The Role of Digital Marketing in Sales Development
However, the idea of digital marketing as a cost-center is something we seek to dispel in this post because much of what digital marketing does if done correctly, is to line up primed, qualified leads for the sales team- mainly if both teams are working together instead of in siloes. It’s an opportunity to mesh both the sales team and marketing team to produce the best sales strategies.
In this post, we’re going to share the five key elements required to create synergy between digital marketing and sales to ensure that your org can meet, or even exceed, its pipeline goals and improve your marketing budget.
5 Key Digital Marketing Strategies That Directly Support Sales
SEO
Digital marketing can help attract your target audience through SEO research that identifies the pain points and topics most sought after by your target buyers, increase website traffic, and improve online marketing.
For those unfamiliar with SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO utilizes specific strong keywords on your website, social media marketing, blogs, and general content to increase your searchability, or in other words, make it easier for your target audience to find you.
It’s become a crucial part of marketing solutions, particularly for e-commerce.
Content Marketing Strategy
Inbound marketing efforts, like content, can generate demand by promoting optimized content that captures interested leads and provides valuable data that can be used to custom-tailor the sales pitch once the lead has matured enough for sale.
Investing in quality content marketing is one of the most significant improvements you can make to your marketing plan and messaging. There are many options for content marketing to suit your budget, such as social media, blogs, infographics, webinars, etc. Not only will content marketing improve brand awareness, but it will increase sales.
An additional tip before we wrap up content marketing is to ensure your content can be viewed well on mobile devices. Mobile devices constitute more than half of online sales, and therefore, it’s essential to optimize your content to accommodate devices appropriately.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for digital marketing campaigns as it’s a great way to engage 1:1 with your customers. Digital marketing can begin prepping captured leads for sale by building awareness, authority, and trust through targeted email marketing drip content or a sales funnel.
Since almost everyone uses email, it’s a perfect way to create engaging content with a call-to-action. With it, you can lead your potential customers where you need them to go.
Landing Pages
As leads progress through the marketing funnel, they will eventually arrive at the last step, typically a demo request or form on a sales-optimized landing page, and either convert to a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) or not.
Often this is triggered by a sponsored LinkedIn or Facebook post or a pay-per-click (PPC) Google ad that captures their attention and sends them to the landing page.
Landing pages should be used to capture potential customers as they go to your website and will begin the sales process for your team. Landing pages can offer content, promote webinars, or can display testimonials to encourage clicks, sign-ups, or requests for information (RFI).
Furthermore, optimized landing pages can significantly increase your conversion rates and are a perfect marketing tactic to increase sales.
MQLs
MQLs, as mentioned above, are the essential connector for your digital marketing plan, your various marketing channels, and at the end, your sales process.
Through each of the tactics mentioned previously, marketing attracts these MQLs that completed a desired action or have otherwise proven they’re primed for sale. Once ready, they are handed over to sales, along with all the data they’ve collected, so sales can begin closing the deal.
MQLs are often placed in an email nurture program, which is created by marketers using marketing automation software. MQLs tend to be at the first part of the sales funnel within the entire sales process.
Using an email marketing campaign to nurture leads, the software can help track their behavior and provide metrics as these leads move through the sales funnel and get closer to being ready for sale.
Why can’t sales find their own leads?
The role of sales teams in business has changed rapidly as technology has evolved and digital marketing tactics have increased in adoption. Today, digital marketing teams are expected to provide the leads that sales try to close instead of independently trying to track down potential leads.
It’s a waste of time for sales to be prospecting. When you apply the breakdown of the cost to pay salespeople to acquire customers, it’s much more costly and less effective than investing in quality digital marketing. They need to spend their time speaking to already qualified leads and closing deals.
By running content marketing and demand generation campaigns, marketing can provide qualified leads to sales primed for sale that have already shown interest in the company and its offerings.
How Interrupt Media Can Help You Increase Sales
Even though effective digital marketing can significantly improve sales, a lot of companies still aren’t correctly measuring or tracking marketing’s performance.
Marketing will never be prioritized as it should be without proper tracking. There needs to be an audit trail of UTM links and analytics that tie every marketing effort directly to the generated sale, or there’s no validation and thus, no reason to allocate budget to marketing efforts.
You can learn more about tracking digital marketing performance with this beginner’s guide to building marketing funnel reports.
Or, if you’re a business owner who needs help finding ways to synergize your sales and marketing efforts, we can help!
Interrupt Media is a full-stack digital marketing agency with qualified marketers and strategists who offer sales enablement assistance. We custom-tailor our services to support your business goals and budget. Whether you’re a large or small business, we know how to help.
To learn more about how we can help you build a robust digital marketing plan that directly impacts revenue, book a free consultation call today.