There are many pieces of a successful inbound marketing puzzle. And among the biggest – and yet arguably the least understood – is a marketing workflow.
While there are several definitions of a marketing workflow, both the best and simplest one is put forward by HubSpot:
"A marketing workflow is a series of automated actions that you can trigger to occur based on a person's behaviors or contact information…workflows take lead nurturing to the next level. As one of the most powerful tools available to marketers today, workflows enable you to build stronger relationships with your leads, send higher quality leads to your sales team, and save more of your time as a marketer."
With this being said, a marketing workflow isn’t a one-size-fits-all system or solution. It needs to be customized for each business in order to achieve optimal results, and fulfill the promise of “building stronger relationships, sending high quality leads to sales, and saving time”.
Below are 3 marketing workflow best practices that will steer you in the right direction, and ensure that you reap measurable, bottom-line rewards:
Marketing Workflow Best Practices #1: Align Marketing Workflows to Your Sales Funnel
A key function of marketing workflows is timing, in the sense that the right content, offer or communication needs to be delivered to the right leads, at the right time.
As such, it’s vital to align your marketing workflows to your sales funnel. For example, leads at the top of the funnel should be engaged differently (both in terms of frequency and messaging) than those in the middle of the funnel, and those at the bottom.
And of course, it goes without saying – but we’ll say it anyway just in case – that buyer personas have to be taken into consideration as well. For example, executive decision-makers at the top of the funnel shouldn’t be part of the same marketing workflow that targets gatekeepers at the top of the funnel. They may both be at the same stage, but their mindset, pain points, authority level, and goals are markedly different.
Marketing Workflow Best Practices #2: Use the Right Metrics
Some business owners think that the only outcome that matters is sales (followed by sales, sales and sales). And while this is obviously the ultimate goal, it’s important to use the right metrics to help identify whether marketing workflows are functioning properly, or need to be tweaked, repaired or in some cases, re-invented.
For example, many marketing workflows are designed to graduate prospects from one stage to another, such as awareness to consideration, or consideration to purchase. If the only metric in place is sales, then the marketing workflow will be perceived as dysfunctional – when in fact, it’s working as designed and doing its job quite well.
Marketing Workflow Best Practices #3: Test and Optimize
Once a marketing workflow is ready to roll, it’s very important test it thoroughly a few times to ensure that everything works and looks fine. This includes checking all links, ensuring that all emails (or other content) is promptly delivered based on the workflow’s rules (of which there can be dozens!), and so on.
Learn More
At Leap Clixx, we build customized marketing workflows for each of our customers based on all of the above-noted marketing workflow best practices, and which incorporate a variety of details including (but not limited to) their campaign goals, marketplace, buyer personas, products/services, and more. We also create the content that our customers need to engage leads throughout their sales funnel, and usher them towards becoming satisfied customers.
To learn more, contact us today and take advantage of your free consultation.
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Topics: Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation
