Content Marketing Spotlight, Why Closed-Loop Marketing Works

Visualizing Closed-Loop Marketing 

To understand WHY closed-loop marketing works – and it does – you’ll first need a better understanding of HOW it works. In the riveting new Ebook, “An Introduction To Closed Loop Marketing”, presented by SugarBush Inc. President and Inbound Marketer Mark Parent, readers are walked through the process step-by-step.

Here is a sneak peek:

Closed-Loop Marketing Step 1: Visitor Arrives On Your Website

            Cookie is set on the visitor and their source (ie: social media, email, etc.).  

The easiest way to close the loop is to make your website the central hub for all of your marketing. Search engines, social media, email marketing, referral links, paid search, and even offline campaigns should get filtered there. That way, when someone visits your site, you can cookie them and start tracking what they do next.

Closed-Loop Marketing Step 2: Visitor Browses Your Website

            The cookie tracks the visitor’s actions on the website.          

As you attract traffic and identify where that traffic is coming from, you need to track the behavior of your visitors.

This is the entry point of your closed-loop system.

Which pages are they viewing? What are the next actions that they take?

Assign a tracking URL to each marketing campaign with its own specific traffic token at the end of the link, so you can pool and analyze each effort and modality. 

Down the line, this kind of closed-loop marketing intelligence will illustrate a path that can help you optimize for faster visitor-to-lead or even visitor-to-customer conversions.

Closed-Loop Marketing Step 3: Visitor Converts Into A Lead

            The visitor submits a lead capture form.

In order to monetize the traffic you’re getting and send qualified prospects to your sales team, you need to convert those visitors into leads.

More than just knowing where your visitors are coming from, you’ll need to know who they are and trace them back to their entry source.

You can make this happen by sending incoming traffic to landing pages, which are going to enable an information exchange and collect more insights from your visitors.

This is the trickiest part of closed-group reporting: making sure that you can connect a visitor’s session with their lead information once they convert on a form.

To make this work, you’ll need to either have very skilled experts manning the back end of your analytics platform or to start using a piece of software that does this for you.

Closed-Loop Marketing Step 4: Lead Becomes A Customer

            Attributing customer acquisition to the visitor’s original source.

Now it’s time to figure out how these visits actually transformed into sales. Which one of your marketing channels contributed the most customers? Are there ways you can optimize the process for other sources?

Closed-loop marketing enables you to identify the activities that bring in the most (and the least) revenues.

If you’ve set up your process properly, this should be a relatively straightforward process, either with a CRM system or even something as simple a spreadsheet.

Are you interested in learning more about how to close the loop between marketing and sales?

Download the Ebook “An Introduction To Closed-Loop Marketing” now!