January 4th, 2019 | Updated on January 8th, 2019
Nobody emerges from the womb knowing how to be a marketer. It takes lots of practice to become a good marketer, and you need to develop some very specific skills in order to excel. The best learn how to track and organize sales leads from generation through conversion.
This high level of organization might not be something you’re accustomed to, but don’t panic! You don’t have to figure this out by yourself. In fact, there are a number of ways to increase your productivity as a marketer. There are plenty of tools at your disposal if you’re looking to work a little marketing magic.
1. Organizational Tools Can Kickstart The Success of Your Business
A tidy desk might be the sign of a disorganized mind, but you don’t have to keep all your leads in a file cabinet anymore. In fact, the tools you can use to keep your sales leads tracked and organized are available right at your fingertips, often at the other end of a computer screen. Using a free, open-source system like Google Docs with its built-in spreadsheet support takes just a few minutes and can be accessed anywhere you have an internet connection.
Simple lead trackers like that might seem crude and primitive, but using a digital system provides massive opportunities for more efficient marketing organization. You’ll be much less likely to miss an opportunity to follow up on a hot lead if you have a tracker available to you at the swipe of a touchscreen, after all. That being said, there’s much more you can accomplish with marketing organization tools, especially if you decide to use more robust ones with better feature sets.
2. An Efficient Business is a More Profitable Business
Efficiency is much sought-after in the business world. There’s a good reason for that, as less wasted effort and resources means more you can devote to areas that need it. That’s why anything you can do to make your marketing more effective, like using a spreadsheet lead tracker, can have a major benefit to your company’s efficiency.
That being said, you can add to that foundation by adopting not just a standalone spreadsheet but an entire lead management system as well. Doing so provides you with opportunities to manage your data for the kinds of trend analysis that can expose new opportunities you might not have seen otherwise.
An integrated lead management system is a potentially game-changing resource. They’re often indispensable to smaller businesses who don’t have the deep pockets of larger companies.
At the same time, smaller teams that are part of bigger businesses also benefit from marketing data analysis, especially with the number of data points larger companies with larger marketing campaigns can generate. Managing teams of marketers is also much easier with such a system, making them highly popular with supervisors.
3. Consumer-Focused Process Management
There’s no mistaking the role that efficient organization play in lead management. Meanwhile, it’s not enough to have these process management tools in place — they also need to be consumer-focused.
The data you gather from your marketing efforts is not going to get you very far unless you’re focusing your efforts on target consumer demographics. While trend analysis can be useful and it certainly has its place, it’s certainly more effective if that data is applied to a targeted marketing campaign.
That’s why data analysis has such an important role to play. It’s easy to take gathered data and use it to create sales reports, but unless you’re analyzing that data in specific ways to identify marketing opportunities going forward you’re missing the mark in a major way. The use of consumer-focused process management tools prevents these missteps and ensures that the time and effort you’ve spent gathering this data provides for a better ROI.
4. Sourcing Organizational Solutions for Your Business
So far, we’ve discussed using simple solutions for lead tracking such as a spreadsheet to begin your organizational efforts, increasing efficiency even higher by using an integrated lead management system, and then using data analysis to supercharge marketing efforts even further to create consumer-focused processes for the ultimate in marketing organization.
Taking all of these techniques and using them in combination obviously brings the biggest advantages, but integration into one organizational solution can be time-consuming to say the least.
In this situation, your best bet is to source a solution that provides all of these services under one roof. A platform that combines lead management integration on this level provides higher levels of efficiency for marketing campaigns of all sizes, and they’re especially well-suited to large-scale marketing efforts.
Such full-featured consumer relationship management platforms are easy to find but perhaps not so easy to choose from, as there are plenty on the market for your selection. Be sure to take your time in choosing the one that will be right for your business and its marketing needs.
5. Going Without Help is False Economy
The cost of marketing efforts is always a concern for any business. Start-ups or small businesses especially need to remain cognizant of their operating budgets, and it’s tempting to keep costs down in areas like marketing by not choosing to use a consumer relationship management system, especially since these platforms can be expensive to access and use. Even those platforms that offer monthly subscription rates can sometimes be seen as an unnecessary expense for cash-strapped businesses.
However, going it alone without the help of one of these platforms is a prime example of false economy. You might be saving money in the shorter term by not using such a resource and instead relying on using a spreadsheet for your lead generation and organization, but you also miss out on a number of opportunities to maximize the ROI on your marketing efforts. As a result, the money you save ends up being a fraction of the money you could have made if you had simply used one of these systems.
As a business owner, you need to play the long game. Invest in the future of your company. Set the groundwork for marketing success today and you’ll have a profitable tomorrow.
