To put it in layman terms, forensic marketing provides you with all the evidence that points you precisely towards which of your marketing strategies and tactics is not functioning as it should. Read on to learn about the instrumental role of forensics in the marketing landscape.
The Need for Forensics in Marketing
Forensics is not just limited to the marketing domain. For example, forensics plays a pivotal role in the realm of Medicine. Forensic Medicine assists in pinpointing the irregularities in medical treatments that general patients have to subject themselves to. Patient response is used to gauge these irregularities.
Similarly, forensic accounting aids you in identifying accounting inconsistencies in standard records and practices.
As you are likely to observe, the common denominator between these fields is that they all identify inconsistencies, disparities, and irregularities. Take a minute and envisage the results you will achieve if you integrate forensics into your business’s marketing endeavors! If you go about it the right way, there is nothing stopping you from accomplishing enormous revenue growth for your business.
Using a forensic approach to assess your current marketing efforts is pretty straightforward.
What goes down is that your company provides a comprehensive solution for a bunch of individuals. This group is your target audience. You want to gain maximum visibility in front of this audience so that they are privy to your solution. You also want to convince and influence them so that they become a client of yours. This is where forensic marketing comes into play. At the end of the day, it is all about converting insights into actionable steps that your business can take to fulfill (and at times surpass) their goals.
Here is how forensic marketers analyze current marketing efforts using forensics to expose potential areas of opportunity.
Is it Easy to Locate Your Business?
Currently, people are on the lookout for organizations that are similar to yours. They are looking at other websites, search engines, reputable review sites, and various social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.). Your business must be easy to locate in all of the above-mentioned places. What you need to do is to begin looking around by yourself. Make yourself believe that you do not have any prior knowledge and do your research like how a novice would do.
As a case to point, clients always tell forensic marketing experts that they want their business to show up for a couple of critical keywords. Upon doing the research, it turns out that most of the individuals who are searching are not using those particular keywords. These people are using different keywords, which less experienced folks would be using. Hence, you need to begin looking around!
Can people easily find you on social media channels, search engines, and related sites such as publication websites? If “No” is the answer to this question, you should reach out to an expert in the forensic marketing realm who will help you to identify why your online presence is limited and what you can do to solve this problem.
What are the Chances of Lead Conversion on Your Website?
Pretend you are merely a visitor and explore your website. Are there lucrative offers present on your website for those individuals who do not want to reach out to you just yet? Does your website feature web pages targeting people in all stages of their buyer journey? Does your website narrate an impactful emotional story that resonates with potential buyers?
If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, you need to engage a forensic marketer. You should get in touch with one to pitch your suggestions on how to include the important details on your details that you have been missing so far. There are several business websites that look splendid but lack in the core areas, which are extremely vital to generate leads.
The great news is that it is not much of a challenge to upgrade to a well-constructed website that features all the missing pieces. Hence, what you need to do is to collaborate with a partner who can scientifically analyze what your website lacks and then suggest those necessary additions to facilitate you to convert more potential visitors to your website into leads.
Cultivating Leads for Sales Opportunities
Let’s face it, merely 10 percent of your leads are going to convert to sales opportunities from the onset. The majority of these people are going to be in the middle or beginning of their buyer’s journey. They are not too eager at that point to reach out to one of your sales representatives. How you nurture these leads is of paramount importance if you want them to get in touch with you when they are ready to reach out.
For instance, if you scroll down your email inbox, you are likely to come across several emails from individuals whom you do not know at all or have never spoken to. Are the people sending you emails repeatedly? This happens to all of us and is a prime example of a lead nurturing campaign gone terribly wrong. What you need to do instead is to earn their trust and educate them continuously on why they should even mull over going about things differently.
A comprehensive forensic review of your business’s lead nurturing campaign will examine click-through rates, open rates, offer mapping and workflows to identify where your campaign might have fallen apart and how you can enhance it to generate a greater number of opportunities for your sales division.
Cultivating Sales Opportunities to Convert to Customers
For forensic marketing, acquiring a sales opportunity is not the end of the line. The end game is when you get a new client or customer. You need to have a rock-solid sales process if you would like to finish strong.
What you need to do and what your goal should be is to build such a tremendous experience that potential customers would want to tell everyone about it when they enter your sales funnel. A forensic review of your entire sales procedure examines rates of conversion in every one of your present deal stages. It also checks the tools of communication, the precise engagement rates of these tools, and your close rate to identify at what point you might be doing something in the sales process.
This immensely invaluable forensic review generally generates revenue in a matter of weeks since it unveils potential areas that prevent individuals from engaging your services today.
Importance of Data in Forensic Marketing
Data is the crux of forensic marketing. In the current times, we do not arrive at any decisions without adequate data to back those decisions up. This gives us the confidence that we are making the correct decision. More performance metrics (quantitative) then validate that decision.
You might consider your website to be lacking somewhere or realize that it is not producing sufficient leads. What forensic marketing experts will do is that they will examine all the data linked with your site. For example, your site could have a low rate of conversion (0.07 percent instead of 3 percent) or an exceedingly high bounce rate (85 percent instead of the accepted 55 percent). This precious data point to the fact that your website is not generating sufficient top-quality leads for your organization.
Having a thorough knowledge of such metrics aids forensic marketers to focus on prime areas that they can impact swiftly and in a quantitative manner. For instance, including the video component on your website will boost the average time a visitor spends on your website. This, in turn, improves the rankings of the website on Google and various other search engines. By incorporating content into those videos, the conversion rate will go up, and what this translates into is that you will generate more top-quality leads for your business.
Regular Monitoring
Often when you begin an investigation of any sort, it requires regular monitoring. You have to survey just as much as investigate. It is important to note that the answers you seek do not always lie in the data. At times, you will find out these answers in your marketing assets’ live performance.
As a case to point, what do visitors click on when they explore your website? How further down the web page do they scroll before they lose interest? Which specific web pages do they visit after checking out the home page? This kind of behavioral data may not be on hand at the start. However, by gathering this data over a certain period (a couple of weeks approximately), you have further data to strengthen your hypothesis.
Post the initial forensic review, you would also want to monitor a broad array of metrics regularly. Your sales and marketing strategies will modify and evolve with time, so you will have to ensure these modifications have a positive impact on performance.
Utilizing a forensic approach to review your sales and marketing strategies and overall performance is very much about being thorough and comprehensive in your approach. One cannot underestimate or ignore any aspect of the forensic review. There is a strong likelihood that the smallest aspect might generate the biggest results.
The other important component of this forensic marketing review is to know precisely what you have to do after you have successfully determined the challenges and issues of the marketing and sales efforts.
If you are not able to rectify the situation, you will likely generate the same or even poorer results than what you achieved before the forensic review. Your prime objective in the capacity of Vice President of Sales or Vice President of Marketing is to unveil the weak links, correct them, and subsequently optimize the efforts over time.
A forensic marketing review of your present marketing activities and sales procedure assists you to swiftly identify and correct these weak links so you can easily meet your monthly and annual revenue objectives.
Request a complimentary forensic marketing assessment here. It doesn’t hurt to know your numbers.
Final Word
To summarize, the ultimate goal of forensics marketing is to highlight and show the specific areas that are not performing as well as they should and then subsequently showcase the value of enhancing performance in these areas. These enhancements will positively impact the generation of leads, boost the number of sales opportunities, reduce the sales cycle, better the close rate, and better the quality of leads that are streaming in. All of this will ultimately lead to enormous revenue growth across the business.
