Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 3

The Advanced Guide

In the last article, “Why Should My Business Use Immersion? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, I introduced you to the many ways that Immersion is able to guide your business on the path to increased revenue. While every marketing and sales effort has its pros and cons, when it comes to Immersion marketing efforts, there are a few things you should make yourself aware of in order to set yourself up for success.

“Be committed to excellence. Listen and respond better than anyone else. Aim to earn trust, not ‘followers.’” — Glen Gilmore ( FORBES Top 20 Social Media Influencer) @GlenGilmore

What Should I Watch Out For With Regards To Immersion?

In this article, I will cover…

#1 Common Misconceptions Marketers Make

#2 Common Misconceptions Sales Make

#3 A Quick Checklist

#4 Mistakes Made When Measuring Immersion Marketing

Let’s go for it…

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#1 Common Misconceptions Marketers Make

In order to execute marketing campaigns successfully, marketing teams should be aware of certain misconceptions they may be making in their efforts that could be hurting their chances of success.

I Only Need To Run Campaigns On One Platform

No matter whether you’re allocated a large or small budget to execute your marketing campaigns, there is always a way to allocate resources across the various channels to ensure that you are using as many of them to reach your potential customers as possible. As mentioned in my previous article, true marketing success comes from being anywhere and everywhere your customers are online.

This Includes:

• Display: This can include platforms such as Google AdWords Display or Gmail networks or a platforms like AdRoll
• Search: This should always include Google AdWords Search, and depending on your strategy, Search sites like Bing or Yahoo
• Social: This may include sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and more, depending on where your target audience is online, and what you are trying to achieve

I Only Need To Run One Kind Of Marketing Campaign

Whether you are running a display, search or social campaign, you never want to limit yourself to a single campaign type. It may be tempting to run a lead generation campaigns only, but this limits your brand’s’ efforts in terms of expanding its reach or increasing its recognition. You may think that you only want to run an engagement driving campaign, again, no, because you will be limiting yourself and the opportunities available to you on the marketing platforms.

As a brand you are always looking to maximize traffic to your website, increase your brands’ awareness to your target audience, drive engagements, generate leads and make sales. But realistically, you need a combination of campaigns in order to be successful. This does not necessarily mean that you have to run a number of different campaigns types on one platform however. For example you could run an engagement campaign on social, a lead generation campaigns on search, a brand awareness campaign on display, and the list goes on.

In truth, whether your brand is only focused on achieving a single marketing goal or not, you want to be closing the loop in your marketing efforts so that you can be getting the maximum results from your efforts — and that will only happen if you make use of every tool at your disposal, both paid and organic.

See how brands like Hollard increased their conversion rates across all pages to improve their overall ROI by 588%by reading their success story here.

I Can Measure Immersion Campaigns The Same As The Rest

Most brands assume that all marketing efforts can be measured in the same way, by the number of sales or leads generated. This simply is not true. Each type of campaign you run, and the different platforms you use has an impact on determining the metrics you should be monitoring in order to determine success.

The Most Common Metrics For Typical Campaigns

• Lead Generation Campaigns — The number of physical leads sent through from marketing efforts in relation to page engagements and visitors
• Brand Awareness Campaigns — The number of times the message was seen, by how many people and how often each person has seen it
• Engagement Campaigns — The number of engagements an ad has received in relation to the people that the ad has been served to
• Traffic Driving campaigns — The number of people who have visited your website or landing page

As you can see, not all campaigns lead to a sale, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve with your efforts. You need to be realistic about what your campaigns can do for your brand before you implement them to ensure that you are making use of the right benchmarks, metrics, campaign types and platforms to set you up for success.

#2 Common Misconceptions Sales Make

In order to increase their sales efforts and results, sales teams should be aware of certain misconceptions they may be making in their efforts that could be hurting their chances.

Marketing Needs To Close Leads That Come In

While marketing efforts may drive leads towards the sales funnel, their efforts alone cannot convert those leads into paying customers. It is true that marketing efforts attract the audience’s attention and keeps is as sales moves them along the funnel, but the sales team moves these prospects actively from point A to point B, turning them into customers in order for both departments to see positive ROI.

Think of this as the steps taken when building a house.

• Both departments decide on what the house should look like and how it should be finalized
• Marketing lays the foundation from which the rest of the house can begin to be built. If the foundation is faulty, the house will eventually crumble
• Sales begins to build the house, working from the ground up
• Marketing assesses the work being done and its impact on the foundation, and works with sales to ensure the house is structurally sound
• Sales applies the finishing touches to the house,getting it ready to be lived in or sell
• Both teams take a share of the profits and celebrate their success

As you can see, neither builder nor planner can succeed on their own, teamwork is key to building a beautiful structure that the development company can be proud of and turn a profit from.

I Don’t Need To Do Outreach

Without outreach, not only will you be leaving the future of your leads’ progression down the funnel in the hands of the prospects themselves, but you will be setting up your efforts to fail. No matter how many times marketing successfully Immerses your prospects in your brands’ message, they still need that little push that sends them over the edge.

Many research studies have found that you need to reach your customers via a number of different touchpoints, whether you are part of a sales or marketing team. The more touchpoints you include in your outreach activity, the higher your chances of closing those leads. We go over a few sales outreach techniques in our publication, so why not take a look by beginning with this article, “Does Email Marketing Still Work? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”, and check back regularly for more resources for sales professionals.

It has been tried tested and proven that a combination of marketing, whether Immersion marketing or more traditional strategies, and sales outreach leads to increased success. And that’s all every company is looking to achieve — success.

I Don’t Need To Tell Marketing What I’m Doing

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. Teamwork. Teamwork. Teamwork.

If one hand knows not what the other is doing, they will both be entering the ring blind. Each sales team has their own way of conveying the benefits of their brands’ products and services to their prospects, they have their own ideas of what their customers need and what they respond to. It is for this reason that sales should be conveying these ideas to their marketing teams to ensure that what marketing is putting out there matches what you are saying to your audiences in your outreach efforts or in meetings. Without aligning these two departments, one of them may be under promising or overpromising what the prospects can expect from another, which can eventually cause chaos.

#3 A Quick Checklist

Here is a quick checklist of ideas that may help you increase your chances for Immersion marketing success.

A Checklist For Marketers

• Have a clearly defined target audience
• Segment your audience based on their stage in the sales funnel, then by common characteristics that will help you market to them better
• Analyse your audience segments to get an idea of what will appeal to them or be off-putting
• Create relevant ads that aren’t only appealing, but appeal to your customer’s needs
• Use a combination of different advertising platforms to increase your reach to your audiences online
• Focus your resource for each audience base on match rates
• Regularly update your audience lists so that you are always targeting them with the right message for that funnel stage
• Monitor your each and engagement levels to optimize your ad scheduling
• Optimize and rotate your ads every month with a slight change to avoid ad fatigue
• Don’t get disheartened if your campaigns do not result in engagements — that’s not your goal
• Ensure you have set up proper attribution details to be able to monitor your audiences’ progress and campaign’s performance
• Talk to sales regularly to ensure your messaging aligns with their sales pitch
• Track the correct metrics for your campaign, even if other departments assume that different metrics are needed to be monitored

A Checklist For Sales

• Ensure your pipelines are setup correctly to effectively move prospects through the sales funnel
• Only begin your initial outreach efforts 21 days after Immersion marketing efforts have begun
• Endure that you are able to deliver what your sales pitch promises and what marketing is putting out there
• Create a follow-up outreach schedule to keep on top of your activities
• Inform marketing if there is a change in your sales pitch or if you get feedback from customers
• Update marketing teams with any additional customer or decision-maker details that enter the pipeline late and need to be added to later stages urgently
• Inform marketing which leads have been lost and need to be removed from the marketing list

#4 Mistakes Made When Measuring Immersion Marketing

All brands need to be able to get their message out there and in front of the right audience to achieve success. However, without having a clear strategy or goal in mind, these efforts will not be as effective as hoped. Below are some common mistakes made when measuring Immersion marketing efforts, that your brand should avoid.

1. Not Agreeing On What Immersion Marketing Means To The Company

We have taken you through what Immersion marketing is, but it may still leave people divided on what it actually means for the company. By not agreeing on exactly how you will define your strategies, and how they will be implemented will result in misaligned expectations, and start your efforts off on the wrong foot. All stakeholders need to take the time to agree on the goals set for the campaigns, and how these efforts will be measured.

Some Common Goal Examples For Immersion Strategies

• Immerse “X” number of targeted customers in the brand by “X” date
• Immerse each unique customer in the brand “X” number of times before outreach begins after the 21 day immersion period
• Immerse “X” number of targeted customers on “X” platform, and “X” number of targeted customers on “X” platform by “X” date
• Use budget of ”X” to gain “X” amount of brand awareness in “X” amount of time

2. Trying To Use All The Available Metrics To Measure Immersion Efforts

Trying to use every metric possible to measure Immersion efforts makes it likely that your campaign will do a lot of different things only okay, and stakeholders will be misinformed on the actual results achieved by the campaign. As mentioned in previous articles in the series, Click-Through Rates and conversions mean little for an Immersion campaign. In terms of your report, the key metrics to focus on and stand behind are Impressions, Reach and Frequency. All stakeholders should be made aware that these metrics will be used to report on the campaign beforehand, in order to manage expectations and avoid the “But why aren’t our conversion numbers shown here?” question.

3. Using Conversion Metrics To Measure Success

Every brand’s goal is to increase their conversion numbers, but those metrics should be measured in terms of Lead Generation, Traffic Driving or Engagement campaigns. The chance that prospects are going to hear about your brand for the first time and decide to convert right there is very unlikely, so you shouldn’t measure the success of your Immersion campaigns on this metric. You should definitely monitor your efforts campaigns to see if they’re contributing to conversions — direct or indirect — but using direct conversions as the sole short-term success metric can set you up for failure.

4. Expecting Quick Results

I have stated that a successful Immersion campaign should be in effect at least 21 days before sales implements its outreach process, and should continue long thereafter as the targets move across the sales funnel. One of his biggest takeaways is that companies have unrealistic expectations. Most companies get discouraged when they launch their first campaign and it doesn’t take off immediately.

However, any kind of marketing effort can be hard. It can take a lot of creativity, testing, and failures to get it right. Immersion campaigns are no exception. This is especially true when you first start out because you have not yet established a rapport with prospects or have managed to build brand trust. All of this is built up over time. Achieving big results right off the bat isn’t common. So stick it out and continue to track the aggregate results of all your campaigns before you decide to jump ship for another strategy.

“It’s time to go where your buyers live: online.” — Jamie Shanks ( CEO of Sales for Life) @jamietshanks

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In this series of articles, I have tried to introduce you to the concept of Immersion and what it can mean for your business in terms of sales and marketing efforts. I hope that you’ve found this article set useful and start thinking about implementing some of these strategies in your efforts.

Thank you for reading these articles. We are constantly adding and updating our publication, Inside Revenue, to bring you more articles on various topics that can help your business achieve sales and marketing success. So keep checking back for more and be sure to clap for this article set if you enjoyed the read!