It’s Thursday, 4:30pm, and your CEO calls you into her office and says, “I’ve just let Davidson—the CMO and your boss—go. Can I count on you to step up?”
“Wow,” you think to yourself, “This is the opportunity that I’ve always wanted—the chance to lead marketing efforts for Propezius (one of the nation’s top professional services organizations).”
“Yes, I’m up to the challenge,” you reply, sensing a catch. “There’s a catch,” she says, predictably. “For me to elevate you, I need to convince our board that you can help us pivot, and I’ll need you to provide me with five steps that you’re going to take to kickstart our marketing program.”
She pauses for dramatic effect. “Oh, and I’ll need to know those steps by 5pm.”
Normally, this would be a tall task, especially since you’re usually prepping for your 5pm check-in with the Client Services team. But, you just listened to the RubyApps Insights interview with Steve Aguiar of Bluewing, and you have five steps in your back pocket.
“No problem,” you state confidently, and your return to your desk, trying to maintain your composure amidst the excitement. You draft the following memo, proof it, and email it to the CEO, before passing by Davidson’s now-vacant office.
“I’ll swap out that rug and put in a bird of paradise plant,” you think, before texting your spouse to share the news.
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Attention: Propezius Leadership Team
Re: 5 Steps to Kickstart our Marketing Program
This memo articulates the 5 steps that I intend to take as Propezius’ new CMO to kickstart our marketing program.
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Determine our strategy
The first step is to determine our marketing strategy, which will likely combine elements of inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
For reference, inbound marketing is practical and effective within industries where key audiences are proactively searching for answers about services or arcane knowledge that providers (like Propezius) deliver. Tactics here revolve around Google, and specifically search engine optimization, organic page ranking through content creation, and keyword search campaigns.
Outbound marketing is popular in industries where people aren’t actively searching for information and/or when we know the specific audiences we’re trying to reach. Today, social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are critical to helping advertisers put their brands in front of prospective buyers.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one type of outbound marketing that has emerged within the B2B space, as it allows us to run ads against particular accounts to which we want to advertise. It also provides a cohesive mechanism to connect our Marketing and Sales teams, whereby we can prequalify targets and pass warm leads onto our sales force—something that I plan to do, per the below.
I will utilize keyword explorers like SEMrush or AHREFs to determine keyword volume, and to get a sense of whether people are actively searching for our services, specifically within our consulting practice areas.
Without entirely revealing my likely strategy, I will probably propose a combination of inbound and outbound—the former, to play the organic long-game and continue educating the market through our blog and published articles; the latter, to proactively educate the market on what we offer, particularly those decision-makers whose needs and pain points our services address.
2. Define the audience
Next, I’ll define the audience that we’re targeting. We’ve already conducted workshops to create an ideal client profile. In our case, it’s Financial Services companies, particularly those within the wealth management segment that have more than $50 billion in client assets under management.
We’ll also want to craft target personas, i.e., the specific people we’re selling to, including their companies, titles, and seniority-level. For Propezius, from experience, we know that individuals with titles of Vice President and above that oversee groups of portfolio managers typically reflect our target personas.
In order to move from client profiles and personas to actual targets, I’m going to recommend that we invest in either LinkedIn Sales Navigator (at the low end) or Datanyze or Redbooks (at the higher end). These competitive intelligence tools will give my team the tools required to define and surface our audience, i.e., a comprehensive list of prospects.
3. Define the offer
Having determined our strategy and defined our audience, the next step is to define the offer. My objective is to be strategic about how we engage with our prospects, delivering an experience that casts a positive light on our brand.
To get there, I will create a matrix, listing our target personas on left and the different stages of buying journey on the top. (I’ll use the classic, three-stage model of Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. For Awareness, we’ll provide something broad in scope to get our personas to click; for Consideration, something more relevant and germane to how our services address pain points experienced by our personas; and Decision, we’ll share a case study to sway them in the direction of Propezius.
In our situation, we’re already well-positioned with great content to share. For Awareness, we can use our blueprint, “A Portfolio Manager’s Quickstart Guide to Building a Client Network.” For Consideration, we can use the article that our practice specialist wrote recently, “How to Keep Clients Engaged Year-Round in Investing.” Then, for Decision, we have the case study on our work with Platinum Financial, “Reinvigorating Lapsed Clients to Deliver a 10X Return.”
4. Drive traffic to the offer
Having great content is one thing; having it found and consumed is another. So, my next challenge will be to drive traffic to our offer.
I like to think of traffic as either search or social. On the search side, some prospects may be searching for our particular expertise, e.g., “How do portfolio managers build client networks,” or “How can portfolio managers keep clients engaged?” For this, we’ll use Google Adwords to help us appear in paid search results. We’ll combine this with our stable of related content matter, including blog posts and articles, as well as search engine optimization, to push Propezius up in organic search rankings.
Because it takes considerable time to deliver results organically, we’ll combine our keyword ad campaign with social advertising, with cleverly-composed, creative ads on LinkedIn and Facebook served to our personas.
5. Convert interest into leads
Finally, we’re going to convert prospective interest into leads. We’ll program our Google Adwords links to go to Propezius’ “Portfolio Manager Advisory Services” page, which includes several white papers on client management, as well as forms to capture prospect information for any white paper downloads. Our social ads will capture prospect information automatically, creating a profile in our CRM and notifying our Sales team of the entry. The combination of these efforts, supported by our underlying marketing technology system, will help us to generate qualified leads and measure the effectiveness of our campaigns.
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For more information, please listen to the full interview of Steve Aguiar on the RubyApps Insights podcast. Visit BlueWing for more information on digital strategy, and RubyApps.com on how to support that strategy with cutting-edge marketing technology.
