What are the fundamentals of strategic marketing? Chocolate and milk, salt and pepper, popsicles and hot weather – it’s easy to find two items that complement each other. Strategic marketing requires two items that also go well together. In an era driven by the internet, marketing has become a different animal. Marketing is no longer about creating fancy, high-gloss fliers or spending thousands of dollars at the next tradeshow. It’s about the digital age and adapting to new buying behaviors shaped by the internet. The digital age has fostered the creation of two fundamental and complementary items that should be the core of every Strategic Marketer’s toolbox, a website and a database. As more and more applications leverage the internet as the backbone for communication companies have greater dependency on their website and database as their most valuable asset.

The first fundamental of strategic marketing is a company’s website. A company’s website should be easy to navigate and look professional; after all, prospects will judge a company based on the appearance of its website. Also, a website is the primary landing page for prospects. It’s critical that a company’s website be laced with targeted and brief (no more than four form fields) landing pages to convert unknown visitors into known leads. Finally, prospects may find your company on Facebook, LinkedIn, partner sites, press releases, blogs and more; however, they’ll eventually come to your company’s website in the final stop of their journey. It’s imperative strategic marketers use B2B visitor tracking technology and proper lead management automation to capture the 96% of all unknown website visitor traffic that goes undetected (never fills out a form). Make sure to capitalize on marketing expenditures by capturing, tracking and managing leads using technology from companies like Lead Liaison.

The second fundamental of strategic marketing is a company’s database. Much too often strategic marketers let a company’s database go “stale” – leads rot, become out of date, incomplete and untouched. In fact, 73% of all companies have no process for revisiting leads. Moreover, with only 3-5% of inbound leads being classified as “sales-ready”, most leads get touched initially then never again. Shockingly, 70-80% of the other inquiries (leads that are not “sales-ready”) are latent demand that will buy within two years, but are typically lost, ignored or discarded by companies.

Better lead management is a necessary fundamental of strategic marketing and starts by profiling a database (using lead scoring), segmenting a database and nurturing a database. Strategic marketers must make sure to think of their database as the most valuable resource the company has and think of their database as their baby. Keep it clean, bring it in for checkups and make sure to nurture it over time. Don’t ignore your baby! Take care of it, give it structure, don’t forget about it and it will continue to give back to you and your company.

To explore how your company can have better lead management please ping us and we’ll tell you how.

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