Marketing "Circle of Life"- How Closed-Loop Marketing Works

Today, most marketers have access to the technology they need to "close the loop" in marketing. The problem is most of them are not taking advantage of it. Reasons often include change, it's too hard, or it's difficult to implement. Often if you want to be an effective an efficient marketer you must be able to tie every dollar, every lead, and every customer back to your initiatives. This will help you find what is and is not working for you. Why spend the money and not track your marketing ROI? Close the loop! 

There are 4 main steps to closed - loop marketing.

1. Centralize - First of all, the best way to begin to close the loop is to have your website be the central station for all things marketing. Even offline campaigns should filter through it as well. It is important to monitor leads through your website so you can trace them back to their original source. One great way to track this is through HubSpot’s marketing analytics tools.

2. Track - Next, you need to track the behavior of your visitors. You can do this by analyzing what type of pages they are looking at, what type of forms they are filling out and what type of content they are downloading. The goal is, that if you optimize this information you will more quickly be able to improve your visitor to lead or visitor to customer conversion rates.

3. Find Out - It’s not only important to know where your visitors are coming from, it is also important to know who they are. The best way to capture information about who a customer is, is to direct your website visitors to a landing page that includes a submission form.

4. Transform - The last step is to figure out how these visits transform into actual sales. This is what it’s all about right? It is important to analyze which one of your marketing channels spoke to your customers the most. This will help you to decide which one to utilize more. You need to take a look at all of the leads that your sales team ended up closing and track them back to their original marketing initiative. This step completes the loop.

So What?

Effective marketers should be able to tie every single lead, customer, and dollar back to the marketing initiative that created them. This is how marketers can prove their worth, and understand how to more efficiently reach their audience.