Marketing's Impact On Other Departments

As a marketer, I’m absolutely susceptible to tunnel vision. There are times where I find myself thinking so narrowly on the marketing challenge in front of me, that I don’t realize potential solutions can be found by working with other departments.

In this post I’ll outline how collaborating with other departments within my clients’ businesses has actually helped to improve marketing performance.

Marketers have a unique vantage point that allows us to understand customer behavior and expectations better than most other departments within a company. This allows us to guide the organization as a whole when it comes to process optimization and strategy.

Marketing and Sales, A Natural Match

I’ve been working with one client in the B2C services space, and we’ve had no problem generating leads via paid media. Our cost per lead is efficient, and the quality of these leads is solid when looking at close rate.

However, we were running into an issue getting these leads to actually show up to their booked appointments. Improving show up rate is a task that can fall into a gray area between marketing and sales in some organizations, so that’s why I partnered with this client to bridge the gap.

I analyzed marketing data to understand what tactics were impacting show up rate. I found that leads who opened our marketing emails between their book date and appointment date were significantly more likely to show up to their appointment. This told me that (obviously) just booking the meeting wasn’t enough, we had to continue to communicate with these leads as we moved closer to their appointment dates.

From a marketing perspective I was able to refine our follow up email campaigns, and I partnered with my POC to set up SMS confirmations from a sales perspective so that we could use another channel to increase our chances of getting in front of leads.

As a result, we’ve been able to improve show up rate, overall closed lead volume, and the efficiency of our paid media campaigns has improved without hitting a button in an ad platform.

Using Marketing Insights For Product Development

The biggest challenge I’ve been working on with another client in the B2B SaaS space has been figuring out what type of offer resonates best with their target audience.

We tried the traditional “book a demo” approach, and we tested a free trial, but saw inconsistent performance from both. After digging into their data, and conducting research into buyer expectations, I realized that we weren’t putting in enough effort to build trust and authority with prospects before actually trying to sell the product.

Many SaaS companies try to build trust and authority through eBooks and webinars. These are fairly standard tactics that have jaded the buyer experience. It’s not uncommon to download an eBook then be bombarded with sales emails, or sign up for a webinar only to realize it’s a product pitch in disguise. Even though this client has no intentions of implementing these tactics, buyers are now more apprehensive to those approaches.

This meant we needed to find a new way to authentically connect with prospects.

When going through sales notes and GA4 data, I discovered that this client’s audience often wanted to diagnose their problems, and work on their associated processes before committing to investing in a tool. As a result, I worked with this client to develop a free workshop that serves as a process diagnostic, and allows the client to share some of the best practices that they’ve been able to develop over the past few years.

Even though this workshop is free, it’s still a new product offering that required additional research and strategy behind its development and launch. This new approach will help us to build trust and authority with prospects by flipping the risk-reward ratio in their favor. Potential customers have almost nothing to lose from attending one of these workshops, and can walk away with immediate actionable next steps to improve their current situation.

The goal is that when potential customers are ready to invest in a tool, they’ll look to this client first.

Wrapping Up

Marketing teams can, and (in my opinion) should, partner with other departments to share insights and improve how a business operates.

My own knowledge of my clients’ audiences allowed me to share a customer-oriented perspective with departments like sales and product. These exercises are aimed at helping both organizations continue to grow.

Even if your work as an agency or freelancer is technically scoped for just paid media/marketing, sharing these ideas can help to provide more value to clients, and position yourself as a true partner to their business.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.