Lower Your Lead Generation Costs by Rebalancing your Marketing Budget

To effectively engage customers in this digital age, you need to support their buyers’ journey. Supporting this journey will require content distribution and authoring strategies that help your field teams connect with customers in a more human way. As marketers, we are all trying to get leads. Except budgets and teams are not growing. So, marketers must produce more with less. How can marketing budgets be stretched to deliver growth while reducing the cost of acquiring new customers?

Traditional budget allocation is heavily focused at the enterprise level. Content is created by the enterprise and broadcasted to all customers and potential clients. As we discussed in our previous article, Three Opportunities Enterprise Marketers are Missing Out On, This means that micro-segments and customers in local markets are less engaged with the content. Those missed opportunities include personalized email engagement, hyper-localized content, and the customers to connect with advisors.

Rebalancing the marketing budget to have a larger focus on distribution will empower field employees. Using a content distribution platform, enterprises can access the field to leverage them for marketing efforts. This allows messaging to reach a larger number of customers that will be provided better value and results in stronger engagement.

By empowering advisors allows for the engagement activities closer to the clients and prospects. By doing so, advisors will be able to create valuable personalized content that is relevant to local markets. When financial advisors are actively involved in the distribution of marketing content there is significant growth in online engagement and more qualified leads for the advisor. So why aren’t more companies implementing this kind of strategy and rebalancing for favor distribution?

1. They couldn’t if they wanted too.
2. Platform vendors aren’t developing this strategy. The major vendors are designed for the head office marketing teams. These vendors cannot provide these platforms to all their field agents, both because it would be too costly, and it wouldn’t allow to ensure compliance and brand consistency.
3. It’s hard to break tradition
4. As mentioned, budgets are small, and requirements of marketers are growing. So, changing up is “working” can be worrying.
5. Fear of change
6. Changing the way funds are allocated can cause fear for marketers. As shifting around budgets and implementing new processes and platforms will involve other major stakeholders. The new changes will need to be justified as a better approach than the traditional budget.  

Who is Doing This Already?

While most organizations know the importance of providing valuable content to their customers. However, fewer companies have implemented the proper tools to leverage a successful distribution strategy. Some of these companies include RBC, American National, UBS, Mortgage Master, Manulife, CIBC, Morgan Stanley, and others.

With the realization of this problem and the opportunity that exists, what can you do? First, begin by re-examining your marketing budget. Where can distribution benefit you? Than explore possible vendors and run a pilot to test your new thesis. Remember, not all vendors are created equal, while the goal may be similar, certain platforms focus on social media, emails, legacy systems, or integrated solutions. Finally, find a vendor that offers internal distribution platforms that best suits your needs.Our product, Digital Agent is one of the platforms that allows enterprise marketers to achieve that distribution strategy and empower advisors while ensuring content and brand compliance.We hope you find the platform that will allow you to transform your advisor marketing programs. If you wish, we’d love to speak with you further about how you can lower your cost for lead generation.