70 Point checklist to get your SaaS digital marketing started.
We have put together 70 points that we think will help you assess what your status is today, where you need to focus and the questions you need to ask to be able to make progress.
The almost nearly perfect 70 point checklist to evaluate your SaaS B2B Digital Marketing needs, benefits & fails.
The 70 point checklist covers:
Is digital marketing right for your business?
So how do I know if I need digital marketing?
What are the key benefits of digital marketing?
Why does digital marketing fail?
Compiling a digital marketing plan
Digital assessment
1). Evaluate what marketing you already do that could be made a digital activity.
2). Forecast the potential gains in time and money from improved lead generation, shortened length of sales cycle, increased intelligence gathering, more cost efficiency,
3). Does your company have the stamina and the culture to undertake a digital transformation project like this?
4). Are you generating a sufficient volume of new and qualified leads to justify a change of approach?
5). Does your sales team feel overwhelmed with the number of leads you’re handing over to them today or are they beginning for more?
6). Is there an alignment between sales and marketing on how to treat leads through your sales funnel?
7). Do you have content marketing material that can be distributed to leads at different stages of the sales funnel?
8). Do you have a buyer persona that you can reference your leads digital behaviour against?
9). Do you have a lead nurturing strategy that works and you can scale larger with more focus and resources?
Is digital marketing right for your business?
10). Have you outgrown your current marketing approach? Are there any gaps in your current structure or lost opportunities?
11). How do you interact with customers – Is it by phone, direct mail, events, meetings or through digital channels?
12). Are you looking to grow your use of new channels shifting your focus to more inbound marketing (social media, blogging, SEO) rather than the traditional outbound marketing?
13). Do you have a sales process that targets individual contacts or do you have corporate deals that require you to interact with multiple people inside the same organisation?
14). What are your SMART goals? Do you want to increase the number of qualified leads handed to sales by how much and by when?
15). How will the digital marketing approach integrate with existing systems? Do you already have some marketing technology in place, (e.g., data bases, social media management, etc.)
16). Does senior management support this initiative – have you presented a compelling case that the benefits of may be new marketing software outweigh the costs involved?
17). Do you have the skill set and staff resources available to manage this project?
18). Consider your company capacity to undertake a project like this, slow at the start and then quick to ramp up – is it a good fit?
19). How will you measure success? Do you use a closed-loop approach to marketing, to assess and analyse the results and make changes where necessary?
20). Have you been realistic about the costs and effort of a digital marketing approach?
So how do I know if I need digital marketing?
21). Your website is not generating leads – even though you are getting a reasonable volume of visitor traffic.
22). You lack the ability to convert website visitors to leads.
23). Your leads aren’t segmented into needs or interests – so you do not know how to approach them.
24). You are not managing which leads to approach with lead scoring.
25). You don’t know where your leads are coming from.
26). You are managing your sales and marketing activities across multiple platforms and systems. and are not consolidating your efforts.
What are the key benefits of digital marketing?
27). Increase organic website traffic.
28). Optimise and prioritise your sales and marketing initiatives.
29). Reduce time spent administering repetitive tasks and increase marketing productivity through digitalisation.
30). Focus on the data analytics from how customers respond to your communication.
31). Improve sales conversion rates.
32). Apply a brand message consistently across all channels.
33). Shorten the sales cycles and improve response and engagement rates.
34). Customise marketing messages for your leads and prospects in the sales funnel.
35). Schedule automated activities for around-the-clock dispatch without manual effort
36). Prevent a leaky sales funnel – with longer sales cycles there are more opportunities to lose a prospect along the way.
37). Increase inbound traffic to your site with increased email click through rates. 38). Enhance your abilities to segment and target your audience.
39). Be able to test what communications work best with a particular buyer persona.
40). Trigger workflows based on behaviour.
41). Send relevant information internally based on a visitors activities to sales.
42). Automate time-consuming, manual tasks and marketing execution.
43). Enhanced ability to generate more and better qualified leads.
44). A unified view of a prospects multichannel behavior and business intelligence.
45). Faster, more effective business decision-making with access to customer insight.
46). Better alignment of sales and marketing efforts.
47). Improved customer retention.
Why does digital marketing fail?
48). Many marketers invest in digital marketing with unrealistic hopes to harvest what small amount of leads they have, but should be focusing on lead generation.
49). Some companies cannot resist buying leads to artificially grow their contact data base. But buying a list means that you are communicating with people who may have no interest in hearing from your brand.
50). Email is one of the most effective tools in the digital marketing “toolbox” but it’s not the only one, so marketers need to understand the preferences and research sources of your buyer person.
51). Lack of skilled resources to manage and execute the digital marketing platform and activities.
52). A contact data base low in quality.
53). Lack of a budget to see the project through or invest in the appropriate marketing or CRM platform.
54). A long lead time from selecting and buying a marketing platform to implementation and seeing the benefit.
55). Lack of marketing content to feed lead generation activities and nurturing once contacts are in the sales funnel.
56). Lack of compatability with incumbent products and systems.
57). No dialogue between sales and marketing on leads for example how to define them, agreeing how to qualify them and how to treat them.
58). The cost of activities for digital marketing or not forecast properly or planned.
59). Onboarding process – the ease of use and adoption of may be a new marketing platform, how long does it take to be proficient at using it.
Compiling a digital marketing plan
60) Identify the customer pain (buyer persona).
61) Develop a Buying journey from Awareness to Decision (all the customer touch points).
61) Undertake individual Customer journey mapping – the good, bad and the ugly of the customer experience.
63) Analyse your sales and marketing funnel (theoretical stages of how the buyer travels down the funnel)
64) Identify the triggers or “hot buttons” on a decision-making path (empathy mapping)
65) Develop your online value proposition to target your buyer persona
66) Understand the google “search intent” of your website visitors
67) Google analytics insights and Keyword research to help organic search and your authority
68) Competitor review
69) Content strategy and planning
70) Conversion path mapping
Take Away:
Digital marketing can fuel business growth. If you need help to assess where your lead generation programme is heading reach out, we are always happy to help.
Read our latest blogs:
- Getting your holiday cottage or cabin ready for summer.
- A celebration of colour from NORDISK PREPPER.
- Shortening the B2B sales cycle with inbound marketing
- How to shorten a complex technology sales cycle by wearing your customers shoes …
- A 7x point plan to turn your SaaS start-up into a marketing rockstar …
