You’ve secured investment, now what?

You can still hear the echoes of the champagne corks popping but you know the real work lies ahead. Any business that’s been through rounds of investor pitches, meticulously prepared presentations and hundreds of handshakes to successfully secure investment, knows that feeling of celebratory relief. When you’ve been focussed on securing the money for so long it’s hard to shift to the next phase. Your strategy is clear…in theory. And now someone else believes you can do it too, which presents a new pressure, living up to the pitch.

How do you ensure you make your budgets work as hard as possible, so you can deliver the profitability your investors need to see and achieve your predicted growth?

Start with a solid self-appraisal

You’ve likely got a very strong idea or product to sell, some great market insight and a formidable sales strategy. What do you think will be the hardest part of your strategy to get right? Are you struggling to distil the benefits of your product into a targeted marketing strategy? Maybe you need help reaching decision makers. It’s worth thinking about this at the outset. If you’re in the SaaS industry, for example and the bulk of your time and expertise has been focussed on developing your software, it’s going to be a steep learning curve for your team in areas where your strategy demands immediate excellence in sales or marketing. Look at your budget and make some decisions about buying in expertise. Working with experts who can nail your brief and give it the time and attention it deserves, will save you money in the long run.

Don’t limit your own success

Maybe you really are the best person to do it all, but think of the scale of the opportunity. Do you have time to do everything? Or, will you free up valuable diary space if you carefully outsource elements that you believe you could oversee with a guiding hand? Think about where your money and your time are best spent. If you’re the face and the voice of the business, you’ll eventually need to relinquish some of the day-to-day.

Build your supplier network

A trusted supplier is genuinely worth their weight in gold. They can give you a steer on where to allocate budget and where you’ll get the most return on investment, provide a valuable sounding board for any ideas or concerns you may have and genuinely look out for opportunities on your behalf. Good suppliers are an extension of your team, bridging that gap in knowledge and expertise and working with you collaboratively to achieve mutual success. They won’t sell you anything you don’t need but instead make even the tightest budget align with your business aims.

You can be ambitious and realistic

When it comes to your business, there’s nothing wrong in thinking big. We’re living in an age of business insight, if you’ve got an ambitious target in mind you can work out what your conversion of leads needs to be to achieve your goals. A trusted supplier can advise of typical conversion rates and how they’ve achieved this for their other clients, giving you an educated idea of what’s realistic for your business and your timescales.

At Air Marketing, we’re experienced in working with clients to maximise their outsourcing budget to achieve their business objectives. We’ve worked with businesses at every point in their journey to leverage the best return on investment for budgets that need to deliver results. We work with clients to create a tailored, blend of services that will deliver the best conversion rates in their desired market. If you’d like to hear more about how we can help your business grow or show you how we’ve helped businesses from all sectors achieve success. Get in touch today, call us on 0345 241 3038. Or hear more from our existing customers here.

Outsourcing your demand generation, everything you need to know

Demand generation demystified

Demand generation is exactly what you’d think, generating demand for a business’s products and services. Where it differs from lead generation is that it’s a long-term, nurturing approach that takes prospects on a journey, moving them from interesting browser to converted buyer. As prospects move through the funnel towards becoming customers, an integrated marketing and sales approach is used to ensure they remain engaged and are targeted with timely relevant content. The upshot, marketing activities can be focussed on delivering quality leads to sales teams that are much more likely to convert. Prospects that aren’t ready to buy today remain under marketing’s watchful expert eye, targeted with relevant messaging designed to maintain the relationship and influence a future purchase.

What’s involved?

Demand generation encompasses all marketing activities from brand building, tactical campaigns, social and digital efforts to targeted email marketing, what makes it distinct from traditional marketing programmes is that all activities build and nurture key relationships for the long term and closely influence the sales cycle.

Why invest the time and effort when I can reach out using lead generation activities on ad hoc basis?

Lead generation, done well, is a vital part of any successful sales strategy, but consider the following: Only 3% of your market is actively buying. 56% are not ready, 40% are poised to begin (source: Vorsight). And 63% of consumers requesting info on your company today will not purchase for at least 3 months (source: Marketing Donut). This makes every interaction a valuable touch-point and an opportunity to convert prospects down the line and importantly, one that can’t be wasted.

But my marketing team are delivering stacks of leads, why would I outsource demand generation?

79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of nurture is the main cause for this (source: Marketing Sherpa). Research shows that targeting users with content relevant to where they are in the buying process achieved 73% higher conversion rates (source: Aberdeen).

Delivering content that’s relevant to where your prospect is positioned in the buying cycle is the most effective way to achieve conversion. Unless you have a full roster of content specialists in your team, it’s a tall order to expect your in-house resource to design and implement demand creation strategies that deliver immediate results. Producing high-quality leads is the number one challenge that B2B marketers face (source: Hubspot) and, with nearly 7 in 10 marketers still unable to identify their funnel (source: Marketing Sherpa) it makes sense to on-board a partner that has deep expertise in delivering results focussed demand creation strategies into businesses. There’s no need to do away with what’s already in place, often these programmes can work in partnership with the existing marketing plans to leverage existing best practice and content.

Why Roots to Market?

At Roots to Market, we build intelligent marketing capabilities using a mixture of proven marketing tactics to reach your target audience and produce marketing qualified leads for your sales team. We offer tailored, blended services of inbound and direct marketing, automation and complete tactical campaigns, dependent on clients’ needs. If you’d like to talk more about how we can drive tangible results from your demand generation strategy, get in touch today on 01392 796 702.

My 5 Tips to Personal Development

I started my journey with Air Marketing back in 2018 as a Business Development Executive. I really enjoyed the role, the culture and the opportunities that were clearly available from this position. But I was hungry for growth and I knew I wanted to develop my career, within the first year I quickly excelled and was rewarded with the management of my first account. I was thrilled by this opportunity to really show what I was made of and also to give the client the best experience of working with Air.

Fast forward to today, just over a year later and I’m stepping into one of just three Account Manager roles, with my sole focus to deliver ROI for our ever-growing client base.

I wanted to share with you how I got here, so these are my 5 focus areas:

Training

I’m a huge believer in achieving anything, if you’re willing to learn and open to change. Within my time at Air I’ve had the opportunity to learn from various senior team members and taken part in some fantastic training sessions. These have been vital to my progression as it doesn’t feel like I have ever stopped learning. My favourite training was a Time Management session run by our in-house Learning and Development Co-ordinator. It taught me how to balance my workload and keep stress levels under control, which is vital in a fast pace, high performance environment like Air.

Feedback

I may be a Gen Z; however I don’t agree with snowflake culture that the generation has been tarred with. I value and really take on board feedback from those more knowledgeable both inside and outside of work to aid my professional development. Sometimes the feedback has been negative, but I always feel you can take learnings and constructive criticism from these moments. Being in sales I have a tough skin anyway!

Honesty

Yes, honesty. I’ve always taken the approach of transparency with my colleagues and clients. It’s something that fits well in our culture and something we pride ourselves on at Air. You can’t lie when it comes to statistics and data. If you’re honest with clients this will create a strong and respectful relationship for the future.

Creative thinking

A large proportion of my role is process driven, with this we see consistency of delivery and of results. However, you need to be one step ahead in account management. This means you need to be thinking of new ideas all the time to keep things fresh. Nine times out of ten your original strategy is going to change, and you will need to adapt to this to keep on the front foot.

Passion

I believe that passion is the biggest thing you need to get to the next step. I love what I do, and I am lucky to work in a culture that nurtures that passion and ignites it even further. Being dedicated to reach your goal is important and it is this drive and dedication that will see you become successful.

I’m looking forward to everything 2020 has in store in my new role, working with more fantastic clients and achieving great results for them. If you’re interested in joining Team Air, visit our careers page or call 0345 241 3038.

Opinion piece by Gracie-May Bryan, Account Manager at Air Marketing Group