The marketing game has certainly changed since I founded KLA Group in 1995. Twenty years ago, content marketing and marketing automation didn’t exist. Today, both are absolutely critical components of an effective lead generation and customer acquisition strategy, and Sales relies on it to deliver.
The good news is that most companies realize the importance of content marketing and marketing automation. They’ve begun to invest time, energy, and resources into building their digital resources and brands.
The bad news? Many of those same businesses are making marketing investments without paying attention to why they’re making them or what their end goal is.
Typically, this leads to companies simply throwing large sums of money at things like marketing automation technology, Google AdWords, SEO, and content marketing with the hope that doing so will lead them to the promised land of consistent lead generation.
Unfortunately, they’re wrong.
I was disheartened when one business owner I’m working with shared that she’d invested $10,000 and three months of effort to migrate her website to a new platform. She was wowed by the platform and expected that a bigger, better website would generate more leads. After three months, her business hasn’t generated a single lead. When I asked her what her strategy was to attract people to her site, her response was painfully predictable: SEO and social media.
While those marketing tactics are important, it’s incorrect to assume that those tactics combined with a heavy investment in marketing technology will magically deliver a large volume of leads and new customers.
So, what’s the goal that should be driving your company’s marketing strategy? What goal will get you the leads you want and need? Recognition ROI.
What’s often missing from marketing strategies is a strict focus on building Recognition ROI: the value a business can derive from prospective buyers knowing who you are, what you do, and why you’re valuable combined with strong, positive opinion from your customers.
The problem is that many companies don’t have a strategy to build recognition in their target markets. They are relying on a steady stream of content to create recognition. They simply assume that randomly writing blog posts, producing videos, and tweeting a few times per week will do the trick. It’s a quantity model.
Wrong again.
To get noticed and achieve Recognition ROI, you must implement attraction strategies that help you do four key things:
- Identify your top target markets
- Create “grabbers” centered on trigger events that capture the attention of contacts in those markets
- Develop content offers that those contacts want, need, and will respond to based on what you can do for them
- Execute a connected, multi-channel nurturing, lead generation and sales strategy
The key takeaway here is that lead generation and marketing aren’t about “activities.” They’re about creating a purpose-driven goal to achieve recognition, and then executing activities that help you accomplish it. The activities matter, but they’re driven by your goal for recognition, not the other way around.