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2.4 Marketing |
  
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2.4 Marketing |
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What are requirements of your customers? Who should be your buyers? A successful business identifies its target customers and markets, tracks them accurately, and above all has an effective marketing program.
Marketing is an vital component in virtually every type of business: no business can expand without it. The effects of marketing are two-dimensional - an increased brand popularity and an ever-expanding customer base.
Campaign
A campaign describes the type of activity where you approach potential customers; a record of marketing strategies to reach potential customers. A marketing campaign is set up, and its goals are defined. For example, you may have a $5000 budget in the expectation that it will bring in $20 000 in revenue).
Various tasks can then be performed:
| • | Create targets: Who is the campaign targeted at? If you’re doing an email campaign to existing contacts in your database, specify them. |
| • | Add participants (for internal use): Which of your employees is involved in this marketing campaign? |
| • | Prepare call list: For an outbound telemarketing campaign, you can generate a list of telephone calls to be made which will appear in the 'to call' list of participants. |
| • | Add respondents: Here the results of the campaign are flagged (respondents are people who responded to your campaign, positive or negatively) |
| • | Create opportunity: This is for tracking sales opportunities that result from the campaign |
| • | Link projects, tasks, documents, notes, calls or meetings to tasks: This makes it easy to track all items related to marketing campaigns from a single screen. |
A successful marketing campaign means targeting and communicating with your audience. When customers respond to your campaign, you can track their responses and refine your future campaigns.
Suppose you have a database of some thousand users, some of whom live in different countries. To make an offer to all users in a specific country, you run the target wizard for those specific number of users - they become your target audience (ie the target of the campaign). Then, you make the offer and some of the users accept it - they are your respondents.
Lead
A lead is a potential customer. This system enables you to create and manage leads. As you utilise leads, you can convert them to other types of records like opportunity, contact or company.
You can create leads in two ways:
| • | manually |
| • | importing them from external files. |
Once you've created a lead, you can use it later for these three record types:
| • | company |
| • | contact |
| • | opportunity. |
A constant pipeline of leads is backbone of your business. Always use all possible sources to generate more leads from both new and existing customers.
Once utilised, leads can be converted to other type of records in the system, such as company, contact and opportunity.
How do you process a web-generated lead?
| • | Send an email confirmation to the lead. |
| • | Create a record in your system. |
| • | Notify the sales manager. |
| • | Make a follow-up call. |
What is the difference between a lead and an opportunity?
A lead is a potential customer; an opportunity is a qualified lead. An opportunity can indicate estimated revenue, relevant notes and documents, and the likely close date.
How do companies, contacts, leads and opportunities relate with each other?
Companies and contact records represent recognised customers, whereas leads represent potential customers. You can use company, contact, lead and opportunity records to encourage new customers.
For example, consider the following scenario. Your sales and marketing teams arrange a seminar to gather information from the participants, including their names, addresses, telephone numbers and businesses names. These records are entered into the system as 'leads'. Your representatives contact the leads to get feedback and ascertain the likelihood of their purchasing your products. Once you've organised this information, you can convert the leads into three new records:
| • | company |
| • | contact for each person |
| • | opportunity for expected sales. |
Events
Events are used for activities like breakfast briefings, seminars, fundraising activities and trade shows.
There are various tasks that can be performed:
| • | Create targets: Who is invited to the event? |
| • | Add participants (for internal use): Which of your employees is involved? |
| • | Add respondents: Here the results of the event are recorded. Who attended the event? Did they make purchases? |
| • | Create opportunity: This is for tracking sales opportunities that result from the event. |
It is also possible to link these items to events:
| • | projects |
| • | tasks |
| • | documents |
| • | notes |
| • | calls |
| • | meetings. |
This makes it easy to track all related activities to the event.
Webforms
A webform is a form on a website, such as a 'Contact us' form or a 'Details capture' form (common on sales and marketing focused sites), requesting that users provide certain details.
Interactive forms on your website are easily created within the system. For example, if someone fills in an 'Enquiry' form, the data automatically goes into the system and will not be lost as may happen with manual processes.
Webforms can become a vital part in your online marketing. Total Enterprise CRM manages webforms as an integral part of the system, allowing you to make use of this powerful tool easily and flexibly.
| • | The user completes a form on your (or an affiliate’s) website. |
| • | When the submit button is pressed, the information travels across the internet to the system. |
| • | The information arrives in the database, is immediately stored, and the assigned workflow is triggered (this can be used to assign the lead to different people, to schedule calls to be made by the sales team, or to create activity notes). |
| • | This information is immediately available to users of the system. |
Implementing webforms is quick and easy using the webforms designer. This enables you to make template forms and use them on any web host you please. All you - or your web designer - need do is apply your own design (eg select colours and fonts) to the forms to create your desired 'look'.