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You would think that if you have a marketing department in-house or if you outsourced a marketing agency that you would be able to see the results they were bringing in. The marketer’s job is to report on the tactics and strategies that they’re implementing, right? Sure, but a business relationship is a two way street and you need to be putting in your own effort to see the best results and to see your business grow. I’m not asking you to roll up your sleeves and dig into the marketing team’s daily routine and post a blog or anything, but getting into the habit of helping them out in your own consistent ways will benefit your entire business.
Clones Don't Win
The key to getting results from your marketing is to be different, to stand out from the crowd. The best way to do that is to sit down with your marketing team and let them know exactly what you see that sets your business apart and what you want your leads and prospects to come to you for. Marketers are creative people and we can come up with some pretty cool ideas, but that doesn’t always mean they align with the CEO’s thoughts. To bypass the back and forth, sit down with them directly and let them know what you want to showcase as your unique message.
Build The Right Team
Marketing is typically its own department. But we actually work best when the sales department is also involved. Closed-loop reporting (when marketing and sales work together) will give you the most accurate return on investment numbers. But if you have a sales team that won’t work with marketing or a marketing team that refuses to ask sales for their numbers, you’re messing up big time. You want communicators. Sales should let marketing know what kind of questions they get in the sales funnel. Marketing can then address those questions and problems before they even speak to sales thus creating more qualified leads. And marketing should find out from sales which of the leads they brought in have closed so they can improve and focus on the right avenues moving forward.
Tell Them What You Care About
Key performance indicators (KPI’s) will help marketing identify and target the important things you want to track. If you don’t care how your keywords are ranking and you’d rather see how your pages are performing overall then tell them that. Don’t waste their time pulling information for reports that you’re just going to skim over. Plus it’ll ensure that you actually look over those reports instead of skim over the mass amount of information they send to you every month. Of course, they’ll still be paying attention to all the metrics that marketers should, they’ll just target your reports better.
Celebrate Accomplishments
Say your marketing team brought you a really qualified lead or increased your website visits by a significant amount. They’re probably really happy about it and you should be too. Make sure they know that even though you aren’t always focused on the marketing side of the business, that you see the results they’re bringing and appreciating the effort they’re putting into your business. Positive reinforcement goes a long way and it will keep any team motivated and striving to be better.
Network and Share
You have your own business network and I’m sure you’ve heard all about how awesome social media is right? Well if you’re not already on it, you should be. Because with your personal and business network as a CEO you could reach and interact with a lot of prospects in your industry. And even if you don’t know that many people that could be considered business prospects, your fellow business networkers sure will. And in no time you’ll be connecting with a ton of people online that are interested in your business and could potentially become customers or clients.
Once you’re connected with these people the next step is to share your content with them. In order to show your network what a smart industry leader you are and prove your expertise, show them the blogs and advanced content you’re marketing team has created that answers all their questions.
Takeaway
In order to see results from your marketing you need to speak up about what you want, what you like, what you find important, and who you want to share it with.
