The old school way of marketing was governed by the goal to create large quantities of materials that would resonate with large quantities of people. When trying to achieve global reach and touch multiple industries it is extremely challenging to customize your marketing material and even harder to track its effectiveness. Holding onto marketing collateral effectiveness isn’t as hard once you get more specific and more relevant to your audience.
In today’s market, you have to be specific and you have to be relevant. Customers are looking for more tailored and personalized content so that they can immediately connect the dots on how your product or service will help them. In addition, the rift between sales and marketing is growing. On one end, sales reps are going rouge with their content because they feel that what they are being provided hinders the sales process instead of enhancing it. On the other end, marketing departments are struggling to maintain brand and messaging control while improving alignment with their sales teams.
According to a study done by Silver Bullet Group, LLC, “Over 50% of marketing and sales communications aren’t relevant to your customer”. That’s an alarmingly high number. If over half of your collateral isn’t even relevant to the people you want to hit then how are you supposed to bring in quality new leads?
How to Fix Marketing Collateral
Now that I’ve sufficiently scared you into looking back over your work, how can you change it?
1. Reign in your focus: As I mentioned earlier, you need to cut through the mix. And the only way to do that is to target your ideal buyers. If you can gear your collateral towards these specific buyer personas, then you can greatly increase the chances of landing new business.
2. Talk with sales: The sales team is your frontline in gathering information. They are the ones out there having face-to-face interactions and are seeing what works and what doesn’t in real time. Talk with them and find out what material they are using and what resonates with prospects at the point of sale.
3. Mobile Application Analytics: If you’re using mobile applications as part of your sales process your app should include reporting capability that allows you to evaluate user behavior and content effectiveness. You can check what presentations or white pages are being used most frequently or view how long sales reps are staying on a particular presentation slide. This can show you what content more engaging or what messaging hits on key pain points.
What tools and methodologies are you using to better your marketing collateral?
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