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Many extol the interconnectivity of marketing and sales. But despite this connection, actual collaboration between the two is rare.
All too often there is conflict between the two. While sales can often believe that marketing is out of touch with what matters to their customers, marketers can often believe that sales are not thinking about the bigger picture.
Within a business, if there is conflict between these two vital cogs, if neither truly understands what the other does, or realises value of the other’s contributions, this can create added tension within the organisation.
To remedy this, and maximise critical opportunities, closed-loop marketing comes into play.
Closed-loop marketing is a highly effective and data-driven marketing approach, which greatly involves both sales and marketing teams. By using data analytics to help build more effective, and more targeted campaigns and content.
What closed-loop marketing does, is create and foster a continuous cycle or testing and learning. Through research, analysis and subsequent adjustment, marketers can design and apply the best strategies and implement the best campaigns, to achieve their goals and subsequently get the best ROI.
What the term closing the loop means, is that sales teams are in close communication with marketing regarding what is happening with generated leads. This information sharing is referred to as closed-loop reporting.
With your sales and marketing teams working together, collaboratively, the benefits are massive. By implementing a strategy like this, you can gain:
As well as this, a business can also reduce its marketing cost, allocate budgets more effectively and greater quantify the return on investment on marketing spend.
Content and communications are the lifeblood of the marketing funnel. Within a closed-loop marketing system, where sales and marketing are in close communication, the two can collaborate more closely on personalised content that works for their customers.
With a collaborative relationship between sales and marketing, content can be made all the more effective. In the long-term this is hugely beneficial for sales and wider business success
Personalised, tailored content is far more effective in converting prospects into sales, with 8-% of customers more likely to buy from a business, if that business provides a more tailored experience.
Stage one of implementing a closed-loop system requires implementing lead capture pages and content optimisation. This will better help you track and identify leads as they arrive on your website.
This customer data can be tracked with analytics or performance cookies. It can also be tracked with social media listening exercises or customer-facing surveys. Teams have a wide array of tools available to help gather this data and identify their traffic sources, Google Analytics being the predominant tool.
By identifying and tracking your online traffic, you can identify your best-performing channels, find out ways to find efficiencies in lesser-performing channels and generally hone in on trends and the consumer behaviour of your target audience.
Once you have sourced this data and identified your potential leads, you need to track what actions visitors are taking to your website. Are there particular pages they’re visiting the most, or are there pages they are visiting, but not converting into a sale or purchase? Are they interested in blogs or thought leadership?
You also need to paint a picture of how visitors are arriving at your site. Are they coming through social content, paid search or pure organic search?
With this information at your disposal, you can curate a very detailed image of customers and how they are using your content, and how that content is – or isn’t – converting into sales.
This will help you gain a better understanding of what your customers are looking for and how you can reach them. It will also help you understand and adjust your content and campaigns that are perhaps underperforming.
Once you have your leads and customer journey information, you need to implement a system to manage relationships with customers. A customer relationship management (CRM) system will allow you to store and access critical information, and is implemented by sales teams to better build the customer journey and make the entire process more efficient.
Implementing a CRM system will mean you have all he necessary information about your customer base in one place. Which will ultimately make the process even more effective.
The final step in implementing a closed-loop strategy is to manage the relationships you have. Building and maintaining relationships with your customers can take many forms. This could be targeted social media content or solus mailers, containing offers rewarding your customers for their loyalty.
Both the sales team and your customer relationship management software will be able to attribute sales activity directly back to your marketing efforts. With this kind of information, you can then implement new and even more effective campaigns and experiences for your customers.
Ultimately thing kind of focused works to improve your ROI, and once this final step is complete the loop is closed.
Public relations can work hand-in-hand with marketing and sales to further amplify your closed-loop strategies.
When aligned with a robust PR strategy, your closed-loop efforts can be even more streamlined in terms of messaging, boosting brand reach and credibility and enhancing your overall reputation.
From a content perspective, PR can also be implemented to enhance your content offering, creating targeted content that truly resonates and hits crucial points in the customer journey.
PR experts can use this content to build positive public perception and foster long-term customer relationships. This can be achieved by leveraging content beyond just owned content and across the wider PESO model.
This final point is where businesses can find true value within their marketing efforts. Realising that your marketing efforts don’t just have to be limited to your owned efforts, and that
The PESO model takes in all important forms of media that are relevant to marketing and PR and combines them into one framework. Not only does the framework provide an overview of marketing tactics, but it also serves as a helpful planning tool and enables you to look for opportunities that arise from the areas that overlap. Developed by Gini Dietrich, it’s a great tool to use when planning for the big picture.
It also helps put in context the media channels that you use and how they work together, and bring greater strength to your closed loop efforts.
