Bar-None by Design, LLC
Digital Pipeline Marketing
What is a pipeline?
In finance, the term pipeline is used to describe progress towards a long-term goal that involves a series of discrete stages. If something is in the pipeline, it has already been planned and has begun. We can guide this success by using specific instructions that we feed into one end, with anticipation of a result or goal coming out the other end.
As recent as this past year (2022), marketing and sales have had very distinct goals and objectives, yet this is where weak links can develop in the revenue system. People in marketing have focused on generating vast amounts of leads. Sales are more interested in the quality of those leads. With today’s technology, focus can be surged towards initial quality over quantity of potential customers. Sales and marketing should be more unified in their ultimate goal of the company’s objective, which is to create more revenue through quality, satisfied customers.
Where pipeline marketing excels is in its ability to unite marketing and sales under the “same roof.” If you have a smaller team in a smaller business, it makes it easier to think of those two traditional activities as one unit.
Digital pipeline marketing involves all your channels, campaigns, and other activities that you use to engage and widen your funnel. By tying the source of a lead to the amount of revenue actualized with each customer conversion you are able to measure direct marketing success.
What is pipeline marketing?
At one time marketing teams primarily existed to assist the sales staff. They assisted with lead generation by creating basic overview assets for that department. They used design techniques to influence people to become potential customers, through the use of general brochures, charts with feature descriptions and benefits, PowerPoint presentations, and case studies.
Old civilizations like Pompeii, Egyptian, and Arabian cultures: humans have always had the need to promote their products or services to those who needed them. Being a marketer has evolved into big business empires by using the innovation of design and technology to its advantage. And in the past 15 years business operations have taken a huge shift, with the development of the age of data.
Marketers use data and tools to make data-driven decisions and are working more efficiently with the sales teams. Thereby assisting to nurture customers through the entire sales funnel. It’s a shift from filling the top of the funnel with as many leads as possible, to revenue generation and a cost per opportunity KPI.
How do you break down barriers between marketing and sales?
In the growing digital marketing world, marketing automation technology struggles to keep up. The customer relations management (CRM) can’t help the sales professionals sell. But by bridging this gap, you will improve your sales, marketing, customer experience, and your commerce.
According to Oracle Fusion Marketing, to create more leads that are ready to buy, use these 4 tips to generating a healthy pipeline:
- Identify and narrow down your target buyers. Who is your target customer?
- Build a target list of your most viable prospects.
- Develop relevant messaging and content for the prospects in your pipeline.
- Test a variety of demand generation tactics.
And, to generate pipeline in sales:
- Step 1: Design your sales cycle.
- Step 2: Identify your ideal customers and target accounts.
- Step 3: Find internal contacts at those target accounts.
- Step 4: Move qualified leads through the sales cycle.
- Step 5: Use a CRM tool to make your sales funnel more efficient.
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of sales prospects and where they are in the purchasing process. It shows the potential purchases your business could convert.
The reason this is important to your business is that it details the stage of each potential sale. It measures your success and is the best indicator of your company’s health. A strategy is a carefully designed plan which guides your prospects through each stage of your business.
Next steps: Account Based Marketing. What is it?
Digital marketing has a lot of analytics tools at its discretion to greatly enhance the success of any business pipeline and/or funnel.
A new method is Account-Based Marketing (ABM) which is a whole new level of digitization and data, personalizes the marketing connection with your target customer. A recent study by LinkedIn states that only about half of B2B marketers are already using ABM campaigns. Yet, 80% are planning to increase their budgets for this over the next year.
We’ll post future blog post about this.
Essentially, this is a strategy you may opt to use with a high-value prospect. Its better to directs all of your marketing efforts on one key account at a time, rather than not enough efforts to too many leads.
Here are some final thoughts
Pipeline market is important to the sales and market strategy of many companies. By joining your sales and market data, you will want to review and analyze it with authority. And by taking the appropriate actions to broaden the sales ‘pipe’, you will convert more events into revenue.
Ultimately, your ‘pipe market’ can magnify promotion (market) investment (MROI) and heighten marketers justification of future spending and budget allocation.
If you don’t have the available resources to staff experts to accomplish this, you may want to consider augmenting your staff to accommodate your needs. Hiring independent professionals who are able to help you, with confidence, using the world’s work marketplace. Learn more at Bar-None byDesign.com