “agreed upon” aspect is important; you want missionaries, not mercenaries. Once expectations and strategy are solidified, that is when marketing defines their goal. If there is a lot of opportunity in the market, then acquire more customers. If there is a lot of opportunity in upselling your customers, then engage your client base.

How do your sales and marketing teams prioritize leads??

First off, sales is our best friend. When the sales and marketing relationship shifts from competition to communication, then beautiful results happen. Our marketing team aligns with sales around prioritization of leads by asking these 3 basic questions:    

1. Is this lead legitimately in-market for our solution? 
2. Does this lead fit within our ideal customer profile?    
3. Is this lead taking actions to define themselves as high intent.?

We have found that prioritization of leads becomes crystal clear when we ask these 3 questions. At the end of the day, our goal is revenue and business growth; if a lead is motivated and a good fit, then that is who we are zoning in on.

Do you think it’s possible to have a direct correlation between marketing and revenue?

At OM, we feel very strongly about the answer to this question. Let me preface this by saying we work with B2B SaaS, FinTech, and Healthcare companies. These solutions have long sales cycles, several touch points, and multiple stakeholders. The answer is YES. Like we said early, marketing needs to align with overall business objectives. And every business ever is focused on one thing: more money.  But, there is a caveat to that answer. Marketing success should not be completely gauged by revenue, but by legitimate indicators of revenue. There are areas that marketing simply can’t impact. For instance, if the sales team or product isn’t strong. These are the realities of business. If marketing was the only answer, then marketing would be the only department. Therefore, marketing’s primary KPI should be focused on a metric that indicates potential revenue; metrics such as “Sales Accepted Opportunity”, “Sales Qualified Lead”, or “Opportunity” (however your company names this lifecycle stage). Now I know what I said may seem contradictory, but here is the punchline. If you hold multiple departments accountable for revenue, then you have multiple departments focused on the same goal. This creates a culture of cohesion and problem solving, which generates the revenue you are striving for!

If you had to choose between social media and email, what would it be?

First off, our belief at OM is strategic and integrated marketing. With that being said, we do not advise to ONLY run social media or ONLY run email. But, in our experience we have found email is the best at driving immediate demand. Social media is great at driving demand in the long run.

How do you measure the success of your marketing activities?

The success of Marketing is measured by a sales accepted lifecycle stage (sales qualified lead, sales accepted opportunity, or opportunity) and revenue. For our marketing activities, we set KPIs per channel based on alignment with the overall marketing goal and nature of the platform.  For instance, paid search is determined by cost per SQL because that is the intent of the platform. On the other hand, LinkedIn has historically been a poor performer in driving leads but great at educating our ICPs. Therefore, we do not want to “cut out” LinkedIn because it doesn’t drive leads. We want to optimize this channel based on its purpose, and that is to educate users through the buyer’s journey. LinkedIn’s KPI would then be an engagement metric or a follow metric. All in all, it is figuring out how each platform influences users through the buyer’s journey and creating a KPI to leverage that platform!