In part 1 of this series, we looked a bit closer at seeking metrics that identify content that is producing quality leads. Now, let’s look at how many of those leads become system sales and maintenance or service contracts. With this information, your team can get closer to measuring a return-on-investment (ROI) trend.
It is important to realize that you will not always know if an online impression resulted in a sale, so be careful to look at these figures as trends while making every effort to identify where leads that result in sales are coming from. To do this, it is important for the sales team to understand how their prospect became aware of your solutions. Sharing this feedback with the marketing team will close the loop and enable reproduction of the processes and campaigns that are successful. This is one reason why tracking call-to-action clicks is critical to the accounting process.
If your systems integration company provides subscriptions online or sells products on your website, you may be able to figure out exactly what the ROI is of a particular campaign. Alternatively, if the advertising and education occurs online, yet a significant amount of sales time is spent offline, it may be more difficult to identify the initial source of the lead. Essentially, content marketing in the systems integration market is not quite as linear as is required to have a perfect view of ROI.
Every company is deploying value-add digital content in a way that seems to work best for their company. However, it is imperative to start to put a dollar value on each lead and campaign. To do this, there will likely be a combination of reporting resources and sales staff communication to fully understand the impact of online marketing efforts. Without an effort to identify which campaigns are successful and which ones are not, your team will be investing blindly rather than focusing time, effort, and investment in the places that are most profitable.
Sales Enablement
Enabling the sales team requires generating, refining, and reproducing content that is timely and relevant to the needs and challenges faced by your customers. Likewise, ensuring that the content is generating quality leads is critical to investing resources in the best campaigns and content production projects. Tracking this path as closely as possible is important to future positive results.
Our team is here to support your sales efforts and marketing programs by helping create and promote unified and aligned pre- and post-sale content for your prospects and clients.
Contact Vector Firm today to discuss your sales initiatives and content marketing needs.
