It’s one of the most daunting challenges we face as marketers: How to determine the effectiveness of our programs and demonstrate measurable return on investment. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 21% of marketers say they are successful at tracking ROI. Below, Steve Barnard, Director of Commercial & Public Sector Marketing at Lenovo, shares his tips for crafting purposeful and measurable marketing campaigns.
Tell me a little about your role at Lenovo
I am Director of Commercial & Public Sector Marketing for Lenovo North America supporting a sales force of about 450. My primary mission is to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that ultimately convert to revenue opportunities for Lenovo products. Including me, my multidisciplinary marketing team of ten generates MQLs using a combination of content, inbound/outbound marketing programs, marketing technology, lead management and governance/operational principles.
What are some of your top marketing priorities for 2015?
Driving Commercial & Public Sector Marketing Qualified Leads that convert to revenue. I also aim to accelerate Lenovo’s Server Business (including the newly acquired System x business from IBM).
Enhancing Lenovo’s overall customer experience via more engaging content, and optimizing inbound + outbound programs to more efficiently drive top-funnel conversion are also top 2015 priorities.
If a marketer asked you what they could do right now to take their organization to the next level, what advice would you give them?
My advice would be to establish a systematic, repeatable, revenue-driven approach to marketing. Too often, marketers do one-off campaigns that aren’t measurable and instead just focus on “shiny objects”, not real business-oriented results like revenue.
Be thoughtful about mapping your customer’s full buying experience and then measuring conversion at key funnel stages. By measuring your campaigns in an ongoing manner with clear objectives, your organization can continue to improve its marketing efforts year-after-year, which is the real goal.
In the end, marketing should absolutely be about shiny, engaging content and programs…. as long as they are purposeful, measurable, and drive return-on-marketing investment.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the importance of marketing and sales team alignment. In fact, according to Marketo, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies are 67 percent better at closing deals. What is your advice for ensuring that marketing and sales teams are in sync?
Align your marketing and sales teams around a common metric and clearly identify how your buyers buy from initial research to post purchase. Make sure marketing and sales both understand the full customer journey.
Develop content strategies that engage buyers and move them down the sales funnel.
Integrate digital marketing channels and nurture prospects down the funnel via marketing automation platforms (like Lenovo’s use of Oracle-Eloqua) and effectively leverage marketing automation’s lead scoring to efficiently pass qualified buyers to sales.
And finally, use marketing automation’s reporting tools to efficiently monitor which campaigns maximize conversion and revenue.
Also, be sure to join us on Thursday, July 16th at 11:30am for our upcoming webinar, “The Path to Nirvana: How to Build Measurable Marketing Programs in a Corporate Environment“, to learn how to make measurable marketing a reality at your organization.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Best practices to align marketing tactics with sales outcomes and build out programs that drive revenue
- How to secure program funding and then properly evaluate ROI
- How measurable marketing differs in a large corporation versus a smaller organization or startup
- Best practices for building and motivating an exceptional team of marketers
