Use Closed Loop Marketing To Target Efforts, Shorten Sales Cycle

Inbound marketing shouldn’t be an experiment in which you throw random ideas at the wall to see what sticks. It should be a targeted strategy based on providing prospective customers with the precise information they want, when they want it.

Bring your marketing efforts into a tighter focus by using closed loop marketing to tie specific customers back to individual marketing channels. The automated responses and reporting created by closed loop marketing systems both proves the ROI of your marketing efforts and informs your ongoing marketing strategy with hard data.

More specifics on how closed loop marketing works can be found here: Take a Scientific Approach to Your Marketing.

With closed loop marketing, you gain insights about your target audience that you can use to avoid wasting energy on the wrong offers and shorten your sales cycle.

How to use closed loop marketing to gain target audience insights

With its ability to track individual prospects from the time they enter your lead nurturing system through to a finalized sale, closed loop marketing provides a complete look at the characteristics of each customer. By the time a deal is complete, you know what type of company they work for, what size, what their job title is, what solution they were seeking, and what solution they ultimately settled on.

More importantly, you know their complete path to becoming a customer.

The basic information and characteristics can be used to develop or refine your buyer personas, now based on actual data about customer demographics and online behavior.

Analyzing the path that prospects follow, from how they first encounter your site (Search? Email marketing? Social media? Referral from another customer?) to their final decision to buy can show you how customers with those characteristics may typically behave online.

How many times do they visit your site? In what order do they access your inbound marketing offers? Which offers are most likely to indicate a readiness to buy?

All of these answers can be used to more directly target your marketing efforts, from content creation and promotion to lead nurturing.

How to use audience insights to shorten the sales cycle

Closed loop marketing insights can shorten your sales cycle by guiding your lead nurturing efforts. Market2Lead has found that nurtured leads have a 23 percent shorter sales cycle. (Click to Tweet)

Your closed loop marketing insights can show you the trajectory followed by one or more leads on their way to become customers. You can then apply that pathway to your lead nurturing workflow for leads who match that particular demographic or buyer persona.

Your automated emails would follow a lead nurturing workflow offering each lead a series of related content that has already been shown to be successful in guiding prospects through the sales funnel.

The insights from your closed loop marketing feedback will also show what actions customers have typically taken just before they are ready to purchase (such as visiting your website’s pricing page). You could set up your lead nurturing and customer management systems to trigger an alert when leads take that action that would then prompt a lead qualification contact to determine if that prospect is ready to transition to sales.

Closed loop marketing can also:

• Improve sales effectiveness
• Improve marketing analytics
• Identify holes in your content strategy
• Link keywords to profits

Learn how to use closed loop marketing for all these purposes in An Introduction to Closed Loop Marketing, and put the information you need for better marketing and more sales at your fingertips.