Social Marketing Is Not Enough: Turn Leads into Profits

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Are you turning leads into profits for your business? For all the buzz about online marketing, social media, building relationships with prospects, you know what you really want is business.

Online marketing firms tell you to publish quality content on a blog, update Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, and make it easy for visitors to find and navigate your website.

Okay. But to use a great movie line, “Show me the money!” It’s one thing to have a stellar online presence — killer website, high-traffic blog, active social networking updates — but at the end of the day, your company has to get leads, and convert those leads to purchases, and make a profit.

What disturbs me most about online marketing firms that hype the latest tools and tactics is the lack of emphasis on the rest of the story: converting leads into profits.

From Point A – online marketing – to Point B – leads – there are some pretty standard road maps. Inbound marketing works well when you follow the guides and suggestions of trustworthy experts such as here at Ariad Partners. But how do you go from there to Point P: PROFITS?

Ask yourself some serious questions. Is your business reality lagging behind your vision for growth?

  • What if your marketing isn’t generating as many leads as you want?
  • What if your salespeople aren’t closing sales fast enough?
  • Are you losing follow-up on leads because you don’t have a defined marketing to sales hand-off process?
  • Can you generate the reports that you need to make the adjustments you need and get better results?

Many times what I find in the conversations I have with business owners is that an organization is lacking a common course that makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly what is wrong. Ask each employee what the company’s brand promise is and you’ll get a different answer.

Breakthrough success comes when all the elements of your business are aligned. Your business is aligned with your market. Your employees are aligned with the company. You are aligned with your employees.

Without a singular focus, your business drifts. Let me illustrate with an example from a client I worked with not long ago. They’ve asked me to keep the story without any identifying information.

Case Study for Ariad Partners

A 15-year-old professional service firm was struggling to reach 10MM in growth.  The company needed to significantly increase the number and quality of leads, and they were struggling to put the structure and processes in place to work more efficiently and effectively. The company came to us because of a lack of leads, but it was clear that there was more that needed to be addressed for success. We could generate all the leads we wanted but if they weren’t being followed up because they dropped through the cracks because of lack of process, or the sales people were struggling to close, it wouldn’t ultimately lead to an increase in revenues and profits. In this case, there was also a lack of teamwork and poor communication negatively impacted results across the company and there were no documented processes or accountability.

We worked with them on improving a variety of processes, including marketing, lead, sales and customer service processes, over many months. Here’s what they reported.

Results:

  • 300% increase in leads within first six months of implementing new Inbound Marketing strategy
  • Improved client satisfaction
  • Increase revenue 25%  in one year (double planned target)
  • Improved team productivity and communication
  • Reduction in turnover
  • Improvement in accountability as measured by management feedback and key performance metrics

As you can see, only a portion of the success story has to do with marketing strategies. And obviously, it was a big factor in the bottom line. But there were a lot of other factors that couldn’t be addressed by marketing tools and tactics. And those are all the “people” and the “process” issues.

People issues are everything that goes on in the minds and hearts of employees, managers and customers. Process is everything you do that brings a result. That’s the value in working with a business growth strategy consulting firm that does more than work with numbers. Is it time you have that conversation? Let’s talk.

(Image: freedigitalphotos.net)