Turbo Marketing Defined

Marketing: promoting and selling goods and services.

“Marketing the new product will be critical to its success.” Synonyms: promoting, creating awareness, generating interest, creating demand, persuading, advertising, branding.

Turbo Marketing:

Target the right customers with the right promotions. “Our turbo marketing effort qualified the right leads and shortened the sales cycle.”

Synonyms: segmenting and targeting the ideal prospects with messages and promotions that resonate, based on a precise understanding of their needs.

note: accomplished through the use of the right data, tools and supporting technology that helps marketers get a deep and complete understanding of their customers at the account and individual level.

Evolution Of B2B Marketing

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Achieving the highest stage of evolution requires data, analytics and tools that marketers in the first two evolutionary stages don’t have and don’t understand how, or are unable to get.

3 Essential Elements Of Turbo Marketing

If you want to activate turbo marketing, there are three factors to keep in mind.

• Ensuring the data you have about prospects, leads and the accounts to which they belong is as complete as possible.
• Keeping a s teady stream of new leads coming in to fuel the sales engine.
• Extracting insights from the data that help marketing do better segmentation to craft better campaigns and content.

As this guide will discuss, these essential elements of turbo marketing are not possible without the right tools and data. With customer data that is current, complete and accurate, and with the tools to keep it that way and extract insight from it, you can:

• Identify and target the right accounts and the prospects most likely to buy, and
• Understand how to best deliver compelling, personalized and highly relevant messages and offers to them.

Step 1: Completing Your Data

Unfortunately, when marketers function as campaign producers or sales enablers, their efforts are much like a car engine; no matter how high-performing the engine, only a small percentage of fuel actually powers the vehicle forward. Instead, engine inefficiencies, idling and drag steal fuel from its intended use. Without complete data, marketers see their lead generation efforts become wasted energy as data expires or proves insufficient to qualify the lead. Not even the most creative marketing materials or visually appealing websites can overcome the fatal flaw of poor quality and expired data. How bad is this problem? According to MarketingSherpa internal research, up to 50% of new names go bad within 120 days!

Data fuels marketing campaigns. If you use poor quality fuel, you’ll get nowhere. When Turbo Marketing, the ongoing challenge of data quality is met by acquiring data from reliable external sources. By appending acquired data to the marketing list, a lead moves from a partial contact record to a complete profile of a company. As a result, the qualification process for leads moves from a guessing game to an objective and efficient process.

In turn, the sales team doesn’t waste time on leads that don’t fit the buying criteria. The customer experience also improves, because turbo marketers don’t have to ask customers to surrender excessive information through online forms—the acquired data can fill in the blanks. Data acquired from a reliable external source ensures the marketing database is complete, current and accurate.

Step 2: Keeping the Leads Coming

Leads fuel the sales engine, and the B2B sales engine is usually a gas-guzzler with an insatiable appetite for leads. And not just any leads, but leads from named accounts. The organization needs the sales engine to rev, not idle. It’s marketing’s job to keep fuel in the sales tank by regularly collecting new leads, nurturing them to determine who’s qualified and who’s not, and then turning the qualified leads over to sales. It’s not a difficult process to understand, but it has its intricacies and it’s not very agile.

Consider this scenario: it’s two weeks before the end of the quarter. The sales team projects a slight revenue shortfall, so they come to marketing asking for help. “Leads” they say; “We need more leads.” The problem is that marketing can’t just wave a magic wand and instantly conjure up a few hundred, freshly qualified leads from the ideal accounts. It takes some time to structure a campaign, build out the content and gather up the leads that are needed to save the quarter. At least it used to.

Turbo marketers understand that when the parameters and business characteristics of ideal prospects are known, they can acquire smart lists that are already segmented and match exact sales qualification criteria. Acquiring lists and data is a fast path to bringing the right accounts to the table, allowing sales to engage prospects that are highly likely to buy.

Step 3: Analyzing Data

Turbo marketing means extracting insights from data, not simply growing the lead database. When the sales engine is running well, marketing can monitor the gauges and perform analysis to know how to keep it purring. It involves turning data into information, because only then does data become actionable and provide value.

Turbo marketers use analysis tools and techniques to segment their data, identifying pockets of success in order to replicate them and do more precise market planning, finding more of the best customers and knowing which ones are dead-ends. They engineer success rather than relying on luck.

Turbo marketers use data analysis for creating personas, which helps them develop messaging and personalization on an account-by-account basis. As a result, they know better what to say and how to say it. A big barrier to personalization and message development is how little marketing knows about the strategic needs of their accounts. It takes time and effort to research customer needs and strategies. Turbo marketers understand how the right tools enable marketing to take what is often 3 or 4 hours of web research down to just minutes.

4. Golden Rules of Turbo Marketing

1. Target the right customers
2. Gain a deep understanding of them
3. Engage them with relevant information
4. Pass qualified leads to sales and repeat the process

Checklists: Technology Needed For Turbo Marketing

Turbo marketing is impossible to do without the aid of technology. Pinpointing the right customers, understanding them well and getting in front of them with relevant messages is done quickly – and easily – with the right tools and data at hand.

You’ll need:

• Comprehensive and efficient research capabilities for identifying target accounts and understanding their strategic needs.
• A reliable, accurate and comprehensive source of acquired data.
• Powerful and easy-to-use analysis tools to gain insights that drive effective personalization and engagement.

With 2.7 zettabytes* of existing data in the digital universe, it’s a virtual certainty that the data marketers need to help them identify and target ideal customers exists in some digital form. The challenge is finding it efficiently

Marketers rely on search engines to comb the web looking for clues about market segments, industry priorities and characteristics of the ideal customer. The problem is that search engines don’t work the way marketers think. Marketers try to use keywords to locate critical business information, but the search process generates a lot of false positives, as well as false negatives. It’s a tedious process.

To turbo market, a conceptual search engine is needed that uses natural language processing and semantic understanding to search through the world of big data to quickly identify segments, industries, companies and contacts, as well as learn about their priorities. Conceptual search engines enable turbo marketing by reducing hours of research down to just minutes.

* A zettabyte is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Reliable, Accurate And Comprehensive Source Of Acquired Data

The information marketers gather from prospects and customers is normally like having just a few pieces to a jigsaw puzzle; the data doesn’t provide the complete picture. Using a quality source of acquired business data allows turbo marketers to give their data depth by appending details that represent the missing pieces of the puzzle, creating a complete picture of accounts, customers, prospects and markets.

Turbo markers can acquire data to enrich their records with contact, demographic, financial, credit, franchise, corporate, executive or industry information. With a complete, accurate and current set of data, marketers are better able to segment their audience, estimate market potential and build better campaigns that use personalization and more precise messaging.

Acquired data also helps keep existing marketing and sales data fresh by identifying who and what has changed over time, flagging expired data for removal and adding new companies and contacts that have emerged. Turbo marketing relies on acquired data to accomplish more in less time.

Powerful And Easy-to-use Analysis Tools

Most marketers recognize that their data represents a valuable collection of hidden insights. Making those insights visible, however, requires tools and expertise that are rarely found in the marketing department. The most common tool – the venerable spreadsheet – is far from ideal when it comes to analyzing large sets of marketing and sales data to draw out the insights they contain. For turbo marketing, more powerful analytical tools are needed but they can’t require a Ph.D in statistics for them to be used effectively.

The foundation of turbo marketing is the insight gained from using the right analytics tools that can separate the meaningful from the menial. The ability to create and analyze segments, and accounts within segments, to discern the political, economic, social and technological influences that can then drive predictability scores is at the heart of turbo marketing. The insights revealed through powerful yet easy-to-use analysis tools allow turbo marketers to engage customers more effectively through personalized content that better nurtures and converts.