For the last few years, sales and marketing have invested heavily into marketing automation tools that help attract, nurture and influence prospects. This method of business development has now entered the “growth phase” for many industries – as companies are flocking to marketing automation systems. While marketing automation is vitally important for mass communication, most marketing campaigns can lack focus through USER ERROR.
Focus is exactly what more and more buyers require to capture their attention. Buyers are less interested in a generic marketing email that speaks to “decision-makers in general”. They want to hear about how to solve their unique problems when they are ready to start solving them!
This is the inherent challenge of “Macro Marketing” campaigns. No matter how segmented you make your marketing list, there will always be prospects or clients on your mass emails that don’t relate to your latest message. While this should be of little concern if it happens once, you need to be very cognisant that this could be happening frequently.
Solution – Combine Micro Marketing with Macro Marketing
Micro Marketing can be combined to provide a great complement to Macro Marketing. A great example of combing these two methods is using Social Media Monitoring to listen and engage with an extremely pointed message to your prospects.
So how can we complement our Macro and Micro efforts?
Empower your SALES REPS to be part of the creation, planning and execution of content
Let’s face it, there’s no way for a marketing team to know exactly where thousands of prospects stand in their buying process. So the question is why is marketing the only ones responsible for developing and distributing of all your marketing assets? Allow your sales reps to participate in the development of the topic ideas, content, and distribution of these assets. Your sales reps will know exactly how to send a marketing asset in a more direct approach to ensure your prospect will see the most value. Remember, some prospects haven’t even identified they have a problem, while some are in the process of comparing vendors. By arming sales people with various tools and providing them with some autonomy to use these tools when needed – this can make for is a deadly combination for reaching your target audience.
Develop marketing content not only per buyer persona, but also by buying cycle stage
This goes along with the above message – don’t only build a marketing asset for CFO’s, or most relevant for only manufacturers. Begin developing marketing assets that solve buying challenges, and think linearly through buying cycles stages. Think naturally through your prospects buying process and see how you may support your buyer during their buying experience. Their buying process may look like this:
- I don’t have a problem!
- Maybe I do have that issue.
- I wonder if there are solutions that solve this problem?
- I’ve found a few solutions, which are the best?
- What’s going to be most important to me when we make a decision?
- Ok, time to pick a solution.
- What’s do I do next once I chose a solution provider?
Always remember that the buyer doesn’t care about your sales process. Buyers only care about solving their unique problems. Think about your prospects buying process, their business function, industry and challenges, and it will become more apparent how and when you should best use your Macro and/or Micro Marketing strategies. By using tools like LinkedIn & Twitter you will be able to execute targeted Micro Marketing campaigns as you follow your prospect in the social community.
Check out the dozens of blog posts on utilizing social selling strategies and LinkedIn and if you’re looking for some hidden gems on how you or your sales team can attract a very specific prospect, I recommend you check out – How-to-Guide: Making $$$ with Social Selling.
