The next step to building out your 2022 marketing strategy is understanding how your marketing efforts interact with your sales efforts to drive revenue.
The goal of marketing is to educate your target market on their pain points, develop a relationship between your target audience and your brand, and hand your sales team smoking hot leads.
These goals are part of a predictable process.
Borrowing a graphic from our friends at HubSpot:
Buyers Journey
A potential customer realizes that they have a problem or need.
They start researching the problem to learn more about the issue. In the process, they uncover several potential solutions. The potential customer evaluates those solutions and decides on one.
Later, they reflect on whether their choice solved their problem. If it did, they are likely to use that solution again and recommend the same solution to friends.
(More on the sales funnel here).
Most marketers break those customers into the following groups:
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) – people who make an effort to learn more about your solution.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) – people who are very interested in your solution as the potential cure to their problem.
Customers – individuals who pay for your solution.
Referrers – people who love your solution and go out of their way to suggest your solutions to friends who have the same needs.
MQLs, SQLs, sales, and sales funnels are most commonly referred to in businesses that have a long sales cycle (3+ months).
Businesses with a shorter sales cycle and smaller average order values can still employ this mindset. However, businesses with lower average order values need to focus on how to automate as much of this funnel as possible to make it sustainable in the long term.
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