Contact Candyce Edelen to learn more about our marketing coaching service and decide whether it would be a help to your team.
Financial Services Content Marketing and Content Strategy
B2B Marketing Coaching Program
With so much on their plates, many B2B technology marketing departments are so resource-challenged that thinking about strategy seems like a luxury. The frenetic pace of business means succumbing to the tyranny of the urgent. Heads of marketing must settle on hastily-crafted tactical plans and move on to the next item on the to-do list. They know that having a solid marketing strategy would really move the needle, but there's just not enough time in the day. Then there's the disconnect with Sales.
What if you could have an ally who could help you think through strategy, with the experience to get you on the same page as the sales team?
PropelGrowth offers coaching for tech companies looking for help developing and executing a marketing strategy. This service is ideal for small and medium-sized firms with small marketing departments. Our coaching clients are working with tight marketing budgets, collaborate directly with the executive and sales teams, and use in-house resources for most of their marketing efforts.
We begin by meeting with your heads of marketing and sales, CEO and other strategic decision makers to discuss the company’s goals, target markets, sales strategy, competitive issues, and marketing needs. From that, we develop a coaching plan and hold weekly sessions with marketing to help in developing and implementing a marketing strategy aligned with the company goals. We have regular check-ins with the executive and sales teams to make sure we're staying on track with the evolving business strategy.
Marketing coaching is available on a monthly retainer with an annual contract. Candyce Edelen does the majority of coaching, bringing in other specialized experts when needed.
Buyer Personas
Our coaching process relies heavily on buyer research, because understanding your customers is essential to effective marketing. We will help you do effective persona research including online research and extensive interviews with clients, lost deals, non-customers, and early stage prospects. The goal of the interviews is to develop a better understanding of your target market’s business issues, buying process, influencers, key performance indicators, and decision points. Based on these interviews, we’ll help you prepare composite buyer personas and develop a persona-based marketing strategy.
Improved Messaging
If your content has typically focused on features, we can help you focus on the business problems and solutions. We will help you make your messaging more customer-centric.
Read more about customer-centric marketing
Learn why Marketing must be compulsively customer-centric
Competitive Positioning
Many companies struggle to understand exactly where they fit in the competitive landscape. We help with online research, interview your competitors, even reach out to interview their clients. This can help your organization get a deeper and more accurate sense of your competitive positioning.
Not only does the competitive intelligence help marketing messaging, it also helps you get a better sense of deals where you’re not likely to win, helping to limit the resource drain and disappointment of late stage losses.
Read about creating a competitive strategy canvas.
Read a case study about a competitive analysis project for a coaching client.
Loss Analysis
Loss analysis is extremely valuable to marketing and sales. Interviewing buyers from lost deals help us refine your competitive positioning, gain clarity into the buying process, and identify internal objections that may not have surfaced in the sales process. The results of these interviews are vital to improving both marketing and sales effectiveness.
Check out a loss analysis case study.
Find tools to reduce your "No Decision" loss rate.
Target Markets
In many cases, financial technology firms target too broadly, resulting in a lack of focus; or too narrowly, resulting in limited market opportunity. We can help you focus on your best addressable market and identify untapped areas of opportunity. This will help to better target marketing and sales efforts.
Thought Leadership
The goal of thought leadership is to establish your team as trusted advisers and thought leaders in your space. We will help you identify areas where your organization has extensive expertise and aid you in developing a thought leadership program that highlights this experience.
Read more about thought leadership’s role in content marketing.
Understand the difference between thought leadership and content marketing.
Lead Generation
We use a process we call “Using Every Part of the Buffalo” to develop a year-long lead generation program. We’ll help you develop a “Buffalo Content Program” including articles, blog posts, press announcements, infographics, email campaigns, online events and live events. We also facilitate the publication, syndication, and promotion of this content, tracking its effectiveness and adapting as needed to improve outcomes.
Read a white paper on creating a 1-year lead generation program on a tight budget.
Hear a real customer talk about how we created and deployed a real-world lead generation program.
Outbound Marketing
In many cases, financial technology providers are surfaced by buyers via word-of-mouth. Outbound Marketing helps build this awareness. It encompasses trade shows, speaking engagements, webinars, company hosted events, email marketing, and direct mail. These tactics can be expensive, so we help you evaluate and select the outbound opportunities that are most likely to deliver desired results.
Read more about optimizing outbound marketing.
Consider the advantages of hosting a live round-table event for your target audience.
Inbound Marketing
We can help you define and execute inbound and content strategies including blogging, social media, content marketing, thought leadership, content syndication, PR, search and online advertising, video and online events to help ensure that your site is found when people are looking for solutions.
Read more about inbound marketing.
Read more about integrating inbound and outbound marketing.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a methodology that enables you to target specific people at specific accounts to attract engagement, help your sales team gain more traction, and improve the chances of closing key accounts. For key target accounts, we’ll help you achieve the following:
- Define account-specific business problems and business/technical needs
- Identify the specific people who are likely to be involved in the decision process and categorize by persona
- Define persona messaging needs
- Develop /re-purpose messaging and content targeted to each persona
- Create an email series with 5-8 unique emails for each persona
- Obtain contact information for each member of the decision committee
- Set up an account-specific nurturing campaign in your marketing automation system
- Launch campaign and measure engagement
- “Rinse and repeat” with another target account
Note: This will be resource-intensive for the first account, but once we develop a process, you will be able to add more accounts in a fairly fluid manner.
Read about reducing your no-decision loss rate.
Find out whether account-based marketing is right for your firm.
Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing
We can help you develop lead nurturing campaigns that engage prospects through their buying process, helping them:
- Understand their business needs
- Identify possible solutions
- Answer questions
- Build internal consensus
- Make a decision that favors your company
We guide you in the process of creating content and programs specific to each stage in the customer buying process.
Read more about lead nurturing.
Learn to support the 4 stages of the technology buying process.
Sales Process and Pipeline Management
The ability to measure marketing effectiveness is closely tied to sales process and pipeline management. We can help you tie the marketing efforts directly to sales in order to track conversions at each stage in the customers’ buying process so you can see deals progressing and get an accurate view into marketing's contribution to the sales pipeline.
We can also help align the sales process with the client buying process. This allows sales to establish objective, customer-centric criteria for tracking deal stages that make forecasting more accurate.
Read more about how buyers create a shortlist.
Read more about lead conversion rates.
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