How are you planning on improving your marketing ROI in 2018?
It’s a question we ask ourselves every year. And yet, there never seems to be a perfect answer.
For most of us, that entails making incremental changes to our outbound efforts or increasing our inbound marketing efforts to drive lead volume. But what does it take to really move the needle?
Here are 4 ways you can go beyond minor improvements and unlock the revenue potential of your target market.
1. Maximize Access to Active Demand
One thing that sets your sales and marketing teams apart from the competition is the ability to identify active demand in your total addressable market. Traditionally, we’ve had to rely on historical success and any first party insights you can derive from your CRM and marketing automation platforms and your website and outbound marketing to access demand.
These are important pieces of the active demand puzzle, but they’re far from comprehensive when it comes to exposing the total market opportunity.
For B2B tech marketers that have already identified this shortcoming, predictive modeling is often the next step, finding lookalike accounts based on historical success. But even the best predictive modeling is only as good as the data sources you are feeding into it. With this approach, you’ll see some output regarding active demand, but you run the risk of identifying accounts that aren’t actually in a buy cycle.
Maximizing access to active demand starts with drawing from the right data sources that showcase demand you cannot see in your own systems. When you have the right data sources, you set yourself up for the quantum leap in marketing ROI.
2. Identify and Engage Active Buying Teams, Not Just Individuals
You’ve probably heard that there’s at least 5 people involved in every big ticket B2B purchase decision. But you’re often lucky if your marketing automation platform includes more than just contact info on an individual level.
To align with sales productively, you need to cover 3 key pillars—the account, the contacts, and behavioral indicators for active demand. In the past, you might just take a spray and pray approach and collect large volumes of contact information with the hopes of filling out buying team info.
Now, you don’t have to waste so much time and effort pursuing high volumes of contact info. It’s becoming more and more easy to work with a purchase intent insight provider to gain access to information about contacts and accounts that are highly relevant to your business.
Help your sales team mobilize around truly active buying teams and you’ll be well on your way to driving the ROI you’re hoping for.
3. Align with Sales Around Account Demand Intensity
So much time is spent discussing the typical gap between sales and marketing. There are many reasons the gap may exist, but perhaps the most important is the fact that sales and marketing speak different languages.
Your marketing automation system focuses on individual leads whereas sales historically targets accounts. The best way to align with sales is to provide them with a better way to prioritize and go after the accounts based on account demand intensity. Demand intensity is determined by understanding the collective behavior of the contacts on the target buying team.
Purchase intent data specific to your niche will help you score accounts properly, align with sales, and better reach and engage entire target buying teams.
4. Leverage Intent Insight to Drive More Productive Conversations
The ultimate goal of marketing and sales teams is to have better conversations, conversations that convert to opportunity and revenue. To accomplish this, they have to find the right contacts at the right time and most importantly, to engage and establish a dialog that will lead to profitable revenue. You cannot open powerful selling conversations without the right context and knowledge prospect solution needs. You can’t do this unless you have better insight on topics and content being viewed by specific contacts, preferably from 3rd party sources that derive intent from owned content and behavior that is directly observed and not inferred.
The Quantum Leap is Fueled by Data
Marketing and sales teams have always been focused on delivering better ROI on their efforts – so what is different now?
In short, data availability.
Relying on first party data alone cannot help you drive the results you need to set you apart in your specific market. There are more quality data providers than ever and it is up to you to understand which sources will be most effective for helping you deliver ROI. As you look to choose a provider, you must ask the right questions to understand if they will be able to help you determine who is in market, when they are active and how they will arm you with the right insight to convert opportunities.
If you want to learn more about how TechTarget purchase intent insight can help your ROI take a quantum leap in 2018 please contact us today.
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