Digital marketing is crucial for any business hoping to survive and grow in a digital world where it is the norm for society to be glued to their screens. Contrary to popular belief, the clicks, views and engagements traditionally used as KPIs in a digital marketing campaign are just part of the success story. To be truly effective, digital marketing has to achieve the business’s strategic goals – be those sales or brand awareness – and this requires the entire organisation to become an extended part of the digital marketing team.
Compelling content and a carefully crafted digital campaign can indeed take your brand and product to new and expanded markets. However, engagement with digital marketing assets is not an accurate reflection of the ROI (return on investment) of a digital campaign, unless you are building, growing or defending your brand. Seeing and reacting to a post appearing on a digital channel is just the first step of the customer journey if your goal is to secure MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and turn them into revenue generating customers.
At Tarsus Distribution, we are turning digital marketing into a science for both ourselves and our channel partners, refining our models to deliver as many conversions out of digital marketing clicks as possible. By expanding the definition of a successful campaign and true ROI, we are discovering that digital marketing is a stronger sales tool than traditional sales, with demand generation now the lion's share of our marketing team’s focus. Our success rests heavily on follow-through from every stakeholder in the value chain; however, a hot prospect loses interest very quickly if nobody responds to their query for days. With a strategic approach and concerted team effort, we find that digital marketing not only delivers a significant increase in immediate MQLs, but that it can also drive increased revenues for some time after a campaign, with the content resonating with the audience’s needs.
Our approach uses our digital campaign algorithms to guide the prospect and potential customer through the campaign funnel, starting with the first step of engagement while the prospect defines the problem to be solved and considers the value proposition from Tarsus Distribution. Engagement from our telesales team completes the qualification, considering the CRM (customer relationship management) lead scorecard, data on the prospective customer’s journey and how the value offering we communicate in our digital campaigns matches their need. This opportunity is communicated to our channel partner and sales team.
This is the make-or-break moment: success depends on the ability of the channel partner to reach out to the qualified opportunity and match the potential customer’s needs and problem to be solved with the most suitable value proposition from Tarsus Distribution and the partner.
To maximise the opportunity and take initial interest to invoice stage, all the stakeholders – telesales, channel partner, Tarsus account manager, Tarsus pre-sales and vendor teams in the case of a complex solution, must collaborate to offer value and make the potential customer feel valued and not like a sales object. The teams need to understand the customer’s requirements and act as a trusted advisor throughout their journey.
An important factor we have identified is that not only should the channel partner(s) be linked in a workflow to service opportunities resulting from the campaign, but their business should be campaign ready.
This means they must have the ability to:
- Act on qualified opportunities within SLA (time sensitive);
- “Read” and value the prospects' need and the problem to be solved;
- Respond to the prospect with a value proposition and not a sales pitch; and
- Collaborate with Tarsus Distribution with timely, insightful and relevant data (revenue generated/future opportunities/what worked/what didn’t work).
Another important factor in the success of digital campaigns is to close the loop with feedback from the channel partner and the Tarsus Sales team, to help marketing teams measure the success of the digital campaigns and improve the outcomes of future campaigns.
We are fortunate to have the vision and the support of Tarsus Distribution management that believes in and invests in the transformation from traditional marketing to digital marketing. In the past, distributors would not dare talk to the end-user customer and create opportunities for their channel partners at scale. For more information, please visit https://tarsusdistribution.co.za/contact-us/.
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