Let’s talk turkey. It’s a Thanksgiving joke and a business phrase that more marketers should take to heart. It means, let’s get to the meat of it, or get to the heart of the matter.
This phrase supposedly comes from an old story of a Native American and a European who went hunting together. When the time came to split the game, the European offered, “You may have your choice: you take the crow, and I’ll take the turkey; or, if you’d rather, I’ll take the turkey and you take the crow.” The Native American was wise to the deception, and made a comment that the European man wasn’t “talking turkey.”
This tale seems typical of the European settlers. They didn’t talk turkey very often to the natives, but apparently did on that first Thanksgiving. Marketers can be the same way when talking to executives, sharing the convenient numbers and avoiding the critical but unflattering ones.
Don’t worry, this Thanksgiving, we’ll be talking turkey and how to bring it home in the remaining business days of 2017.
Get More Leads
You need to keep growing your database, otherwise you will find your database shrinking by 22.5% each year.
You must maintain your data quality and prepare for some natural lead loss by constantly filling your pipeline.
This can be achieved through both inbound lead generation and outbound lead generation. A blend of both is recommended. For inbound think organic social media, blogging, videos, etc. For outbound, think retargeting campaigns, engagement data, and more.
Keep the top of your funnel full and you’ll find that the bottom of your funnel yields more conversions as well.
Create Actionable Content
Don’t get bogged down creating content that doesn’t interest and inspire your audience. You are wasting your time and theirs.
Get leads to gobble up your content by giving them a slice of their industry’s most valuable knowledge. Then make them want to act on it. Be sure to include another action for users to take on every piece of content you create.
Each time you get a lead to act, the more likely they are to continue taking actions in favor of your brand. This is through the phenomena of confirmation bias, wherein your brain tries to justify every action to itself. It does this through a tendency to take in all stimuli as a confirmation of one’s beliefs or ideas.
The action you ask leads to take varies depending on where they are in the funnel.
At the top, ask leads to keep reading beyond the first page of content. Give them a handful of tantalizing options to do so.
A bit further down, ask leads to sign up for your email list or to follow you on a social media platform.
From there, send them emails that ask them to click through to some of your posts or other valuable information.
Later in the funnel, see if they are interested in some of your premium content, in the form of ebooks and white papers. Give them these valuable assets in exchange for just a little more information on themselves and their company.
Eventually, offer the most premium of your content: your software, your services, etc. By the time you ask the lead for this, they will have taken countless actions related to your brand, which means they are more likely to buy from it.
Each action reinforces the bond between your brand and the lead, much like the bonding that occurs in families as they sit down and share Thanksgiving dinner.
Pass Leads to Sales
When leads are getting close to purchase, make sure that you have an efficient and reliable process for transferring leads to Sales. Maybe the lead is ready to buy today, but the sales rep doesn’t call him for three days. By then, the lead found what he needed from a competitor.
Don’t mess up the conversion on the pass over. On Marketing’s side, ensure that the sales rep knows what the lead has engaged with and if/when they indicated they wanted to make a purchase. On Sales’ end, ensure that reps prioritize who they follow up with and that there is a procedure in place for putting cooler leads back into marketing.
That’s the meat of it. Streamline your lead nurture process and find out which actions are causing conversions and which ones are not. Measure them, record them. Only then will you be able to go up to your boss and “talk turkey.”
When you measure and record, don’t get too hung up on vanity metrics like follower counts and likes. Those are like the crow the European offered in the opening anecdote. It’s technically part of the bounty from the hunt, but compared to the turkey it lacks substance.
Talk conversions and purchases. Figure out where and how they began, and what actions leads took on the way. Linking these is the only way you’ll find out what in your marketing is successful, and what is not.
Are you getting to the meat of your marketing? What important numbers has your team been dodging? Let us know in the comments section.
