In last week’s enews, Dominic Pontrelli, Marketing and Strategy Advisor, Pontrelli Marketing, debunked some notions of what marketing is and explained why strategic initiatives are necessary to define objectives before embarking on an effective marketing campaign.
But for many dealers a persistent question remains: “Why invest in marketing?”
Many dealer principals say they are reluctant to invest in marketing because they don’t see a return on investment (ROI). For Pontrelli, this goes back to his earlier point of the common misunderstanding of what marketing is.
“The fact is when you say marketing to 20 different people, you get 20 different answers,” he says. “Most people still define it as activities that are really sales support activities.”
Dominic Pontrelli
Pontrelli says that if you develop a plan of specific tactics to drive the strategic initiatives, you can include key performance indicators (KPIs), wrapped around your marketing campaign. KPIs will not only provide measurable data, they are the most effective way to generate pipeline growth, which is a term used to express a method of connecting sales and marketing data for decision makers.
He uses an example of attempting to sell a new solution to illustrate how the lack of KPIs can lead to wasted efforts.
“In a traditional space, we might plan a customer outing,” he notes. “Was it successful? We say yes because 50 customers show up. But how many leads did we generate? What’s the pipeline? What would be the incremental revenue we achieved based on this activity?”
Pontrelli says that activities like this might generate some leads, but if there is no extensive follow up, everything is lost because there isn’t a mechanism in place to measure whether it was truly worthwhile.
“Did you have the right decision makers there?” he asks. “Or was it just the guys who come to everything to have a nice lunch, but continue to buy only copiers? We don’t know.”
Pontrelli notes that a digital campaign that includes KPIs allows you to see clicks and opens. This way it is possible to see key buyer information through an auto-activity. It will also reveal pipeline growth and, ultimately, revenue growth in strategic areas.
KPIs provide tangible evidence of a marketing investment by demonstrating if specific campaigns have been successful or not. However, Pontrelli warns that, for the most part, many are not currently measuring this way.
The CRM is another tool that can help provide critical information, but it is also one of the most misused, says Pontrelli. Commonly used as a sales tool or for pipeline management and forecasting, Pontrelli says it is really a marketing tool. By managing the lifestyle of a customer, it provides key measurables.
“We want to identify the key markets and we want to input that information into the CRM,” he states. “We want marketing to utilize the CRM to better communicate to customers and prospective customers.”
Another powerful repository for KPIs and other measurable is a website. Pontrelli believes that this is often overlooked in the planning stage. He notes that web developers will always ask the principals to provide their strategy. But if they don’t have one, they will receive a 30,000-foot vision. This means the website will be relatively generic.
“It’s not going to address specific customer pain points or requirements,” cautions Pontrelli. “It won’t speak to the customer, and that’s what the customer is looking for when they go online – they’re looking for solutions to their problems.”
Pontrelli says that a website needs to be a reflection of a strategy and a plan. If properly geared towards the vertical markets or pain points you plan to target or the key solutions you want to offer, it will reflect how you want to be viewed in the market place and ultimately gather specific measurable data to validate your marketing efforts.
“When you have a marketing strategy and a targeted marketing plan, driven by strategic initiatives and supported by measurements, you can positively measure the impact of marketing,” says Pontrelli.
