The Marketing Machine

14. Raw Leads Content Social Media Paid for Audience (On or Offline) Networking & Sales Owned Web Email Distribution Channels Events Landing Pages Promotional Content LP for Media-Like Content LP for Product Content Traffic Drivers

15. Social Media Paid for Audience (On or Offline) Networking & Sales Owned Web Email Distribution Channels Events Landing Pages Content Profile Data  Name/Title/etc.  Needs/Concerns  Engagement Record

16. Social Media Paid for Audience (On or Offline) Networking & Sales Owned Web Email Distribution Channels Events Landing Pages Content Profile Data  Name/Title/etc.  Needs/Concerns  Engagement Record “Squeeze Page”“ Progressive Profiling”

17. Social Media Paid for Audience (On or Offline) Networking & Sales Owned Web Email Distribution Channels Events Landing Pages Content Profile Data  Name/Title/etc.  Needs/Concerns  Engagement Record “ Segmentation”

18. Social Media Paid for Audience (On or Offline) Networking & Sales Owned Web Email Distribution Channels Events Landing Pages Content Profile Data  Name/Title/etc.  Needs/Concerns  Engagement Record Tag! Your IT

19. Social Media Paid for Audience (On or Offline) Networking & Sales Owned Web Email Distribution Channels Events Landing Pages Content Profile Data  Name/Title/etc.  Needs/Concerns  Engagement Record

20. Raw Leads Traffic Drivers Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages

21. Raw Leads Traffic Drivers Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages Profile Data  Name/Title/etc.  Needs/Concerns  Engagement Record Closed Deals New Customer

22. Raw Leads Traffic Drivers Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages Closed Deals Landing Pages New Customer

23. Raw Leads Traffic Drivers Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages Landing Pages New Audience Audience Qualified Leads Marketing Qualified Leads Sales Qualified Leads Closed Deals

24. Closed Deals Raw Leads Traffic Drivers Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages Landing Pages Audience Qualified Leads Marketing Qualified Leads Sales Qualified Leads New Audience LP for Media Content LP for Marketing Content LP for New Audience LP for Product Content

25. Closed Deals Raw Leads Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages Landing Pages New Customers Existing Customers

26. Closed Deals Raw Leads Content Distribution Channels Landing Pages Landing Pages New Customers Existing Customers

27. The Marketing Machine

Editor's Notes

Automated marketing systems give you the power to build a marketing machine, one that can help capture, nurture and convert leads.
Let’s begin by explaining the inputs and outputs.
The two key inputs are raw leads which bring you new audience and content which fuels the system. The output is closed deals. These create the revenue you need to run your business… including the expenses associated with running a marketing machine.
Now let’s take a look inside your marketing machine and see how it works.
Leads create new audience members that become part of your “owned audience” once they are captured by the system. That is to say, leads are converted to audience which you “own” when you collect their profile data and store it in your automated marketing database. The output, closed deals and business transactions, create the revenue you need to run your business… including the expenses associated with running a marketing machine.
Let’s see how leads are processed by the system. Leads are qualified in the first place to ensure that they belong in your audience. If they are not part of your target market they can be deleted from your database. You can educate your audience with information that they are interested in and pull them into the marketing process. Once they enter the buying cycle they can be tagged as “Marketing Qualified Leads”.
Marketing Qualified Leads are real prospects for your company. They can be nurtured through content marketing campaigns that help them become aware of the needs and challenges that you can help them overcome with your products, services or business solutions.
Content marketing campaigns will create multiple engagement opportunities with these leads, creating automated conversations with your prospects. In these conversations, you share information with your prospects and they share back information about themselves, their needs and the questions they may have about the products and services you offer. An automated marketing system will track these engagements, record the input from the conversations and build a score for each prospect in the system.
When that score is high enough, the lead can be tagged as a “Sales Qualified Lead” and your sales staff can be notified to contact the prospect.
Let’s walk through the system and see how it achieves your marketing goals.
You can generate raw leads through marketing campaigns designed to bring new audience into the system. Any marketing channel can be used to drive traffic into the system, including: Offline Ads, in television, radio or print… Online Ads, including banners, promoted posts and Paid-for Search…. Email Campaigns, especially when your sales staff has acquired new contacts themselves …from Networking activities By using content published through social media or through your website…. Or by simply purchasing leads from a reputable lead source. The objective of these campaigns is to only bring new leads to your “owned audience”; not close them as new customers. That job is handled by the marketing machine after they have first been made part of your audience.
Once you have created an “owned audience” you can continuously drive them to consume more content through multiple distribution channels.
These include channels that you control or own, like… social media sites where you have created business pages and of course any company websites you have created. If you have a professional sales staff, they can help drive prospects directly to content by sharing links to content within the network of contacts they create themselves. Since your “owned audience” may not always respond to distribution channels you own or control yourself, you can always use paid for media to drive traffic to your content just as you did to capture them in the first place. Because your “owned audience” is in your database you can create email campaigns to promote content you have created for them …or to drive them to events where you can build stronger relationships and create powerful engagement experiences.
You might think that when you drive traffic to your content that you should simply provide them with a link that takes them directly to that content. A far better practice is to drive them first to a landing page where you can engage them through an interactive form that allows you to capture some information that will help you build out their profile in your database
The trick to making this part of your system function properly is to market the content; not your products and services. Constantly promoting your products and services instead of marketing your content is the number one mistake that companies make when building a marketing machine. Before you provide a prospect with a link to the content you want to first capture a little bit of information about them.
A landing page that is designed to capture a little bit of information about a prospect, in exchange for some content, is sometimes called a “squeeze page”. If your content marketing strategy is designed to support multiple engagements, then you can collect a lot of information about a prospect over time. This is sometimes called “progressive profiling”. Initially you will want to collect basic information about the prospects like name, title, company, and so on. More useful information can be collected using common features found in survey tools, like multiple choice questions, check boxes and comment boxes.
Focusing on needs and concerns is a great way to segment prospects into subgroups, or “customer segments”, so that you can drive them into automated marketing campaigns designed for those specific customer segments. Segmentation is perhaps, the most powerful technique offered by an automated marketing system. It allows you to fine tune the work of your marketing machine and automate conversations that can drive prospects into the sales funnel. It can even automate the first part of the sales process.
A simple tagging system that tags a prospect based on an activity, like marking a check box, can be used to tag that prospect and place them into a particular customer segment.
Once the landing page form is complete you can provide a link directly to a page where your prospect can view the content on the web or download it. If you prefer, you can send your prospect a link to the content by email which adds a step but this also creates another engagement that can be tracked by the system. Remember… every engagement activity can be used to raise the lead score of the prospect. Obviously, more activities show a greater interest on their part to do business with you.
Let’s review the processes involved in using a marketing machine to capture and nurture leads. First, traffic drivers, such as ads promoting your content, are used to drive raw leads into the system where they become part of your owned audience. At this point you will have captured some basic contact information and created a personal profile for that prospect. Next, campaigns using multiple marketing channels drive your audience to landing pages where you can capture additional information and progressively build a more detailed profile about their particular needs and concerns. Then, after they have completed an engagement form and shared more information with you, they can be directed to the compelling content that interests them and that helps educate them about their needs and your solutions.
Prospects remain in the system, subject to additional campaigns that continuously nurture them through the marketing process, allowing you to build a more detailed profile of them until they are finally converted into a new customer.
Landing pages can vary depending on the role they play in the system. Obviously you can use them at the beginning of the automated marketing process when you first capture leads.
But they also can be used in unique ways at each of the key conversion points in the system where leads are validated as being in your target market, converted to qualified marketing leads and then into sales qualified leads.
So you can create unique landing pages for new audience members, designed to focus their attention on their own needs and challenges for audience members that are consuming media like content, designed to address their needs and challenges for audience members consuming marketing content, that that bridges the gap between media content and promotions… This kind of marketing content should focus on the customer experience, showing how your products and services actually benefit your customers. and for audience members consuming product content, that describes specific features and benefits of your products and services.
Once you have created the campaigns that capture and convert leads to new customers, you can build a secondary set of processes to continue nurturing existing customers so that you can continue to up sell new products and services to them as well. The number of these campaigns will vary depending on the nature of your business and how much revenue you generate from existing customers.
Once you have built the basic processes to support your marketing system you will have a fully operational marketing machine that continuously processes prospects and customers in your database night and day, 365 days a year. It will always be working even when you are not, helping to drive leads into the sales funnel, generating new revenue for your business all year long.
To learn more about how to build a marketing machine watch Media, Marketing and Metrics on Axix Media

The Marketing Machine

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The Marketing Machine

Editor's Notes