How to Align Press Releases to Your Marketing Funnel
As your business systems grow, and both your marketing and sales strategies become more advanced, it’s time to take a look at aligning them. Actually, the sooner you can align sales and marketing the better results you’ll have overall. However, many businesses mistakenly keep them separate because aligning them can be complicated and difficult to manage. One approach to that’s often easily managed and quite successful is to integrate marketing and sales one channel or campaign at a time. Press releases are one marketing tactic that can be both straight forward and powerful. It’s a good place to start.
How Do Your Customers Buy?
Before you begin laying out the products in your sales funnel and creating press releases for each product, examine your customers. How do they buy? Do they typically start at the top of the funnel and work their way down in a systematic and organized way? Or do they jump around? Is the entry point really the entry point? Meaning do your customers start with the lowest cost product or do they often begin somewhere mid-way? Generally, the middle of the funnel is where the sales process begins, but that doesn’t mean you have to align your press release content here.
Consider Your Goals
As you evaluate your customer’s buying behavior it’s time to let some goals take shape. What do you want to achieve? For example, if most of your customers enter mid-way down the funnel, maybe you want to drive more traffic to that product’s sales page. Or perhaps you want to heavily promote the next product down the funnel, the next most expensive product.
Lead Generations or Lead Conversions?
One consideration to make when aligning sales and marketing is which phase of the sales process you want to focus on. Do you want to drive traffic to the sales funnel or work on engaging existing prospects and converting them to customers? The press release campaign will reflect that decision. For example, if you want to focus on lead generation you might use your press releases to promote events, free information, case studies and so on. If you’re focusing on lead conversion then you might focus on using your press release to highlight special promotions or new products or services.
Distribution Matters
Your goals and the phase of your sales that you focus on also impacts how you distribute your press release. The first step for any press release will be to use a press release distribution service. However, you’ll need to decide if you send your release to your customers, to your email list, or post it on social media?
Evaluate Press Release Activity
Finally, it’s important to stay on top of your press release activity. Is it helping to achieve your goals? Are sales, leads, and conversions being positively impacted? Who is most responsive to the release? A press release distribution service with quality reporting functionality can be a huge help in deciphering success.
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