Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Please complete all fields.
Chances are, when your boss brings up the end of Q4, you’re not quite in panic mode yet. Sure, it’s only October, but when you factor in major holidays during November and December, your end of year is actually right around the corner. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?
Fortunately, there are plenty of steps you can start taking today to help prevent the end of year frenzy come December. Especially for your lead generation and campaign efforts, identifying some quick wins now can help pave the way for long-term results down the road.
Let’s take a look at a few a few quick wins that you can start incorporating into your strategies — and don’t forget to tune into our SalesforceLive webcast, Maximize Your Marketing Efforts for Huge End-Of-Year Wins, on October 22nd for even more tactical takeaways.
As you approach the end of the year, your resources are often down to the wire. Between employees taking time off for the holidays and budgets becoming that much tighter, it can be hard to find the time to create new marketing content to drive your campaign initiatives.
Take a step back during the last few months of the year and re-evaluate your top-performing pieces of content. Recycling content or repackaging it in a new way can be a great way to get more out of what you’ve already produced. Try breaking down an e-book into a few blog posts, creating an infographic around an industry study you sponsored, or packaging blog posts into a long-form piece of content.
Another quick win for content is to turn your sales team into a vehicle for content distribution. With the growing importance of personalization in the selling process, it’s becoming more and more critical to map your content to the different stages of your sales cycle, so that your buyers are receiving targeted content throughout their journey.
Once this mapping is complete (here’s a helpful worksheet to get you started), try building out a library of content to make it easier for your sales team to find exactly what they’re looking for. Sort your content into categories and provide talking points and email templates so that your reps know exactly what they’re looking at. Not sure where to start? Check out this helpful guide.
Another great way to get more out of what you already have is to run a re-engagement campaign targeted at the inactive leads in your database. These are leads that you have already spent time and money collecting, and while they may not have engaged with your brand over the past several months, they’re not necessarily worthless.
Try kicking off a nurture program that sends inactive leads engaging pieces of content (think top-of-funnel assets like infographics and blog posts) to get them interested in your brand again. This will allow you to stay in front of them over time so that when their status changes, your company will be top of mind.
At the end of the year, your sales team is looking for marketing support that can help them move deals to close. This means a good part of your focus as a marketer should be on the bottom of the funnel. Start thinking about ways that you can help your sales team close deals, whether it’s hosting a more product-focused webinar, devoting resources to a robust buyer’s guide, or putting together some sales enablement resources that your sales team has requested.
The key here is to communicate with your sales team and sales leaders to better understand their top needs as they approach year-end.
A more obvious focus point as you approach the end of Q4 is optimization. Depending on where you might see the biggest impact, you may want to focus your optimization efforts on your landing pages, forms, advertising creative, nurture programs, email templates, CRM — the list goes on. The goal here is to test and iterate until you feel confident about your revised programs going into 2016.
Check out the list of resources below to get started:
Let’s take the fifth point a bit further. The end of the year is a great time to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing technologies to make sure that you’re using them to their full potential. For example, is there a certain marketing automation functionality that you have yet to take advantage of? Does your database need cleaning or de-duping before next year? Are there any nurture programs that you haven’t tried yet?
Most marketing technology providers offer resources, training programs, and webinars for free that can help you get the most out of your system. Take a look as you approach December and see which areas you might be able to improve.
Want more tips to help end the year strong? Check out our full SalesforceLive webinar on October 22nd. Register here!
