As marketers, we now have the ability to impact the direction of our respective businesses like never before. We’ve entered the age of the revenue marketer where we strive to tie every marketing dollar invested to revenue contribution — and we look to test, measure, and learn from everything we do. We also now have the systems to help accomplish this and really shine in our roles.
But, we may have a blind spot.
The immediate gratification of today’s leads may be causing us to spend a disproportionate percentage of our time and budget focusing on the very small population of target prospects who are already in our nurturing sites. The unintended consequence of this direct response program focus and leads addiction is that we may be handicapping every dollar invested and hour spent on that tiny part of our target audience that is ready to engage today (think lower funnel) at the expense of taking time to educate the broader population of buying audiences that we care about (think upper funnel).
Compared to our overall target audiences, we all have relatively few prospects that are actively seeking a solution to a problem today. These few make up the smaller pool of target prospects that might take the time to download our white papers, register for our webinars, or get started on our free trials.
What if we resisted the urge to drive those additional 500 conversions this month and spent more time and budget making sure the broader audience that we care about knows who we are, what we do, and why we matter – long before a formal buying process kicks-off? I bet you half of next quarter’s marketing budget that you’d get more out of every dollar invested in programs across your mix, you’d see more of the right traffic making it to your website and converting; and you’d increase velocity of leads through your sales process.
By forcing ourselves to think beyond this quarters lead flow, and mounting targeted branding campaigns (there I said it – the “B” word!) to educate the broader audiences we care about, wherever they choose to consume information online, we’ll start getting at the true potential value of a marketing dollar invested in our direct response programs.